Bonus: if I’ve missed your content-related panel, tell me. I’ll add it!

Friday, March 12th

2:00pm

Content Strategy: What’s In It For You?: Margot Bloomstein

3:30pm

Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For: Rachel Lovinger & Karen McGrane

Saturday, March 13th

3:30pm

Content Strategy FTW: Kristina Halvorson

Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies: Greg Beato, Markos Moulitsas, Amy Langfield, David Carr, Henry Copeland

5:00pm

New Publishing and Web Content: Erin Kissane, Jeffrey Zeldman, Mandy Brown, Lisa Holton, Paul Ford

Sunday, March 14th

2:00pm

Writing Web Content For a Living: Tiffani Jones, Ian Alexander, Erin Anderson, & Dan Maccarone

Monday, March 15th

12:30pm

Freelance Isn’t Free: The Twisted Economics of Writing Today: Jeff Beckham

Tuesday, March 16th

12:30pm

Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation: Anne Gentle

3:30pm

How to Save Journalism: Drew Curtis, Jeff Weber, Kelly McBride, Matthew Palevsky

Reading his memoir, A Moveable Feast, has not provided great insight into Hemingway’s soul, but it has certainly served up a sugary slice of one element of his personality: a true and abiding gift for insulting other famous people.

Call it callous, but there’s something to be said for a dis so good you yell it from the bedroom, so everyone in the kitchen can hear it. A dis so good you cringe to think the dissee ever read it. Such a dis is this:

On Wydham Lewis—painter, author, founder of the Vorticist movement and editor of modernist literary magazine BLAST.

Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Boheme. His had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra [Pound’s] left leads or blocked then with an open right glove [while boxing].

I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him… and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great race-horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, his eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

“I met the nastiest man I’ve ever seen today,” I told my wife. “Tatie, don’t tell me about him,” she said. “We’re just going to have dinner.”

About a week afterwards I met Miss [Gertrude] Stein and told her I’d met Wydham Lewis. “I call him the Measuring Worm,” she said. “He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb, seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.”

This is how he seemed to me the first day I ever met him in Ezra’s studio.

OUCH!

On the poet Ernest Walsh.

Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic, and clearly marked for death. [At lunch], he appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat—[but] he did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then, but he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this.

I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask them.

[When he said I would win the writing award], I was embarrassed and it made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. Death was not conning with him. It was coming alright.

YOUCH!

Read the book for more.

The Best of Creative Nonfiction: Vol 3, edited by Lee Gutkind

Short, memoir-inspired essays about life. Check out “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” by Wesley Yang, “An Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine: Dining In” by Sean Rowe, “What Comes Out” by Dawnelle Wilkie and “Community College” by Tim Bascom. Bring a Kleenex.

Corpus Christi: Stories, by Bret Anthony Johnston

Only halfway through, but I have a soft spot for morose-but-revealing-and-hopeful short stories about love and loss. Check out “Anything That Floats” on Bret’s blog, too.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

If Margaret Mead, Steven Levitt, and Miss Manners had a baby, it might have written like Jane Jacobs: intelligent, just artsy enough, frank, polite and pragmatic. Learn the uses of sidewalks, why neighborhood parks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and how unslumming and slumming happen.

Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, by Yamamato Tsunetomo

A book of anecdotes and samurai wisdom that I remembered after watching Ghostdog again. You’ll have to overlook the extreme violence and disturbing sexism (it was written pre-1700!).

The Help, by Kathyrn Stockett

Fiction, about a ambitious young writer from Jackson, Mississippi who wants to help black maids in town tell their stories. A compassionate and nuanced—if not a little romanticized—look at race relations and growing up in the civil rights-era South. Written by a super blonde southern lady who knows how to tell a story.

A Little History of the World, by EH Gombrich

I’ve already written about this one, but I can’t say enough about it. Read it if you want to actually remember the history of the world.

The Sleepwalkers: a History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, by Arthur Koestler

A brainy, epic journey through the history of ideas about religion, cosmology, and science. Like Gombrich, Koestler is excited. He inserts his opinion, too, which is wonderful (check his dis on Plato, page 59). This book is carrot juice and bran muffins, though, so take it easy.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker

Been reading this one for a while. It’s another carrot juice and bran muffins book. Actually, carrot-ginger-beet-juice and wheat germ salad book. It’s a lot to digest, but digest you must. Pinker describes how words and minds work together. How every time we speak, we reveal something fundamental about how we think.

Same goes for benefits. Men would require the university to pay for moving costs or hire their spouses as part of the contract, for example, whereas women would not. This pattern was consistent, regardless of the job in question.

