September 5th, 2010
Once upon a time, a man (or woman) entered a job, worked his entire life, and retired not seeing the light of day in another company, not knowing the travails of unemployment unless his own company went bankrupt, remaining naive and loyal, and at retirement receiving a pin, a handshake and a pension. These symbols of gratitude were as valuable as the decorations placed upon war veteran’s chests at the end of their service, with the accompanying words, “Well done, old boy! Sorry about the blown-up leg and the shrapnel in your chest, but you took one for the team. Enjoy your pension until you die, it’s on us.”
But that has all changed now, hasn’t it? Gone are those lifelong careers. Piecework, or transactional employment, is now the fashion. While demobilized soldiers still receive a pension for the limbs and minds sacrificed in war, the guys who metaphorically endure the same kinds of losses in the trenches of the business or arts world have lucked out. They are beset with employers asking: “Can you work only one day this week—Sunday?” “How many pieces of that widget can you make in an hour? 40? Not enough. How about 120?” “I don’t care about how many books you have in you, I’ll try this first one, and if I like it, I’ll come back (if you haven’t died of hunger in the meantime, that is).”
While all this bodes well for the best products being available in the market at all times, it does not improve the life of the creators of these products who cannot be producing at their best all the time, and who cannot always be expected to outperform each other and themselves. What will happen to our piece worker with his infrequent bursts of creative brilliance? Impoverishment and neglect will get him eventually, after his best pieces have been sold.
Translating this development to the world of writing, even mighty Google has realized that it cannot forget the bedrock upon which its giant advertizing revenues have been built: content, and by extension, that quintessential piece worker, the writer. How to save this much-maligned hack is now the crusade that Google, and other givers-away of content, are trying to determine. We hear of “premium content zones” or walled information communities, where “curated content” will be made available for a fee, with writers being nurtured, protected (and hopefully compensated) for such valuable output. Is the pendulum swinging back? Is it, really?
Will we ever return to the whole-life based relationship between creators and their employers, where the former are nurtured, fed, and released to produce their life’s work, free of the shackles of worrying about when or where the next meal is coming from? Or has progress led us back to the dark ages where the baser pre-occupations of acquiring food, shelter and safety overpower the pursuit of self-actualization, back to a world devoid of creativity?
Piecework may make short term economic sense from an employer’s viewpoint. But it devalues the very resource, the creator, who produces the product. Ultimately this lame donkey may have to be put to sleep, impoverishing the farmer.
Tags: arts, business, careers, creators, employers, employment, Google, limbs, minds, pieceworker, products, soldiers, transactional, veterans, widgets
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August 12th, 2010
How does one make money at writing today? That question seems to be the “pre-occupation de jour” of most commercial writers and journalists. The cyber airwaves are chock full of content: blogs, wikis, e-mail, self-published books, e-zines. How does a writer insist that he gets paid for his work when there are equally good, or sometimes better, content being written by people who possess a deep understanding of their subject matter and an altruistic desire for sharing their writing, and who earn a better living through other means than they can or ever will as writers?
Encyclopaedias were money makers once, but their time ran out; software makers made money too, but they spawned the open source movement and jumped into services instead. Pagers were absorbed into cell phones, typewriters into personal computers, music CDs into MP3’s, videos into You Tube, broadcast radio into blog-talk radio, cable television into web-TV, long- distance phone plans into Skype, and now tree-books into e-books. Many successful products that once exchanged value for monetary benefit are now offered free or have been subsumed into other inventions. And content—a writer’ primary product, plucked out of a fertile imagination not given to many, and delivered in beautiful language—is now also… free?
I think of the hippie era when we played in musical bands purely for the love of expression, not for money but in protest against an out-of-touch establishment and all things resembling corporate greed. But that did not last either, did it? After the hangovers and love-ins wore out, we took haircuts, shaved our beards, bathed, bought new clothes, and joined the very guys we had protested against, to unleash some of the greatest economic growth cycles in history, creating unparalleled inventions, and unleashing unbridled greed that resulted in the meltdowns of Black Monday, the dot-com bubble, and the Crash of 2008.
And now, as if in atonement for our past excesses, we are going back to our hippie days of free drugs, free love and free expression, and giving everything away for free again, including our artistic creation—our writing. Even Big Business is calling this the Age of Creativity and seeking to monetize it. But the creative ones don’t seem to care; self actualization is triumphing over the baser needs of the ego and the pocketbook.
