Category: Leadership

2018 Social Media and Democracy Research Grant Application

2018 Social Media and Democracy Research Grants

Applicant Information
Ariel V. Sheen
Innovation and Technology Management Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana Colombia

Project Details
The Social Media Behavior of Venezuelan State Media: A Case Study on TeleSUR English

Priority Topics
Disinformation, Polarization and Election Integrity, Civic Engagement

Dataset(s)
Facebook URL Shares Dataset

Keywords
Political Polarization, Disinformation, Social Media, Democracy, Influence

Countries of Research
United States

Disciplinary Focus
Communications, Political science and government

Project Length
6 Months

Amount Requested
$49999.00

Project Abstract
TeleSUR English is a media project of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments to promote their desire for a multi-polar world order. Their main news outlet has over 600,000 people listed as following it on Facebook, while their other properties, consisting of cultural, historical and current-event commentary, raises the numbers of followers they have to nearly a million. Their combined content on YouTube has been viewed in excess of 20 million times.

Over the four year course of their operations, TeleSUR English has partnered with other state-owned foreign language news media outlets such as Russia’s RT, Iran’s HispanTV, Qatar’s AJ+ and China’s CCTV.

This project will use quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Venezuela’s government’s English language media operations to answer specific questions such as:

  • To what extent were specific demographics and geographic areas targeted by TeleSUR?
  • What were the defining attributes of the political content and areas targeted by TeleSUR English?
  • What connections can be made between Russian and Venezuelan state media operations to influence the American electorate?
  • How can Venezuela’s social media actions affect the way Americans build common sense, and how does the spread of strategic political content lead to political fragmentation?

It is expected that the final results of the investigation will show that Venezuela sought to increase political polarization through the targeted promotion of information aligned with specific political sector interests and thus demobilizing its readers from the political process rather than categorically promoting the public interest. Other data set will

Practical Importance of Project
Charting the efforts of Venezuela’s social and news media projects to influence the political values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of groups and individuals within the United States electorate is of practical importance for consideration by a wide variet of public and private policy makers.

Showing the connection of Russia’s state media to Venezuela’s activities is also important for illustrating the manner in which it is is possible for small groups of skilled people to accelerate actual or perceived political polarization; spread disinformation or propaganda; facilitate political actions that range from legal to illegal and, overall, impact American  elections.

Visualizing the scope and shape of this particular iteration of coordinated inauthentic behavior and it’s relation to In Real Life (IRL) action will help readers of the project better understand how to exercise media literacy skills and help shape future conversations about the relationship between social media and democracy. Furthermore, it will provide coders new means of adapting existent algorithms so as to be able to more effectively identify coordinated inauthentic behavior on the Facebook.

Expected Outcome of Project
This project will produce a minimum of 30 graphic visualizations based on Facebook data, data compiled from public records, subscription  based data sets, of APIs as needed.

These graphics will be packaged together with historical/technical context and analytical writing to promote media literacy and showcase new knowledge as to how TeleSUR English/Venezuela seeks to influence American politics as well as their links to Russian media on Medium. This will then be promoted via outreach to media outlets that have previously published on similar themes as well as via influencer outreach.

Ethical and Privacy Considerations
The ethical and privacy considerations evidenced in the research in this vein thus far produced by the Digital Media Research Labs, the Atlantic Council and the Kings Centre for Strategic Communication will be the guide for our our work. With the exception of TeleSUR English, RT, Sputnik and other employees or associated accounts engaging in public behavior, all individual users privacy will be maintained by illustrating only general, numerical patterns of event behavior. Absolutely no private individual Facebook, Twitter or other social media users will be named in order to prevent another @Ian56789 incident.

Review of Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Business and Politics

“The distinctions between leadership and management constitute a major shift in our thinking about how the private sector should be organized. A mere [six] decades ago, leadership was a conception business and industry generally chose to ignore. But now the best and brightest afree that leadership belongs in the private sector as much as it does in the public one. The only question is how exactly leadership and management should be defined” (147)

Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Business and Politics by Barbara Kellerman was published by the State University of New York press in 1999 and is volume in the SUNY series in Leadership Studies. At the time of the book’s publication, she was the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.

While an academic work, the book’s message is also directed to leaders and managers in both the upper reaches of the private sector as well as the public sector – something that is reflected in its style. The first premise of the book is that a number of significant failures of government has shown that earlier models of political leadership are inadequate. The second is that changes in social norms and conceptions of leadership wrought by political events have made traditional notions of management that came into prominence in the period of the 1950s to the early 1970s no longer relevant. The third and final premise is about the advantages of the convergence and synthesis of leadership values that embraces traditional government and business positions. Given the increased necessity of business and government leaders to communicate and collaborate this helps to develop a common language so as to better understand each other and the interests they represent – the public and private capital interests.

