My NPR 3-minute Fiction Entry

I entered NPR’s Three Minute Fiction contest.  The rules are straightforward: using a prescribed first sentence, write a short story in less than 600 words. If I’m the big winner, I’ll be interviewed and have my story read on-air during Weekend All Things Considered and receive an autographed copy of the book “How Fiction Works” by  The New Yorker’s James Wood, who’s judging the contest.

Here’s my submission:

The nurse left work at five o’clock.  He knew what he was doing, leaving mid-shift, but it was time for a change. A mid-shift departure would make change inevitable.

Leaving the employee parking lot, he waived at the attendant and switched on the news.  More reports of layoffs, expiring unemployment benefits, bank failures…yet, he’d walked out.  Mid-shift.

Pulling into the potholed parking lot, he scanned the fenced-in runs to see if it really was Scamp they’d brought in.  “Puppy prison,” he’d called it when his parents took him to the pound to choose a dog for his 8^th birthday.

Prison. Maybe he’d apply for a job at a prison – plenty of job security in a growth industry like that. Maybe he could get a job working on death row, keeping the guys alive until the state could have its justice. He might enjoy working with those who’d accepted their ultimate fate, for a change.

Just an hour before, he’d advised the Johnson family that without a Do Not Resuscitate Order on file, the staff was obliged to keep their mother alive if possible.  Of course he didn’t go running to an administrator just because Mrs. Johnson’s daughter slapped him, but his former co-workers would draw the conclusion that it was the “Johnson family incident” that finally took him over the edge.  Cardiology was notorious for unruly family outbursts. Was it because there was usually no time to plan?

Death row. Opening the door to Puppy Prison he wondered how many they’d gassed today.  The uniformed clerk looked up from her filing and smiled as if she worked at Dairy Queen, not Auschwitz. “Here to pick out a pet?”

“No, my vet called to say you might have picked up my dog – a beagle mix with an attitude.”

“Oh, yes, good thing he had a rabies tag. C’mon back.”

Fifteen minutes later and $50 lighter, he and Scamp merged back into traffic.  Fondling Scamp’s notched ear from a long-ago-lost battle, he mused what a perfect match they were – their sweet faces belied a tendency to pick fights they couldn’t win.

Moving his hand to his own lightly-califlowered ear, acquired four days after he’d started the job he’d just essentially quit, he felt the irony that in that case, he’d tried keep a patient from taking his own life. God, that guy was strong. A monster.

Swerving to miss a kid on a skateboard, the sudden jolt swept Scamp and the cell phone onto the passenger floor.  Scamp was no worse for the wear, but the nurse wondered if this was the last tumble for his old phone. He’d resisted replacing it because all the new phones had features he didn’t want.  “Simplicity” was his new watchword.  Life had gotten too complicated.

After a traffic report, NPR ran a story on the nation’s death panel hysteria. Yeah, everyone’s a little crazy right now. The living take their lives and the dieing want to prolong theirs. Whatever happened to the role of Providence in these things?

Pulling into his driveway alongside the lime green Beetle driven by the home health aide, he was glad his father was past noticing the early hour of his arrival. Pop’s days and nights were indistinguishable to him now.

Scamp pushed past his master. Trotting straight to the living room where they’d set up Pop’s hospital bed, the dog uncharacteristically stopped and whimpered.  The aide looked up; “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, “I tried calling your cell phone ten minutes ago.”

Chocolate Copy

I’m not sure if it’s technically a blessing or a curse that a friend and his family own The Secret Chocolatier.  If I had what’s called a “fortunate metabolism” I wouldn’t be asking the question.

I digress.

My friend needed some fresh copy (<100 words)  and sent me these key phrases to work with:

• Family owned/operated
• Passionate about chocolate
• Traditional recipes
• Handmade
• Taste is paramount
• Products: Chocolate Truffles, enrobed brownies, favors, cakes / wedding cakes

Here’s what I delivered:

We’re a family of chocolate artisans, using traditional recipes and channeling our passion for chocolate into handmade truffles, enrobed brownies, cakes (including wedding cakes) and all manner of favors. There’s chocolate, and then there’s The Secret Chocolatier’s chocolate — your tastebuds know the difference.

