Cuz You MAGAt Morons Like to Be Lied To

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why You'll Need to Become a Different Kind of Leader

The leadership vacuum created by Washington leaves us without people we can look up to. Entrepreneurs can fill that role -- but you need to step up your game. Here are four ways to do it. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

The next few years, as the pandemic becomes endemic, are going to be some of the most challenging times any company leader will face in their career-- however long they've been at it. Building your business from scratch, rebuilding your existing enterprise, or growing to accommodate new and different opportunities are all going to be brutal tasks. In part because the path forward is so uncertain and the players and circumstances have changed in so many ways. Most of the traditional management tools, storytelling skills, role models, and cultural crutches we've relied on are no longer up to the job. As difficult as it may seem, post-pandemic, the road ahead for CEOs and other senior managers is going to be bumpier than the last three years.

Common concerns and shared values are fractured, scattered; agreed-upon facts and basic behavioral ground rules for deal making no longer exist, and employees' career aspirations, work-life expectations, and goals are all up for grabs. We live in a DIY world where the "story" is always suspect, employees make up their own realities and choose their own situational moralities; compromise is regarded as signs of weakness, and no one knows who to trust or whether anyone should be trusted.

Some of these issues are the rotten remnants of the bottomless pit of crime, corruption, and lies of the Trump presidency. The lies these days outlast the liars; others are the product of years of the destructive influence of social media, where the dream of enhanced connection morphed and soured into hatred, division, and separation. Finally, the loss of more than a million American lives through COVID-19 has shaken everyone's belief in our competence and ability to handle the next crisis.

Our employees, our customers and clients, the media and the general public continue to have less and less trust, comfort and confidence in our national and corporate leadership. This is directly and negatively impacting the prospects for the economy's rapid recovery and growth. Every business leader today needs to learn how to operate in these hostile and critical environments. And sadly, we won't have the previous maps and guidelines that used to help us navigate.

In addition, given the sorry state of our performative politics, we also can't expect any material help or effective leadership from Washington any time soon-- whether it's the bad faith actions of the MAGA morons or the inability of the Democrats to get anything done in the face of the twin obstacles of Republican obstruction and continued right-wing lower court rulings. Does anyone even remember when we had civic, judicial, and corporate leaders that we could honestly look up to? Today, we're stuck with clowns and criminals on all sides; serial liars, lifelong losers, lunatics, and leftover retreads -- a sorry surfeit of dimwits and deniers whose pathetic and obstructive antics are a constant waste of time and energy as well as a global embarrassment.

So, it appears that it's up to the business builders-- the ever-eager entrepreneurs and those remaining credible corporate and company executives as well-- to develop, deliver, and then live up to objectives and behaviors that show the way forward. And we have to do a much better job of sending and selling our messages than even the politicians on the sane side of the fence have done to date.  

 

Here are my four suggestions.

Hold Your Own Head Up - What You Do is More Important Than What You Say

Leadership isn't just a position, it's an ongoing process of storytelling, role playing, and modeling the behavior that's expected of all team members. Leaders can cast shadows or light; in troubled times, we can make ourselves miserable or make ourselves strong -- it takes the same amount of effort. Don't expect others to listen to your advice and ignore your actions or inaction. When bad things happen, as Dr. Suess said, you can let them define you, let them destroy you, or let them strengthen you. The right choice is obvious. Your faith in yourself and your business needs to be stronger than your fear of failure and it needs to be readily apparent to all your people.

 

Commit Yourself and Your Resources Wholeheartedly

Don't try to do things cheaply that you shouldn't do at all, or put lipstick on a pig. The cost of doing things halfway or half-heartedly is the same as doing them correctly and far less stressful. Sticking to your principles 97% of the time is painful and grueling and actually much harder than going all the way all the time. There's no such thing as a minor lapse in integrity. Have the strength and the willpower to do the important things quickly, completely, and to the very best of your ability. If you're not all in, you don't have a position; you've merely got an opinion offered from the cheap seats and not worth much. It just doesn't pay to be tentative: you can't steal second base with one foot on first. If you're going to agree to do something, just say "yes". Don't say "yes, but" because anything you say before "but" won't really mean a thing. "Maybe" is a loser's word-- don't say "maybe" when you should say either "yes" or "no" and mean it.

