On communication, professional and otherwise.
Last week, The New York Times put forth a fascinating, well-researched article on why people are beginning sentences with "so." The piece quotes linguists who trace the use of "so" to the computer programmers' culture—and actually to Microsoft programmers.
But I found the lack of a heavy bag disappointing.
Hat tip to sis Piper for the steer to that egghead Times piece.
I try to avoid actually providing anything useful on this blog, lest people think they can get something for nothing. But sometimes I just can't help it.
On Monday, the big story was the Kagan nomination for Supreme Court. The New York Times ran stories, but they also ran a six-shot photo-album.
If you just clicked through the photos—and how could you not want to see this curious-looking woman from a few angles? Christ, she looks like Otto Pilot, from the movie Airplane!—you learned about as much about Kagan as anyone knows, just from the photo captions.
Check it out:
1. Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, will be nominated by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice, Democrats said.
2. Her nomination would fill the vacancy left by Justice John Paul Stevens's retirement. Ms. Kagan has never been a judge.
3. Ms. Kagan is known for her easy banter with the justices. She spoke with former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at a conference in 2009.
4. Ms. Kagan's appointment will require Senate approval, and both sides of the aisle are gearing up for potentially contentious hearings.
5. Born in Manhattan, Ms. Kagan, here in a 1977 yearbook, received degrees from Princeton and Oxford before attending Harvard Law.
6. Ms. Kagan, with former Harvard Law School students, was the school's first female dean, from 2003 to 2009.
Pretty slick, NYT. Pretty damned slick. And a lesson to us all.
PRacconteur Fraser Seitel used to get an automatic laugh in his seminars by casually referring to CEOs as "knuckleheads." I'm sure he still does.
That's because when communication people get together, we find comfort in an agreement that we are more intelligent than the executives we work for—or at least far more evolved in the most important aspect of life, human affairs.
One way I water down my own communicator's conceit is to read the "Corner Office" column in the business section of the Sunday New York Times. Here, CEOs are interviewed, usually on human matters, and while they often say the expected stuff—they invariably say that they love to hire people better than they are, for instance—they often show they know a thing or two about "our" end of the business, the human end.
"I was the first female president of the General Dynamics Corporation, and I went out and bought my new fancy suits," said BAE Systems president Linda Hudson in a recent Corner Office interview.
A lady at Nordstrom had show me how to tie a scarf in a very unusual kind of way for my new suit. I have my first day at work, and then I come back ot work the next day, and I run into no fewer than a dozen women who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.
That's when I realized that life was never going to be the way it had been before, that people were watching everything I did. And it wasn't just going to be how I dressed. It was about my behavior, the example I set, the tone I set, the way I carried myself, how confident I was—all those kinds of things. …
To this day, not only the awareness of that, but the responsibility that goes with it, is something I think about virtually every day.
And in yesterday's Corner Office, Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo, told a story that explains why she's a CEO:
My mom died when I was 8, so my grandmother raised my brother and me. She had a great sense of humor, and she never really let things get to her.
When we were on a farm in Wisconsin, and I was probably 13, there was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, "Grandma, there's a snake."
And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off and said, "You could have done that." And, you know, that's the tone she set. Just get it done. Pick yourself up. Move on. Laugh.
These women are pretty smart, for CEOs.