Ed Batista

Guy Kawasaki Calls Do-Overs

The other week Guy Kawasaki posted a list of 15 job interview tips.  Fine advice if you're job-hunting, but I thought one item stood out as something worth trying in everyday life:

Retract your mistakes. If you screw up an answer in an interview, it's cool to say, "That was a crappy answer. Let me try again." If nothing else, it shows that you can realize and correct a mistake in real time. It's better to retract a stupid answer than to leave a permanent impression of cluelessness.

One of the reasons why saying "Wait--I made a mistake" is so powerful is because we hear it so rarely.  We commit ourselves to a particular course of action or a solution to a problem, and when it turns out to be wrong, we're often too embarrassed to admit it.  So we soldier on, hoping that no one notices--or daring them to call us on it.

But Kawasaki's opening up a door and challenging us to walk through it.  Take our egos out of the equation, own up to our mistakes, learn from them, try again.  Or even more simply: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

On Metadata: What You Can't See CAN Hurt You

I had a vivid reminder this morning that we're represented online not only by the data we can see--from blog posts to search results--but also (and increasingly) by metadata that we often can't see.  (And I also learned just how good customer service can be.)

One of my favorite tools is Feedster, which describes itself as "the largest and richest archive of indexed feeds on the web."  (What's a feed?)  I use Feedster, Technorati and Ask.com's blogsearch service on a daily basis to keep up news from feeds on a variety of topics--including myself.

Searching feeds for my name or for links to my site allows me to see who's commenting on or linking to my posts and to jump into the discussion if I want.  I can also just confirm that my posts are being picked up and indexed by these services so that other people can find them.

Although I do like Feedster, I'd gotten a little lazy and hadn't run a vanity search on their service for a while.  So it was a little surprising to run one this morning and get the following:

If you look carefully, you'll notice that at the bottom of each search result is a link to my feed, which has been given a somewhat lengthier and, ah, more colorful title than plain old "Ed Batista."  To each his own, of course, but that's not really how I want my feed to be described.

I use FeedBurner to add a bunch of features to my feed, so I immediately took a look at my FeedBurner configurations.  Nothing there suggested that my feed should be titled anything but "Ed Batista."  I searched their forums for advice but didn't find anything applicable, so I used their contact form to ask for help directly--and just 34 minutes later I heard from Paul at FeedBurner.  Paul couldn't solve my problem, but he confirmed that it didn't appear to be on FeedBurner's end and suggested that I contact Feedster.

After double-checking that my feed wasn't mistitled on any other feed search services, I went to Feedster's site and used their contact form to ask for help--and 19 minutes later I heard from Jeff at Feedster.  Success!  Apparently "certain fields were corrupted" at Feedster (whether inadvertantly or by someone with too much time on his hands, I don't know), resulting in the "inappropriate title" for my feed.  Feedster solved the problem, but they're still in the process of checking the millions of feeds they index to be sure that the metadata associated with each feed is correct.

And happily, a search for "ed batista" on Feedster is now a little less...adventurous.

Lessons learned?  Even free services like FeedBurner and Feedster can do customer service right, so there's really no reason to settle for anything less.  Kudos and thanks to both of them.  And I'm sure as hell going to run those vanity searches a little more often.

Trumba on TypePad

UPDATE: Trumba has terminated their free and low-cost service aimed at consumers and small/medium businesses, and is now focusing exclusively on large customers with an event management service that's priced at $99 per month.  I've switched to Google--as I predicted in my original post below, resistance was futile--but I'm really not a fan.  If you know any any better alternatives, please contact me.

UPDATE 2: I'm really unhappy with Google Calendar's lack of display customization, so I've switched again to CalendarHub.  I tried 30 Boxes, and I liked a lot of their features, but the inability to display a list of upcoming events (as in my sidebar here) was a deal-breaker.  I also looked briefly at AirSet, but they have no options for publishing personal calendars at all.  CalendarHub isn't great--the interface for adding and editing events is clunky and slow--but it essentially does what Trumba did.  We'll see if they can hold out longer than Trumba did.