Kellerman defines management as the efforts of those who hold a position of authority at some level to ensure that the activities of a firm continue as needed and that leaders are those that engage followers in the mutual pursuit of agreed-on goal representing, usually, significant and not merely incremental change. These two conceptual inputs for the synthesis she believes is now needed were defined by various authors writing for either the professional or government leader/manager. By showing the typical continuing education paths for both the professional and the government official and analyzing professional literature – such as Harvard Business Review publications as well as an impressively large list of books on management and leadership in corporate America – Kellerman shows how divergently the ideals character traits and habits of thought for each social actor was first conceived – and how large political scandals and failures drew the two together in a way that more contemporary theorists would categorize as a mix of neoliberal or technocratic with a human face.

Whereas previously managers did not view their role as to influence – simply to command, control and if necessary to coerce – the changes in cultural and legal norms mean that this no longer was valid. In some workplaces where there hasn’t been much change wrought by America’s changing labor laws, such as extraction and agricultural industries, these were few alteration in norms. In worksites dealing with more intangible goods and services, like those of the many value-added business-to-business industries, the impact was significant and well commented on in the journalism and editorials of the professional and government press.

A number of seminal business leaders from the 1960s to the 1980s are presented as case studies to show the varying trends in how leadership was approached as a theory and practice and a number of common threads highlighted. One such theme found in the private industry, but not in that of the public, was of the need for management to “know themselves” in a way that included rigorous self-assessment so as to become more aware of the interpersonal dynamics at the workplace and within the market in general. If this all sounds curiously “new-agey,” or vaguely psychotherapeutic in nature” Kellerman says in one of her many amusing asides, “that’s because it is” (76).

Another of Kellerman’s observations is that while egalitarian ideas increasing permeated literature on leadership in business that in practice a noticeable change in work relations towards something that might be defined as “workplace democracy” never materialized. In its stead there became an infatuation with “collaboration” and “teams”. While anachronistic to this book, a good modern example of this is found in Agile, Scrum, and DevOps, coding and testing team practices associated with software development firms that shown in their literature and practice to be highly consultative and communicative in nature. The scandals of presidents and CEOs as well as changed in legal regulation – especially the opening of borders for trade – all feed into the changing workplace dynamics. Because certain types of labor could be more easily moved in the face of organized discontent by workers, which increased the reserve army of labor able to replace those in other, less at risk sectors, there was an additional shift in those work cites as well. Not a point which is gone into in detail – it seems that the effects of this would be another large influence for the imperative to blur the lines between public and private leaders and managers. And on this topic, Kellerman cites three specific imperatives wrought by the new, post-NAFTA globalized:

  • Politicians will have no choice but to take cues for their corporate counterparts
  • Business executives will have no alternative but to learn lessons from leaders in government
  • Leaders in both domains will have to reinvent themselves to create something altogether new.

In the closing section of the book Kellerman extensively quotes a number of business leaders to make the point that “although real-world problems are interdisciplinary, and solutions are interdepartmental, interprofessional, interdependent , and international, our institutions – particularly our institutions of higher education – start with a heavy bias against breadth.” (219)

The book closes with a description of the image of the new ideal for a political leader and business leader. The traits that they should have, the challenged they face, the strategies that they deploy and the values they embody to strive are listed as they could go on the back of a baseball card. All in all, it’s a fascinating read on how Leadership and Management as a concept and practice have evolved in America and how it is that one should act if one desires to be a Leader or Manager in the modern political-economic environment.

This is from another of Kellerman’s books.

Review of Leading Change

Leading Change by John P. Kotter was published by Harvard Business School Press and is an action plan for achieving innovative changes in the workplace. Published in 1996, at the time when the 4thIndustrial Revolution was just starting to whet the imaginations of investors and all things internet related were hot, the book presents a series of steps for business leaders to help their companies successfully adapt to the changing market conditions. With the increased pressure for efficiency and adaptability to the new market conditions which have increased the speed of business and shaken much of the business environment stability that previously existed.

It is based on John P. Kotter’s extensive research experience and conversations with major business executives that provides him with the crux on which innovation initiatives either fail or flourish: Ideating, enacting and sustaining cultural change in the workplace. It is not enough, he warns, to be aware of new pressures and possibilities for constructing value – to truly adapt requires a long-term view that many managers have been taught vie years of on-the-job experience to not consider. Because of the creation of what he calls a generalized “overmanaged, under led corporate culture” he states that a different type of business figure is needed to help instigate, inspire, and incite meaningful change within companies: a leader.

