Own it in Paper!

Dear Other Link Prospectors;

I run a major website at CJSHayward.com. It is a collection of my creative works and has increasingly been focused on Orthodox theology. Suggested starting points include Doxology and The Angelic Letters. Most of what I've written for reading (as opposed to e.g. open source software or artwork) is available collected in this seven volume set.

I've gotten the occasional fan (e)mail, but I have never had a fan or visitor be generically impressed with everything on my website. I've only had one visitor claim to have read everything for that matter. People who just like my work tend to give some specific compliment or thanks for some of the specific content on my site. Usually people who write fan mail are more than happy to explain what, specifically, makes them happy my site is available to them.

For that matter, I've gotten flames, and the flames in general are quite obviously written in response for some specific posting or element on my site. No one really seems to call me nasty things without some specific statement about how work on my site fully justifies the claim.

If you try to obtain a one-way backlink from my site without bothering to find out what my site is about and what some of my works are, you are failing to show me a courtesy readily shown by most haters. Please do not be offended if I regard your contact as spam and it is reported as spam.

A "Hall of Shame" example

I've gotten various link prospecting emails that in generic terms could be sent to the owners of almost any website. The most recent example of a particularly objectionable link prospecting emails is,

Subject: Thank you

Dear CJS Hayward,

Although, it is generally not in my nature to "cold-contact" people I don't know, nonetheless, I wanted to offer you my gratitude for the writings you have shared on your website. They have gotten me through some very hard days. As way of saying "thank-you", and not being at this time to make any purchases of your products, following are three website links related to one of your current posts, that I thought you may find useful. They are:

http://arachnoid.com/
(Psychology - Located on the sidebar of homepage)

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/
(Geared towards parents of gifted children, but may be useful as a general resource)

[URL deleted]
(Fr. [name deleted], of the Anglican Catholic Church - His perspective on similar psychological and theological topics)

I apologize in advance if these links are not useful to you. As I said, they are a humble offering in appreciation for what you have freely shared.

Thank you again,

Bryan W.

I believed what it said for a short while. I started to write a thank-you note, and then when I thought things through, I was horrified.

The first point, if a subtle one, is that like many sites on the website, my contact page contains a direct and explicit request of people contacting me: that they put "To the author" in their email subject so it gets fished out of my spam folder if need be. This is not meant as a hoop to jump through, but I ask it and the feedback form and email link on my site have a "To the author" baked right in. This provided a crystal-clear red flag that however much he may have wished for resharing, it didn't translate into respecting simple instructions. (That much, by the way, offers a useful filter, and if you are working on triaging your own incoming link prospect requests, you might include some simple and very clearly stated request on your contact page.)

The second point is that the first paragraph does not reference anything specific. Now my website does have several works intended to offer strength and comfort to people in hard times; The Best Things in Life are Free comes readily to mind. However, while some of my work has been received respectfully, this is the first report I've heard that they've helped someone quite that much. They don't deserve sole credit. I think they're good and worth reading, but I think that anyone who really benefitted from them would be benefitting from several other supports too. But I may be being too picky here; it is common practice to exaggerate some compliments so I don't want to be too legalistic.

The first psychology link left me mystified; I do not consider psychology to be a particularly active interest, and I follow my advisor in regarding psychology to be a sort of leftover that stayed around during and after a process of secularization in the West. Or maybe that's a strong way of putting it, but one post about Theory of Alien Minds: A UX Copernican Shift does not make me a credentialed psychologist nor does it make psychology a primary interest.

The second link left me mystified as regards approaching giftedness; you don't really tell gifted parents to go to Hoagie's Gifted almost like how you don't really tell web users to go to Google to find things out. Apart from my retaining the spammer's mention of Hoagie's Gifted in this posting, the only real reason I would see myself telling someone about that site would be if I got an "out of the blue" email from a parent whose child was identified as gifted and the parents want a roadmap.

The third link is the cultural equivalent of saying, "You're from Japan? Say something in Chinese!" It made me profoundly uncomfortable, and there is a profound difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglican "Catholics", and I was much more uncomfortable with that contact than I usually am either with mainstream Romans or mainstream Anglicans. I wanted to send the spammer a link to my reply to those Greek Catholic T-shirts that say, "Orthodox Christian in Communion with Rome," a T-shirt that says, "Roman Catholic in Communion with the Archdruid of Canterbury". (I restrained myself.)

And by the way, that wasn't really three links the sender equally wanted me to see. It was two links of window dressing and one link of payload. This was part of multiple aspects of guile in this post. It was made to give the impression of having received a great benefit, without mentioning anything in particular, and it presented the three links as a thank-you when they were, in fact, there to do the job of link acquisition. Upon reflection, I believe the email was sent in the optimistic hopes that I was born yesterday.

And the last thing I'll mention is that it is admittedly current practice to avoid the word "link" in link prospecting emails and more generically speak of sharing and passing on even though what you want most is a link. That at least might be appropriate, but the goal of this email is to obtain a white-hat one-way backlink, and there was a lot of guile and feigned respect. Sorry, no.

I am, as a site owner, willing to give links, including white-hat one-way backlinks. However, if you want something that big from me, your due diligence is to communicate honestly, research my site enough that you have some idea of its marketing proposition and some examples of its content, and if your site is a religious site, read the sharply written An Open Letter to Catholics on Orthodoxy and Ecumenism, and needless to repeat, respect the clear instructions on my contact page. Guile is one of several ways you can get reported for spam.

Owners of other high-quality sites might appreciate similar considerations.

Thanks,
CJS Hayward

Own it in Paper!

An opening "Heads up!"

This article is intended to do something that is usually best avoided, at least in the context of an article.

Some students of culture describe semiotic frames that define a society's possibles et pensables: they shape what is seen as possible and what is even thinkable within a society. And it is usually preferable to handle communication so that you aren't asking people to overhaul their mental frameworks: if you can think far enough outside the box that you find possibles et pensables the sort of thing that can be easily brought into question, that's a wonderful thing to be able to do, but it is usually best kept under wraps, and usually best kept in a back pocket.

This piece is designed to delve into deeper work and not be as quickly digested as other fare. It's harder to process than an article intended to persuade you between two options that we both already understand well enough. I tried to think about how to make my point while dodging working on what is seen as possible and what is even thinkable, and I don't see how to eliminate that work from my point. I want to revise what is seen as possible and what is thinkable about branding today.

Where did branding come from anyway?

To the best of my knowledge, and to only present the beginning and end of a story, branding was once what happened when cattle owners would use a hot iron symbol to brand an identifying mark on cattle they owned, to be able to claim whose cattle they were if there were any question. There is a fairly close equivalent to this in the modern business world, but the equivalent isn't really "how a company communicates itself and its offering to the outside world." It's really much more the unsexy practice of attaching metal tags to valuable company equipment that say, "This is property of XYZ corporation, serial number 12345." And while there may be good reasons for engaging in this part of due diligence, it is hardly that interesting or deep.