 

Remind Your Team that You've All Been Here Before and Survived

The best entrepreneurs have learned that, while skill and smarts are important, the largest single determinant of success in the long run is perseverance -- persistence with intention -- not beating your head against a brick wall but understanding that you've faced and triumphed over larger obstacles in the past and that the newest threats are just another set of mountains to climb. Recognizing, reacting, responding and adapting to the latest challenges isn't any more difficult than it was in the past. But it does require confidence and belief in your team and an appreciation for the old Bob Marley line that "you never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice." Sharing prior wins, war stories, desperate times of old and super close calls are all ways to reinforce the message that the only way out of the current swamp is all the way through it to better days.

 

Resist the Temptation to Settle for Silence.

Talk is cheap and plentiful and when the world's on fire around you, there's a powerful tendency in business discussions, and especially in painful personnel negotiations, to "buy" peace and to secure some silence by settling for half a loaf or just giving up on some important concerns. It's always a mistake to deny your convictions for the sake of peace and quiet. Seeking universal consensus so that everyone feels good about the result (except you) is also foolhardy, unachievable and likely to lead to mediocre results in the end.

There are plenty of other problems with settling as well, but the biggest one is that the moment you settle for less than you need or deserve, you generally end up with even less than you settled for. Buying peace is too high a price to pay for a makeshift solution; no business can afford to start making these kinds of bad trades. It's a variation of the old foolish strategy of feeding the beast in the hopes that he'll get satiated before he gets around to eating you. The "asks" never end and the short term answers distract you from addressing the real problems which - just to be clear - don't ever disappear or go away. They just fester and get worse. 

Bottom line: Now's the time to take the time to make sure that everyone on the team is eager, anxious to move ahead, and aligned with where the business needs to go. They're all going to be looking to you for direction and guidance. Make sure you're prepared and up to the task.

 

Howard Tullman Speaking at The Money Show in NYC

 

THE SCUMBAGS FROM THE MAGAt SEWERS

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Is Your Firm's Culture Ready for the WFH Future?

You can order people to show up at the office, but that will waste their time and your money. You need to reshape the way you can share your corporate culture in this new world. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

The latest “encouraging” news from the Chicago media is that maybe 50% of the pre-COVID workforce has returned to their offices in the central business district for at least a couple of days a week. Allegedly, Chicago is doing better than a number of its peers in terms of the re-occupancy rate although I’d take the whole thing - especially in the midst of a fierce mayoral race -- with a major mouthful of salt.

There’s a lot of self-interest surrounding these stats on the part of just about everyone involved in reporting and generating them - the city, the industry, the media, downtown restaurants, theaters, vendors of all kinds, and the employers anxiously presiding over still largely empty nests. They’re all praying for a wave of wandering workers to return to the fold. There’s a pretty fine line between praying and whining, so it’s hard to exactly tell who’s telling the truth. I like the old line from long-time Chicago alderman Ed Burke: If “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts, then every day would be Christmas.

So, as you might imagine, my money’s on planning how you’re going to handle a hybrid workforce that has not only shifted geographically but also one which has shifted irrevocably in a temporal sense as well. And probably, when we look back in a few years, much for the better. If 9-to-5 “shifts” or anything like that ever made sense, it was for factories and for the convenience of foremen, bean counters, attendance takers, and other supervisors. Which has nothing whatever to do with the effectiveness of developers, coders, white collar knowledge workers and managers. It was just as antiquated and counterproductive as sending sleep-deprived students to school at the crack of dawn when the entire world knows that they’re likely to learn next to nothing until after lunch time.

Recapturing hours of foregone daily commuting time, successfully and cost-effectively balancing and managing childcare responsibilities, spending quality time with your kids during their waking hours and working when they were otherwise engaged and dodging the countless interruptions and meaningless meetings have taught us something. Namely, that working anywhere but the office from 9-to-5 makes a ton of sense and increases our productivity.  That is, at least among serious and self-directed grown-ups. I can’t speak for the still-employed bros at home sucking down beers, binging everything on the boob box, and doing more gaming than anything gainful. I actually think that Elon and Mark will eventually take care of them. 

But assuming that you’re interested in retaining and re-inspiring your remote employees you’re going to need to employ new tools, techniques and technologies to help get the job done well. And you’re going to have to overcome some of the concerns and shortcomings that we’ve been living with due to the stop-gap measures that were adopted in the rush and crush of COVID-19.

