Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

Tom's rule for the day: "Never confront people with their own ignorance."

Let's say someone is in a critical position to do something. Let's further say that said person has no real grasp on what needs to be done, and isn't even approaching understanding any of the foundational pieces of knowledge that would be necessary to understand what needs to be done.

Are you justified in telling that person just how vast his incompetence is?

It won't help. What's the best possible outcome of such a disclosure? That the person would realize the insight of your comment and humbly step aside, allowing someone more qualified to act. Does that ever happen in real life?

Much more likely, the person will become an enemy. Defensive and eager to shift blame -- especially if it can be directed back to you.

The Better Approach is to acknowledge what the person can do and then work with them to help them through the problem. Teach them, if you can, what they need to know. Provide as much help as possible, subtly, without calling it such.

Especially if you're a vendor and they are an employee of your client. :o)

(Note to any clients who may be reading this: I'm not talking about you!)

The dilemma: we run up a large bill each month with the various search engine PPC programs. Those bills can only be paid by credit card, due to the policies of the search engines. Our high-credit-limit card was disappearing and the only replacement card we could use had a much lower credit limit.

The first approach: I called the search engines and tried to get them to switch us to prepaying or invoicing or bank transfers. After many phone calls, applications, negotiations, and pleadings -- nothing.

The brilliant second approach: one of our accountants suggested prepaying the credit card directly, establishing a positive balance there. Then we run as normal, and instead of running up a big negative, we just run our card down to a zero balance.

I can't use the phrase "out-of-the-box" without wanting to kill myself, so I'll just say that was a clever solution to the problem. I hope to keep that idea somewhere in the back of my brain so next time something like this comes up, I can use it again. I love it.

I've had another taste of my own mortality, which is always good for me, I'm sure. A good friend and business associate, the guy who has been with me at 10x longer than anyone else and who is really to credit for the business sense and organization that turned us around and made us a really great company, was basically fired by the Corporate Overlords who purchased us and signed a legally binding contract forbidding them from firing him. This has been a fascinating thing to watch, because they're not even hiring a replacement. I would have assumed -- as I'm sure he assumed -- that he was viewed as basically essential to the company. But he's gone, and we're getting along okay without him. Sure, many good things that would have happened had he remained won't happen. But we're not going to fold tomorrow. And the Overlords aren't really evil; they just value short-term profitability over long-term direction right now.

It's weird to see how quickly something like that can happen. A terrific and valuable employee can suddenly become an expensive liability, when the company shifts to a hard focus on short-term profits. I've assumed -- heh, heh -- that I'm also basically essential to the company. For the moment, they've confirmed that they view me that way as well. But I watched how quickly things changed for our old president, and I have a better sense of how readily that could happen to me.

It's frustrating to know that I'm naive about a thousand million things. I guess that's what experience is for. :o)

If you don't start, you'll never fail.

The world has been destroyed many times since I arrived:

• Acid rain ruined all the crops, poisoned all the lakes, and mutated all the people.
• African killer bees wiped us out, one by one, as they spread inexorably across America.
• Mad cow disease contaminated our entire meat supply and we all turned into zombies.
• Deforestation has halted all commerce, since we're out of paper and unable to build anything.
• Overpopulation turned us against one another and we all died in a series of massacres.
• Bird flu infected me when I visited Hong Kong and I carried it back home to infect everyone else in the US.
• The ice age froze us all to death in my infancy.
• Global warming has disrupted my natural habitat and melted the polar ice caps, flooding out most of the world.

I shudder to think how the world will be destroyed next. Thank goodness I have TV, newspapers, and other vehicles of mass media to warn me so I can prepare in advance.

What do you do to prepare for a Texas-sized meteor strike?

Flash! I could give an entire lecture on the strategic implications of Flash, pros and cons, when to use it, why to use it, bla bla bla. I've given that lecture many times. But I'd never really dived in to making my own Flash until I was forced to for my final project in this semester's Web Technology class. ("If you can't do, teach?" I never liked that idea.)

Behold, the fruits of my almost obsessive labor:

http://www.tomdalton.com/flash/survival.htm

I put way more time into this than the project required because I wanted to learn how it all works. I drew the pictures myself (pencil, #2, sharp) on scrap paper, scanned them with my beautiful Epson 4180 Perfection, colored them in my LEGAL copy of Photoshop CS2, then imported them into Macromedia Flash. The sounds are all free, from flashkit.com.

Two small, stupid points that won't mean much to anyone but me: (and this is, after all, my blog)

1. Rajah -- the rise of India and a social move towards Hinduism; "truth is rarely reached by consensus"

2. The feeling of power that comes from matching an old, poorly publicised vulnerability with an unpatched system

I think that'll do. Thanks!