What I’ve Learned So Far

Molly Ivins no longer counts the years. I cannot count the ways that Texas failed to deserve her abiding attention.

• A tribute from her fellow Creators’ Syndicate writer, Anthony Zurcher. (Thanks to John Scalzi.)
• Ivins’s last column. (Ditto.)
• An obituary from The Nation.
• All kinds of coverage at her spiritual home, the Texas Observer.

Maybe someday Texas — and this Republic as a whole — won’t need a journalistic scourge like Molly Ivins. Until then, may her spirit live on.

“The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person’s rights, it can take away everyone’s.”

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Addendum, Thursday, 6:30 a.m.: The New York Times has posted its obituary here.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

–Upton Sinclair

Sitting through a multi-presenter meeting the other day, I was struck by the difference in styles of the folks who took the dais. Most were soft-spoken — it was a smallish meeting among friends — but the differences in pace and tone were telling.

My summary judgment is hardly groundbreaking: Slow and clear beat fast and mumbled every time. When you’re presenting to any audience, plant your feet, open up your chest (ask anybody who’s ever did high-school theater how to do this), and raise your chin. Slow down so that your audience can distinguish your words, and be willing to say less, but more clearly, in the service of making your point. Whatever you have to say, be it ever so humble, say it with conviction.

What’s that? What if you don’t have conviction about what you’re saying? Then you shouldn’t be standing in front of an audience — any audience — until you can muster it. Consider finding that conviction as an exercise in coming clean with yourself, about your speaking abilities and about the content of what you have to say.

If your lack of conviction comes from a lack of confidence in your presentation skills, that can be addressed with simple practice. Find someone you know who gives good presentations, and ask them to coach you, if not formally, at least in the sense of listening to a run-through and telling you whether you’re loud enough, slow enough, and easy to understand. If you’re using slides, make sure they make sense. The basics of presentation skills are just that: basic. You can practice them as surely as a you can a sand wedge or a piano etude. And if you’re going to be called on to make presentations in your career, you should practice them.

Now, what about content? Even if what you’re saying is simple, even if it will only take two minutes of your audience’s time, do yourself and your listeners the favor of polishing the material in your mind before you take the stage. In the right setting, there is room for thinking out loud in front of a friendly audience, but that’s a very different thing from presuming to take up that audience’s time with information that you haven’t made an effort to digest for yourself. Do not take the stage to deliver a first-draft presentation; to do so insults the busy people who are trying to listen to your wanderings. At the very least, subject your material to the same test that Marilu Henner’s character did in L.A. Story when she was preparing to go out for the evening: take a quick look back over everything, and remove the first thing that sticks out to you as being too much.

When you’ve earned your own confidence in your material and your mode of delivering it — that is, when you’ve come clean with yourself — you can stand and deliver with the best of them, even if you never attain the seemingly effortless grace of a Godin or a Kawasaki. Until you’ve come clean with yourself in this way, you could be delivering the gospel truth to willing listeners, but you’ll still sound like you’re ignorant or you have something to hide.

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Addendum: Following up on the suggestion of Phil Lynch in the comments on yesterday’s post, I’ve added blogroll links to Beyond Bullets and Presentation Zen, two sites I referred to almost exactly a year ago. If you want to make better presentations, by all means you should check out these sites, as well as Cliff Atkinson’s book, Beyond Bullet Points.

Dig this from the whiz kids at 37signals:

Pouring tons of money, tons of resources, and tons of people at a problem is like using a jackhammer to break out of jail. Putting a few smart people on the problem, embracing constraints, not trying to solve the wrong problems, focusing on precision, not using seven words when four will do, and taking the time to get it done right is like using the spoon.

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In the Elizabeth Kolbert article I cited in the previous post, Kolbert talks about Amory Lovins’s use of the term “negawatt” (and, by extension, “nega-barrels”) to refer to the watts of energy we don’t use thanks to energy efficiency. For more on this, check out this Sierra magazine article by Reed McManus:

Negawatt Power: The simplest solution to global warming.

