Mies, 1938

Something sent me to the bookshelf for the big thick book on Mies van der Rohe, Mies in America. I was looking for things he had said, and I found this, from a speech in 1938:

Let us guide our students over the disciplined path from materials through the practical aims of creative work.

Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive buildings, where each axe stroke meant something and each chisel stroke made a real statement.

Where can we find greater clarity in structural connections than in wooden buildings of old?

Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form?...

What feeling for material and what power of expression speaks in these buildings.

And buildings of stone as well: what natural feelings they express!

What a clear understanding of the material. What certainty in its use. What sense they had of what one could and could not do in stone. Where do we find such wealth of structure? Where do we find more healthy energy and natural beauty? With what obvious clarity a beamed ceiling rests on these old stone walls, and with what sensitivity one cut a doorway through these walls...

The brick is another teacher. How sensible is this small handy shape, so useful for every purpose.

What logic in its bonding, what liveliness in the play of patterns.

What richness in the simplest wall surface. But what discipline this material imposes.

Thus each material has its specific characteristics that one must get to know in order to work with it.

This is no less true of steel and concrete. We expect nothing from materials in themselves, but only from the right use of them.... Each material is only worth what we make of it.

Axe strokes. Chisel marks. Such unity of material, construction and form. Such wealth of structure. How sensible. What certainty, what logic, what liveliness. What richness. What discipline. What obvious clarity.

A culture-change sentence

My colleagues and I have been busy with a series of culture initiatives, working with teams of people entrusted by their organizations to write the words that will hang on the wall and be pointed out as the essence of who they are. As they struggle to arrive at just the right phrasing, they tend to ask two defining questions: Is this aspirational? Or is it real? We like to steer them away from the dichotomy, toward: This is who we are when we're at our best.

Here's what that sentence does for you: It says that the culture you aspire to is not detached from your current reality. It's just not everywhere, all the time, in full bloom. If you travel around your company, you'll find your cultural ideals in play now and then, here and there, more or less. So we're asking you to step up in a big way, but not to step outside of what's real. We're aiming for consistency across time and place and uptake, to be "at your best" more often, in more places, with greater clarity.

It's the culture-change version of the (alleged) William Gibson quote: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Authentic voices #5

The history of an industry in one man's tale, that's what it was. My friend Doug Cassidy hooked me up with Ed Latek in the summer of '03. I turned on my digital recorder and Ed took it from there.

It was 1959, in the south suburbs of Chicago, when Ed's dad started a rental business on the side while finishing his career working on telephone equipment at Illinois Bell. "I'm a senior in high school," Ed says. "Mom runs the store during the day. I get out of school at 2 o'clock and go straight to the store. I run it the rest of the day and close up. Dad runs it on weekends."

Ed ran the store all that summer and then went off to St. Joseph's College in Indiana to major in accounting. In the middle of his sophomore year, the American Rental Association (ARA) brought its annual convention to Chicago and Ed cut classes to attend. He roamed the exhibition floor with lust for a Cub lo-boy tractor and an air compressor, among other things. His wish list grew to $10,000, which was about $10,000 more than he had. So he arranged a second lien on his dad's house.

After graduating with an accounting degree in 1963, Ed attacked the rental business for real. As he grew his dad's business into a multi-branch Chicagoland franchise, he was irritated by one thing: no one would let him borrow money using future revenues as collateral-- not the banks, not the finance companies, not the equipment manufacturers themselves. To Ed, there was not a surer bet in the lending business; if you bought $10,000 worth of equipment this year, you'd make it all back the next year, and that same equipment would continue to make money for you another 10 or 15 years. In the early 1970s Ed sold the family business and got ready to become the banker for the industry himself.

He started Reli Financial Corp., where he borrowed money from banks and loaned it back out to rental companies. At the ARA conventions, Reli was the only finance company on the exhibition floor. Ed describes it:

I had a booth that looked like a bank. When they opened the doors, everybody lined up at our booth. Every year I would take some of my bankers to the convention so they could see what we were doing. Every manufacturer in the world was there. And we were putting millions of dollars on the floor. By the time I got back to Chicago, I would have messages from the banks upping my line by two million, three million dollars.

In 1985 he sold Reli to a major insurance/financial services firm. He was ready to slow down, but the third phase of his business life was already kicking in. Before he knew it, he had structured a merger between two rental companies in Salt Lake City, done a couple of acquisitions in Southern California, found a buyer in upstate New York for a renter who wanted to retire, put together a deal in Houston. He was starting to look like an investment banker, and in 1990 he made it official it by forming Latek Capital Corp. In short order, he became the man in the middle of the consolidation wave, connecting the roll-up interests with the fragmented owners. In many ways he was undoing what he had spent decades putting together. But he was a money guy, and he understood how money worked:

It took us 40 years to get where we were as an industry, and in three years it turned upside down. All the leadership of our industry was taken off the table. No matter how much you wanted to hang onto your business, you couldn't do it. You had to sell. There was just too much money on the table.

It hasn't been the happiest of times for Ed, but he has a healthy respect for extracting value the founding generation never imagined.

When I started out, everybody in the business was my father's age. And they were all like fathers to me. Now, someone I've known a long time calls and says why don't I stop by the next time I'm in the neighborhood. I know what that means. So a few weeks later I give him a call and tell him I'm coming to town. We go to dinner. We talk. We think out loud. We pull his financials together. We figure out what we think the value of his business is. We compute the tax implications of selling. We consider how it's going to affect the rest of the family. We both know he wants to sell. That's why he called in the first place. But now we have it all laid out and he says let's go ahead. So we develop the buyer. We educate the buyer on our industry. Then we finally bring them together. Those transactions take a long time. We're closing on a deal next week. I started talking to the owner over a year ago. After about six months I felt like I had a good reading on it. I put it together about a month after that. Here we are now, eight months later, finally ready to close. And I started financing this guy in 1981. I know him. I know his family. I find a buyer who's a good match. And that's what it's really all about.