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I'm writing a lot more about personal and organizational development than technology these days, but I recently started using Trumba, an online calendar service, and so far I'm sufficiently impressed that it's worth a post.

Like millions of other people, I somewhat reluctantly use Outlook for my main personal productivity functions: email, contacts, task lists, and calendar.  I seriously considered switching twice in the past 18 months, but for a variety of reasons decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.  And then earlier this year David Allen's GTD and Outlook actually transformed Outlook into a much more useful tool for me.  (I don't use the GTD plug-in for Outlook, I just adopted the strategies outlined in Allen's 40-page guidebook.)

But having decided to stick with Outlook, I still needed an calendaring tool that would allow me to publish information about upcoming events on my schedule.  Optimally it would integrate with Outlook as well, but if I had to maintain it separately that was OK.  Note that I wasn't looking to replace my Outlook calendar--I just wanted an additional tool that would allow me to create and share a public version of my calendar.

I looked into Google's GCal and Backpack's calendar and a few other services, but nothing did exactly what I wanted, particularly when it came to publishing and sharing my schedule.  GCal's options have improved a lot over the past few months, but it's still not flexible enough for me.  (And although I'm a heavy Gmail user, I typically route all my email to Outlook and work with it locally, so currently there's not much value to me in centralizing my calendar and email on Google's servers.  At some point, resistance will be futile Google will make it worth my while, but not yet.)

And then I learned about Trumba through TypePad.  Bingo.  Here's what I like about it:

• Publishing Options:  Highly flexible and configurable.  Link to your calendar, display your calendar, display a calendar graphic, display a list of upcoming events, allow users to change the template, allow users to filter and search your calendar--you can even create a crawl.

• Sub-Calendars: Trumba makes it very easy to create "sub-calendars" that have a parent-child relationship to your main calendar.  You can mix and match events between the sub-calendars and your main calendar, and you can publish the sub-calendar separately, which is great if you have different audiences for your published calendars but you want to maintain them in a centralized location.

• TypePad Integration: Trumba is a TypePad widget partner, and you can create a list of your upcoming events, like the one in my right-hand sidebar, directly from Trumba's site.  I prefer to create a TypeList manually instead, because TypePad gives you more control over TypeLists than they do over widgets, but Trumba still makes it easy to get the code you need.  And functionality aside, the fact that Six Apart chose Trumba as their partner says good things about their business prospects.

• Outlook Integration: I haven't  sprung for Trumba's paid service yet ($10 a month, or $100 a year), but if I really become a heavy user, the biggest incentive to switch will be the ability to manage my Trumba calendar directly in Outlook.  (Presumably it's a two-way synch, but that's not clear.)  At the moment, the free service is fine for my needs, but I'll take a serious look at switching in a few months.
  

Pema Chodron on Patience and Letting Go

I just came across Pema Chödrön's March 2005 article, The Answer to Anger and Aggression is Patience.  As I've written before, I'm not a Buddhist, but I've learned a lot from Chödrön's writings and often look to her for guidance.

The following passage from the article made me think about the many things I hold onto past the point of usefulness--certain ways of doing things, beliefs about myself and others, even my perspective on the world--and how liberating it can be when I let go and open myself up to alternatives.  But Chödrön also provides a healthy reminder that it takes patient effort to explore and understand these things, and that sometimes it's best to focus on small ones before addressing big ones:

[W]henever there is pain of any kind--the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain--if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we're holding on to...

...After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you're there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften...

It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You’re going to say to yourself, "I don't want to see this." You'll be afraid, because even if you're starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you're going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it's something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.

On the other hand, sometimes it's easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking to see if there's something you’re holding on to, often it's going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, "It's too big; you can't let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go."

That was extremely good advice. You don't have to do the big one, because usually you can't. It's too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore and Chris Corrigan for providing the serendipitous path.

