If Only I Had Known!

I may have mentioned once or twice previously that I have been writing fiction, off and on, since at least 1980 – and possibly before, depending on your point of view – with a grand total of zero professional sales to date. This isn’t actually all that unusual for amateur writers, as it happens. Even as the quality of instruction in writing has plummeted in recent decades, the value placed on writing has also declined, to the point where everyone who has never tried it seems to believe that writing a books is as simple as arranging 100,000 or so words into something vaguely coherent. At the same time, the decline of magazines, newspapers and books in favor of free content on the Internet has reduced the number of opportunities available to writers, until only the extremely fortunate or unreasonably well-connected (and those ghost writing for celebrities of various kinds) have any realistic hope of becoming published. But apparently, once you do actually achieve publication becoming a best-selling author may be as easy as writing a check…

You can check out the Wall Street Journal article online here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a number of services have appeared over the last decade or so that will artificially increase your initial sales for your new book by placing thousands of pre-orders in advance of your release date. Then when your book finally hits the stores it outsells all other new releases for that week, gets on various bestseller lists, and makes you a “Bestselling Author” – resulting in instant street cred, prestige, a much higher hourly or day rate for your consulting services, or whatever other befits you might be able to gain from being the author of a bestselling book in your field (whatever that might be). And the best part is that this method will work even if what you have written is complete twaddle, without any redeeming features…

Of course, the following week, when the artificially inflated sales dry up the book will drop to the level of sales it would have achieved on its own – possibly with a small increase for having been on any major Best Sellers list for a week, or at least until actual reviews of the book start to appear. In some cases, if the books has some utility or interest it may achieve modest sales following the jump-start, but these are unlikely to justify the enormous cost of using the tactic in the first place (up to $200,000 in some cases), and the Journal notes some examples where the books promoted in this fashion are actually experiencing negative sales (more people return copies each week than purchase new ones) once their debut week is over and they have to survive on their own merits…

Now, obviously this won’t affect writers of fiction as much as it will those authors trying to publish professional books, how-to and self-help books, business strategy books and so on, if only because the rewards available to a successful author of fiction are much smaller. Somebody whose novel appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for a single week is unlikely to draw a lot of six-figure consulting or speaking engagements, and their ability to leverage such a “success” into a new opportunity will be much smaller – especially because a novel can’t have any utility; it’s either a good read or it isn’t. Most publishers are going to require more than just one good week of sales before they will order more copies printed, and if they ever find out about how you’ve gamed the system your chances are effectively shot. But I still can’t help wishing I had known about this strategy years ago…

I’d probably still be a scruffy blogger nobody ever reads. But I’d be a scruffy Bestselling Author who writes a blog that nobody reads…

The Ethics of Textbooks

Back when I was in college there was one class that began with our instructor apologizing for assigning us the textbook he had written. He seemed genuinely embarrassed by this, but he explained that his really was the standard text for this subject; it was then (back in 1984) already in its ninth edition, and you would have read the same textbook if you had taken the same class at UCLA – or Harvard, for that matter. But assigning your students a book you wrote is considered unethical in some circumstances (you’re making money off of a captive audience, you see) and our teacher – who was a good teacher – made a point of assuring us that if there was a better text available he’d use it…

Today, with the rise of self-publishing, e-publishing and a variety of specialty press businesses that would have been called “vanity publishing” just a decade or so ago, anyone who teaches at college level could conceivably author a textbook for his or her class, and many colleges and universities would allow an instructor to assign his or her book to the class without any further review. But while the industry and the technology have changed, the basic question has not: is it ethically acceptable to assign one’s own students a text book one has written and from which one is (at least in theory) receiving royalties? I thought we should take a closer look…

On the one hand, there is no doubt that not all textbooks are created equal. In most fields there appears to be a one book, or at most a small group, that find wide acceptance and become the standard texts for that subject. However, just because a book has become the standard in the field that does not mean that it is necessarily the best explanation of that subject, or that a given instructor somewhere might not have a better understanding of the subject (and a better grasp of how to present it) than the authors do. If an instructor can provide better information to his or her students than they can get from the standard text it could be argued that he or she has a duty to his or her students to write up that information and publish it for them…

