I got to be in the live audience yesterday of a Tom Peters webinar where for an hour he railed, riffed on great quotes, told stories, and test-i-fied. Hell of a performance. While the rest of us are nattering among ourselves, Tom is out making converts among the heathen. Go, Tom!

I nodded my head continuously for an hour. Business is about passion. Leadership is about being able to say “I don’t know.” “Don’t rebuild. Reimagine.” “Don’t hire someone who had a 4.0 GPA. The definition of a 4.0 student is someone who’s bought the act.” And he tells how the war in Afghanistan was fought much more efficiently because direct, person-to-person communication was enabled — Instant Messaging was way important among stealth soldiers on the ground — rather than mediated through the Last War hierarchy of command.

And then he talks about branding and I find myself struggling to translate it into language I understand. Tom tells us to brand ourselves at work. My hackles go up because corporate branding suffers from two flaws: First, it reduces rich complexity to an annoying jingle. Second, branding exercises are the most cynical activities companies engage in. People sit in a room — I’ve been there — and try to come up with a corporate image that will sell. It has no connection to what the company is about. Can this be what Peters recommends that we do to ourselves?

No, it’s not. Although Peters doesn’t use the word “authenticity,” he assumes it as a value. The people he admires aren’t faking it. In fact, they’ve shaken free of the corporate pose that says that managers can never admit weakness, are not permitted to risk an original idea, and must “not rock the boat.” So, when Tom tells us to brand ourselves, he does not mean that we should invent a persona. He means we should work on figuring out who we really and what we really do for the business.

That’s what I tell myself as I cringe hearing the “brand” word applied to individuals. Tom’s really talking about the enthusiastic embrace of self-understanding. He puts it in terms of “branding” because his audiences consider corporate branding to be a good thing.

I find it more useful — given my wanting to hurl when I hear “branding” — to think in terms of “reputation,” a term that’s begun to be used in place of “brand” in some corporate marketing departments. “Reputation” has three big differences from “brand”: Reputations are earned, reputations are bestowed by others, and reputations can be rich and multifaceted.

Brand myself? Nah. Let me build a reputation. That’s how I take Peters’ talk of self branding.

On the other hand, Peters has been getting through to businesspeople for twenty years while we’ve been nattering. For example, last night at dinner, the waitress said that everyone at the restaurant is taught to be creative and human in their responses and to exhibit their passion for their job. The source? In Search of Excellence. Too cool.

[The fact that Peters ran an interview with me on his site last May certainly has not affected my opinion of him. I've been liking what he says for 20 years now.]

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DarwinMag.com has run a column of mine on why the cynicism so typical of engineers is a virtue. As a teaser, here’s how it opens:

The table was round, the croissants were stale and the speakers hadn’t yet begun. “So, why are you here?” I asked the 30-something man seated next to me.

“I’m the COO of an 200-person computer services company and I was brought in to provide professional organization and structure to a company that’s been in putting-out-fires mode.” He adjusted the very white cuffs of his shirt.

What’s the chief obstacle he’s facing? Without hesitation: “A cynical engineering staff.”

I tried not to laugh. Good luck, buddy. Cynicism is a virtue, especially for engineers …

Kevin Marks and Maf Vosburgh four years ago wrote, “Code and Personality: How to tell your personality type from your code” an amusing yet instructive guide to with copious examples of source code.

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Peter Kaminski writes to a mailing list:

Today’s PR trivia: Google for “al qaeda”, and along with the results you get one of two ads:

“Saudi Arabia offers you an opportunity to understand our fight against terrorism. www.aboutsaudiarabia.net”

“Saudi Arabia revoked Osama bin Laden’s citizenship in 1994 and invites you to learn more. www.aboutsaudiarabia.net”

And why is it that if you google “oil”, “war on terror,” or “saddam,” there are no ads, but “homeland security” has eight?

W. David Stephenson points out that the official Homeland Security homepage has been redone. Less overt PR for Ridge and Bush, but still a gigantic missed opportunity.