After a week’s rest my eyes are fresh. I think I might like it better broken into three sentences:

We’re a family of chocolate artisans.  We channel our passion for chocolate into handmade truffles, enrobed brownies, cakes (including wedding cakes) and all manner of flavors using traditional recipes.  There’s chocolate, and then there’s The Secret Chocolatier’s chocolate — your tastebuds know the difference.

Corporate Bankruptcy Word Cloud

Here’s a free word cloud maker:  www.wordle.net

Simply copy-paste your text or give Wordle an RSS feed and let it work its magic.  When it spits out your custom image, you can play with the layout, fonts and colors to your heart’s content.

I took the two (so far) responses to “Corporate vs Personal Bankruptcy Attitudes” and fed them through Wordle and got this result:

Sink AND Swim

Yesterday I asked a question about attitudes toward individuals filing for bankruptcy protection.

Today I want to point to an article in The Atlantic’s June 2009 edition titled, “Sink and Swim” wherein the magazine’s business and economics editor Megan McArdle argues that a relatively lenient American system of debt forgiveness is actually good for our economy:

“America leads the developed world in bankruptcies because for more than a century, we’ve worked hard to build the best—and, not coincidentally, the most generous—bankruptcy code in existence. We didn’t do it by design, but in fits and starts; the hodgepodge of innovations that have helped systematically ensure that debtors get a fresh beginning were as much the brainchildren of grasping creditors as of beleaguered debtors. Nonetheless, our system works so well that other nations are trying to move away from their harshly punitive treatment of insolvent debtors, and closer to our free-and-easy, all-is-forgiven model.

“Our leniency toward those with unsustainable debts helps not only profligate debtors, but the rest of us as well. Less onerous bankruptcy procedures boost rates of entrepreneurship: reduce the cost of failure, and people become more willing to take risks. America’s business environment is much more dynamic than that of Europe or Japan, for many reasons—and our generosity to capitalism’s losers is one of them.”

Debtor’s prison, anyone?

It seems most people want at least a pound of flesh from the insolvent.  Let’s see how that works by looking at Dubai, a country with no concept of bankruptcy.  As soon as you leave your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren’t covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, you are forbidden to leave the country and they throw you in prison.

Yep, that’s just what we need — more people in prison sucking up public monies for their upkeep instead of trying to start businesses and raise their families on the outside.

Prompts for financial and legal professionals:

• Based on what you’ve seen with your clientele, are we each just a job loss or serious illness away from insolvency?
• Are any of your clients asking if they should liquidate their 401-ks to stave off a bankruptcy filing?  Under what circumstances do you think this is a viable strategy?
• What should our schools do about the lack of financial literacy in America?  What can be done about the financial  illiteracy of adults?
• Has this recession in any way made you re-examine your professional views on the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005?

Corporate vs Personal Bankruptcy Attitudes

I ghostwrite a bankruptcy practice’s blogsite and moderate the comments.  Got an interesting comment last week. The commenter wanted to be on record that bankruptcy attorneys are devil’s spawn who enable the deadbeat insolvent to saddle the piously solvent with their mistakes.

The commenter isn’t the only one with this attitude, which is why I bring it up.

When a company declares bankruptcy the angry mob doesn’t break out the pitchforks and go after the management team or board (with a nod to the quasi-exceptional case of former GM head Rick Wagoner).  But the screeds about people in foreclosure and those who seek bankruptcy protection proliferate like melanoma cells.

Upside-down logic

According to the Institute for Financial Literacy, the four most common causes of financial distress include overextension on credit, unexpected expenses, reduction of income and job loss.  These are essentially the same reasons corporations file for protection (income and job loss more logically rolled together in the case of businesses).

So when it’s the masters of the universe and captains of industry at the helm of corporations making short-sighted decisions that drive their companies into financial distress, why are we so hard on the employees and small business owners whose personal misfortunes are tied to corporate failure?

Welfare Queens?

Those of us alive during the 1980′s remember the famous stories/urban legends of the woman paying for groceries with food stamps, then carrying them out to her new Cadillac.  In other words, gaming the system and thumbing her nose at the rest of us.