Not so with real branding in today's business world, not by any stretch. As I have prepared and thought about the question, I'm not sure I can think of an equally significant concept that I have met. To pick two examples from my own field in information technology, Agile development and open source software may be significant concepts, but I do not see the same niches and layers. There is some theory about open source software as such, and people may complain that a company that releases software under an open source license but "drops patches [external contributions] on the floor" isn't really walking the walk, but in my experience the theory that most open source software developers are interested are the computer science and software engineering issues concerning their tools and pet projects, and you simply don't have subspecialized high value consultants on the theory and ideology of open source. But branding is in fact a very big concept, and you do have high-value consultants actively engaged for their expertise in some specialization or subspecialization somewhere under the "branding" umbrella.

And with this significance comes something else, maybe something less attractive: however useful or prominent it may be, it is far from a worldwide universal, and I am not aware of any Great Teachers who have thought in terms of branding. Not only that, but Socrates might very well have lived to a ripe old age, instead of being condemned to death, if he had lived a brand that would have been socially acceptable to the citizens of his city. (The entire story of his gadfly's teaching and life is an example of how to avoid branding yourself if you want to succeed and live.) Discussion of branding may be anachronous if applied to Socrates, but the principle justifies such an intrusion.

Two seismic shifts, one after another

In the popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that a shift had taken place in wisdom literature: that is, what people have written about how to succeed as a person; one definition offered for such wisdom is, "skill for living." Whenever the text was written, the author had apparently read a great deal of wisdom literature over time and made a cardinally important distinction between a character ethic and a personality ethic. Up until about World War II, the basic framing assumption in wisdom literature in the U.S. is that success is success arising from character. One needs to be diligent, and humble, and merciful to others, and so on. In short, we need virtuous living to get ahead. These virtues may include practices: Ben Franklin's "A penny saved is a penny earned" is an exhortation to the virtue of thrift. But success is acquired through growing as a person, by growing in virtue.

The subsequent sub-par personality ethic was much more superficial; it offered tips and tricks to get ahead, while avoiding anything calling for real internal transformation. And while there are definitely mere practices that we could do better (I could smile more), most of my problems aren't on the level of personality, but where I need to do more inner work. The shift Covey documents is a seismic shift, and it is difficult to overstate its significance. Something like the character ethic and the personality ethic exist at least to some extent side-by-side in information technology: there are people who have been educated in computer science and software engineering, and who maintain a lifelong curiosity towards those areas as well as working their way through fads and individual tools, and there are educational programs that just teach buzzwords and individual tools with only incidental coverage of deeper issues in theory. A manager who has dealt with both kinds of programmers will know the difference well.

I would posit, or rather point out, that there has been a second shift after a shift from a character ethic to a personality ethic: a shift from a personality ethic to a (personal) brand ethic. There are books I've read that offer an induction into a brand ethic in ways that someone who's not already an insider will understand: but I don't remember anything I've read treating as a live question whether we need a brand ethic or a personality ethic, or whether we need a brand ethic or a character ethic. Personality has a place: it has a place because a personal brand on Twitter that incorporates some amount of what feels like personality is a stronger brand than one that is one-dimensional. The place for personality is neither more nor less than what the brand ethic calls for. And that's odd.

But you, CJS Hayward, have a brand!

In one sense, at least some people will say that I have a brand, and one that I have consciously contributed to. This blog's background, for instance, is one touch out of many things that provide a sense of brand. Old-fashioned, exaggeratedly recognizable links could be called another.  None the less, I meet the concept of a personal brand with some degree of puzzlement. I've written dialogues before, but I'm drawing a blank at how to flesh out a dialogue with pretty much any of the world's great teachers about marketing-style branding as a paradigm for how to relate to others. I do not find branding in the Sermon on the Mount, I have difficulty envisioning what Sun Tzu or other sages would say, and for that matter I do not think that Muhammad would have understood the concept, and if he had understood it, would find it to be extremely offensive: much as democracy's foundational attitude that you have a say in things is profoundly un-Islamic (when George Bush was pushing to endow Iraq with democracy, my comment to friends was, "I wish that Bush would herald a goal that would be less offensive to Muslims, like a hambone in every pot.").

It is possible for brands to be layered. It is possible for brands to have depth. It is possible for brands to present a tip of an iceberg with lots of room to dig. However, I would pick as a particularly bad piece on personal branding a book chapter which advised the reader to pick three positive adjectives on the list, and simply decide, "These will be my brand." And this isn't just one book. When a company has announced that XYZ represent its values, it gives the impression of something arbitrarily chosen and tacked on, something plastic, something that would really make Michael Polanyi squirm.

Our close contemporary Michael Polanyi (Wikipedia), to pick one of the achievements he is best known for, argued essentially that knowledge is not something separate from people. When people are initiated into a tradition of expert practice, there is knowledge tacitly held by those who are already insiders in the culture of expert practics, and this knowledge is tacitly transmitted to people who are being trained to become insiders, without ever being held or passing consciously to those in either role. He comments that swimming coaches and swimmers alike breathe differently from non-swimmers in that they expand their lungs to hold more air when they breathe in, and they keep more air in their lungs when they breathe out, using their lungs this way for added buoyancy. Other explanations may be available in this case, but, the broader picture is one that uses tacit knowledge, or to take the deliberately chosen title of his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge, and recognize that we have many layers beyond the surface. And I'm trying to imagine Polanyi reading a text telling him to pick three adjectives that should identify him as his personal brand. I see him squirming, much like the Far Side cartoon entitled, "Baryshnikov's ultimate nightmare" that shows a square dance caller saying, "Swing your partner 'round and 'round, now promenade left and don't fall down..."

However, the concern I raise, which may or may not be terribly distinct from Polanyi, isn't just that a personal brand is shallow, or at least has been shallow in every book I've read telling me I need a personal brand. It's also designed as artificial and plastic, not real and alive. It may have an alive motif, like the handmade-looking lettering and art in cookie-cutter Starbucks locations. But it is what Neal Stevenson described in In the Beginning was the Command Line, in describing a mediated and vicarious experience waiting in line for a ride at Disneyland:

The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the  gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient  structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, of course, and protected from real rust by a  plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless you get down on your knees.