On the other hand, publishing textbooks is often seen as a lucrative sideline. Unlike popular fiction, where margins are often small enough to preclude any large royalties to anyone, the markup on textbooks is so outrageous that even a relatively small run can add up for the publisher (500 books at $200 each is $100,000, and 500 students isn’t a particularly large class in some universities). There’s no real question that this system is prone to abuses, and even if the authors are receiving a relatively small percentage of the profits there would be a very strong appeal to writing and assigning your own text. Certainly there are some texts that will be published and assigned despite being absolute twaddle…

So that leads me to the question: Does a publishing company have an ethical responsibility not to publish textbooks that contain no useful information and could actually be harmful to a student due to the mass of misinformation they contain? Does the company have a responsibility to its stockholders, employees, and other stakeholders to sell whatever products will result in the highest profits, regardless of the effect on the student, the discipline, or Education in general? No one is suggesting that a textbook on medicine or chemistry that contains faulty information, and could result in a danger to the general public, should ever be countenanced. But do we, as businesspeople, have the right to decide that a given text should not be produced based solely on the fact that the instructor who is going to assign it is also the author?

It’s worth thinking about…

Can You Blame Them?

I was reading through some of the news aggregation sites the other day when I turned up a story about several countries (notably including Australia, Canada and Italy) that are backing out of the multi-national purchase program for the Joint Strike Fighter, otherwise known as the F-35 Lightning II. This is problematic for all of the usual reasons – the company’s profits will drop, possibly until they can’t make any money on the project; the volume savings the program was supposed to provide may not be possible if they don’t make as many airplanes; various U.S. allies may not have the best gear (or may buy it from companies in other countries), and so on – but in this particular case there’s also a certain amount of credibility involved. You see, one of the reasons that Australia has given for not wanting the aircraft is that they can’t fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm…

You can find the Reuters/Yahoo News story about the situation here if you want to, but the basic idea is that if you fly the F-35 too close to an electrical storm there is a risk that the airplane’s fuel tank may catch fire and explode. This is not an attractive quality for a military asset, and it isn’t helping the reputation of a project that has already cost nearly $400 million without producing a single deployable airplane. But the fact that the general overseeing development of the F-35, on an interview for Australian television, admitted that production of the airplane was started before the design was ready is only making the whole thing look more like a gold-plated boondoggle and less like a critical defense asset. This, in turn, is causing some of the prospective buyers to consider purchasing other types of military aircraft – pretty much anything that won’t catch on fire and explode in the event of an electrical storm, in fact…

Now, we should probably consider that the American track record of producing and supporting cutting-edge military equipment has been somewhat hit or miss over the past two generations. On the one hand, we’ve produced world-beaters like the F-15 Eagle (which has never lost a dogfight in the over 30 years it has been operational), the F-16 Falcon (one of the most commonly-used warplanes in the world), the C-130 Hercules and F-4 Phantom II and a number of others that remain in use in dozens of countries. On the other hand, we’ve also produced flops like the A-12 (a strike airplane so ridiculous that it was cancelled after the program has spent over $2 billion without producing a single flyable airplane in the 12 years they were working on it) and the “Sgt. York” air defense gun (which was cancelled after it repeatedly failed to hit a large helium balloon). There’s no question that a good design would find fans (and buyers) all over the world; but these days the potential customers are requiring rather more convincing than they once did…

I’m not sure how this story is going to turn out. On the one hand, the F-35 represents not one but several completely new capabilities that would be of enormous utility, not just to the United States but also to a number of friendly nations that have agreed to buy it. On the other hand, there’s a limit to how much use a tactical fighter or strike aircraft is going to be if you can only use it in nice weather. The company says that now that they are aware of the problem it will be easy for them to correct, and the final design will be even better than they initially claimed. And all of that may be true – but until they can back up those claims it’s going to be really difficult to blame Australia and some of the other prospective buyers from acquiring the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet instead…

