Some thoughts on negotiation need writing down, because that's how agreements work.
Agreements end not with a handshake but a signature.
I learned why early in my writing career. I was taking a new job editing a weekly newspaper, and all that stood between me and my future boss was salary. I wanted him to match what I was paid in my last job. We were apart $5 a week. Newspaper salaries being what they were, this could have been a deal breaker.
"Well," he said, "I'm not going to argue about $5."
I thought he was conceding, and I had won the argument. So I took the job. But when I got my first paycheck, it came short of my expectations—$5 short. Every agreement has its checks and balances, and this check was what counted toward my bank balance.
Since then I've taken many other jobs. I've sat in on union contract talks. I've drafted vendor contracts. I've discussed community agreements with local businesses. Till I see a John Hancock, I'm never sure whether something has been agreed, or only promised.
President Wilson looks on from my grandfather's 1915 journal.
Taking note of my note-taking helped improve my outlook. A lifetime of writing and I might yet get it right.
My dad kept a to-do list on an index card folded in his wallet. He would retrieve it from the billfold like a fiver, and add to the list or cross something off.
I kept a to-do list in my head. But my bosses tended to reward co-workers who kept action items on paper. "I know you've got it all thought out," one told me. "But what if you get run over by a bus? Then I'd be lost." So now I make plans.
Since my days in college lecture halls I'd recorded what others say in the moment, in detail. It still took some sort of test for me to go back and study my notes. Taking verbatim notes as a reporter required more speed than neatness. I'd hold eye contact with my source, and the pen would float over the notepad as if across a Ouija board, guided by an occult hand. I scrawled every which way, but legibly enough so to transcribe before I forgot the conversation.
When I started in project management, I carried a notebook to meetings. Software may have managed my action items better, but the notebook never needed a recharge or restart. My notes remained very much in the moment, till they met their end in a filing cabinet graveyard.
It was high time to reflect on and organize my thoughts. This was a change of direction for both my penmanship and my process. This was my entry into journaling.
In the mid-1990s a research-minded class of e-commerce websites was incubated in Chicago's Gothic Tribune Tower.
We all lead by design. My first Chicago Tribune web project taught me about leadership styles and the value of a team.
In 1997 I started working in a cramped suite on an upper floor of Tribune Tower. Desks were pushed together to hold boxy computer monitors, and the worn linoleum floor tiles showed cement below. Not much different from my old spot on the Chicago Sun-Times copy desk, but now I was building websites for the Chicago Tribune.
None of us in the room had built much more than a home page before, but months earlier our publisher Owen Youngman had launched chicago.tribune.com. (It took another year for Tribune to buy the chicagotribune.com domain—tribune.com was just fine for the whole chain, thank you.) I'd quit the Sun-Times business section. Building websites seemed more interesting than writing about them.
We were a roomful of hyphenates. Mike DiGioia, the art director, was a zine editor and Cuba tourist. Brian Neale our automotive expert, was a sportswriter who rode his motorcycle to the Tower. Ernesto Perez was a designer-DJ, Elise Bittner a travel writer-chef, Jayne Lilienfeld an ecologist-sculptor, Marilia Gutierrez a reporter-interpreter.
Editor Bill Swislow had published a Tribune business digest via the new medium of fax machine, and a personal home page with cultural critiques of Nancy and Sluggo comics. He dabbled in outsider art, and kept Martin Denny LPs propped up against his desk lamp just for the kitsch of it. All of us had multiple interests, a good plan if you're not sure exactly what skills you'll eventually need.
New media, new rules
This team taught me more about leadership than when I was bossing around reporters. Though I was an officer in my professional society, I hadn't seen myself as a leader. Bosses had tough names and tough reputations. Ken Lay. Mike Ditka. Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Neutron Jack Welch. The Sun-Times newsroom was full of gruff J. Jonah Jameson types to my neurotic Peter Parker. On the business beat, corporate chieftains were losers if they weren't following Welch's lead and firing 10% of their staff as slackers.
There's more than one way to lead, though, and the internet was here to school us. Youngman admitted he didn't have all the answers. "Every day I'm going to make a wrong decision," Youngman would say. "No one knows what will prove to be right. Still, if I don't make decisions I'll miss opportunities." Although surfing the web put Youngman in rough waters, he had started new sections of the Tribune, and was convinced that the internet was more than a fad. His enthusiasm for an unproven medium made him a persuasive leader.
“Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.”
What's a quest without a Yoda to challenge the hero?
"Star Wars" lifted a story line as old as Homer, right down to the sage older adviser for Odysseus, a character named Mentor. For ages since, the stories we tell ourselves about our professional and personal lives leave a role for mentors. Mastery requires finding a master.
Except that Yoda was right. An apprentice is just an apprentice. Yoda had a job to do, training Jedi knights. Eight centuries on he's still at it. Here comes yet another hotshot, young Skywalker. Yoda doesn't need this. When Luke shows up, Yoda thinks, Leia this is not. Yoda plays the fool, toying with this pretty boy who crashed on Dagobah with his pet robot. In the end he agrees to help Luke master the Force. Duty calls.
Mentorship likely will confound me till I reach Yoda's age. In this galaxy, mentors are on bad paper. They mansplain the obvious. Their motives are suspect. They look like Harvey Weinstein. They act like Harvey Weinstein.