And on this point I'd like to mention a point from The Cost of Discipleship. I don't know now whether I'd agree with the suggestion Bonhoeffer makes, but he highlights that the Sermon on the Mount says both Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven, and also that we are to conceal our good deeds: But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. Asking how these two incongruous commands fit together, Bonhoeffer says that we should do good deeds but hide them from ourselves, that we should reach a state of doing goodness that we do it without being aware of it. Now whether that should exactly be believed in reference to the Gospel, I don't know. But something like that is true of some secular skill. I remember a conversation with a Unix professional who said that in a job interview he had claimed to be a Unix wizard because that was required in that social situation, but it would have been "an outright lie" for him to make that claim among his peers. I assure you he was very competent. But his competency had reached a level where (among other things) he knew how little he knew and how much more there was to know, and like almost any good Unix wizard, he found calling himself a Unix wizard to feel like an outright lie. When I was asked in high school as the school's student Unix system administrator, I hesitated, and I was both surprised and delighted when a friend said "Yes" for me; I would have been making an outright lie (in my mind) to make that claim. Nor is this a specific local feature of Unix wizardry. That is just an example close to my experience, and it seems that nobody considers themselves what in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine terms would be called Morlocks. There is a kind of "reverse hypocrisy" here. A Morlock, to expert practitioners, is someone else at a higher level of skill. (Linus Torvalds has voiced confusion about why others consider him technical.)

The general rule is that the most confident in their performance are usually the most-overconfident, and the most competent are actually less confident; unlike the over-confident, they are guided by a sharply tuned inner self-criticism, the same self-criticism that in any competent practice of classical music means that musicians hear their performance mistakes more quickly than even the most discerning audience members. What is going on here is the same thing as was told to me as a child, which I'll leave in politically incorrect terms:

An Indian and a white man were standing on a beach, and the white man drew a small circle and said, "This is what the Indian knows." Then he drew a larger circle around it and said, "This is what the white man knows." Then the Indian drew a huge circle encompassing both other circles and said, "This is what neither the Indian nor the white man knows."

And this quality, of seeing a huge encompassing circle of things that none of us know, is foundational to being a genuine expert almost anywhere. Hence a high school biology text compares the discipline of biology to trying to discern the characters, plot, and themes of a long and intricately complex movie, when all you have is half a dozen stills in varying conditions. Hence one biology teacher I remember fondly saying very emphatically that we don't know what's going on: all that biologists know now is only a tiny slice of the truth.

So what does this all mean for branding? It means a couple of things, and perhaps it may be good to have three positive adjectives you seek to represent. But one thing it means is that people are often not aware of their good (and bad) properties, or at least not all of them. This might be true morally, but it is also true in terms of professional competence. I remember going to a presentation on getting a government job and the "stupid questionnaire" (the presenter's preferred term) where you were asked to rate yourself from 1 up to 5 on different areas of competency. Now coming from a business background where I had been asked to rate myself 1 to 10 in competency and advised the higher self-rating I gave, the harder test questions would be asked of me, thought of rating myself mostly 3's with a couple of 4's on the ones I was strongest, the presenter made crystal-clear that that was not going to work. The only acceptable answer was a 5, or maybe you could get away with one or possibly two self-ratings of 4. And that's not selecting for competency. It is selecting for overconfidence, and for gaming the system. For someone who is genuinely competent, and is not aware of how and why to game the system here, giving a sincere and well-thought-out self-evaluation is a recipe for elimination even if that employee's past five supervisors would mark the person as a clear 5 across the board.

The title I've been mulling over, The Twitter Job Search Guide, is part of the cohort of books where branding is bedrock. It also suggests that Twitter competencies expand outside of Twitter, so that a cover letter is composed of a few tweets and a resume is composed of a few more tweets. Now that's an idea I'd be cautious about dismissing; communicating value concisely is a valuable skill, and in some sense Twitter might be seen as a Toastmasters of written communication. Toastmasters' Competent Communicator course trains people with five to seven minute speeches addressing core competencies in speaking (plus a couple of other details), and the thought is not exactly that participants will only need to give speeches of that length, but rather to lay a foundation that is explicitly intended to be adaptable to longer or shorter speeches. And Twitter is not always 140 characters of nothing; there are profound contributions made, and it is a valuable skill, and one quite often present among the most competent gifted, to make a significant point clearly and concisely. For a business world that just wants the time, not the whole process of a watch being built, it may be good discipline and skill to be able to write a six tweet cover letter and twelve tweet resume. But I am concerned when this all falls under the aegis of branding. And in The Twitter Job Search Guide, the tweets for a cover letter and resume all fall under the heading of communicating a brand. Though there is (for instance) discussion of what constitutes a good ratio between professional and personal tweets, I've read two thirds of the text and I haven't yet seen advice to tweet or communicate something that does not fall under the aegis of your personal brand. The beginning, middle, and end of what you are advised to communicate is brand. There is no other way to relate to others, it seems, and this is a plastic form of life.

Now before going further, there is one point I would like to clarify about boundaries (a topic that I believe is ill-framed, but that is not my interest here). One professor, addressing graduate students who were or probably would be teaching assistants, talked about "being the same on the outside and on the inside." She went on very directly to state that this did not mean "letting it all hang out"; that was precisely what it was not. Normal social interactions embody both what is anthropologically called "positive politeness" and "negative politeness", and on this point I would recall another professor talking about appropriate communication in crossing cultures. He gave some examples of positive politeness, things like saying "Hello!" to a friend (the sort of examples of politeness that jump to mind). Then he said that when strangers approach each other and look down at the sidewalk when they're a few meters apart, that's politeness. It is a refusal to wantonly intrude; it says, "You have not invited me in and I will not presume where I am not invited and I do not belong." And that is politeness. He mentioned, to drive the point a little bit further, that he had one good friend he visited, and though he did not do so at this visit, he would have thought nothing of opening his friend's refrigerator and helping himself to anything inside. The principle of negative politeness is that you do not do things without invitation; one may surmise that some point along the way the professor's friend gave one or several invitations to rummage through the fridge without asking specific permission, and I would be almost certain that the professor had not asked permission to arbitrarily rummage his friend's fridge; he had presumably been given that permission as the friendship developed. And outside of a few exceptions like this, it is a significant violation of negative politeness to rummage through someone's fridge without asking.

Socially appropriate relations, or boundaries, or negative politeness, or whatever you want to call it, applies; that can and should mediate our interactions, and brands that have any sense to them will stay within these boundaries. However, while I believe we need the mediation of negative (and positive) politeness, there is something plastic about the mediation of brands. It's good not to give TMI, but a personal brand is neither the only nor the best way to communicate within positive and negative politeness that respects boundaries.

I'm not sure this addresses all of branding; I'd expect that someone who knew branding well could point to currents within branding that survive this critique. I've picked examples that struck me as silly; I haven't discussed the silliness I see about corporations picking three identifying values, and in much more mainstream and professional venues than a book in a career center offering a list of positive adjectives and an invitation to pick three as defining your personal brand. But for what I'd like to see instead, I don't have a big program to offer, just appropriate social interaction: social interaction that is appropriate to degree of relationships and the roles of the participants. Others have written The Clue Train Manifesto; I have not examined that manifesto in depth but its opening words about a human voice suggest I'm not the only person, nor the first person, concerned with human communication.

