Emotional browsing

I’ve just loaded StumbleUpon on FireFox. StumbleUpon is an FireFox extension that shows up the menu bar; when one clicks on Stumble!, a website loads and one can vote thumb up or thumb down. So far, almost all the site StumbleUpon has proposed have been fantastic (I wonder how it knows so much about me; should I worry?).

First I visited 3 or 4 photography sites, with stunning photos. Then I watched the online version of More, the six-minute short that was nominated for the Oscars in 1999 (I had not seen it; it’s definitely worth watching).

Finally, I landed on PostSecret. I had heard about this site on NPR a couple of months ago, but I had not had a chance to visit it. It’s heartbreaking. Reading the anonymous postcards revealing secrets it’s like seeing naked bodies of strangers, in all their vulnerability, imperfection, and blinding humanity. You want to look away and at the same time you want to look right at them. It’s like reading a message in a bottle. You connect with the person who wrote them even if you don’t know anything about them.

Just this evening I was thinking how the blogs I like and read are those that reveal some of the human, imperfect aspects of their authors, rather than just presenting neat lists of interesting facts and news, or smart commentaries on business, Internet, and technology. Even in cyberspace, I crave for confessions and introspection.

May 27, 2005 | Filed Under Blogging, Designing Experiences | Comments Off 

Cassandra, the Columbia accident, and Corporate America

You probably have all heard about the myth of Cassandra. Cassandra was the beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy and his wife Hecuba. To seduce Cassandra the god Apollo gave her the gift of seeing the future; but because she didn’t love the god back, the revengeful Apollo placed a curse on her: her predictions will always be right, but nobody would believe her (more information here).

So, Cassandra told the people of Troy not to trust the wooden horse the Greeks had offered them. Nobody believed her, and Troy was defeated. She told Agamemnon that his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus would kill him (and Cassandra herself); he did not believe her, and they both were murdered. That’s a pretty stinky fate.

Now, I was telling my husband that if Cassandra were a corporate employee, she would have been rated as a Needs Improvement at year-end. No bonus and no merit increase, and a serious risk for a demotion. I can see her appraisal:

Although Cassandra demonstrates skills in analyzing problems, understanding situations, and making accurate predictions, she completely lacks the ability to generate trust in his coworkers and to persuade her team of the correctness of her suggestions. Her communications and negotiations skills are below those of her peers. As a consequence, her contribution to project work is limited or nonexistent.
Cassandra often complains about obscure threats and casts a pessimistic outlook on the future of the project, creating a gloomy atmosphere that does not promote collaboration and teamwork.

Corporate America has zero tolerance for Greek tragedy.

Cassandra Syndrome

Wikipedia has an interesting description of Cassandra Syndrome:

The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.

A few months ago I read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, which devotes an entire chapter to the analysis of how NASA’s “can-do-no-matter-what” culture played a strong role in management (bad) decision-making.

I do understand the corporate tendency to reward optimism and can-do attitude. It’s actually really nice to have people around you who are positive and energetic. But sometimes things are pretty bad, and the only way to make them better is to first recognize how bad they are. I just cannot shake this impression that some behaviors I see in companies should be classified as Cassandra Syndrome.
“A tendency to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial.” As much as the employees have an obligation to tell persuasive and articulate stories, isn’t there a similar obligation from management to listen with an open mind to both good and bad news and do some fact checking before dismissing the bad news or accept the good ones?

[And of course, whatever you do, do not EVER use PowerPoint to deliver bad news.]

May 24, 2005 | Filed Under Corporate Culture & Career, Women | 1 Comment 

Why I like losers

As I mentioned in my previous post, Scott and I went to see the show Spirit: The Seventh Fire. While we were waiting for the show to start, Scott asked me if I like Native American culture, and I answered yes. Then he asked me: “Why?” (Scott never miss out the opportunity to ask some provoking questions) and I suddenly realized that the main reason why I like Native Americans is because they are the ones who lost. Even more than their spirituality and old fashion way to perceive the connection between humans and nature, I like them because they have been so thoroughly defeated (not to mention exterminated and culturally erased).