 (1)   Don’t Blame It on the Time or Distance.

You can lead from anywhere. Leadership is not a matter of physical presence or proximity, it’s all about performance and results. But your management team is going to have change their thinking.  This is not going to be easy for people used to looking over everyone’s shoulder and tracking trips around the office to understand that today it’s about productivity and taking care of business rather than busy-ness. Activity is not a measure of accomplishment. They won’t have the visual cues and the daily connections and collisions that made up so much of the office’s information ecosystem in the past. They need to generate that “connectedness” in new ways.

 Old line managers are also gonna have to make room for the best people to do things the way you want without their hands being held. Tomorrow’s complex and distributed businesses are going to be driven by inbred company culture and performance expectations rather than by rote rules of behavior. You can’t write a handbook big enough to handle the challenges that your team will face in the future. You’re going to have to trust your people to make the right decisions in real time and to get the job done.

 (2)   Take Back Control of the Conversation.

As much as increased employee autonomy will be essential, it’s equally critical that businesses take a step back from some of the behaviors of the last couple of years, which grew out of the peculiar and unique circumstances of the pandemic. First was the hierarchical flattening effect of technologies like Zoom and Slack, where it appeared that everyone on the channel or on the screen had an equal time, voice, impact, and say in the ongoing conversations. The idea that every idea had value, that every thought needed to be expressed, that meetings were more like sharing and therapy sessions -- free to fritter and drift -- rather than structured opportunities to share important information and decisions grew up in the absence of precedent and the novelty of the whole experience. That attitude needs to change.  

 Second was the impression-- especially among new young employees who had never worked at the business before COVID -- that democracy was a virtue in every meeting and decision.  And that critical decisions should and would be the result of votes or polls taken after extensive conversations leading eventually to a consensus. The reality is that Amazon warehouse workers will never have the right to decide which books they pack and ship. The missing message is that, while a smart leader’s job was always to listen and to ideally and ultimately make the right decisions, it was never to delegate or abandon the responsibility of making the final and most difficult calls.

 Lastly, much like our society in general, the promise of constant and continued conversation led in too many cases not to closer connections, shared culture and a strong community, but to festering, factional disputes and debates within companies. Instead of connection, we’re stuck with more and more division. Nothing kills a culture quicker than backroom and behind-the-back bickering. A true friend always stabs you in the front.

 (3)   Make the Meetings that You Do Have Matter.

Whether they’re in person or on Zoom or Teams, you need to understand that, more than ever before, meetings need to meet the needs of everyone on the team. They’re not just to serve as cosmetic reminders of the old days -- reassuring assemblies to make management feel that everyone’s onboard, or demonstrations of commitment because people killed a few hours coming into the office or sitting in front of their screens. Meetings need to be CRISP: Concise, Rigorous, Immediate, Short and Prompt because time is the scarcest resource in our lives today.

 Most importantly, especially when so many participants are remote, the meeting’s leaders need to insist that the meetings serve as the finite forum for conversations rather than as jumping-off points for a million subsequent sidebars. If you aren’t prepared to say something during the meeting, don’t say it after the meeting to a smaller and more select audience. Making sure that all the critical views and opinions are shared and surfaced at all levels of the business is one of the benefits that new technologies and services like Balloon, which can address some of the most pressing needs of the hybrid workforce. In addition, take the time to do one-on-one temperature checks and pray that your people are telling you the truth.

Finally, you need to make sure that the basic messages and the critical information and directions are getting through. Data dumps won’t do. Even the most compelling facts need to be put in the proper context -- tied to the company’s story -- and delivered with emotion, which is incredibly hard to do over crappy video while speaking to a bunch of people in little boxes. Because the water-cooler conclaves, which used to be the be-all and end-all of company conversations, are gone, it’s easy to accept the comfort and the illusion that effective communication is going on when you’re really just talking to yourself about what you wish and hope was happening.

