It’s always amusing to see religious insights about human behavior expressed in management-speak, which is happened precisely in The NY Times this past Saturday, in their interview with David Rock, the director of the NeuroLeadership Institute. The acronym Mr. Rock uses to describe the in’s and out’s of motivation is SCARF, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. For those keeping score at home, SCARF is basically shorthand for we mean when we talk about Original Sin, i.e. you could almost substitute Self-Justification for Status, Bondage for Certainty, Control for Autonomy, Exclusivity/Scapegoating for Relatedness, and Judgment for Fairness…
Lighting Sixteen Candles at Lehman Brothers: When the Worst Thing Is the Best Thing
I’ve noticed a thread that runs through a few of my favorite (relatively) recent films. Win Win and City Island and Ruby Sparks and Secrets and Lies and even last year’s Flight–all highly recommended–tell stories where the thing that everyone is dreading, the outcome that the characters are working tirelessly to avoid, turns out to be the key to their personal happy ending. Films, in other words, where the worst thing that could happen turns out to be the best thing and vice versa. This is what John Z talks about so beautifully in the opening to Grace in…
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Another Week Ends: Randy Travis, Prayer Book Poetry, Sanford’s Tutorial, Ethical Blind Spots, Breaking Bad, Bernie, Glorious Ruin and Cville Conf Update
1. An amazing, amazing article about Randy Travis appeared on The Atlantic, trying to make sense of the country singer’s hellish year. You may know that in August he was booked for a DUI after being found naked on the side of the road (his truck in the middle of a nearby field), and then last week he was jailed following a fistfight outside a church. Writer Anthony Easton looks at Randy’s dramatic ups and downs via the two most tried and true narratives about alcoholism in country music: you’re either delivered by God or you die. Easton notes how…
Knocked Unconscious, Part I
When things begin to get real, accurate diagnosis and a true acknowledgment of the situation are typically forthcoming… at least, earnestly desired. This is unswervingly true when one’s own self-interest is at stake.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “What’s in Your Blind Spot”, one’s own financial future and legacy are at stake with respect to “blind spots” and their potential impediment to advancement. The article encourages people with “great expectations” of leadership to utilize tools that enable greater self-knowledge… especially self-knowledge with respect to faults. Implied here is the idea that these business leaders possess unconscious faults that…
Love Laughs Out Fear: The Quirky Grace of Southwest Airlines
I’m generally a nervous flyer. It’s gotten better in the last couple years, but I still get sweaty-palmed and tightfisted when the plane is ducking and bobbing through even the most minor bits of turbulence. When the pilot’s ding sounds, I always mute my music to listen in. I’m quick to buckle-up. I’m quick to assign my own seat if I can–I always pick a window. I don’t know why that matters, as if knowing exactly where I’m going to be sitting in a nosediving 757 is some hellbent way to have some control in certain death. I guess I’d…
Why You Are Your Junk Mail: Reputation Silos and Madison Avenue’s Doctrine of Predestination
Besides this particular website, go to any of the others you frequent and, if you’ve done any online shopping ever you’ll find all these creepy, tailored advertisements along the sidebars of the news you are reading, or the new shoes you are checking out, or the movie you are reading up on. I recently bought a leather dopp kit for myself, and now if you are looking at anything–anything!– on my computer–sports, international news, search engines–you would think I have this obsession with leather goods and world travel. Now on my Gmail inbox–do you have this?–there are spookily, hair-raisingly accurate…
The Crazy-Making IPO: Facebook Madness and the Compulsive iDisorder
Add one more to the tally, after Franzen, after Marche, after Turkle. The Wall Street Journal‘s “Smart Money” blog, Pay Dirt, which does a lot of interesting behavioral economics writing, performed a quick psychoanalytic survey of the madness of Facebook “liking,” in wake of the IPO attention the company is getting. Its findings were telling if not all that remarkably surprising: we compulsively compare, and the comparison to such inaccurate standards leads to compulsive modes of depression. When we see standards with whom we are well- (or at least perceivedly well-) acquainted, the Law of Liking meets us where we…
When Enron Gamed the System
This one comes to us from the illustrious Jim Zucker:
Living in Houston, even more than ten years after the collapse of Enron, references to Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, et al., still catch my attention. Recently, Fastow, the Enron CFO who became the Government’s “star witness” in its prosecution of Lay and Skilling and has served his own jail sentence, spoke to a Financial Statement Accounting class (riveting!) at Tufts. His observations (as conveyed by the professor) on the effect of the law and regulation are not surprising to regular Mockingbird readers:
“Regulation has not prevented fraud. In fact, it…
The Law of the Shelf: What Lives Behind Your Amazon Order
Amazon is scary good, people. It’s always kind of an unsettling miracle when the order you’ve placed online finds its way to your front door, as though there’s some magical winged deliverer, some mythical albatross who, from the belly of the earth, has brought to your stoop longed-for treasures. It’s amazing. Granted, most of us naturally remember the one time this process did not work out so romantically, the time the wrong power converter/phone charger/ABBA record/hair treatment came, but how often has that happened, honestly? Amazon is really good at getting you what you demand. And you are one tough…
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Another Week Ends: DFW50, Simpsons 500, Ira Talks Radiolab, Rowling Talks New Novel, Helpless Women, Helpless Kids, Lenten Identity, Cormac McCarthy Pictionary
All the best wishes for those mockingbirds at the Liberate Conference in Fort Lauderdale this weekend, including our very own David Zahl.
