Ed Batista

Who Is Landon Donovan Working For?

Landon Donovan is a 24-year-old professional soccer player and one of the greatest American soccer players ever. Donovan was sufficiently talented to win a contract with a top German team at age 17, but despite expectations that he would be one of the first Americans to break into the Bundesliga, the highly competitive German league, and compete at a world-class level, he had a generally unsuccessful experience in Germany during 2004-05 and returned to the much less rigorous American professional ranks.

Donovan's poor showing in Germany seemed to result from a number of factors, including homesickness. But he's been criticized by a number of American soccer coaches, players and fans for his failure to succeed in that environment. They contend that rather than dominating Major League Soccer here at home without breaking a sweat, Donovan should be pushing himself harder to compete in the Bundesliga in order to make himself a better player and by so doing to improve the chances of the U.S. national team. Recent quotes from Donovan in an interview with Reuters' Erik Kirschbaum suggest that Donovan agrees that going to Europe would have that effect:

I'd probably become a better soccer player just from the day-in, day-out grind of it there... [But] I wouldn't be a better person. I wouldn't be a happy person. I'd be pretty miserable.

So what should Donovan do? It depends on who--and what--he's working for, but that's a more complicated question than it seems at first. Is he working only for himself? And what does that mean: Maximizing his happiness by staying at home, or getting the most out of his talents by returning to Europe? Making good money by staying here, or making great money by returning to Europe? Will he be most fulfilled if he stays within his comfort zone, where he knows he can succeed, or will he one day wish he'd tried to compete on a bigger stage? And what about Donovan's obligations to others with an investment in his success? Should their perspective affect his decision?

Obviously, I don't raise the issue because I think we can answer these questions for Donovan; only he can answer them for himself.  But I think they're worth asking of ourselves. Who and what are we working for? More to come.

Photo of Landon Donovan courtesy of nwistheone. Yay Flickr.

Tarpits: Where Ideas Go To Die

I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) system an incredibly helpful way to organize my work and be more productive while reducing stress.  (That's not to say I use it effectively all the time--if I were that together, I wouldn't need GTD in the first place.)  One of the foundations of GTD is the process of sweeping out all the places you store ideas and action items--your email inbox, your actual inbox, all your notebooks and various lists--and combining and prioritizing their contents in a single place.

The problem is that we typically try to store and organize too many of these items in our head, and we don't do a very good job of it--we either fail to prioritize items appropriately because we're always looking at a partial list, or we forget items entirely, or we stress ourselves out trying to keep track of too many things at once.  And GTD usually solves this problem.

But I've discovered a few loopholes in my application of GTD, and I've come to think of them as tarpits.  Tarpits are places where I'm storing ideas or action items without actually realizing it.  Because I don't consider them "inboxes" or "lists," they escape my regular sweeps, and their contents pile up and stagnate.

For example, my browser has become a tarpit.  I typically use Firefox, which allows me to open multiple websites simultaneously and work on them in separate "tabs."  I've customized Firefox with a plugin called Session Saver, which remembers the tabs I have open when I close the browser and re-opens them the next time I launch the browser.

This is a great feature, up to a point--but when I'm keeping thirty (!) tabs open across multiple browsing sessions, I'm not using it appropriately; I'm stuck in a tarpit:

So what to do?  The first step is recognizing that new tools (and old tools' new features) are changing my productivity landscape.  My browser isn't just an application that I turn on and off; it's also a de facto list of ideas and action items.

And the next step is extending my concept of GTD to incorporate this new landscape.  Regular GTD sweeps help me manage my email inbox and my notebooks and lists--now I need to include my browser tabs in that process (and I need to keep an eye out for other tarpits I've been stumbling into.)

A Little Housecleaning: Feedback Requested

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've been cleaning things up around here over the past few days.  (Note to Explorer users: I know the boxes in the left-hand sidebar are running wide--I'm trying to determine the cause of the problem.  Thanks for bearing with me...and have you ever considered using Firefox?  Um, just a thought.  Note to feed readers: Feel free to skip this post.)  Here's a quick orientation--and any feedback would be greatly appreciated:

• The "Stay in Touch" menu at the top of the left-hand sidebar includes links to subscribe to my feed, get updates by email, use my contact form, and my email and IM/Skype addresses.

• The "About Me" menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar includes links to my About page, as well as my Recent Transitions and Local Meeting Spots posts.  (I'll keep the latter two up for a while, but I'll probably update and/or replace them shortly.)  And on my About page, I've consolidated my reputation/profile links under the "For More Info..." menu, which currently includes LinkedIn, Opinity, Trufina and RapLeaf.  I'm uncertain as to how useful these services are--if you've found them helpful (or not), I'd love to know.