 

FOX LIES

 

Exciting New Poll

 

Loop North News: It’s clear that transparency is a phony issue

 

It’s clear that transparency is a phony issue Lots of companies fuss over the idea and promise transparency by the boatload, except when it really matters. For new businesses, transparency isn’t always a virtue. By Howard Tullman 27-Dec-22 – Transparency will be the most abused, overused, and unhelpful word in 2023. Accountability will be a close second. You didn’t hear those words here first, and if you haven’t already heard pithy pronouncements with these words as anchors at least a dozen times this week – in every conceivable context – just give it a day or two. You can’t escape the unending media barrage of self-serving pronouncements, pandering polemics, and pitiful pronouncements – hair shirts, mea culpas, and tearful testimonials – flowing through every channel of our digital universe. Every petty politician, petulant publisher, grasping government official, besieged college president, battered police superintendent, suck-up social media maven, corrupt team president, and clueless sports authority is piling on the “tell all” campaign without the slightest intention of making significant changes in the wretched ways they do business. Nor are they disclosing any image-damaging information which – if and when actually and honestly shared – could make material improvements in the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, players, and professionals. When The Washington Post announced surprise, sizable layoffs to take place in the first quarter of 2023, practically the first words in response from the Post Guild, its union, highlighted the hypocrisy of the Post’s oft-asserted commitments to the twin virtues of transparency and accountability. These folks are all happy to gore everyone else’s ox and hoist them all on their own pathetic and hypocritical petards as long as none of those chickenshit comments come home to roost. In fact, for the worst of the bunch, like Elon Musk, all this noise and performative nonsense isn’t a solution for anything. It’s just an excuse for bad behavior, bullying and BS, all cheap talk and utterly free of cost, commitment, or the slightest consequences for these two-faced jackals. A recent ChatGPT demo spun out a six-point corporate mission statement in two seconds, composed entirely of meaningless mush and clichés with core values that included integrity and accountability, and a poignant testament to the power of transparency and open communication. The bot regurgitated a comprehensive crock of jargon and crap which would be at home in the handbooks of any Fortune 500 company – and just as empty and useless as what they now display. But the rest of us aren’t free from these lies or able to ignore the problems such pretense presents, especially for startup entrepreneurs and new business builders who are trying to create and nurture their company’s culture. Because, like it or not, an entire generation of current and prospective employees has been brought up by peacekeeping parents steeped in conflict avoidance and ego inflation. The kids have been lectured by academics interested in no opinions other than their own. And they’ve been led to believe that brutal honesty, unfeeling frankness, and “constructive” criticism are today’s be-alls and end-alls – demonstrably greater goods and values than traditional company assertions – that are far more pressing and important than any others. Their parents and school academics have set them up for failure and the rudest of awakenings when they enter the real world and start spouting their naïve opinions and truths. Aggressive transparency, random truthing, and sharing whatever strikes their fancy is not the way the real world works – never has been and never will be – and, in fact, it’s a prescription for certain and consistent disappointment. The newbies feel and have been told by their folks that they need to bring their own “truth” and their whole selves to work with them, speak their minds and their unfiltered thoughts, and share it all unreservedly and without regard for the consequences or the feelings of others with those around them – like it or not. But aggressive transparency, random truthing, and sharing whatever strikes their fancy is not the way the real world works – never has been and never will be – and, in fact, it’s a prescription for certain and consistent disappointment. As a result, it falls upon each and every CEO who’s trying to inform, excite, and educate team members about their own company and its culture to figure out how to carefully, quickly, and clearly separate the facts of life and business from these persistent and sadly prevalent impressions and misunderstandings. This task couldn’t be tougher than today when half the country continues to live in a bubble of lies and liars, and the very concepts of objective truth and accepted facts are under constant attack. I’ve previously written about the issues around “situational ethics” but primarily with an outward focus: the need to tell the whole truth all the time to clients and customers. Half a lie is still a lie. While the same general ideas apply – the truth doesn’t vary based on circumstances – the way you handle internal discussions and information sharing are considerably more complicated when your people have radically different ideas about how things should go. While honesty is clearly a virtue, complete candor is far more of a challenge. Especially in a new and growing business – where the culture is still formative and malleable – the simple facts and the bottom line are that the truth needs to be wielded with care. Not all truths are for all people and not everyone needs to know everything. This philosophy may be hard to swallow for your newer team members but the ones worth keeping will recognize both the need and the necessity of carefully navigating these very treacherous seas. Being open and upfront at the outset may not get you a lot of friends, but it will ultimately get you the right ones. It’s better to take the beatings and lectures upfront and refuse to wobble than to live for the longer term with an insincere and undeliverable promise. And, believe me, I appreciate how hard it is to hold your tongue when a 25-year-old kid is telling you how to run your business. Like having Ronald McDonald criticize your taste in clothes. But listening to advice sometimes accomplishes a lot more than heeding it. Still, for my money, there are a few ideas that you need to set in stone from the get-go: 1 The first matter is money. Money is what people without talent use to keep score. No one has some God-given right to know what everyone else in a privately-owned business earns. Public companies are obviously different. In today’s complex and stressful hiring game, salaries, bonuses, options, and every other kind of perk are part of the puzzle and built into the most competitive packages. They’re nobody’s business but the boss’s. End of story. 2 Democracy is a great concept, collaboration is terrific, consensus is a mixed blessing at best, and everyone’s entitled to their opinions and to provide constructive input into the decision-making process. However, not every idea or suggestion is smart, appropriate, or even useful. Once a decision is made by management, that’s the end of the conversation and everyone gets on board and moves forward. All the wood behind one arrowhead. 3 Constructive criticism is much more than simple fault-finding. Newbies need role models far more than they need critics. Showing rather than telling is a helpful and instructive approach for both parties. If you can’t offer a better way to proceed and a clearer path, it makes the most sense to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Everything looks easy if it’s someone else’s job. 4 At some point, endless conversations become a matter of “my way or the highway” because people need to get down to business. Newbies need to be reminded that they may eventually earn the right to do things “their” way. One clear sign of maturity is when you realize that it takes less time to do as you’re told than it does to complain incessantly about what you’re doing. There are truths which are not for all people, nor for all times. Howard Tullman is General Managing Partner for G2T3V, LLC – Investors in Disruptive Innovators, and for Chicago High Tech Investors, LLC. He is also the author of You Can’t Win a Race With Your Mouth: And 299 Other Expert Tips from a Lifelong Entrepreneur.