There is a significant difference between management and leadership, and those that have trained and worked for years in the former typically are unaccustomed to being able to accomplish the latter. They think in terms of weeks and months rather than months and years. They are accustomed to “following the book” rather than reviewing all of the available data that ought to influence future planning, engaging stakeholders on their perspectives and then writing a book. They are typically not very charismatic, but eminently practical. What follows is the book is a detailed overview of a successful change model; explanations as to why it is so important for the steps to be followed in order; examples of effective and ineffective solutions to problems that present themselves in the process considerations to be made to ensure that the change process is fully supported by the middle and upper-level executives; and approaches to ensuring that the cultural changes promoted are sticky.

  1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency
  2. Creatindg the Guiding Coalition
  3. Developing a Vision and Strategy
  4. Communicating the Change Vision
  5. Empowering Broad-Based Action
  6. Generating Short-Term Wins
  7. Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
  8. Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

Common errors to organizational efforts include the following: allowing too much complacency, failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition; underestimating the power of vision; under-communicating the vision; permitting obstacles to block the new vision; failing to create short-term wins; declaring victory too soon; neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture. The appearance of these errors within the change effort has serious consequences. New strategies aren’t implemented well; acquisitions don’t achieve expected synergies; re-engineering takes too long and costs too much; downsizing doesn’t get costs under control; quality programs don’t deliver hoped-for results. Kotter also explains how it is that such process deformations can occur and accrues and how to watch out for them.

For instance, if there are no short-term wins built into the process it is likely that it will be abandoned. New forms of business intelligence guiding strategy may be ignored if there are secular reasons for non-performance that are not addressed by management. Interdependent processes that have been marked for change may seem excessive and leads to such an escalation that employees push back. Because of this, it is of the utmost importance that an effective innovation vision not just be presented, but also to be explained, talked about when appropriate in meetings by management, referred to when discussing the rationale behind a change in process that is not always adhered too, etc. These and more examples provide the basis for the specific order of the process described within the book and how to avoid getting off course. Following these steps allows a leader to truly anchor in the novel and innovative approach into the company culture.

Kotter’s depiction of an effective vision is it’s containing the following characteristics:

Imaginable: Conveys a picture of what the future will look like

Desirable: Appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customer, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise

Feasible: Comprises realistic, attainable goals

Focused: Is clear enough to provide guidance in decision making

Flexible: Is general enough to allow individual initiative and alternative responses in light of changing conditions

Communicable: Is easy to communicate; can be successfully explained within five minutes.

This model is somewhat similar to Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick model of marketing – Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories – and similarly emphasizes the importance of interpersonal qualities to gaining buy-in by those involved in the innovation-change process. Some people that don’t follow the new direction will have to be let go, especially those with positions of power whose hypocrisy (saying that they’re following the new direction but actually not) causes friction. The inverse can be said of those that are lone leaders working to assisting in a company’s innovation change project. Kotter tells a story about a General Motors division that had been a highly effective leader of a transformation program, but how after step 7 –  Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change – he was immediately fired so that step 8 –  Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture – didn’t have a sufficient amount of time to express itself. The result, within 6 months everything went back to the way it was and the gains that were starting to be seen were lost – along with the momentum in the right direction. Only after three stumbling quarters went on did the managers start to admit that they had slipped in their adherence to the structure that was to lead them to success!

Kotter’s cogent and informed book ends with a section that reflections on the modern business world with words that I resonated with given that I’m reading this as part of my doctorate program in Innovation and Technology Management at UPB. The last chapter of the book is titled “Leadership and Lifelong Learning” and in it, he describes how the prototype of the 20th to mid 21st century executive is no longer applicable to the modern business world. He shares several anecdotes of entrepreneurs and middle managers that he’s met who, with the combination of inborn ambition and helpful connections and executives who were able to radically scale their leadership skills and thus radically increase the competitive capacity of the businesses that they were involved with. Their willingness to seek new challenges and reflect honestly on their successes and failures leads not only to the expected knowledge and leadership skill increased but an uncanny ability to deal with an increasingly competitive and fast-moving economic environment. Given that this path and those goals were what motivated me to enroll in the program I’m now in, it was nice to read that someone like Kotter in a way confirmed that I was talking the best path to master the skills needed for the age of the 4th industrial revolution.