Key quote, relative to what I was just saying about energy efficiency and standards of living:

The “2,000-Watt Society” program promoted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology claims it’s feasible to reduce per-capita energy use in industrialized countries to 2,000 watts per day — that’s a two-thirds reduction in energy use for Europeans and a five-sixths decrease for spendthrift Americans — without crimping anyone’s standard of living.

Just so. There’s also a nifty chart that compares costs per kilowatt-hour for energy derived from various sources. Solar is still very expensive (although technological advances continue to bring it more in line with other sources), while wind has become competitive with natural gas. Coal is cheap, cheap, cheap, at 4.5 - 5.4 cents per kWh . . . but still expensive compared to energy efficiency, at 3.13 cents per kWh.

Energy conservation: It’s not just a “personal virtue”.

First, the estimable Elizabeth Kolbert (she of Field Notes from a Catastrophe) brings us a profile of Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. As far as I can tell, this piece is not available online, but if you can lay hands on the 22 January 2007 issue of The New Yorker, do give the article a read. Here are some key snippets, along with my commentary.

“You know, there’s this old joke about the economist who’s taking his mannerly granddaughter for a walk,” [Lovins] told me. “She says, ‘Oh, Grandpa, I see a twenty-dollar bill lying in the street. May I go pick it up, please?’ He says, ‘Don’t worry, my dear. If it were real, somebody would have picked it up already.’ ” Lovins likes to say that he takes economics “seriously, not literally.” In his view, the streets are littered with twenty-dollar bills.

What Lovins is saying may seem hard to believe — especially when he extrapolates it to the entire society and claims that the U.S. could wean itself off of oil entirely by 2050, while saving money yet without giving up Americans’ luxurious standard of living. But what he’s saying does match my experience of working in the business world. Yes, people want to make money. Yes, in theory people work to maximize their economic well-being, especially in the context of running profit-seeking enterprises. But in practice, it’s faaaaar from perfect. Why do you think the big consultancies (IBM, Accenture, McKinsey, Bain, et al.) make so much money? Because plenty of businesspeople know that, much of the time, they’re not maximizing their returns.

The problem isn’t that businesspeople are dumb, but that, as humans, we’re all married to certain conceptions of the status quo. We have assumptions we swim in with as little thought as a fish swims in water, and it’s not until they’re challenged in some way, or queered by external events, that we come to question them. Climate change — or at least the reasonable assumption of the threat of it — may finally be doing this for a broad audience. But in general, I’ve found it’s safe to assume that large human organizations will exhibit gross failure to maximize for at least some goods, especially when these goods (e.g. atmospheric carbon stability) previously have not be highly valued.

[Lovins argues:] People weren’t interested in energy for its own sake but, rather, for the benefits — hot showers, cold drinks, dry clothes — that it conferred. If Americans could get the same benefits using less energy, then they would, in effect, have found a new energy source. [. . .]

Lovins likes to call the United States the “Saudi Arabia of nega-barrels.”

The latter point is a ripe one. The U.S. and Canada use far more energy per capita that many other highly industrialized nations, yet overall the standard of living in, say, Belgium would be quite comfortable for most Americans. (The beer’s good, too!) But most Americans don’t want to hear about energy efficiency, because as soon as it’s brought up, they think of hardship and deprivation and shortage. Yet in many cases it doesn’t have to be that way at all, as the handy example of compact fluorescent bulbs makes clear. The challenge for those of us who already see this is to convey the potential benefits without wrongly giving the impression that they must all be accompanied by hardship. (Some folks, e.g. the more dire predictors of a Peak Oil societal meltdown, would say we do have to prepare for hardship. Maybe — but I’m talking about what’s emotionally workable right now for the great mass of the population.)

It’s not that people are stupid, exactly. It’s that their intelligence is limited. When they make decisions, they tend to worry only about their own self-interest, which they see in such narrow terms that they miss the larger opportunities all around.

