by Brian Christian
Wired Magazine, May 2012
Want to build a perfect website?
Don’t trust your instincts. Trust the data.
Don’t trust the designers. Trust the audience.
Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truth, but his story begins with a lie. It was November 2007 and Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, was at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, to speak. Siroker – who today is CEO of the web-testing firm Optimizely, but then was a product manager on Google's browser team - tried to cut the enormous line by sneaking in a back entrance. "I walked up to the security guard and said, 'I have to get to a meeting in there,'' Siroker recalls. There was no meeting, but his bluff got him in.
At the talk, Obama fielded a facetious question from then-CEO Eric Schmidt: "What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?" Schmidt was having a bit of fun, but before he could move on to a real question, Obama stopped him. "Well, I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go:' he said - correctly. Schmidt put his hand to his forehead in disbelief, and the room erupted in raucous applause. Siroker was instantly smitten. "He had me at 'bubble sort,'" he says. Two weeks later he had taken a leave of absence from Google, moved to Chicago, and joined up with Obama's campaign as a digital adviser.
At first he wasn't sure how he could help. But he recalled something else Obama had said to the Googlers: "I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and science and feedback - everything that allows you to do what you do. That's what we should be doing in our government." And so Siroker decided he would introduce Obama's campaign to a crucial technique – almost a governing ethos - that Google relies on in developing and refining its products. He showed them how to A/B test.
Over the past decade, the power of A/B testing has become an open secret of high stakes web development. It's now the standard (but seldom advertised) means through which Silicon Valley improves its online products. Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior - gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases - it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it's quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. A/B allows seemingly subjective questions of design-color, layout, image selection, text-to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science.
After joining the Obama campaign, Siroker used A/B to rethink the basic elements of the campaign website. The new-media team already knew that their greatest challenge was turning the site's visitors into subscribers – scoring an email address so that a drumbeat of campaign emails might eventually convert them into donors. Their visit would start with a splash page-a luminous turquoise photo of Obama and a bright red "Sign Up" button. But too few people clicked the button. Under Siroker's tutelage, the team approached the problem with a new precision. They broke the page into its component parts and prepared a handful of alternatives for each. For the button, an A/B test of three new word choices-"Learn More," "Join Us Now," and "Sign Up Now" - revealed that "Learn More" garnered 18.6 percent more signups per visitor than the default of "Sign Up." Similarly, a black-and-white photo of the Obama family outperformed the default turquoise image by 13.1 percent. Using both the family image and "Learn More," signups increased by a thundering 40 percent.
Most shocking of all to Obama's team was just how poorly their instincts served them during the test. Almost unanimously, staffers expected that a video of Obama speaking at a rally would handily outperform any still photo. But in fact the video fared 30.3 percent worse than even the turquoise image. Had the team listened to instinct - if it had kept "Sign Up" as the button text and swapped out the photo for the video-the sign-up rate would have slipped to 70 percent of the baseline. ("Assumptions tend to be wrong," as Siroker succinctly puts it.) And without the rigorous data collection and controls of A/B testing, the team might not even have known why their numbers had fallen, chalking it up perhaps to some decline in enthusiasm for the candidate rather than to the inferior site revamp. Instead, when the rate jumped to 140 percent of baseline, the team knew exactly what, and whom, to thank. By the end of the campaign, it was estimated that a full 4 million of the 13 million addresses in the campaign’s email list, and some $75 million in money raised, resulted from Siroker's careful experiments.
A/B TESTING WAS A NEW INSIGHT IN THE REALM OF POLITICS, but its use on the web dates back at least to the turn of the millennium. At Google - whose rise as a Silicon Valley powerhouse has done more than anything else to spread the A/B gospel over the past decade - engineers ran their first A/B test on February 27, 2000. They had often wondered whether the number of results the search engine displayed per page, which then (as now) defaulted to 10, was optimal for users. So they ran an experiment. To 0.1 percent of the search engine's traffic, they presented 20 results per page; another 0.1 percent saw 25 results, and another, 30.
Due to a technical glitch, the experiment was a disaster. The pages viewed by the experimental groups loaded significantly slower than the control did, causing the relevant metrics to tank. But that in itself yielded a critical insight - tenths of a second could make or break user satisfaction in a precisely quantifiable way. Soon Google tweaked its response times and allowed real A/B testing to blossom. In 2011 the company ran more than 7,000 A/B tests on its search algorithm. Amazon.com, Netflix, and eBay are also A/B addicts, constantly testing potential site changes on live (and unsuspecting) users.
Today, A/B is ubiquitous, and one of the strange consequences of that ubiquity is that the way we think about the web has become increasingly outdated. We talk about the Google homepage or the Amazon checkout screen, but it's now more accurate to say that you visited a Google homepage, an Amazon checkout screen. What percentage of Google users are getting some kind of "experimental" page or results when they initiate a search? Google employees I spoke with wouldn't give a precise answer - "decent" chuckles Scott Huffman, who oversees testing on Google Search. Use of a technique called multivariate testing, in which myriad A/B tests essentially run simultaneously in as many combinations as possible, means that the percentage of users getting some kind of tweak may well approach 100 percent, making "the Google search experience" a sort of Platonic ideal: never encountered directly but glin1psed only through imperfect derivations and variations.
Still, despite its widening prevalence, the technique is not simple. It takes some fancy technological footwork to divert user traffic and rearrange a site on the fly; segmenting users and taking sense of the results requires deep knowledge of statistics. This is a barrier for any firm that lacks the resources to create and adjudicate its own tests. In 2006 Google released its Website Optimizer, which provided a free tool for anyone who wanted to run A/B tests. But the tool required site designers to create full sets of code for both A and B - meaning that nonprogrammers (marketing, editorial, or product people) couldn't run tests without first taxing their engineers to write multiple versions of everything. Consequently there was a huge delay in getting results as companies waited for the code to be written and go live.
