purple motes

Steve Outing observes:

For years, sports enthusiasts have read about their sports in magazines, mostly — with advice and celebrity profiles written by professional journalists and freelancers, and the occasional athlete. But what we’re seeing with the EG sites [here] (which are primarily about climbers/bikers/runners/et al sharing their own stories and images) is that people like being the writers and photographers themselves, and viewing the amateur musings of fellow enthusiasts who they can interact with easily and directly.

Some recent research is consistent with this view:

Advertisements featuring endorsements by celebrities such as David Beckham are less effective than those featuring ordinary people, new research suggests. This is because keeping up with the Jones's rather than with famous people is the main motivation behind many people's choice of which product to buy.[1]

Personally, I'm keen to keep up with my brother Dwight. But he is, in fact, a celebrity.

Note:

[1] Quoted from University of Bath press release (separate paragraphs condensed). The research that is the basis for this press release seems to be Torsten Tomczak, Daniel Wentzel, and Martin Brett, "Consumer Susceptibility to Normative Influence," forthcoming in Journal of Advertising, 2007. While that journal bills itself as "the premier journal devoted to the development of advertising theory and its relationship to practice," not making the paper and associated data freely available on the web makes this research less credible.

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This month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats is dedicated to the importance of management. Nothing is more important to bureaucracy than periodic restructuring of management, along with associated renaming of business divisions. In a well-functioning bureaucracy, management generates the work demand that sustains the existence of the organization. Moreover, management statements determine the success or failure of the organization.

Noted management consultants Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman worked with The Turtles, a rock band that gained popularity in the late 1960s. Using frequent managerial restructuring combined with a multi-manager generalization of matrix management, Kaylan and Volman succeeding in getting the organization to sing Happy Together.

Charles H. Green's Trust Matters states:

The continued existence of a particular corporate organization is a pretty un-inspiring goal, when you think of it. ...
The point is not to last. The point is to do great things for all your constituents. Where continued existence helps, great. Otherwise, standing water stagnates. The visionary thing works; but these days, the vision had better be to change, morph, grow, evolve, turnover, shift.

Self-perpetuation is a primary imperative of life. Bureaucracy has a life of its own. Thus self-perpetuation is a primary imperative of bureaucracy. Maybe that's not inspiring, but that's the way life is.

Jack Yoest at Reasoned Audacity discusses an influential article on managing management time. The article asks:

Why is it that managers are typically running out of time while their subordinates are typically running out of work?

While this outcome is theoretically possible, it's unlikely in a well-functioning bureaucracy. In a well-functioning bureaucracy, the persons who rise to management positions are skilled at making work and directing it to others.

Dan Harris at the China Law Blog reports that a government bureaucrat in China has declared that ethnic descrimination does not exist in China: "The 56 ethnic groups are like brothers and sisters living in one family," said the government bureaucrat. This outcome is an example of superb bureaucratic work. The only remaining issue is when they'll be ready to record a Chinese version of Happy Together.

That's all for this month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the Carnival index page.

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As a young child, I remember pondering with my brothers the idea of digging a hole to China. We considered this to be possible. After all, we understood that the earth was round like a ball. But we figured that digging a hole to China would be too much work. We settled on digging a swimming pool. We dug a small hole that filled with muddy water after a rain.

In 1994, concerned about economic reforms in Russia, I decided to write a Russian novel. Russian popular culture, it seemed to me, lacked hugely popular literary masterpieces like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and Stephen R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I imagined writing something like Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, but updated to reflect subsequent insights from economic history.

You can't swim in that hole we dug. But, if you can read Russian, you can now read the chapters that I wrote of that Russian novel. They probably won't contribute much to Russian economic success. But perhaps some Russian schoolchildren might find them amusing. Here's the English translation of the title and the first paragraph:

The Way to Wealth

Chapter 1

Several years ago in Saint Petersburg I met an American. A lot of those foreigners are running around now, talking with everyone, and no one follows them. I met this American in that new restaurant Pizza Hut. He was sitting next to me, and I noticed that he had on his pizza green peppers, onions, and broccoli. On my pizza was sausage. [more in Russian]

Technical notes: Because I wanted this work to be culturally authentic, I chose to type it using the KOI8-R character encoding. I'm grateful to Petko Yotov's Universal Cyrillic decoder for converting it to CP 1251, an encoding easier to use with MS Windows computers. Babelfish offers Russian-to-English machine translation, but the results in this case are quite bad. So if you don't read Russian, you'll probably have to wait for machine translation technology to improve in order to appreciate this unfinished literary masterpiece.

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