I support those trying to make a living at this very difficult art at this particular time in history. It is indeed a desired end: to do the things you love and to also earn one’s livelihood from it. But it seems like these bold souls are swimming against a tide that has, at least for the next few years, turned against them.
Tags: blog-talk, CD's. MP3, Content, Crash, hippie, monetizing, radio, sharing, TV, writers, writing, You Tube
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July 31st, 2010
When the towers came down in New York innocence was lost in North America, they say. People wanted only to read about news and features – they wanted facts, facts, facts…When was the next calamity going to happen, and where? Were we heading towards the end of days, and when? And whenever escape became an emotional necessity, it was sought in worlds far beyond (and therefore safe from) the present one – how about Hogwarts School for starters, or the dark and mysterious Vatican with those Da Vincian codes, or those dread-lands populated by vampires and werewolves, or a juicy murder mystery in distant Scandinavia? Mainstream fiction got sidestepped, because life had become stranger and more frightening than make-believe of the literary kind.
And now, several years on, we are drowning in facts. We Google “facts” and they are arrayed before us, from umpteen sources, with varying degrees of accuracy and bias. There is comfort in knowing that if we need the facts, they are always available, 24/7, at the click of a button. Welcome to the Factual Age, in which we get the facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts. Boring…
I am more interested in that other world, the lost one: the one in which facts or pseudo-facts were re-arranged to fit a coherent dramatic trajectory, unleashing a moral, providing meaning and hope, allowing for triumph over adversity however trivial. A world where lies were conjured in order to illuminate a higher truth. A world that was delivered in beautiful lyrical prose conjuring imagery from life, giving us hues ranging from blue to gold, shadings from dark to light, perspectives from vulnerable to sympathetic, and action from heroic to barbaric.
The relentless onslaught of the Factual Age is similar to us being bombarded with still photographs of life, to the point that we are once more hungry for paintings to re-engage our moribund faculties, replete with the artist’s slant, bias, perspective, character, flaws, and opinion. And the artists too have gathered outside the gates with piles of their wares accumulated over the lean years since 9/11, during which output was limited to the very few, who made their handlers lots of cash by dabbling in predictable genres.
I think the pendulum will swing back now that the thirst for facts and information has been satisfied by the powerful search engines of today. I believe we will be looking for ways to convert these facts into stories that attempt to make sense out of an increasingly meaningless life rushing along at an even faster pace. I believe that those gates will soon be shoved open and that the artists will come rushing in, even giving away their wares as gifts, because sharing will have become more important to them than selling. And a grateful audience will embrace these stories again, the lost books, lost from the day the developed world lost its innocence.
Tags: 9/11, artists, Da Vinci, facts, fiction, Google, Hogwarts, literary, Scandinavia, vampires, Vatican, werewolves, writers
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July 10th, 2010
I read a meritorious review of a novel in a national newspaper recently, which highlighted how in a single sentence the novelist describes a character’s worn trousers as containing “the urine he couldn’t cut off due to the cold, the semen from his last wet dream, cocoa spilled from the day before, snot he’d rubbed off, pus from his skin ulcers, blood from popped leeches, and homesick tears that he’d wiped away.”
Getting over my initial reaction, which was “Gross!” I pondered this passage at length, to figure out why the writer of today needs to provide so much detail, when we have been always prodded by the maxim of “less is more”.
I then tried to write the sentence the way Hemingway, that old master of the “clipped style” would have written it (and re-written it umpteen times, as he was known to do). Old Papa may have gone something like “and his soiled trousers were layered with the flotsam of life.” How would I have written it? Being a Hemingway acolyte, I may have tried, “His unwashed pants were full of crap.”
How much description does today’s average time-strapped reader with a diminishing attention span need? Does semen, pus, piss, blood and other bodily emissions shock us into paying attention? Do we need to be reminded of people we are not, in order to be curious enough to read on? Are we moving into a more sensory stage of literature, where not only dialogue, actions and narrative, but smells, sounds, discharges and other internal workings have to be turned inside out to engage us?
I was even more perplexed after reading that book review, and I tried to re-write some of my sentences in this new format. Here’s what I came up with as a sampler:
Original: “He wolfed down his breakfast and quickly exited the diner.”