 

 

Review of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky, productivity expert and founder and CEO of Behance, is a guide to developing execution skills on an individual and organizational level. The book is in large part about how to use design principles to organize projects. While PMP is the standard for approaching project management in the United States, the reality is that often times the smaller scope of projects for companies with under 50 workers and start-ups don’t require someone with this specialization. Furthermore, the reality is that creative environments are no conducive to such organizational demands for specific procedures, restrictions and processes. The creative worker’s generalized rebellion against these is part of their recognition that there is no one best process for developing ideas. This does not, however, mean that chaos should reign but that other methods must be developed.

The book begins with a discussion of the Action Method, which is a set of general principles and means for organizing workflow such that there is a bias towards action rather than reaction. According to Belsky: “The state of reactionary workflow occurs when you get stuck simply reacting to whatever flows into the top of an inbox. Instead of focusing on what is most important and actionable you spend too much time just trying to stay afloat. Reactionary workflow prevents you from being more proactive with your energy. The act of processing requires discipline and imposing some blockages around your focus.”

In order to prevent this, he provides a number of techniques – such as breaking processes into elementary, actionable steps; maintaining a backburner of low-priority items; and keeping up a daily practice of journaling to ensure that there is as little as possible that is interiorized and thus likely to be forgotten about or causing sub-optimal work due to stress.

There are a large number of actionable insights from the first third of the book as it relates to personal workspace within a company as well as hiring and managerial practices. Some of the takeaways can be summarized as such:

  • Generate ideas in moderation (more is not always better).
  • Act without conviction to keep momentum and rapidly refine ideas.
  • Encourage productive conflict within your teams to refine ideas.
  • Seek competition; it will boost accountability and strengthen your approach.
  • Reduce bulky projects to just three primary elements.

The second part of the book focuses on the social, community elements within which creative enterprises occurs. The section on Dreamers, Doers and Incrementalist posits that there are three archetypes for those within the creative business world. The Dreamer is the one that is full of ideas and able to come up with solutions from a wide range of knowledge. These are the people that relish in ideas, but have trouble managing clients, staying organized or accountable, etc. The Doer is the inverse of this. They are able to help Dreamers translate the ideas through a series of specific processes and steps, as well as ensuring that the stakeholders are informed of what is going on and that the bills are paid. Belsky cites a number of famous businesses where such pairs were able to lead their companies to great success. Tim Cook & Steve Jobs of Apple; Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight of Nike; Barry Schwarz and Calvin Klein are some examples of these. The Incrementalist archetype is the combination of Dreamer and Doers. These are rare people that because of their independent attitude and capabilities must learn to work together – as the Doers and Dreamers seem naturally inclined to do – lest their projects falter due to being overwhelmed by the fact that they don’t trust other enough to help them.

The third part of the book covers how to be a respected and effective leader of creative teams.

Incorporating fun into projects whenever possible to keep minds fresh is one of the many pieces of advice that he gives. Citing his interview with Ji Lee, the creative director of Google’s Creative Lab, he illustrates how it is that a number of his personal projects have seen themselves applied in various ways into the professional field – which explains why it is that the company famously allows for 20% of the projects worked on by their workers to be personal projects. After an excessive focus on trying to solve problems, after all, an intellectual plateau can be reached – which is damaging to a creative enterprise.

Additional insight includes picking an appropriately balanced creative team. While it’s understandable that those with a “creative background” would be chosen, the variety of insights gained from having informed perspectives that are vastly different in their composition is also important. This is also why it’s suggested to involved potential end-users of products and services into the development process – something which many companies’s now practice.

Sharing appreciation is also important for managers. Most of the creative workers surveyed cite their rationale for departing a particular enterprise as stemming from a poor work environment wherein compliments towards good work is rare. Belsky cites an instance of going to a storytelling workshop in order to see how it is that merely focusing on the positives within a first edit/prototype story can lead to changes that are encouraging rather than covertly critical.

The section on self-leadership I found to be particularly engaging. In my interactions with a number of team leaders, I’ve frequently seen people acting in emotionally detached, mechanistic manner. Many of them did not seem to have psychologically developed themselves enough to direct their emotions as it relates to work situations in a positive manner, and so did not make the sort of decisions or communicate in a manner with their employees such that it garnered respect and confidence in them.

 

On Anonymity and Eduardo Rothe

Reading the article “TeleSUR and the Anonymous” by Eduardo Rothe made me cringe for a number of reasons.

For one, his argument is so divorced from the realities of office life that I can’t help but wonder whether the author has ever worked for a prolonged period of time in a large office setting.

Secondarily, he ascribes a sacrosanct aura to TeleSUR as a revolutionary organization and Venezuelan labor law that is a wretched form of fetishism and dogmatism.

