Write right

Here's an article I submitted to the Carolina Communique earlier today:

When you scan job postings for technical communicators, you’ll find prospective employers seeking candidates who have an understanding of current technology, working knowledge of publishing tools, and time management skills. A bullet may ask for “excellent writing and editing skills,” but that bullet rarely appears at the top of the list.

Not for me. As a manager who hires technical communicators, excellent writing skills are what I seek first. By writing skills, I mean the ability to produce clear, concise, and compelling prose on deadline. Any candidate we interview must bring writing samples, which we evaluate during the interview session. If samples don’t evince sufficient skill, we won’t hire candidates, regardless of their other qualities.

Technology changes, publishing tools become obsolete, and there are only so many hours in the day. In contrast, good writing is a constant. Someone can learn about the latest technology in a matter of months. Someone can master current publishing tools in a matter of weeks. You can buy a PDA to point you to your next meeting. It takes a lifetime of practice to master the art and craft of writing.

There are varying degrees of writing skill. Consider a martial arts metaphor. A writing white belt can put together clean sentences. A yellow belt can combine clean sentences into lean paragraphs. A green belt can assemble paragraphs into a coherent and compelling narrative. A blue belt can extend the narrative over several chapters. A brown belt can disassemble and reassemble chapters without losing the thread of the book. A black belt can juggle material in a library of books so that a reader knows where to go and never gets lost. More important, a black belt can tutor others.

You get better at writing by writing, just as you get better at marital arts by performing them. It pays to have a good tutor. It also doesn’t hurt to read as much as you can to guide your practice. In my judgment, there are four books every writer needs on her bookshelf. They should be regularly consulted, like a favorite English teacher.

• Strunk, William and White, E.B. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. ISBN: 0881030686 – I consult my dog-eared, yellowed Third Edition copy almost every day. Broken into well-polished rules of usage, principles of composition, and guidelines for form and style, this classic covers all the basics in less than 100 pages. As White explains in the introduction, the book was Strunk’s “attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.” White goes on to say, “today…(the book’s) vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken.” If you have only one book in your writer’s library, make it this one.
• Shertzer, Margaret. The Elements of Grammar. ISBN: 0028614496 – A companion to Strunk and White, this comprehensive guide covers everything you forgot from 6th grade English about parts of speech, capitalization, and punctuation. Don’t use it as a style guide – there’s the Chicago Manual of Style and your company’s style guide for that. Instead, refer to Shertzer to remind yourself, for example, just what “case” is, and why you should care about it. When, if ever, should you use the subjunctive mood? When should you use a semicolon instead of a colon? It matters.
• Blake, Gary, and Bly, Robert W. The Elements of Business Writing: A Guide to writing clear, concise letters, memos, reports, proposals, and other business documents. ISBN: 0020080956 – One time I complained to the director of my children’s day care center about its badly written memos to parents. I offered to give a presentation on “professional communication” to the staff. I consulted this book as I prepared my slides. Blake and Bly explain their mission in the introduction: “Bad writing hangs on…because new employees tend to check through old files to see how others have written a memo or a letter before they write one. So it’s no surprise that antiquated expressions and stuffy, pompous nineteenth-century verbiage emerge from (contemporary) word processors. This book aims to update those filing cabinets by giving contemporary advice on the style, tone, and format of business writing.” For anyone who’s read or written a memo that included phrases such as “in reference to” (versus “about”) or “inasmuch as” (versus “since or because”), this is welcome help.
• Brohaugh, William. Write Tight: How to keep your prose sharp, focused and concise. ISBN: 1882926889. Once I wrote an article for my company’s newsletter. I thought I’d done a pretty good job trimming the fat, so I was surprised when I saw that the published version was nearly half the size of my final draft. No substance had been lost, and the published version was much crisper and easier to read. I asked the managing editor how she did it. She pointed me to this book. I ordered it from Amazon.com that afternoon. Chapter 2, entitled “Sixteen types of wordiness and how to trim them,” is almost worth the price of the book by itself.

These aren’t the only books you need, but they are ones you shouldn’t be without. I also consult Judy Tarutz’s Technical Editing and heartily recommend William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Other favorites are The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein and A Handbook for Scholars by Mary-Claire Van Leunen. And no library is complete without H.W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

One thing all writing books worth reading and re-reading have in common is the directive to write simply. It is the simplest advice to give and the hardest to follow. As Zinsser puts it, “Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.” Weeding out the adulterants is hard, time consuming, but ultimately rewarding work. Developing judgment about what to prune and what to leave alone takes practice. I find joy in that practice.

