"For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight." Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.
How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!
Inspired by Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the editor of Blawg Review will be flying around the country on a JetBlue "all you can jet" pass, wherever these wings take me. Learning to fly; learning to be.
You can follow the journey by reading this blog post, which will be updated frequently in the days and weeks ahead. Last year, it was 22 flights in a month; this year, maybe more. Like a bird on the wire, I'll be tweeting @blawgreview and might even check in from time to time on foursquare to let followers know exactly where I'm at on this remarkable adventure.
Let's begin, where photographed above, at the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, California. Where to next? You tell me.
Before we take off, let's make sure I've packed everything necessary for a month of unlimited travel where we jet on JetBlue. As they say in the airline business, there's only two kinds of luggage, carry-on and lost, so I never check baggage. Still, I like to have absolutely everything needed for any possible travel situation. This isn't backpackin' around the world like Tim Ferriss, with 10 lb or less. This is serious business travel. Just how do I pack?
I travel a lot; think George Clooney in Up in the Air, without the unlimited sex. What's in your backpack?
Arriving soon, in a city near you. Follow me on Twitter @blawgreview and here, where you can see where I've been on the JetBlue AYCJ pass, and where I'm going next:
LGB to LAS ... LAS to JFK ... JFK to DEN ... DEN to JFK to BUF ... BUF to JFK to LAS ... LAS to JFK ... JFK to ORD ... ORD to JFK to SFO ... SFO to JFK to ORD ... ORD to BOS to JFK to LAS ...
Chicago IP Litigation law blogger and unapologetic Chicago Blackhawks fan R. David Donoghue hosts this week's Blawg Review #277. Having attended a playoffs game in Chicago as Dave Donoghue's guest, I really hope he sees his Stanley Cup on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame this year.
Included in this week's Blawg Review is a case involving Don Henley of the Eagles who, despite his disdain for YouTube, might approve of the use of this video clip of a performance of The Last Resort to raise awareness for indigenous people on this special day.
Charles H. Green is hosting Blawg Review #275 on Trust Matters. Charlie is not a lawyer but he did go to Harvard Business School, and he's the co-author of one of the most important books any lawyer will ever read: The Trusted Advisor.
A few years ago, I wrote a recommendation of this book for the Reading Minds column in Law Practice Magazine, which can be found online at ABA Net in the wayback machine. If you Google hard enough for that book review, here's what you'll find:
The theme of The Trusted Advisor (Free Press, 2000) is that the key to professional success is not just technical mastery of one’s discipline, but also the ability to work with clients in a way that earns their trust and gains their confidence. This book is a seminal treatise on the subject of trust.
Most, if not all, young lawyers starting out as new associates in established firms want to get ahead as fast as they can. Freshly minted from a competitive law school environment, they typically think being the best lawyer is all about mastering the law. Authors David Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford write this:
“Then comes that crucial career transition, from technician to full professional, from content expert to advisor. As technicians, our task is to provide information, analyses, research, content and even recommendations. All of these are basically tasks performed out of the client’s presence. In contrast, our task as advisors is an ‘in-person,’ ‘in-contact’ challenge to help the client see things anew or to make a decision. This requires a complete change of skills and mind-sets.”
Lawyers who make this career transition, achieving the status of trusted advisor, know the meaning of true professionalism and, unlike so many of their colleagues, really enjoy the practice of law. For young lawyers starting out, there’s no book I’d recommend more highly than this one.
Ed Post, is the pseudonym of the Editor of Blawg Review, a weekly carnival of the best law blogs presented on a different host’s blog every Monday. Ed was a young lawyer himself, almost over 30 years ago.
The Trusted Advisor is a great book for lawyers, but don't just take the word of an anonymous blogger. Read the book and decide for yourself.
We've hosted the Carnival of Trust before. It was here on the Blawg Review blog that the founder of the Carnival of Trust, Charles Green, took the show on the road in August 2007, letting us host the first of these trust carnivals away from the big top at Trust Matters. The Carnival of Trust has had a great tour since then, over the past three years, stopping along the way at somegreatlawblogsfamiliartoourreaders.
Last month's Carnival of Trust hosted by lawyer Doug Cornelius is a tough act to follow--what with the circus clowns and all--so if we're gonna try to trump that performance, we should probably open with the King, in Las Vegas, and Cirque du Soleil.
The performers of Cirque du Soleil exemplify professionalism and trust. Opening with "Jailhouse Rock" is a nod to the lawyers in the house and regular followers of Blawg Review, the blog carnival for everyone interested in the law. Ending with "Suspicious Minds" reflects the larger view of trust that is the scope of the Carnival of Trust.