Is there a bit of that same belief about individuals who go bankrupt?  That they use bankruptcy as a personal money management strategy like Donald Trump uses it as a business strategy?  Hrumph, even The Donald gets his own TV show and multi-level marketing network of millions.  What gives with our idol worship of this guy and our disgust for the little guys?

I’d really like to know what’s behind the difference in attitude here.  Please weigh in.

Financial Word Clouds

Catching up on reading this weekend and came across two great word clouds in Pat Allen’s Rock The Boat Marketing blog.

For those new to my blog, I post word clouds because they’re valuable whole-brain communications tools; a brief glance tells you what’s important to the author.   Use them in presentations, websites and white papers.

Tell me, please, where you’ve employed a word cloud.

Fidelity’s July US economic update

Oppenheimer’s Weekly Market Review

Old Age in America

My dear friend is going through end-of-life issues with her parents. Below I’ve pasted a missive she sent to me from her childhood home, where she’s been helping out after her father collapsed.

This post has nothing to do with my “business” and the things I usually post, but since I own this blog and get to make all the big editorial decisions, here it is.

Subject line: “Aging in America”

I cracked today. Sitting for two hours outside of the house because the garage door opener wouldn’t work and there was no key and my mother can’t hear the phone while she’s out cold on Darvocet and Atavan at 9am.

… buying a wheel chair, at my mom’s request, then being told it was uncomfortable and “felt funny”

…being told where to turn and when to turn and what speed to drive and what lane to do it in on a route I had memorized thirty years ago

…buying dinner that was “too salty and cooked with some awful hot sauce on it” ( it was a plain chicken sandwich from Arby’s)

…seeing my father hunched over a walker in a shirt flecked with drool in a “rehab” facility where the patients still look like they will only be leaving feet first

…hours where the only conversation is ” do you need a drink, do you need to go to the bathroom, do you want to get in the bed, have you had a bowel movement yet ( not kidding)

…sitting in a room trying to have a conversation where the “roommate” has the TV blaring without any regard for their neighbor– Wheel of Fortune does not sound good at any volume, much less loud

…watching my dad sit there catatonic after an Atavan to “relax” him after a stressful day

What finally got me was when the wife of the room mate closed his curtain to do some clean up on her husband and this horrific odor began to permeate the entire room – it kept getting worse and worse and I had no idea why someone’s shit would stink that bad- then my brother told me that the roommate had a colostomy. I can not describe this stink.

And this facility is the top notch skilled nursing/rehab facility in the region – everyone has said so

That is when I had to leave the room to cry. And cry and cry- but by myself because if my Marine brother sees me cry I will have to take 50 lashes and 100 push ups because I am “an enabler” and too emotional.

The only levity is (my brother) — he says he’s bringing Vicks to stuff up his nose like for autopsies and he reminds Dad that many men would like to have cute little aides wipe their balls and ass.

Oh boy this is fun. I’d rather be working 70hrs. And by the way I have yet to get online to try to do my job. Even an aircard does not get reception in this house in the country.

I truly suck at this. Lousy daughter.

I invite your comments, good wishes and prayers for my friend and her family below

CAN-SPAM Clarity

The  recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision surprised me.  In it, the judges touted the “beneficial aspects” of email marketing. WOW.

“The purpose of the CAN-SPAM Act was not to stamp spam out of existence,” the court wrote. “There are beneficial aspects to commercial e-mail, even bulk messaging, that Congress wanted to preserve, if not promote.”

The court decided that the federal CAN-SPAM law doesn’t allow individual recipients to bring lawsuits. Instead, the only private parties who can sue under federal law are Internet service providers (ISPs).

Putting the ISPs in the driver’s seat means now, more than ever, you need an email service that they trust.  Do not try bulk mailing from your own inbox.

“I loved the way he used PowerPoint”

The anti-PPT bandwagon doesn’t have room for another rider. My only addition to the chorus  is that a bad PPT-based presentation is like a bad dog — blame the owner!

PPT isn’t inherently bad, but, like a Rotweiller, can be placed in the wrong hands and do real damage.