We professionals are paid to write strong prose to help readers figure out who is doing what or if something needs to be done right now. This means putting excellent writing and editing skills at the top of our list. It means going for the next belt. Whatever other changes your encounter in your career, the constant quest for writing mastery should prove a worthy and rewarding endeavor.

Imagine the smell

My wife has been sensitive to smells as long as I've known her. In a previous life, she must have been a bloodhound. If I snack on something, say some Kalamata olives or a dill pickle spear, and she enters the kitchen well after I've finished, she'll sniff and ask "what have you been eating?" If I don't reply immediately, she usually guesses.

There's a scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves where Snow White teaches the dwarves how to bathe. "Do we have to wash where it doesn't show?" one of them asks. Stop and think about that. That is a practical question from someone who works in a mine all day and whose house was a trash heap of dirty dishes and filthy clothes before this princess arrived. Why bother washing some place where it won't be appreciated?

So I have to wonder. What did this dwarf cottage smell like when Snow White first arrived? What would my wife do if she came upon this cottage?

Walk past it, I think.

We gather together

My wife will start cooking the organic, free-range turkey breast around 10:00 a.m. My parents' brown Buick will pull into the driveway shortly after 11:00. My mom is bringing iced tea, both sweet and unsweetened. My father-in-law will arrrive between noon and 12:30. This year, my sister is driving to Connecticut with her husband and daughter to visit her mother and sisters in law. Otherwise she'd be here with deviled eggs.

We'll gather around the dining room table with its extra leaf around 1:00 or 1:30. We got the turkey breast for free because of a mixup at the store. They couldn't find my wife's original order even though she placed it in person last week. They offered this turkey breast at a reduced rate, but she still balked at the price. So the store manager said, "Happy Thanksgiving!"

We have much to be thankful for.

Rigor mortis

I ran the half-marathon I'd planned, a slower 20 miler than I wanted, and the slowest 10K of my life this past Saturday at the Richmond Marathon.

I was 1:57:02 at the half - on pace to break 4 hours. I was 3:06:17 at 20 miles, which was slower than I needed to be to break 4, but that goal was still within reach.

I finished the marathon in 4:35:58 - the worst time I've ever posted for 26.2.

I felt great before the gun. It was about 40 degrees, clear, and the humidity was low. Wearing a short sleeve Coolmax shirt, split shorts, new sunglasses, my fuel belt loaded with four bottles of Gatorade and four gels, and my trusty Gel Kayanos on my feet, I found the 4:00 pace team and started very comfortably and smoothly with them. I felt great at 6. I felt great at 10. I felt great at the half. Starting to tire at 16, I fell slightly behind the 4:00 pace leader, who turned and reminded me "it's only a 10 mile training run from here." He was still within sight at 18.

Just before I crossed the mat at 20, I got a cramp in my left calf.

Between 20 and the finish line, I couldn't cover any significant distance without a sharp jolt in my calf or hamstring. A discouraging pattern emerged: the cramp would stop me dead in my tracks, I would stretch, then walk, then move as if cross-country skiing, then jog, and then BOOP, the stabbing pain would return and I would have to stop again. One time, I thought to myself, "if I weren't in so much pain, I would be incredibly impressed with the muscle definition of that calf." And most of the time I was thinking, "where's the next mile marker?"

I wasn't alone. I encountered several other runners, men and women, young and old, all stopped and stretching, frowning and limping.

The last .2 mile was downhill but I couldn't take advantage of it. No more than 200 feet from the finish line, I had to stop. A medical volunteer on the side shouted to me "is there anything I can do?" "No" I croaked. I heard the announcer call out "Michael Harvey, from Raleigh, North Carolina!" Grimacing, I hobbled over the finish line. I wonder what the finish photo will look like.

A young boy put the medal around my neck. I wrapped a foil blanket around my shoulders and let them clip the chip off my shoe. I walked around the chute for several minutes, trying to work out the cramps.

I hobbled down the street to the food station. I guzzled a bottle of recovery drink and snarfed two bananas, a bagel, and a slice of cold pizza. Grabbing another two bottles of recovery drink, I retrieved my belongings from the bag check and limped back to my hotel room.

I called home - my daughter had already looked up my time on the web. "Sorry about your time dad." "You can always run half marathons," my wife observed.

I called Christopher, who reminded me "dude, you finished!" We briefly spoke about entering Myrtle Beach in February, but agreed it would be a hard sell to our wives.

