Unreadable . . . unbelievably bad. Ironically, for a book about innovation, the concepts are trite and the prose consists of one lazy cliche after another.

Watch — I’m going to open the book to a random page and list the cliches: “secret sauce,” “blow the doors off,” “boil the ocean,” “where the action is,” “ivory tower,” “marching instructions.”

The book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who might conceivably want to read it.

Shared vision as the DNA of an organization . . .

It’s common knowledge that Southwest is a successful company, but there is a shocking performance gap between Southwest and its competitors. Although the airlines industry as a whole has only a passing acquaintance with profitability, Southwest has been consistently profitable for more than thirty years.

The reasons for Southwest’s success could (and do) fill up books, but perhaps the single greatest factor in the company’s success is its dogged focus on reducing costs. Every airline would love to reduce costs, but Southwest has been doing it for decades. For this effort to succeed, the company must coordinate thousands of employees ranging from marketers to baggage handlers.

Southwest has a Commander’s Intent, a core, that helps to guide this coordination. As related by James Carville and Paul Begala:

Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.

“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”

The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”

Kelleher’s Commander’s Intent is “We are THE low-fare airline.” This is a simple idea, but it is sufficiently useful that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years.

— Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick

Since I’m currently unemployed, my friend GL asked me to write something about the job interview process. The problem is, there’s already so much written about the job interview process, it’s hard to think of anything to add.

Which brings me to my point: It’s easy to overprepare for interviews.

For example, we have a book here that my wife bought called Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions.

Two problems:

1. Who has time to prepare answers for 201 interview questions?
2. What if the interviewer asks a question that’s not on the list? Where is your God now?

But wait! It gets worse! If you go to Amazon and look up this book, you’ll find a list of similar titles like

• More Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions
• The 250 Job Interview Questions You’ll Most Likely Be Asked
• 301 Smart Answers to Tough Interview Questions
• 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions
• Etc., etc., etc.

Clearly this notion of preparing answers to all possible interview questions in advance quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns.

Here’s what I’d suggest instead: Write up a list of the key points you want to make about yourself in the interview, the unique contributions you’ll make to the job and the company. Brush up on a few stories that show you at your best in the workplace.

Then — no matter what the interviewer asks — respond with your points and stories. We’re in the midst of a political season, so it’s easy to observe this technique in action. Politicians are not out there to think up answers to every stupid question someone throws at them. They have a list of points they want to make. So do you!

This list is mostly for your own reference, but you may want to go ahead and put together a nicely formatted version, print out a few copies and bring them to the interview. That way, if the interviewer asks — and they often do — “What makes you the best person for the job?,” you hand them a copy of your list.

Bonus: Most of what’s said in an interview is quickly forgotten. What remains is a general impression and of course — documents!

Related Links

• epoWiki: Interview Questions
• Four Questions to Ask a Hiring Manager

The dictator and the useful idiot

Keep before you the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind; mark how hollow are the echoes of applause, how fickle and undiscerning the judgements of professed admirers, and how puny the arena of human fame. For the entire earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner in it; and how many are therein who will praise you, and what sort of men are they?

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3

I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations when my son, referring to the cover photo above the author’s name, says, “Who’s that? Zeus?”

“No,” I say.

“Caesar?”

“No. It’s Marcus Aurelius.”

“Hmmm. That seemed too obvious.”

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For some reason, the publisher chose to give away the climax of the story in the dust cover illustration, although it does leave a few questions unanswered so as not to make it too obvious:

• Is Voldemort falling backwards or just hovering mysteriously?
• Why doesn’t he have a wand?
• Potter appears about to catch something out of the air. What could it be?

My son’s hockey team didn’t do so well at NARCh this time around. They got knocked out in the round-robin portion of the tournament.

That left us with some extra time on our hands, some of which we used to drive up to Tampa to watch the Angels get worked by the ordinarily hapless Devil Rays, 7-2.

We got good seats though! — right behind home plate about 10 rows up.