A Woman In Society

Maybe I shouldn’t admit it, but until my friend told me what she’d found, I’d never given much thought to my role as “woman in society,” mostly because I’d never felt discriminated against on the basis of my gender. Even though I was raised by southern women who did face gender (as well as economic) discrimination, I’d always believed that my abilities were limited only by my interests and work ethic—but never my sex.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that capable, ambitious 40-something women were asking for 3/4 or maybe even 1/2 as much as their male counterparts. For the first time, I felt indignant and conflicted about being a woman.

Clearly, “society” was partially to blame for creating a world in which women felt so unsure of themselves professionally. And yet, didn’t women bear some responsibility, too? Shouldn’t we demand better? Couldn’t we just ask for more money?

Getting What You Want

Since then, I’ve made concerted efforts to ask for what I want. When I felt that my tuition payments were too high, for example, I simply asked the Assistant Dean to reduce it, citing good grades and consistent community involvement. She made a call and did so—by at least 50%.

I’ve also learned to ask for what I think I’m worth. I try to think of these interactions as logical negotiations, not emotional or ethical quandaries. My negotiating partner can always say no, after all.

This strategy has served me well, but it’s not always easy. I find myself second-guessing my experience and stumbling over what I’m worth more often than I’d like. I have to consciously work at it.

It makes me sad that confidence, assertiveness, and even cockiness—traits that correspond to getting what we want—are almost always associated with men, not women. It seems that women are far less likely to risk failure or rejection to make something happen, or to confidently put their real opinions out in public and deal with the consequences.

Of course, this is not all our fault—we simply aren’t conditioned like men are. Instead, like the worn stereotype suggests, we’re trained to be diligent, pretty, peace-making caretakers. All wonderful qualities, when balanced with the reality that we could be different if we felt like it. But unfortunately, this is not always our reality.

Avoiding Risk, Seeking Approval

At the heart of our conditioning are two key forces: Risk aversion and approval-seeking behaviors.

It’s obvious that risk-aversion in women has biological roots—we don’t want our foolish behavior to accidentally kill our babies. But I’m not talking about smoking, drugging, hurt-your-baby, lose-your-family risks. I’m talking about calculated risks that have a decent chance of yielding high returns, and some chance of failure. Compared to our male counterparts, we tend to avoid these types of risks.

In fact, some women even avoid taking risks that have a very small chance of failure and high chance of success—if taking said risk might get us branded “irresponsible” or “foolish” or if doing so means sticking our neck out.

The problem? We don’t want to take risks that might expose less savory aspects of our personalities, because we’re conditioned to believe that friction and disapproval are bad. So we don’t put ourselves out there for evaluation. We don’t bite off a little more than we can chew, knowing we’ll figure it out as we go. We censor.

The worst part is that it isn’t just men who do the censoring—women censor each other, too. We censor by judging ourselves and our peers primarily according to how responsible and diligent we are (again: amazing qualities when balanced). We censor by waving the invisible “don’t be unreasonable” rag when one of us gets out of line. We censor by prioritizing other peoples’ needs over our own, or letting fear and guilt drive our decisions.

The tragic result is that many women can’t even imagine what getting what we want would look like—much less take the risks we need to actually get it.

Being More Cocky

In the interest of making this a solvable problem, I’ll do some “shoulding” on women:

We should start by asking for what we want—whether it’s more money, more time off, a better pencil sharpener, a new business, or whatever. Then, we should learn to calculate the real risks involved in pursuing what we want. This means assessing the situation and deciding if the positive outcome (whatever success means to us personally) is worth the temporary risk (Someone being annoyed at us? Getting fired? Seeming selfish?) it takes to achieve said outcome. Then, we should acknowledge when the feared or imagined risk is lower than the actual risk. Finally, and more often than not, we should take the intelligent, calculated risk.

In other words: we should access our inner 6th grade basketball (or put in your substitute activity here) player, and act a little more cocky.

I am indebted to Clay Shirky and Cheryl Heller for their recent articles on this same topic.

Well, I may have been wrong about that. It looks like business schools far and wide are starting to improve upon the old, rigid finance and accounting-based model that puts young students on the fast track to a solid mid-level management job at Target’s headquarters or an 80-hour workweek at Deloitte and Touche.

Instead, according to this recent New York Times article, some schools (such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto) are taking a hint from Stanford’s d.school and beginning to re-orient their curricula around “design thinking” and the idea that “students need to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they need to learn finance or accounting.”

In other words, business schools are starting to flirt with the humanities and steal from the design world.