Not Surprised

Like a lot of married people, one of the things in which I take a deep satisfaction is seeing ads for various dating sites and knowing that I am permanently off the market. I know it’s an inappropriate thought, and if I’m honest I should admit that I’ve never used a dating site or any dating service; partly because I’d rather be dissected by aliens and pickled alive than attend a speed dating event (or any other sort of activity put on by one of these services) and partly because I’d be too worried about announcing to the whole world (or whatever part of it happens to be drifting through the Internet at that moment) that I am alone and vulnerable enough to be looking for companionship online. But apparently this hasn’t occurred to some of the people using the Christian Mingle online site…

I’ve written in this space before about some of the issues with online dating sites – fake profiles, site employees flirting with prospective members to make the site look more useful than it is, hordes of long-since-abandoned profiles being left up to inflate the number of “members” using the site, and so on. A number of site operators have attempted to deal with these perceptions by specializing in one particular demographic of date-seekers, notably including people over the age of 50, fans of various pop culture communities, people from specific professions or educational backgrounds, or even (amazingly enough) farmers and ranch hands. Almost inevitably, some of these specialized sites have focused on members of a specific religious group, on the principle that people consider membership in the same faith to be a requirement for a serious relationship, and are more likely to be trustworthy than godless heathen…

Given the nature of cybercrime (and the general nature of human beings) I wasn’t really all that surprised to read this story from ABCNews (by way of the Yahoo News page) about a serial rapist who appears to have found and selected his victims entirely through the creation of multiple fake profiles on the Christian dating site Christian Mingle. It isn’t clear from the news story if any of the victims let their guard down because of the nature of the site they met the guy on, or if this is just more sensationalist news reporting. On reflection, however, I’m not sure it matters in the larger context of new online risk…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that any significant number of the people on any particular Internet site are rapists (or other types of criminal); nor do I oppose the creation and use of these services. The truth is, businesses that help single people in doing something about their condition existed for decades before the appearance of the Internet, and all of the dangers currently associated with online dating services were present in all of those channels as well – not to mention the risks inherent in meeting people in singles bars, coffee houses, community college classes, or any of the other venues people have used to meet other people over the years. It’s only in the implication that a given service is better because of its religious affiliation that things start to get murky…

In its incessant online advertising, Christian Mingle actually uses the tag-line “Discover God’s plan for you” – clearing implying that using their service will get you a date specifically chosen for you by the Almighty. While this is clearly fanciful (how exactly would a private company employ God as a matchmaker? What could they possibly offer as a salary?), the company is trying to differentiate its service from dozens of others by claiming an affiliation with the Christian religion, and implying that matches obtained through their service are somehow superior to those obtained using any other service. All of which might seem innocent enough – until someone starts using that veneer of religious approval to commit horrific crimes…

I’m not sure if the moral of this story is the oft-repeated “Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet” or if “Anything that looks too good to be true probably isn’t true” conveys the message better. But I’m reminded of another truism: “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than going to a garage makes you a car.” Apparently, the same can be said about people who go to Christian websites…

The Ethics of Risk

In our last post we considered the case of a CEO who was fired after his attempts to hold out for a better buyout offer for his company turned into a fiasco of lost money when the value of the company itself took a nosedive before any such offer was received. I argued that this is part of the CEO’s job – and the fact that he or she may be blamed (or fired) for events that were beyond anyone’s control is part of why the person running a company is often given such an elevated salary. But this case also raises the issue of whether the CEO has a responsibility to take such risks, and whether the stockholders have any responsibility to let him or her get on with the job. I thought we should take a closer look…

On the one hand, if the CEO of a company overestimates the value – and even more so, the future potential value – of his or her company, there exists a real chance that they will pass on an offer to purchase the firm that the CEO feels does not live up to that potential, even though this is actually the best offer they will ever receive. This can result, as we saw on Friday, in the company’s stockholders firing the CEO for interfering with their best chance of cashing in on their investment. However, this is not the only possibility…