• I've moved the "Search This Site" links to the left-hand sidebar, at the top of the content navigation menus (Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories and Archives).  You can still choose between Google and Technorati, but I've added logos and simplified the interface.

• I cut out a few menus from the sidebars that didn't really seem useful--like my Del.icio.us tagroll, which you can still find as a link under the "Tools I Like" menu on the left.  And I'm about to do a major culling of the sites in my blogroll--they're all worthwhile reads, but I'm currently oversubscribed to technology sites and undersubscribed to management sites, and I need to adjust my feed reading to fit my current interests.

• I may not be done--I'm thinking about a new, less cryptic banner [Update: I've added a new banner and tweaked the color scheme] and a swanky top menu (if I have the guts to tackle it), and I'll definitely be adding a page on my professional services soon--but I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out to date.  Thanks to TypePad for continuing to exceed expectations and to John Unger at TypePad Hacks for some great ideas.

Brown University: On Happiness

Students at Brown University were recently deemed the happiest in the nation by the Princeton Review. I attended Brown from 1988 through 1990, graduating with a degree in History and a few credits short of a double major in Fine Art, and I was pretty happy myself, most of the time. In general I don't think college rankings are a good thing--they reduce an incredibly complex institution to a single number, they create a phony sense of objectivity, and they're useless when determining whether a particular school is the right place for a particular student.

But if we're going to rank our universities, by all means let's include students' happiness in the mix. According to the Princeton Review, their "Happiest Students" list, like most of their rankings, was derived from the results of an 80-question survey completed by 115,000 students--an average of 350 per school). (I have no idea whether this is an effective way of measuring happiness, but that sure sounds like a lot of data, doesn't it? And Lord knows we Americans--especially those of us with the opportunity to spend time at places like Brown--find a great deal of comfort in data, so let's at least pretend that there's some validity to the process.)

So why was I happy at Brown? Well, for starters I felt very lucky to be there. I had an up-and-down freshman year at Duke, which has many strengths as a university but was not the right place for me, and then spent two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I worked my ass off and got my head together before deciding I wanted to return to college. In a fit of youthful exuberance, I decided that Brown was the only place for me, and it was the only school to which I applied. (Thank God they took me.)

And why did I think Brown would be only place for me? Because after living on my own in Boston, and after working as a laborer, truck driver, and copy clerk to help support myself while I was in art school, and--most importantly--after having the freedom that the Museum School afforded me to create my own curriculum and select my own classes, I needed to attend a school that would treat me like an adult and let me make my own decisions. And that was Brown's philosophy in a nutshell.

I haven't been back to Providence in a long time, but I have to assume that Brown still gives its students more than enough rope to hang themselves plenty of latitude to chart their own course. And independence alone may not be enough to make you happy, but I don't know how you can be happy without it.

Feeling Sorry for Yourself?

From my brilliant friend Sage Cohen:

At the rehab vet's office tonight, I met a Corgie on wheels. His hind feet were wrapped in bandages and covered with neon socks; they dragged behind him as the little metal cart supported his rear end. By compensating for his back legs with wheels, the cart allowed him to leverage his front legs for complete mobility. His "wheelchair" had a little American flag poking out of it. This crippled, happy, well-loved dog was the metaphor I needed today to reconcile my 9/11 unease. There is cruelty in this world, and there is joy; we can feel unlucky that our legs don't work or lucky that we are fortunate enough to have wheels.

This dog's parents were there in the waiting room together (you almost never see both parents at the vet's office) and they were in such a damned jolly mood about everything--including the hour-plus backlog of waiting, that I was shaken out of my own small thinking about what had seemed earlier today like insurmountable struggle. I was reminded that people can simply be happy together; that this is the brick and mortar upon which our world is built and built again. Kindness is our most precious natural resource. It can never be taken from us, no matter what falls from the sky.

We can feel unlucky that our legs don't work or lucky that we are fortunate enough to have wheels.

It's pretty tough to read that and not feel inspired to 1) be thankful for my blessings and 2) get off my ass and get busy putting those blessings to good use. Thanks, Sage. Excerpt from Fearless Love of the Universe.

Photo of Lily courtesy of Pawprints, which is supporting the efforts of the Humane Society of South Mississippi and the SPCA of Louisiana as they deal with the continued aftereffects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Three Batistas: On Blogging, Marketing and Global Fandom on the Live Web

The ways in which the Net--particularly the "Live Web" of indexed blogs and powerful search engines--continues to shrink the world never ceases to amaze me.  For example, if you Google "batista," the first three people who come up are Dave (the professional wrestler), Fulgencio (the Cuban dictator deposed by Castro), and, uh, me.  (Can you guess who's who above?)