My personal unbrand

I wanted to give a bit on my personal brand, or rather unbrand, or, if you prefer, ersatz brand. You're welcome to say, if you like, that it is in fact just a personal brand, only a personal brand that embodies at least one classic and cardinal mistake. Or at least two mistakes, apart from the easily digested simplicity of an effective brand, the bulk of my effort is growing in terms of both who I am as a person, and how I can achieve deeper competence. Some attention is given to appearance, but a brand works primarily on image management. Skills one acquires, for instance, are there because of their usefulness to a branded image. But let's return to the other basic attribute in what makes sense in a brand.

One of the parameters that is desired in a brand is doing one thing well, simplicity. There may be contours to the brand's landscape, but if you are a jack of all trades you are assumed to be a master of none. One part of a brand's job description, personal or otherwise, is to present a simple core, perhaps one core feature that offers a value proposition with one core benefit. Or, perhaps, there are a few pieces working together, but if you can't write it on the back of a business card, you have failed. And in fact this is not restricted to branding. Good to Great talks about good companies that became great companies having and/or discovering a core "hedgehog concept" that they keep returning to, and while such a general title on business has to assume marketing and with it branding as part of the picture, I do not recall the emphatic "hedgehog concept" discussion portraying it as a particular issue for marketing and branding. In Good to Great, the "hedgehog concept" defines a one-trick pony that fundamentally outperforms Renaissance man opponents.

In my own case, what I offer is a profoundly gifted portfolio of interconnected skills. Want to know what reading Latin and Greek has to do with the business world? At a competitive local exchange carrier, we were working with an upstream provider who did business with us because they were required to by law, even though they didn't want to, because they saw us as cream-skimmers. Nobody else in my group could make sense of their opaque, bureaucratic communication. I could, and there wasn't much of a hiccup when my boss, with my consent, added communication with that provider to my responsibilities. I don't know if any of my bosses have cared that I enjoy writing, but several have cared that I could create and edit clear and high-value documents. I don't know whether any of my bosses have particularly cared that I've received rankings as high as 7th in the nation in math contests, but they do care when I apply that to solo programming that hits the ball out of the park. In the positions I'm focusing on now in User Experience, I don't really expect my prospective bosses to care that I have postgraduate coursework in essentially all major User Experience disciplines: anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, with a distinctive work addressing something at the core of User Experience competency. However, once I am hired and running usability tests, I expect they'll care how much that background lets me draw out of a test.

And, to dig a bit deeper, the achievements I value are not because of intelligence, but communication. I've calmly spoken to a bawling four-year-old with an extremely painful blood blister under her thumbnail, until she she had stopped completely. I've been asked why I know how to relate to Ukrainians. I've been told, "You are like a white American and like a black African, and closer than an African brother." I've communicated across large gaps with remarkable success.

And, to give one last detail, I've had many projects and there is a common thread running through virtually all the ones I've liked most: I've reduced user pain, or made something a joy to work with. To pick one example from when I had just started a new job, I was given a four-word spec before my boss left for his vacation: "Get [name of employee] off overtime." The employee was a revenue assurance auditor who was trying to keep on top of a provider who was slipping us inappropriate charges, a responsibility that had him on heavy overtime in a company which normally stuck with a 40 hour workweek. And I winced when I saw what he was doing. I respected him and his actions as a team player, but he was cutting a steak with a screwdriver because that was the only game in town, and I wanted to give a razor-sharp knife, designed for him personally. When he said he was perfectly willing to do drudge work, my unspoken response was, "I appreciate and respect that you're willing to do drudge work. I still want to get it off your plate." And I drew on Edward Tufte's principles and made a carefully chosen greyscale (instead of numbers) system that cut his involvement down to 40 hours a week, then further down so only part of his time was spent keeping on top of this responsibilities, and he was in a position to engage other responsibilities that were out of the question earlier. At a certain point into the process, I told him, "The only reason I ever want you to do us the old tools is because you want to," and he very quickly answered, "I don't want to!" In other words, the new tool completely superseded prior methods, which is a rarity. I don't remember exactly how far along we were when my boss returned from vacation, but the employee told me he was raving to my boss, and in that whole position my boss never really showed much inclination to micro-manage me. (He described me as "nearly self-managing.")

These and other things could be a basis for a number of personal brands that I could treat as my working contract with the professional world. However, it is my preference not to have my dealings mediated by a constructed personal brand. I'd like to give my friends and employers alike the real "me", and while I will act differently with friends, family, church, and an employer, I don't want people dealing with an artificially infused personal brand. I want them to deal with me. And while one friend explained that a fellow graduate student in psychology who dealt in measuring psychological traits answered a questionnaire for a job application, she understood exactly how the test worked, answered like the personality profile that the company wanted, and just made sure to act like the profile they wanted while she was at work. I don't want to judge, but I find something very sad about the story. And it has everything to do with working with a personal brand.

This is not as crystalline as a normal brand. That's intended.

Back to a character ethic...

Own it in Paper!

Dear Valued Patron;

How would you like to associate your organization with false advertising, illegal marketing scams, snake oil diets, and offensive unsolicited porn? You can—it's easier than you think. You can reach thousands of people for every penny you invest. The only real cost is to your reputation.

What? That doesn't sound attractive to you? Too bad. You're doing all that—and more—every single time you send unsolicited bulk e-mail. It's also known as spam, and for good reason. Why?

In a classic Monty Python sketch, a customer in a restaurant asks what's on the menu. The waitress tells him, "Well, there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage, and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, spam; spam, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam; spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam, tomato, and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg, and spam" (and so on). Then a chorus of Vikings begins chanting, "Spam, spam, spam, spam; lovely spam, wonderful spam." The waitress just doesn't get it, even when the customer repeats that he doesn't like spam.

You may be the victim of false advertising. Many spammers advertise "opt-in e-mail lists" with millions of targeted recipients—but please think for a moment. Would you choose to be on a mailing list that let advertisers fill your mailbox dirt-cheap? Are there millions of people who would choose to have a mailbox with advertisement, advertisement, personal letter, advertisement, family newsletter, and your advertisement? If someone has asked you to read this page, there's a good chance you've patronized spam—and been advertised along with snake oil diets and illegal marketing scams. Don't you think you're in bad company?

You don't have to be. If you want more information, you can read Stopping Spam: Stamping Out Unwanted E-mail and News Postings. It's one of O'Reilly & Associates' best-selling titles. But, most importantly, you can stop paying people to make you look bad. Think about it.

