Posts Tagged → Processed

Selected Rules of Consulting

Gerald Weinberg is the grandmaster of consulting and project management. From the hundreds of hints and tips on offer in his excellent secrets of consulting series, Adrian Segar explores his favorite 19 :

You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit. (The Credit Rule.) Check your ego at the door.

In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always a problem. (The First Law of Consulting.) Yes, most people have a hard time admitting they have a problem.

No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem. (The Second Law of Consulting.) I learned this after about five years of being engaged as a technical consultant and repeatedly having CEOs confiding to me their non-technical woes…

If they didn’t hire you, don’t solve their problem. (The Fourth Law of Consulting.) A common occupational disease of consultants: we rush to help people who haven’t asked for help.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (The First Law of Engineering.) Must. Not. Unscrew the tiny screws just to check what’s inside.

Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell you the solution in the first five minutes. (The Five-Minute Rule.) Unbelievably, this is true—the hard part is listening well enough to notice.

If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant. (The Hard Law.) Everyone makes mistakes, and that can be a good thing.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others. (The Hardest Law.) The hardest things to notice are things about myself.

The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. (The Law of Raspberry Jam.) Or, as Jerry rephrases it: Influence or affluence; take your choice.

When the clients don’t show their appreciation, pretend that they’re stunned by your performance—but never forget that it’s your fantasy, not theirs. (The Lone Ranger Fantasy.) “Who was that masked man, anyway?”

The most important act in consulting is setting the right fee. (Marvin’s Fifth Great Secret.) Setting the right fee takes a huge burden off your shoulders.

“We can do it—and this is how much it will cost.” (The Orange Juice Test.) Jerry uses an example straight from the meetings world for this one—event professionals will recognize the situation, and appreciate the insight.

Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered. (Prescott’s Pickle Principle.) Sadly, the longer you work with a client, the less effective you get.

It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the ending of an illusion. (Rhonda’s First Revelation.) A positive way to think about unpleasant change.

When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely—and harder to take.(Rhonda’s Third Revelation.) Notice and challenge your illusions before they turn into crises.

If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking. (The Rule of Three.) The perfect antidote to complacency about your plans.

The best marketing tool is a satisfied client. (The Sixth Law of Marketing.) Word of mouth is the best channel for new work; being able to satisfy my clients led me to a successful, twenty-two year IT consulting career without using advertising or agents.

Give away your best ideas. (The Seventh Law of Marketing.) When you teach your clients to handle future similar problems themselves, they’ll appreciate your generosity and are more likely to give you further work or good word of mouth to others.

Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital

It is not often that a newspaper article can cause a fight in my household (unless it is one where my wife quotes Hamas supporters). But the other day, merely quoting this article led to a serious bust up for my even considering the premises Catherine Hakim’s book reviewed by Will Self:

In a typically razor-sharp exchange of dialogue which establishes – yet again – that The Simpsons provides the most coruscating illumination of contemporary mores, Lisa says to her grade school teacher that “Good looks don’t really matter”, to which Ms Hoover replies: “Nonsense, that’s just something ugly people tell their children.” Stripping away the layers of irony from this statement we can reveal the central premise of Catherine Hakim’s book, which is that not only do looks matter, but that they should matter a great deal more. Furthermore, the people who tell young people – and in particular young women – that their beauty and sex appeal are of little importance are themselves ugly, if not physically then at least morally. For, as Hakim sees it, it is an “unholy alliance” of wannabe patriarchs, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists who have – in Anglo-Saxon countries especially – acted to devalue what she terms “erotic capital”. In Hakim’s estimation, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits – financial, intellectual, situational – an entirely legitimate form of self-advancement should consist in their getting the best out of – if you’ll forgive the pun – their assets.

via Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital by Catherine Hakim – review | Books | The Guardian.

I dare you to read it. I double dare you to agree with it in the presence of your female better half…

Mesofacts and the lingering effects of propaganda

“Stop, smell the rose”, Dorcol, Belgrade, 2010

Update November 2016:

Two new pieces to add to this article:

Agnotology. It’s a term worth knowing, since it is going global. The word was coined by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor, who described it as “culturally constructed ignorance, created by special interest groups to create confusion and suppress the truth in a societally important issue.” It is especially useful to sow seeds of doubt in complex scientific issues by publicizing inaccurate or misleading data. – Bloomberg.com

And this great piece on nested debunking from FiveThirtyEight called “Who will debunk the debunkers?”

Original post

A Boston Globe article – “Warning: Your reality is out of date” – alerted me to the concept of the Mesofact (http://www.mesofacts.org/):

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale.

This got me thinking about how this plays out in human affairs.