Frankly, I liked it better when it was an embarrassment. At least then we had something to laugh about. Oh well, there’s always the video of W trying to get a cliche right.

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I heard from Macy’s and GiftCertificates.com that someone bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of gift certificates online using my credit card. Obviously, I cancelled the card immediately.

Lessons to draw from this?

1. I was impressed that the two establishments caught the anomalous behavior.

2. I never had a serious worry about being stuck for the cost of the stolen goods.

3. It’s not at all clear that my card number was stolen because of my own online use of it. It could have been any real world vendor who jotted down the number.

Overall: My confidence in the safety of online buying remains unshaken. I don’t like the rest of you stinking humans as much as I once did, but I’ll get over it.

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According to Masha Geller’s newsletter at MediaPost, a new DoubleClick report says: “The overall click-through rate for industry text emails was 7%, while Html emails was 10%.”

Say wha’?? People on average not only open 7-10% of their spam but actually click on links in them? No wonder I’m getting so much spam! Will you morons stop clicking already?? You’re ruining it for the rest of us!

Here’s the overall clickthrough percentages by industry:

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The LA Times has run an article, by David Streitfeld, about Lawrence Lessig and his crusade for reasonable copyright laws. Great reading. And, as Doc has pointed out, this is published right in the heart of the Copyright Cops, the Rustlers on the Commons, the Vandals of Fair Use, i.e., Hollywood.

Among the good points: Lessig uses Walt Disney as his poster boy since Disney himself took advantage of stories that had passed into the public domain as the basis for his early cartoon successes. And, Lessig tells about Sony’s lawyers informing an owner of an Aibo robotic dog that he is not permitted to reprogram it to dance to jazz.

Then there’s this bit of insight:

Studying under the long shadow of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the dark prince of Cambridge philosophers, Lessig learned that the way to influence a seemingly intractable debate was by reframing it, getting both sides to confront something they hadn’t seen before. It’s a technique that has served him well in the Eldred case. =

Most unexpected fact: “Lessig was a professional singer as a child…”

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Chris Gaither has a delightful account in The Boston Globe of a 14-hour email riot among students and relatives at Wesleyan University. A msg with a typo got sent to an administrative mailing list. As people tried unsuccessfully to unsubscribe, others told them that if everyone just shut up, traffic on the mailing list would cease. Others took it as an opportunity to goof. 300,000 msgs later, the list was shut down.

An anomaly, yes. And what do we conclude from it, hmm?

Note: The Globe will lock up the link after a few days.

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Andrius Kulikauskas couldn’t take it any more. A general-purpose list we’re on together has been going on about the coming war against Iraq, slowly descending into “How dare you insinuate”s and “If you just want to pose and exaggerate, then go ahead”s. He replied with this long message about his personal experience speaking truth to power, and truth to fear, and truth to neediness, at the most local level.

Andrius is enough of an idealist that he is sometimes shocked by the cyncism most of us take for granted. And lord bless him for it. And he never lies. This is worth reading.

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The Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here’s the way the headline writer put it:

FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?

After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn’t (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these “monarchic weapons” (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.

The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it contracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry’s article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.

Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world’s global conversation.

In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker.

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My e-pal Gilbert Cattoire has joined Annotis.com, an outfit that provides a toolbar for your mail client that lets you do all sorts of funky things to your HTML-based email, like add customized stamps, highlight text, annotate text and add sticky notes. The recipient doesn’t have to use Annotis to see what you’ve done, of course. It costs $25, and there’s a 30-day free trial. Only Outlook and Outlook Express users need apply at this time.

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From Jonathan Arnold on a mailing list comes a rudely funny link: Taliban Reunited.

Dick Joltes, from the same list, recommends the latest in innovative services for today’s highly leveraged executives: Cadaver, Inc.

