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Golden Oldies: Ducks in a Row: Politically Correct is a False Positive

Monday, May 13th, 2019

Poking through 12+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

While politically correct has made a lot of noise since its rise in the media, it hasn’t made any real difference. Join me tomorrow for a look at the problem with many progressives and why it will undermine many of the changes they champion.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I sent an article about the “frat house” (AKA, sexist) culture prevalent in ZocDoc’s sales department to “Kevin”, a good friend who works in sales.

While agreeing about problematic sales cultures, he had a different take on culture in general.

His viewpoint, from someone who has been there/done that, may not be socially acceptable and could probably get him in trouble if posted on social media, but I can share it here — anonymously

Whether you’re a nigger or a bitch, this is the shit you have to deal with. I prefer environments where it’s obvious what the culture is, like this, than politically correct cultures where bigotry is the norm, but you never know for sure why you didn’t get the bonus, promotion or accolade with superior performance. Screw political correctness!

I believe it’s important to know where you stand, because then you can make informed choices. Give me this culture anytime – when I enter, I will know what the rules are. If I stay, it’s to accomplish a particular personal goal. When I leave (if not immediately), I will know why I stayed, left, and what I gained. I’m richer, they are poorer.

There is no such thing as “politically correct”. The term itself is an oxymoron that implies consensus building, popular sentiment or sinister machinations. Politics is about popularity — we never let others know where we stand or what we stand for in order to win a popularity contest. It is giving in to the tyranny of the mob, not daring to have unpopular opinions or stances, because one will not be popular.

Being a black man, I prefer a racist that’s honest about who he is and what he is. I prefer working for such a person because I know what to expect. I presume it would be the same for you as a woman regarding sexists. These days no one is a racist, we just have “unconscious biases” that prevent us from taking unpopular positions and that ensure that the powerful can continue to exclude the less powerful.

Politically correct environments rob me of information, choice, and the ability to navigate astutely to attain my objectives.

I agree with Kevin, even in those instances where bias has its basis in neuroscience, it’s better to know.

Flickr image credit: Zaskoda:

21st Century Robber Barons

Wednesday, April 17th, 2019

Are you familiar with the term ‘robber baron’?

Robber baron” is a derogatory metaphor of social criticism originally applied to certain late 19th-century American businessmen who were accused of using unscrupulous methods to get rich, or expand their wealth.

It’s a great description of many, not all, of the tech titans you hear/read about daily.

The most familiar names are Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, and Jeff Bezos, but there are many others, as well as all the aspirational robber baron founders looking for their own brass ring.

Today’s barons build their empires on your metaphorical back, i.e., your personal data, but the result is the same.

What drives them? Money? Power?

Why can’t they see what they are doing? How can they not?

What are their values? Where are their ethics?

I found the answer in a working paper published by Harvard’s Working Knowledge in 2007 and authored by four professors from various universities.

“The current effort to curb unethical behavior “ignores the innate tendency for the individual to engage in self-deception” (p. 224), an error which substantially negates any systematic efforts at the organization level.

This paper was intended to bring the psychological processes of the individual decision-maker to the forefront by examining the self-deception that is inherent in the beliefs about one’s own (un)ethical behavior. Individuals deceive themselves that they are ethical people and the continuation of this belief allows for the perpetuity of unethical behavior. We hope that by examining the interplay of the want/should selves through a temporal lens, we shed light on these false beliefs and break their defeating cycle.”

Self-deception.

That helps explain all the men who, after being called out for their words and actions, claim they didn’t do anything wrong.

While the research provides a reason, it certainly doesn’t alter the negative results of the behavior.

Reasons don’t excuse the behavior.

Nor does it offer a way to change it.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Golden Oldies: 7 on Ethics

Monday, April 15th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pictoquotes/45246658861

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Before the bubble burst in 2008 I was writing a blog called Leadership Turn for b5 Media. The comments left led to a four post series. The Siemens bribery scandal brought me back to the subject in 2008 and I returned to the subject in 2009. It’s fluidity and changing definitions have always fascinated me (you can find more recent posts by using “ethics” as your search term).

Unlike those who see ethics as black and white, I’ve always seen them as shifting and changing with society. My favorite example of that change is murder. Every society condemns murder, but labeling a killing as such depends who died — no slave was ever murdered by their owner.