Sincerely,
CJS Hayward

Read more of Hayward's Unabridged Dictionary on Amazon! ]]> https://cjshayward.com/negotiation/ Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:44:47 +0000 //cjshayward.com/?p=368 Continue reading "Friendly, Win-Win Negotiation: Interest-Based Negotiation and "Getting to Yes""]]>
Own it in Paper!

Own it in Paper!

When the Master governs, people are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

Lao Tze, Tao Te Ching, tr. Stephen Mitchell

In looking at various award review sites, I have seen people equating creative web design with good web design. This is not simply in acknowledgement that creativity is one of the gifts of the human mind and an indispensable part of the great triumphs of human culture. It goes further to take the perspective that "good web design" means design that impresses the viewer with its creativity. This perspective, which is almost never questioned among awards reviewers, is one which is eminently worthy of question.

Good acting does not leave people impressed with how good the acting is. The very best acting leads people to be so involved with the drama and tension that they forget they are watching actors at all. Not all acting reaches that standard — which is a very high standard — but acting has the quality that, at its best, it is transparent: people see through the acting to the important thing, the story.

What are the basic responses to my A Dream of Light? In order from best to worst:

• Best: The reader is moved by the images and stimulated by the ideas, and leaves the reading a wiser person. Perhaps this involves being impressed by the thoughts, but the reader who is impressed is impressed as a side effect of the literature's power. The reader leaves the reading thinking about the writing's subject-matter.
• Second best: The reader's primary response is to think about how smart I am, or how eccentric, or something of that sort. The writing has not completely succeeded. The reader leaves the reading thinking about me.
• Worst: The reader reads it and walks away thinking about the page's design, even how clean and uncluttered it is. The reader leaves the reading thinking about the web design.

If a reader walks away from that piece of literature thinking about my web design, the design is a failure. The design is as bad as a photograph where the scene is blocked by the photographer's thumb.

It is sometimes easy for webmasters to forget that readers spend most of their time viewing other pages — not figuring out mine. I intentionally employ a standard web design in nearly all of my pages: navigation bar to the left, and a body to the right with dark text on a light background, different colors for visited and unvisited links (with visited links looking washed-out compared to unvisited links), no frames, judicious use of emphasized text, a header at the top, and navigation links at the bottom. I do not use any technology just because it's there — one page uses Java, and has content that would be almost meaningless if the applet were not there. The design on my home page is not creative, because it is intended not to be creative. I copied best practices from other sites and from friends' suggestions, in order to make a design that gets out of the way so readers can see the content.

To adapt a classic proverb: Don't bother to impress people with creative design when you can impress people with creative content. My web design is not evidence of any great creativity, but many readers have found the content in what I've written to show considerable creativity. I employ a very standardized web design for the same reason that I use standard spellings and grammar when I write: I want people to be able to see through them to whatever it is I'm writing about. Yf spelynge caulze uttinshun too ihtselv, itt yss mahch herdyr too thynque abaut whutt iz beeynge sayde. If, on the other hand, people employ standard spellings, readers can ignore the spelling and focus on the point the writer is trying to make. The spelling is transparent. Spelling is not where you want to demonstrate your creativity. And neither, usually, is web design.

Now, does that mean there is no place for creativity in design? No! In the "I learned it all from Jesus" poster, I had each sentence a different color from the one before, andnone of it black — which I regard as a legitimate artistic liberty. The Quintessential Web Page is aiming at a quite different effect (humorous rather than artistic), and it does other things that are not ordinarily appropriate. In this page, I use the content to draw attention to the design — also not normally appropriate. These things are not a special privilege for me; I just mention my pages because they're the ones I know best. There's some really beautiful Flash art on the web. One human-computer interaction expert has created a usability resource that is one of the ugliest pages I have ever seen, and does almost every major no-no on the list. This is as it should be — he is making a point by demonstrating features of bad web design. In that regard, making a page that is singularly annoying makes the point far more forcefully than an exemplar of good web practices that says "Be careful that you don't have text that's indistinguishable from your background." It is perfectly acceptable to stray from general rules if you have strong and specific reason to violate them. "I learned it all from Jesus," in my opinion, is a unique and valuable addition to my web page — but if I made every page look like that, my PageRank would drop through the floor.

Picasso said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." Great artists never believe they have to invent everything from scratch to make good art — instead, they draw on the best that has been done before, and use their own creativity to build on top of what others have already accomplished. In web design, this means making a site that is usable to viewers who have learned how to use other sites.

A careful reader will notice one element of design on this site that is not standard, but should be. Designers for major sites, who often have excellent vision, will put navigation links on the page, but make them as small as they can be and not be completely illegible. This is a truly bad idea, and I don't understand why it is so common. (Maybe web designers forget that some of us only have 20/20 vision?) The navigation links are some of the most important links on most web pages, and I wish to say, "Yes! I consider these links important for you to be able to read and use, and I will proudly let you read them at whatever your preferred text size is, not the smallest size I can read!"

I will consider this to be a successful design feature if you weren't aware of it until I pointed it out.

Read more of Hayward's Unabridged Dictionary on Amazon! ]]> https://cjshayward.com/demo/ Wed, 06 Jan 2016 20:11:08 +0000 //cjshayward.com/?p=143 Continue reading ""Concept Demo" Awards Program"]]>

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Purpose

Program temporarily closed.

This program is closed until the end of January 2005 to deal with a personal emergency. If it is February 2005 or later, please contact us.

In a nutshell, we're looking to award sites that do two things:

• Present great content.
• Let people enjoy that great content with a minimum of distractions.

We believe that good web design is like good acting: instead of thinking about it, you're drawn through it into something else. And so we want to award sites that have great content, and that employ user-friendliness (usability) to let people focus on the content without the site getting in the way. (Our disqualifications and criteria spell out exactly what we mean by that.)

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

About and Awards

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Ethics

I, CJS Hayward, owner of all Awards Programs held at the Jonathan's Corner web site, do hereby declare on behalf of myself and any other evaluator/s who may be contracted at any time by Jonathan's Corner to evaluate for any Jonathan's Corner sponsored Award Program, that we agree to advance and promote the website evaluator Code of Ethics in order to ensure fairness to all applicants and to maintain the honor and integrity of applicants, evaluators and awards.

We agree that all critiques given will be constructive in nature as positive comment is productive. We will refrain from criticism unless specifically requested by an applicant, and in such instances, will remain positive where possible in an effort to promote goodwill and advance the level of quality among Internet sites.

We agree to allow eligibility to all applicants who meet the posted online criteria of any particular award. We agree to be uniform in our eligibility requirements (criteria) and will fairly evaluate all sites/pages meeting our criteria which are submitted by any applicant. We further agree to clearly post these criteria.

We agree not to discriminate on grounds of race, gender, nation of origin, religion, profession, age, mental or physical handicap, or any other reason which is not globally viewed as an illegal trait or manner of conduct.