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The FX cable channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch, plans to do an “American Idol” style show where the winner doesn’t get to perform live on the Regis show but does get to run for president, according to an AP article:

The cable channel announced on Friday the start of a series, “American Candidate,” designed to pick a TV-endorsed potential president.

“We think it’s a marriage of a tried-and-true concept, as shown by ‘American Idol,’ with a down-home political spin to it,” said Peter Liguori, FX president. “We are a nation where, quote-unquote, anybody can become president, and this is a concept that gives everyday folks a forum to express their point of view and have people respond to it.”

R.J. Cutler, the filmmaker who made “The War Room,” a documentary on the 1992 Clinton campaign, is producing the project with Jay Roach, director of the “Austin Powers” movies.

Just when you think it couldn’t get any fucking stranger.

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From Euan Semple of The Obvious:

I don’t know about you but I for one have got so much from the hard
work of Mark Wood in putting together one of the best and most
rewarding blogs on the web. Mark is without access to a computer at the
moment. I reckon if even 100 people payed $5 each we could get him a
computer of his own. I’ve set up a PayPal account and a link from my
blog for donations. I will ensure that Mark gets all money donated.

You’ll find a PayPal button conveniently on The Obvious site.

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I’ve captured from The Daily Show the clip of W struggling to say “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Notice the look of abject fear as he realizes that he’s going to muff it and it’s going to end up on the news, and on damn fool weblogs.

And so it has.

Higher res version of Windows Media file (wmv) (2.2MB) for broader band users
Low res version of Windows Media file (wmv) (322K) for dial-up users
Real Video (217K) if you have the Real Player

MPG (880KB) for dialup users
Higher-res MPG (1.3MB) for broadband users

QuickTime (MOV) (381K) Best clarity per bit. (Thanks, Kevin Marks.)

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Josh Claybourn blogs that the article on a report I cited is just one of a zillion think tank white papers and doesn’t represent the Bush administration’s views.

I think he’s right that the article that cites the report imputes a close tie to the administration that may not be there. On the other hand, the new, official Bush Doctrine statement at the White House site reflects the ideas in that initial report all too closely.

Mitch Ratcliffe does a good job blogging about why the the Bush Doctrine is immoral, scary and impractical. Hey, I knew it was going to be bad, but I wasn’t expecting a trifecta!

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Common Cause has a page where you can fax a message to your Congressional representatives.

Here’s what I faxed this morning to Sen. Kerry, Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Barney Frank:

Please do not make the historic mistake of giving the executive branch a free hand to start and prosecute a war against Iraq.

Especially not this executive and his oil administration.

Especially not this war that is opposed by almost the entire world, that is being “marketed” to us in a propagandistic way, that is ill-defined in its goals, and that would occur without exhausting all alternatives.

Please have the courage to oppose President Bush’s call to have a free hand in attacking Iraq.

[Thanks. Chip, for the link.]

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InformationWeek’s “Secret CIO,” who writes under the pseudonym “Herbert W. Lovelace,” in the September 9 issue takes aim at enterprise blogging because it takes time away from real work, and if successful, it’s hugely distracting:

The last thing you want are uncontrolled and ever-expanding records of individual activities.

The column puts well what I expect the corporate response to blogging to be. I imagine talking with a CIO who straightens his rep tie and says:

“Let me see. You’re telling me that each of our 150,000 employees will have a weblog. And you say people typically spend a half hour a day writing and reading weblogs. So, you’re trying to sell me software that will drop my company’s productivity by 1/16th? Security, we’ve got an intruder!”

Here’s what I want to say to The Secret CIO:

Much of what you say is right, although you’re ignoring the benefits of discovering a handful of people who start writing incredibly useful blogs that are full of ideas and that crystallize unarticulated opinions and feelings. And you’re ignoring the ability of blogs to pull together groups and preserve much of their intellectual value. But maybe you’re right. Maybe giving every employee a blog isn’t the right way to get to these goals.