In 2009 this remained a problem in need of a solution. After the Obama campaign ended, Siroker was left amazed at the efficacy of A/B testing but also at the paucity of tools that would make it easily accessible. "The thought of using the tools we used then made me grimace," he says. By the end of the year, Siroker joined forces with another ex-Googler, named Pete Koomen, and they launched a startup with the goal of bringing A/B tools to the corporate masses, dubbing it Optimizely. They signed up their first customer by accident. "Before we even spent much time working on the product," Siroker explains, "I called up one of the guys from the Obama campaign, who had started up a digital marketing firm. I told him what I was up to, and about 20 minutes in, he suddenly said, 'Well, that sounds great. Send me an invoice.' He thought it was a sales call."
The pair had made a sale, but they still didn't have a product. So Siroker and Koomen started coding. Unlike the earlier A/B tools, they designed Optimizely to be usable by nonprogrammers, with a powerful graphical interface that lets clients drag, resize, retype, replace, insert, and delete on the fly. Then it tracks user behavior and delivers results. It's an intuitive platform that offers the A/B experience, previously the sole province of web giants like Google and Amazon, to small and midsize companies-even ones without a hardcore engineering or testing team.
What this means goes way beyond just a nimbler approach to site design. By subjecting all these decisions to the rule of data, A/B tends to shift the whole operating philosophy-even the power structure of companies that adopt it. A/B is revolutionizing the way that firms develop websites and, in the process, rewriting some of the fundamental rules of business.
Here are some of these new principles:
You have to make choices
Choose everything
The online payment platform WePay designed its entire homepage through a testing process. "We did it as a contest," CEO Bill Clerico says. "A few of our engineers built different homepages, and we just put them in rotation." For two months, every user that came to WePay.com was randomly assigned a homepage, and at the end the numbers made the decision.
In the past, that exercise would have been impossible - and because it was impossible, the design would have emerged in a completely different way. Someone in the company, perhaps Clerico himself, would have wound up choosing a design. But with A/B testing, WePay didn't have to make a decision. After all, if you can test everything, then simply choose all of the above and let the customers sort it out.
For that same reason, A/B increasingly makes meetings irrelevant. Where editors at a news site, for example, might have sat around a table for 15 minutes trying to decide on the best phrasing for an important headline, they can simply run all the proposed headlines and let the testing decide. Consensus, even democracy, has been replaced by pluralism – resolved by data.
The mantra of "choose everything" also becomes a way for companies to test out relationships with other companies - and in so doing becomes a powerful way for them to win new business and take on larger rivals. In 2011 a fund-raising site called GoFundMe was talking with WePay about the possibility of switching to its service from payment giant PayPal. GoFundMe CEO Brad Damphousse was open about his dissatisfaction with PayPal's service; WePay responded, as startups usually do, by claiming that its product solved all the problems that plagued its larger competitor. "Of course we were skeptical and didn't really believe them," Damphousse recalls with a laugh.
But using A/B, WePay could present Damphousse with an irresistible proposition: Give us 10 percent of your traffic and test the results against PayPal in real time. It was an almost entirely risk-free way for the startup to prove itself, and it paid off. After Damphousse saw the data on the first morning, he switched half his traffic by the afternoon-and all of it by the next day.
The person at the top makes the call
Data makes the call
Google insiders, and A/B enthusiasts more generally, have a derisive term to describe a decision making system that fails to put data at its heart: HiPPO - "highest-paid person's opinion. " As Google analytics expert Avinash Kaushik declares, "Most websites suck because HiPPOs create them."
Tech circles are rife with stories of the clueless boss who almost killed a project because of a "mere opinion." In Amazon's early days, developer Greg Linden came up with the idea of giving personalized "impulse buy" recommendations to customers as they checked out, based on what was in their shopping cart. He made a demo for the new feature but was shot down. Linden bristled at the thought that the idea might not even be tested. "I was told I was forbidden to work on this any further. It should have stopped there."
Instead Linden worked up an A/B test. It showed that Amazon stood to gain so much revenue from the feature that all arguments against it were instantly rendered null by the data. "I do know that in some organizations, challenging an SVP would be a fatal mistake, right or wrong," Linden wrote in a blog post on the subject. But once he'd done an objective test, putting the idea in front of real customers, the higher-ups had to bend. Amazon's culture wouldn't allow otherwise.
Siroker recalls similar shifts during his time with the Obama campaign. "It started as a pretty political environment-where, as you can imagine, HiPPO syndrome reigned supreme. And I think over time people started to see the value in taking a step back and saying, 'Well, here's three things we should try. Let's run an experiment and see what works. We don't know.'"
This was the culture that he had come from at Google, what you might call a democracy of data. "Very early in Google's inception," Siroker explains, "if an engineer had an idea and had the data to back it up, it didn't matter that they weren't the VP of some business unit. They could make a case. And that's the culture that Google believed in from the beginning." Once adopted, that approach will beat the HiPPOs every time, he says. "A/B will empower a whole class of businesses to say, 'We want to do it the way Google does it. We want to do it the way Amazon does it.'"
Says WePay's Bill Clerico: "On Facebook, under the heading of Religious Views, my profile says: 'In God we trust. All others, bring data.'"
The risk is making a huge mistake
The risk is making only tiny improvements
One consequence of this data-driven revolution is that the whole attitude toward writing software, or even imagining it, becomes subtly constrained. A number of developers told me that A/B has probably reduced the number of big, dramatic changes to their products. They now think of wholesale revisions as simply too risky - instead, they want to break every idea up into smaller pieces, with each piece tested and then gradually, tentatively phased into the traffic.
But this approach, and the mindset that comes with it, has its own dangers. Companies may protect themselves against major gaffes but risk a kind of plodding incrementalism. They may find themselves chasing "local maxima" - places where the A/B tests might create the best possible outcome within narrow constraints - instead of pursuing real breakthroughs. Google's Scott Huffman cites this as one of the greatest dangers of a testing-oriented mentality: "One thing we spend a lot of time talking about is how we can guard against incrementalism when bigger changes are needed. It's tough, because these testing tools can really motivate the engineering team, but they also can wind up giving them huge incentives to try only small changes. We do want those little improvements, but we also want the jumps outside the box." Paraphrasing a famous Henry Ford maxim - "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse" – Huffman adds, "If you rely too much on the data, you never branch out. You just keep making better buggy whips."
