Writing Boots

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:

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?

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.

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?

The chips were down at Notre Dame yesterday, and I was there, having done some consulting work for ND's communication people, and begged a press pass to see President Obama deliver the most angst-ridden commencement address in history.

I drove past smiling people holding posters of bloody, dead fetuses onto a sunny and peaceful campus. 

Inside the arena, I saw bellowing people stand and try to disrupt the speech. They were drowned out by most of the 1,200 graduates, shouting back, "We are ND," in defense of the president.

Young, mostly white midwestern Catholics, fiercely defending the African American president of the United States.

The president of the United States, who communicates like this:

… I stand here today, as President and as an African American, on the 55th anniversary of the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Now, Brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the
"separate but equal" doctrine, but it would take a number of years and
a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights
for all of God's children. There were freedom rides and lunch counters
and Billy clubs, and there was also a Civil Rights Commission appointed
by President Eisenhower. It was the 12 resolutions recommended by this
commission that would ultimately become law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There were six members of this commission. It included five whites and
one African American; Democrats and Republicans; two Southern
governors, the dean of a Southern law school, a Midwestern university president, and your own Father Ted Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame.
So they worked for two years, and at times, President Eisenhower had to
intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the South would
serve the black and white members of the commission together. And
finally, when they reached an impasse in Louisiana, Father Ted flew
them all to Notre Dame's retreat in Land OLakes, Wisconsin—where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal.

And years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he
was able to broker an agreement between men of such different
backgrounds and beliefs. And Father Ted simply said that during their
first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered they were all fishermen. And
so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake. They
fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

I will not pretend that the challenges we face will be easy, or
that the answers will come quickly, or that all our differences and
divisions will fade happily away—because life is not that simple. It
never has been. But as you leave here today … remember that each of us, endowed with the dignity possessed by all
children of God, has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another;
to understand that we all seek the same love of family, the same
fulfillment of a life well lived. Remember that in the end, in some way
we are all fishermen.

If nothing else, that knowledge should give us faith that
through our collective labor, and God's providence, and our willingness
to shoulder each other's burdens, America will continue on its precious
journey towards that more perfect union. 

After the speech, I overheard the mother of a graduate tell a reporter she walked out and stood in the lobby while Obama spoke.

"He speaks no truth to me at all," she said.

I tried to muster the usual fear and loathing. It wouldn't come. Instead, I shrugged, out of pity for a poor old woman who's been pushed to the side by progress. By legitimate, honest-to-goodness progress.

My habit is to look at everything and see how much better it ought to be. On this sunny Sunday I couldn't help but look at everything and see how much better it already is.