Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility:

“To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.”

The management lesson to me is that — contrary to popular perception — there’s often far more pressure to say yes than to say no. This is true whether the sexy new thing is Universal Health Care or a War in Iraq or some cool new widget.

Sometimes the correct answer is Yes. Usually the correct answer is No. And the only way to be able to say Yes — and to deliver — where appropriate is to say No all the other times.

I have very mixed feelings about the Tea Party movement, but the part I love is their passion for fiscal responsibility. Any moron can increase spending and lower taxes. And any product manager can get excited about all the new great ideas that come along. But you won’t be able to deliver on any of those new ideas unless you’re very passionate about saying No to all the others. The average company is like the US government. Its biggest challenge isn’t finding great ideas. It’s finding the discipline to store up enough resources to focus on the one or two great ideas that they have.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/biscuitsmlp/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

SphinnCon Israel was great, thanx Barry! Thanks everyone for all your help in generating this post:

SphinnCon

Best Speakers:

• Sam Michelson: Funny, engaging, informative presentation on brand management.
• Eli Feldblum: Apparently a great session on SEO for Video.
• Miriam Schwab: Great tour of tools for Word Press.
• Debra Askanase: Great tour of Social Media tools.
• Uri Breitman: On Hebrew SEO
• Charlie Kalech: Word on the street is that Charlie’s session was awesome.

Best Lines:

• Sam Michelson: You need to meet with your clients to understand what they really want. I like spending the weekend. With the ones who aren’t in jail.

Best Take-Aways:

• Gab Goldenberg: Build long term relationships, friendships, reciprocity (not trading). One of the best strategies is guest posting.

Best Gags:

• Sam Michelson: Fake slide about building reputation for the Mossad.

Best Running Jokes:

• Dixon Jones after being tweaked by Ari Ozick that Majestic has a bad UI: We have a bad UI because everybody uses Excel anyway … Then I download it into Excel, because we have a lousy UI.

Best Tweets:

• Shira Abel (@shiraabel): ohhhhhh… dangerous keywords. Oh. Not as exciting as I had hoped…
• Dan-ya Schwartz (@danjas): I wonder if @neyne knows that his computer is projected. I enjoy following the way his mind work. [I wish I were there].

Best Examples:

• Vanessa Fox: TSA’s Reputation Management success.
• Shira Abel: Lower Merion School District’s Reputation Management failure.

Best Interaction:

• Tomer Honen: Phone went off while he was speaking. Asked if it was for him, said to tell them he’s not here.
• And then Tomer again, setting up Vanessa. The exchange went something like this:
  • Conference Participant: I got a message that I have too many URLs.
  • Tomer: How many do you have
  • Participant: About 180 million.
  • [After the laughter died down the second punchline came...]
  • Vanessa Fox (from the audience): I programmed that feature!

Best Live Blogging:

• Debra Askanase: SphinnCon Coverage

[I almost wrote Lisa Barone & Barry Schwartz out of habit :-). Great job by Debra.]

Also in this series:

• Best of PubCon 2009
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of BirdBrain 2010

I usually avoid politics — why lose or offend readers who agree with me on the blog’s core ideas but disagree with me on politics? But as I come closer to articulating this blog’s core ideas (more on that in a future post), I’ll take my chances that you’ll stay with me despite knowing my views. And I’d love to hear where you agree or disagree with me.

Tea Party movement

I originally loved everything I knew about the Tea Party movement. I thought we shared the same concerns, that it is the nature of all human organizations to expand, pursues its members’ self-interests, over-estimate their own virtue and their opponents’ vices, get increasingly corrupt, and increasingly take from and tyrannize others. I consider myself conservative because I’ve concluded that the organization that most threatens us is government. So I was initially quite happy about the Tea Party’s rise. And as I watched Glenn Beck last week speaking at CPAC, I was mesmerized for a while before starting to turn scared.

I think David Brooks sums it up well in today’s column comparing the Tea Party movement with the 60’s Left:

“But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.”

Brooks then defines conservatism in the following paragraph:

“For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.”

Brooks does a good job summing up my fear of populists and simplifiers, in business, politics, and elsewhere. I have a visceral reaction when people pronounce  simple solutions and expect everybody to just say “wow,” when they themselves haven’t first seriously learning and considered the accumulated wisdom.

