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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