Author Archives: kevin

About kevin

I write the posts

links for 2011-03-19

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links for 2011-03-17

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links for 2011-03-16

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links for 2011-03-15

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links for 2011-03-14

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The Apartment

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Warning: contains spoilers. The Apartment is a classic movie about a pencil pusher who lets executives at his company use his apartment for trysts, in exchange for a fast-track up the corporate ladder. He falls in love with the current mistress of a company VP, who is, coincidentally, using his apartment to hook up with her. It's a tribute to the idea that you don't need a complex plot or special effects to produce a wonderful film. In my summary of Breakfast at Tiffany's last year, I noted that Audrey Hepburn's character only started to like George Peppard's character once he rejected her. In a slight twist, Shirley MacLaine's character only starts to like Jack Lemmon when he turns down the VP's request for his apartment, and quits his job instead. Which is, to be frank, the first alpha-male move he's made all movie. MacLaine leaves the VP and heads to his apartment. And then you get this scene, culminating in one of the most famous lines in moviedom: Lemmon throws away all of his alpha status by proclaiming his love for MacLaine. She's obviously aware of this, and also put off, which is why she tells him to "Shut up and deal." This is code-speak for "Stop cloying, if you keep it up I'm really going to regret my decision to be with you." This is reminiscent of an earlier scene in the movie, when Lemmon actually forgives MacLaine for standing him up, and MacLaine rebukes him for doing so. Total post-movie relationship time: Unless Lemmon starts acting like she should be grateful for the chance to date him, and not the other way around, I'd give it about a week. (As a side note, Fred MacMurray's character is a master of reframing. MacLaine attempts suicide after he doesn't show her enough affection, and in their first conversation after she recovers, he says something to the effect of, "How could you be so silly? You should apologize to me for giving me such a scare." Maybe 1% of guys would ever think to say that and 0.1% would have the guts to pull it off.) George Peppard-Jack-Lemmon role that you see in Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Apartment, where the cloying lead character gets the girl anyway, is not one that you see much nowadays.

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High Noon

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Recently I watched High Noon, the 1952 classic about the sheriff who stands alone against four bad guys who want to kill him when the town is too afraid to stand up. The lesson is supposed to be to stay true to your principles and stand up for what you think is right, even if you might die in the process.

The sheriff is supposed to be a hero. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great movie. But what I see instead when I watch the movie is someone who does not understand group dynamics, and makes his task much more difficult by failing to recruit anyone to his cause. The sheriff thinks that he’s got lots of allies in the town, and from the opening wedding scene, it appears that he does. But when he asks for help, he discovers they are not true allies. High noon is a bad time to find that out.

The sheriff also fails to win the PR war between himself and the bad guy he locked up 5 years ago. The bad guy hasn’t spoken a word to anyone in the town in over 5 years, he’s coming back to town to kill the sheriff, and the sheriff still can’t convince people to help him fight this guy.

The sheriff goes (alone) to the bar, the church etc. and pleads for help. Well when you are one person in a crowd of 50 who all say no, it is easy to say no. This is a good way to *not* recruit people to your cause.

The sheriff needs people to help. But people are unwilling to help if they think they are the only one helping, and rightly so, as the risk decreases with the number of additional people on your side.

Instead the sheriff should act and behave as though he has 3 or 4 other people ready to help. The people he asks rightfully feel guilty about leaving him to face the bad guys alone, but he absolves their guilt instead of exploiting it. He should approach his most likely allies individually and secure their support. Then once he has their support, he can go to the larger community with those allies behind him.

The sheriff also fails to strategically plan for the long term. He’s positioned himself as an outcast, a loner, without support from the group, who believe that he’s going to die. Even if he kills all the bad guys, he will not be welcomed back into the community with open arms.

It’s true that our heroes need to have lots of courage, and they often face a solitary road. But they don’t often screw up such an easy opportunity to recruit allies.

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Email etiquette

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This is a lesson that’s probably for an audience of people who would not be reading this post, but on the off chance they read it, here goes:

1. Never use all capital letters. Especially in the email title.

2. If you’re going to send out images to 1200 people, figure out how to upload them to a server, then embed HTML code linking to your image in the body of your email, instead of sending them as attachments. When you add them as an attachment, the size of your email becomes massive, and you’re creating 1200 copies of the same file that sit in everyone’s inbox. Plus attachments can’t be read on a mobile phone.

3. You have roughly 80 characters for the message preview in most email clients. Try to communicate everything I’d need to know about your email in that space. If your email is short enough consider sending the entire message content in the subject line.

4. Never use more than one exclamation point.

5. Do not say your email is “High Importance” when it isn’t.

6. Double check your email for typos and factual content before you send it. Send a test email to yourself first. If you catch a mistake do everything in your power to avoid sending a second email. Followup “correction” emails are only appropriate if the recipient is Jack Bauer and the subject of the correction is the location of a nuclear bomb.

6b. Double check to make sure the recipient is correct. Be careful when the Reply-To email address differs from the From address. Do not ever confuse Reply and Reply All.

7. Try as hard as you can to limit your email to the appropriate audience; send to a class-specific listserv for example instead of the entire school.

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links for 2011-03-04

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links for 2011-03-03

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  • Broke Town, U.S.A. - NYTimes.com
  • The top 1%
    Those 200 resumes you got from Craigslist? Those consist of the one guy who happened to be good, but he's only applying for a job because his wife wants to be nearer to her family, and the usual floating population of 199 people who apply for every single job and are qualified for none. And now you think you're being "super selective" but you're not, it's just a statistical fallacy.

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