Life is complicated. Individuals and organizations have their virtues and their weaknesses. I originally supported the Tea Party movement because I think Barack Obama has too much faith in government, and is overly empowering it at the expense of the individual. I fear the Tea Party is a strong overreaction the other way.

I think both sides are guilty of over-emphasizing the purity of those they wish to empower (government or individuals) while projecting all the evil onto the other side.

I’m thankful that the United States, both legally and culturally, has a system of checks and balances that is phenomenally conservative and resistant to sudden change. I hope it’s strengthened by the current clash of opposing populists.

I think it’s safe to share my political views because they match my managerial views. I think managers manage best when they manage least, when they help guide and empower their people to great achievements. Much of management is patience and focus, considering all sides, saying no to impulsive ideas, and making sure today’s sexy new idea incubates for a while before distracting the company from following through on yesterday’s plan. If you hate my politics, you’ll hate my management philosophies as well, so my risk in discussing politics to make my points is limited. And whatever your views are, I’d love to hear them. Even if that view is that I should never write about politics again.

Follow-up post: A Passionate No

I’m making my SMX speaking debut on Sunday at SphinnCon. And next month I get to present at SMX Toronto.

Speaking at SMX Toronto

Just learned that a perk of speaking and blogging about it is I get to share a 15% discount code to SMX Toronto, so just use REICH15 when registering.

Vanessa Fox, who was named Best Moderator in Best of PubCon, will be moderating my SphinnCon session. A few hours ago she finished wrapping up SMX West in San Jose by speaking at a similar session on  Social Media, Search, and Reputation Management. Our session is Online Reputation Management and I’ll be joined by Sam Michelson, Shira Abel, and Dan Gerstenfeld.

At SMX Toronto, I’ll be speaking at the Real Time Search, User Generated Content and Social Networks session. Jeff Quipp will moderate, and I’ll be with Barbara Coll and Rob Garner.

My presentation will be about Using Q&A sites to Grow Your Business & Reputation. I’m looking forward to it! Quite nervous, though. I think my biggest challenge will be keeping my speaking speed under 200 words per minute. Though I wonder. Would that be a good gimmick? Doing a minute of the presentation at my full speed? Would be fun, like those old FedEx commercials. Only downside is nobody would understand a word I’m saying. Though sometimes that’s a good thing. :-)

Mel Rosenberg at BirdBrain

Jeff Pulver, Yossi Vardi, Mel Rosenberg, Noam Fine, and Sharon Ariel ran a networking breakfast and Bird Brain Unconference yesterday.

A bunch of creative people doing different things. The highlights:

Best innovation idea:

• Roi Chobadi: A chat client that looks like you’re programming in Visual Studio. You know, so when your boss walks into your office you don’t have to quickly Alt-Tab.

Best lines:

• Jeff Pulver: “I worked in the World Trade Center. I got fired. Saved my life. So you never know”
• Jeff Pulver: “Hire people who don’t have experience. They don’t know what can’t be done.”
• Oded Sharon: “The best motivator? Give credit“
• Tal Yaniv: “Instead of telling my child ‘don’t spill’ I say ‘keep it in the glass.’ Focus on the positive.
• Yossi Vardi: “The main thing that stops people from making their ideas succeed is fear of looking stupid.”
• Mel Rosenberg: “This is an unconference, if you want to speak put your name on board. We won’t read it, but at least it will be there.”

Best Tweeting:

• @tallynetzer. Thanx Tally!

I also liked the back story to the conference, which Mel described as:

When I saw that Jeff Pulver was going to be in Israel, I wanted to do an Unconference after his Networking Breakfast. I figured it should probably be about Mobile since we were at Afeka college. Jeff said ‘Mel, what are you passionate about?’ I said ‘About helping people be creative.’ So that’s our topic.

Well done, Mel.

George Washington never got the same respect from many intellectuals as some of the other Founding Fathers, but that tells us more about those intellectuals than it does about Washington. Washington was the central figure of the American Revolution, and I’m not only referring to the war, but also the fifteen critical years that followed. A blog about greatness should consider this man on his birthday.