Authentic voices #4

I met Juan at the boarding gate at Chicago Midway, July of '02, when he needed help understanding the Southwest Airlines system of boarding in groups. He said he was making his first trip ever to Los Angeles and asked if I was going there too, which I was. I wasn't looking for a companion though. I was traveling alone, and relishing the idea of curling up at 39,000 feet with a book and nothing ahead of me but three loosely planned days in the Ojai Valley.

Being the experienced SWA traveler, I size up the crowd and decide it's about half a planeload. So I walk two-thirds of the way back and take a window seat, figuring I'll have at least four rows of buffer between me and the rest of the pack. I have my shoes off, my book out, my stress level sinking fast -- when I see Juan breaking through the knot of bin-stuffers and striding toward me with a big grin on his face. He says he has come to sit with me, and not just in my row -- he plunks down in the center seat, elbow-to-elbow with me, surrounded by rows and rows of vacant seats. I could at least have said, "Hey Juan, take the aisle seat, so we have room to stretch out."

But instead I had a little talk with myself. I said, "Bill, you got yourself pretty attached to the way you thought this trip would be. Now the universe has delivered this man to you. Do not oppose. Take it as a gift." So I ask Juan to tell me his story. He's 43 years old, born in a village near Puerto Vallarta, now a Chicago business owner. Every summer he packs his wife and three children, ages 4, 13 and 17 into the van and drives straight through to Mexico City. From there they continue to Puerto Vallarta, where Juan likes to sit on the beach and stare at the waves. After several days by the ocean, they drive on to the village of his youth, where he used to have horses--and when he tells you that part, you know that on some level, he still has horses.

Juan likes the highway mode of travel. He's a little jittery about this jet. The night before, he had decided to cancel, but he didn't know how to tell the people who were waiting for him on the other end. A friend dropped him off at Midway and said, "Southwest? Only poor people fly Southwest!" But Juan is not poor, and his ticket is paid for by the manufacturer he is going to see.

For 14 years, Juan worked an 8-to-5 job and sold jewelry door-to-door on weekends. After a while, he was making more money on Saturday and Sunday than he was Monday-through-Friday. So he took the plunge and bought a jewelry store. He's been at it for 19 months, and it's been no piece of cake. He hadn't thought through the capital requirements. He started by calling the customary manufacturers and asking if he could buy $200 worth of jewelry at a time -- on credit. They all said no. Eventually, he cold-called a manufacturer he found in The Yellow Pages and they said yes. I ask him why this one said yes when all the others had said no. This is what he tells me:

They came to my store and watched me run my business for six hours. And then they said, "We believe you are an honest man." I started out buying $200 worth of jewelry at a time and paying them back in 30 days. Sometimes I didn't have the money and I would call them and they would say that's okay, pay us when you can. Now I order a kilo at a time. And finally they start telling me I have to come to see how they make the jewelry. They say, "You are ordering from a book. Someday somebody else gives you a book and then you don't order from us anymore. We don't know you. You disappear and we never see you again. So you must come to our factory. We send you a ticket."

That alone is not enough to get Juan on a jet plane. But about this time an uncle who lives in California starts calling him, telling him they have to see each other, it's been too long, almost 20 years. Juan says, "I can get a free ticket!" He calls the manufacturer, and to his astonishment, a ticket on Southwest Airlines arrives 12 hours later.

About 120 miles from LAX, Juan looks at me with a smile and makes a descending motion with his hand. With every foot of lost elevation, he is more relaxed. We cross over the Santa Annas and the LA Basin sprawls before us. I'm looking down on the grandstands, the paddock, the stables, the manicured dirt track of Santa Anita. Juan leans over me like the boy from the long-ago village and says, "Look! Horses!"

Authentic voices #3

I was working with restaurant owner/operators from all over the world as they rehearsed their stories about their "passion" for their work, which they would tell on stage in front of 12,000 of their peers. There were big stories, like the husband and wife team who had started some kind of charity for kids in -- it could have been Russia, but I'm kind of foggy on that. And there was a guy who did something with a clown somewhere in Latin America. And something from Japan, the details of which escape me. But most of all, there was this Norwegian, whose story I can still punch up in my brain, must be seven years now after the fact. It goes like this:

It was late afternoon on a Saturday. There was no one in the store except a small family quietly finishing their meal. I walked over and asked them if they would care for dessert. A little boy, about four years old, said he would like to have an ice cream cone. I said, "How would you like to make it yourself?" He said he would like that. So I took him behind the counter and found something for him to stand on. I showed him how the machine worked and handed him a cone. He held down the lever and filled the cone up. I watched him walk back to his mom and dad with a look of amazement on his face. To eat something that tasted so good, and that he had made with his own hands, was a special thing. He ate every last bit, and his family got up to leave. His mom and dad had already gone out the door when he stopped, turned around, pointed to me and softly said, "I will never forget you."

Authentic voices #2

Don't ask why, but I was riding in a pickup at the top of New Mexico through about three feet of snow to feed the buffalo at Vermejo Park Ranch, which today belongs to Ted Turner but back then was owned by Pennzoil--which allowed people like my client to use the old land grant for meetings. We were about two hours out when we found the herd. We threw some hay on the ground and then the driver announced that we had to travel on to a different pasture and feed this one buffalo who would be the object of a buffalo hunt in a few days. I asked him what that meant and he said a big game hunter was flying in from Dallas, and he specifically wanted to shoot a buffalo. They were not going to put the whole herd through such an ordeal, so the victim had been chosen and sent to the killing field.

A couple of hours later we came over a rise into a treeless bowl with a frozen pond at the bottom. An old buffalo stood there in the clearing, by the pond, facing into the winter wind. The driver, who was one of the hunting guides, stopped the truck about 100 yards from the animal.