Experience teaches us lessens
Data can make the very idea of lessons obsolete
The single biggest evolution in A/B testing over its history is not how pervasive it has become but rather how fast it has become. In the early '00s, test results were typically delayed 24 hours: You ran a test today, saw the results tomorrow, and learned something-a principle, a rule of thumb to apply to future designs. This might explain why testing began in marketing teams before it moved to product teams: Ads generally stick around over many days and weeks, making them amenable to revision at that pace. But for many web businesses, the product is too dynamic to sit still for that long.
That's all different today. "Ten years ago you did not have data. Five years ago the best reporting tools were a day behind," says Yulie Kim, VP of product at the furniture etailer One Kings Lane. "But we're in a world now where you can't wait a whole day to get your data." Kim's boss, CEO Doug Mack, says the speed of the feedback has become integral to the operation: "Big data is not enough. It has to be real-time data that we can act on during the course of the day. This has been a huge boon for the growth of our business."
The difference with live testing is not just that there is no time to learn and apply lessons. It's more radical than that: There are no clear lessons to learn, no rules to extract.
At the gaming network IGN, for example, executives found that crisp, clear prose was outperforming hyped-up buzzwords (like free and exclusive) on certain parts of the homepage. But in previous years, the opposite had been true. Why? They talked and talked about it, but no one could figure it out. Soon they realized that it simply didn't matter. A/B would guide them at ground level, so there was no need to worry about why users behaved in one way or another.
Similarly, One Kings Lane has a business model that involves swapping out inventory every day, and Optimizely's A/B tool plays a big role in the on-the-fly improvement that happens within each of these "flash sales." Why do people like the ottoman better if it appears to the left of the throw rug than if it appears to the right? There's no time to ask the question, and no reason to answer it. After all, what does it matter if you can get the right result? Keep testing, keep reacting, and save your philosophizing for the off-hours.
IF YOU FIND THAT LAST implication to be somewhat troubling, you're not alone. Even if we accept that testing is useful in learning how to run a business, it's hard to take the next step and accept that we won't learn how to run our businesses at all. Indeed, as A/B becomes more widespread, we might not even know what choices the tests are making: One of the burgeoning trends in A/B is to automate the whole process of adjudicating the test, so that the software, when it finds statistical significance, simply diverts all traffic to the better-performing option-no human oversight necessary.
On a more fundamental level, the culture of A/B cuts against our common-sense ideas about how innovation happens. Startups, we imagine, largely succeed or fail by long-term strategic decisions that are impossible to test with such precision. Likewise, it's hard to imagine a midsize company A/B-ing its way out of obscurity to become a billion-dollar titan. Even among the tech giants, it seems like the most important decisions are immune to focus-grouping, let alone A/B testing.
Yes, Google has built its empire by listening to data, but we reserve our awe for the sort of vision that Steve Jobs brought to Apple, and we nod along at the famous answer he gave when asked how much market testing he did for the iPad: "None," he said, echoing Henry Ford. "It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." And in fact, it's impossible to imagine how to arrive at something like the original Macintosh, with its lack of expansion slots and its impregnable chassis, entirely through evolutionary tweaks. How could the no-slots version possibly have won over the slots version? How could a one-button mouse edge out a two-button mouse? Yet somehow a number of ostensibly negative features, when combined in a precise way, result in something serene, elegant, and Zen.
It's a false dichotomy, of course, to pose vision against data, lofty genius against head-down experimentation, as if companies are forced to choose between the two. Every firm ought to test the small stuff, at least; and no firm should (or does) use A/B for everything. Google doesn't test things at random but relies on intuition and, yes, vision to narrow down the infinite number of possible changes to a finite group of testable candidates.
But it's also true that the A/B culture, in part by shaming its HiPPOs into submission, can sometimes lead companies down dead-end paths. Testing allows you to constantly react to user preferences, but that doesn't necessarily make you agile; 10,000 ongoing tweaks don't add up to a fundamental change of direction when one is needed. Almost every successful company has to radically alter course at some point, and often such double-down decisions can't be made in degrees or with a soft launch. And just as a testing culture can make it hard to address the big problems, it can also make it hard to stop sweating the small stuff. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case," wrote ex-Google designer Douglas Bowman on his blog the day he left the company: "I can't operate in an environment-like that."
THE ELEGANT MINIMALISM of Apple's design has trickled out into the world beyond technology. So it's fair to ask: Could the scientific rigor of Google's A/B ethos start making waves outside the web? Is it possible to A/B the offline world? With the rise of big data, some major retailers are embracing the experimental method. Chains will test out store floor plans in a few locations and then implement them nationwide if they boost revenues. Some retail software packages will oversee the rollout of individual products, putting them on a few shelves throughout the system and tracking their sales.
But the constraints of physical reality make it hard to experiment nearly as often, or to control one's experiments so that the outcomes aren't maddeningly ambiguous - biased, perhaps, by location factors or weather or some other unknown (and unknowable) variable. Faced with those ambiguities, the HiPPOs can still have their say without fear of contradiction. Only in the digital realm is it possible to be two different things at the exact same place and time and thereby to generate data that upends the whole nature of institutional authority.
Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. "There's this grilled cheese place down the street," says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. "They can't test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make." At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can't be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you're in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the "traffic" is on the line with every decision.
The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday: we can only shrug: We went with B. We don't know why. It just works.
Brian Christian (brchristian.com) is author of The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
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by David Boies
You need to know what you would like to achieve and what you would accept as your last alternative-that is, what would you prefer to have as opposed to not getting any deal. The result of the negotiation will almost always be somewhere in between those two points. One of the things you try to find out first is whether the other side is in the same range or not. If it's not, you can't get a deal. You don't want to posture. You want to maintain your credibility. When you tell the other side that the settlement has to be at a particular level, you want them to believe you. Don't give false expectations that make the other side think you are prepared to settle at a lower level than you really are. That can cause them to dig in and not negotiate a deal you both would accept. Don't stake out a position that's so high they conclude that's your walk-away point and everything ends right there.