But even if you were 100% right, you’re missing the point. Don’t think shooting down the proposal from an enterprise blogging company shoots down blogs. We don’t need the proposal and we don’t need your permission — if we’re not allowed to blog in the corporate space, there’s still a might big Web out there. Blogging is happening whether you want it to or not. Your best employees are already setting up weblogs — and mailing lists, and discussion boards, and web pages — to talk about what matters to them, in their own voice.

Weblogs are a done deal. The question is whether there’s additional business value to be had by aggregating, mining (yech) and nurturing the blogging community that’s already created itself under your nose and under your radar.

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The transcript of a chat I did at spirituality.com on the topic “The Spirituality of the Web’s Architecture” has been posted here.

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That’s the title of an article in “The Integration Survival Guide,” the “Official Publication of Business Integration Conference Services.”

Oy veh! What were the titles they threw out? “Heil Integration”? “Integration: The Final Solution”? “Integration Macht Frei”?

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This morning I made it all the way to the final boarding line at Logan Airport in Boston without once having to show any ID. After swiping my credit card to get my printed boarding pass, I went through the security checkpoint without anyone asking to see my ticket or ID. The only time I had to whip out my wallet was when they were doing the meet, greet and ticket-rip at the entrance to the jetway. This contrasts with the last time I was at Logan a couple of months ago when I had to show ID every 10 minutes.

Of course, what could possibly happen at Logan Airport?

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I have a one-day trip to NJ tomorrow, beginning with a 6:30AM flight and returning in the evening. Thus, depending on the state of Wifi in the Garden State I may not be blogging. Do try to carry on without me.

BTW, I’m trying out a new presentation for these CIOs: Messiness as a Virtue.

But I’m still gonna iron my pants and put on a clean shirt.

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I don’t know about you, but most of my dreams aren’t nightmares and most aren’t particularly delightful. Usually, stuff just happens. Why then do we use the word “dream” as if it meant “delightful” or “perfect”?

My theory, based on nothing: When “dream” was first associated with “ideal,” it made sense because our dreams were better. Our dreams have been in decline ever since.

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Katriel Richman, and old e-acquaintance in Israel, writes:

On a personal note from my end, I’m trying to change the terms of my response to the Palestinian intifada by bicycling to Eilat on the Wheels of Love bike ride to benefit the children of Alyn. Over the last two years we’ve been reacting on the bombers’ terms, meeting the evil of the homicide terrorists with fences, closures and military force. The Alyn ride is a chance to respond to the intifada on our terms, meeting malevolence with benevolence.

It’s a 5-day bike ride from Jerusalem to Eliat to raise money for the Alyn Pediatric Hospital in Jerusalem, “Israel’s only rehabilitation center for disabled children and young adults that offers a full gamut of medical, paramedical and educational services seasoned with love and dedication.”

Katriel doesn’t mention that of course Alyn is open to Palestinian children as well as Israeli kids because that’s taken for granted.

You can give online at Network for Good. Katriel would appreciate if you were to fill in the “Designation” line with the words “Wheels of Love” and the “Dedication” line with the name of the rider you wish to sponsor (Katriel Reichman), but he’d appreciate it more if you just gave something.

Emily Skarzenski reminds us about The Hunger Site where simply clicking causes sponsors to donate to projects to reduce world hunger.

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Yang Jianli, a resident of Brookline, MA where I live, is being held by the Chinese government. He was a Tianamen protestor who , after being refused a passport many times, traveled back to China for a visit using a false one. He was caught and has been kept incommunicado.

The following letter has been signed by a number of US Congresspeople. If your representative’s name isn’t at the bottom of this message, could you please write or call him/her to urge him/her to sign?

There’s more information here and here. You can get the address of your Representative here.

Congress of the United States
House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

September xx , 2002

H.E. Jiang Zemin
President
People’s Republic of China

Dear President Jiang:

As you prepare for your meeting with President Bush in Texas in late October, we respectfully ask for your assistance with an urgent humanitarian matter. We hope that your government will respond to the concerns expressed by many Members of Congress regarding Dr. Yang Jianli, a legal U.S. permanent resident who has been detained incommunicado in the People’s Republic of China since April 26, 2002.