George Washington

The following 6 lessons stand out most from the life of George Washington:

1. Know when to step down or step aside: Chronologically this came last but conceptually this comes first. Washington was not the center of his vision of the United States. He understood that he was playing a temporary role in something bigger than himself. This understanding allowed him to play his role to the fullest, and to step aside at the appropriate time. BTW, this is a key concept behind the Sabbath as well. We improve our ability to contribute to the world by frequently reasserting our knowledge that we’re not the center of the universe, and that the world can turn without us. One of Washington’s finest and final political acts was insisting that Vice President Jefferson walk before him the day Washington became a private citizen.
2. Know when to retreat: Yeah, similar theme. Washington was best known for his retreats. His greatest military accomplishment might have been surviving 1776. And yet his ability to avoid most military engagements allowed him to win the war.
3. Don’t make enemies: He fought the French, and then enlisted them as allies against the British. Even while fighting the British, the British press continued to paint a positive image of the opposing general. After the war he established strong relations with the British. A century before Lincoln established his Team of Rivals, Washington managed to keep even bigger rivals united under his leadership.
4. See things from others‘ perspective: Richard Brookhiser writes in Founding Father that Washington won the war by making it unwinnable for the British. In a zero-sum situation, he focused on his enemy’s strategy and subverted it.
5. Step up: I’ve focused on Washington’s restraint, but Washington’s restraint  is so impressive only because of the context of a revolutionary leader. At all the key moments, Washington stepped up and took the helm. Washington made great things happen as a plantation owner, military commander, and political leader. His retreats must be understood in the context of the strategy that he developed that ultimately proved victorious. The rest of this post focused on his restraint because that’s what most set him apart from other revolutionaries. What most set him apart from the average person were his remarkable actions.
6. Help others shine: I’m returning to the restraint theme for the final point. Whenever an ensemble cast shines it’s important to recognize the leader who helped it happen. I don’t know of any other revolutionary leader from any other period under whom men like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and others could have contributed so greatly and shined so brightly. Jefferson wrote of Washington and Franklin that “I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.” Washington wrote “Speak seldom … never exceed a decent warmth, and submit your sentiments with diffidence. A dictatorial Stile, though it may carry conviction, is always accompanied with disgust.” Yes, sometimes Washington’s diffidence was a barely veiled act, as when showing up in military uniform to the Continental Congress and declaring himself unequal to the task of commanding the army. But the years where Washington stood at the center of the American Experiment saw remarkable contributions by others. Washington was president of the Constitutional Convention. The convention was an historic success. The fact that his name is often ignored as others are credited with the resulting document IMO speaks loudly to Washington’s greatness.

The American Exception is largely based on the remarkable balance the Founding Fathers achieved between Revolution and Restraint. Nothing exemplifies American greatness more than the humility and heroism of George Washington.

Also see: 9 Management Lessons from Lincoln

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/the-o/ / CC BY 2.0

Excellent recent articles in the New York Times, TechCrunch, and All Things D have brought some clarity and insight to the issues surrounding large-scale content-creation sites. Here’s an industry overview:

Assembly Lines for Content

Who?

Demand Media’s eHow, Associated Content, New York Times’ About.com, Aol’s Seed.com, Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com’s WikiAnswers (where I work).

What?

These sites create thousands of articles every day.

The articles generally meet the following criteria:

• Users are searching for it
• Advertisers are bidding on it
• Long potential lifespan, aka “Evergreen” or “durable.” It won’t be “yesterday’s news” tomorrow.

How?

Demand Media has algorithms which sort through search logs and advertiser bids to find which articles will attract both users and advertisers. They then offer these writing jobs to their network of freelance writers and editors. Seed.com and Associated Content follow similar models. Wired magazine provided an excellent description of the process in The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Model (though “disposable” is inaccurate, and his estimates on Demand Media’s profitability through this model seemed to be off by an order of magnitude).

Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers let users post questions to volunteer communities. These sites do not filter based on advertiser value.

About.com is closer to Demand’s model, with a freelance staff of “experts.”

Market Size:

If Yahoo! Answers, eHow, WikiAnswers, and About.com were stand-alone sites, they would probably each rank among the 25 most visited sites in the US.