Be patient. In lots of negotiations, you have to move slowly. Otherwise, you give a false impression that you are too anxious for a settlement. That can lead the other side to take a position that prevents a successful completion. You want to make reasonable arguments. You want to try to persuade the other side of the merits of your point of view. Those things can help on the margins. But my experience has been that people go into large, important negotiations with a point of view that is not likely to change materially. They have thought about this just like you. They aren't going to say, "Oh, that's a great argument. I give up." At least, that's never happened to me.
• David Boies is chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner and represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore. As told to Devin Leonard, April, 2012
All alone, or in two's,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.
Isn't this where....
In the last few years, the public, the press, donors, volunteers and supporters are more observant and aware of the actions of nonprofits than ever before. There are a number of proactive steps that nonprofit organizations should take to accommodate the changes in expectations and ensure that they are using best practices as stewards.
Accountability
Simply defined, accountability means that the resources of a nonprofit do not belong to the organization, but instead to the community it serves. This means nonprofit organizations should seek to be open and accountable for decisions and resource allocations.
Nonprofits should make sure that they have up-to-date conflict of interest policies for both the senior management team and executive board. Policies should be reviewed annually with everyone in the organization reading and agreeing to adhere to the policies.
Have an annual outside audit, not just a review. For many nonprofits, an annual outside audit is a cost issue. However, nonprofit academic literature is full of organizations that tried to avoid a $2,000 audit expense and ended up with $30,000 in internal theft. If there has been fraud, theft or other malfeasance, an audit is more likely to find it. One of the benefits of a higher degree of accountability demands is that donors are more willing to help pay for a full audit to maintain accountability.
Have a strategic plan, and encourage input from the community during the planning process. A strategic plan may seem at first glance to have no place in a checklist of ways to improve accountability or transparency. However, planning is not only good stewardship; it also lets everyone know where the organization is going. Having a plan is a public form of accountability. Goals are set and organizations are expected to achieve them, or explain why they didn’t.
Nonprofits should emphasize the value of their mission and discuss trends in businesslike terms. Nonprofits are passionate about their mission and feel that if they talk about it long and passionately enough, other people will join the cause. Sometimes that works. But in the current environment, nonprofit organizations must be both passionate advocates and responsible managers.
Clear and concise financial reports are the best tools to demonstrate impact to the community. It doesn’t do much good to create a financial report if people can’t understand how to read them. It is a good idea to set up a one hour overview followed by a series of short sessions at three or four executive board meetings that lead up to the budget discussion and adoption meeting. By reporting in this manner, the board can see how the organization is making progress and adopt change if necessary.
Nonprofits should develop mandatory document retention and periodic document destruction policies. Nonprofits should consult their CPA and trade association before establishing a policy to ensure any and all applicable laws are being met.
External Transparency
Every year, post 990 and 990T (if necessary) forms on the web site. By posting the 990 online, nonprofits are demonstrating an openness and forthright within the management.
Post an annual strategic plan on the web site that notes the status of each goal, and what accomplishments are the most significant. Putting a regular plan update on the web increases an organization’s visibility and transparency, and holds the organization accountable for reaching expectations.
Post the date, time and location of board meetings on the web site.
Conclusion
Good stewardship demands good management. This includes avoiding as many bad things as possible. Fraud prevention, accountability efforts, and transparency are a part of this category. By attending to these issues, nonprofits, their boards and management team can help ensure that the organization will be viewed well within the community, and will not suffer the potentially damaging results of fraud or an investigation by outside investigators. We live in a cynical world, so nonprofits should do their best to combat that cynicism by being open, accountable and prudent.
Reprinted 2007 Kintera, Inc. http://www.kintera.com/
Michael Sandel doesn't look like the sort of person who could hold a boisterous audience in thrall. And yet his every lecture packs Harvard's capacious Sanders Theatre to the limits of the fire code. His Harvard course titled "Justice" is the most popular in living memory, and a book and video of the same name have become international best-sellers.
There's a reason for the popularity - Sandel uses concrete situations, Socratic-style, to explore knotty philosophical questions. Was it fair for the rich to be allowed to buy their way out of military service during the Ciil War? If not, then how should we think about the all-volunteer army? Would it be fair for universities to auction off a number of places to the highest bidder? What if all the money west to extra scholarships for the poor?
Questions like these have led to Sandel's latest book, What Money Can't Buy. Yes, he notes, we all agree that money shouldn't buy some things, such as human beings. But, stangely, a spirit of "market triumphalism" has survived the financial crisis. Surrogate wombs, prison-cell upgrades, citizenship, police protection, imported kidneys, the right to kill endangered species, the right to pollute, the right to drive in the car-pool lane - all are available on terms dictated by markets, and by markets alone. "Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?," Sandel asks. "Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?"
In America, the answer too often is: Forgot to ask.
- commentary by Cullen Murphy
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374203032/?tag=kappabetasigmach
Switch is a compelling, story-driven narrative the Heaths use to bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can engage our emotions and reason to create real change.
The book is arranged around an analogy that illustrates the crux of emotional intelligence: when making a decision we are typically torn between our rational, logical reasons and our emotional, intuitive feelings. Chip and Dan ask us to imagine an Elephant and its Rider (the mahout). The Rider represents the rational and logical. Tell the Rider what to do, provide a good argument and the Rider will do it. The Elephant, on the other hand, represents our emotions, our gut response. If the Rider can direct the Elephant down a well-prepared path then there is a good chance for change. Otherwise, the massive elephant is bound to win.
"For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your team. Picture the person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You've got to reach both. And you've also got to clear the way for them to succeed." By now, the Heaths have explained how others have directed the Rider, motivated the Elephant, and shaped the Path. They conclude their book with a Q&A section during which they advise how to resolve twelve problems that people most often encounter as they fight for change. They suggest, and I agree, that this advice "won't make sense to anybody who hasn't read the book." The same can probably be said about much of what I have shared in this review.
