My Team Is Hiring!

In case any of you reading this are also in the marketing business, my immediate team in Thomson Reuters is expanding right now. The jobs are listed for the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas metro areas, but, given the world we currently live in, there may be some flexibility on more remote locales.

And when I say "my team," I don't mean "working for me" but I do mean "doing the same thing I'm doing for different products and/or working with me on a daily basis." So take that as a positive or negative as you wish.

(One last note, "Manager" in TR is a slightly higher level title than bog-standard "Marketing Manager" anywhere else -- I moved from being a Marketing Manager at Wiley to a Senior Marketer here, and that was basically a lateral move.)

The jobs are:

JREQ138330 – Sr Marketer, Content Creation (Corp Legal)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Sr-Marketer--Content-Creation--Corp-Legal-_JREQ138330

JREQ138327 – Manager, Content Marketing (Corp Tax)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Manager--Content-Marketing--Corporates-Tax-_JREQ138327

JREQ138329 – Solutions Marketing Manager (Corp Practical Law)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Solutions-Marketing-Manager--Corp-Practical-Law-_JREQ138329-1

Book-A-Day 2018 #182: Young Frances by Hartley Lin

I don't want to oversell my expertise here: I've never worked in a law firm, and my professional work is generally marketing to attorneys within companies rather than firms. So I may be just saying that one thing I've never experienced personally matches another thing I've never experienced personally. [1]

But Hartley Lin's Young Frances is a remarkably nuanced, detailed, smart look at the pressure cooker that is a major Big Law firm, smart about office politics and full of off-handed details about both how bruising and all-consuming it can be and about how it used to be so much worse. Ever more exciting, that's not the point of Young Frances: that's the world she lives in, and the work she's doing and trying to make meaningful, but the story of this graphic novel is about her personally.

Like all of us, her work life is not her whole life -- but it's a huge piece of that life, and influences everything else. She struggles with insomnia, and worries about what she should do with her life, and has a complicated friendship with her roommate Vickie, a gorgeous actress on the verge of a huge career breakthrough. In lesser hands, Young Frances would be a "quarterlife crisis" book -- yet another story about someone young and aimless.

But Frances Scarland is not aimless. She just doesn't have much confidence in her aim, and wonders if the life she's building for herself is worth what it costs. We all wonder that, at least now and then, and I think most of us are not as confident as we look, either. She's a hard worker, focused on details, and cares about what she's doing -- and she's also embedded in an organization that is designed to bring in large groups of young, hard-working people every single year, run them ragged, and then spit out most of them within three to five years. A big law firm is a brutal place to work, even if you're not an attorney -- maybe even more so, since shit proverbially flows downhill. Frances is support staff, a law clerk: she's very far downhill.

But firm politics also lead to alliances and schemes and favoritism. At the beginning of this book, Frances is given the kind of thing that can pass for promotion in an organization like that: asked to support another practice group and given more work as others are let go. So she's soon working mostly for the chilly rainmaker Marcel Castonguay, head of Bankruptcies -- and he seems to favor her, to want to further her career.

But the core of Young Frances is that question: is this her career? Is this really what she wants to do, or is it just what she happens to be doing now? How does it affect the rest of her life? And does any of that matter?

Her roommate Vickie pulls her in other directions -- sometimes frivolous, work-shirking ones, sometimes scarily major, change-your-life-entirely ones. Frances Scarland needs to decide who she is and what she will do. Like all of us do. And, like all of us, it's not a one-time decision: every day is another choice, another step in one direction or another.

Lin tells this story in quiet comics panels, three tiers to the large pages and a precise semi-ligne claire style. This is a book full of words -- these are lawyers and their support staff, with a subset of actors! -- but his open pages and crisp lettering makes it all flow smoothly and evenly throughout.

Young Frances is simply astonishing as someone's first book: Hartley Lin has arrived, fully-formed, as a mature artist with a strong story to tell and a deft hand at handling characters. We're only halfway through 2018, but this will be really hard to beat as the debut of the year.


[1] ObligatoryReference: "So, what you’re telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen."

Memories and Memes

So I noticed that a book cover I was responsible for was memed recently -- that's it at the top of this post.

I say "I," but Jim Butcher wrote the actual books, and Dan Dos Santos did that great cover -- and I think it was Toby Schwartz who was the art director at the time, so she contacted Dan, negotiated the deal, and worked with him to develop the cover. I did make the deal for the omnibus -- Wizard at Large, the third Butcher omni I did, back in 2006, collecting books seven and eight -- and had the idea for the cover, though.