Third he denies the necessity of a formal inquiry into charges that have been repeatedly made despite the ease which such an investigation could be accomplished.

Fourth, he conjectures that those expressing discontent in regards office policy may be “manipulated by the enemy” – exactly the type of stigmatization that makes a creative, constitutive enterprise like TeleSUR become stagnant and filled with ideological automatons that can recite the part catechism without missing a word but may not have the right skills to do good work.

The Realities of Office Life

Only someone that has never witnessed or experienced increased adversarial behavior by management or shunning by one’s co-workers for fear of being associated with them following a comment made that contests the correctness of management’s decisions, or something along that line, could make such an argument.

Eduardo Rothe’s criticism is so absurd as to also ignore the realities of changing jobs and the power that management has as a result of their recommendations and references for that person.

Black-listing of workers deemed problematic has long been a way of enforcing beliefs and disciplining workers. The black-list is not always of a quality wherein it is some secret document shared or comment made by management, but in the case of a media organization like TeleSUR becomes something that becomes discoverable by those doing due diligence before a hire.

It’s because of just such publicly available documents that I was able to create these biographies of the people that work at TeleSUR. It’s this document, for instance, that allowed me to connect the director of TeleSUR English, Pablo Vivanco, to RPRPR RPRPR of Time Magazine – and thus explain how such factually baseless news that reads more like an advertisement to be disseminated.

This sort of behavior is done in places where any murmur of discontent leads to major stigmatization by management. Anyone who receives such a mark of Cain suddenly has their entire manner of relating to others at work changed.

It means that people avoid talking to you in the office kitchen lest management sees or gets a report. It means you don’t get invited out to lunch or drinks with the same people lest management gets a report. One starts to wonder if their criticism about a new policy or deadline is going to make its way through the office grapevine, where a write up of insubordination or some other trivial cause now means that you are on the path out the door.

In a meeting, your voice may not have the same aura of authority; your insights – no matter how beneficial – may be categorically dismissed. You become the embodiment of why one should not speak up as people may make morale-killing wisecracks about your actions

In a media outlet that describes itself as wanting to be a constitutive force it sure is ridiculous that they’re not able to do more in order to create that. What normalizing such workplace behavior does is to limit the availability to attract highly skilled talent as those that have professionally developed themselves to fit such a role can easily find opportunities elsewhere, in a place where one need not fit a particular ideological mold.

The Aura of Unassailable Authority

It is the height of absurdity to state that because a law exists and means for investigating claims that laws were broken exists that such violations need not be publicized. A correlative to the above point, once someone submits information to the Ministry of Labor they are now on record as being someone that is a “problem”.

Furthermore, it’s the nature of government institutions to cover up the misdoings of other institutions. This is not some peculiarity of post-Chavez politics in Venezuela but is something that happens in the United States frequently. Police refer to it as the blue line, and its often times not until such a public furor happens – like in Ferguson – that suppressed realities become clear.

It’s for this reason that Rothe’s claim that the people who wrote the article to which he is responding are arguing for abstract principles completely misinterprets them. They are expressing a means of exercising a greater degree of control over their work through an onsite organization as they feel that the means by which they have to appeal are insufficient.

The Ease of Investigation via Digitization

Addressing the third issue, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, given the digitization of work and work schedules making an inquiry into the charges made by the anonymous employees does not take a significant amount of time. It not only becomes a means of determining whether or not these charges are true, but it allows for the objective identification of those that act contrary to a positive work environment. With this process in place, those identified as potential trouble sources can either receive more training on how to better do their job, be reassigned to some other position, or be told to leave if the problems found are significant.

Creating an Authoritarian Workplace

It’s exactly what Eduardo Rothe describes as desirable that extensive studies have shown to be exactly what makes workers dissatisfied, disengaged and unappealing to those that view authority in meritocratic terms. It’s why, in the United States, the private sector often finds it easier to attract highly skilled workers in various industries.

Innovation occurs when traditional methods for doing something and established boundaries are pushed. An enterprise such as TeleSUR, whose mission is the propagandizing towards the formation of a new type of political subjectivity by very definition requires such persons to resist the bureaucratic rationalizations that may look good on reports but on the ground have little to no import.

Review of Rework

I read Rework by Jason Fried and David Hannson of 37Signals and BaseCamp fame and think that if you are tired of working for other people and are interested in starting your own business, or you have one and you’re looking to make it more effective, than this is the book for you.