We agree to set forth awards criteria and to adhere to same. Proposed time frames for changes will be posted for one (1) week prior to the final publishing of same with notices posted on site so all potential applicants can view and understand the proposed changes.

We agree to evaluate web sites under the criteria which were in place at the time of any and/or all application/s. If changes are made to criteria after application/s is/are received, the submitted site/s will be evaluated using the criteria that were in effect when applicant/s initially submitted the site/s.

We agree to immediately inform any criteria compliant applicant in writing, of a 'Refrain to Evaluate' if it is found that a conflict of interest would occur in evaluating their web site - e.g. Such may occur upon being requested to evaluate the web site of a good friend. We will offer such applicant a choice of evaluator taken from CEM/CEMA membership listing.

We agree to maintain a professional, friendly and positive manner in any and/or all correspondence and/or communication held with any applicant/s.

We agree to evaluate all submitted sites within ninety (90) days of receipt of submission. If this deadline cannot be met, we agree to suspend submissions until we can again work within this timeframe.

We agree not to divulge any information about any applicant to persons, groups, or agencies not directly connected to our Awards Programs, and only then for the purpose of evaluating submissions and notifying winners. All information received from applicants via e-mail submissions or submission forms will be deemed private.

We agree to encourage and promote the use of original material for Awards Programs criteria and evaluation processes. We agree to assist any person requesting advice concerning ethical evaluation for and disbursement of awards. Please note: The awards evaluation processes in use at CPSnet Web Awards are copyrighted material and written authorization is required for their use.

We agree to maintain any owned individual web site/s that includes Awards Program/s to a standard that meets the criteria of the Award/s given. In the case of any Award/s offered that is/are outside the main subject of our web site/s, any and/or all such web site/s will be maintained to a high standard of integrity in all its/their main areas.

We agree to maximum dimensions of awards given in courtesy of web sites that will use them. If the maximum dimensions cannot be adhered to then a text only link will be permitted for graphics larger than maximum size; maximum size dimensions offered from this web site are: no more than 80 pixels height and 100 pixels width.

We agree that there will be only one obligation for winning awards from this web site beyond meeting the criteria. It is not, and never will be, mandatory at this web site to sign a guestbook or to join a mailing list. It is a requirement that any awards granted from this web site must be linked back to our web site in a method that will be outlined in award notification e-mails.

We agree that we will not grant awards to, or in any other manner endorse or promote, any web site that endorses, promotes or contains content which is considered globally to be illegal or discriminatory against humans.

We agree that we will not accept favors of any sort in exchange for preferential treatment of submissions. We will at all times maintain a high standard of honesty and integrity.

We agree that we will take all measures necessary to maintain the honor and integrity of our Award Program.

We agree that we will use an application process that respects the applicants' time.

Submitted on this day, 16 February 2005

CJS Hayward

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Disqualifications

The disqualifications and criteria are each broken into two parts, with an important difference between the two parts. The first part has rules, such as no porn and no browser crashes, that are important, but they're things you probably expect if you have read the criteria for several of the top Award Sites! programs. If you know your website meets all of those requirements, you can safely skim them, or skip to the program specific disqualifications. If you don't know what I'm referring through, I ask you to read through all the disqualifiers. One disqualifier, on either list, will bring the evaluation to a screeching halt.

Common Disqualifications

• There may be no rude, offensive, or dangerous content, or content that incites dangerous, offensive, or illegal activity.
• There may be no pirated software (warez) or links to sites with warez.
• There may be no cracking (breaking into people's computers) or materials that encourage or help cracking.
• No occult (Wicca, Satanism, New Age, etc.)
• Your site may not cause a browser crashe at any point in the evaluation.
• Your site may not contain any internal broken links. (I will check it with Xenu Link Checker.)
• Your site may not contain porn or nudity.
• Your site may not defame or promote discrimination against any people or group of people.
• Your site may not contain plaigarism, copyright infringement, or bandwidth stealing.
• Your site may not contain or promote malware, including requiring Comet Cursor, which is spyware.
• Your site must have a clearly visible, child-save privacy policy.
• Your site must be rated with ICRA/PICS, and must give a child-safe green light on validation.
• Your site must contain at least 10 pages of actual content, excluding guestbooks, collections of links, awards sections, and administrative pages like privacy policies, copyright, and terms of use.
• Any page that fails to load in under 30 seconds on my broadband connection, after three attempts on my part, will disqualify your site.
• If you have a Flash introduction, there must be a "Skip Intro" link.
• No spam.
• No scams, multi-layer marketing/pyramid schemes, etc.
• Your site must be in English or French, or have a complete English or French version available.
• I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a horizontal scrollbar, your site will be disqualified.
• I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a scrollbar after 7 clicks, your site will be disqualified.
• Your site must make use of alt and noframes tags (if appropriate).
• Your site must not have popup windows. This includes i.e. GeoCities popups; popups are annoying, and if your web host uses popups, you should consider moving to a host that doesn't make your website seem offensive.
• Your site must not contain copyright violations.
• I must be able to reach you and your site with the information you provide, exactly as you type it.
• I must not need a password to access your site. It is not enough to give me the password because you're still excluding almost everyone else.
• If you run an awards program, your website must meet the standards of your highest award.

Program-Specific Disqualifications

Both the program-specific disqualifications and program-specific criteria draw on knowledge that many awards programs do not incorporate. Especially in the area of usability (user-friendliness), there is a lot of good knowledge that awards programs do not yet incorporate. If one of my disqualifications surprises you, please read the stated reason. You may learn something new.

What do I know about usability? Well, I have two master's degrees, and both of them involve heavy lifting in issues related to usability (making software user-friendly). And I know who to pay attention to. If there is one usability author I wish web awards people (and webmasters) would read, it is Jakob Nielsen. And I'm not the only person who respects him. Even if I have two master's degrees, he knows a lot more about usability than I do. The New York Times calls him "the guru of web page usability." U.S. News & World Report calls him "the world's leading expert on web usability." Stuttgarter Zeitung calls him "the world's leading expert on web usability." And the Chicago Tribune says he "knows more about what makes web sites work than anyone else on the planet."

