Whatever you do, don't stare at his eye

Yesterday I had the increasingly rare experience of meeting a professional acquaintance for the very first time in person who despite having corresponded with this person over email and having one or two calls, I had no idea what they actually looked like. While we were connected on LinkedIn, and I think following each other on Twitter, this person had no profile pic up on either site. I had also never come across any pictures of them from other events or conferences. I 'knew' this person a little, but would not have been able to pick them out of a crowd (unless the crowd were all wearing name tags, which thankfully for me, they were).

Why bring this up? Because it seems to me in the modern world, this kind of thing almost never happens anymore. Every professional, or so it seems, is on LinkedIn. And every single piece of LinkedIn 'advice' tells people to post a profile picture, and probably most do. Add in Twitter, and if you are really a little bit stalker/creepy, Facebook, and with a little bit of sleuthing you can find a picture online of just about anybody. So meeting a professional contact that you have had a fair bit of interaction with and having no clue what they looked like just doesn't seem to happen much anymore, at least not with me.

The episode reminded me of the first 'real' job I ever had, way back in the day. It was an entirely normal, professional office job, but since these were the days pre-LinkedIn and social media of any kind, (yes, the Dark Ages), I did not know what anyone looked like at my new workplace. Which was not a big deal back then, as we expected to know almost nothing about people we were meeting for the first time. As I look back, it is actually kind of refreshing to think we didn't start every business relationship with a bunch of pre-determined conclusions we've made from spending 15 minutes checking out the other person's social networking profiles. We took people more at face value, and judged based on how they behaved.  

But anyway, back to the new job. When I started the person who would be my direct manager was on vacation, and would not be back for a couple of days. In his absence the alternate 'onboarding' person ('Your desk is here, the bathroom is over there'), said 'Bob (my manager), is a really great guy. You will like him. Just one thing you need to remember when you meet him. Whatever you do, don't stare at his eye.' Ok, I thought, I will try not to stare at Bob's eye. Can't be that hard, right? 

Fast forward a couple of days when Bob returned from vacation and we met for the first time. And Bob was, in fact, a really nice guy. Exceedingly nice. Honestly even to this day one of the very best managers I've ever had. But there was one shall we say, unusual element in Bob's appearance. His left eye was prosthetic, a glass eye. And the fact that I had been warned in advance not to stare at the eye made it all the harder to not stare at the eye, if you know what I mean. It would have been better, I think, if no one had mentioned it at all to me prior to the meeting. I would have noticed it sure, but hopefully, would have not sort of fixated on it as much as the notion of 'Don't stare at his eye' had been bouncing around my head for days.

Need to wrap up this nonsense here. Don't be so creepy stalking people online before you meet them. It's ok to be surprised sometimes. It's even ok to not know everything there is to know about a person before you even talk to them once. 

And don't stare at their eyes.

Persistent sameness

I read two really interesting pieces over the weekend, the first was a really long, (I mean really long, give yourself an hour or so to take this one on), review and analysis of the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack. This is an endlessly interesting and evolving story, I blogged about it briefly last week, but even just a week later it is probably worth revisiting, as the repercussions from this case are only just starting to be felt.

The second piece that caught my attention is quite unlike the Sony tale, is much lighter (fitting the start of what is for most a short, holiday week), but no less interesting, just in a different way.

The piece comes from Citylab.com and is titled 20 Years of Street Photography Shows Just How Boring We All Are, a review of the work of Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom over that past two decades.

From the Citylab piece:

Since 1993, he has worked on his "photo notes"—arriving in a city, setting up on a major street, and then, within 10 to 15 minutes, choosing a recurring visual theme before shooting in the same spot for one to two hours. Once he's done, he puts the best examples into a grid, with the place and time at the bottom of the page. This technique yielded a stream of Louis Vuitton-style murses in 2006 Paris, a pack of Canadian tuxedos (denim on denim, see the image on the right) in 2007 Amsterdam, and an army of shirtless rollerbladers in 1997 New York.