Finally, it’s good to keep in mind that legal doesn’t mean ethical and ethical isn’t synonymous with moral.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Ethics and Corporate Leadership  August 27th, 2007

Are Ethical Values Set or Fluid?  August 29th, 2007

So You Think You’re Ethical…  September 11th, 2007

The Quandary of Ethics  September 14th, 2007

Legal Isn’t Always Ethical  May 29th, 2008

The Changing Face Of Right And Wrong  April 3rd, 2009

More Ethical? Not That Simple  April 10th, 2009

Image credit: BK

If The Shoe Fits: Culture and Values

Friday, March 29th, 2019

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Pundits and investors of all kinds, from lone angels to major VCs, say that your company’s culture is critical to its success.

Therefore, the most important question founders should ask themselves is what are my values?

Not what you say out loud, or agree to in order to fit in, or because they are good talking points, or to be PC.

You need to be brutally honest, at least with yourself, because, in the long run, whatever your values truly are will out.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed he wanted to do good by connecting people.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to organize the world’s information and “not be evil.”

But, in the long run, their top core value became obvious, echoing Gordon Geko’s, “Greed is good.”

Also long term, Andrew Wilkinson’s 2015 words reflect his values, I’m not a unicorn, I’m a horse.

Culture is based on founder values and sooner or later the real ones do surface.

This is where being “your authentic self” trips up a lot of people, not just founders.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Other Nefarious Companies

Wednesday, January 9th, 2019

Nefarious encompasses much of what’s wrong with the prime goal of social media companies — hook users.

I love the word ‘nefarious’; in case you aren’t familiar with it synonyms include, evil, wicked, rotten, treacherous, villainous, and many more.

Hook them and sell them.

Users bear some of the responsibility, but it’s difficult to say no to something that’s not just socially acceptable, but necessary, in spite of it having the addictive power of heroin.

Sure, social media companies need to police their platforms much better, but users need to use their brains when sourcing services.

Assuming information offered by service providers, such as plastic surgeons, on sites like Snapchat and Instagram is truthful, reliable and vetted is just plain stupid.

“I’ve had my before and after photos stolen—used by other doctors as if they’re their own work. I’ve had my own video content—even sometimes with me in it—used by other people,” said Dr. Devgan.
In fact, a 2017 study found that when searching one day’s worth of Instagram posts using popular hashtags—only 18% of top posts were authored by board-certified surgeons, and medical doctors who are not board certified made up another 26%.

Then there are phones — and third party apps.

A friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan (…) The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo.

(…) data you provide is only processed within your own phone. This might not seem a cause for alarm, but any third party applications you have on your phone—like Facebook for example—still have access to this “non-triggered” data. And whether or not they use this data is really up to them.

Google freely admits it reads your Gmail and Android constantly harvests data; all in the name of providing a “more relevant marketing experience.”

Amazon’s Alexa keeps having security problems that are shrugged off as minor ‘oops’, but they aren’t minor when they happen to you.

Google suffers from similar problems, as does every smart product you add to your home.

There’s a lot more, but you can find it faster than I can add it to this post.

The lesson to learn is that privacy and security start with you, because believing that the companies supplying the product/service give a damn flies in the face of the daily increase of evidence to the contrary.

The Liar That Claims to be Your Friend

Tuesday, January 8th, 2019
https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcopako/

If someone claimed they were your friend, but constantly lied to you, used you, stole from you, and vouched for con artists would you still trust them?

Would you invite them into your home and introduce them to your friends?

You probably already have.

The ‘someone’ is Facebook in all its forms, subsidiaries and partners.

In truth, parent Facebook lies constantly.

It lies about who/how they share you.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. (…) The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

It lies about stalking you for targeted ads.

“There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely,” the Facebook spokesperson said told Gizmodo.

It lies about its true purpose — and always has.

It should not come as a surprise that Facebook — a giant, for-profit company whose early employees reportedly ended staff meetings by chanting “domination!” — would act in its own interests.

It lies about its efforts to stop fake news.

Current and former fact-checkers for Facebook have slammed the company in interviews with The Guardian, saying it cared more about “crisis PR” than actually combatting the spread of fake news.

Do you think Sheryl Sandberg’s a role model? If so, think again.

A report from The New York Times shows that, while Sandberg was building her global brand, she was using aggressive and underhanded tactics at Facebook. As the company faced increasing criticism and pressure (…) she embraced a strategy to suppress information about Facebook’s problems, discredit its critics, and deflect blame onto its competitors.

What about companies owned by Facebook?

WhatsApp is a major child pornography platform.WhatsApp has become a platform for users to “openly” share pictures and videos of child pornography, the Financial Times reports. (…) WhatsApp only has 300 employees to monitor its 1.5 billion users globally.

Then there’s Instagram.