Nothing makes me want to throw down $70,000 more than the prospect of marketing, art, and comp lit getting in bed together. And looking at my own odd career trajectory, I can say an open relationship between the three might actually work out—I majored in psychology and religious studies in undergrad and got a Master’s degree in philosophy and ethics, but I managed restaurants and mentored business school students through school. I’m pretty sure this DIY interdisciplinary approach has made me more, not less, capable of running a business.

Though it may ruffle feathers at first, it’s great to see business schools add classes like “The Fundamentals of Integrative Thinking, about understanding and analyzing how people use [finance and accounting] models in every day lives” and “The Opposable Mind, about developing and practicing the personal skills you need to be a good integrative thinker and manager” to the standard menu.

If business school’s new goal is to produce better innovators, thinkers, and problem solvers, I can see no better way than this (beyond kicking students out of class and into the job market early or offering internships at IDEO, maybe).

Still, I maintain my earlier reservations: It’s probably not a good idea to spend gobs of cash on business school unless you have a specific reason for doing so. Even if you do get to read poetry in strategy class.

In 1847, one out of every six mothers giving birth in doctors wards died of peurperal fever (the current death rate is 9 out of every 100,000). The problem was, nobody new why. Experts usually blamed the mothers, either for misconduct in early pregnancy or bad eating habits.

Then came doctor Ignatz Semmelweis, who was the first to acknowledge that doctors had no idea what lead to puerperal fever and suggest that mothers weren’t to blame.

After years of research, Semmelweis concluded that it was the doctors themselves who were unwittingly causing the deaths—by bringing in bacteria from cadavers they had been dissecting just before the births.

The solution? Doctors needed to wash their hands.

Germ theory had not been invented yet, so nearly everyone rejected Semmelweis’ ideas—it wasn’t until after his death that the medical community came to respect him. Today, of course, his theories are widely accepted. (Although not, apparently, always followed. The book also talks about how it’s nearly impossible to get doctors to thoroughly wash their hands, even though they know they should.)

The quirky, Occam’s Razor-ish appeal of SuperFreakonomics is typical of Levitt, and useful—you find yourself automatically applying his insights in behavioral economics to day-to-day life stuff.

Check out the book. Aside from an occasional nosedive in tone (I’m still on the fence about “pimpact”—see Chapter 1), it’s real good.

It’s been six months since I started Second and Park. I have been fortunate in almost all respects: a full load of clients from the beginning, a supportive group of former colleagues and professionals cheering me on, and a very patient husband / business partner who’s willing to talk me down from scary freelancer ledges.

But despite all the kind people and good luck, I’d be lying if I said it was skittles and scones every single day. On bad days, this work can make you feel tired, confused, and annoyed. On really bad days, it can lead to escapist fantasies about joining the circus.

Still, I’m convinced it’s possible to make freelancing (or small agency-ing) an energizing and creative experience far beyond the 3-month honeymoon. You just have to know what the problems are, which ones are your fault, and which ones you can fix.

In the spirit of optimism and flexible circus performer strength, I’d like to define the problem (in this post) and offer a few inchoate solutions I’ve found (in a later post).

So first, the problem.

The Problem With Freelancing

The biggest problem with freelancing is, ironically, that you have clients. Clients give us life and money, but I’ll bet that not learning how to handle clients is why 90% of unhappy freelancers are unhappy.

If you’re like me, you probably started this biz with a sweet, subconscious chip on your shoulder, thinking to yourself, “I am a fair and balanced communicator with wolf-like business acumen and an advanced ability to distinguish good prospects from bad ones.” I hate to say it, but you thought wrong.

No amount of studying, working out, or late-night practice (you plucky go-getter, you) can prepare you for your first piece of client hate mail. Or the first time someone doesn’t pay you, treats you like a ‘dumb woman’ or ‘lazy web person’, or thinks that if he just emails you enough, you’ll work for free.

It would be tempting to beat our chests, rip out our hair, and create secret drinking societies where we sit around and talk about how mean and dumb and quaint our clueless clients are.

But of course, this would be the wrong answer. The right answer is to learn about clients—what they want, how to talk to them, and what to expect.

Learning About Clients

Successfully handling clients is about more than “Building Great Client Relationships!”. It’s about learning to build and navigate actual relationships with warm-blooded, mercurial people who, no matter how professional, have moods and unstated expectations and a completely different way of looking at the world than you do.

When you and your client have professional, thoughtful, flexible expectations that you communicate to one another and gracefully agree on, the results are magical. You feel good because your client trusts you. Your client feels good because he/she trusts you. Before you know it, you’re baking your client a layer cake, and doing a little extra work just because. This high-quality relationship is sustainable and energizing—it’s the kind you should aim for.