I thought of how 10 years since the end of the last Balkan war (Kosovo 1998-1999) and the establishment of a liberal democracy in Serbia, Serbs are still thought of as the “bad guys” in the Kosovo story, even though we have seen over a decade of exemplary Serb behaviour (economic and social liberalisation, reconciliation with neighbours, apologies for crimes committed by Serbs, cooperation with international authorities, use of diplomacy not aggression) and yet during the same period in Kosovo we saw of ongoing political and violent oppression of of Serbs (and other minorities), massacres, ethnic cleansing, rampant corruption and organised crime penetrating all levels of government and society to operate the vilest practices of human slavery, drug and weapons smuggling.

The same is true of the Afrikaner people of South Africa. Fifteen years since the end of Apartheid, one third of Afrikaners are living below the poverty line. Rural Afrikaans farmers are being subjected to what some describe as a genocidal campaign of murder and intimidation. Three thousand people have been killed, many of whom tortured and mutilated in acts of near incomprehensible cruelty and sadism. Despite this, both at home and abroad they are still seen as a strongly, privileged group, even though they are politically and economically disenfranchised, and subject to violent oppression.

Outdated mesofacts about the Serbs and Afrikaners dominate the public discourse, and these “facts” strongly influence the fortunes of these people.

When you combine the phenomenon of the mesofact, with disinformation and the confirmation bias, you have entire nations trapped in a negative stereotype deliberately maintained by special interest groups for political purposes.

In fact the mesofact can be established over time by relentless propaganda and other disinformation. Once the “facts” about the target group are established – they become Flat Earth News – all it takes is an occasional “top up” to refresh the stereotype. Reporting the anniversaries of massacres is a good excuse.

In the Serbian example, the media focusses on the trials of notorious Serbs over crimes committed in the 1990’s whilst ignoring the daily attacks on Serbs in Kosovo today.

Similarly, in South Africa a case where a white farmer murdered one of his workers then fed his remains to lions made front page news across the world, yet the 11 gruesome murders committed against white farmers that month were never reported, and continue to be largely ignored to this day.

Nebojsa Malic of Gray Falcon explores this in relation to the recent Gaza Flotilla incident, where he observes that the Israel’s were “Serbed”:

It should be obvious by now that the “Gaza flotilla” was a trap. Israel walked right into it. Fortunately for the Israelis, they too were filming the whole thing, and knew how to use blogs and YouTube, so they may have even come out ahead in the propaganda skirmish that followed. But there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the whole flotilla operation was designed from the start to be a propaganda stunt. The “activists” (is that what they are called these days?) aboard those ships were armed and ready. They wanted to be stopped and boarded, so they could scream to high heaven about being abused by the Israeli “pirates” on the high seas. It almost worked, too.

…the entire strategy employed by Hamas seems to be a reprise of Sarajevo. So the Israeli presence on its borders becomes a “siege”, the legitimate blockade of a hostile polity becomes “strangling”, and Israeli raids in response to missiles fired from Gaza become “terror.” Israel is dubbed an occupying power even though it unilaterally retreated from Gaza in 2005, leaving it as a de facto independent city-state. And Israeli inspections in international waters, though legal, become “piracy.”

Hamas routinely fires missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilians across the border. They see nothing wrong with this – remember, to Hamas, Israel has no right to exist, and needs to be obliterated. But if Israel retaliates, whether by assassinating Hamas leaders or sending tanks into Gaza to destroy missile launchers, or by enforcing a perfectly legal blockade to deny Hamas weapons and ammunition, while allowing food and other civilian supplies in – ah, that’s nothing short of “genocide,” then!

Israel has a powerful conventional army, navy, air force, and most likely even nuclear weapons (though not officially acknowledged). It has defeated Arab armies on numerous occasions in open warfare, and has successfully fought terrorism and insurgency through special operations. So those who wish it destroyed came up with a way of turning that strength into a weakness: cast themselves as innocent, unarmed, helpless victims and howl as loud as possible about being abused by that very Israel whose strength no one can dispute.

We can now chance a definition of the verb “To Serb”:

To Serb (verb): To place a country, ethnic group or people in a situation where their designated victims can literally get away with murder yet be portrayed as innocent and virtuous, while they, the designated culprit, can be slandered with impunity, and anything they do is portrayed as as purely evil and motivated by malice.

The mechanisms is simple and effective. It is a staple of 4th Generation warfare, which is conducted mostly as a pantomime for the global mediated masses (public opinion). Perceived weakness is an asset, and perceived strength is a liability. One side is cartoonishly evil, the other saintly and beyond reproach. Simple tropes and characters for a simple media landscape.

So, in summary, the way to defeat your enemy in the 21st Century:

  1. “Serb” your enemy so that their evil become Flat Earth News
  2. Maintain a steady stream of propaganda, disinformation and selective reporting to “top up” the myth of evil applied to your enemy
  3. Attack and otherwise provoke your enemy, relying on your friends in the media to ignore your violence and provocations
  4. When your enemy counter-attacks or resists your violence, cry foul and rely on your friends on the media to portray them as evil and depraved.
  5. Continue to exploit your enemy’s vile reputation in the post-conflict era to cover up and distract attention from your own crimes against them and corruption.