I'm not sure how many students of Cuban history stumble across this site, but I know that some pro wrestling fans do because yesterday morning I received the following email:

Dear Batista Supper Star,

 

My name is [deleted] and My nationality Cambodian people I watching TV on the Supper Star of Smarkdon and Raw clubs soar you to be the Supper Star have the justice and have the very much people support and take care and this firs time I searching see your email and would like to support you. I am very happy to search see your email. My two daugther she like-minded and she is like watched TV supper Star very special to be to see you.

if you contact me please you see bellow my address.

 

Thanks, Best Regards

[deleted]

On a certain level, of course, the confusion is pretty funny--"Supper Star" is my wife's new nickname for me--but I'm not posting the message to mock it.  Never having seen Dave in action, I don't know much about his wrestling persona, but apparently he's a good guy--he "[has] the justice" and "the people support."  And it's somehow touching to think about a man in Cambodia watching pro wrestling with his daughter, both of them rooting for Dave Batista, then tracking down an email address and sending a message to express their admiration as fans.

I know I shouldn't be surprised that American pro wrestling is popular in Cambodia--but I am.  And now I have all sorts of questions about the internationalization of pop culture: How is pro wrestling perceived in places like Cambodia?  As pure entertainment?  Pure sport?  Some combination of the two?  Are the wrestlers' outsized personas seen as characters?  Are kids around the world holding "backyard brawls" like their American counterparts and getting scolded by their parents?

But there's an even more basic question: What have I done to be in the mix with Dave (whose reach obviously spans the globe) and Fulgencio (a third-rate dictator but an historic figure nonetheless)?  The answer is: I blog.  And blog posts are indexed, and search engines just love indexed content, and that's how you get found on the Live Web these days.

Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Misanthropy and Inspiration

According to Tom Peters, Peter Drucker thought Warren Bennis and Pat Biederman's Organizing Genius, which studies high-performing groups, should have been titled "Organizing Idiots."

Peters also recently read an interview with Drucker in the Australian Institute of Management's journal in which the latter was quoted as saying that "The purpose of professional schools is to educate competent mediocrities."

Drucker is one of my personal heroes--I reread "Managing Oneself" at least once a year to gauge my development as a professional and to inspire myself to take some risks and push myself further--so initially I was as surprised as Peters to learn that Drucker was apparently such a misanthrope.

Peters notes that Drucker "had personal experience with Nazis, and had closely observed Mao and Stalin," and wonders whether that colored his opinion of the human race.  And several commenters have suggested that Drucker's critical view of professional education should be read as an indictment of business schools' methods and pedagogy, not necessarily of their students.

But the more I think about what I know of Drucker and what I've experienced of the world and people and business (and business schools), the less surprised I am.  In fact, I think the impulse to rationalize away the seeming contradiction between Drucker's misanthropic attitudes and his inspirational genius is misguided.

Drucker was a Serious Person.  I don't mean that he was somber or joyless but that he was extremely clear-eyed, ruthlessly realistic and had no time for bullshit.  Most people--myself included--would like to operate that way, but we find it difficult to do so without becoming cynical or even bitter because there's just so much foolishness and wishful thinking and bullshit in this world.  So we tolerate a little of it (or a lot) in order to keep our own hope and inspiration alive.  (Maybe there really is a pony in there!)

I don't think Drucker needed that crutch.  In the blood-soaked depths of the 20th century, he saw humanity at its worst, and he knew just what knaves and villains we could be.  His misanthropy was a rational (and hard-earned) response to history.  But unlike most of us, Drucker was able to balance a clear-eyed view of the human race and of our limited capabilities as individuals with the ability to hope for the future and to inspire us each to do our best.  It's a rare gift, and I respect him all the more for it.

Monet in Normandy: On Personal Vision and Hard Work

Find what you love to do, do it your own way, and dedicate yourself to that pursuit.  That's the lesson I took away from a visit last week to the Monet in Normandy exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  Monet spent most of his life in northwest France, and the exhibit's several dozen paintings trace his development as an artist while documenting the natural world that surrounded him.  I'm hardly an art historian, but seeing 60-some years worth of work compressed into a handful of galleries gave me a new perspective on Monet and a keen appreciation for his work ethic and for his accomplishments as a champion of personal vision.