But in many cases, your client (or you) do not exude this measured positivity. You’re suspicious of one other, in a hurry, and determined not to get burned. Therefore, the bar for freelancer happiness is set depressingly low.

Freelancing is the wild west of business, and it’s just you, that one psych class you took, and your current maturity level versus the wild unknown mess of the self-interested masses. You have to be strong and confident—not to mention organized, decently nice, and good at your job—to make this work sustainable.

Your New, Super Extreme Independence

The way one handles independence and personal agency is, paradoxically, what makes or breaks the freelancer experience. To succeed, you must embrace it, come up with a plan, and sit calmly poised in anticipation of the inevitable fire. Then, you have to be strong, calm, and patient enough to steer things back in the right direction when they veer off.

And so in a way, the problem with freelancing is not clients—it’s us. Only we can determine who we should work with and how to adjust to new situations as they hop in our laps. Only we can engage our inner armchair psychologist. Only we can decide if we’ll be happy doing the work. Like it or not, the ball is so squarely in our court, we’re tripping over it.

In my next post, I’ll stop talking about problems and get down to some “we can do it-style” solutions.

Literature

Most writers agree that you can’t write a book that everyone loves. Or at least, you can’t write a great book—one that truly captures the imagination and stays on shelves—that everyone loves. In fact, most great books are polarizing: people either love or hate them. Or they don’t care at all, which is almost the same as hating.

The reason for this is, great writers know who they’re trying to connect with, and write to that audience exclusively. They aren’t hung up on making every single person agree with their theories, and they draw strong moral lines around what they’re willing to compromise in order to get published.

These tough choices make art.

[Note: I learned this all last night, at Stephen Elliot’s memoir writing workshop at 826 Seattle.]

Business

It strikes me that the same is true of business.

One thing that’s really punched me in the face since I started doing my own thing is that if I want to succeed, I’m going to have to pony up and act real tough-like. Otherwise, I’ll wind up saying yes to every person who trots through my contact form, alter my prices, or worse—turn into a skeezy, watered-down, tip-spraying web writer whose work is technically accurate, but super boring. Eww.

Maybe orienting my business (even my life?!) around connecting with who I want to connect with, rather than taking the defense-as-offense route, is the right idea.

Evidence points to I am right. Aren’t most great businesses, thinkers, artists, and pioneers kind of eye-popping and dissonant at first?

So I’ll say it: in business as in literature, only art survives.

Nishant Kothary is a Sr. Evangelist for Microsoft’s Mix Online team, and probably the best manager I know. Below you’ll find parts of a conversation we had, in which Nishant gives practical ideas about how to use common sense and critical thinking—not just books—to successfully plan and manage your business.

On Strategy Books

As it turns out, I’ve never picked up a book with the word “strategy” in its title. If I did then I never got through it. I’ve never really thought about it until now but I think my approach has always been to figure out what is needed in the long-run to help me/my business meet its rationally prioritized list of goals without ever succumbing to any destructive short-term thinking.

Doing What’s Needed

Depending on the project/business/situation, I may find that self-improvement is needed. For instance, I’ve been reading about “differentiation” within the context of building healthy relationships and realize now that it has a profound effect on how we conduct ourselves even in professional relationships.

Or, I may find that I need to acquire a skill/knowledge. For instance, I found out recently that I need to do more research and be a more critical thinker for certain topics—like the standards debate—which previously I’ve taken for granted.

And then at times, I find out that I need to learn more about the world. The idea that people are systematically irrational was something I went looking for after quietly coping with seemingly ridiculous stakeholder behavior.

What is Strategic Thinking?

I’ve always thought of it as a way of being, rather than a skill that you can go acquire. I think “strategy” is born somewhere near where a few qualities meet, most notably and off the top of my head: vision, integrity, discipline, experience, street smarts, empathy, competitiveness, differentiation, perceptiveness, technical competence.

That said, there are some qualities that all strategic thinkers share in common, while others are specific to their environments. And, of course, the notion evolves.

In a nutshell, I think good strategy is about habitually asking the tough questions, formulating your best answers (and this often requires evolving one’s self, ideas and methods) and then acting on them without compromising your value system and long-term goals.

Conclusion?

Use your common sense and critical thinking to come up with the best strategy. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Check out Nishant and his teammates’ writing in the Mix Online Opinions section. Good stuff on design, development, and other web things there.

And as for the best strategy books? Results are inconclusive. You could think through the concept of differentiation (here). Or just pick up a book that inspires you to think/plan/do business better (Nishant likes Outliers and even Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries).

If you have any bright ideas or suggestions for great books about business strategy, SWOT Analyses, or anything else—I’d love to hear them.