One mango at a time

In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.

About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”

Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.

For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.

Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.

Richard Wright stamp

While I was on the USPS website, I discovered to my surprise that a stamp honoring Richard Wright came out last year.

It looks nice, but it’s a 61-cent stamp. Who uses 61-cent stamps? If you really want to honor a major American writer, wouldn’t you put him (or her) on a first-class stamp? Instead we have Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, and the Simpsons. 

Happy Groundhog Day

As I did last year, I want to honor Groundhog Day with a quotation from Thoreau’s Journal. Although Thoreau wrote more about some other creatures (for instance, the muskrat) than he did about the woodchuck or groundhog, his affection for this creature is obvious.

June 21, 1854
Here, in the midst of extensive sprout-lands, are numerous open hollows more or less connected, where for some reason* the wood does not spring up, — and I am glad of it, — filled with a fine wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom around the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries straggling down into them. The woodchuck loves such places and now wabbles off with a peculiar loud squeak like the sharp bark of a red squirrel, then stands erect at the entrance of his hole, ready to dive into it as soon as you approach. As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored West or East.

*Maybe frosts.

Once again, groundhog fans should visit my friend Lucy’s pages (with more quotations from Thoreau), including her tribute to one charming but unfortunate young woodchuck.

How Air America lost teen spirit

One of my favorite maxims on marketing comes from advertising legend David Ogilvy: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

The people who made Air America what it started out to be—Marc Maron, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Jim Earl, Brendan McDonald, Mike Malloy, Rachel Maddow—understood that.

The suits at the top, notably CEO Danny Goldberg, did not.

In 2003, Goldberg published a book called How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Two years later, while the paperback edition was fresh off the presses, he pulled the plug on Morning Sedition, which more than anything else on Air America had the intelligence, sharpness, and hilarity to grab young listeners (as well as the not so young).

It’s hard to recall just how exciting it was to discover Air America when it was first on the air—and especially Morning Sedition. Jenn and I turned it on when we were barely conscious, and even before our first cup of coffee we were laughing at Morning Remembrance, Future Marc, the Pitch of the Week, and all the other inspired insanity.

Danny Goldberg put an end to all that. In a guest post at the Down with Tyranny blog, he defends himself at length—but scroll down to see what Brendan McDonald and Jim Earl have to say. I’ll let Jim Earl have the last word:

Aside from applauding everything Brendan’s already written, I’d like to add these choice bits:

I wrote for Air America from the beginning, but ended up mostly performing and writing for Maron’s show—this, despite his atavistic predilection for pouring warm spittoon tailings into the break room coffee-maker every morning.

Aside from that, the most peculiar thing I ever witnessed at Air America, including the time Riley secretly married a breakfast roll in the basement, was how a liberal network whose concept was rooted in the goal that it not become a humorless copy of NPR, had now become a humorless copy of NPR. And that was Danny’s genius. No one could suck the happy out of a building faster than you could. And that’s what killed the best, most exciting shows at Air America: some guy who didn’t like or didn’t get jokes. You know—satire, parody, sarcasm. Things that can actually catch people’s attention in politics. Instead you opted to bore the crap out of radio audiences—much like you did to me half way through your blog. Radio audiences don’t like being bored, Danny. And if you hadn’t spent most of your job time recuperating at your Malibu beach house or bunkered in the corner office atop a pyramid of TaB, perhaps you would have discovered that.

What the Dog Saw

The enormous success of Malcolm Gladwell’s books has a lot to do with his beautifully clear and engaging way of telling a story. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that the main ideas of those books are of particular interest to businesspeople and especially marketers.

The Tipping Point argues (as does Seth Godin) that success in marketing comes when you reach not only the groups and subcultures that will be most enthusiastic about your product, but those that are well connected enough to spread the word widely and rapidly.

Blink holds out the promise that the right decision may come to you in an instant (though only if you’ve devoted enough time to learning your subject). (Outliers, on the other hand, may have less appeal to the titans of industry—arguing as it does that success doesn’t always come from hard work or innate talent but usually requires timing, luck, and personal or cultural advantages.)

Anyone with three back-to-back number-one bestsellers is going to generate a certain amount of resentment. Participants in the Gladwell backlash accuse him of oversimplifying and cherry-picking his data and anecdotes. Life is not that simple, they argue.

As if in response, many of the essays in the new book What the Dog Saw make the point that in many situations the quantity of data, of noise, and of complicated interrelationships is such that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, whether you’re in business or not. Storytelling itself is a response to uncertainty, a way of finding (or creating) a narrative thread that makes sense, or seems to make sense, of our experience.

In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell explodes the very kind of appealing narrative explanations that he’s purveyed himself. Criminal profiling, he argues, is no more accurate than the predictions of sideshow psychics based on generalities and leading questions. The experience of being an NFL quarterback is so different from being a college quarterback that there is no way to predict which college stars will do well.

Enron, says Gladwell, didn’t really hide its financial risks—they were simply buried in the mountains of documents they disclosed. Similarly, the warnings about the safety of the Challenger space shuttle, and about the 9/11 terrorist attack, weren’t ignored—they were simply lost in the mass of similar warnings that seemed equally significant. And so on.

All this is interesting, but somewhat unsatisfying to those of us who are looking for guidance in how to make decisions.

One of the few people Gladwell finds who has actually found a way to profit from uncertainty is Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, whose investment strategy is based on buying insurance against large and unpredictable disasters. NInety-nine days out of a hundred, or more, this is a strategy that loses a little money. But every so often—for instance, during a global financial meltdown—it pays off big time.