Art need not defer to religion. If that’s no longer obvious we’ve gone astray.

 

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

A Left-Leaning College Didn’t Want to Offend, So It Closed Down Her Art Show

Feb. 13, 2023

 

                               Taravat Talepasand  "The Physicality of Death"  (Tullman Collection)

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The work of the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.

When “Taravat” opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus on internationalism, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing Talepasand’s show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.

Those curtains astonished Talepasand, an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University. “To literally veil a ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ exhibition?” she exclaimed to me.

The uproar over “Taravat” was directly connected to a recent controversy at Hamline University, a few minutes’ drive away from Macalester, where an adjunct art history professor named Erika López Prater was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of Muhammad in an art history class. In late January, Macalester — where, as it happens, Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion between faculty and students, most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There, some students described being upset by “Taravat.”

“I invited them to share what emotions they were holding in their bodies,” one faculty member wrote in an email, part of which was shared with Talepasand. “They named ‘undervalued, frustrated, surprised, disrespected, ignored, and it felt like hit after hit.’”

Ultimately, Macalester handled the student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired, and after being closed for a few days, “Taravat” reopened. But the administration’s response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.

In a message to campus, the provost, Lisa Anderson-Levy, said that Macalester understands “that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community.” The black curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper on the gallery’s glass entrance and frosted glass panels on its mezzanine windows, protecting passers-by from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door. Next to it, some students put up a yellow sign asking potential visitors to show solidarity with them by not going in.

“There’s a lot of nuance and complexity in these kinds of situations,” Anderson-Levy said in a statement when I reached out to talk. “We believe that taking time to slow down and listen carefully to the diverse perspectives across our campus community allowed us to create space for conversation and learning.”

At least some students seemed to be learning to approach contentious art cautiously. A senior sociology major who’d visited the gallery with their sculpture class when Talepasand was still assembling the exhibition told me they were thinking of returning to see what had changed. But they worried that could be an act of entitlement, and felt the need to reflect “on my place as a white person” who is “not affected by the harms as much as others.”

Some readers might object to dwelling on one instance of misguided sensitivity at one small college when the country is in the midst of a nationwide frenzy of right-wing book bans, public school speech restrictions, and wild attempts to curtail drag performances. But I think this moment, when we’re facing down a wave of censorship inspired by religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right to be shielded from discomfiting art. If progressive ideas can be harnessed to censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those ideas bear rethinking.