I grabbed the example of the Canadian tuxedos to run with the post, but you really should click over to Citylab to see some of the other examples that Eijkelboom has captured over the years. And the interesting part is that these collages of sameness only take about an hour or two to compile, and probably could be even larger if they were not edited down for presentation.

I am not going to overthink the significance of these observations and images, it is pretty obvious I guess that most folks like to fit in, to swim with the prevailing tide with respect to fashion anyway. I suppose the greater danger arises when we allow this tendency towards sameness to extend other areas that are not as trivial as fashion choices. I will think about that when I see the 27th article this week about why 'Employee engagement is important' or '5 Tips to be Super Amazing in 2015' that gets shared relentlessly on social media.

When we all tend to dress the same you get the funny and sort of ridiculous images in the Eijkelboom works. When we all seem to read the same things, quote the same quotes, listen to the same Ted Talks - you get the idea, we end up with something worse that a picture of two dozen people in the same shirt.

It's worse that than, but it's much harder to take a picture of what it looks like.

Have a great week!

Off Topic: The acceptance of perfect things

Simple question for a Friday - can something, (or someone, or some abstraction like a process or project), be perfect?

I'm not thinking necessarily about some universal or arbitrary definition of perfection, but more situational and personal. Can something be perfect for you?

Take a look at this piece from Gizmodo - 'This Bowl Will Always Be Exactly the Size You Need it to Be', about a novel kind of bowl called the Stretchy Bowl, (image below) designed to be flexible and adaptable to the level and number of items placed in the bowl.

From the Gizmodo piece: 

The Stretchy Bowl is the easy-to-store fruit basin that never wants to disappoint. Composed of a white metal base (which requires minimal assembly) and a matching metal hoop wrapped in a layer of breathable, elastic fabric, this bowl is always the right size to accomodate your haul of produce.

As you add more fruit to stretchy fabric disk, the bowl deepens. 

That's pretty cool, right? A bowl that's not just flexible and adaptable, but always exactly the size you need to be.

Seems kind of impossible though, I mean, always exactly the right size?

Could the bowl hold ten oranges, twenty, two hundred? And still be exactly the size you need?

Of course the commenters on the Gizmodo piece are doing the usual - taking apart the idea as not really as described and advertised, bringing up the standard arguments about mass, size, and the pesky laws of physics that make the Stretchy Bowl not really always exactly the size you need it to be.

And while that is the expected and rational reaction - no container can physically be that adaptable, it also kind of disappointing.

Why can't most of us accept that the bowl could be always the right size?

Why do we have to find the flaw, the failing, the imperfection that makes the claims null and void?

Why can't we (usually) accept that there might be perfect things?

Have a Great Weekend!

It's quite possible that I might be wrong. Or maybe not.

It can be really easy to see people, not you of course, since you are wise enough to be reading this post I know you get it, but all those other, silly people that might not possibly agree with you or insist of thinking or acting in ways not necessarily aligned with your genius as not getting it, or worse, having a disastrous lack of vision or even some shady morals.

We're seeing this constantly here in the USA in the spectacle that currently passes for political discourse these days. Mostly, philosophical disagreements or even simple policy impasses are escalated to massive proportions, and eventually result in, (or rather degrade to), a schoolyard style round of name calling followed by a 'I am taking my ball and going home' deadlock. Case in point from outside of the political sphere, and one that hits much closer to my heart - the ongoing National Basketball Association labor negotiations. This train wreck so far have been notable only for a lack of progress leading to the cancellation of the first two weeks of regular season games, and the slightly more interesting but also unfortunate dalliances by current NBA stars with leagues and teams in Europe and Asia. How are the locker rooms in Turkey, D-Will?