I generally agree with the authors of Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, “You are the message. Who you are–your character, experience, values–shapes the message your listeners hear.”

Dan Ariely, PowerPoint master

Last year I heard Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor at my B-school (Fuqua — Duke) speak on behavioral economics and his first book Predictably Irrational.

In staccato diction, he regaled us with tales of our irrational behavior — like why we won’t pay $3000 for a leather couch in the family room while we will pay the same amount for a leather interior in our family car — and he did it with the delivery skills of any comedian’s aspiration.

If he’d been a rock star we’d have whipped out our cigarette lighters and stomped our  feet until he gave an encore.

And yes, he used PPT, including a slide with an x-ray of Homer Simpson’s brain.  See?  I remembered that one.

In defense of PowerPoint

Recall a time when someone gave a terrific, memorable, actionable presentation WITH PPT, as Professor Ariely did.

I’ll wait.

OK, I can’t wait all day.

If you did have the good fortune of attending such an event, you’ll recall that PPT didn’t make it great — it was great because the speaker had something to say and said it with conviction; they knew their stuff cold, engaged the audience, told stories and stayed ON POINT.  Did the PPT help?  Maybe, after all, who knows how it would have gone without the screen?

Reasons for PPT:

• Leave-behind for those who couldn’t make it to the live event
• Guided handout for taking notes
• Satisfies the need for visual stimulation
• Illustrate points graphically

Bottom line:  No one says “I loved the way he used PowerPoint;” but if you’re a good presenter they’ll say “I’d go see him speak again.”

Malcolm Gladwell speaks

A friend of mine had the good fortune of attending The Foundation for the Carolinas’ annual meeting.  You can hardly drag me to one of those, but I wish I’d gone to this one.  Why?  Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell did the keynote.

According to my friend, Gladwell took a wireless mike and roved the audience, telling stories about a town in (I believe) Pennsylvania and how and why it prospered and failed.  My friend, a public relations pro who is not easily impressed, was awed.

Just the opposite of Ariely, Gladwell is soft spoken.  Where Ariely is irreverent, Gladwell is earnest.  Both can bring the house down.

I’m not a qualified speaking coach — my specialty is the content — but to me this is the bottom line:  You don’t have to be “dynamic” to get your message across.  The book mentioned earlier, Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, got good reviews and the website and book Presentation Zen is chock full of great stuff. And I’m always here to help.

It’s easy to bash PPT, and you’re welcome to bash away in the comments section.  I’d really like to hear from you about a presentation that thrived WITH the visual support.

August Book Lust

If anyone’s read these, please write a review.  My appetite for books far exceeds the time I can devote to them.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

Excerpts from The Washington Post’s review
Fox, a business columnist for Time, spins a fascinating historical narrative, beginning with economist Irving Fisher’s paean to markets in, alas, 1929. Postwar economists such as Paul Samuelson noticed that most investment pros do not beat the averages. This led to the one positive contribution of the efficient-market hypothesis: Jack Bogle’s invention of index funds, which mimic the performance of the stock market as a whole and keep ordinary people from wasting their money trying to beat it. Fox recognizes that true believers in the market’s efficiency suffered from a “blinkered” mindset and “tunnel vision.” Yet I think he lets them off too easily. He laments (as if it were necessary) the lack of any alternative “grand new theory” and finds that the debate has resulted in a “muddle.”

Fox concludes, “If you do come up with an idea for beating the market, you need a model that explains why everybody else isn’t already doing the same thing.” Not necessarily. Markets aren’t physics. Maybe no one model explains them. The emerging school of behavioral finance fills in many of the gaps left by the efficient marketers. Behavioral finance, which Fox discusses at length, holds that financial man — far from the perfect, mechanical trader depicted in textbooks — is a rather neurotic fellow. He follows the crowd, fails to plan ahead and often makes mistakes. To think that his every price is perfect is a remarkable error indeed.