On the other hand, if the CEO underestimates the potential value of his or her company, there is a real chance that they will sell out for significantly less than the value of the company, thus cheating the stockholders out of a significant portion of the revenue they could have received from cashing in on their investment. This will, most often, also result in the CEO being fired. In fact, it can generally be assumed that any CEO actions that result in any significant loss in stockholder equity will result in the loss of the CEO’s position – because increasing stockholder equity is the book definition of the CEO position’s duties in the first place. Unfortunately, if the CEO never takes any action whatsoever, this will almost certainly lower stockholder equity in and of itself…

There’s no real question that the CEO of any company has a responsibility to make that company as successful as he or she can – a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders, a professional responsibility to the employees, and an ethical responsibility to anyone else whose livelihood depends on the company’s continuing health (e.g. customers, vendors, community leaders, communities dependant on the company for tax revenue and so on). But if any or all of these interests can demand a specific course of action from the CEO, and then demand his or her replacement in the event of any failure to represent their specific interests, are they fulfilling their responsibility to let the CEO get on with the business of running the company?

In general, the stockholders are employing the CEO to weigh these risks and make these choices for them, and they have a right to require the CEO perform appropriately to the situation, and for the compensation they are offering. But if they are going to hold the CEO responsible for both the risks taken and the risks not taken, do they then have the responsibility to step back and let their employee get on with the job they have given him or her? Mediating between the management team and the ownership groups of a company is the primary duty of the Board of Directors, but as the elected representatives of the stockholders there are limits to how effective they can be in the face of stockholder activism. At some point we have to ask whether the owners of the company have the same responsibility to their highest-ranked employee that every other manager has to every other employee…

It’s worth thinking about…

You Pays Your Money…

I was reading an article on the Business Insider website this week and it struck me that how you viewed the events the author was talking about would depend very much on your point of view. If you don’t want to hit the link, they’re talking about a CEO who turned down an offer to buy out his company – an Internet start-up video-sharing service – for $100 million USD, only to then see his company’s business taper off, its market value drop, and then get fired by his board. The author is looking at this from a position sympathetic to the CEO, discussing how upsetting these events are to all entrepreneurial business people (all Business Insiders in general, one assumes), and how awful it must be for the CEO in the story to have had all of this happen to him. When I read the story, my immediate reaction was that the CEO had a $100 million offer in hand, gambled on being able to get $365 million instead, and lost, taking most of the stockholders’ equity out in a flash…

Now, one could legitimately point out that a lot of new Internet services have sold for a lot more than the $100 million offer over the past few years – notably the photo-sharing service called Instagram, which is essentially the still-picture equivalent of the video-sharing service in our story. It would certainly be foolish to sell an asset worth in excess of $360 million for only $100 million, and you would probably expect a CEO who low-balled the sale of his company to be punished in some fashion once the news got out. People still talk about the inventors of the original DOS system selling out to Bill Gates for what was actually a quite reasonable price at the time, and just imagine what people would be saying about someone who decided to take a low-ball offer for Google or Facebook before they really took off…

On the other side of the issue, we can also point out – as the Board of Directors in our story seem to have done – that passing up a buyout offer for $100 million is still depriving the stockholders of the company of $100 million, and that taking this offer before the company’s business took its sudden decline and its price plummeted as a result would have been a better strategy. It’s not clear from the story if the CEO had any reason to believe that these things would happen, but he had to have known it was possible for the company’s overnight success to slow down or stall out, and he must also have known that gambling on the value of his company rising and losing would not sit well with the company’s owners. It’s also not clear from the story what ownership position (if any) the CEO had in the company, or if Agency Theory problems even come into this…

One of the key issues in Agency Theory is that while a stockholder can own stock in all of the companies he or she wants to, the CEO can (usually) only be the Chief Executive of one of them. This makes the executive less likely to take risks with the company (such as selling it and hoping you got a good price), but he or she also needs to remember that acting against the interests of the stockholders (such as refusing to see the company for $100 million just before its site traffic drops by 83%) will eventually get you fired – unless your gambles pay off…