In her excellent 2021 book “On Freedom,” the poet and critic Maggie Nelson described how, in the 20th century, the avant-garde imagined its audience as numb, repressed and in need of being shocked awake. The 21st-century model, by contrast, “presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection.”

There is value in this approach. Mary Gaitskill recently published a captivating essay about two writing classes that she taught 25 years apart. Each included a menacing male student obsessed with sadistic violence against women. In 1997, the guy was named Don, and Gaitskill was struck by how enthusiastically his female classmates seemed to respond to his imagined scenes of torture and murder. It is only toward the end of the semester, after another student’s outburst, that the young women express their fear of Don. Until then, surrounded by a culture that valorized shock and darkness, they demonstrated a “seemingly bizarre forbearance” that blunted their authentic reactions.

“But these days that breed of forbearance is looking like an indulgence that we cannot afford,” Gaitskill writes. “These days, niceness is looking pretty damn good; these days, the darkness is just too overwhelming.” In her 2022 class, she writes, almost half the class had spent time in mental institutions. Relentless demands for safety can simply be a sign of how vulnerable people feel.

Still, to automatically give in to those demands is to suffocate the arts. This becomes especially clear when you see how easily the language of trauma and harm can serve reactionary ends. Just last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a school district in New Jersey that removed Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a frequent target of conservative censorship, from the freshman honors curriculum. A parent had complained that exposure to the book’s “graphic images of sexual violence” could be “emotionally traumatizing.” This, said Talepasand, “is where the far left and the far right look very similar.”

I’m not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work. Art need not defer to religion. If that’s no longer obvious we’ve gone astray.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

  

The Write Way to Develop Our Kids

ChatGPT has people fearing that students will adapt it to cheat. They're missing the point. We need to teach them actual writing, which helps youngsters to learn how to think, organize and execute-- important business skills that have faded in the iPhone generation. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

There's so much misguided press and frantic conversations about ChatGPT and its clones writing papers for high school and college students that it makes me wonder how so many "literates" and arguably educated folks can be completely missing the central concern.

The authenticity of the ultimate composition is only part of the education equation - and maybe not even the most important part. The essence of composition is a series of careful and creative steps: selecting a subject; assembling the facts and arguments you want to share; organizing your thoughts in an orderly fashion; and then clearly, concisely, and convincingly setting them down and communicating them. There may be a fast-approaching time when the physical part of this process-- the assembly of the material and an outline of its contents -- can be done mechanically and competently by machines. But it has nothing to do with how we need to be educating our kids and preparing them to be a valuable part of our future workforce.

This is the exact same conversation we have with parents who insist that they want their kids to learn code in school and who don't necessarily appreciate that it's not about learning the specific code -- which will be outdated and superseded in seconds. Writing code is really about learning how to think about the problem being solved by the programs being built and the best ways to accomplish the goals of the project. That's what really matters. 

All these articles -- which generally assume that our kids are inclined to be lazy, arrogant and crooked -- are also too often focused primarily on the foolish question of whether the AI-invented (or stolen) output can successfully fool the faculty, as if that was the ultimate objective. As if the faculty members were utterly incapable -- by simply asking a question or two of any suspected students -- of determining whether the accused are actually guilty of the crime. It's really no harder than figuring out whether Mom or Dad helped Junior do his math homework last night, an age-old and traditional inquiry every teacher has mastered.

But what's really sad is how these self-appointed and overly concerned guardians of the integrity of our educational institutions -- most of whom have never taught anything -- are missing the point.  It's the end-to-end process of effective writing, not necessarily the resultant product, that we're trying to teach our kids to learn, and to do well.  And, just to be clear, we're doing a fairly miserable job of at the moment. We're teaching our kids to type, but not to write.

We see college graduates entering the workforce who require months of remedial instruction and who couldn't compose a simple business letter or proposal if their life and livelihood depended on it. Honestly, stream of consciousness spews haven't been in vogue since James Joyce; no one wants to read your feelings vomited out on the page.  I've been harshly critical of rappers over their content, but they certainly understand that their screeds have to have some pace and structure to make sense, along with a dollop of Mom's spaghetti.

