A free RSS feed to the Boots reader who can beat or even equal this Onionesque communication headline that came to me this morning as a bolt from the blue?
After initial flurry of contributions, wiki languishes
Today’s David Brooks column on executive communication: a stretch, a grope, a bridge to nowhere
It's not easy being a daily columnist.
Some days, you gotta call in sick.
Otherwise, all you're left to you can do is regurgitate a bogus pop-social science study and hammer on a half-relevant concluding paragraph to justify the previous 12.
But it sucks when the columnist's bad day concerns a subject you actually care about.
To wit, today's David Brooks column, in The New York Times. Brooks cites a new study that tells us what we already know about CEOs and fails to account for the exceptions that prove the rule:
[The researchers] relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 C.E.O.’s and
measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people
skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits
like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic
colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when
it comes to leading successful companies.
measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people
skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits
like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic
colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when
it comes to leading successful companies.
What mattered, it
turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that
correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail,
persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work
long hours.
(Yes, yes. Better to have a humorless bean-counter than a mindless cheerleader. But what about Jack Welch?)
Brooks elaborates (and elaborates) on this theme, until he gets to the bottom of his column and with 150 words to go, appears to realize in a panic: Hey, what the hell does this column have to do with the milqutoast conservative political view that my readers come to me to have legitimized every day?
And so we get this odd last paragraph, saying that the requirements that CEOs be dull and boring is "changing." Why?
We now have an administration freely
interposing itself in the management culture of industry after
industry. It won’t be the regulations that will be costly, but the
revolution in values. When Washington is a profit center, C.E.O.’s are
forced to adopt the traits of politicians. That is the insidious way
that other nations have lost their competitive edge.
interposing itself in the management culture of industry after
industry. It won’t be the regulations that will be costly, but the
revolution in values. When Washington is a profit center, C.E.O.’s are
forced to adopt the traits of politicians. That is the insidious way
that other nations have lost their competitive edge.
Ah, finally an explanation for those hordes of hilarious, persuasive, charismatic German, British and French CEOs who don't know the difference between accounts payable and accounts receivable.
David Brooks, what in God's name are you talking about? You don't know yourself, do you?
You shoulda called in sick.
Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop tweeting?
I continue follow Neville Hobson on Twitter for the same reason why I often follow a slow-moving truck on the freeway: There's a certain bovine comfort to it.
Neville, a U.K.-based communication consultant, issued 40 Twitter tweets on one recent day. That's about four tweets for every waking hour.
Neville Hobson is tweeting two packs a day.
I don't know how he does it any more than I know why he does it.
Most of Neville's posts are links to articles and web sites of interest to him and his communication followers, and I understand why he shares them.
But why is he clogging up the Twittersphere with these kind of posts:
"Morning!"
"Now heeding calls to pay attention to family things as I promised I would today 🙂 See you later!"
"At the gate, boarding flight EDI to LHR soon."
"FedEx guy just came. As a result I noticed that the doorbell battery needs replacing :)"
"At desk after
dinner, away an hour, 3 missed calls on mobile. None with caller ID and
none left message. Ok, so what do you want from me?"
"Time for a bite with some rioja."
I've actually asked Neville about his Twitter philosophy before and
received such a vague response that I'm discouraged to try again.
(Neville and I are techno frenemies; we've found one another engaging
in person and yet confound each other online.)
However, I will let him know I've posted this and see if he'll weigh in here on the question: Don't
you worry that if everybody tweets every time they fart, Twitter will
become an even more overwhelming clusterfuck than it is now?
Whatever Hobson's Twittering excesses, at least they are his own.
Did you know the social media empressario Guy Kawasaki actually hires this person to "ghost tweet" for him? That's probably why Kawasaki has issued 24,590 Tweets since joining Twitter, as compared to Hobson's paltry 18,539.
Neville
Hobson and Guy Kawasaki—at the precise moment that I've finally come to
see Twitter's social utility, why are you trying to ruin it for
everyone by tweeting too much?