I said, "So on the day of the hunt, he'll be hidden in the woods, right?" "No," said the hunting guide, "He'll be right there. He hasn't moved since we brought him over here." I asked if they would honk the horn, or make wolf sounds, or something, to at least try to make him run. And that's when he told me how it would all go down:

We'll stop the truck right here, just like you and I did. We'll look at the hunter and say, "There's your buffalo." He'll nod and get out and get ready to shoot. If he's a good shot and knows what he's doing, he'll hit him in the heart on the first shot and that'll be the end of it, nice and clean. But...I've yet to see that happen. Most generally, it goes like this. First shot hits the ol' boy in the flank, and he just looks around as if he was bit by a fly or something. Second shot'll get him in the shoulder and stun him a little. Third shot will bring him to his knees. And he'll roll over on the fourth shot and bleed to death. Hunter'll walk up and nudge him with his foot. The boys'll pick him up and in a few weeks the hunter will receive a mounted head for his trophy wall and some bison meat for his freezer.

We drove on down and dropped off some hay, and I watched as we motored away and never saw the buffalo move. I spent the rest of my day making plans with my client, his sales vice president, his chief marketing officer and his chief financial officer, and then the hunting guides came in their vehicles with the big knobby tires and drove us on back to Raton where the company plane was waiting to take us home.

Authentic voices #1

Twenty-five years ago I was doing a corporate video at a chemical plant on the Escambia River in the Florida Panhandle. We were waiting for the magic hour, when the sun would be low enough to light the plant at right angles. To pass the time, the videographer asks our host a throw-away question: "I'm not really worried about it or anything, but, say, just for example, if there were an explosion, what would we do?" To our host, it's clearly not a hypothetical question.

"If it comes from over there," he says, pointing to our left, "there'll be a gas that'll eat your lungs out. It's heavier'n air, and we're in kind of a bowl, you see, so run up that hill over there just as fast as you can go. Now if it comes from this other direction, there'll be a gas that's highly inflammable, and first time it hits a spark it'll be a rolling ball of fire. The river is that way. Make a run for it. If you manage to get there, jump in. Don't think about it. Jump in and keep your head low. Don't worry about the gators--they'll be gone."

The authenticity of his life-and-death counsel made an impression on me that hasn't dimmed over two-and-a-half eventful decades. I can still see the videographer's gaze, aimed at the middle distance in the direction of the river, his appetite for small talk satiated as we waited in silence for the light to be right to make beautiful images on videotape.

Which one of these is not like the others?

The assignment was to take five words and turn them into a statement of a company's culture. The five words were performance, people, leadership, connections and collaboration. Here's what we came up with:

We are a company that believes in performance as a foundation, leadership as a differentiator, people in their uniqueness and their commonalities, connections that unite us and collaboration as a way of life.

Which of these phrases is not like the others?

It's the "people" statement.

In the other four, the key word is linked to its usefulness to the company. Performance is a foundation that the company can build on. Leadership is something the company can use to set itself apart in the marketplace. Connections are important to help unify the company. And collaboration is how the company does things. But people? The company believes in their uniqueness and their commonalities -- how they differ and how they fit together. Are people a foundation to build on, or a differentiator? Maybe. But the statement of culture doesn't say anything about that. It just says we believe in you, in the ways you are different, and in the ways you are alike.

I wrote it that way on purpose and submitted it without any explanation. No one has said, "Hey, I see what you're doing there!" I like to think of it as a little treasure waiting for someone, someday, somewhere along the line, to sit down and seriously contemplate what kind of company they work for, and to stumble across this little discontinuity of syntax and suddenly feel better about everything.

Promulgate!

I want to make it safe for me to use this word, the way the late Howard Zinn used it:

We should have a history that enhances human values, humane values, values of brotherhood, sisterhood, peace, justice and equality. Those are the values that historians should actively promulgate in writing history.

Yeah, like that. I want to be able to say "here's how we're going to promulgate the new culture" without fear of being ridiculed for making up words. But that will only happen if people hear the word in context enough times. So here's a start, from a quick search of what's going on in the world:

"Oli said the Maoists would not help promulgate the constitution by the deadline."

"That will let HP promulgate its Converged Infrastructure strategy..."

"They have all contributed to promulgate and popularize the now-how and how-to in the domain of securing a sustainable development for all mankind."

"However, Gelb has been so successful in getting out his message that even in criticizing him, critics unwittingly promulgate it."

"EPA has refused to promulgate an antidegradation implementation plan."

"I hope the media promulgate this study's message far and wide..."

"Nepal is yet to promulgate a new Constitution for the country..."

"We are concerned that sites like this one that promulgate inaccurate perceptions of campus safety may result in a breakdown of the important process of sharing publicly accurate information."

It's a good word. We need to make a place for it.

Long sentence update

If you've been following the long-sentence thread, here and here, I'm happy to say that I have now written a long sentence that got approved, and it goes like this:

So this matters, what we're doing today, this gathering of people, this new office space, these new jobs, those patients out there who need the particular medicine we're bringing them today and the additional medicines we will bring them in the near future and in years to come, this North and South American region we are building, from Canada now, down through the United States, on across Mexico, and into Brazil--all of this matters.

These words appear in a speech, so they don't show up in the script as one sentence. But everything here is an expansion of the subject "this" and the predicate "matters." They are 80 words that belong together, entering the listener's ear on the simple assertion that "this matters," and then going on to paint a richer picture of what "this" actually is: it's this gathering, this space, these jobs, those patients, this region; and when all is said and done, the listener should have a pretty good sense of how it matters.

On narrative, and narrative consistency

I was sitting across the table from a hip hop artist who was explaining his plan for helping other independent artists cross the licensing and distribution chasm to make sure they get paid for what they do. He'd figured it all out for himself, and now he wanted to help others. We were at the end of this long list of things when he finally got to something I understood:

"It's all about the story," he said. "50 Cent sold 10 million copies of Get Rich or Die Tryin' because he got shot nine times."

There you go. The power of narrative. 50 Cent sold 10 million copies of Get Rich or Die Tryin' because he got shot nine times.

By the way, how'd this guy 50 Cent get that name? Wikipedia says he took it from the trade name of a 1980s Brooklyn bank robber. They quote the new 50 Cent as saying he appropriated the old 50 Cent's name "because it says everything I want to say. I'm the same kind of person 50 Cent was. I provide for myself by any means."