Unfortunately, in the name of freedom, flexibility, art and creativity, too many college grads these days have been taught that they're free to discard the rigor and rules of good writing as the toxic demands of the white privileged, and to write however and whatever they choose. It seems to be more about hubris than homework. Everyone wants to be on a winning team, but no one wants to come to practice.

This permissiveness makes for mush and it's not that much different from what I used to tell young artists when I served on the board of the New York Academy of Art, as well as new employees who insisted on doing their own thing: learn to write properly first, and then ignore it eventually if you choose. Too much imagination - too little skill. Feelings aren't everything -- art is nothing without form. Creativity without craft and constraints equals crap.

Whether it's the fault of our schools, the sins of spellcheck, the arrogance of auto-fill or just the complete devaluation of writing as a crucial business communication tool, we've really dropped the ball on making it clear to our kids that being a good writer is a crucial part of being a good citizen and good person as well. Writing is vital to our intellectual growth. Dreaming about things being better is okay, but writing those dreams down makes them concrete and putting them in action makes them real. Don't just think it. Ink it. Putting your dreams on paper is like stirring the embers of your life into a fire.

Writing is a powerful and rewarding discipline -- great when you finally get it right, and torture the rest of the time. At least for me. Editing is even worse, although there's a real appeal to the successive approximation that draws you constantly closer to the final achievement. If young people don't learn early on that the things in life that they'll come to value are those that they've worked hardest to achieve, then they'll never understand that if you don't put the work into something you'll never know the true worth of it.

Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. The routine of daily writing, the rigor of edit and review, and the power of iteration and continual refinement are powerful ways to offset the daily, unceasing noise, the constant dopamine distractions and the utter lack of focused attention that is killing our ability to concentrate.  Even worse, the clutter and noise are slowly destroying our kids' ability to learn. They're insatiably curious to know everything about nothing worth knowing. They don't care what's on the screen; they want to know what else is on. Kids with remote controls are like ferrets on double expresso.

Drugs won't help, but a daily dose of patient and painstaking attention to the details and demands of creating and crafting something of style and substance might just do the trick. If it's not handwritten, by the way, it's probably not worth doing. There's a power and an emotional connection to the care and beauty of cursive (and all forms of calligraphy) that we're also on the cusp of losing forever. Clever fonts and emojis will never cut it.

Start small. Get your kids a notebook or a diary, sit them down first thing in the morning each day, and ask them to write three pages of anything. Check out the Morning Pages concept from Julia Cameron, which isn't just for artists. It's almost as effective a protocol as Jack Dorsey's daily ice baths in terms of providing an energizing kickstart for the rest of the day.

Our kids and our employees are all in a hurry to be bosses, creators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. They've been convinced that there are tricks of the trade and painless shortcuts to such success if they can only find them, but true success knows no shortcuts. They want to be alive, always on, excited and thrilled in every way because that's the false and rotten dream they've been sold by social media -- the toilet of the Internet. They're told that they must be "inspired" and bring their "whole" selves to every occasion. But it's not the Hokey Pokey.

We need to tell them to slow down and wake up. And we need to tell them what every great writer (but not ChatGPT) will tell them about writing and inspiration: You don't sit down to write because you're inspired; you become inspired because you sit down to write. Each day and every day.

MAGAt PIGS AND TRAITORS

 

SUCK ON THIS YOU STUPID MAGAt MORONS

 

Is It Too Late to Save Chicago From Progressive Misrule?

 

Is It Too Late to Save Chicago From Progressive Misrule?

The city has gone downhill fast but it isn’t clear voters are ready to turn the page on Lori Lightfoot.

By Collin Levy

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Feb. 10, 2023 1:59 pm ET

 

The Windy City is in unusually bad shape. Crime is up but the statistics don’t capture Chicagoans’ true concern about the collapse of public order. Taxes are high, pensions are underfunded, businesses are leaving, and unions are gaining unprecedented power in a city they already dominate. So it’s hardly a surprise that the mayor’s race has become a free-for-all.

Nine candidates, including incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are trying to distinguish themselves on the big issues of troubled schools, city finances and law enforcement. Their platforms are a progressive punchbowl. One candidate wants a tax on the suburbs; another proposes a “public bank.” But the issue that really matters is crime. Voters want to know: Is anyone here going to save the city from its slow-motion demise?