• Every link, including external links, must open in the same window.Reason: It's common to require that external links open in a new window. And also wrong for a couple of reasons. First, it's handicap inaccessible. Opening a link in a new window is much worse than a missing alt tag. Because of the limitations of nonvisual browsers, opening a link in a new window often causes blind people so much trouble that they can't get back to your site if you want. Second, it's confusing to inexperienced visitors. It causes problems on lower-end computers, and some people may wonder why their back button is greyed out and they can't get back to your lovely site. This is why Jakob Nielsen not only says not to do it; he ranks it as one of the top ten mistakes in web design.
• Most text, including all navigation links, must be the default font size or larger. On all pages, the user must be able to control the size of the text by normal browser mechanisms.Reason: Most web designers have excellent vision. That is a good thing, because it means that graphics are crisp and clear. But it's not so good when web designers forget that their vision is above average and design as if everybody can see as well as the designer can. What is meant as a good way to save space and makes the pages smaller means that, for many visitors, the entire page is hard to read. (This happens on many awards sites.) Before linking to more of Jakob Nielsen's articles, I would point out that his site uses the default font size. This is not an accident, nor is it an accident that my site uses the default font size.
• Do not destroy the browser feature of making visited and unvisited links different colors.Reason: As others have said, making visited and unvisited links the same color to achieve an aesthetic effect is like painting a stop sign green so it will match the color of a nearby building. Making visited and unvisited links the same color is one of the easiest ways to mess up visitors' navigation abilities by confusing them about where they've been and where they haven't been.
• Your URL must not contain a tilde (~).Reason: Large numbers of users do not know how to type a tilde.
• Your website must work under any browser I try to visit it with and must not tell me that I should use a particular browser/version/resolution to see it. Furthermore, all navigation must work with Flash, Java, and JavaScript turned off.Reason: My site is not so good that people are going to download another browser so they can see it, nor are they going to buy a larger monitor. Neither is yours. Flash, Java, and some JavaScript navigation has been called "mystery meat navigation" because if you don't have the technology installed—for instance, if you're blind and your browser doesn't show cool-looking Flash menus—then you can't tell what you're selecting, if you can use it at all. Add to this many people in the first, second, and third world who do not have state of the art computers and who do not feel comfortable enough with technology to upgrade their browser and install plugins, and what you have is navigation that includes people. Standard HTML navigation is inclusive. Mystery meat navigation is inappropriate because it excludes people. (An exception is made if there is alternate navigation so visitors can move about the site even if their browsers won't let them use the mystery meat navigation.)
• Your design must be similar to that of some other sites I've seen, including major sites.Reason: Why am I reccommending this when most programs want a distinctive design? The answer to that can be seen in my own article, The Case for Uncreative Web Design. A new design is one that users will have to figure out. An old, or in other words, familiar, design is one that users already know how to use. Besides bluntly saying, "Zero learning time or die," Nielsen observes, "It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon." He's talking about commercial websites, but for the same reason personal pages work better if new visitors already know how to use them. Instead of trying to invent a navigation system that no one has thought of before, it adds value to a website to learn to make effective use of things that are proven to work well, things that your visitors will already know how to use.

This list is just where these disqualifiers are written down. It is common practice to have an awards program meet the criteria of its top award; this site is meant to do far more than tell about the criteria. This site is meant to put the pieces together and show what they look like in action. Are you wondering why this site employs a standard design? Couldn't I think of something more creative? The last disqualifier explains why, and I try to practice what I preach. And to show what it means to practice what I preach.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Criteria

The disqualifications and criteria are each broken into two parts, with an important difference between the two parts. The first part has rules about content, design, and the like that are important, but they're things you probably expect if you have read the criteria for several of the top Award Sites! programs. If you know your website meets all of those requirements, you can safely skip to the program specific criteria. If you don't know what I'm referring through, I ask you to read through all the criteria. If you pass the disqualifications, you will be scored from 0-100 points as listed below.

Common Criteria (50 points)

• The HTML should be hand-coded and should validate. Any JavaScript should be free of errors (5 points).
• There should be a balance between text/images and whitespace (5 points).
• There should be no music unless I specifically request it (5 points).
• Your content should be at least 90% original, with explicit attribution of non-original content (5 points).
• No disabled right click, including photography and fine arts pages, no full screen mode, and no unethical use of JavaScript to keep me on your site (5 points).
• You have a separate awards page, even if it is empty at the moment (5 points).
• You have no blinking text and no more than 2 animated GIFs per page. (Both of these can cause problems for viewers with epilepsy.) (5 points)
• I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a horizontal scrollbar, or I have to click down more than 7 times, you will lose points. Long pages (or, if you prefer, all pages) should have a "Top" link at the bottom (5 points).
• Correct grammar, spelling, and nO teXt liKE ThIS or 133+ ("leet" speak). You may find ordering The Elements of Style to be well worth the price in knowing how exactly to do this (10 points).

Program-Specific Criteria (50 points)

Usability Criteria

• Your site should have an intuitive overall information architecture (5 points).Remark: This is a fundamental issue in making a website that people will use and come back to. If you're not sure how to do this, you might order Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
• We should be able to easily navigate each page without stopping to search for navigation elements, without guessing, and without using the browser back button (5 points).Remark: If we have trouble navigating your site, the average user may have trouble as well.
• Not only should the text contrast with the background (2 points), it is preferable to have dark text on a light background (3 points).Reason: As the eye ages, seniors lose photoreceptors and everything seems to darken. This means that light text on a dark background is much harder for an older adult to read than it is for someone younger.
• Does your web design draw attention to itself, or does it smoothly draw our attention to focus on the content? Do we leave your site thinking about web design or thinking about what you said?

Content Criteria

The secret phrase, which will be requested on the application, is "I respect your time."

Some of these appear subjective, in that they're hard to quantify. I believe they're important enough to include even if you can't measure them with a ruler.

• Your website is about at least one major subject. (5 points).
• Your website shows deep thought about that subject(s) and tells me something I didn't know (5 points).
• You communicate difficult concepts in an understandable way (5 points).
• Your content is a joy to read (5 points).

At my option, I may award up to 5 extra points for something special when a website goes above and beyond the call of duty in a way that my criteria do not anticipate.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Winners

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Self-Test

You want to be able to answer as many of these questions "Yes" as you can.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Application

If you are unable to use this form, please e-mail the requested information (your name, email address, website title, URL, age and your parent's permission if you're under 13, the secret phrase, and a brief description of your website) tochristos.jonathan.hayward@gmail.com with "Award application" in the subject.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Privacy Policy

I hate spam as much as you do. I respect your privacy, and will not give out your name, e-mail, or any other information to anyone without obtaining your permission first. I will use personal information provided only to respond to feedback and perform log analysis.

If you are under 13, you must get your parents' permission before giving any personal information.

The Facebook fan community linked to from The Jonathan's Corner Community is governed by Facebook's privacy policy and practices.

Email Jonathan Hayward. ]]> https://cjshayward.com/customer/ Wed, 06 Jan 2016 19:47:58 +0000 //cjshayward.com/?p=129 Continue reading "An Open Letter from a Customer: I Don't WANT to Abuse Your Employees and Be Rewarded for Gaming the System"]]>

Own it in Paper!

Dear Customer Service;

I don't WANT to abuse your employees and be rewarded for gaming the system.