There you go again: narrative consistency.

Another long sentence

From Ian McEwan, in the very first paragraph of Solar:

Patrice was seeing a builder, their builder, the one who had repointed their house, fitted their kitchen, retiled their bathroom, the very same heavyset fellow who in a tea break had once shown Michael a photo of his mock-Tudor house, renovated and tudorized by his own hand, with a boat on a trailer under a Victorian-style lamppost on the concreted front driveway, and space on which to erect a decommissioned red phone box.

73 words. Nice.

Plain talk

On a college football discussion board, where opinions are a dime a dozen, a poster interrupts the recruiting, coaching, and spring training conversations to seek advice on cohabitation with his girlfriend. He was richly rewarded. Here's a very small sample:

"Be clean. More clean than you think is necessary."

"You will find yourself watching more Food Network and Lifetime than you ever thought possible."

"My friend, simplify your life. Date the girl or marry her."

"Have fun in your lake of fire, sinner."

"In two words: separate bathrooms."

"The problem with living together beforehand and the reason all of the research says it is detrimental is that it builds a 'backdoor mentality' into the relationship."

"Still need to see pics before I give my perspective."

"Whatever you do, don't buy Clapton/Winwood tickets for you and an old college buddy assuming she wouldn't want to go because she listens to a lot of crappy music and doesn't even know who Traffic or Blind Faith is."

"Dating isn't anywhere in the ballpark of marriage. Because when you make those vows, there is no backstop, alternative, or exit strategy."

"When I use the bathroom, hell, that side of the house is off-limits. She will LOVE to corner you in the can, so establish some rules early."

"I lived with a girlfriend for a year. Suffice to say it didn't work out. In fact, when she moved out, she moved to INDIA. As in, NEXT TO PAKISTAN. As in, SHE WENT TO LIVE IN A BUDDHIST MONASTERY."

"You said she wanted at least an engagement ring prior to cohabitating. Well that nails it. She's traditional. It doesn't matter if you understand it. The sooner you learn to pay attention to THEIR value systems instead of trying to reason with them and change them, the better off you'll be."

"If you're planning on getting married anyways, then might as well do it. It's a great way to save money for the ring. I will caution you however. If you are supposed to be saving for a ring, then she will nitpick every little thing that you buy for yourself. Come home with a new pitching wedge? I DON'T THINK SO ASSHOLE!"

"Think of it this way, you're out with a couple of buddies. If a chick wants you to go home with her, are you going to do it, figuring your girlfriend won't find out because you have a great alibi and friends who will confirm your story? If you will, the answer is don't move in with her yet. If you don't think you will, the answer is don't move in with her yet. If you know you will not, it's probably okay to start thinking about moving in with her."

"I only have to visit her apartment, ride in her car, and observe her spending habits to figure out how she manages her household and see if it complements my own habits or not. I need only visit her family, church, and hometown to see if her values are similar to my own."

"By the way, the costs of breaking a cohabitation are going to surpass what you may save in rent."

"Just because you don't have any, doesn't mean her values are less correct or less important. Your enlightenment is worthless."

Right about here, the original poster comes back and says, "Alright dudes. Well, I will be moving in with my girlfriend and I am looking forward to it. I think my girlfriend is the greatest woman ever born and I don't think there is anything we can't handle. We filled out an application last night and are both really excited. Keep it real." A few posts later, he's back again. "UPDATE: We just got approved for the apartment. My realtor buddy is hooking us up with a $1,200 realtor rebate. 50 inch plasma?"

It was, beyond a doubt, a testosterone-powered thread, but once it was clear that the cohabitation was going to happen, it was a woman's voice offering best wishes and pragmatism, with this: "I wish you guys the best of luck. My advice: keep your finances separate, put both names on the lease, and don't get a puppy."

Going long

Peggy Noonan started it, for me, last month, when she wrote this 89-word sentence:

Both our political parties continue, even though they know they shouldn't, even though they're each composed of individuals many of whom actually know what time it is, even though they know we are in an extraordinary if extended moment, an ongoing calamity connected to our economic future, our nation's standing in the world, our strength and safety--even though they know all this, they continue to go through the daily motions, fund raising, vote counting, making ads with demon sheep, blasting out the latest gaffe of the other team.

Then, a few days later, I quoted a 100-word sentence from Don DeLillo in this space, and mimicked it with a 94-word sentence of my own. I've read all three of these sentences many times, and I love them more with each reading. So I was locked and loaded when my friend Bart called and said he needed an introduction to a swatch book for a paper called Finch Opaque. Bart and I have collaborated on a couple of years worth of promotional materials for Finch Paper LLC, and I know their story well. And so I sat down to write a sentence that, in and of itself, would be a differentiator; it would tell a complete story unlike anything else in the industry. And out of that came this:

When you want a real opaque, and no surprises, in delivery or on-press, and the feeling that everything's going to be okay, and the faith, the conviction, that what you will have at the end of your run will be everything you had in mind before you started, not to mention the comfort of picturing the mill beside the river in the town beside the forest, that one mill where all your paper will come from, made by the people who live in the town and do the work their people have done back through the generations, and the real person who takes your order knows all the people who will make your paper, and knows their children too, and all of them will stand behind not just their paper, but your paper, the paper they made for you, and they'll stand behind how it all works for you from the first call you make to the way you feel when you're holding the finished product in your hands -- when that's what you want, it's got to be Finch Opaque.

A whopping 181 words. The full measure of DeLillo's 100, and around the bend for 81 more. I read it over several times, to make sure I was serving Bart and the client well, and not just indulging my long-sentence obsession. I felt good about it, and so I sent it. When I hadn't heard anything by end of day, I called and asked how they liked it. Bart was unavailable, but his designer Gosia said he had received it, had sent it to the client, and it "would do for now." That doesn't sound so good. I've probably read it 20 times, and I'm still partial to it. I hope somebody reads it here and says, "Hey Bill, can you write one of those for us?" If there's a place for the long sentence on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, and in the American novel, why not in the way a business talks about itself?