Three candidates—Ms. Lightfoot, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, and U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia—are currently in a dead heat for the lead, followed by Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, businessman Willie Wilson, Alderman Sophia King and community activist Ja’Mal Green. The slate will face off in a primary on Feb. 28. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two will compete in a runoff on April 4. The primary is technically nonpartisan, but in Chicago that doesn’t matter. All nine candidates are Democrats.

Ms. Lightfoot’s tenure has been marked by Covid and crime. Her combative personality was appealing when she was an outsider, but it has left her this time without a natural constituency. Her current approval rating is 22% among likely voters, and 71% think the city is on the wrong track, according to a WBEZ poll. In 2019 she won every ward in the city.

Those bleak numbers have created an opening for Mr. Vallas, a candidate whose positions on public order and city finances are a throwback to an earlier, more practical era of Chicago Democratic politics. His reputation as a budget guy and turnaround specialist with policy expertise, derived from stints running large school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Recovery School District of Louisiana, earned him the endorsement of the Chicago Tribune, which called him smart and “unapologetically wonkish.”

Mr. Vallas’s rise in the polls to around 18% is reflected in the missiles now coming his way. Ms. Lightfoot says he isn’t speaking up enough on abortion (he’s pro-choice). Mr. Garcia says he is a conservative “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But nothing seems to stick. Since Jan. 1, Mr. Vallas has raised $2.4 million, compared with $829,000 for Mr. Garcia, $751,000 for Mr. Johnson and $739,000 for Ms. Lightfoot, according to political consultant Frank Calabrese.

Why? Residents are less preoccupied with the usual ideological flashpoints than they are with the sense that crime is spiraling out of control. Carjackings and retail theft are common, lotion is locked up at Walgreens and some neighborhoods have hired private security patrols. At the end of 2022, Michigan Ave., Chicago’s high-end shopping strip, had retail vacancies around 30%, says Cushman & Wakefield.

Ms. Lightfoot’s approach has been more defensive than constructive. In summer 2022, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski gave a speech affirming his company’s commitment to Chicago but noting that crime in the city is a “crisis” and high taxes are driving out other major companies like Boeing, Caterpillar and hedge fund Citadel. It was a cry for help, but Ms. Lightfoot kicked sand in Mr. Kempczinski’s face, telling him to “educate himself” before he speaks.

In February she reached out to the business community, telling them they should “champion” the city and that she is open to more cooperation. That would make her a better second-term mayor, but it sounds like an offer of conciliation out of desperation. Who knows if she means it?

Mr. Vallas pitches himself as the law-and-order candidate with the slogan that “public safety is a human right.” He has done pro-bono work on contract talks for the Fraternal Order of Police and has the endorsement of the Chicago Police Union. Voters may wager he has a better shot at getting the city back on track than Ms. Lightfoot, who cut the police budget in 2020. Politically, she owns the crime wave.

The other big issue is the city’s public schools. The teachers unions, which supported Mr. Garcia in 2015, have this time put their money behind Mr. Johnson, a former teacher. Since joining the race in October, around 97% of Mr. Johnson’s roughly $2.4 million in contributions have come from the American Federation of Teachers (of which the Chicago Teachers Union is Local 1) and the Service Employees International Union.

If he doesn’t make it to the runoff, and Mr. Garcia does, count on the CTU support flowing Mr. Garcia’s way. The teachers’ contract is up for renegotiation in 2024, so this year’s campaign money is meant to ensure they will be negotiating with a friendly mayor. A new contract could set conditions for five years or even longer.

The most under-discussed issue of the race is the city’s finances and public pensions, which are among the worst funded in the nation, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. But fixing that will require great relations with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and a first-rate ground game in Springfield. Ms. Lightfoot has neither.

Have Chicagoans had enough of progressive misrule? Might they finally turn to a centrist Democrat to put an end to the crime and disorder that is ruining civic life? Over the years, blue cities like Seattle, Los Angeles and New York have episodically swung to the center. But only when things got so bad that progressivism’s bold promises and good intentions were no longer believable.

A new Lightfoot campaign ad includes footage from a 2009 interview with Mr. Vallas saying. “I’m more of a Republican than a Democrat. . . . If I ran for public office, then I would be running as a Republican.” In most years, this would be a ticket to political oblivion in Chicago. In 2023 it could be the kind of change the city chooses—and needs.

Ms. Levy is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.