Yesterday’s post cited a quote from a book, “Power is the ability to sustain illusion.”  At the time, I used it in a post that focused on the idea that powerful people often believed and acted as if the rules didn’t apply to them.

Of course, powerful people — glitterati, politirati, digirati, corporati, religirati — have acted on that premise for centuries; still do and always will.

But there is a difference, actually two differences, between then and now.

The first is the new technology that is blurring and even erasing the separation between truth and lies, reality and fantasy.

The second is far more worrying.

It’s not just people’s willingness to turn a blind eye and rationalize what’s happening, AKA, business as usual.

Rather, it’s their willingness to actively embrace it — often with their eyes wide open.

Not as active protagonists, but as passive ones.

It’s not that they are bad people, but as Edmund Burke said, The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Image credit: Angie Trenz

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.

I wrote this 9 years ago, long before Facebook, Uber, Zenefits, Google, and a myriad of other companies that started on the light side of ‘but me’ and, over time, migrated to the dark side.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few days ago I read Fourth Down, Death, an old mystery by Michael T. Hinkemeyer, and I’ve been thinking about how true was the statement, “Power is the ability to sustain illusion.”

We see the illusions fail all the time in the news these days—think Enron, WorldCom, options backdating.

What will it take for the corporate elite to realize that the illusion is fragile and that it takes very little to crack the power that sustains it?

Put another way, when will they stop operating on a “but me” basis? ” As in, “the rules apply to everybody, but me.”

However, “but me” is also

• the mindset that yields the greatest inventions, as when two brothers thought, “everybody thinks that man can’t fly, but us,” and fosters innovation at any level;
• what lets each of us continue functioning in our crazy world, knowing that the bad and scary stuff we hear about in the news can happen to anybody, but me.

Think of “but me” as having both a light side and a dark side—then choose the side on which you want to play.

Please join me tomorrow for an updated look at the quote that started me thinking way back in 2007.

Image credit: Yaniv Ben-Arie

Would you jump in front of an object moving at 30 mph or better to take a selfie?

Would you do it knowing that not only you, but others could be seriously injured or even killed?

That’ what was happening at this year’s Tour de France.

What drives people to play this kind of Russian roulette and then brag about it?

I doubt they have a death wish or even consider that they might maim or kill someone else.

Do they have any understanding of cause and effect; action and consequences?

Is it “but me” syndrome?

Is it that they just don’t think?

Can they think?

I honestly don’t understand and would appreciate any insights you might have.

Image credit: Jose Been via Business Insider

The ‘me first’ attitude so prevalent today makes everyday living anywhere ever more difficult.

That ‘me first’ is especially obvious when poop isn’t scooped.

“In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.”

Brunette’s mayor wanted a more creative solution that didn’t rely on substantial fines, because in tough economic times that fine could be the difference between eating and going hungry.

With the creative help of McCann Erickson, Brunete’s mayor tried a totally new approach to the poop—along the lines of ‘return to sender’.

Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners. (…) Delivering 147 boxes of the real stuff seems to have produced a far more lasting effect in this town of about 10,000 residents. The mayor guesses a 70 percent improvement even now, several months after the two-week campaign.

The campaign wasn’t done as a surprise;

At first, Ricardo Rovira, who was part of the design team at the agency, worried that the mayor would not have the courage to go ahead with its direct marketing idea. But he did. McCann also made an amusing public awareness video, produced by Juan José Ocio, largely using actors. It was shown around town before concerts and community meetings.

According to Rovira, the campaign also netted McCann some real clients with serious money to spend.

This has been a fun little doing well by doing good story on a summer Wednesday that, hopefully, will inspire you/your company to DIY.

YouTube credit: McCann Worldgroup Spain

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

“The higher you go in life, the greater the capacity for self-delusion.” —George Mitchell

There’s a very contagious illness making the rounds and it reached pandemic proportions more than a decade ago.

To check if you have it take the simple quiz below.

In the privacy of your own mind how would you answer the following questions?