Completing the hat trick of futility, I arrived back in California to find that the mortgage bank I worked for had laid off 400 people, including me.

The good news is that I did get a severance package, unlike the last time I got laid off (from a dot-com company), when all I got was a handshake and an escort to the parking lot.

Oh, and I’ve got more time to read the last Harry Potter book. I’m really sick of Harry Potter but I do want to find out how the whole thing wraps up . . .

This is the Way for men who want to learn my strategy:

1. Do not think dishonestly.
2. The Way is in training.
3. Become acquainted with every art.
4. Know the Ways of all professions.
5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
6. Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
7. Perceive those things that cannot be seen.
8. Pay attention even to trifles.
9. Do nothing which is of no use.

— Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

UPDATE: One of my son’s friends has a hamster named Miyamoto Musashi. His book says he’s very famous in Japan, but then it would say that.

‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’

— Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

You know what I saw at the bookstore this afternoon? A 35th anniversary edition of Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization!

If I’ve ever read a better business book, I can’t remember what it was. Townsend was way, way ahead of the curve in both style and content . . .

Highly recommended!

We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection.

I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA.

While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old.

I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on its own merits?

I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s epiphany in The Painted Word, that the distinction between, say, a Jackson Pollock painting and the splatterings of a kindergartener is that the kindergartener’s work lacks a persuasive critical theory:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well–how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.

At the time the book [Brave New World] was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.

— Aldous Huxley

New additions to the First Lines and Last Lines quizzes:

First Lines

Call me Ishmael.

It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Last Lines

He loved Big Brother.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby people tend to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. It was first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920.

I read an interesting article this weekend by Phil Rosenzweig, the author of The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, on the halo effect in the business world:

Imagine a company that is doing well, with rising sales, high profits, and a sharply increasing stock price. The tendency is to infer that the company has a sound strategy, a visionary leader, motivated employees, an excellent customer orientation, a vibrant culture, and so on. But when that same company suffers a decline–if sales fall and profits shrink–many people are quick to conclude that the company’s strategy went wrong, its people became complacent, it neglected its customers, its culture became stodgy, and more. In fact, these things may not have changed much, if at all. Rather, company performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression–a halo–that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, culture, and other elements.

For example, when Cisco Systems was riding high in the late 1990s, it was widely praised for its “brilliant strategy, masterful management of acquisitions, and superb customer focus.” When the tech bubble burst, Cisco was said to have “a flawed strategy, haphazard acquisition management, and poor customer relations.”

Another example: When ABB — a European engineering firm — was performing well, it had an “elegant matrix design, risk-taking culture, and charismatic chief executive.” When the company’s performance dropped off, ABB had “a dysfunctional organization, a chaotic culture, and an arrogant CEO.”

In reality, neither company had changed much; only the perceptions had changed.

Most of the business books I read are full of this type of after-the-fact “analysis,” where judgments are merely attributions reflecting a company’s performance. It appeals to managers who’d like to find a simple formula that ensures success.

Of course, if success could be reduced to a simple formula, there’d be a lot more successful managers and companies . . .

I notice that you use plain, simple English, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English–it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

— Mark Twain

Enron’s performance in 2000 was a success by any measure, as we continued to outdistance the competition and solidify our leadership in each of our major businesses. We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions. . . . We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company to a marketing and logistics company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and its innovative people.

— Enron Annual Report, 2000

Source: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway & Jon Warshawsky

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well–I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

Staring your boss in the face and saying June 1 when you know that even a year from June would be optimistic sounds bad. It sounds like lying. But being a Can Do manager sounds good.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect on me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

 

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions, I myself was intact. The world was intact.

 

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

Identify these two well-known novels from the first and last lines. Answers are in the comments. More lit quizzes here.

Book One

First line

We were using the old blue china and the stainless steel cutlery, with place mats on the big oval table and odd-sized jelly glasses for the wine.

Last line

I said: “It’s the color of the sky.”

Book Two

First line

The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.

Last line

“The only proper action,” Colonel Green agreed.