Stagefright and Public Speaking

John Lahr has a great article on stagefright in the August 28th New Yorker that made me think about how much I hate--and love--public speaking.  Lahr writes:

All the central traumas of childhood--being alone, abandoned, unsupported, emotionally abused--are revived for an actor when he appears before the paying customers, who have the power to either starve him of affection or reward him with approval... When things are going well, the stage and the house merge and a sort of imaginative union is achieved... "There is brilliant intellectual clarity, a sense of boundless, inexhaustible energy as the chambers of the brain open up," [Ian] Holm says of a successful performance... When the actor cannot make contact and the audience withholds its affection, however, the experience brings back a primal anxiety.

That aptly describes the attraction and repulsion that any public speaking opportunity holds for me.  But Lahr goes on to explain that the terrors of stagefright can be useful, even salutary.  He quotes the pianist Charles Rosen:

"Stagefright is not merely symbolically but functionally necessary, like the dread of a candidate before an examination or a job interview, both designed essentially as tests of courage," Rosen writes.  "Stagefright...is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense--that is, insufficient by itself, but a necessary condition for success."

Lahr closes with a discussion with the acting coach Susan Batson:

"If you're a people pleaser"--worried about whether the audience is going to like you--"you're bound to have stagefright," she told me.  "If you have an issue of not feeling like you're good enough, you're bound to have stagefright.  The people who survive it are the ones who can take control of the situation and override it."

Rather than think of performers with stagefright as aberrant or lacking in determination, Batson actually takes the opposite view:

"I'm always terrified of the person who doesn't have [stagefright], because it means that the commitment is not fully there."

Lahr's article makes me think that the problem isn't really stagefright itself--it's my resistance to stagefright.  I feel anxiety and fear; I see those feelings as evidence of my inadequacy as a speaker or as harbingers of failure; and I become consumed with the futile struggle to stamp them out.

But if, instead, I see those feelings as evidence of my desire to do well and to win over the audience, and as entirely natural reactions to the situation, I can simply accept that I'm anxious and fearful--as I should be--and harness that energy rather than try to fight it.

I've linked before to R. Todd Stephens' public speaking tips, and I still recommend them.  But in addition to those tactical ways to increase my comfort level before an audience, I'm going to adopt the strategy of simply accepting my stagefright, breathing it in, and moving on.  We'll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Marnie Webb has a detailed description of the process she's developed to deal with  stagefright when speaking.  Two things I particularly love:

1. By telling her audience at the outset that she's prone to fast talking because of nervousness, she "invites everyone into the problem" and allows them to be part of the solution.  We could apply the same strategy to any issue that we struggle with as speakers--inviting our audience into the problem (i.e. recognizing and embracing it, rather than trying to hide it) completely transforms the dynamic from "me vs. them" to "us vs. the problem."  Big difference.
2. She drafts a detailed text to accompany each slide and then deletes it, leaving just "a screen shot or a word or a phrase."  The text goes into the notes section, so the audience will have a useful handout after the talk, but during the talk their attention will be focused on what Marnie's actually saying, not on her slides.  The slides will complement and support her words, rather than substitute for them.  And Marnie will be engaging the audience by looking at them, rather than looking over her shoulder in order to read her slides.  This is consistent with Seth Godin's excellent PowerPoint guidelines, but it also forces Marnie to practice her presentation repeatedly, which is probably the best way to deal with stagefright, but also one of the most easily ignored.

Even Millionaires Need A Pat On The Back

The Cincinnati Reds just arrived in San Francisco to kick off a West Coast road trip with major playoff implications.  Before they left, Reds owner Bob Castellini sent each player a letter:

Your performance on the field has been awsesome all year. You NEVER quit. Good luck on your West Coast swing. Please know upon your return we will have done everything we can to fill the stands in these last crucial homestands. You deserve nothing less from our fans and management team.