The Ascent of Money:  A Financial History of the World

Excerpts from The Washington Post’s review

The pleasure of reading Ferguson’s treatment comes partly from the clarity of his explanations of financial concepts but mostly from his pen portraits of the extravagantly gifted and flawed characters who have led money’s long rise. He shows us how far we have come since Mesopotamian moneylenders developed rudimentary accounting around 1,000 B.C. and the Medici created elements of modern banking in 14th- and 15th-century Florence. But he also weaves a long series of manias, panics and crashes into his tale. The Medici family’s surviving papers, he notes, bear scorch marks from the vengeful reformist Savonarola, who set up a Bonfire of the Vanities to destroy sinful goods and sent the Medici packing in one of the periodic reversals of fortune to hit financial leaders over the centuries.

Ferguson sketches the rollicking career of John Law: Scottish con man, killer, genius, lover and creator, in 1719-20, of one of history’s great stock market bubbles. Law effectively took control of the French national debt, substituted paper currency for gold and sold shares in the company that controlled French Louisiana. As the shares rose in price and investors borrowed against them, the volume of paper money doubled in a year, breeding inflation, speculation and the new term “millionaire” before Law’s system collapsed. From that day on, Ferguson writes, all bubbles have followed five stages:

1) Displacement, as economic change brings a chance for extraordinary profits; 2) Euphoria, as investors take advantage of the opportunity, 3) Mania, as novices, crowds and swindlers rush in; 4) Distress, as insiders see their prospects for profit declining because of the mania and start selling; and 5) Revulsion, as all stampede for the exits.

Guts:  Combat, Hellraising, Cancer,  Business Start-ups, and Undying Love: One American Guy’s Reckless, Lucky Life

From Publishers Weekly
Vietnam vet, cofounder of New England Monthly and a media consultant, Nylen, who died last year, shares with punchy humor and tremendous grace his tough approach to taking risks and staring down exacting bosses as well as cancer.

Cherishing such stoical role models as Don Quixote and Ulysses S. Grant (as well as his own father, who spent his prime years as a DuPont executive before a traumatic fall altered his life permanently), Nylen celebrates America’s admiration with gutsiness, and his own lifetime attempts (frequently foolish) to make the Cool Guys Hall of Fame.

The bulk of this memoir is Nylen’s facetious though moving account of his stint as an infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968, and the men he loved and lost—the ghastly experience, he assures readers, was never accurately depicted in popular movies. Shell-shocked, married after release from the army, simulating a normal person and appearing unemployable, he began his accidental career as a media ad salesman starting at Look magazine, dealing with tough bosses like Bill Dunn at U.S. News and World Report and Mike Levy at Texas Monthly before embarking on his own.

Diagnosed with colorectal cancer stage III when he was 60, he endured treatments, surgeries, pain and frequent accidents of his own making, but preserves his cheerful, frank, optimistic and ever competitive spirit in the face of mortal adversity.

*Notes:  The review doesn’t mention that Nylen founded BeliefNet.com.  And yes, I believe that is a set of brass balls on the cover.

Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

In his first book, communications consultant-to-the-stars (Sprint, Nextel, Cisco, Nortel, TI, Motorola) and “expert in consumer behavior” Martin uses ideas from the worlds of science, technology, psychology, history, philosophy and business to demonstrate how a consumer’s unconscious controls most of his or her behavior. As a result, Martin argues, companies large and small are wasting money and energy engaging the wrong part of the brain (my emphasis added) -rather than worrying over expected behavior or ultimate satisfaction, marketers should focus on how buying habits form through simple, time-tested methods like reward and repetition.

How else would brands like Microsoft-infamously frustrating but ingrained in the culture-and Starbucks coffee-overpriced but ubiquitous (and literally addictive)-make it? In a reportorial style fit for both marketing executives and savvy consumers, Martin presents interviews with marketers, researchers and scientists that outline the principles supporting his method, delineating the executive mind from the habitual (unconscious) mind, exploring how an ideal product like the iPod targets both minds, and providing a blueprint for creating habitual buyers. Martin’s argument requires readers to suspend some long-held beliefs about consumers, but rewards them with some eye-opening perspective.

Update

A Twitter friend  alerted me to this video after I tweeted the url

Another Tweep told me about Paul Krugman’s review of the book in NYT.

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