So much writing I see seems to assume the reader is automatically bagging whatever the writer is mowing. In which case, why are you writing it in the first place? And why are they reading it?

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg recently re-ran a column he wrote years ago, about a fellow Chicago writer, who asked him to critique a chapter of a book he was writing. “Read it like you hate me,” Lee Bey told Steinberg.

Steinberg liked the phrase because it invited his “true opinion, the criticisms you would lovingly tote up reading the work of somebody you loathed.”

Yes.

But I think this concept has a much broader application for writers: We should write everything as if to a reader who despises us.

No, that’s not it. That’s too hard.

We should write it to a reader who likes us, but who reads us with a discerning mind—who has criticized us before when we’ve gone too far, or not far enough. Missed the point or made the point with a sledgehammer when a surgical mallet would have done. Said something barbaric on the one hand or smarmy on the other.

And then when we’re finished writing it, we should then reread it through the eyes of someone we know and respect, who we think is disinclined to agree with this particular thesis—and toughen it up, accordingly.

And then we should reread it through the eyes of someone who thinks we’re really full of shit most of the time (assuming we have such people in our lives; and we should).

Whether or not we force concessions out of those latter jagoffs, our work will be much stronger for our trying. It’ll be more irritating to our intellectual combatants and more valuable to our comrades, who must defend our ideas too, if they’re going to agree with them.

My late adman dad’s best pal Carl Ally made a famous commercial for Volvo in the 1960s, promoting the car’s toughness by urging customers to “drive it like you hate it.”

I’m urging writers who want to achieve more than filling LinkedIn and other electronic shitcans with happy blather that moves no one:

Write it like they hate you.

Fifteen years ago there was a TV show called “Undercover Boss,” where CEOs traveled through their own companies in disguise. In one episode, as I wrote here in 2010, the founders’ son-CEO of Hooters restaurants discovered, “to his genuine surprise–that some people think Hooters is degrading to women, that ‘Hooters girls’ are actually real people with real problems and that employees at the sauce factory don’t think much of him, since he hasn’t visited the facility since he was in sixth grade. At several points in the show, Brooks finds himself so newly awash in the meaning and consequence of his job as the CEO of Hooters, that he begins to cry.”

Seems to me Amazon leaders are due for a similar awakening, though I doubt they’ll ever get it. 

To wit: Fortune reported last week that Amazon is asking its corporate employees, DOGE-like, to list three to five “accomplishments” that exemplify their best work. The Amazon memo specifies: “Accomplishments are specific projects, goals, initiatives, or process improvements that show the impact of your work. Consider situations where you took risks or innovated, even if it didn’t lead to the results you hoped for.”

Fortune notes that the new performance standards place “greater emphasis on individual accomplishments than in recent years.” 

Or do they reflect a greater abdication of management responsibility?

I think of my own little company, and my four mostly full-time colleagues. Not only do I know their “projects, goals, initiatives or process improvements,” I also know which of my colleagues I want to take take risks or innovate—not the CFO!—and which colleagues whose innovations I don’t think of as “risks” at all—but rather as worthy experiments whose upsides and downsides we’ve all considered carefully.

I realize it’s possible to have more direct reports than I do, but how many more? I’d say, one less than whatever number causes a company to ask employees to list their accomplishments, because no one seems to know what the fuck they’re doing around here.

Amazon, don’t force your employees to write little essays portraying themselves as hard-charging “intrapreneurs”—remember that old term, from corporate leadership bullshit of yesteryear?—when really they’re just ole Ted down in IT, whose been grinding away on the database conversion for the last three years. When you ask him how he’s doing, he sardonically replies, “Living’ the dream,” and he gets back to work. 

Instead, hire managers, to know what your people are doing and to mentor them, guide them, inspire them and lead them in the doing of it. I know how old-fashioned that sounds. But sorry, honey, there’s no sustainable alternative.

My dad had a cartoon on his refrigerator that showed two guys turning a pole that disappeared into hole in the ceiling. “I dunno,” one of them says to the other, “I think they got a merry-go-round up there.”

With Amazon, the same cartoon should show Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos turning a pole, that disappears into the floor.

NEXT!

P.S. I think of my friend and former colleague Bill Sweetland, who once refused to evaluate his own performance on a 360-degree review, on grounds that he and only he “would ever know” just what a slack and dishonest a worker he really was. “But you won’t get a raise,” said the flabbergasted company president. “Fine!” Sweetland bellowed, over his shoulder.