For the ear

The request was that I read a video script and make sure it was written properly for the ear. Here's one sentence (with client identity masked) that I felt the need to doctor:

For more than XX years, we've worked with clients in da-da-dee and da-da-dum, and have developed superior industry expertise.

I edited it to read:

For more than XX years, we've worked with clients in da-da-dee and da-da-dum, developing a superior brand of industry expertise along the way.

The first problem was that second "and." It puts working with clients and developing expertise on equal footings, like "we mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges," two ideas side-by-side -- when actually the industry expertise was an outgrowth of the XX years of working with clients.

So we delete the "and" and insert the comma and we change "have developed" to "developing." All of which serves as a setup for the thing we really want people to remember, which is superior industry expertise. However, the way this sentence was written, those three key words race past the ear and then the sentence abruptly ends: Zoom! Screech!

We need to slow that whole sequence down and create a little space for the ear to do its work. So we change it from "developed superior industry expertise" to "developing a superior brand of expertise along the way," where "brand of" is a timing device and "along the way" is a rhythm apparatus; the ear gets two beats to grab "superior" before it has to snag "industry expertise," and then it has "along the way" as a cool-down period before cranking back up for the beginning of the next sentence.

The eyes that review this script can take all the time they want, reading and re-reading, and viewing each phrase in the context of the total piece. But the value of the script is determined by what happens when the words in spoken form go sailing past ears that get only one fleeting shot at them. Those ears need all the help they can get.

How to interview an SME

There are four of us who all came from the same place. We've known each other since the Dow was at 900 and for the past two decades have pitched in on each other's writing projects. Last week, Doug was preparing to train a team of technical writers and felt that he was lacking good ideas in one of the areas he was supposed to cover, which was "how to handle interviews." So he sent an email to the other three of us asking "how to draw out essential material from SMEs under the normal constraints of time and availability." Within 90 minutes, John had responded with this:

1. Get a recorder...and a phone patch cord--and make sure you know how to "get bars" to indicate that the recorder is actually working. I would never trust my note-taking to capture the nuances of interviews (especially on technical subjects).

2. Get as much background as you can about the subject ahead of time, and sketch out some questions based on the background.

3. Take notes...even if you're running a recorder. It's often helpful to have a "visual" clue at your fingertips, reminding you of what's been discussed...so that you can ask follow-up questions, or return to key topics later in the conversation.

4. Don't try to fill up the silence: If somebody's thinking, let them think. Let them pause...in order to elaborate. A well-placed "um" or "uh-huh" is often enough to let them know that you're still there, engaged and listening.

5. Engage in enough small-talk to put the interviewee at ease...but don't waste a lot of time on it. If you're in two different cities...and you know that the other place just got a lot of snow, or their team won the Super Bowl, use that sort of detail to create a civil, engaging tone to the conversation.

6. If you need additional detail or background, ask for it. It's OK to ask what an acronym means, for example. Usually, you'll get more useful information if you play a little dumb, rather than trying to prove to the SME how smart you are.

7. If, during the course of an answer, you learn about an existing PowerPoint presentation or white paper, ask for a copy of it.

8. Respect the SME's time. If you promised to end in 30 minutes, then try hard to do so--setting a followup time if you still need to get more info after your "window" is up.

9. Expect the SME not to respect your time. Count on them being late for the call...and don't schedule another call to follow immediately thereafter.

10. Check your recorder immediately after the call, to make sure it was working. That way, if it DIDN'T work, the topics you talked about will still be fresh in your mind, and you may be able to cobble together enough written notes to save your butt.

11. Most of the above tips also apply to face-to-face interviews, and with one addendum: Make eye contact. It's OK to look away to take notes, etc....but don't stay buried in your notes. Treat the interview like a conversation.

Laurie was on vacation at a beach in Mexico, but three hours after John, she had added her tips:

1. Get a digital recorder. In four years, I have not suffered a malfunction (knock wood), and it's great to have a backup file of the interview on your computer.

2. Get approval ahead of time from the moderator or SME to record the interview. Explain that it dramatically increases the accuracy and time efficiency of the entire project.

3. During the interview, when you hear a key topic, jot down the time stamp from the recorder. Afterward, you can zip right to that point.

4. Download to your computer and transcribe ASAP. A foot pedal helps immensely.

Interview questions (if these apply to technical writing)...

Ask the SME:

-- "What is the most important thing that (the audience, users) should know about this (topic, product)?"

-- "Who are the different types of people likely to use the product?"

-- "What are the benefits to each type of user?"

At the end of the interview, ask: "As a hypothetical exercise...if you had to put a headline on this (story, product description), what would it be?"

I wanted to go last, hoping that all my points would be covered and I could just respond: "what they said." But in the end, I was inspired to add something of my own. Ten minutes before midnight, I sent my list:

1. I like to start an interview with as broad a question as possible and then avoid asking another question as long as possible. Like this: "Wow, cloud computing...what's your story on that?" And then shut up. The point is to see where they will voluntarily go with it. They might talk for 10 or 15 minutes if you don't stop them, and that tells you what's important to them, and the order of importance. As they talk, of course, clarifying questions will occur to you. Write them down. When they finally run out of steam, you can then say: "Back when you were talking about total cost of ownership, you said something I didn't quite understand..." If you ask questions during the flow of their initial answer, you break their stream of consciousness, and you'll never get it back.

2. This sounds so elementary, but it requires discipline: As soon as someone says something like "There are three keys to this initiative...", you have to start counting. You don't want to go back and listen to your digital recording (you are using a digital recorder, right?) and only have two things, or not be able to tell where #2 ended and #3 began.