1. Are you usually the smartest person in the room?
2. Are you annoyed when someone doesn’t instantly “get it?”
3. Do you listen equally well to all your people?
4. Is your main networking criteria WIFM?
5. Did you succeed because of others?

If you answered yes, yes, no, yes, no then you’re already sick.

If you considered the answers obvious you have a serious case of what Pat Riley calls the “disease of me,” while the startup world knows it as “founder’s ego.”

It means you not only do things better than others, but also can do no wrong.

While there is no inoculation against it, there is a cure.

The cure requires changing your MAP and it’s free.

Hat tip to Wally Bock for a great reminder on how easy (and stupid) it is to buy into your own infallibility.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I have little tolerance for what I perceive as rudeness.

However, a jam-packed, always-on, socially-enabled lifestyle combined to varying degrees with a me-centric view of the world appears to be driving a rising tide of rudeness in people of all ages.

Is there anything else going on beyond the obvious?

Perhaps part of what comes across as rudeness is merely misunderstanding.

Perhaps the difference between such actions as “acknowledgment” and “feedback,” which is a different animal altogether, have blurred to the point of merger—for the record, feedback requires thought, while acknowledgement doesn’t.

Ask anybody in resume limbo how much they would appreciate some form of acknowledgement that their resume had been received.

There was a time when companies sent form letters acknowledging receipt, as well as thanks/no thanks rejections on hard copy and actually paid postage to do it.

These days they can’t even bother with programming an auto-response that costs them nothing, but gains good will.

Many (most?) individuals are even worse; screening their responses to calls and email through a what’s-in-it-for-me filter or are so busy checking Facebook and playing Angry Birds that they don’t have time for the niceties.

Yet, as with most things, the rudeness is not one-sided.

Resumes sent and contacts initiated based on the premise that if you throw enough something will stick also deserve the rudeness label.

Then, of course, there is always the possibility that my definition is archaic and what I see as rude has become acceptable.

Flickr image credit: Ronald Saunders

Are you familiar with the power and choices of ‘but me’?

Don’t kid yourself, ‘but me’ is what makes the world go round.

‘But me’ is why people get married; fly in a plane; text while driving; rob a bank or a myriad of other actions—both good and bad.

Heck, if it wasn’t for ‘but me’ they probably wouldn’t even get out of bed.

It is ‘but me’ that feeds the roots of entrepreneurism—from the hobbyist who dreams of turning passion into enterprise to the serial entrepreneurs on their umpteenth startup.

It is ‘but me’ that turns wishes into reality.

All I can say is, “Long live ‘but me’!”

Flickr image credit: John Haslam

Back in early 2003 I read an article in the Wall Street Journal called Multitasking Makes You Stupid and I cheered. Why? Because it’s always nice to have one’s opinion confirmed through scientific study by experts with lots of credentials—especially when most of the people around you are bragging about how well they multitask.

I got to thinking about that and did a bit more searching to see if anything’s changed. There’s one study that looked at gender differences and came to the conclusion that whereas productivity is about equal, women have a slight advantage in accuracy. I’m certainly not claiming I read all 250,000 pages returned on a search using the terms, multitasking study Dr university, but scanning through the first hundred I didn’t notice anything that contradicted what I’ve always thought—multitasking is not productive!

So what’s happened since the original article appeared? More ways to multitask; more managers demanding that their people do it; and more people bragging about their skill at it—more errors, accidents and loss of productivity.

Don’t believe me? Think about

• what it’s like talking to someone who is reading email or doing other computer tasks during the conversation;
• how close you’ve come to creaming someone, or being creamed, while talking on a cell;
• the last time you didn’t notice the sirens ’cause you were listening to an iPod or talking on a cell.

And before you write all this off with the famous “but me” argument ask yourself: are you really that different from the rest of the human race?

For more insights read HBS working Knowledge columnist Stever Robbins (among many others), then read my Think, Dream, Innovate, and then really think about how you want to run your life!