It's Saturday

The Richmond Marathon is this Saturday. I ran 4 on the treadmill yesterday, and I probably will not have time to run today, so I'll plan to run 4 tomorrow. Then that's it. I'm ready.

Crashed and burned

I spoke with Christopher yesterday about his experience at the New York Marathon this past Sunday. He said that he passed the mile 24 marker at 3:47. Somewhere between there and mile 25, something happened, and the next thing he knows, he's waking up in a medical tent. DNF. He's disappointed but very philosophical about it.

22 tomorrow

Christopher and I are running 22 tomorrow - our longest run of the training regimen. We ran 20 week before last. I seem to be out of my training doldrums. And the weather's turned cooler - thanks goodness.

Usability – full-time work for the expert; part-time work for the vigilant technical writer

Here's an article I wrote for the Carolina Communique, our local STC newsletter.

We became technical writers for different reasons. One reason many of us share is that we enjoy expressing ourselves. The irony here is that technical writing affords little opportunity for self expression. We can make up for that by taking pride in the clarity and concision of our work. We can claim to be vigilant advocates for “the user” as we transmute jargon into understandable prose.

It’s understandably hard when we realize that the audience for whom we toil has little interest in reading what we produce. In fact, most of the time, our audience reads what we write only as a last resort. They peruse our prose only when the application or the system didn’t lead to the expected result or product. It’s our responsibility to write crisp information and to provide adequate context that allows readers to find it as soon they need it, comprehend it quickly so as to act effectively, and get back to work.

Congruent with that responsibility is one to become familiar with the subject of usability. The definition of usability my organization has adopted is “a design attribute that characterizes the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can accomplish desired tasks with a product.” Determining the usability of something means asking whether someone can figure out what to do with it, what’s going on at the moment, what, if anything, is going wrong, and what to do next.

It’s easy to make something unusable, as Donald Norman illustrates in his book The Design of Everyday Things:

• Give no hints about what to do
• Provide no feedback and no visible results of actions just taken
• Fail without indication or explanation
• Use obscure command names
• Provide uninformative error messages
• Let something be done one way in one place and another way somewhere else
• Make operations dangerous by allowing a single mistake to destroy work

It’s hard, though, to make something truly usable.

The January 2005 Intercom focused on usability and the user experience design. One article spoke of the trends that “usability practitioners” should consider, suggesting to me that technical writers may consider themselves usability practitioners. Usability experts and technical writers share a passion for customer advocacy. My own immersion in the subject leads me to conclude that you can be a full-time technical writer knowledgeable about usability, or you can be a full-time usability expert knowledgeable about technical communication, but you cannot be a full time technical communicator/usability expert. You do both professions a disservice if you try.

Earlier this year, I attended a Usability Boot Camp run by Bentley College. The most important thing I learned during that intensive one week program was that usability, done correctly, is a full time job. Each aspect of usability can in fact lead to a different full time job – you can be a full-time user-centered designer, or a full-time expert in gathering and evaluating customer requirements, or a full-time usability tester, or a full-time data analyst. Some companies go all out (think Apple) and thus have a devoted customer base (think iBook or iPod). Most companies don’t invest this heavily into usability, and expect a smaller staff to implement it in their development process. Either way, it requires someone’s full-time attention to do it justice.

Developing a set of core tools for implementing usability during the development process requires a lot of effort. The core tools are:

• Personas
• Heuristics
• Usability testing

Personas are fictional characters whose personal and professional characteristics closely match those of real customers. They can be personal descriptions, with names, families, college allegiances, all to make them as real as possible. They represent groups of users, not just a single individual. A key ingredient of a persona is her or his goals. For example:

Joe is a system administrator for a 300-person company. He’s 30 years old, married, and has no children. He’s got 10 years of experience. He went to college for two years and quit when the part-time system administrator job that he had as a student became a full-time position. He works about 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, even though he’s expected to respond to emergencies at any hour. He wears a cell phone on his belt and it goes off at least four times a day. He would love to get caught up on his project work (upgrading the server, installing new applications, swapping out old network hubs, and so on), but he doesn’t expect to ever get the time. Every day he’s interrupted in his project work by folks asking him to solve their specific problems. He’s an expert in Windows, and knows a little bit about Unix. He works with two other technicians who informally report to him; they serve 500 PCs networked into two clustered servers. When he’s not working, he likes tinkering with his Harley and riding it in the mountains.