As a customer and as a member of the public, I like being treated with courtesy and respect, and it is nice if customer service employees can be gracious to me whether I am right or wrong. And if "The customer is always right!" is about being gracious and representing the company well whether the customer is right or wrong, then I'm all for that version of, "The customer is always right!"

However, if you say "The customer is always right!" as a policy that invites customers to be deliberately abusive, and treat your employees as punching bags because they know you will treat them better than customers who act like mature adults, I will take my business to places like Starbuck's (for one example) where employees give the excellent customer service that only employees supported by their management can give.

I do, sometimes, come in with a complaint that I want help with. But even then, I'm not looking for "free hits" on a punching bag. I'm not even looking for a shoulder to cry on, although it might be nice if customer service can offer a sympathetic ear when a customer has had a rough day. What I really am looking for is help fixing a problem, and the bigger the problem is, the more an emplowered employee is my best ally. An unsupported employee who has been put out as a punching bag, and is trying to hide resentment from being put out as a punching bag by management, is not nearly so big a help to me as an empowered employee. I've heard that bad internal customer service never gives good external customer service, and when I need help, I want an empowered employee acting with management support, not someone management pushes forward as a doormat.

Like a lot of other people, and like a lot of other customers, I don't like to watch someone be abused, and then treated better than those of us who try to respect your employees as humans. The message is very clear, whether or not it is one you would want associated with your organization. The message? You are willing to let us see others who are obviously acting abusive to your employees to get ahead of us when they are "just" being abusive to game the system, while people who treat your burning-out employees with respect are effectively second-class customers. Why? Because we are not gaming the system by abusing your employees.

I've heard of stores where the management treats employees with enough respect to call the police if a customer will not stop treating employees abusively. This happens perhaps once or twice a year; most of the time the employees are trying to make any reasonable effort to please customers. But when it does happen, the spontaneous response from the other customers is to clap and cheer. Most customers do not enjoy seeing someone be abused, even if the abuser isn't getting rewarded for gaming the system.

I spent a bit of time in England, and one thing that really struck me there was that customer service settings seemed to quite often have a poster that said something like, "I am here to help customers. Please let me do my job. If you treat me in an abusive manner, my supervisors will put their foot down and call the police if they need to." I was, for a very, very short while put off the first time I saw one of those posters, and then very, very impressed. And I realized that those posters went hand-in-hand with excellent customer service: not just the routine details, but deftly smoothing some very ruffled feathers when a customer was wrong and upset at not getting what he wanted.

And perhaps it stands to reason. I know the English place an emphasis on politeness, but customer service people who are treated as punching bags will probably be working hard to hide resentment. I may be missing something, but these customer service people didn't seem to have much resentment to hide. (If any.)

I miss that customer service, and for that matter I miss the posters. Now I often get the inferior customer service that comes from employees who know that management doesn't support them (and knowingly expects them to take abuse), not the top-notch customer support of employees who are supported by management, are not expected to take frequent abuse, and act empowered and free to help me as the customer. It's quite a difference.

It's a shame when "The Customer Is Always Right" gets in the way of treating employees well enough that they can deliver good customer service.

As a customer and as a member of the general public, and as a man and a human being, I would appreciate if you treat your employees as human beings who you will no more allow to be abused on your premises than a customer.

Sincerely,
CJS Hayward
CJSHayward.com

Own it in Paper!

There is communication that concerns the person it's directed to, but says too much — for example, most of the legal contracts I've seen. The tiny print used to print many of those contracts constitutes an implicit acknowledment that the signer is not expected to read it: they don't even use the additional sheets of paper necessary to print text at a size that a person who only has 20/20 vision can easily read. There is also communication that is broadcast to many people who have no interest in it. To that communication, I would propose the following rule: Do not, without exceptionally good reason, broadcast a communication that concerns only a minority of its recipients. It's OK every now and then to announce that the blue Toyota with license place ABC 123 has its lights on. It's not OK to have a regular announcement that broadcasts anything that is approved as having interest to some of the recipients.

My church, which I am in general very happy with, has succumbed to vice by adding a section to the worship liturgy called "Announcements", where someone reads a list of events and such just before the end of the service, and completely dispels the moment that has been filling the sanctuary up until the announcements start. They don't do this with other things — the offering is announced by music (usually good music) that contributes to the reverent atmosphere of the service. But when the service is drawing to a close, the worshipful atmosphere is disrupted by announcements which I at least almost never find useful. If the same list were printed on a sheet of paper, I could read it after the service, in less time, with greater comprehension, with zero disruption to the moment that every other part of the service tries so carefully to build — and I could skip over any announcements that begin "For Married Couples:" or "Attention Junior High and High Schoolers!" The only advantage I can see to the present practice, from the church leadership's perspective, is that many people will not read the announcements at all if they have a choice about it — and maybe, just maybe, there's a lesson in that.

As well as pointing out examples of a rampant problem in communication, where an administrator cries "Important!" over many things that are not worth reading, and then wonders why people don't believe him when he cries "Important!" about something which isimportant, I would like to suggest an alternative for communities that have access to the internet. A web server could use a form to let people select areas of concern and interest, and announcements submitted would be categorized, optionally cleared with a moderator, and sent only to those people who are interested in them. Another desirable feature might let end receivers select how much announcement information they can receive in a day — providing a discernible incentive to the senders to minimize trivial communication. In a sense, this is what happens already — intercom litanies of announcements ignored by school students in a classroom, employees carrying memos straight from their mailboxes to the recycle bins — but in this case, administrators receive clear incentive and choice to conserve bandwidth and only send stuff that is genuinely important.

While I'm giving my Utopian dreams, I'd like to comment that at least some of this functionality is already supported by the infrastructure developed by UseNet. Probably there are refinements that can be implemented in a web interface — all announcements for one topic shown from a single web page, since they shouldn't be nearly as long as a normal UseNet post arguing some obscure detail in an ongoing discussion. Perhaps other and better can be done — I am suggesting "Here's something better than the status quo," not "Here's something so perfect that there's no room for improvement."

In one UseNet newsgroup, an exchange occurred that broadcasters of announcements would be well-advised to keep in mind. One person said, "I'm trying to decide whether to give the UseNet Bore of the Year Award to [name] or [name]. The winner will receive, as his prize, a copy of all of their postings, minutely inscribed, and rolled up inside a two foot poster tube."

Someone else posted a reply asking, "Length or diameter?"

To those of you who broadcast to people whom you are able to address because of your position and not because they have chosen to receive your broadcasts, I have the following to say: In each communication you send, you are deciding the basis by which people will decide if future communications are worth paying attention to, or just unwanted noise. If your noise deafens their ears, you have no right to complain that the few truly important things you have to tell them fall on deaf ears. Only you can prevent spam!

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