Revised: “He stuffed pancakes into his cavernous mouth, syrup dripping down his lower lip; bacon bits crunched between his teeth and spewed on his neighbour as he tried talking at the same time. He choked on the last mouthful before spitting it back into his plate, where it sat in an unrecognizable gooey paste. He wiped his mouth with an already soiled napkin, smearing his face, threw his cutlery down with a loud clatter, belched into his hapless neighbour’s ear, and departed with a loud fart that filled the diner with the aroma of an undigested human mash-up of bacon, eggs, coffee, maple syrup, buckwheat, baked beans and strawberry yoghurt.”
Okay, I stopped at this point even though I could have waxed un-poetically on the description of that hurried meal, enough to fill a couple more pages, or until I had spewed out my own breakfast from being sickened by my own writing. Gross is addictive. For now, I think I am sticking to “less is more,” bland though my writing would be.
How would you have written that passage?
Tags: bacon, blood, breakfast, eggs, Hemingway, less, more, pancakes, pus, semen, snot, trousers, urine
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July 3rd, 2010
When I saw TV footage last weekend of the burning police cruiser in downtown Toronto, of the guys in balaclavas and black suits breaking windows of commercial establishments, and of the armour-bearing cops in black marching down familiar streets, herding protest groups into smaller segments to render them ineffective, I realized that our World Class City had finally lost its innocence.
The disconcerting factor was that I was unable to distinguish which of these groups of men in black were the good guys. The G20 leaders were calling their conference a success, so their goons must be in the right, eh? Wait a second, what about the balaclava brigade’s claim that unless violence happens no one pays attention – how about that, eh? And what about our oblivious citizens of Toronto, who have always taken their good city for granted, who were out that day walking their kids and their dogs and taking photographs of these costumed marauders, as if their streets had been taken over for the shooting of another one of those “Hollywood North posing as New York City” action flicks, and who were left wondering why they were suddenly being arrested and held in detention centres, or being asked for ID. “Damn it, I am a Canadian, eh, and a Torontonian, to boot! Don’t you recognize me, copper? This is a bad movie. Let me out of here!”
Just like our naive and hapless city dwellers who were stuck in the middle, we middle class taxpayers are now paying for the excesses of the men in black: $1bn in security costs and a bundle in property damage that will invariably find its way back into municipal taxes and insurance premiums for Citizen Joe Blow.
What also struck me was how similar these two groups of men in black were: in appearance, in their capability to do harm, and in their level of organization. Yet, they were on two diametrically opposite sides of the political spectrum. Have we polarized so much in what was once a middle class society, one in which everyone had enough to afford the basics of life, that we now have to take sides with either the haves or the have-nots, with either the ones with power or the ones wanting to grab a morsel of it?
My last book featured a protagonist who pursues the Middle Way, a back-to-the-centre approach, taking the best of Socialism and Capitalism and leaving the bad behind. Call it Enlightened Capitalism, or Liberal Socialism, if you will, a system, which once it takes root, eliminates the need for men in black, gated communities and beggars on the street. I was inspired by similar approaches taken by great teachers and wise political leaders in the past, albeit for brief periods in history, for greed always intervened to thwart their efforts. My “progressive” critics dismissed this approach as being archaic, utopian and idealistic. And yet, I wonder if our politicians have really found a better solution. When I saw that burning cruiser, I didn’t think they had.
Tags: balaclavas, Black, city, Enlightened Capitalism, G20, Hollywood North, Liberal Socialism, Men, Middle Way, movie, New York, Toronto
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June 21st, 2010
I’ve been watching a spate of recent championship games – the NBA finals, the NHL finals, the World Cup soccer finals – and I have been more interested in seeing the faces of the coaches of the participating teams. They must be the most keyed-up, unhappiest people in the stadium, perhaps on earth, at that particular moment; and to cap it all, they are on syndicated TV, their sourpusses exposed to the world.
They pace, they straighten their ties (the ones who wear them), they mutter uncontrollably, occasionally they yell, they recall their players and give them a dressing down during a time out, they shout at referees and linesmen, they shout at their players, but nobody listens to them. And occasionally, when their team scores, they are seen embracing their assistant coaches and dancing a staggering war dance to let out steam. Do they get secretly drunk after a game?
Often when the championships are over, they are left hunting for a new job. The last win was only the last win. They are not paid for the last win, but for the possibility of future wins. And, God forbid, if their team has suffered a string of losses, there is probably no job awaiting them.
I know why I have such empathy for the coaches. They remind me of writers.
