How we invented the internet

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.

A mentor your boss is not

“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.

The pitch for exceptional communicators

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.

How do you describe a communication style? My research suggests that there are three basic communication types, or four major styles, or five ways to communicate or maybe six, or "your style is unique."

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.

Google rules: 3 search engine mysteries

Johnny Seo: Why is this man in my Google?

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.