"Regatta at Sainte-Adresse," from 1867, when Monet was 27, was my favorite of the earlier works.  Even in this conventional scene there's something oddly personal and moving--I like to think that comes from Monet's commitment to paint what he saw, not necessarily what anyone else would see.  That quality is buried in the more detailed images of the ships and buildings and bystanders, but it bursts through in his treatment of the sea and the sky.

Over the next few decades Monet found a way to tap into that personal vision, and it allowed him to pare down his work to its essential elements (apparently at some financial cost, given art buyers' preference for paintings with things like people and ships.)

"Grainstack at Sunset" from 1891, when Monet was 51, was my favorite painting in the show, and this little image doesn't come close to doing the original justice.  In person the colors are incredibly rich and vibrant--they seem to radiate off the canvas.  This image also does a poor job of capturing the almost abstract quality of the original.  Standing in front of the painting, I felt as though Monet had used the real world merely as a springboard to allow us to sense the colors and feelings coursing through his head.  The grainstack, the fields, the sky, the sunlight are just props--the painting's real subject is something else entirely.

The painting's surface is also intensively worked over, as though Monet returned to it again and again until he was satisfied.  The note accompanying the painting mentions that he typically set out at sunrise or at sunset with a wheelbarrow filled with half-completed paintings and supplies, and he worked on the painting that best matched the day's weather and light conditions.  I love the image that conjures up of a man passionately dedicated to his craft, working not just "when the spirit moved him" (like most artists in the popular imagination) but on a steady basis, allowing the spirit to find him because he was out there, at dawn or at dusk, with his wheelbarrow.

"Wisteria," from 1919-20, finished when Monet was 79, is one of the last paintings in the Legion of Honor galleries.  I don't have nearly the same personal affection for this painting as I do for the two above, but it still strikes me as an extension of the themes of individual vision and hard work that resonate throughout the exhibit.

As with "Grainstack" above, the image here doesn't really convey the highly stylized and almost abstract nature of the original painting.  Sure, it looks like a wisteria vine when it's compressed into a few square inches, but when I was standing in front of it, I was almost boggled by the colors and the brushstrokes rushing across the (fairly large) canvas.

Even though my art school days are long behind me, there's something deeply inspirational in Monet's ability to absorb a conventionally beautiful image and use it as a vehicle for personal expression that's relevant to my professional path today.  Every job, every project is an opportunity to express myself fully.  I'm not saying I approach my work as an artist per se (nor am I comparing myself to Monet), but I often face a choice between doing something the conventional way and doing it the way I believe it should be done, and Monet's example will help me make the right choice more often.

Although Monet finally achieved some financial security in the final decades of his life, he faced a number of personal difficulties.  His second wife Alice died in 1911, and his son Jean died in 1914.  After painting "Wisteria," he would undergo two surgeries for cataracts in 1923.  And it appears that he kept painting through it all, right up until his death in 1926 at age 86.  I have to believe there's a correlation between loving what you do, pursuing your personal vision, and finding the strength to keep doing it all your life, no matter what obstacles you face.

Look to the Future Day

A colleague of mine has designated today "Look to the Future Day."  He's been working with the same organization for over a decade and is thinking about making a change.  But between work and family and just living a life, he's only been able to grab scraps of time to think about the future.

So he took a day of vacation today and will use the time to gather input, reflect at length on his plans, and hopefully get a lot deeper and move a lot further ahead than he could have in 8 random hours spliced into other responsibilities.  I think it's a great idea in general, but I particularly like two aspects:

• Instant Networking.  Having spent  so much of his career with one organization, my colleague hasn't made as many external contacts as he'd have liked, and as he prepares to make a change, he's finding his network insufficient to his needs.  So he decided to just tackle the problem head-on: he made a list of people he thought it would be helpful to talk with, sent them a thoughtful email and asked for some of their time, and scheduled a series of calls during the day.  Clearly, there's a skillful way and a clumsy way to execute this plan, but, hey, his approach worked on me.

• Searching AND Planning.  The other day I asked, "Are you a searcher or a planner?"  I believe dynamic searchers often outperform plodding planners, but I recognize that we have to find the right balance between the two strategies, matching our approach to the situation.  And the way my colleague has structured his "Look to the Future Day" will help him find that balance.  His calls and conversations will result in new ideas and action items, but the luxury of a day of uninterrupted focus will allow him to put those next steps into context and prioritize them accordingly.
  

Photo by C.P. Storm.
 

Purpose Driven Change Management, or Fighting the Forces of Hell

When most of us try to initiate change in an organization, we rarely find ourselves facing the forces of hell.  Not so the Revs. Roddy Clyde and Glen Sartain of Church Transitions, a North Carolina organization that works closely with Rev. Rick Warren, author of the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life" and pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA.