(I can't claim much credit for that, though. I think my brief to Toby was pretty much "Dan's done two of these already, and he knows what he's doing. But there's a scene where Harry rides a zombie T-Rex, and I think Dan would do a killer job on that. But you and he might have other ideas.")

Still, it was a hoot to see my old life pop up unexpectedly: that is a great cover, and I hope Dan is selling a lot of prints of it. Who knows? Maybe some day I'll be lucky enough to walk by it on the side of a van.

Amusing Myself

I'm working on the list of books to send to a conference at work, which is a bit tedious but the kind of work I like: nitpicky, looking over a big spreadsheet and making changes, doing something big and useful and concrete.

And, of course, I'm finding titles that shouldn't be there, titles that are missing, and other errors -- that's the point of the exercise.

Why, just now, I saw that one book is on the list but has no copies listed, so it won't be sent until I specify a quantity.

That book, amusingly, is Accounting for Managers -- because we all know... there is no accounting for managers!

(And even after seven years I'm still not tired of that joke.)

Hope your current working days are at least this pleasant.

In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

Ethics: Not Always Profitable

A new Harvard Business Review study reports that male professionals with high ethical character earn 3.4% less than those with lower character.

Actually, both of those metrics are self-reported, so it may be that the people reporting high ethical character are stuck-up prigs whose careers have stagnated, or those who report low ethical character are just more likely to lie about their salary. All we can really know for sure is that men who say they have high ethical character also say they make less money.

In Which A Lying Liar Lies

Some bozo named Cameron Herold -- a consultant who clearly gets paid for making other people's working lives miserable, curse his name -- touts that "the private office is dead" and that "employees love" open plan, no-privacy workspaces.

And from this we can easily deduce that he has the kind of aggressive, hard-driving management style that shuts down all actual discussion in his immediate vicinity, because actual real people loathe those kind of offices. Really. And they say so when someone other than their boss asks them.

I also call bullshit on his claim that "a conversation that could take seconds in an open-concept environment gets needlessly stretched into minutes by walls and doors." In my actual working experience, having a meeting with people in real offices means walking in, saying "Got a minute?" and closing the door if necessary. Having a even-mildly-private meeting in an open-plan office means finding a quiet space to do so, which takes extensive checking-of-calendars, searching-of-rooms, and so forth. And those conversations in the next cube? Everyone within ten feet is desperately trying not to listen and to focus on their own work, to no avail. Every supposedly quiet five-minute conversation kills about an hour's worth of work in the surrounding area.

Also, I take great offense to his privileging of "collaboration" over actually being able to concentrate and do your own work -- most jobs are not done better by four kibitzers than by one person who actually does it. (But management consultants, as always, love kibitzing, since it's all they know how to do.)

This Herold chap is evil and needs to be stopped before he kills any more workplaces.

Creepy WSJ Article About the Ever-Shrinking Workspace

Speaking as someone who once got to work in a real office with a door, and now operates out of a noisy fabric-covered box, this has already gone too far --- but the WSJ gleefully serves up a vision of an even worse hell waiting for us.

And you know that all of the CEOs, Senior VPs and Directors who love this idea so much have big corner offices with credenzas and couches, too. How about we reallocate some of their space?

I Want You!

Well, not me, precisely. And possibly not you, precisely, either. But my group at Wiley -- we happy few, we band of brothers -- is looking for a Digital Products Manager right now.

We are awesome people doing awesome things, and, if you are the same, you can now join us. Do you want to be one of us, or with Westmoreland? I ask you. The choice is yours.

Innovations and Innovations

So Amazon has a new Kindle reader for the web, which is nifty, and as part of that roll-out, they're also allowing first-chapter previews to be embedded on any webpage, which is doubly nifty.

Since I'm going to be encouraging my authors to use this, I figured I'd better test it out myself.

So here's a preview of one of my books, shipping this month, on a topic that's (I hope) of much wider interest than a lot of my controllership and fraud books. Let's see if this works as advertised. (Just click on the "full screen" icon to read it comfortably.)

(By the way, the book this chapter is from -- I really should tell you that, shouldn't I? -- is The Innovation Playbook by Nicholas J. Webb.)

Time Travel for Fun and Business

I'm currently looking over a cover mechanical, sent via e-mail through my company's neato-keano intranet-based routing system. And I note that it was sent at 8:05 PM on Friday, with a "due back" time of 3:00 PM on the previous day (Thursday).

If I could do that, I very much I doubt I'd be bothering with cover mechanicals for accounting books....