Human selfishness is pervasive across societies, but it has been so easy to exercise in this particular vein because energy has been cheap for so long. As soon as energy prices spike, a lot more people — including many who would never think to call themselves conservationists — start seeing the wisdom of fuel-efficient cars and the like.

Lovins tends to be a polarizing figure, but his approach to solutions has certainly yielded lots of positive results. For another take on Kolbert’s article, see this Gristmill post.

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A follow-up to my earlier posts on Ryszard Kapuscinski: The New Yorker just posted Kapuscinski’s account of his first trip abroad.

Namely, why on earth do we continue to pursue the anti-cocaine policies that we do?

“Try asking why this policy is still pursued in spite of its evident and repeated and inevitable failure, and why it has been allowed to poison the society with death squads and corruption and poverty, and you will receive no answer.”

The piece is one of Hitchens’s slighter efforts, but it comes to this question in a graceful way after discussing one of my favorite books, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I’ve said it before: I may just link to every single thing Seth Godin ever says about giving presentations, especially as that relates to using Powerpoint. Just last week I had a friend tell me, without my even asking, about how awesome Godin is to watch in person, about how he had a big roomful of people eating out of his hand and laughing out loud when he presented at a conference my friend attended.

So, here’s Godin’s latest blog entry on this subject — a reprint of a four-year-old piece he wrote:

Really Bad Powerpoint

For more in this vein (including links to earlier Godin installments), try these rants from yours truly:

Presentations: the un-presentation.

Presentations: prose on slides = death.

In the past couple of days my wife and I have both read The Blonde, by Duane Swierczynski. It’s a smart thriller that is absolutely packed with action — it’s relentless, I tell you. I figured it was worth reading after my wife (a.k.a. She Who Slurps Books) stayed up late to read all of it on the same night I gave it to her as a gift, and I certainly was not disappointed. The book has fights, chases, mystery, romance, a bit of sex, and lots of nanotechnological badness. In Philadelphia!

So, go read it, is what I’m saying.

What made me want to read it: John Scalzi’s interview with Swierczynski.

Where you can find out more about Swierczynski: His blog.

It’s hard to believe they could sink lower than their performances in the Ashes series of (multi-day) Test matches against Australia . . . but that’s exactly what they’ve done in their recent series of one-day matches. Overnight comes the news of their latest schoolyard whipping at the hands of the dominant Australian side. They lost by nine wickets in a one-day match. If that’s all Greek to you, imagine a baseball game in which each side gets its nine turns at bat all in a row; this outcome would be equivalent to playing your nine innings for a measly couple of runs, then seeing your opponent outscore you by their second inning.

Peter English sums it all up nicely in the lead paragraph of this recap:

Embarrassing England sink to new low
England have spluttered to so many deflating losses on this tour that even rabid and patriotic Australian supporters have started pleading for them to lift off the bottom. After today’s nine-wicket caning in a match lasting only 59 overs the same thought stands. Please can this be the turning point?

A similarly pithy assessment comes from Andy Bull’s running Guardian commentary on the match:

[Commentator Dean Laffan said:] “. . . Any game that revives serious discussion or a Mercy Rule is not good. Poor England, every time they seem to have hit rock bottom, they grab the shovel and set new, subterranean lows.” Too right Dean. England are flat on the canvas screaming submission.

I’m mildly an England fan when it comes to cricket, but my fascination with this goes beyond the sport to the overall concepts that drive excellence and failure. Someone, anyone, must take this team in hand and turn it around. Their failures on the scorecard would be forgivable if the team were simply outmatched by their opponents; no one complains when the green, undermanned Bangladesh team takes a pounding from a veteran side like Sri Lanka or South Africa, so long as they play hard. But England boasts some of the game’s most potent players — Flintoff, Strauss, Pietersen, et al. They simply have forgotten how to fight.

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UPDATE — noon Friday:  At least the England coach has the decency to apologize for their showing.