Rework has a number of choice endorsements from major names in the business world such as Mark Cuban, who says “If given a choice between investing in someone who has read Rework and someone who has an MBA, I’m investing in Rework every time…. A must-read for every entrepreneur.” and Jeff Bezos, who says “Jason and David start fresh and rewrite the rules of business. Their approach turns out to be as successful as it is counter-intuitive.”

This doesn’t meant that information in this book is limited in application just to CEOs and Entrepreneurs with billions of dollars in the bank and those that want to provide them business service. This is equally applicable to artists who want to achieve real professional success.

I’m not going to go into too much detail on the actual content as the book itself is such a quick read and

Instead, here’s five of the titles of their mini essays and how they relate to my own experience.

Decommoditize your Product

Since competitors can never copy the “you” in their product, make you a part of your product or service. This makes it someone that no one else can honestly offer. I realized that this was something that I was doing with this website, merely by posting all of my book reviews, thought experiments, media analysis and other articles on niche topics.

Chances are those end products have zero relation to my client’s needs, but through them they see that my thought processes are informed by years of research into the humanities and best practices for digital marketing.

Sound Like You

“What is with businesspeople trying to sound big? The stiff language, the formal announcements, the artificial friendliness, the legalese, etc. You read this stuff and it sounds like a robot wrote it… This mask of professionalism is a joke. We all know this. Yet small companies still try to emulate it. They think sounding big makes them appear bigger and more “professional”.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be professional, just that the masque of professionalism can be incredibly disingenuous and farcical.

Another aspect related to sounds like you that I sometimes struggle with is avoiding formal terms and acronyms. They can be very effective when working with an internal team or writing for a specific group of people, but when client or sales-prospect facing, it’s important to avoid this.

 Out-Teach Your Competition

“Teach and you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing.”

This point is succinct and goes into much greater detail in Joe Pulizzi’s book.

When starting out a business – or even an artistic enterprise –  your competition is bound to have more money for marketing themselves, more connections than you, etc. It can be hard to demonstrate credibility when just starting out but you can always start thinking about out-teaching your competition. Most businesses are focused on getting new clients, improving processes, hiring, etc. However, not many are worried about this. In Joe Pulizzi’s book Content Inc., in fact, he gives a story of one company doing this so well that they developed their business to the point where they no longer just installed pools, but started manufacturing them as well.

This new work ethos is in part why I’ve created this online repository of my research and a portfolio of my work.

There’s No Such Thing As An Overnight Sensation

“Those overnight-success stores you’ve heard about? It’s not the whole story.”

If you’re going to do anything and be successful – it’s going to take some time. Have patience, understanding and prepare for the inevitable delays, set backs and failures along the way.

Stop Working at 5pm

“You don’t need more hours; you need better hours.”

I’ve been in a number of working environments where my co-workers complain about having to work late into the night at home in order to complete certain tasks that they’d not completed as if they were proud of it. I’ve never understood why they would want to do this much less take pride for it.

A productive work ethic is a good thing, but the amount of hours you work aren’t nearly as important as what you get done in those hours.

Let me give you an example.

When I was still working as a private teacher, one of my responsibilities was to input individualized comments into a reporting box on an web-based grading application.

However the manner in which the reporting software was designed was poorly thought out and because of this there was a process in place that required three whole days of work for two people to ensure that they were written according to the guidelines.

The results of my thinking creatively? What had taken my colleagues eight hours to complete took me one hour that semester. In total I saved myself a full 24 hours of work simply by working smart instead of hard.

Now that I make my own schedule and work for myself there are some days where I work past five pm, or over the weekend or have a 12 hour day. But this is rare and stems at based because I choose to do so.

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Still not ready to buy the book after all this? Give their Rework Podcast a listen and maybe that’ll help convince you some more

Click for full image to zoom in and see all the designs.

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Review of “A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory”

A permutation of the research project I’d designed for myself in hopes of getting a year-long grant to study at the University of Havana, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory by Steve Cushion focuses on the factions within the trade union movements and their relationship to the Batista regime. Its publication came at a perfect time, as I learned of its existence shortly after the new criteria for the IB History Period and Theme focuses were released.

Cushion’s primary research documents were the union, official and underground newspapers, student and radical journals and letters of participants that could lead to arrest, assault and increasingly in murder by beating. Given the need to keep documentation of participation in these subterannean movements against the current government, there are gaps in ability to give full accounts in all regions of Cuba from this alone. In order to make up for this dearth of material he also includes the recorded speeches and published positions of the union leadership. Government documents stemming from police documentation of the lives of those ran for office, which were often those “approved” by Batista functionaries. Despite whatever de-facto official positions propounded by the leadership, internal factions of ideologically oriented groups competed for control. It is the groups within these unions would come to create make connections with MR-26 and facilitate the martial overthrow of the Batista Regime through concerted community support.