Many journalists have written that Demand Media is taking in over $200 million a year in this business, but that number is apparently highly misleading. Most of Demand Media’s revenue apparently comes from other, unrelated sources, such as their domain registrar.

The concerns:

Some of these sites are now considered content factories, that are using a freelance global workforce to create specific content according to specific standards.

Some online journalists have expressed concern that this will:

• Decrease journalists’ pay, as they compete with content factories using a freelance global labor force
• Push journalism towards boring and monetizable content
• Fill search rankings with low quality content
• Cause content to be too standardized, like fast food
• Provide low quality content

The journalists’ fears are real. One prominent journalist first wrote positively about Demand Media:

“As long as search engines like Google continue to rank niche, topical content highly – and we see absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t – then Demand Media will continue to pump out thousands of articles a day …”

and then changed track and started throwing around imagery of demonic content farms infiltrating Google, powered by journalists who swallow their pride to work under sweatshop conditions.

Naturally, the first article received little notice, but the later tirades attracted quite an audience. Globalization and efficiency experts sounded like much better ideas when they were threatening other people’s professions.

Still, these sites are generally not playing a large role in the problems facing writers. Eric Schonfeld writes in Seed’s Goal Is To “Redefine Journalism For The Internet Age,” Its Reality Is Untangling Cat Hair.

“Seed is supposed to help by assigning the stories that “satisfy the world’s curiosity” (the Seed Creed) …

The closest assignments I could find that might require some actual reporting are “What it’s like working at Target” ($25) and “How to Untangle Matted Hair on a Cat” ($80), which asks for an interview with a pet groomer.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that none of these are going to win a Pulitzer.  But maybe that’s not what Aol means by redefining journalism.”

These sites are not competing with most journalism. These sites will rarely appear in your search results when you’re looking for hard news. They will show up when you ask Google about untangling cat hair, and they’ll be competing with each other, not with most journalists.

Regarding standardized content, often quality standards are good. I’m glad that eHow articles will generally share a template and meet certain guidelines of how a How To article should be written. Perhaps eHow isn’t the place I go when I want to hear a fresh voice.

The biggest issue may be the last one. These sites produce both high and low quality content, and their long term success will be dependent on how much high quality content they can produce. Wikipedia did a great job creating quality content from a diverse group of volunteers, by focusing on standards. YouTube is a more diverse site, with plenty of great content and plenty of awful content. The search engines will continue to get better at highlighting the quality content. The large content sites will keep getting better at creating quality content. Meanwhile, the best journalists like Kara Swisher, Eric Schonfeld, and David Carr will continue covering these subjects and receiving traffic from their loyal readers and from search engines.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

Wikimedia’s strategy memo is interesting for what it has and for what it’s missing.

Wikimedia Strategic Planning

Key Concerns:

• Editing community has flattened out.
• Have been very successful in the “Global North” but it will be much harder to grow in the “Global South.”
• Technological and financial infrastructure have not kept pace with growth in readership.

They will:

• Invest in their infrastructure: technological, organizational, and financial
• Reduce friction for new contributors
• Remain “free of commercialism”

They won’t:

• Go to China.
• Invest in developing content partnerships
• Invest in direct editorial interventions to increase quality, e.g. paying people for developing content or policies.

Most of their strategy sounds good. They need to build the infrastructure that can handle their site’s activity. They need to make changes to their culture and to their site to encourage new contributors. They should stay out of China. And their mission and vision requires that they expand to parts of the world that need them more, but where progress will be much harder to achieve.

The biggest problem IMO is their plan to increase spending without developing a viable revenue model. The only parts of the strategy document that discuss finances discuss the money that they’ll spend and the income possibilities that they reject.

They discuss their revenue possibilities in a separate document and you can read the notes from their financing task meeting. Ideas include seeking government funding, selling user data, premium subscriptions, more aggressive fundraising, pursuing an endowment, and displaying advertising. The only mention their strategy memo makes of these ideas is to reject some of them. The ones that aren’t rejected may be either unrealistic or worse than the ones that were rejected.

I think Wikipedia does a lot of good. But I think the same of Microsoft and Google. And those companies’ revenues have been (or will be, I expect) used to contribute billions of dollars in taxes and charity. I wish Wikimedia luck in figuring out how to cover their expenses, and I hope their moral compass doesn’t lead them to try to finance through taxpayer money in order to live up to their values of “free of commercialism.”