1. Along with the rest of the blogosphere this week, we wish David Foster Wallace a happy 50th birthday. There’s too many blessings to recount, but the web has exploded with numerous avenues for you to get your feet wet or soul soaked. Take a look at The Awl’s “46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday,” a piece of which includes an 86-minute interview with German TV ZDF, the first of which you’ll find…
Targeted Shopping Habits and Preemptive Diaper Ads
Yikes! The NY Times ran a lengthy piece by Charles Duhigg this past weekend about absurdly precise, borderline Big Brother market research techniques that companies like Target (pun sort of intended…sigh) are pioneering to capture our dollars. The article doubles as an overview of recent breakthroughs in the study of habit formation, and it’s disconcerting on a number of levels.
For our purposes, the main ‘takeaway’ isn’t exactly news: we are all creatures of enormous habit, much of which is unconscious, and regardless of how autonomously we like to think of ourselves, it is our painful predictability that unites us –…
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Another Week Ends: Immortal Smartphones, Jefferson Bethke, Adolescent Rewards, Profound Comedy, Therapeutic Irony, more George Lucas, Pixar and Hunger Games
1. In last weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Carina Chocano explained “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg” – AKA what our current obsession with “data” has to say about our humanity – dropping her usual allotment of insight bombs along the way. Not only does she point out the increasingly prevailing illusion that if something wasn’t ‘documented’ it didn’t happen, she gets at the real crux of our smartphoned existence: the false promise of immortality. In other words, a familiar serpent has found its way into the, um, Apple Store:
This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that…
The Myth of Brainstorming and the Fruit of Passive (Non-)Management
Why do we find it easy to be creative in some situations and not others? What sorts of atmospheres shut down our imagination? And what sorts stimulate it? A pair of fascinating articles from pop science/human limitation guru Jonah Lehrer appeared this past week seeking to answer these questions, a short one in Wired and a longer one in The New Yorker. Presumably in anticipation of his forthcoming book on how creativity works. Lehrer relays a number of important findings on the subject, not the least of which is the debunking of brainstorming as a viable method of generating good…
Would Jesus Drive a Pink Cadillac? Mary Kay’s Warm Chatter and the Confessions of a Contact Evangelist
Another one from Mbirder Jason Redcay:
I recently heard a story on The Moth Radio Hour about Jen Lee, an amateur evangelist and Mary Kay Cosmetics saleswoman searching for souls and customers in the aisles of a Target store (if you’re not familiar with the amazing work being done by The Moth, you can find out more about them here). The story deals with her struggle to promote/sell Mary Kay and the Gospel at the same time, and, as you can imagine, it is in turns amusing and sad, not to mention uncomfortably insightful about church culture.
If you don’t…
If You’re Reading This At Work…: Rest, Productivity and Lifehackers
If you need an affirming word (who doesn’t?) to stave off the nagging presence of productivity guilt, if you find a looming self-consciousness with each fork of each road of each infinitesimal decision of each workday (“Should I have e-mailed this first?”), if you wonder why vacations are so longed for and yet always somewhat unfulfilled, check out the Atlantic’s brief post from Derek Thompson about “Why Summer Vacations (and the Internet) Make You More Productive”. There’s more here to uncover than Thompson is interested in addressing, but it’s a start. Similar to an article covered earlier this year in…
Todd Brewer: A brilliant, but sad, analysis. The fall of Michael and George Michael...
Clay: Michael - You could have also named this article "The Grace of Looking...
Tam: oh man, that last paragraph. I really needed that today. Thanks....
Marianne Brian: Loved it. So, so true! I love Ethanisms, as well!...
David Zahl: Wonderful, wonderful piece, E. I'm almost tempted to call it 'charming...