The idea is that as you’re designing an administrative interface for a large system, it will be easier to design for Joe rather than for “the administrator.” Alan Cooper makes a strong case for personas such as these in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

Heuristics are guidelines written in everyday language that help verify that you’re meeting specific usability criteria. One of the most important characteristics is that they are measurable. “Is it easy to use?” is impossible to measure in a repeatable way, but “Is the system status clearly visible?” can be measured precisely.

Heuristics can be applied to different aspects of a product, such as the user interface, error messages, or the installation process. Here are some sample heuristics for error messages:

• When an error occurs, is the person informed of it and of what stage of the operation the error was detected?
• Does the error give a clear indication of the underlying problem?
• Does the system tell the person how important the error is and what will happen until the underlying problem is fixed?
• Does the message suggest specific actions to fix the underlying problem?
• Is the message complete enough that the person doesn’t have to refer to another document to know what the message means or what to do?

Usability testing is a process by which you observe or interview real users as they interact with live systems, prototypes of systems, or paper mockups of systems. Users are given goals to achieve and are facilitated by someone as they attempt to achieve them. Tests are often recorded or transcribed for detailed analysis afterwards. In some tests, users are encouraged to think aloud as they work through the problem. Analysis of the tests should reveal what contributed to the success of the participant and what inhibited success in achieving the goals.

You don’t need a formal lab to conduct usability tests; you can use portable equipment in the customer’s environment or you can use paper mockups in any available conference room. While I was at Bentley’s Usability Boot Camp, I watched one of the instructors perform a usability test on Quicken in our classroom. Someone unfamiliar with the application attempted to add an account, make a deposit, write three checks, and list transactions of a particular category. The participant thought out loud as she tried to perform each of those tasks. The professor in a non-directive way kept things on track. Because I’m experienced with Quicken, I was surprised to see someone struggle. I imagine most engineers who are experienced with the applications they produce would be surprised by the results of usability tests on their products.

Even though putting these core tools together into a successful usability regimen is not a part-time job, technical communicators can serve valuable part-time roles in contributing to its success. We can help run the usability tests. We can record and help analyze the data. We can review and comment on heuristics. We can help implement heuristics by, for example, editing or rewriting error messages. We can help flesh out personas. We can interview customers to gather characteristics that would help lead to representative personas or usability criteria. We can help make sure that the ideas that usability experts need to communicate to those who actually build the product are clear, concise, and complete.

The more intuitive a product’s interfaces and procedures become, the more usable it becomes. Thus, the less formal documentation it requires. To do our part, we can strive to reduce the number of words a customer needs to read. Focusing on clarity and concision, we can take pride that of the words that remain, because every word will count. Working with usability experts, our fellow customer advocates, we can transmute unwieldy products into easily used ones. To me, that’s a compelling reason to remain a technical communicator.

Want to know more about usability? Start with these books:

Cooper, Alan. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. SAMS, 1999.

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability Engineering. Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988. (2002 Edition)

Rubin, Jeffrey. Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests. Wiley, 1994.

And of course, you can get involved with STC’s Usability and User Experience SIG

Busy busy busy

It's hard to keep up with a blog. Last weekend, my wife's sister and brother-in-law came down from New Jersey for a weekend visit. The weekend before that, my son and I went whitewater rafting on the French Broad River and spent the rest of the weekend at Camp Rockmont for the Trail Blazer Fall Outing.

My Duke University Continuing Studies class was canceled due to insufficient enrollment. That recovers several Thursday evenings over the coming weeks.

Too fast? Too hot? Too wimpy?

Went on a long run with Christopher this morning - out and back at the Durham American Tobacco Trail, adding the Riddle Road spur. Our goal was 16 - stretch goal was to go longer if we felt up to it. He wanted to run at marathon pace for a few miles, so I demurred. We ran at pace on the spur on the way back, which is about mile 11.

Felt fine until that surge. Went slower after getting back on the main trail, but I felt fatigued. Then, I simply ran out of gas about .75 mile from the finish. Just simply ran out of gas. Heart rate was around 165 - it took a while to recover after I got back to the car and started sipping Gatorade.

This is annoyingly similar to what happened last weekend during my long run at Hanes with Christopher and Eric. Ran out of gas just before the finish.

What was common to both episodes?

• It was warm (70s)
• It was humid (90%)
• I went faster than I would have preferred
• I wore a hat that didn't breathe

I'm going to have to run the long runs slower - the goal is to finish! I've got 20 miles coming up next weekend - I need to finish it.

Need to eat more protein for recovery - so, for the first time since 1983, I'm going to add chicken to my diet until after the Richmond Marathon.