In 1993, the New Yorker famously published a cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The internet was where you lived your anonymous second life. How times have changed.

The excellent Doc Searls mocked the way sites treat your privacy by imagining it in the real world:

“The [privacy] policy tells you that, if you fill out this guy’s form, he will plant on your person a tracking device that will report your movements back to him. Collected data might include the type of car you drive, the routes you take, the names and addresses of the places you visit, and the times and dates for all this activity …At the bottom of the form, under a heading titled “Your Consent”, it says “In dealing with me, you consent to the terms of my Privacy Policy, my Terms and Conditions, and my processing of Personal Information for the purposes given above. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please stop talking to me. If you continue talking to me, I reserve the right, at my discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions from this Privacy Policy at any time. Your continued conversation with me, after I put a new form like this in my back pocket, means means you accept these changes”.

“This is your ‘Privacy Policy’”? you say.

“Yes”.

“And your ‘Terms and Conditions’ are something else? ” …

– from Where Markets are Not Conversations, Doc Searls

And then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they were changing their privacy policies since privacy was “no longer a social norm.”

Naturally, there’s a lot of discomfort here. I keep flashing back to blockbuster movies with Will Smith and Shia Labeouf where the big bad military types get control of all of our information and use it to tyrannize the innocent. I understand the fear. But ultimately I think Zuckerberg’s point is very relevant and mostly good.

I’m reminded of the scene in Dharma & Greg where Larry is horrified that Dharma got a Social Security card. “Now you’re on the grid!” he says ominously.

I think this is progress. A generation ago people chose untraceable usernames and lived a second life online. Today we use our real names as Twitter handles and Facebook Connect into social applications. Our online presence is part of our total presence. Online man is born anonymous but surrenders his anonymity to society so that we can interact responsibly and with accountability as our true selves. We shed some of the lies and barriers and interact with greater openness than in the past.

This isn’t just an online thing. My parents and grandparents had many family secrets. Intimacies, squabbles, diseases, and struggles were covered up lest family members be shunned from future work or social relationships. People changed their names to hide their religious and ethnic identities.

People today are generally far more open and less prejudiced than they were years ago. As a result there are far fewer people living in their various closets. Billy Joel’s The Stranger keeps declining in relevance. We come closer to interacting publicly as our true selves.

This is not to argue the important details of privacy policies. But the general social shift that Zuckerberg notes is IMO a generally wonderful thing. May we continue to increase society’s openness online & off, and may it be a reflection of increased appreciation and respect for authenticity, individuality, and responsibility.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/ / CC BY 2.0

Questions

Friends (if you’re reading this, that includes you), can you help me out with this? For my birthday, my wife bought me a consulting package from Beyond Blogging. Step 1 is “Finding your passion.” They write:

“It’s essential for long term success to find a topic that you’re passionate about. …

Here’s a quick test: If you could blog on any topic for the next five years, and be paid $100,000 to do it, what would you choose? …

Can you … work on this project ‘until your eyeballs bleed?’

[great bloggers have] a real passion about their topics and a desire to share their knowledge with the world.”

So where’s my passion? The best validation I’ve had for this blog are three particular friends who came up to me and told me how much they like reading my blog. Maybe they were just being polite, but I’m going to pursue this passion on the assumption that it’s more than that.

My passion is the search. The questions more than the answers, and the unknown more than the known. The perfect life for me is filled with awe and humility and constant searching and questioning. And my passion is to share that journey.

I don’t want a monologue, I want a conversation, with others who are moved by the same search.

The worlds of online search and Q&A will often be the concrete topics discussed. Also issues of leadership, quality content, and successful teams, communities and companies.

Which leads to another question. Should I move this blog from ManagingGreatness.com to GilReich.com? Or to somewhere else? The blog was originally going to be about management, but it’s been more about the search industry. I changed the tagline this morning to “searching and questioning, online and off”.

So I’m asking you for your thoughts. Does this blog need a more focused topic? Are you interested in carrying on a conversation on this blog? Does the theme of “searching and questioning, online and off” work? Is it time to move off of the current domain name? I appreciate your help.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ / CC BY-SA 2.0