Whatever you think of Warren's pop spirituality, his efforts to change the culture and practices of contemporary evangelical churches have been hugely influential over the past 20 years.  According to a front-page article by Suzanne Sataline in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Warren has sold 25 million copies of "Purpose Driven," some 20,000 worshippers attend services at Saddleback each weekend, and he claims to have trained 400,000 pastors around the world through his church and nonprofit organizations.

This is where the Revs. Clyde and Sartain come in--you might call them "church management consultants" who work with local church leaders to implement Warren's practices.  Sataline quotes them as advising the audience at a seminar that "the transition will be rough," and "to trust very few people with their plans" because...

"All the forces of hell are going to come at you when you wake up that church," said Mr. Sartain...

And you thought your job was tough.

But the spread of Warren's methods is causing a backlash among some churchgoers who resent the prominence of contemporary interpersonal issues in sermons, the short shrift given to traditional themes of sin and salvation, changes in church music and attire, and a strong emphasis on "Madison Avenue" marketing techniques to increase attendance.  Some churches that have tried to become more "purpose-driven" have found themselves torn apart in the process, with Warren advocates and opponents struggling for control of their local institution.

Spiritually speaking, I'm pretty middle-of-the-road.  I'm not a churchgoer, but I'm respectful of religous practice; I was a confirmed existentialist as a kid, but I've become a hopeful believer in a vaguely Deist sense; and I regularly turn to the writings of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, for comfort.  So I don't really have a dog in the fight over Warren and his philosophy.

But from a professional perspective, I'm interested in several underlying aspects of this story:

• How'd We Get Here?  The mere existence of an anti-Warren backlash begs the question of how he's been so successful at spreading his philosophy in the first place.  (I'll focus on earthly factors for the purpose of this post.)  Weak competition in the form of stuffy mainline Protestant denominations, and an ecumenical approach to issues of Biblical doctrine surely paved the way, but they're not really meaningful issues in most other industries.  However, I'd argue that we should all be looking at Warren's emphasis on congregants' needs as individuals (and as consumers, and as an audience) in order to create a sense of enthusiastic fellowship, and on his loosely-networked organizing structure that provides pastors with a shared set of values and tools without bogging them down in a centralized, hierarchical bureaucracy.  It's really a very Cluetrain approach to meeting peoples' needs and a World of Ends approach to managing a network--perhaps Warren is a big Doc Searls and David Weinberger fan.  (I'm not joking--the guy's very net-savvy.)

• What Do We Really Mean By "Marketing" These Days?  Sataline's WSJ article quotes traditional churchgoers who find Warren's "Madison Avenue" tactics aimed at increasing church attendance unseemly, and that resonates with our shared assumptions about "marketing"--namely, it's a passel of lies--and for that reason alone churches really shouldn't have anything to do with it.  But even marketers don't believe in "marketing" anymore.  Just ask Seth Godin.  Or Tara Hunt.  Contemporary marketing isn't about convincing people to buy what you've already built and are compelled to sell; it's about engaging them in a dialogue, listening to their needs and responding accordingly.  In that sense, Warren's not a conventional "Madison Avenue" marketer at all--as noted above, he's a lot more consumer-friendly.  (Of course, from the perspective of traditional churchgoers, who do believe that a church's role is to convince people to buy [or rather, accept] something that's already been built [so to speak], perhaps that's the root of the problem.)  I'm not sure that Sataline and her interviewees fully appreciate the differences between the old and new methods of marketing, but I'd bet that Warren does.
  

• Change Isn't Easy.  Change management is often thought of as a "soft" discipline, focused on making people comfortable and insuring smooth transitions.  Well, not according to the Revs. Clyde and Sartain.  Maybe it just comes with the territory when you're fighting the forces of hell, but these guys are definitely not soft.  According to Sataline's article:
  

  During a [seminar] session titled "Dealing with Opposition," Mr. Clyde recommended that the pastor speak to critical members, then help them leave if they don't stop objecting.  Then when those congregants join a new church, Mr. Clyde instructed, pastors should call their new minister and suggest that the congregants be barred from any leadership role.

  "There are moments when you've got to play hardball," said the Rev. Dan Southerland, Church Transitions' president, in an interview.  "You cannot transition a church...and placate every whiny Christian along the way."

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you whiny Christians.  I'd have to think long and hard before recommending similar tactics to a client who was considering a change initiative that was likely to meet resistance--and I'm left wondering if such tactics are at the root of the anti-Warren backlash Sataline describes--but it's interesting to know that they've been used successfully in at least some cases.