Notes from Marcus Buckingham’s “The One Thing You Need to Know”

I really resonated to this book, especially now as I've broadened the scope of my authority at work. Here are my notes.

"To excel as a manager you must never forget that each of your direct reports is unique and that your chief responsibility is not to eradicate this uniqueness, but rather to arrange roles, responsibilities, and expectations so that you can capitalize upon it."

"To excel as a leader requires the opposite skill. You must become adept at calling upon those needs we all share. Our common needs include the need for security, for community, for authority, and for respect, but, for you, the leader, the most powerful universal need is our need for clarity. To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future vividly and precisely."

"...sustained success depends on your ability to cut out of your working life those activities, or people, that pull you off your strengths' path. Your leader can show you clearly your better future. Your manager can draft you on to the team and cast you into the right role on the team. ...it will always be your responsibility to make the small but significant course corrections that allow you to sustain your highest and best contribution to this team, and to the better future it is charged with creating."

Average managers play checkers. Great managers play chess.

In the happiest couples, the husband rated the wife more positively than she did (herself) on every single quality (like open, warm, patient, etc.)

Find the most generous explanation for each other's behavior and believe it.

Not everyone can be a leader.

No matter what the situation, (the first response of a great manager) is to think about the individual concerned and how things can be arranged to help that individual experience success.

Great leaders rally people to a better future.

Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.

The three great levers:

• Strengths and weaknesses - the most influential qualities of a person are innate and that the essence of management is to deploy these...qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance - overconfidence is not the problem - self-awareness drives performance - unrealistic self-assessment actually stimulates performance, but the person has to have a healthy respect for the challenge/difficulty of the task - the person should have a fully realistic assessment of the difficult of the challenge ahead, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it
• Triggers - recognition, praise, "being on someone's case," etc.
• Style of learning - analyzing, doing, watching

How do you identify the levers?

• What was the best/worst day at work you've had in the last three months?
• What were you doing?
• Why did you enjoy it/did it grate on you so much?

What was the best relationships with a manager you've ever had? What made it work so well?

When in your career do you think you were learning the most? Why did you learn so much? What's the best way for you to learn?

Leading - discover what is universal and capitalize on it

Five fears, five needs, one focus

• Fear of death/the need for security
• Fear of the outsider/the need for community
• Fear of the future/the need for clarity
• Fear of chaos/the need for authority
• Fear of insignificance/the need for respect]

To inspire confidence, be clear

Points of clarity:

• Who do we serve?
• What is our core strength?
• What is our core score?
• What actions can we take today?

Disciplines:

• Take time to reflect
• Select your heroes with great care
• Practice

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time

You will NOT learn the most in your areas of weakness

You will not feel most energized and challenged when focusing on your flaws

Discover your strengths and cultivate them

If you are bored, chances are you're deep interests are not engaged
If you are unfulfilled, chances are that your values are not engaged
If you are frustrated, chances are your strengths are not in play
If you are drained, chances are your job requires strength where you have weakness - find someone else to do the thing that drains you

Rockmont, putting in the miles

In a few minutes I'll pick up my son from school and we'll pack for a Trail Blazers outing to Camp Rockmont. We've been looking forward to it for weeks. It'll be the second time this month we'll head to the mountains. We'll go white water rafting on the French Broad tomorrow. The weather forecast is good.

Ran a little under 11 earlier this morning, but I had no zip in my legs, so my average pace was over 10". Then again, I did 8 Yassos with Christopher and Eric yesterday, so my legs probably haven't recovered from that speed workout. Won't be running this weekend. Still, my weekly total is 25, and last week's total was close to 40, so it works out.

17 tomorrow, and then we head west

I'll run 17 tomorrow, swapping next week's scheduled mileage for this week's scheduled recovery because I'll be at Camp Rockmont next weekend with my son. It will be my longest long run since I trained for Disney in 2003.

Christopher and I had a good Yasso workout yesterday. Times 7 @ around 3:40, an easy mile on either end. Christopher cannot join me tomorrow because he's traveling to Dallas to visit his ailing father. Eric may join me tomorrow - I e-mailed him what I planned to do but I haven't heard back from him.

After the run, the family willl pack up and head to Salisbury to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Then it's off to the mountains for a Labor Day vacation. This despite $3.50 gasoline and the governor advising against unnecessary travel. It's not as though this is an impulsive trip - we'd been planning it for weeks. The kids have never seen the mountains. Question is, how available will gas be in the western part of the state?