3. I think of the interview in four parts: #1 is the broad opening question that they can take in whatever direction they want to go. #2 is the clarifying questions you wrote down while they gave you their stream-of-consciousness answer. #3 is the questions you wrote down in advance, some of which will already be answered, and some of which you now need to ask. And #4 is a fishing expedition. I have some favorite things to ask here. One is, "So was there a moment in this whole thing when you knew this was actually going to work?" Often there was, and their answer gives you the turning point that helps you turn information into a story. Another question is: "Through this whole experience, what was your biggest surprise?" They'll usually stop and think about it, because the question intrigues them. You have to keep quiet while they think. Their answer will frequently be something that also contributes to the narrative. Another one I like is, "I can see that you really changed this (process, function, environment, etc.) but how did it change you?"

4. With a group of SMEs, don't work toward consensus too soon. Keep them in the question as long as you can. I'm actually kind of bad about avoiding consensus at all. Sometimes I don't want them to tidy up all the loose ends, because I don't trust them to come up with a better conclusion than I would on my own.

5. Don't settle for abstract answers. Make them tell you what actually happens. You say, "So walk me through this. A guy comes into your bank with an idea for a dog-walking service. What does he say? What does he know? Where has he been before he got to you?"

Years ago I worked with "the worldwide competency leader in knowledge management" at IBM. He defined knowledge like this:

Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms.

Yeah, that's what we did, my friends and I, emailing through the afternoon and night, knowers telling what they know in a way that offers a framework for a new generation of technical writers to use as they strive to more quickly and competently do what they're asked to do.

Pick a rock

A friend from our cubicle days is sitting in my living room talking about the last speech she gave. Her story goes like this:

As I was doing my research for the speech, everything shifted for me. I suddenly saw that, in gathering my material, I was stepping into a river of information. If I came to this river tomorrow, the information would be different. It changed the way I looked at everything. And I realized it made no sense to prepare a linear speech about information that was not the same from one day to the next. So I gathered some river rocks, wrote a different topic on about 20 of them, placed the rocks in a basket, and went off to give my speech. I asked people to "pick a rock" and then I'd talk about whatever was written on it. We picked rocks until the time ran out. If different rocks had been picked, it would have been a different speech.

My friend has been the dean of a communications school for 15 years. When she speaks, I listen.

Garbage and greatness

From out of nowhere a quote pops into my head: "People are a mixture of garbage and greatness. Listen to their garbage; speak to their greatness."

I heard it 25 years ago from a man who was a proof point of the first sentence and a practitioner of the second. The usefulness of his advice lies in the semicolon, which acts as a stop sign. So you read the sentence like this: Listen to their garbage (STOP!) speak to their greatness. In other words, don't DO anything with the garbage -- just listen to it, then speak to the greatness. If you do anything at all with the garbage, you lose.

A DeLillo sentence

If you've ever read the quotes to the right of this space, you may have noticed that the first one is from Don DeLillo. It's all about the sentence, with him. For that reason alone, without fretting over some of the things his bewildered reviewers must consider, I buy each of his new books as soon as they come out. My favorite sentence from his new novelette goes like this:

A hundred years of junk, this is what I saw, glass, rags, metal, wood, alone here, we'd left her, and the feeling in the body, the sheer deadness in my arms and shoulders, and not knowing what to say to him, and the chance, the faint prospect that we'd be standing on the deck in faded light and she'd come walking along the sandpath and we'd barely believe what we were seeing, he and I, and it would take only moments to forget the past several hours and we'd go in to dinner and be the people we always were.

I see a lot of trust here, in us, his readers, to paddle out into the current and just go with it, from comma to comma, taking comfort in his lists of things, because he does like to do that, list the things he sees, in a kitchen, or a shed, nothing special about them, except that we read them and know we've been there ourselves, and then feel things we've felt, and know things we've known, and what about her, the one that was left alone there, yes, that night, what about her?

A sentence worth writing

Delbert McClinton has his "sky blue ragtop Mustang, 1964." Richard Thompson has the infamous "Vincent Black Lightning, 1952." I don't have any of that. I like sentences. So it was fun this morning to find Verlyn Klinkenborg in The Times invoking a single sentence he'd read somewhere back up the line. It went like this:

I cannot see these cats...without thinking of a sentence by the writer Guy Davenport: "My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I'm not supposed to know him, either."

I read it to my family and they laughed. We've all seen that cat.

The perfect introduction

Leonard Cohen, introducing his song Ain't No Cure for Love:

It's been a long time since I stood on this stage in London. It was about 14 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I've taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I've also studied deeply in the philosoplhies and the religions -- but cheerfulness kept breaking through. But I wanted to tell you something that I think will not be easily contradicted: there ain't no cure for love.

It's personal, authentic, surprising, revealing, funny, establishing, evocative, endearing -- and 75 seconds start-to-finish.

6 categories of suckitude

Nancy over at the Duarte blog is going off right now on Steve Ballmer's launch remarks for Windows 7. She took a transcript of what he said and marked it up with six categories of suckitude. They are:

Apple campaign references

Unnecessary filler words or phrases

Confusing words, phrases or statistics

Ballmer's references to himself

Upgrade fixes problems

Bold statement with no supporting information

Her mark-up reminds me of some work I did recently with a person who writes scripts for quarterly earnings calls. I was brought in to help him improve his writing. I'm not a teacher, and I don't have a how-to-write list. So I told him to just do the next one as usual, I would edit it, and then I would make some suggestions based on the kinds of edits I made. As Nancy did, I came up with six problem areas. I sent them to him in this chart:

LESSONS TO CARRY FORWARD FROM 3Q09 EARNINGS SCRIPT
1	EMPTY PHRASING	Eliminate “empty” phrases, sentences or paragraphs that take up space without saying anything. (“Before we get started…” “Let me highlight…” “We can’t tell you when these storm clouds will pass, but when they do…”)
2	SOFT WORDS	Be vigilant against “soft” words in key places. For example, “we will continue to strengthen…” is a more assertive way to close than “we will be well positioned to emerge…”
3	LAZY STRUCTURE	Watch for instances of “lazy structure” – such as bundling seemingly unrelated points into a paragraph that starts with “Let me highlight a few key points for the quarter…” It’s a stronger statement if you can begin that same paragraph with “We beat our own expectations in several key initiatives. For example…”
4	BURIED NEWS	Look for “buried” news – items that deserve to be mentioned earlier in the script, and move them up.
5	RUN-ON PARAGRAPHS	Check for paragraphs of a third of a page or more, and break them up.
6	UNNECESSARY COMPLEXITY	Always be alert for opportunities to use a smaller word, a shorter sentence, a tighter paragraph.