And while I've trained a lot of people in a lot of jobs, my work was to teach the ways of journalism or blogging or spreadsheets or databases. A mentor your boss is not. At times I strayed from this mission, though. Once as an editor, I told one of my staffers the way to get ahead faster was to work elsewhere. The staffer left journalism, but not immediately. We're still in touch decades later.
Like a baseball pitcher, the exceptional communicator chooses a delivery for a specific effect.
Why do so many job listings call for an "exceptional communicator"?
This phrase appears so often in postings that I searched one of the recruitment sites for Exceptional Communicator Jobs in Chicago. I came up with 9,000 listings. Is there even enough oxygen in the Windy City for thousands of exceptional communicators?
Resumes adopt keywords from job postings, so mine should state that I have "exceptional written, oral, interpersonal, and presentation skills." In theory, that exact wording will engage the job-matching robot and move me to the top of the list.
In the real world, Exceptional Communicator is not a job title. Human screeners would reject "exceptional communicator" on a resume—that's not how exceptional communicators write. Get past the HR department and into an interview, and less-than-exceptional communicators will be on the other side of the desk. Your mission is to draw out at least some details about the job beyond those buzzwords, and to display a few useful skills. It's exceptionally difficult.
Exceptionalism disproves a rule
Applicants need to show that they're aware of their communication style, but they may have trouble defining it. The great writers learn to "show, don't tell," but HR departments aren't looking for Chekhov an a resume. A glint of light on broken glass certainly won't interest the applicant tracking software in your moonlighting.
Resume robots pick out words like collaboration or flexibility that imply an approach to communication. Exceptional communicators can read a situation and respond in any number of ways—whatever gets results. The rule is not to know your style but to change your style.
For at least 20 years, webmasters have been engaged in search engine optimization, or SEO. There's a system for everything — Google's engineers call theirs an algorithm — and to get our work recognized we must learn how search engines find and rank pages.
This process seems like the punishment of Sisyphus: Not to be gamed, Google keeps its process in flux, making any victory fleeting. Just the same, if there's a way to game the system, it will be found. It takes both engineers and marketers to maintain stasis. This makes all the rules around SEO subject to debate. The marketer's first rule of SEO is: You talk endlessly about SEO.
With no shortage of opinion, the facts about this generation of search seems as mystifying as ever. Typing "seo" into the Google search bar brings me a range of results, including the bio of Johnny Seo, K-pop boy band heartthrob. Yet if I type "seo as a noun" I'll retrieve detailed definitions of SEO and arguments for the acronym's use as noun, adjective or verb.
The endless search for knowledge about search has made me shy from work as a full-time SEO. Yet from my experience as a writer and developer, I've formed 3 basic SEO rules.
Picture your route to work. Some of it could move more quickly, but in other places you intentionally stop to talk to friends, or pick up something to eat. Or it's not a destination but a point where you reflect on what's ahead.
For me that's the subway stop near my home. Not so much the subway itself—we share the tunnel with quite a few creatures but it's not like visiting the zoo. And not so much the entrance, where the stairway is getting patched checkerboard style with whatever tile's on hand, and when it rains you have to dodge the puddles.
Beyond the Blue Line entrance at Division is a small plaza, which is possibly even less notable. Milwaukee Avenue is the cross street, and in Chicago we love our diagonal intersections. North, Damen and Milwaukee is just up the street, the gateway to Bucktown, and people are all in a hurry to get somewhere and walking every which way, no matter what the traffic signals say. Here, where Division intersects Ashland just a bit short of Milwaukee, there's this triangle-shaped wedge of a plaza that floats in the intersection like a raft. People mostly avoid it, as if it would float away.
The station and its patchwork staircase are due for renovations, so I was describing this place to a Tribune reporter. It's not as welcoming an area as it should be, I said. There's a constant fight against pigeons. I went on at great length, but those 16 words are all that got in the paper. When talking to a reporter, always keep a sound bite handy. This isn't the one I would have chosen.
It's not fake news. The reporter started out the column calling it a gray pigeony place—if pigeony is a word, it's unknown to Google spell check—and the pigeons helped out by posing for the Tribune photographer. So this part of the story has the insistent coo of truth. But my point was to look beyond the subway station and give some love to what has long been called the Polish Triangle.
SoxFest people, there's no need to dress for the occasion. We all know why we’re here.
Spring is coming. I've seen it on the horizon at SoxFest.
SoxFest is the annual gathering for fans of the summer game played on the South Side. North Siders have a similar event, Cubs Convention, that's just as silly as the Chicago White Sox event—three days in a hotel mostly standing in line. Think of it as Disney World, but without the thrill rides.
Like most rituals, the fan festivals signify something unseen. A fan convention starts a process in which a major league baseball team assembles its coaches and staff for spring training. Pitchers and catchers will report to Arizona on Feb. 12, but in the bleak midwinter, fans can get a read on spring before the groundhog (which by the way a minor-league mascot in the Braves system.)
So Brenda and I go. The couples we sit with in the ballpark go. We all meet each other in the halls and coffeeshops and bars at the Chicago Hilton, comparing notes on who's available to sign what and when. Collectively we’re trying to recreate the ballpark experience by killing time creatively.
