Rowan's Future of Choice

More on understanding

I forgot to say that Laura got me thinking about the connection between understanding and decision making, in something she wrote in her blog last week. In it, she ventures well beyond my post this morning; it is worth a read.
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Laura Young, Does Anyone Really Understand You? Link

Kindness is seldom mistaken for anything else

We all want to be recognized for making the 'right' choices. Judgment, integrity, and courage are important in our decision-making, but being right is the goal. We want others to know when we reach it. The trouble is: most of the people we know are too preoccupied with hoping they will be recognized for making their own right choices to tell us how they feel about ours.

How to break the cycle? Try patience and forgiveness and kindness. Try setting aside being right. Ignore the goal. Recognize the desire and struggle that went into making a choice. Tell them, "I know that must have been one of the toughest decisions you ever made." And mean it.

One of my favorite people wrote:

I was misunderstood growing up and have often been misunderstood since, but then so is everyone else. People are busy, and you can't expect them to drop everything and try to understand you. If you want to be understood, practice kindness and mercy. Kindness is seldom mistaken for anything else. Small kindnesses reverberate a long time in people's hearts.

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Garrison Keillor, from his article, The Old Scout: Everyday Sweetness in America. Link; thanks to  Jennifer Warwick for her post at 100 Bloggers.

Shorthand

It always surprises me how much one person can say with only a few words, and how little another can say with volumes.

It was early August, 1938. America was deep in the Great Depression. A woman named Helen sent a postcard from downeast Maine to a relative near Boston.

The card was postmarked in New Harbor and addressed to Mrs. Roger W. Weeks, Willowbred (sp?) Farm, Marion, Massachusetts. It is now for sale on eBay.

Dear Kara,

I didn’t hasten to answer your card as I knew that Pa had written to you, and that you would know that he was all right.

He’s pretty worried about you with no water + lights.

We’re delighted with this fine weather down here + glad to be missing it in  Boston. Pa is fine.

Love,
Helen + all of us.

eBay link

Good karma

This weekend I was picking out a special batch of business/calling cards to use at the PopTech conference next month. I clicked over to Hugh MacLeod's blog, gapingvoid, to look at his card service.

Occasionally, I study his cartoons because I have often used humor in business. So few other people make business cartoons, beyond Scott Adams and some of the New Yorker artists. I want so much to like MacLeod's drawings and sense of humor. Sometimes I do, but most of the time they leave me feeling empty and sad. I love sarcasm, and use it myself, but these seem too cynical.

Anyway, I picked out the cartoon below for one side of my card, and text for the other. I was about to check out when something made me stop. The next day it dawned on me why I was uncomfortable. The idea of marketing beliefs turns my stomach. Beliefs are not like pop songs or breakfast cereals. They are neither infinite nor measurable. I want marketers to stay away from my beliefs. I know they won't because choice is a product of belief, and companies want to make choices for me.

I will keep looking for a cartoon to use on my business card. One I can laugh at.

Gapingvoid.com; belief cartoon; PopTech;

The Tower of Bloggers

John Greenberg at the Goodmind blog posted a great summary of what he learned at the Blogging Goes Mainstream conference sponsored by the Business Development Institute.  He writes that “Blogging constitutes a new form of decision-making.” He goes on to write that blogs let people use conversations, not knowledgebases and databases, to help them make decisions. Link

If true, I think this statement is dangerous. How do we separate the bullsh#tters from the honest and informed? The ability of any blogger to self-publish to the world for free reveals how little we know about a wide range of topics. We may have opinions about this body of ignorance, but so what? Are others to base important decisions on the uninformed opinions of a stranger? Only at our peril. What do you think?

There is a related commentary by Richard Tomkins in today’s Financial Times, called “The truth, the half truths and nothing resembling the truth.” Link requires subscription.

"I believe in open government"

The current U.S. administration says it wants citizen involvement in decision-making. At the same time, the government is withholding more and more information from the public.

Mr. Bush said yesterday, "You're entitled to how I make decisions and you're entitled to ask questions, which I answer."

and...

"Information which used to be easy to obtain is now difficult or impossible to get," he said. Trivial things such as the Pentagon phone directory have been marked for official use only and are no longer public."   

Claiming national security concerns, the Bush administration clamped down on declassification of government documents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The trend toward keeping more government information secret began even before that and those who advocate for openness in government are worried that the freedom of U.S. citizens is eroding with every file they are not allowed to read."

Read the full AP story at the ABC News web site.

Transparency is not just about Sarbanes-Oxley

Prolific blogger David St. Lawrence wrote in his manifesto about changes he sees in corporate decision making:

"If there had been an internet and business blogs when I was struggling to make career decisions, I know that my business life would have been quite different. Weblogs can have an enormous effect in making people successful in their careers, by creating and maintaining a body of anecdotal information on how businesses actually make decisions about employees."

I really think he is on to something. They say Microsoft is opening up. I wonder when/if government will become more transparent?