The following quarter, he pulled out this list and went to work on a new script. His improvement as a writer was dramatic.

To edit Mr. Volcker

Reading Paul Volcker's prepared statement for his appearance this afternoon before the Senate Banking Committee, and fighting the urge to edit it. Well, maybe just a few lines, dealing only with words and structure:

Him: Mr. Chairmen, members of the Banking Committee: You have an important responsibility in considering and acting upon a range of issues relevant to needed reform of the financial system.

Me: Mr. Chairman, members of the Banking Committee. You have an important responsibility to consider and act upon a range of issues that are vital to us as we work to reform the financial system.

Him: That system, as you well know, broke down under pressure, posing unacceptable risks for an economy already in recession.

Me: That system, as you well know, is broken. It broke under pressure. And it broke in a way that added unacceptable risks to an economy already in recession.

Him: I appreciate the opportunity today to discuss with you one key element in the reform effort that President Obama set out so forcibly a few days ago.

Me: I'm now going to focus on one key element in the reform effort that President Obama set out so forcefully a few days ago.

Him: That proposal, if enacted, would restrict commercial banking organizations from certain proprietary and more speculative activities.

Me: I'm talking about the proposal to restrict commercial banking organizations from certain proprietary and more speculative activities.

Him: In itself, that would be a significant measure to reduce risk. However, the first point I want to emphasize is that the proposed restrictions should be understood as a part of the broader effort for structural reform.

Me: By themselves, the proposed restrictions would go a long way toward reducing risk in the financial system. But it's important that we see them as part of the broader drive toward structural reform, which takes us to the heart of "too big to fail."

Him: It is particularly designed to help deal with the problem of "too big to fail" and the related moral hazard that looms so large as an aftermath of the emergency rescues of financial institutions, bank and non-bank, in the midst of crises.

Me: After all, our greater cause is to eliminate the moral hazard that looms so large when financial institutions, bank and non-bank, know they can gamble with no fear of losing.

The grill and the girl

My home for my last year in college was a garage apartment behind a small brick house that had been carved up into three tiny apartments. A friend of mine lived in one of them. One summer afternoon, while taking the shortcut through the alley, he found a discarded grill, which he helped himself to.

He hadn't had a date all summer, and he saw this grill as the break he'd been looking for. If he only had some charcoal, and something to put it in, he could set them under the grill. And if he had two steaks, he might be able to entice a girl to eat one of them. Which turned out to be true; a girl did agree to come for Sunday dinner.

My friend scraped up enough money to purchase a bag of charcoal and two steaks. He took another trip down the alley and borrowed a garbage can lid. He walked half a block to the Texaco station, which was closed on Sundays in those days, lowered the hose of the first pump, and drained a few drops of gasoline into a Mason jar. Doing the same with the other pumps, he filled the jar about one-third full.

What happened next, I was privileged to watch from my second-story porch. At first, everything seemed routine. My friend washed the garbage can lid, filled it with a thin layer of charcoal and balanced the grill on top. Then he picked up the Mason jar and poured the gasoline over the charcoal. I knew enough about gasoline to suspect that it wasn't soaking gently into the briquettes, but was probably pooling at the lowest part of the garbage can lid. So alarms went off in my head when my friend took out his cigarette lighter and leaned into the garbage can lid as if intending to blow on a glowing ember in hopes of coaxing a flame. I think I may have leaned back from the rail of my porch in the spirit of self preservation.

Two things happened. My friend's head disappeared in a huge ball of fire, and his hand threw the cigarette lighter straight up. The picture that is seared into my brain is of a body on all-fours, with fire where the head should be, and a Bic lighter flipping end over end about even with me on the second-story porch.

He survived. He cooked his steaks. His date showed up for dinner as promised. She ate quickly and then left, probably thinking she was pretty sure that my friend had eyebrows when she accepted his invitation.

It's amazing that he wasn't seriously injured. Not his time, I guess. That would come the following summer, when, crossing a parking lot on his way home, he walked into a bullet meant for someone else.

***

The point of all this goes back to the theme of being a master story-teller: you have to be ruthless about what you leave out. I really wanted to tell you why I was sitting on the porch in the first place, why I didn't shout a warning to my friend, where he was going the night he got shot, who shot him, and why there were other bullets waiting for him if that one hadn't found him. And maybe you're curious about that now. But at the time, we were trying to draw a straight line from the finding of a grill to a date with a girl, with a twist at the end. Anything that didn't help us get from Point A to Point B was left out. Mastery demanded it.

Metaphoria

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan says the current health care bill "will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed souffle in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house."

And over at The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse is asking "where will the court's raging judicial hormones lead it next, now that it has experienced the joy of overturning?"

Ah, metaphor.

I once recommended to the president of a broadcasting company that he sell his 27 barely break-even radio stations and focus on his seven TV stations that were making hundreds of millions of dollars. But to give it a little extra kick, what I wrote was "Let's take all these radio stations, put them in a paper bag, drop it on someone's front porch, set fire to it, ring the doorbell, and run." He stared at me for a long time, and then he put me on retainer.

Elizabeth Warren tells a story about data

I pre-ordered Garr Reynolds's second book, Presentation Zen Design, because he makes me better at what I do. It's been on my desk for a few weeks, and I pick it up from time to time and think about his "ways to think like a designer." One of those ways is "Become a master storyteller." Okay, that's on everyone's list these days. I read what Garr says, and I don't feel like it's made me any better as a storyteller. I've been wondering how I would deal with that topic.