What happened to the CEO in this story may be unfortunate, but the truth is he was gambling with other people’s money, and those people became upset with him when he lost most of it. He could have chosen to be more conservative, to counter-offer with a high sale price, or any number of other strategies, but he was in no real position to complain when the results came out. As my late mother was fond of observing: “You pays your money and you takes your chances…”

The Saddest Story

Let me tell you the saddest story I know. After I finish, you can tell me if you still think it’s inappropriate for the season – but I don’t think you will…

Many years ago, now, I happened to be working in a large office on V-Day, and one of my co-workers had been trying to work up the courage to ask out a woman from another department for nearly as long as I had known him. As far as I know he had no reason to assume failure; there was no great gap in age, rank, social status, wealth, education or relative attractiveness, and the woman in question wasn’t seeing anybody at the time. But my co-worker was (and presumably still is) painfully shy, and had been unable to even to speak with her beyond some occasional light banter. Consequently, nobody in the company knew he had a serious thing for this woman – not even the sort of office gossips you would expect to trade in that kind of information. I only know this story because he told me about it after the fact…

Anyway, for reasons unexplained (and probably inexplicable) my co-worker decided to have flowers delivered to the woman on Valentine’s Day with no note on it, not even a “Guess Who?” He settled on something nice, but not too showy, and planned to watch the delivery, wait for the usual round of admiration and speculation from the other people in our office, and then at the right moment fess up to being the guy behind the gift. I think it gave him an out – if the woman in our story was offended, outraged, disgusted, put off or whatever, he could just fade into the crowd and never admit to knowing anything about the situation. Whether you choose to see this as unfortunately timid or endearingly bashful is up to you, of course…

Unfortunately, in the event, it turned out that the woman receiving the flowers wasn’t quite as broken up from her ex-boyfriend as my co-worker had believed. She (quite logically) assumed that the flowers were from her ex, asking for another chance, and called to thank him. Her ex-boyfriend, who apparently hadn’t wanted to break up in the first place, seized his opportunity with both hands (whether or not he accepted credit for the gift wasn’t clear, but wouldn’t have mattered in the long run) and took the occasion to re-start their relationship. In hindsight, my co-worker admitted, he couldn’t blame the guy; he says he would have done the same thing, given the chance…

Would this story have come out differently if he’d had the nerve to put his name on the delivery? Or just go over to her desk and take credit for doing so? We’ll probably never know. Even if the gift-giver in our story made it through the day with face unslapped and actually got to date the woman he had the crush on, there’s no reason to believe that anything would have come of it. But I told you this story just on the off chance that somebody out there reading it (assuming anybody is reading this) is planning a similar stunt today…

I can’t tell you if your equivalent of this gesture will get you the person of your dreams, or a short but savage beating at the hands of a jealous boyfriend, or just a bill from a florist and a sad story for one of your associates (it would be a bit of a stretch to call him a friend) to blog about decades later. Maybe your story will turn out differently, and maybe you should drop the whole idea and try something else. But whatever you do, whatever it takes, find somebody to love. They’re only words on a computer screen, and you’ve heard them before, but you’ll be a poorer human being if you don’t take them to heart…

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone...

Alternatives

Yesterday’s post about what to get a man for Valentine’s Day led several people to ask me what, in fact, I did recommend they get their significant other for the big day, if not Special Occasion Sex. Let me hasten to assure everyone reading this (assuming that anybody is) that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with Special Occasion Sex; on the contrary, if your plans for Thursday included any form of intimate activity that does not involve actual criminal acts, then by all means go ahead. And, in fact, if that is what you believe to be the best choice for your significant other on that occasion, I wouldn’t dream of telling you otherwise. I am merely pointing out that the reasons for giving someone a present and the reasons for sleeping with them aren’t always congruent – and sleeping with someone only because you can’t think of another option is probably not the best idea…

For the most part, men in this culture haven’t been socialized into expecting anything in particular for this occasion – many of them believe that V-Day is nothing more than an occasion on which the right combination of gestures, words and expenditures may result in a form of reward that they will enjoy. Thus, they may not be expecting anything from you, and almost any form of gift will suffice – although, as noted in previous years, presents that represent alterations in their lifestyle or behavior that you would like to see are likely to be unsuccessful. With that proviso, the average man will be quite happy to receive the same type of gift you would give him on any other occasion…

