Willful Blindness

Aug. 12, 2013

Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness"

Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn’t want to know. In a talk that’s part history lesson, part call-to-action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of "willful blindness" and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up. (Filmed at TEDxDanubia.)

What is Leadership?

via Caesura Letters

Leadership Doodle

By James Shelley

This is one of my favourite napkin doodles:

I draw a circle to represent “a goal”. Another circle to represent “the people”. An arrow pointing from the “people circle” to the “goal circle”.

The question: what is leadership?

What does it mean to move people — the rather finicky creatures that we are — to actually do something together?

Push. It seems that some leaders get behind the people circle and push it towards the goal. Well, they call it “encourage,” actually. Nelson Mandela said, “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.” (Stengel, 2008) Classic push-leaders often find second careers as motivational speakers: “Yes, you can do it!” is their primary message.

Pull. Some leaders get in front of the people circle and pull everyone along, in a way that conjures up the stereotypical image of an alpha personality, akin to the image of a face-painted William Wallace persona leading the charge. In less euphoric times these are the leaders who, in the words of John Naisbitt, settle for “finding a parade and getting ahead of it.” (Naisbitt, 1982) When they are actually sitting still they are busy fine-tuning endless drafts of vision, purpose, objective, and mission statements.

Insiders. Some leaders like to dive into the people circle and lead from within. Disciples of Dale Carnegie and John Maxwell come quickly to mind. These are the people who are out to save corporate America one coffee appointment and “checking in on you” email at a time. Of course, we all love these kinds of leaders—and we know full well that these leaders love for us to love them too.

If I am the crunched up end of a coffee stir stick, bouncing around the metaphorical napkin of leadership, I find myself most in sync with my convictions when I just ignore the people circle altogether and move myself toward “the goal” circle. Trying to manipulate and alter people’s thinking (not to mention their habits) is hard work, in fact it is a never-ending pipe-dream into which one can easily flush many years.

Ironically, most of the leaders who we revere as our idols did not invest their lives into trying to subvert the conscious landscape of the people circle. No, the greatest leaders in history seem to have just gone after the goal because they believed in it. The following hypothesis lands outside of the realm of provability, but perhaps it carries anecdotal truth nonetheless: humans seem almost lustful to follow an individual with an audacious, personal commitment to practical action.

We instinctively want to trust leaders who are really going to “make it happen” — so it seems logical that there is no leader more enticing than the one who is already doing it. We know that the leader who cares the most is the leader who will die for the goal, even if no one else is following. Yet, these are the people who become the magnetic centres of movement, change, and accomplishment.

The adage is as old as the hills: if no one follows you, you are not really a leader. The problem is that most people who call themselves leaders do not really know if anyone is following them. They are too busy trying to create alignment — something about getting the right people on the right seats on the right bus. You can invest so much energy into managing, motivating, and manipulating the people circle in the name of “leadership” that the actual task itself is forgotten in the pile of self-help books.

“Leadership” has become more of a psycho-persuasion exercise than doing an action that other people repeat, mimic and respond to in turn.

Doers. As an alternative to general push, pull, and insider models of leadership, I want to suggest a third idea: go and do it and see who follows you. To really test your leadership capacity, quit trying to lead people and actually try doing “the thing” you want others to do. If people come along then you have followers — then and only then are you truly a leader.

The first concern of the leader is the goal circle, not the people circle. Yes, you should care deeply and genuinely for your followers — caring for those around you is indispensable — but don’t confuse your “followers” with people who you are merely trying to coerce into doing something that they would never find you yourself doing.

Leadership, as a methodology, sells a lot of books.
Leadership, as a job title, is an institutional invention.
Leadership, as a discipline, is the pathway to dogmatism.
Leadership, as an ideal, is the instigator of disillusionment.
Leadership, as a status symbol, breeds resentment.
Leadership, in a reality, will simply change your neighbourhood.

Peering through the veil of "It's for your protection".

Recently our government has been collecting data on ALL phone traffic from Verizon. Today it was revealed that they were actually collecting data from 9 different internet companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter. U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms This program apparently costs 20 mill a year to run. When you think about it, it's pretty amazing ... all this coordination and only 20 mill a year and it's all for our protection. If this were true, then the people charged with protecting us should should be truly treated like heroes ... right?

Of course not, because this isn't about protecting americans. This is about power plain and simple. Think of how much power the IRS will wield the next time it wants to attack opposing political parties. Or how much power the DOJ will wield the next time it needs to track down the source of a leak.

We should be ashamed that we allow this to continue. While at the same time make the men and women out on the battlefield giving their lives for our so called freedom wait on average ONE YEAR to provide the benefits they so desperately need. Average Wait times for Veterans Administration Services!

Unprotect PDFwith password

I continually receive PDF's from either my accountant or my bank that are password protected which means if I want to extract a page or two and then fax to a bank to verify funds for a purchase, the print to PDF option won't work. So I have done this a few times now and wanted to document for others and myself since I keep forgetting how to do it.

gs \ -sPDFPassword=pass \ -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -sOutputFile=unencrypted.pdf \ -f password_protected.pdf

This will open the file using GhostScript and then create a new file and the new file will not be protected. The important part here is the first param giving the password to gs.

Brute force using VIM

I was just presented with a situation where about 60 html files were generated and some of them contained duplicate entries that needed to be removed. We couldn't go back and re-generate because some of the verbiage on the pages had been tweaked already. I started looking into sed to see if it would help, but it apparently doesn't shine at finding duplicates and removing them. So it looked like the only way was to brute force edit each page ... blah!

But wait ... VIM can make even the most laborious task seem trivial if you know a few key concepts.

So I decided to buffer all the *.html files and tell vim to find a specific string in each of them. The string was the html class of the menu.

vim +/search\ string *.html

Now I have all the files open and I simply need to review each one for the dupes. So for each file, I simply pressed "n" to find the next occurrence. If the dupe was present, I executed

7j+shift+v6jd

move down 7 lines, start selection, move down 6 lines then delete the selection. Then I simply saved the file and deleted it from the buffer and on to next file.

I probably could have used a macro but that would have taken longer to learn than the 10 minutes it took to edit the files. So I'll put that at the top of my reading list.

Knowing your toolset can make the most laborious task seem trivial. Continuous learning, not just the language you use but the tools that support your efforts, is the key here.

Great UX design postings

Things to keep in mind when designing UX.

http://bokardo.com/principles-of-user-interface-design/

and

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/26/gamification-ux-users-win-lose/

Love some of the gamification concepts.

Accessing command line from within VIM

This has proven pretty handy and wanted to document so I wouldn't forget.

To suspend VIM and reveal the current command line:

"Ctrl+Z" then run your commands as normal and then "fg" to return to VIM.

This will also execute the command and wait for you to hit enter before proceeding:

":!"