And then, last night, I was thinking about Elizabeth Warren, and how every introduction of her starts off by saying, essentially, that she was born and raised in Oklahoma and now here she is, incredibly, against all odds, a professor at Harvard. I happen to know there are lots of ways to grow up in Oklahoma, and at bedtime on a school night I suddenly had to find out exactly what part of Oklahoma Professor Warren grew up in, and what was it like. I never even found out what town in Oklahoma, but I did end up watching a lecture she gave at Berkeley. She came with a bunch of statistics comparing family budgets as they looked in 1970 and in 2006. All on PowerPoint graphs. But here's how she talked about them:

You may be surprised to know that there's a place in the federal government where they've kept track of everything a family spends, going back over a hundred years. When I found out about that, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. So I called them up and actually talked to a real person. I asked him if we could slice and dice those figures and he asked me to tell him exactly what I wanted. So I said, give me a mom, a dad and two kids, and tell me what they spent on clothing in 1970 and in 2006. Because, you know, we have these $200 Nikes now and all these special stores in the malls. And he came back and said the difference was 30 percent. I was sure he meant 30 percent more in 2003, but he meant 30 percent less. And the next eight times I talked to him, it was with the firm belief that he was reading the numbers wrong. But no, so I said let's look at appliances, because you know we didn't have to have microwaves or cappuccino makers in 1970. Only to find out that we spent less on appliances in 2006. And so we looked at food, and not just at the grocery store, but fast food restaurants. And the numbers showed that we were spending less in 2006...

Now, those may not be her exact words. I didn't go back and look at the video this morning. I'm going on memory. And I'm also telling the story the way I would retell it at lunch today. Check it out for yourselves -- I think you will find that my version is accurate, if a little compressed. And I could tell you the rest of what she said, but that's not the point. The point is this: If her slides were in Garr Reynolds's book, or Nancy Duarte's, they would be the "before" example, not the "after." And I'm all for making them better. But despite that handicap, she kept me up last night long past my bedtime. It wasn't the slides. And it wasn't what I could learn from the slides. It was because she took me on the same journey she had been on. Oh my goodness, the government has these numbers? There's a real person I can talk to? They will slice them any way I want? The results came back and everything I thought I knew was wrong?

That's how you become a master storyteller. By telling the stories only you could tell.

Five sentences

Some recent sentences I'm happy to have written:

"It was the kind of crazy idea that Alberto Colzi would never have approved in the old mindset." It's a sentence on which a story pivots. There was an old mindset, and now there is a new one. There's an idea on the table, and it's crazy. One man gets to decide. Things are not usually so portentous in corporate writing.

"Complexity never sleeps." Admittedly, I'm a sucker for assigning human characteristics to abstract nouns. I also carry around with me a few Neil Young influences.

"The Gooley Club, on Third Lake in the Essex Chain, is six miles from the nearest road." It's about the specificity: Gooley Club. Third Lake. Essex Chain. Six miles. We're painting a picture of a real outpost in the middle of a managed forest that provides pulp for a paper mill. The club is run by and for conservationists. They serve as "extra eyes and ears" to monitor the well-being of the forest. You should feel good about buying your paper from this mill.

"We have this orphan drug for this orphan disease." Words matter. When you're given a word like "orphan," run with it. It is actually a technical term in the pharmaceutical industry, dating back to and before The Orphan Drug Act of 1983. Nevertheless, a word like "orphan" goes straight to a place we all want to reach as writers.

"To have adjusted so quickly and effectively in mid-course is an indication, in my judgment, of the outstanding financial discipline, operational agility and managerial commitment we have in our company." You don't see the beauty in that? It's in the stability of "financial discipline," "operational agility" and "managerial commitment." You're looking at word pairs of 19 characters, 18 characters and 20 characters. Substitute a shorter word anywhere in the triad, or insert an extra word, and the beauty is gone.

Shopping for punctuation marks

If I were going out to restock punctuation marks, I would buy a pound of periods and the same of commas. More endashes and colons than are probably good for me. A small bag of ellipses if I'm writing a speech, but not if I'm writing for print. Wouldn't take an exclamation mark even as a free sample. The economy pack of quotation marks, apostrophes and hyphens. Ambivalent about semicolons. And then we come to the little pairs of parentheses. Never buy them, as a rule. Got little to no use for them. I figure, if you can't say something right out in the open, then why mention it at all? But then, in this morning's New York Times, there was this:

Since its release in December, James Cameron's science-fiction epic has broken box office records and grabbed two Golden Globe awards for best director and best dramatic motion picture. But it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

That's mighty fine use of the parenthesis, right there. A body probably ought to have a few around, just in case an opportunity like this comes along. Okay, I'd take three pair. Probably a total waste.

The art of the input session

I'm sitting at a table of about 15 people, all of them talking about what their organization stands for. They're collectively working very hard to help me "understand." I'm saying as little as possible, trying to be a bottomless receptacle. I don't want to take them in any one direction. I want to see where they will go on their own. Mostly, I listen and nod.

They talk and they talk and they talk. We're not capturing anything; no easels, no white boards. (But I am unobtrusively running my digital recorder.)

About an hour into this group effort, someone at the end of the table says something that rings true and pure to my ears. I don't remember the exact words, but it was in three parts, like "We are people who believe A, B and C. Very different from those who go in the direction of X, Y and Z. And therefore, what we do is 1, 2 and 3."

Instantly I know I've got what I came for. As soon as this person finishes talking, someone decides to call me out. He says, "So are you getting any of this?" To which I respond:

"I think our message is that we are people who believe A, B and C. Very different from those who go in the direction of X, Y and Z. And therefore, what we do is 1, 2 and 3."

I was very careful to repeat, exactly, the sentences I had just heard. I thought it would be funny. I thought we would all have a great laugh. But no one even smiled. They just stared at me. And I realized they hadn't heard what I had heard. They were taking this as my distillation of everything that had been said. Then, as one, they exhaled. They took their elbows off the table and leaned back in their chairs. They smiled, not in a ha-ha way, but more like "whew..." And one of them said, "You see! THAT is why we brought a writer to this meeting."