Tags: coach, coaches, NBA, NHL, soccer, sourpuss, TV, World Cup, writers, yelling
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June 7th, 2010
I love to sit in my libraries (one at home, and one in my office) during my spare hours, and when not reading or working, I try to visualize the tears, fears, joys and adventures that led to the writing of the tales within the pages of those many books on the shelves. Sometimes, when stuck on a plot point in my own stories, I thumb through these books for a prompt that will get me going again. And I stop to silently thank the writer concerned for the nudge to my stalled creativity.
I glance through the spines of murder mysteries, histories, Canadian literature, American literature, Asian, European and Jewish literature, children’s stories, “how-to” books on writing, and on business consulting, books on wine making, golfing, encyclopaedias that I never refer to now thanks to Wikipedia, dictionaries that I rarely refer to because of dictionary.com., books on nutrition, or on how to make money and retire early (I never read this latter category now because the formulas did not work for me), fantasy novels, magazine and finally even copies of the novels I have written, and the magazines and anthologies my short stories have been published in, and I feel in good company.
I try to visualize the angst these writers suffered to experience, create and bring to fruition their works, works that have outlived the lives of some of their creators and continue to give us pleasure and wisdom today. Many of the dead writers would have passed on with no clue as to the merit their hard work would garner beyond their life spans.
And I feel a sense of loss, because all these books will soon be condensed into a small electronic tablet that I will cart around with me henceforth and read whenever I need an injection of intellectual stimulation in the printed form. I will have to imagine all these great minds and their wisdom squeezed into a mini computer chip. I wonder what I will do when I have to add new books to my present libraries; will there even be tangible books in the future? Or will my present collection remain stagnant, with every addition arriving in electronic form?
I do know that my new e-reader will be many times more efficient, reducing space in my luggage, giving me instant access to books that pique my fancy, letting me sample chapters before I decide to buy, giving me dictionary and encyclopaedia access to words or passages I come across, even read back to me when I am too tired to exert my eyes. But will it give me companionship with the masters, where by sitting quietly in my library and touching those old tomes, I would connect with the spirits of the great writers who contributed so much to the literary canon, and who inspired me to follow my life path? I wonder?
Tags: company, creativity, great minds, libraries, literature, masters, writer, writers
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May 29th, 2010
I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review (a venerable magazine that I have read over the years and continue to devour from end to end) that Indian management types are now adopting “employee first” practices and are anecdotally accounting for this shift being part of their country’s successful emergence as a global force in commerce over the recent years.
Wait a second, guys – this has happened before. Companies yo-yo between Customers, Shareholders and Employees at different stages of their evolution and at different times in the economic cycle. In times of start-up and growth, the rallying cry is “Customers, Customers, Customers – let’s grab market share and damn everything else”. When markets get too hot and job hopping for higher pay becomes de rigueur, the mantra changes to “Employees, Employees, Employees.” And when markets are stable and both Customers and Employees are behaving responsibly, then it’s time to focus on those fickle Shareholders, just in case they dump their investments and go looking for higher returns.
Indian companies, particularly those doing outsourced work for western companies, are running employee turnover rates in excess of 30% at present – no wonder they need to focus on “Employees, Employees, Employees” at this time! But as the jobs-decimated West tries to repatriate all those call centre, software development and other “global” jobs back to their shores, and as compensation rates in the hot-job economies in South Asia shoot up due to opportunistic job hopping, I’m wondering whether “Employees, Employees, Employees” will lose its shine and “Customers, Customers, Customers” will return to the top of the table in India. And this time around, the hunt for customers will be in the newly affluent and customer-abundant domestic and regional markets instead of in the elusive Western ones who tend to close their gates when the going gets rough, and whose populations are reducing because of lower reproduction rates.
From my vantage point in North America, I remember the ‘80’s of Tom Peters when the Customer was king in the West. I remember ‘90’s and Hal Rosenbluth’s cry for the Employee, and the glory days of the new millennium when Jack Welch roared on behalf of the Shareholder. I’ve seen the ascendance of Marketers in times of growth and their replacement by the Accountants in recessions, and more recently the rise of the Risk and Compliance guys during these times of corporate bad behaviour (aka greed).
Putting down my copy of Harvard, I felt a sense of déjà vu. The cycle is starting to reverse again, this time in another part of the world, where western-educated and newly minted MBAs are recycling old concepts that have been tried out here.
Tags: Customers, Employees, Hal Rosenbluth, Harvard Business Review, Indian, Jack Welch, Shareholders, Tom Peters
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