Although, in my opinion, this is one of the most important business books published during the last several years, no commentary such as mine can do full justice to it. It simply must be read and read carefully, preferably then re-read carefully. Otherwise, it makes no sense to visit www.switchthebook.com/resources to obtain additional information and assistance.
1 – Plan something that the brotherhood will look forward to. If your chapter doesn’t have something to look forward to, it will become stagnant and your brothers will become complacent.
2 – Realize that the best way to improve is by getting a little better each day. In order to start, you have to step up as a leader and show the way. You say that meetings are a waste of time. Go over the agenda and determine how to par it down and keep the meeting on track. Remind brothers that the meeting agenda will help focus their time towards productive goals. I promise brothers will see your example, and they will end up helping. Someone has to take the lead though.
3 – Eliminate all the crap the brothers hates and spend your time and effort focusing on the stuff the brothers likes.
4 – Cut the dead wood. If you have brothers who are dragging the Fraternity down for whatever reason, have a heart to heart talk about whether they really want to be a brother. If they can’t meet expectations, get rid of them fast.
5 – Have a fundraiser. I have written a bunch of articles on fraternity fundraisers. I suggest having a raffle for a quick and easy cash infusion for your chapter.
6 – Make it a point to hang out together. Strong brothers eat together , study together and work out together. By the sounds of your situation, that isn’t happening in your chapter.
7 – Make your meeting worth coming to. I’d bet a buck that your meetings are either information sessions or bitch sessions. Both aren’t very productive ways for brothers to spend their time. I’d probably skip them too. Eliminate unnecessary meetings that only serve as a time suck.
8 – Reach out to alumni for advice. This is done by calling them on the phone and asking direct questions. If you can form relationships with a few alumni, more and more will start showing interest in the chapter. Also, don’t neglect alumni from other chapters that might be in your local area. They can help as well.
9 – Talk openly with your Greek Life Director and Regional Officers on how to improve the Fraternity. Both have a vested interest in your success.
10 - Finally, read, research, and realize that you are not alone. Many brothers have walked in your shoes and can give you insight on how to motivate, inspire, and develop leadership based on brotherhood in your chapter. Share your thoughts, frustrations, accomplishments with your other motivated brothers. If you follow some of these steps, you will save your chapter.
This list first appeared in http://www.thefraternityadvisor.com/ by Patrick Daley
And I heard as it were the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw
And behold a white horse
There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around.
The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the Man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling, voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks
Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the Man comes around.
Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still
Listen to the words long written down
When the Man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks
In measured hundred weight and penney pound
When the Man comes around.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/abrahamlincolnvampirehunter/
"It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor Americans pursue prosperity. Ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835.
The previous two posts discussed the role of the Project Manager and how to prepare a Project Plan. This final blog on the subject of project management presents an actual project plan and budget for a small project goal where you need to raise $10,000 net and a larger project goal where you need to raise $30,000 net. Please remember that the success of any project depends on the skills of the project manager and the organization and inclusiveness of the project plan. Without either, the event is doomed to failure.
Example 1 Project - Summer Computer Camp
Your organization has partnered with a summer camp organization and agreed to sponsor 100 campers at a computer camp. The project plan goal here is to acquire the funds to enable the children to attend the summer computer camp
Setting Goals for Your Event within Your Overall Fundraising Plan
Many people want to be associated with a successful, positive, professional program. With enough time and careful planning your event will attract enough supports (past, current, and future) to provide the synergy needed for a continuous successful event. People will donate for many reasons – among them, to support you, to be seen, and to network. This is an event that allows you to stay true to your organization’s mission and core values. Therefore it is important that your project manager have experience and contacts in the field of publicity and communications. This project must cultivate attention and draw sufficient interest so that seeking sponsorships, and in-kind donations will meet with success. First, you must identify how you will raise the funds, i.e., your revenue source.
Budget
The Project Plan
This project plan must include success for obtaining sponsorships and ensuring that your tickets to the venue have been sold. The plan must include working with the venue, caterer, menu, event flow, and every imaginable detail including parking needs. The project plan must include extensive detail regarding who and when to solicit sponsorships, sell tickets, solicit auction items, and handle additional income stream of the signature drinks. The project plan has to also include outreach and publicity by engaging other organizations and high profile individuals in order to encourage success with the silent auction and meeting your sponsorship goals. Failing to invest the proper amount of energy in all revenue categories could have a negative impact on the project goal.
Example 2 Project - Community Awards Banquet
A modification of the small project will allow you to create a larger project plan which can generate in excess of $50,000 net revenue. In this example, the organization has announced a target of awarding five $10,000 scholarships to graduating seniors this year. The “Summer Camp Luncheon” project plan can be used as a template and modified for a “Community Awards Banquet”. The two important differences in this event is including a souvenir journal and offering awards to local community leaders to attract additional sponsors.
It is important to try to account for all possible hard-cost expenses in the budget. The budget must include every conceivable expense. However the project plan can be creative in reducing expenses. Contact the local community college Fine Arts Department and arrange student photographers to use your event as a pro bono class project. The same could be suggested for all graphics and logo artwork. It will help students develop a portfolio of work from a real-world event.
Budget
Success is Guaranteed !!!
Now that you have set your goals, put your plan together for a great event, and identified potential participants, you need to get the people there. Although a well-put-together event is bound to attract attendees, don’t overlook opportunities to ensure that the people you want to be there will be. Reach out to your sponsors to get the name of their guests and consider sharing your event’s invitation with their contact lists. You must follow-up to key stakeholders by phone to ensure that you obtain the number of attendees. It will require making a lot of calls and sending several reminders. You will also use social networks if appropriate. A press release with detail information offering special and unique insight into the event will encourage coverage of your event. Again you will need to have direct contact with an editor or news director to obtain the coverage you desire.