Professional baseball players are among the most competitive people on earth, and they're obviously well-compensated--the average MLB salary was $2.6 million in 2005.  It would be easy to assume that they don't need any extra motivation.  But I love Castellini's approach here-he's clearly aware that a pat on the back can be important even when it might seem superfluous, and he's sending a great message to everyone in the organization: We're all in this together, and everyone's role is important.

Apparently inspired, the Reds came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the Giants last night 6-3.  Grrr.  (Thanks to Geep at the SportsFrog for the heads-up.)

Are You A Searcher Or A Planner?

From a "How-do-you-tackle-problems?" perspective, there are basically two types of people: Searchers and Planners.  Searchers see a need, identify a feasible solution, find the resources required to get started, and hit the ground running.  Planners see a need, identify the best solution, find the resources required to finish the job, and launch when success is (theoretically) assured.

I was reminded of this this dichotomy by Jason Riley's op-ed in the August 21 Wall Street Journal on  the different approaches to treating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.  Riley writes approvingly of entrepreneurial Searchers, who "prefer to work case-by-case, using trial and error to tailor solutions to individual problems, fully aware that most remedies must be homegrown."  And he sneers at the bureaucratic Planners who, while well-meaning, take a large-scale, top-down approach to issues such as poverty, which they see as "technical engineering problem[s] that [their] answers will solve," in the words of economist William Easterly.

I don't know much anything about malaria or public health policy, so I can't comment on the aptness of Riley's comments in this particular case.  But I agree with his larger perspective: Planning is overrated and sometimes even counterproductive.  I know from personal experience that planning can become an end in itself--you can get so caught up in the process of planning that the plan becomes a proxy for the problem, and when the plan's complete you feel a sense of accomplishment, even though all you've done is finish the plan!

I studied entrepreneurship with a brilliant guy named Chuck Holloway in business school, and one of the principles he stressed was the importance of being able to pull back, assess your progress (or lack thereof), and adjust course accordingly.  He taught us to avoid unnecessary long-term commitments and plans that can't be revised and to keep our planning horizons realistically short.

This philosophy is essential in any entrepreneurial situation where resources are tightly constrained and the future is highly uncertain, but I'd argue that it can be just as useful in other circumstances.  In fact, a lack of resource constraints can be a distinct disadvantage because it can lead to an overemphasis on planning at the expense of actual work.

I see a parallel in the rise of the rapid development approach to software in the 1980s, which replaced longer-term, planning intensive models.  As Wikipedia notes, "The problem with previous methodologies was that applications took so long to build that requirements had changed before the system was complete, often resulting in unusable systems."  Bingo.  And that's not just a problem with software development.

I don't mean to suggest that planning's useless.  Eisenhower was a pretty thorough Planner, and it's hard to argue with the results of D-Day.  But every planning process should be tailored to fit the situation, and we need to keep in mind the tendency of plans to consume available time and resources.  I also think we need to understand where we sit on the Searcher-Planner spectrum as individuals, because sometimes our natural inclinations will be just the right fit for the circumstances, while at other times we'll need to push beyond our comfort zone or find someone else to do the job.

One of my favorite stories about planning comes from Joan Didon's The Year of Magical Thinking, her moving, thoughtful and surprisingly funny memoir about coping with several deaths in her family.  She writes about her first years of marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne:

My memory of those years is that both John and I were improvising, flying blind.  When I was clearing out a file drawer recently I came across a thick file labeled "Planning."  The very fact that we made files labeled "Planning" suggests how little of it we did.  We also had "planning meetings," which consisted of sitting down with legal pads, stating the day's problem out loud, and then, with no further attempt to solve it, going out to lunch.  Such lunches were festive, as if to celebrate a job well done.

I think we've all been there.

UPDATE: Greg Neichin adds a great line in the comments from Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines:

We have a "strategic plan."  It's called doing things.

Lest We Forget

One year ago today, on August 23rd, 2005, Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas.

New Orleans still needs your help--please give to the charity of your choice at Network for Good's Katrina page.