Cuba’s political and economic turmoil stemmed from advances in processes of transportation, production and financial pressures wrought by secular, cyclical capitalist crisis. During this period of an employer offensive against wages, workers rights and and the work done there was a general rebellion against the conditions proffered as the new status quo. The Batista regime became an adjudicator of industrial struggles and so consistently sided with the “non-Cuban” international investors that the came to be correctly seen as the enforcer for the needs of American capital. That such a belief was held by workers, students, radicals, farmers and revolutionaries alike should be seen as no surprise given that Cuba was the primary producer of sugar on the global market by weight by far and by 1958 U.S. capital owned 42% of the production capacity of the sugar industry. As large as that sounds this says nothing else of their other investments in railroads, docks, public transportation busses manufactured from Detroit, banks, clothes, medicine, etc.

Cushion’s analysis of regional leadership pockets of the MR- 26 showed how they were at times at odds with the political aspirations of their erstwhile supporters. A number of the subterranean leaders of organizing activity in the coastal shipping regions were Trotskyists and Communists. The fighting force of MR-26 was a distinctively nationalistic based organization. Cushion documents the change in their published positions from making populist style appeals for land redistribution and other programs to generalities that merely state that devastating effects that advances in capitalist production and transportation of raw materials had on the population must be addressed and that the current government had no legitimacy and should be ousted.

While other nationalist groups published broadsides against the government that similarly documented abuses, they differed in that they also combined jeremiad’s with political platforms to raise awareness of what members in the organization were seeking to accomplish by overthrowing the government. It’s in this, and not in the military fighting, that working class socialists played a large role – helping to get enough people to resist the brutality of a government that would force strikers to work at gunpoint and would beat to death students and organizers for their activity.

It’s because of all their work, documented here by industry, region and organizations with operational strength, that the great strike which paralyzed the entire island of Cuba came into fruition. It’s as a result of their alliance building, political development, organizational structures that the barbudos were so easily able to come in a conquer a much larger, better equipped army. It’s because of them that the romantic ideal of the revolutionaries have been so fawned upon in revolutionary circles – for if they’d have to spend multiple months fighting over key city control points than they’d seem dirtier on a moral level rather than just a jungle living level.

Review of Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

I’ve been wanting to read Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto for several years. I’d come across it when I first started teaching and had looked into a number of critical pedagogy books to inform my teaching practice. I picked it up now that I’m returning to teaching a public high school as a refresher to all those books by Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. I’d not paid close enough attention and what I’d expected to be a more empirical approach to looking at different manners in which there is consciousness raising manners in which to teach in the class room instead got a collection of speeches lengthened into articles. After having read the author’s I’d previously mentioned, I wasn’t that impressed. Rather than what I didn’t like, however, I’ll start with what I did like.

As a criticism of mass schooling on the industrial model, Gatto’s is pretty typical. Students become alienated through the school institution. They don’t learn things that will often help them in real life, they aren’t able to follow paths that interest them, the bell schedule is structured so that they feel that little is worth devoting a significant amount of time to, the learn to value themselves based upon an external authority, they learn intellectual dependency, they learn no real personal or spiritual values other than submission to the state, the learn disconnection from the community.

While a lot of these criticisms are true, the age of the books printing doesn’t address the fact that many new Federal government initiatives have addressed some of these by encouraging project, problem and inquiry based learning methods related to Common Core. In this, the book is dated. The teaching of mindfulness practices and emotional intelligence methods for dealing with problems is another area the book is silent upon. Overlooking this, however, I think the book is on point. There is a great need for student’s learning to be connected to their immediate needs and community. Gatto’s focus on the all-positive family, however, rings hollow from my own experience. When previously teaching in public schools the level of involvement was low and the anecdotes that I heard between kids in the hallways was not all that encouraging as to the types of acculturation that they were receiving at home. And this is in large part the turn towards the thrust of my criticism.

What I didn’t like was Gatto’s right-libertarian, anti-school union bent of the author’s suggestions. In this regard the success of the book and the paid public speaking gigs he refers to gets cast in a different light. It’s because his critique is aligned with the assault against public school unions and the pro-charter/homeschool movement. Thus while I think that his congregational approach to teaching, wherein students act as the market demanders for the subjects that they want to learn, I also feels that it does a disservice to “professional” educators. I agree that a certain degree of professional experience or personal devotion to a subject qualifies someone with the content knowledge to teach is does not always grant them the methods for successfully conveying this information to students. This stems from the fact that typically after people have mastered a number of elementary skills they have difficulty conveying the steps that they took to learn them. Gatto’s libertarian perspective thus, also, isolates and dehistoricizes the students/parents he speak of. He claims that a number of American economic illnesses stem from industrial American education rather than the specific dictates of capitalism. This is something that is addresses in limited detail, but it underlies all of his opinions. All in all I enjoyed reading it, but if someone was interested in the same content dealt with in greater depth Illich and Freire are who to look to.