Instagram was of even more help to Russian interests in 2016 than Facebook.

“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s [Russian Internet Research Agency] influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony …”

It has far more harassment and bullying, than Facebook — in spite of its so-called “kindness” initiative” Read the stories, they are a real eye-opener.

As is the recently released Senate report on Russian disinformation in which Instagram is a star.

Zukerberg not only lies, he is expert at turning a blind eye on the headline-generating happenings and focusing on all the marvelous accomplishments in 2017.

In his annual year-end letter, which he published on his Facebook page on Friday, (…) boasting of all that the company had accomplished this year and all the great things it does for its users. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made.”

Join me tomorrow for a look at the nefarious doing of others and Friday for what you can do to fight back.

Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

Golden Oldies: Lies, Cheating and the Slippery Slope

Monday, January 7th, 2019

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Lying isn’t new, but it is certainly in the ascendancy. It doesn’t matter what media you follow, not a day goes by without a story about someone in a position of trust lying — whether politician, corporate chief, religious leader, friend, relative, or someone else. It is important to remember that few, if any, see their actions as problematic.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Lying and cheating are common occurrences and recent research shows that, contrary to popular wisdom (wishful thinking?), they do not make people feel badly.

In an interview, Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist at Duke and author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, made two comments that especially caught my eye for both their perception and accuracy.

“I have had lots of discussions with big cheaters — insider trading, accounting fraud, people who have sold games in the NBA, doping in sports. With one exception, all of them were stories of slippery slopes.”

“When you are in the midst of it, you are in a very, very different mindset…. You are not a psychopath, and you are not cheating. You are doing what everybody else is doing.”

Slippery slopes, indeed.

KG’s comment after reading the interview brings forth another salient point.

It is my belief no person ever quite understands their own artful dodges used to escape from the often grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Long before lying became the issue it is today, Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) had a great response.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

The problem with this solution is that it requires self-awareness, personal effort, determination and grit.

All of which, if there is no financial reward, are in short supply these days.

Flickr image credit: Sean MacEntee

Your Value Bit by Bit

Wednesday, November 21st, 2018

Tech firms know a lot about you

but that’s nothing compared to data brokers, who collect from everywhere and sell to anyone.

 

What Price Money?

Tuesday, November 20th, 2018

 

Your life.

Profiled in data.

With or without your permission.

Collected and sold to anyone.

Much of it done by your best friend Facebook.

For years.

When Facebook was challenged?

It took a traditional approach.

The next time, leadership denied and denied and denied.

When that didn’t work they again lied and lied and lied.

Then they hired a PR firm that essentially poured gasoline on burning waters.

And while Facebook is clearly the poster child for data misuse, Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t exactly on the side of the angels.

Politicians on both sides are weighing in, but, considering the money involved in US-approved corruption, AKA, lobbying, that effort is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.

One question comes to mind.

Is there anything more valuable than data?

The answer is yes.

Talent.

And the talent isn’t happy.

“Increasingly — and especially given the political environment — a key part of this consideration for workers has become the moral and ethical implications of the choices made by their employers, ranging from the treatment of employees or customers to the ethical implications of the projects on which they work. This is especially true given the central role of ‘big tech’ in new fears about information, rights, and privacy and the growing feeling that a lack of oversight in this sector has been harmful.” –Prasanna Tambe, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions

In fact, the hiring luster isn’t just thin, it’s becoming nonexistent.

“Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there,” said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. (…) As Facebook has been rocked by scandal after scandal, some young engineers are souring on the company.

“Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”

“They do a lot more due diligence,” said Heather Johnston, Bay Area district president for the tech job staffing agency Robert Half. “Before, candidates were like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do team interviews. I want a one-and-done.’” Now, she added, job candidates “want to meet the team.”

“They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”

The criticism by Google employees played out much more publicly.

More than 20,000 employees and contractors walked out of Google’s offices around the world Thursday, Nov. 1, organizers said. The group is protesting sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a non-inclusive workplace culture.

So.

Perhaps “we, the people” will have more force in the corporate world than it does elsewhere.

Image credit: Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

Ignorance, Money — and Voting

Friday, November 2nd, 2018

A question was posted on Quora after the last election explaining that the poster had voted for Trump as a joke, was horrified that he’d won and asked how he could change his vote.

That level of ignorance seems well beyond what Socrates had in mind in his comments on voters.

 

And the image below is meant as a graphic argument against the belief some people have that their single vote doesn’t count for much.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/13493779915/

That said, don’t forget to vote!

Video credit: The School of Life Image credit: DonkeyHotey

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