By contrast, women in most Western cultures have been socialized into placing importance on V-Day, and specifically on tokens given to them as an expression of love by their significant other. This often becomes problematic in the case where one partner is committed to celebrating the holiday and the other is not. Fortunately, this means that a man attempting to purchase a present for a woman on this occasion has a great deal of leeway; the only really fatal errors would be those cases in which his significant other finds his choice to be inappropriate. And while no hard-and-fast rules exist, it’s probably fair to say that anything you wouldn’t purchase for any other occasion will also not suffice for this one, meaning that anything too cheap, too expensive, too cutesy or not cute enough, too personal or too impersonal, too elaborate or too casual, etc., will still not suffice…

The point which in my estimation gets overlooked much too often is that this occasion does not, or should not at least, occur in isolation from the rest of your interactions with your significant other. Months or years of previous experience should give you some idea of whether a pink stuffed animal holding a heart-shaped object with a holiday-appropriate slogan on it is a suitable gift, or if a package of personal lubricants isn’t. If you seize on this occasion to make a grand, romantic gesture that is perfectly reasonable – but you should probably be prepared for the possibility that you may be wrong, or that you may have chosen the wrong gift, the wrong price level, or just the wrong person to give it to…

But that’s a story for another day…

Mixed Messages

I was reflecting on whether or not to write a Valentine’s Day post again this year (is it a tradition, because I’ve done them so often before, or just a recycling of old material?) when I saw an ad for KY products that attempted to address the time-honored question of just what does one get a male significant other for Valentine’s Day in the first place. As you might expect, the company was advising the viewer that what her significant other wants most would be sex, preferably with the assistance of one of the many fine KY brand personal lubricants. Clearly it’s a tongue-in-cheek ad, intended to be funny and just sexy enough to cut through the clutter of incessant television advertising. But watching it, I couldn’t help but feel that there were several problems with this approach…

First of all, the company is perpetuating the old stereotype of men being obsessed with having more sex, along with the implication that women are almost equally dedicated to have as little sex as possible. As always, I will leave moral and philosophical discussions about whether such stereotypes are sexist, elitist or generally detrimental to our society to those better qualified to have such discussions, and simply point out that this is a problematic message for a company that specializes in selling products that facilitate sex to be promoting. Just like any other company, KY needs to convince as many people to make use of its products as it possibly can, not just on February 14, but at all times, and reinforcing the popular belief that half of the population should want to avoid the primary activity in which your product is used does not seem like a strategically sound choice…

Even worse, though, is the possibility that the other half of the population might take the same message to heart. If male customers accept that what their significant other wants most is to avoid having sex with them, it would logically follow that they should offer her a night (or a selection of nights) without any demands (or even requests) of a sexual nature. One could easily imagine a variation on those novelty “coupon books” that offer coupons good for various sexual activities, only in this case they excuse the woman presenting them from such activities at her discretion. At which point, KY is not only missing out on opportunities to sell its products, but also eliminating any chance that their male customers might buy something on the vague or distant hope of using it…

Personally, I’ve always found the stereotype to be annoying, if not outright insulting, because of the remarkably low opinion of all human beings it of necessity perpetuates. Not all men are monomaniacal perverts spending all of their time focused on sex, or such miserable partners that no same woman would ever want them – and, by the same token, not all women are frigid, conniving manipulators who exploit that weakness in their counterparts in order to get what they want by participating in an activity in which they derive no enjoyment whatsoever. In fact, I would argue that neither of these things are inherently correct, and that most of the people who conform to these behavior patterns are doing so because they have been socialized into doing so by elements of the popular/media culture in which they live…

Now, I’m not claiming to have any better answers for KY, let alone for human civilization in general. None of my degrees are in marketing or advertising, let alone psychology, sociology or anthropology. I’m just saying that perpetuating behavioral stereotypes that influence people to avoid using your product may not be the best way of selling it…