Meeting in the Middle: Coaching and Counseling

The worlds of coaching and counseling seem to be converging in a way that allows practitioners in both disciplines to be more effective by drawing upon a wider range of techniques.  I'm generally enthusiastic about these changes, but I share the concerns being raised about maintaining appropriate boundaries.

Suzanne Leigh had an extensive article on cognitive therapy in the August 6th San Francisco Chronicle Magazine.  Leigh explained that in cognitive therapy...

[D]octor and patient form a collaborative partnership in which healthier life skills are developed to help patients handle challenging situations.  Unlike traditional psychodynamic therapy, which evolved from Freudian psychoanalysis and is based on the assumption that depression is usually the result of unresolved unconscious conflicts in childhood, cognitive therapy focuses on the present and is significantly more structured and undertaken over shorter periods.

Cognitive therapy is generally used to help people with depression or anxiety, but many elements of the model remind me of coaching principles employed to help people tackle other, work-related issues: the collaborative partnership between coach and client; the goal of improving skills in order to better address challenges; and a short-term, structured engagement.  As Leigh's article makes clear, there is some controversy over cognitive therapy, and I'm not suggesting that it's a panacea--but I do believe in the efficacy of the coaching model, and I'm encouraged to see it reflected in these counseling practices.

The following week, Hannah Karp had an article in the August 11th Wall Street Journal on therapists, social workers and other counselors who have integrated physical activity (from tennis to running to yoga) into their work with clients.  Karp notes that the substitution of antidepressants for traditional psychotherapy has encouraged counselors to explore alternative forms of treatment, and that a growing awareness of the psychological benefits of exercise has resulted in new forms of "physical therapy."

In this context the parallels with coaching are are even more obvious--some of these practitioners are actual athletic coaches who've simply integrated counseling practices into their work with clients.  And again, there's some controversy--Karp quotes a therapist who sounds a cautionary note: "To maintain boundaries, people need to be very cautious... If you play tennis with them, where do you stop?"

Although I think coaches and counselors have much to learn from each other and that there are substantial parallels between their practices, I also think it's important to understand the distinction between the disciplines and to insure that the client is getting their needs met appropriately.  It's a fascinating dialogue, though, and I hope it continues to result in fruitful collaboration.

Money and Happiness

Jonathan Clements' "Getting Going" column in the August 16 Wall Street Journal reviewed findings from recent economic and sociological studies to make the case that money only buys so much happiness.  From the column's sidebar:

Folks earning $90,000 or more report being much happier than those earning less than $20,000--but not much happier than those earning between $50,000 and $89,999.

And even that marginal bump-up in happiness above $90K may be illusory.  From Clements' column:

[R]esearchers have speculated that our happiness is influenced not by our absolute level of wealth and income, but rather by how our financial situation compares with friends and colleagues.

This may help explain why so many high-income earners describe themselves as "very happy."  Much of the time, these folks aren't necessarily all that cheerful.  But when asked in surveys to assess their satisfaction with their lives, they think about their standing in the world--and that prompts them to say they are happy.

This strikes me as, uh, right on the money.  My wife and I went to law school and business school, respectively, and as a result became members of a high-earning, upwardly mobile and deeply stressed-out cohort.  Over the last few years, we both turned away from lucrative professional opportunities to do work that was more rewarding and less stressful, and we're a lot more satisfied with our lives as a result.

Sure, if our income dropped below a certain level, our happiness would drop as well, but downward mobility has its rewards.  Today we have a lot more time for each other, we're getting more exercise, we cook and eat dinner together almost every night, and perhaps most tellingly, we sleep soundly, free from work-induced anxiety dreams.  The process hasn't been pain-free, but if we had to do it all over again, I have no doubt that we'd make the same choices.

Reading Clements' column, I couldn't help but imagine that some of the high-earners taking that survey considered their bank balance and their material standard of living and thought, "Well, I'm supposed to be happy, so I guess I'll say I'm happy."