Love Your Work

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by some cosmic practical joke, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

I'll admit it. I'm a basketball junkie, I love hockey ("a sport for middle-sized white boys") and baseball, I irregularly tear up golf courses, and have an abiding affection for Australian Rules Football -- the consequence of watching ESPN in its early days. It should therefore be no surprise that there is a second website that begins with E that I check daily, and a usually delightful consequence of that is the opportunity to read Bill Simmons' columns.

Recently, I came across one of several columns that consist of a series of emails between Mr Simmons and another writer I've become fond of, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point. There are a couple of parts to the conversation that are fascinating.

One has to do with Mr Simmons' unabashed admiration for Mr Gladwell's writing ability, something Mr Gladwell tries to downplay. For one thing, he says, he loves to write.

That leads to a comment by Mr Simmons about professionalism (he quotes another pretty decent writer, the late David Halberstam: "Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don't feel like doing it."), and a question to Mr Gladwell about whether he finds writing difficult. Gladwell's response:

Mr Gladwell earns a protest from Mr Simmons when he compares himself to a specific NFL quarterback, but he also explains.

The second part that got my attention is a discussion of how terrible most sports teams' general managers are; they make decisions -- which are almost always personnel decisions and are directly related to how successful their teams are going to be -- based on potential rather than proven behavior. Mr Gladwell calls this the "moral hazard":

A year or so ago, I wrote about Matthew Stewart, whose The Management Myth caused quite a stir when it was published five years ago. It turns out that Mr Gladwell's comments about general managers -- who have many of the same attributes of managers in other industries -- echo those of Mr Stewart. Mr Stewart has little use for the people who are "trained" in "business management"; he notes that most people with MBAs have not managed anything other than spending a couple of years getting three letters to put at the end of their signatures.

How much Mr Stewart's essay was mirrored by Mr Gladwell's comments is almost eerie. Stewart wrote, "As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers." Substitute the word "players" or "draft picks" for "writers", and you could be taking words right out of the Simmons/Gladwell conversation.

And at the core of Mr Stewart's observations about "management theory" and the people who teach it: "Curiously, [Frederick Winslow] Taylor and his college men often appeared to float free from the kind of accountability that they demanded from everybody else." (We wrote a little bit a couple of weeks ago about why venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and his partner invest in companies managed by their founders; the issue is the same suit of clothes with a different color of material.)

Mr Simmons listed, and Mr Gladwell agreed, that the attributes of great coaches (and general managers) are that they are more like great professors, and less like the ex-players most of them are; they

Mr Stewart would probably agree; he says that managers need to spend less time regurgitating the sophstry of business schools and start acting more like philosophers:

Finally, Mr Stewart notes, "If you believed our chief of recruiting, the consulting firm I helped to found represented a complete revolution from the Taylorist practices of conventional organizations. Our firm wasn't about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love."

The bottom line for both: If you don't love your work -- not your job, or perks, or bennies, or hours, or salary, but the work of managing, you're probably not going to do it very well. And if you think the letters on the door or the key to the executive washroom is fooling the people who are in your employ, there is really only one person you're fooling.

More News and Notes

Playing in the cloud: If you have an account with Sony's PlayStation Network, get ahold of your bank. But you knew that, because the last two weeks have been full of the news about the 77,000,000 accounts that were compromised by a hacker a couple of weeks ago. But even more than the ongoing unavailability of the network, what has everyone in a tizzy was the days of radio silence from Sony's corporate offices about the whole affair. The company is is offering identity protection, but that is of little solace to the millions of people who can't get their gaming fix.

And of course, it gives the world's most masterful game players -- members of the US Congress -- the chance to kick Sony when it's down -- not that Sony doesn't deserve it. The company went so far as to blame Anonymous, the marginally organized group of people who have been harassing a few big companies on behalf of Wikileaks. For its part, Anonymous denied taking any credit card or other personal information, but didn't deny attacking Sony, and in any case it has bigger fish it intends to fry. Meanwhile, attacks on Sony continue.

What will be interesting to watch is how Sony's fumbling will affect the sales figures of the other game console/network manufacturers, specifically Microsoft, which saw sales of Windows sag. There could be a reason for that: operating systems ain't what they used to be, and Redmond is in Opera territory when it comes to mobile systems.

He who laughs last has found someone to blame: Amazon posted an explanation for why its cloud vaporized a couple of weeks ago. Is anyone else seeing a pattern here?

