Back in 1996, when I was publishing my short-lived zine, zuzu's petals — which, in a wonderful bit of circularity, played a significant role in my getting married! — I wrote a pretty cynical essay about why I loved It's A Wonderful Life, not so much for its purportedly uplifting message, but rather for its "unintentionally subversive message".
Pictures are very often worth much more than 1,000 words, and something about this one, as the rumors of Clinton being on the verge of becoming Obama’s Secretary of State appear to be true, is oddly reassuring.
Despite all the heated rhetoric of the primary season, I share Sullivan’s slightly cynical take on it:
The differences between Clinton and Obama were always exaggerated; and we need all the talent we can get. I defer to no one in Clinton Derangement Syndrome, which is why I believe it’s good for them to have their hands full and to be kept under surveillance.
I didn’t like the idea of her as President (or Vice President), as much because of the question of Bill as her own deficiencies as a leader — which in some ways are directly related to each other — but I kind of like the idea of her and Obama becoming the new faces of the US abroad. It’s a powerful symbolic combination for a country that purports to be dedicated to the idea of all “men” being created equal.
A couple of jobs back, when I still worked only in marketing, I used to joke around with an ebiz friend about which of us had the bigger “smoke and mirrors” job. I developed media kits, sell sheets and emails to promote our wares, and fought with our emedia department tooth and nail on developing the right tools for us to sell to our specific market; meanwhile, he was focused on finding new emedia products that worked on a corporate level and which the emedia department would have to implement and support across multiple markets. Neither of us had any solid metrics for what we did to really determine our effectiveness, while the sales reps depended on both of us to do our jobs well in order to effectively navigate the magical revenue stream that runs through cyberspace.
Except, of course, there is no such magical stream, as many publishers are now finding out.
Seth Godin, of whom I’m quickly becoming a disciple, isn’t a big fan of the emedia=revenue mindset that’s driving a lot of initiatives in the publishing world these days, but he’s not simply a naysayer with a soapbox, instead positing a different approach to emedia that, in his opinion, leads organically to revenue…when it’s deserved:
First, the market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It’s not “how can the market make me money” it’s “how can I do things for this market.” Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It’s entirely likely that many people in the chain WON’T make any money. That’s okay. That’s the way change works.
Amen.
In this light, it’s arguably one of the better Veteran’s Days in many years. Certainly the best card I’ve ever received!
More from someecards below the fold, and also on Facebook.
Just do it.
Or, as Gandhi put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
That, in a nutshell, is the primary message of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s masterful mini-manifesto on what it takes to be a leader and why YOU should be the one to take the lead.
“I can tell you this: leaders have nothing in common.
They don’t share gender or income level or geography. There’s no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren’t born. I’m sure of it.
Actually, they do have one thing in common. Every tribe leader I’ve ever met shares one thing: the decision to lead.”
Emphasis mine, but it’s a point Godin returns to several times throughout the book, illustrating it with numerous examples of people from various walks of modern life who didn’t take no for an answer: they rejected the status quo, risked failure to achieve success by being deeply committed to what they believed in, attracted like-minded people to their cause as a result, and led them forward.
“All you need to do is motivate people who choose to follow you…
This leads to an interesting thought: you get to choose the tribe you will lead.
Through your actions as a leader, you attract a tribe that wants to follow you. That tribe has a worldview that matches the message you’re sending.”
Through the wide range of instructive and/or inspirational examples he cites, from the requisite Steve Jobs and Starbucks, to the far more interesting Grateful Dead and Nathan Winograd — he even throws in a nod to Barack Obama, although unnamed, in a brief section sub-titled “Criticizing Hope is Easy” — Godin gets in front of almost every likely objection someone might have for why his premise doesn’t apply to them and knocks them down.
Things are looking shakier by the day for Borders, with GalleyCat now reporting that a Major Distributor Raises Concerns about their financial situation:
GalleyCat has received a copy of a “special alert” sent from a major book distributor specializing in independent publishers to its clients, warning them that Borders, whose financial difficulties are widely recognized, “now tell us that they will not be paying us for two months due to anticipated excessive returns,” a situation the company views with understandable concern. This distributor “typically carries receivables of approximately two million dollars with Borders,” the memo continues. “A default of that amount would by no means put [us] out of business, but it would be painful, weaken the short-term health of the company, and would mean we would have to defer some of our plans for future growth.”
This on top of Barnes & Noble announcing their expectations for a brutal holiday season and no sign of things getting better any time soon:
The chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc. last week told employees via an internal memo that the nation’s largest bookstore retailer is “bracing for a terrible holiday season,” and that he expects “the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.”
In his memo, Leonard Riggio, the retailer’s largest shareholder, noted that comparable store sales, a key retail indicator, recently declined for the first time in the retailer’s history.
“Never in all of the years I’ve been in business have I seen a worse outlook for the economy,” wrote Mr. Riggio. “And never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in. Nothing even close.”
So, if the two biggest brick-and-mortar book retailers in the country are having such a rough time of it, perhaps Amazon.com is picking up the slack and the future of bookselling lies online and the printed book slowly gives way to the Kindle and iPhone?
This morning's sustained exhilaration has been tempered somewhat by the remnants of intolerance as it appears California has narrowly passed Proposition 8, stripping gay couples of the right to marry, largely on the strength of opposition from blacks who voted for it by more than a 2:1 margin. Arizona and Florida passed similar bans, the latter by a depressingly wide margin. As Obama said last night, "the road ahead will be long." The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have…