When I arrived in the USA, I realized with some surprise that the worse insult you can inflict to an American is “loser.” Italians are really creative when it comes to insults, but we don’t even have an equivalent of “loser.” [“Perdente,” the literal translation of loser, sounds quite clinical and devoid of the emotional connotation of its American English counterpart.]

I thought about it and I concluded that it’s because Europeans actually like losers. There is some kind of epic greatness in somebody that fought and was defeated, either peoples or individuals. Besides, when you reflect on thousands of years of history (rather than just a few hundreds) you realize that nobody wins forever. The Roman Empire lasted for 900 years, but eventually crumbled and left only a large amount of (beautiful) ruins. So, there is some Old World wisdom in having some sympathy for the losers of today when are you are still the winner.

We like the romantic aura that comes with defeat and suffering even better than the heroic aura that comes with victory. It’s so more interesting.

May 22, 2005 | Filed Under Social Behavior | 7 Comments 

Theme of the day: Office Angst

Is it just me, or does it happen to you too to have these days in which everything seems to revolve around the same theme, like in a sit-com? The theme of the day for me today was office angst.
Granted, I am sensitive to this particular theme in this period, but still, it feels like it was looking for me.

It started this morning, when I checked out Boing Boing. Xeni Jardin had published this list of Zen flash animations (originally from chaos kitty) and I watched the beautiful British I’m a creep, which I highly recommend (warning: the site is called “Low morale: a series of animations portraying one’s man struggle with working life,” so don’t expect anything uplifting). On the same list, the thematically related and interesting Not my type.

This afternoon, Scott and I went to see Spirit: The Seventh Fire at Fairmont Park. The synopsis:

Spirit - The Seventh Fire tells the dramatic story of one man’s journey to find a balance between the culture in which he exists, driven by the “American Dream,” and his roots, rich in heritage, tradition and connected to the natural world.

And again, the office cubicle was the metaphorical representation of the “American Dream” as well as of the disconnection between our day to day life and our deep needs and longings.

I’ve always thought that one of the biggest failures of corporate America is to have created a work environment where people feel alienated, pressured to the point of rupture, and out of place. True, not everybody feels that way; but judging from the people I know, the number of people who feel their corporate job is just a temporary pact with the devil is just too high to consider the office a healthy and happiness-promoting work environment.

May 22, 2005 | Filed Under Corporate Culture & Career | Comments Off 

Show me your feeds
and I’ll tell you who you are

In the last couple of days I have been looking at other people’s Bloglines feed collections, and I am really enjoying exploring interesting, funny, and absurd ways of organizing links. I was surprised to notice how many people just leave all their feeds in a flat list even when they have lots of them. I was even more surprised to find out that Lou Rosenfeld’s didn’t bother organizing his feeds in some really clever and neat hierarchical structure; again, just a flat alphabetically ordered list.

Many feeds, though, are neatly organized, and I think you can understand a lot about a person’s interests and way of thinking by looking at the way they organize their feeds (the more unusual, the better):

[Note: these are really all true and unadulterated category organizations]

So interesting. And you can pay attention on whether somebody has many or few categories, if all the feeds are organized in the proper categories, or whether there is a chaotic mix of single feeds and folders. Now, if I were Jared Spool, I would make a report out of it.

May 20, 2005 | Filed Under Blogging, Designing Experiences | 3 Comments 

Caterina Fake on hard-working women

Yesterday Caterina Fake posted a commentary on Misbehaving.net about the effort women need to make to succeed in high-tech [Work Twice as Hard].

I am sure high-tech executive women need to work really hard to get were they are. But I also see a lot of (really talented) women working twice as hard just to survive. Going against the current is not very rewarding: you swim like a crazy woman just to remain in the same place.

Not to mention that in addition to the work our beloved companies force that upon us, we have often to struggle with the voices in our head. I do work a lot (well, some days more than others), but I am also so conflicted about it that it feels even harder. I work so much more that I would like to do or that I consider healthy. And sometimes I find myself still in the office at 8:30 PM and I realize that even if I worked for 24 more hours straight I wouldn’t be able to scrape more than the surface of the pile of things to do.

May 18, 2005 | Filed Under Corporate Culture & Career, Women | Comments Off 

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