Doing the needful: India has decided to crack down on snarky comments made by bloggers -- and anyone else. We'll let you know if there are a ton of bouncebacks.

It's still easier to park in Pleasanton and take BART: San Francisco city officials have written an app for the iPhone that finds parking places in the City.

God considering "ooops" button? There is already enough junk on the Internet. There are already too many people who believe stuff that's made up and passed around Facebook, Twitter and Fox News as fact when it's really the delusional ramblings of people like Glen Beck. People are now suggesting an "Internet erase button" that would let people revise how they portray themselves on the Internet. Can you imagine what the Florida secretary of state would like to do? Not to mention all the people who misquoted Dr. King, or got pwned by fake photos. Memo to folks: If you do something dumb, you should be prepared to live with it. It's called r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y and it's good for you.

Apple to fix core: The best way to get your name out of the headlines is to hope that someone else has bigger problems than you do. Such was the case for Steve Jobs, as he managed to duck questions -- or at least, duck having to see his name on Page One -- about Apple's iPhone/iPad tracking. It's a bit of a tempest in a teapot, because everyone does it, but that doesn't stop some people from getting their knickers in a twist.

Also on store shelves: Duke Nukem Forever: One of the US court system's longer running dramas is in the endgame stage; the US government's oversight of Microsoft's behavior with regard to its dominance of the personal computer software market is scheduled to expire tomorrow.

Think anyone will notice? Friendster is going to delete all those photos and stuff, and Novell got a US appeals court to say it could sue Microsoft over WordPerfect.

Of course they're going to deny it: Rumors are all over the place that Twitter is going to make the Tweetdeck owners rich, but it's been a week since the rumor hit the Twitosphere and nobody is confirming anything. So... a company that has virtually no income is going to pay $50 million for another company that has no apparent income. No wonder the bankers went nuts a few years ago.

Just so Susan knows we're not biased: Apple has upgraded its iMac computers. And as a public service, how to change the F-key functions.

In case you missed it: The front pages of newspapers the day Osama bin Laden was killed. The action by US Navy Seals and the CIA was reported live ("Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood :-/") from Pakistan, then leaked by people who, you would think, should know when to keep their fingers away from the keyboard. Nonetheless, it was a good day for Twitter, and a boost to those encryption-breakers who need something to do. Also, required viewing for people who like seeing myths destroyed.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Two people in California are suing Twitter, alleging spamming, because they received a message from Twitter acknowledging their request to stop receiving messages from Twitter. Also, we're not sure which is more of a DOH! moment: The military embracing social media or the New York Times considering it news, and every teenaged boy's fantasy come true.

Nata's Corner

When I first started hanging around Experts Exchange, I was asked by the owners to be the Zone Advisor -- we were called Page Editors back then (long story) -- for the Lounge. That had some good moments and some bad ones, but one of the funniest and most memorable comments I read was the Lounge Lizards' solution to almost any problem: fdisk and format. There was a time -- back about the time of Windows 95 -- when it was pretty common for computer techs to tell people to solve most problems by doing that.

Now, most of the time, the problems caused by that uncle in the basement nobody talks about when he starts messing with your laptop at 1:30 in the morning are best solved by treating only the specific disease. If you have too many toolbars, it's going to slow your Internet experience to a crawl. Visit too many of the wrong sites, and your computer will be so loaded with viruses and malware that you might well need to start from scratch. But trust me -- it's not something you want to do, because if you haven't backed up your data, you could lose all your emails, photos, recipes and music.

I know you should all know this, but be careful about what links you click in emails about Osama bin Laden's death. And don't fret too much if you happen to not get one of those emails, because something will happen next week and the malware guys will come up with an email about it. And speaking of spam-related emails, there is a reason I still haven't created a Twitter account: I hate spam.

Finally, g8kbv had this comment about the item I had last time regarding Sophos' toolkit:

Milestones

New Geniuses: arnold earned his second Genius certificate in the past month in Microsoft Operating Systems, while DrUltima earned his first in Windows 2003 Server. Outstanding work!

My First Million: Reaching 1,000,000 points in March were the following: ewangoya, cgaliher, Roads_Roads, PowerEdgeTech, mrcoffee365, clockwatcher, edbedb, remorina and D_Brugge. Congratulations on joining the Seven Digit Club!

Milestones: mlmcc is the fifth EE member to earn 13,000,000 points in a single TA: Crystal Reports.