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From NY Times's obit on Tony Schwartz, the guy who created Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy Nuke" TV advert:

“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” he wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”

This is really true of any of the best influence writing. Even business writing. When I am crafting a new case study, I take care in providing images that provoke emotions within my audience. This gets tricky if the audience is not homogeneous: having to write for labor leaders and managers isn't as hard as one would think (they really aren't that far apart) but you do need to stop and think about it.

I would argue that much of preaching follows this. You may not learn as much from this style, but it hits home and you remember it.

O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work — because mothers work now and always have worked — and your parents must say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ‘sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.

Encyclopædia Britannica reports that today is the birthday of Ṣaddām Ḥussein, executed deposed-President of Iraq, and the anniversary of the execution of Benito Mussolini, dictator and self-styled "Il Duce" of fascist Italy.

Nice juxtaposition, there.

Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin & Patricia Shaw. 2000. Complexity Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?. Routledge: New York, NY. (Part of the Complexity and Emergence in Organization Series.)

I've had this book for a long time (~2003), having scored it from Powell's near the U of Chicago and I've yet to be able to plow through it. But I spent four months working intensively with Warren Kinston, a highly accomplished Systems thinker. Maybe I just needed more exposure to systems theory in order to understand the argument.

Not that the writing has helped. It's a thick book, written in dense text. But the topic itself is dense. I missed out on Philosophy 301 at Trinity of Texas (maybe because I slept through my classes for a semester) but I really didn't have the background to get the teleological arguments. After getting through Kinston's Working With Values I'm more prepared for these types of density and philosophical arguments.

Philosophy matters, of course, especially in management theory since so many managers are Pragmatists in their decision-making approach.

A sample of the discussion:

This deals with sexuality and may not be suitable for younger readers.

It's amazing how hard this number was to find.

From "Behavioral, Biological and Structural Components of MSM STI Morbidity" by Steven Goodreau and Matthew Golden, University of Washington CFAR. Presented at the 2004 National (USA) STD Prevention Conference, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [PPT]

In this slide from their talk (and probably a summary of their findings reported later in Sexually Transmitted Infections (2007;83:458-462).

• MSM = Men who have Sex with Men
• UMHS = Urban Men's Health Survey, c. 1998, "a telephone interview of a probability sample of men who have sex with men (MSMs) living in four cities - San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. An MSM was defined as any male who reported same sex contact since age 14 or who self-identified as gay or bisexual." [Sociometrica]
• NHSLS = National Health and Social Life Survey ("The Sex Survey"). 1992

So around 25% of all males have had more than two partners in the past twelve months, while among just MSM it runs around 65%.

The problem is that NHSLS is representative of the nation as a whole. UMHS only surveyed urban men, and the methodology seems flawed to me, skewing towards MSM who would be heavily sexually active.

This still doesn't say what the median or modes are.

I've been reading Dean Keith Simonton lately. (Kudos to the state of Indiana for making the Insight databases of webfeat available to residents.) He has an extensive publications list, but what I'm interested in here is a point he probably makes best in a book: acknowledged geniuses are people who produced a lot.

Kirsch, David and Goldfarb, Brent. November 17, 2006. "Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Bad Ideas, Good Ideas: 'Get Big Fast' and Dot Com Venture Creation".

Kirsch, David; Goldfarb, Brent; and Miller, David A. April 24, 2006. "Was there too little entry during the Dot Com Era?"

Laseter, Tim; Kirsch, David; and Goldfarb, Brent. 2007. "Lessons of the Last Bubble". strategy+business, 46 (Spring 2007).

Laseter, Tim; Turner, Martha; and Wilcox, Ron. 2003. "The Big, the Bad, and the Beautiful.". strategy+business, 33 (Winter 2003).

The general argument in all of these is that "Get Big Fast" works only in limited circumstances. Kirsch, Goldfarb and Miller argue that the Dot Com Era had a higher success rate in new businesses than both the national average and for new businesses in mature, known industries. Over 50% of Dot Com Era tech firms made it past the drop.

(I should admit that I was the owner of a Dot Com Era tech firm that provided consulting services to large firms, including other consulting firms. We survived but only because "we" is not a big number. I would imagine that many such companies exist. My old partner's company is still around although he'll bill about $500 this year. I closed mine after eight years and am now opening up a new one. Long and short: I'm suspicious of the numbers.)

The articles all make the point that big is not always good, that managed growth is better than explosions.

From "Lessons of the Last Bubble":

To avoid the [next] bubble, we recommend lots of little experiments that send the herd in many different directions. Avoiding the 'get big fast' strategy and the herd instinct allows for a more thorough investigation of the terrain. Many members of the herd will fall upon barren terrain and die, but in the long run, careful nurturing of the fruitful routes will produce a greater herd than overgrazing of the fertile patches discovered by the lucky few.

Or, as someone else said sometime before them:

Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.

And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.

And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.

And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

This indiscriminate scattering of seed has bothered people for years. You should concentrate on the model that works, they say. But you can't ever be sure what that model really is, or who will receive your output today. Yesterday's customers, whether in business or for the "Kingdom of Heaven", are not the receivers tomorrow.

Models must be experiments, hundreds of them, which all have more or less equal chances of being wild failures. In fact, the failures may produce successful strategies that can be adopted by others later. But if you are going to be successful, you must not worry that things aren't always successful but concentrate on learning.