Now, without further ado, let's get on with the show!
Where better to start than at Trust Matters, as Charles H. Green and Rich Sternhell have co-written a couple of posts about restoring trust and confidence in business. In their post titled CNBC Asks Experts How to Improve Confidence in Business: Hmmm.. Sternhell and Green look critically at a recent panel discussion of experts in the mainstream media. In a follow-up post to that constructive criticism, these trusted advisors offer their recommendations for Restoring Trust and Confidence in Business. "Talk about a simple, succinct recipe for restoring trust in business!" adds Don Peppers, of Peppers & Rogers, in the comments on Trust Matters.
Do journalists collude with one another on how to "spin" stories? On developing "talking points," just like politicians? Do they share ideas on some kind of JournaList? David Warren discusses The Trust Thing.
In an article on Salon headlined Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy, Glenn Greenwald writes, "Project Vigilant is but one manifestation of a booming and unaccountable industry: groups which collect vast amounts of highly informative data about American citizens -- particularly their Internet activities -- and then sell it or otherwise furnish it to the U.S. Government."
Though social-networking sites like Facebook are growing in popularity, they are not necessarily satisfying their customers, according to a recent survey. David Toussaint wrote a very interesting article about how he got disappeared by Facebook, leaving him feeling rather, well, unsatisfied to say the least.
Mike Wokasch, on Pharma Reform, a blog about transforming pharmaceutical companies in an era of healthcare reform, writes that Perceptions of the Pharmaceutical Industry can make Normal Business Practices seem Unethical or Illegal. He says, "It all boils down to a lack of trust and credibility. The industry can’t even credibly defend itself to maintain normal business practices because there are just too many cases that demonstrate companies are willing to betray this trust and take advantage of the market for financial gain. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t seem to be too concerned or you would have seen a dramatic change in behavior." In the comments to this blog post, Charlie Green adds, "You can blame lawyers, PR people, marketers, or general management: but until pharma stops focusing on preventing risk, and instead gets comfortable with telling the truth, they will not earn the reputation for trust and credibility that you rightly suggest they need."
What should business-minded lawyers advise when their corporate clients ask what to do when a bribe is suggested to get a deal done? Alexandra Wrage, President of TRACE, wrote on The Huffington Post an interesting article about Bribery as a Business Strategy.
"Sales organizations at companies like Xerox, IBM, and the Chicago Blackhawks consider customer-centricity in every part of the sales cycle, from prospecting to lead management to post-sale activities," writes Elizabeth Glagowski at 1to1 Media, in an interesting article about The Customer-Focused Sales Cycle. Apple, not so much.
Brian Galvin at Aria tells a story about trust in customer service and in a subsequent blog post titled Trust, but Verify tells of another situation from his consulting career where a similar type of situation was occurring, and where it was fixed simply and effectively.
John Gapper, at BusinessDay, wrote about how not to salvage a corporate reputation with reference to BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward. "Not everything Hayward did was wrong, and nor was poor public relations the only cause of his downfall. Hayward’s fate was sealed when BP’s early plans to cap its well failed, leaving oil still spewing. As one of BP’s advisers argues: 'This is not a PR disaster; it’s a disaster.'"
Bret Simmons wrote an interesting post Leadership Integrity, Value Congruence, and Employee Engagement with thoughtful links to related subjects: "Leaders with integrity in the eyes of their employees speak and act in ways consistent with what employees value. The leader’s personal behavior reflects values congruent with employee values. As leaders inspire others to enact their best selves and stretch for higher and higher levels of performance, they never expect values to be compromised, and they never accept compromise in their own behavior or in the behavior of others they have been given the privilege to lead." How many lawyers have leadership integrity, as viewed through the eyes of their partners, associates, employees, and clients?
When will you trust someone again? Art Markman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think, says attitudes affect beliefs by making them more coherent. "There is even evidence that these mechanisms are at work in juries making decisions about court cases," writes Markman writes in Psychology Today. "Dan Keith Holyoak and Dan Simon studied people playing the role of jurors in a 1999 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. They found that as jurors came to believe that someone was guilty, they focused more on evidence consistent with guilt than on evidence consistent with innocence. Conversely, as jurors came to believe that someone was innocent, they relied more on information consistent with innocence than on evidence consistent with guilt."
Professor Mark Liberman, an expert in linguistics at UPenn, who with his colleagues at Language Log long ago helped us lawyers agree to disagree on the use of the portmanteauword "blawg" for law blog, has an entertaining post this week about the art of conversation. Bloggers and commenters alike will appreciate the included blog post "Conversation" in which Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams wrote, "...I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were." Sound like a blawger?