We believe that a prompt and successful resolution of his case would help to improve the climate between our two countries and to demonstrate the PRC’s commitment to internationally recognized principles of human rights.

We understand that Dr. Yang’s brother was told by the local authorities that on June 2, 2002, Dr. Yang was arrested and was being held somewhere in Beijing. In apparent violation of PRC and international law, none of Dr. Yang’s family members has been allowed to meet with him or has received written notification of his arrest and place of confinement. These factors have prevented Dr. Yang’s family from obtaining legal counsel for him.

Dr. Yang’s wife and children are American citizens residing in Massachusetts. His detention is a cause of growing pain and anguish to his family. We urge your government to assure that Dr. Yang is given a prompt and fair trial, permitted to meet with his wife and U.S. government representatives, and allowed to return to the United States to rejoin his family as soon as possible. This positive humanitarian gesture would be strongly welcomed by Congress.

Thank you for considering our requests, and for taking the time to address this important matter.

Already signed:

REP. CHRISTOPHER COX
REP. NANCY PELOSI
REP. TOM LANTOS
REP. SANDER M. LEVIN
REP. ED ROYCE
REP. DAN BURTON
REP. JOHN W. OLVER
REP. STEPHEN F. LYNCH
REP. MARTIN T. MEEHAN
REP. BARNEY FRANK
REP. FRANK WOLF
REP. DANA ROHRABACHER
REP. CHRISTOPHER SMITH
REP. EDWARD J. MARKEY
REP. WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT
REP. JAMES P. MCGOVERN
REP. MICHAEL CAPUANO
REP. CONSTANCE A. MORELLA

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Pick any three countries and see what they’re the axis of. Great site.

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Andrew Odlyzko sent the following to the attendees of a small conference I was at recently:

U.S. Broadband Lines	U.S. Cell Phones
Dec 1999 2.8 M	Dec 1989 3.5 M
Dec 2000 7.1	Dec 1990 5.3
Dec 2001 12.8	Dec 1991 7.6
Dec 2002 20.0 (est.)	Dec 1992 11.0
&nbsp	Dec 1993 16.0
	Dec 1994 24.1
Broadband data for 1999-2001 from FCC statistics, covering both business and residential connections, with broadband defined as anything with more than 200 Kbps in at least one direction, cell phone data from CTIA

Thus broadband growth in three years equals cell phone growth over 5 years. Hence even though cell phones beat broadband connections by almost exactly a 10:1 margin as of Dec. 2001, they spread more slowly.

These figures come from an article called “The Many Paradoxes of Broadband.”

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Dan Gillmor has followed up last week’s column about ten decisions that made the Internet the good thing that it is with a column on the three decisions that are still to be made:

Freedom to create innovate
Customer choice and competition policy
Security and liberty

Dan’s assessment of the decisions we’re in the process of making in each of these areas is pretty glum. And, unfortunately, hard to argue with.

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When I was designing my blog, I made the aesthetic decision to remove the underlines from the links because underlines are such horrid little things. Instead, I made my links red, which I thought made them distinctive without making them like they were words I particularly wanted to emphasize.

Ralph Brandi wrote to me yesterday. Ralph is color blind. My links don’t look like links to him. Nor to anyone else with reg-green color blindness. So, the underlines are back in. For example, when I tell you that Ralph’s blog is here, you’ll see “here” underlined.

This being the day before Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, I hope Ralph and his color-blind sisters and brothers will forgive me.

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Chip forwards a link to what may be an important article in the Sunday Herald that claims that the “regime change” in Iraq is part of a larger plan put together by Bush’s cronies before he took office:

Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President

By Neil Mackay

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

more…

It is literally a plan for US global domination. Or, more exactly, a plan to make our global domination more thorough, direct and undeniable.

Peter Kaminski points us to the actual report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

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