Award banquets are a time-honored tradition that can bring a lot of value to your organization and meet the goals of your development plan. Although they require careful planning and the involvement of many people, they provide the kind of opportunity for engagement, participation and important face-time with the many stakeholders of your organization and community that is not possible with other fundraising strategies. With good food, drinks, venue, entertainment, and speakers, you can create an experience for your guests that encourages their steadfast (and increased) commitment to your organization.
Six-Month Project Plan for Luncheon or Banquet
In a previous post I wrote about “The Committee Chairman is the Project Manager”. This post concentrates on building a successful Project Plan using standard project management tools.
In the world of project management, it often falls to the project manager to articulate clearly what may be unformed thoughts floating around in the minds of the participants, customers or stakeholders. This is one of the greatest challenges in a project: coordinating the ideas, thoughts and agendas of this diverse group of Brothers and have them focus on the goal and the eventual success of the project. Brothers have different and sometimes conflicting measures of success. Brothers may also measure success in different ways. Therefore it is of great importance to articulate in a measured manner how the project will be deemed a success.
Building the Project Plan
When you have identified a clear project objective and how the success of the project will be measured, you need to build a project plan that will use resources and create tasks towards the objective. Using a chart, spreadsheet or flow diagram, you outline how resources and tasks will be used by each member of the project within a specific time period.. Each objective is considered a milestone or a dependant task that can be measured and identified for modification or adjustment. There are various methods of identifying how best to outline and measure each objective. Most project plans incorporate many of the following elements:
Top-down and Bottom-up
The Top-down estimate of a project includes all tasks, events, and resources and applies an overall timescale and costs. It is created at the beginning of the project to determine how long the project will take and how much it will cost. It is usual to add some contingency resources or funding to allow for risky assumptions or cost overruns due to lack of proper resources or personnel. The Bottom-up phase of the project refines the timescale and costs as each milestone or stage of project is completed. It allows the project manager to adjust all upcoming tasks, events and resources in light of actual measured tasks. Top-down and Bottom-up estimating allow planning to take place at both project and stage levels and help anticipate challenges or issues before they evolve into problems or emergencies.
Work Distribution
Many projects may utilize complex tasks or specialization to achieve success. As a project manager, you cannot be expected to be an expert in every task. Nor can the project manager perform every task or handle every event. Therefore, each task and event must be assigned a resource or person to oversee it to completion. Each task or event must have a deliverable (a due date) and measureable achievement (cost, completion, success, failure). The project manager updates each task in the project plan with new data provided by the resource (person, expert, specialist) and achievement (cost above/below budget; within or out of the timeline; within or out of expectation). Continuous updating of the project plan gives the project manager an indication as to whether adjustments are required to meet the project’s final goal.
Estimating Time and Costs
The project manager’s ability to estimate the duration and cost for each task or event can determine how the project goal is achieved. For example, if a committee member suggests it will take seven days to complete a task when the project plan indicates that it should take three days, you will only have one opportunity to challenge – and improve or revise – the estimate. The project manager’s failure to review and revise the project plan and hold people accountable to their deliverables will doom the project to inevitable disaster and failure. An ineffectual, inefficient, uncooperative, undisciplined, non-communicative manager is a poor manager and recipe for failure.
Identify and Manage Risk
So what is a risk? Former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said:
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.”
This is an excellent understanding of risk and project management:
• 'There are known knowns.' Rumsfeld was referring to things that have ceased to be preventable because they have happened and thus it is not possible to stop or circumvent them. Project managers call these 'issues'. Put another way, 'the stuff has hit the fan'.
• 'There are known unknowns.' These are the problems that have been identified and which it may be possible to mitigate (perhaps preventing a problem arising or reducing its effect if it does). To continue the analogy, you know where and how much stuff is out there, the fan is running, but one has not yet been introduced to the other.
• 'There are unknown unknowns.' These are the problems that have not been identified or anticipated. They are the threats to a project's successful outcome which are not yet even known about. The analogy concludes: no one yet knows how much stuff is out there, where it is (or if it even exists), or how fast the fan is running.
So, a risk is something that may place the success of the project in jeopardy. Or an assumption or a guess that, by virtue of being unknown, is also a risk and places the project goal into jeopardy. When a risk is identified the focus should be on doing something positive to moderate the risk. There are several potential options: Accept, Lessen; Avoid; Share. This forms the convenient (and possibly appropriate) acronym, ALAS.
excerpts taken from Effective Project Management by Paul Roberts, KoganPage Press, 2011.
The Committee Chairman is not the most important person involved in the committee project or program, nor is he the only person so involved. Successful projects are dependant upon well constructed project plans and a team committed to the delivery of a project successfully. Not surprisingly, successful Committee Chairmen are outstanding Project Managers.
Therefore, selecting a proven project manger in a role of leadership, although a very positive step, it is not sufficient to guarantee a successful outcome. Having a detailed and effective project plan and an individual responsible for keeping the project under control and within budget is the difference between success or failure.
Why must there be a Project Plan?
Your project is a vehicle for delivering change. The outcome of your project must have a defined deliverable purpose. The deliverable must be simple and easy to identify; “raise x amount of dollars for x number of scholarship awards,” “increase membership by x number of members within x number of months,” “offer x number of hours of after-school tutoring to x number of students.” The specified deliverable will help shape the budget, provide a range of available or needed resources, and the project’s life cycle.
Every project has a defined budget. There are a great many things in which we may be investing money in order to build the project’s deliverable, including, but not limited to, people’s time, contractors, computer hardware, software licenses, building materials, and marketing matter. These and similar investments contribute to what will eventually be known as the project’s budget.
A project will need to benefit from the capabilities, knowledge, skills and experience of people from a wide range of backgrounds from within and possibly outside the organization. A project has a beginning, middle and end, all are important for different reasons, and all can benefit from some order and governance. This “life cycle” and the combination of the project’s risk are at the heart of successful project management. The ability to obtain and articulate a clear and basic understanding of these variables is what determines the success of each project.
