A blog I have bookmarked, by celebrity-teacher Seth Godin, this week (Nov 22-23) has a short post on kindness, right below a short post on google. Seth’s trademark is short posts.
The kindness post graphed how the word “kind” has been used in books, over the past 200 years, far, far more often than the words “smart” or “generous.” What Seth didn’t need to point out is? There’s a lesson here.
His other post implied, without directly saying so, that “google” and “being kind” do not go in the same sentence. This without him saying anything about google losing one or more big government court cases, such as against the European Union. I have never forgotten a father who had, down the years, placed all of his growing child’s pictures on google… only to have all the pictures vanish forever. “Because google.” Seth’s advice was to backup everything.
Don’t trust google.
But short years ago google was not an Evil Goliath but more like a good David. One landmark day, as all the staff gathered to ponder the google mission and vision and market values, a computer software engineer sitting at the back proposed, “Don’t be evil.” The slogan verbally gained a lot of traction… but… it was never formally adopted. The engineer, Paul Bucheit, has since left, and google, to use a phrase the digital generation will instantly recognize, “went to the dark side.”
How can I say such a cruel thing about poor google? Easy: because “actions speak louder than words,” and “by their fruits ye shall know them.”
Another of my bookmarked blogs is by Scott Berkun (the guy from my post Delighted by Design) There a reader commented that google had expected him to legally sign that he had been given, and had read, the employee handbook. (Policy and procedures manual) But he couldn’t do the latter because he couldn’t do the former: There was no book. When he couldn’t sign a legal lie, google got rid of him. (His friends with the company urged him to sign—I guess the darkness had reached them)
Scott’s post, by the way, is a good one, about how “company culture” is a powerful thing, hard for competitors to copy. And yes, I’m somewhere among his 69 comments.
Given that I have never set foot in Silicon Valley, my personal knowledge of google is that of the little guy. My old blog, at blogspot, aka Blogger, was hosted by google. I would have such fun checking my stats to see what unusual search words people used to find my posts—google does search, right? But they stopped posting the words because they didn’t want the big guys, the corporate marketers, to know which words were succeeding. I guess millions of us little guys suddenly became chopped liver.
This summer google changed Blogger. “New and improved?” No! One guy on the Blogger forum noted that now our blogs were only good for saying, “Today I ate a sandwich.” By “today” he meant an “eternal present,” because folks could no longer easily or effectively consult or scroll any blog history or archives. This while I have always tried to make posts that would still worth reading many seasons on, called “evergreens.” Just like the posts of Scott Berkun—who is not on blogger.
Note: My old blog, lacking my new gimmick of “nothing over 900 words,” meant keeping myself busy for each post with many man-hours of writing and polishing. Not that I was especially gifted at essays, but hey, you get better by practising, right? We all need a hobby. And some of my posts were good enough to be translated, as I found out only from my stats feature—the translators never bothered to say hello.
A lot of smart people work at google, so maybe I’m wrong or crazy: Could I somehow document and footnote? Sure, see the footnotes below, including this zinger, from the sprawling Blogger help forum: “I haven’t seen one comment on here from someone saying they liked the new interface.”
If you ask me, google just doesn’t care. Dark side. So as Seth advises, don’t trust google, but instead backup everything.
My final story (I forget where I read it, maybe Clayton Christensen) is from back in the days when businessmen traveled by trains, not airplanes. A couple of professors had made a very good research and marketing report for a business. Although in academia charts and graphs and figures and footnotes speak for themselves, the two nevertheless had to take a train to go report to “the board” in person. The younger professor was puzzled, and asked the older prof, “Why?” “Because they want to “see” us.” He meant: “judge our credibility.”
Corporate culture is powerful, but hard to achieve, as hard as building one’s personal culture of integrity, common sense and kindness.
Just in case I ever have to take a train to meet a board: The easiest way to persuade a board of a dozen seasoned businessmen to “see” that “Yes, I can cut through your problem” is not only to document, but to have “sharpened my ax” by having spent time achieving my personal culture of credibility. If this were easy then everyone would do so… See? Not much competition.
(878 words)
…
…
Sean Crawford, kind comments are a joy forever
South of Red Deer
November 2020
Footnotes, as promised:
From a blog I have bookmarked, Orange Crate, of a retired professor, a man old enough to remember the fiasco of the new coke, comes “Is New Blogger the New Coke?”
From Blogger help forum: “They don’t care…I’ve been complaining about this new interface for months, I haven’t seen one comment on here from someone saying they like the new interface…I’m shutting down my blogs…I’ve been blogging since 2007…I’m not going to blog anymore..Or at least not on BLOGGER…I’m done as of today. I had four blogs that I published nearly daily…I enjoyed writing them…With this new interface, it is very stressful…Nothing is worth all of this..They don’t care about our complaints..And I’m tired of arguing with them.”
Remember back in innocent times when the F.B.I. wouldn’t admit the mafia existed? As a mafia guy told Archie Bunker on a 1970’s TV sitcom, “Shhh! Don’t say that word! Do you know what the F.B.I. calls organized crime? Organized crime!”
For those who don’t read Russian, the above is an advertisement from their mafia, a group that grew partly because of us: The west blasted the bonds of Russian society by forcing them to get away from communist rationing—cold turkey! Even though, as Canada’s prime minister (P.E.T.) warned us at the time, Britain’s own rationing had lasted into the mid-1950’s well past WWII.
To me, the only solution is the slow hard work of rebuilding civil society. Like in southern Italy today (November 2020) where decent folks are trying to rebound, after the mafia has been as bad as Covid-19 for the Italian medical system and hospitals.
In the meantime, even if you don’t believe in the devil, please believe in the Russian mafia and Putin’s state troll farms. The “farms,” rows of computer scoundrels, only act through social media, not traditional media.
Please be careful about believing what gets forwarded on the web.
Very good post! We are linking to this great post on our website. Keep up the good writing. Jessy Hansiain Raveaux
I’m going to remove the Russian comment because I am getting so much spam comments. I don’t know much about computers, but maybe the spam is because I left the other one up.