As I write this, I have live video streaming in from WWL TV in New Orleans. No matter how sore I feel after a long run, no matter how stressful it gets at work, no matter how hectic it can get at home, no matter how high gas prices get, it pales to the horror that those folks are living through. We suffered through Fran, but Fran was a picnic compared to Katrina.

Different strokes for different folks

I've gotten different reactions to this blog or to the fact that I started a blog. One person warned me not to reveal too much about my kids. Another person said "...I checked out Yahoo's 360 page, that has a blog to it, but I didn't really care for the site ..... Maybe I'll have to try out blogger.com like you here..... I want to think that I'll do it, but I doubt that I will keep up with it......" Still another said "I will look at your blog. It will be my first experience with one." My daughter said that the photo of me from 1974 was "embarassing."

I wonder how well I'll keep up with this blog. This is my first experience with one. My daughter is easily embarassed these days.

My hair used to be longer and less gray, as this photo from around 1974 shows. That's Derrick on the right - he was my best man when I married Anni in 1987.

King Crimson, ethical companies, and Lyndon Johnson

Surfing the web, following an arc of hyperlinks about King Crimson and Robert Fripp, I find this on http://www.disciplineglobalmobile.com/cat/index.htm (under "Business Aims").

"May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.

DGM is a business structure & vehicle for the projects of Robert Fripp, David Singleton & The Vicar, trading under precepts of the ethical company. These projects include King Crimson, the ProjeKcts, Soundscapes, Ton Prob & The Vicar Chronicles.

The Ethical Company

Recognisable features of the ethical company, in the literature and discussion of business ethics, involve these attributes:
transparency, straightforwardness, accountability, owning-up, honesty, fairness, common decency, distributive justice.
Recognisable features of a company whose base is ethically challenged are these:
dissembling, use of threats, unkindness to employees, a widespread use of gagging orders, an inequitable distribution of company income."

An ethical company! Imagine!

Is there some size after which a company cannot help but strain to remain ethical? When the decision makers are far removed from those affected by the decisions, do ethics lapse? Is there some size after which it's impossible to consider input from all who contribute to the revenue of the company? Is it more likely that companies in the 21st century will be directed by someone like Robert Fripp or someone like Ken Lay, or even worse, someone like Dennis Kozlowski?

Will the answer to that question depend on the level of government oversight of business?

I recently finished a fascinating book entitled Judgment Days : Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America by Nick Kotz. Johnson spent his political capital pushing landmark civil rights legislation, collaborating with King to marshal support for it. A bipartisan coalition of liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans formed to get the 1964 Civil Rights bill, 1965 Voting Rights bill, and 1968 Open Housing bill through both houses of Congress. Imagine! A president spending political capital to help his least powerful, poorest constituents! Forcing businesses to behave ethically - opening their doors to blacks!

Sigh. Will we ever see such a president, such a congress, again in our lifetimes? Of course, I wax admiringly with the benefit of hindsight and the buzz you get from a good book. At the time Johnson was president, I could only see that he was getting us ensnared into an unjustified quagmire in Vietnam. That he refused to level with the country about the futility of that war.

Not too many folks read history these days.

I don't like humidity

I'm training for the Richmond Marathon in November 2005.

There used to be a Raleigh Marathon, but for the three years that they held it, something managed to go wrong. The first year, they had to postpone the race one week because a snowstorm was forecast so the police pulled their support, but the storm didn't happen. Imagine a group of runners who were primed to run a marathon on Sunday. They were told Friday "no, there's going to be too much snow." They wake up that Sunday and see nothing on the ground. No one laughed.

The second year, helpful officers of the law directed the front runners off course, causing them to run less than the requisite 26.2 miles. Those who were trying to qualify for Boston were, well, let's say they were disappointed. Luckily, the race director smoothed things out with the BAA and those who would have qualifed did.

The third year, utiltity crews were cleaning up branches and downed power lines after one of the worst ice storms on record. I had to tiptoe over black ice. The Raleigh Marathon seemed to be a jinxed race.

Anyway, I ran 15.1 miles this morning in Umstead Park. I started around 8, and as the morning progressed it got hot and humid. This means I'm sucking in more water vapor than oxygen. I run slower than usual. Afterwards, I literally had a pain in the butt - I guess I overtaxed my glutes going up the last hill. But overall my pace was pretty steady. I am looking forward to 50 degree mornings.

First entry

I've been writing since I've been able to hold a pencil. I've written short stories, news stories, poetry, games, essays, technical manuals, presentations, abstracts, journal articles, and now a blog. So let's see what happens with it.