Define success
As a project manager, these are the common measures of success:
- Delivering within the expected timescale.
- Delivering within the expect budget.
- Producing the quality of deliverable as expected.
- Managing changes in expectations along the way.
- Minimizing the detrimental effect of risks and issues.
- Keeping the team motivated and focused.
Support Tools
There are a great number of project support tools and project management software to assist with the project plan. Web-based project management tools such as www.gantter.com or www.mavenlink.com can be used by the project manager to organize and outline the project’s budget, resources, timeline and deliverable.
Remember to Treat A Project Like A Business
The project manager must maintain his focus on the project’s overall success and shepard it towards its deliverable. Additionally, the Chapter must contain a layer of authority that allow Brothers at different levels to use their particular skills, knowledge and experience to make the right decisions at the right time. The project manager is designated as someone who is to be held accountable for its success and therefore must have the authority and confidence of the Chapter’s leadership to keep the project on track and pointed towards a successful outcome.
excerpts taken from Effective Project Management by Paul Roberts, KoganPage Press, 2011.
You can attract and retain members by improving your Reactivation Processing, I would suggest observing and embracing the Best Practices used by many mega-churches. These Best Practices provides that when a new visitor is identified, he fills out a contact card, and “hidden” processes and procedures are automatically put into motion which includes:
His contact info is entered into a tracking database;
He is given literature and information about membership;
He is assigned a “buddy” to help answer questions and encourage continued membership;
He is contacted by the buddy for coffee or lunch to establish a relationship;
He is contacted by the Pastor to thank him for his interest and participation;
He is encouraged by his buddy to attend upcoming meetings and focus groups;
He is encouraged to join a focus group or committee or task force that suits his interest or passion; and
He is later encouraged to become a membership “buddy” with a new member.
This process works like a water wheel in that as new members join each is partnered with a buddy, who help bring him comfortably into the membership and at the end of the process, the new member becomes a buddy who helps pull in new members. This process reinforces relationships and helps build strong bonds among members as the organization grows. I am suggesting that you create a “process” that works like a water wheel for reactivation.
When someone reconnects with a brother, the process would begin with an email “Welcome” message that introduces him to the current E-Board membership, including their names, email addresses and phone numbers. The email must include some personal reference to the addressee so that it does not appear to be a form letter.
Most importantly, within seven days, the brother is assigned a “buddy”.
The buddy then calls the brother to encourage a meeting over coffee or lunch to create a relationship. This is critical. If this contact is not made, the opportunity to reactivate this brother will be lost. It is our brotherhood, our common and shared experience that should allow a relationship between the buddy and lost brother to develop. If the connection by the buddy is not made, there is no magnet to help reactivate this brother.
The buddy encourages the brother to attend an upcoming Chapter meeting or event. During this event the brother must be pulled into the Chapter organization – if the brother attends a meeting or event and is not asked to accept responsibility for a task or project – he will have no reason to return. You must give him a reason to return.
The buddy can help the brother be successful with their new task or project. The buddy can suggest other brothers or resources this brother can use to be successful. The E-Board should immediately highlight this new brother’s task or project in order to incorporate him into the Chapter. When his task or project is met with success, he should be asked to consider being a “buddy” for a brother new to the Chapter.
This process takes commitment and courage to embrace this as a Best Practice. Additionally, the chapter membership has to “buy-in” that this is the process that they will use when a brother reactivates which includes “pushing” him onto a committee and asking him to take responsibility for a project or task immediately and without delay. The desire to demand that the brother pay his reactivation fees has to take on minor importance with respect to the desire and demand that the brother connect into the Chapter and “step-up” and immediately accept responsibility for a project or program.
It does require leadership and hard work for it to be a success.
At words poetic, I'm so pathetic
That I always have found it best,
Instead of getting 'em off my chest,
To let 'em rest unexpressed,
I hate parading my serenading
As I'll probably miss a bar,
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it'll tell you
How great you are.
You're the top!
You're the Coliseum.
You're the top!
You're the Louver Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare's sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse.
You're the Nile,
You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!
Your words poetic are not pathetic.
On the other hand, babe, you shine,
And I can feel after every line
A thrill divine
Down my spine.
Now gifted humans like Vincent Youmans
Might think that your song is bad,
But I got a notion
I'll second the motion
And this is what I'm going to add;
You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.
You're sublime,
You're turkey dinner,
You're the time, the time of a Derby winner
I'm a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
You're the top!
You're an arrow collar
You're the top!
You're a Coolidge dollar,
You're the nimble tread
Of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You're an O'Neill drama,
You're Whistler's mama!
You're camembert.
You're a rose,
You're Inferno's Dante,
You're the nose
On the great Durante.
I'm just in a way,
As the French would say, "de trop".
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
You're the top!
You're a dance in Bali.
You're the top!
You're a hot tamale.
You're an angel, you,
Simply too, too, too diveen,
You're a Boticcelli,
You're Keats,
You're Shelly!
You're Ovaltine!
You're a boom,
You're the dam at Boulder,
You're the moon,
Over Mae West's shoulder,
I'm the nominee of the G.O.P.
Or GOP!
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
You're the top!
You're a Waldorf salad.
You're the top!
You're a Berlin ballad.
You're the boats that glide
On the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You're an old Dutch master,
You're Lady Astor,
You're broccoli!
You're romance,
You're the steppes of Russia,
You're the pants, on a Roxy usher,
I'm a broken doll, a fol-de-rol, a blop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
lyrics by Cole Porter
We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway, yay
And I wonder if I'm really with you now
Or just chasin' after some finer day
Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'
And I tell you how easy it feels to be with you
And how right your arms feel around me
But I, I rehearsed those lines just late last night
When I was thinkin' about how right tonight might be
Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'
And tomorrow we might not be together
I'm no prophet and I don't know nature's ways
So I'll try and see into your eyes right now
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
These are the good old days
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are..... the good old days
lyrics by Carly Simon
Newly elected Chapter officers have an agenda and opinion of what works and doesn’t work for their Chapter. However those assessments are usually based upon opinion rather than fact. If you haven’t measured membership satisfaction, or identified the reasons why your chapter programs and projects failed to meet their objectives, it will be difficult to plot a new path towards success. If you haven’t measured it, you can’t manage it.