Maybe it is a by-product of the 24/7 news cycle, the explosion of online outlets for everyone and anyone to get on their soapbox, and the milliseconds after anything happens reaction, and re-reactions on social media, but the frequency and intensity of arguments seems more prevalent and acute than ever before.

I think there's also a bit of the instant expert phenomenon at play here as well.  I loved how this week on social media 'I once rented a DVD' equated to 'I am expert on Netflix' business model and am fully qualified to tell them how to run their business via Twitter.'

I am sure it is naive, (and boring), to write about by-gone days where we could disagree without questioning each other's fundamental being or integrity or where we could have honest differences of opinion absent the passive-aggressive character assassination we see sometimes (maybe more than sometimes), online. But we can, and should do better I think, and try and compartmentalize these disagreements into the typically smallish buckets where they usually belong.  And even if the disagreements are kind of big, well as the great songwriter/philosopher Sting so eloquently suggested so many years ago, even the Russians loved their children too.

But  I don't mean that phony, politician-style faux-respect that usually starts with, 'I am sure Jim-Bob is a really good family man', but then proceeds into a lengthy and scathing rebuke of everything Jim-Bob has ever said, all the things he stands for, and how every single decision he has ever made in his life is foolish and wrong. I am thinking about the kind of honest disagreement that can really only come from having just a bit of perspective and at least the sliver of empathy. The kind of thinking that can only be present if we can be big enough to admit we might possibly not have all the answers. And the kind environment where we feel reasonably safe from attack if we take what might be an unusual stance or an unpopular position.

The kind of place that allows me to freely admit that in fact, I do still like Sting.

Trains and Perception

How much is the perception of the experience impacted by what the experience is called?

There have been a few recent rants posts about some dreadful experiences with air travel recently. China Gorman made her blogging debut on the HR Capitalist with a tale of woe on a recent flight, and Mike VanDervort at the Human RaceHorses blog documented a unforgettably poor experience trying to make his way home from the SHRM conference.

It is not news that air travel can really suck, and that customers are often subject to rude, inconsiderate, and even downright offensive treatment at times by airline employees, policies, and even fellow customers. To be fair, to me it still is an incredible experience to be able to strap inside a metal tube, blast off 35,000 feet into the sky, travel thousands of miles in a few hours, and arrive safely at your destination. I am not going to try and defend the industry, but it does seem like perhaps we are all a bit spoiled.  Sure United broke that guy’s guitar and he made certain that we all knew about it. In fact, United breaking his guitar was probably the luckiest break that band ever had.

But what about the millions of other pieces of checked crap that is moved successfully each day? No one blogs or makes catchy videos called ‘United transported by ridiculously heavy bag of golf clubs safely to Myrtle Beach’.

Maybe the airlines need to take a step to improving their image (and perhaps the customer service they deliver), by taking a page from Amtrak.  Book passage on an Amtrak train and you are likely to be traveling on the ‘Coastal Starlight’, the ‘Silver Meteor’, or the ‘Happyland Express’.

Take a redeye flight from Los Angeles to New York and you are liable to be on #AA27’, which quickly can morph in to ‘Steerage to Oblivion’, ‘Six Hours in a Middle Seat in Coach’, culminating in a ‘Sweaty Wait on the Tarmac.’

Perhaps it is just me, but somehow I get the feeling that employees, customers, and everyone else associated with making sure the ‘Coastal Starlight’ makes it successfully, safely, and positively from Seattle to LA are just a bit more motivated and excited that the community that surrounds ‘UA6033’, one flight that travels that same route.  

And if I am right, the same logic could be applied inside the organization, to programs that you have to maintain and administer, but don’t necessarily engender excitement and enthusiasm from the HR staff tasked to deliver, and the employees and managers forced to participate. Create a title that resonates and connects.

-

Instead of marching off managers to ‘Mandatory Regulatory Compliance Update Training’, send them to ‘Who’s Next on the Perp Walk - Don’t Let it Be You’.  

I think people might get pretty fired up for that class.