Wisdom of the Day

While attending a meeting wherein three presenters pitched two different journalistic projects that were seeking new submissions, a young man asked the following question: “If we don’t have any writing in that style, what should we submit?”

This is the mentality of the uncommitted and undeserving. Write a piece aligned with the theme of the journal and worthy of being published by the outlet and submit that! The time spent on it at worst an exercise and at best the start of a new game!

The Secret of Embodiment’s Role in Achieving Your Goals

Since the publication of The Secret in 2006, the Laws of Attraction have gained currency amongst many that have sought to bring increased intentionality and positivity to their lives. In helping people to realize that they are not trapped by habit and history in whatever situation they are in it has been phenomenal. However what is missing from such admonitions to change your life is that thinking is merely a first step. It is not enough to merely THINK about what you want to get, you must wholly EMBODY that desire if you want to achieve it. Your body is your unconscious mind and if it is not fully committed to your intention in its core you will have inner conflict that causes attention to be disrupted by the doubtful or opposing intention or thought. The unconscious mind/body is like an iceberg: most of it is beneath the surface. As every thought creates a biological reaction when the body and emotions are not fully aligned then the bodies three brains sends out mixed messages and creates confusion. Neuroscience has clearly demonstrated the importance of the body/mind/emotion alignment for generating strength and focus. This is why it is important to remove and release any opposing thoughts and feelings as they biologically and mentally sabotage success.

To make an analogy, if like-attracts-like is the Law as it is written, than your body’s embodiment of those desires are the enforcers of those desires. Your body can either express a strong, muscular desire or a weak, flabby one. The law can either be followed so that order is maintained or an arbitrary and unjust rule will reign over your actions. As it relates to developing attentiveness, you are likely now wondering which embodiment is most effective for your obtaining your goals. The answer is multi-faceted and depends on what your intention is.

First, you need to have a clear vision of what you really want in a situation. Determine what it is you desire and then write down what steps you need to take in order to obtain it. This reminds you of what needs to be done and allows you to cross them off the paper when you’ve completed a step so you can see that you are progressing towards your goal.

Second, you need to determine the intensity level of your intentions through self-calibration to evaluate which embodiment will be most effective to fulfill each task. Let me give two examples of what I mean. If your intention is to relax at the beach on your vacation, you don’t want to be standing in a rigid position. If you have encountered an immanent threat, you don’t want to lay down. Self-calibration isn’t limited to just yourself, also consider your social and professional network to help you determine what barriers you might encounter. If you don’t have support you can count on, think about how you might be able to get some.

You also want to learn to be able to rapidly adjust to any situation, as they may change during your quest to obtain your goal. Embody a position of strength, but also flexibility. Regardless of external conditions, the collapsed embodiment of an apathetic person destroys attentiveness just as the puffed up embodiment of an enraged individual or the rigid embodiment of a frightened individual causes imbalance and weakens the ability to focus. An attentive embodiment is a strong physical and emotional structure abiding in peace, presence and is congruent to the existent conditions.

Third you want to bring into your awareness any negative inner dialogues you have concerning your desire. A fear of failure because of earlier failed attempts, a feeling you are inadequate and unworthy to reach your goal or a sense of guilt you still carry from hurting others to get what you wanted, all must be acknowledged and forgiven before your core power is totally focused.

Lastly you need to continually self-calibrate. How you feel in each moment allows you to make small adjustments to keep yourself centered. Just like a car, you need to be aware of your fuel and water level, your temperature and speed as otherwise friction and heat can lead to malfunction. To do this you need to have excellent self-communication skills. These helps you manage your internal impulses while maintaining the ability to interact with others in a peaceful connecting way. Inner awareness also helps you establish mutual interests. Self-sensing of your body, emotions, attitude and spatial feelings provide a present time feedback mechanism to direct and guide your thinking, decisions and actions. When not calibrated to your body you live in the virtual world of your mind. You become caught in idolized pictures of perfection, unfulfilled desires and fears. Your goal is to live life with confidence and focus and not to get caught living a virtual existence solely in thoughts. Thinking and imagining certainly have their place, but being present to experience the magnificent diversity of life is far more enjoyable and satisfying.