Using a free service such as freeonlinsurvyes.com you can poll your membership to determine if the path that you have chosen is matched with your Chapter’s expectations and ability. Here is sample membership survey that can quickly measure what direction your Chapter is heading.
1. Are you attending the monthly Chapter meetings?
Yes.
No, I don’t know where/when Chapter meets.
No, the day/time is inconvenient.
No, I am not active.
2. What is your opinion of Chapter meetings?
Meetings are too long.
Meetings are disorganized and confusing.
Meeting time/location is inconvenient.
Meeting agenda is too long.
Meeting agenda is not substantive.
3. Please rank the value of the following benefits with 1 being Least Important and 5 being the Most Important
Professional networking
Socializing + fellowship with brothers
Community activism
Continuation of the colligate experience
Opportunity to influence National/Regional policy
4. What are your interest in serving on a committee?
I would like to, but don’t have extra time.
I would like to, but it costs too much money.
I would like to, but I don’t agree with the Chairman.
I would like to, but I’m not aware of how to serve.
I am serving on a committee.
5. Please tell us the amount of time you are able to offer to committee service?
One hour meeting per month.
Two hour meeting per month.
One meeting per month.
Two meetings per month.
6. Please tell us what committee(s) you would be interested in serving on (check all that apply).
Membership
Fundraising
Scholarship
Social Action
Sigma-Zeta
Pan Hellenic
Sigma Beta
7. Please share with us any additional information or comments about committee service.
8. Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the level of Chapter communication?
Yes - I am aware of all Chapter events, and can plan accordingly.
Somewhat – I don’t know where/when Chapter events are held.
Somewhat dissatisfied – I do not receive information in a timely or consistent fashion.
Dissatisfied – I don’t receive information or enough info to plan accordingly.
9. Overall, how satisfied have you been with the Chapter’s projects or programs?
Very Dissatisfied
Somewhat Dissatisfied
Neutral
Somewhat Satisfied
Totally Satisfied
10. What suggestions do you have to help improve the Chapter?
by Robert D. Kaplan
At Harvard, many students and faculty members alike are on the make, networking for that first, or next, position in government or the think-tank world. The environment is vaguely unfriendly to theories or bold ideas, Huntington being the grand exception that proves the rule. After all, social-science theories are gross simplifications of reality; even the most brilliant theories can be right, say, only 75 percent of the time. Critics unfailingly seize on any theory's shortcomings, damaging reputations. So the truly ambitious tend to avoid constructing one.
The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau's 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama's The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China's military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking.
excerpts from "Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right *about some things" The Atlantic, January 2012, p.80
Death Comes to Pemberley
by P.O. James
At 91, the great P.O. James has just established herself as "heir apparent to Jane Austen's creative legacy:' said Carol Memmott in USA Today. Many have tried before to emulate the 19th century legend's tone and plotting finesse, but the "doyenne of British crime fiction" has outdone them with this "perfect" crime thriller. Six years after the marriages that end Pride and Prejudice, "Mr. Darcy" and his bride, Elizabeth, are living in wedded bliss at Pemberley when Elizabeth's sister, Lydia, arrives at the estate one night to inform them of the murder of a friend.
"Austen fans need no reminder of the trouble Lydia brought to her family" in the original novel. Nothing, apparently, has changed, James' "faultless replication" of Austen's writing style lifts her above "the ever-growing pack" of Austen imitators, said Fran Wood in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. But Death Comes to Pemberley is not just a tribute; it's a first-rate murder mystery.
The eventual trial will offer twists you won't see coming.
Book review originally appeared in This Week, 23 December 2011, p.24
Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports
by Mark Ribowsky
How could it be that "a human spectacle as unique as Howard Cosell" has already been widely forgotten? said Richard Sandomir in The New York Times. With his "adenoidal Brooklyn voice, polysyllabic vocabulary, and vulpine presence," the late sportscaster was the dominant personality in his field for 20 years, at a time when holding a network throne meant something. He was "loud, audacious, obnoxious, perspicacious, brilliant, narcissistic, provocative, and haughty"-qualities that both lifted him to prominence and contributed to his downfall. For those who remember hearing him, Cosell's slowly enunciated signature sign-off-"This is HOW-id Cyo-SELL"-will be ringing in their ears as they flip through the pages of Mark Ribowsky's "vivid," if sometimes overexcited, biography.
Was there anyone who didn't do an impression of that voice in the 1970s? asked Gene Warner in The Buffalo News. Ribowsky's "nuanced and complex" portrait accurately captures a man so divisive that he once won both most-loved and most-loathed television personality in the same poll. He certainly wasn't afraid to irritate audiences. A Manhattan lawyer before making the unlikely career jump into sports broadcasting, he rose to national prominence in the 1960s thanks largely to his on-air rapport with Muhammad Ali, who, when he adopted his Muslim name, had few defenders in broadcasting besides Cosell. Later, as part of the first team to host Monday Night Football, Cosell won the enmity of NFL fans by using 50-cent words to deride players-playing black hat/white hat with his affable co-host, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith.
"Even if you loathed him, Cosell's performance was what made Monday nights memorable," said David Remnick in The New Yorker. But as Ribowsky points out, Cosell was also a real journalist, a "blunt questioner" who used his sports beat to address the more pressing issues of the day. In the early '80s, the suits at ABC gave Cosell the boot after finally tiring of his self-aggrandizing and habit of drinking on the job. Ribowsky's biography, which follows the story to its sad end, is too loaded with florid prose to be called a great book. But it does remind us that Cosell was a singular figure. These days, "it's nearly impossible to imagine someone on the air who is, at once, an impresario, a circus barker, an analyst, and a serious journalist." Cosell is the only one who has managed the feat, and he's "never been replaced."
Book review originally appeared in This Week, 23 December 2011, p.24
