Results tagged “martin”

I take it back, people do sometimes leave good comments. I'm thrilled with the comments on "A Malcolm and a Martin", as well as the conversations on other sites:

From Scott Berkun: (Buy his book now!)

My position is that you need attention to have influence, and radicals can bring attention to an issue that is being ignored. But there are other ways to get attention. You can earn it from people who learn to respect you for intelligent work you do, problems you’ve solved, or smart things you say.

Interestingly, I'd summarize a lot of Scott's argument as a plea for civility and accountability. Put succinctly, you catch more flies with honey. I don't disagree, I just think the honey-tongued are inspired by those with a gut full of bile.

From Timothy Johnson: (Buy his book now!)

In projects and in life, you need those people who will challenge the status quo with reckless abandon. And you need those people who will calmly assess the status quo against the proposed changes, analyzing and logically weighing the alternatives to provide solutions. It's about balance, but it's also about tension.

On another topic, my ramblings on Office 2007's big bet have indirectly led to my quotes in Information Week's piece on TransMedia. I like both hosted web apps and installed desktop apps, and think they complement each other well:

"Writely and Word each enhance the value of the other, but they're for completely different purposes," he writes via e-mail. "Kids in junior high write their papers in Word from the Student version of Office, so we're at best 10 years from the workforce including a significant number of employees who had their primary word processing experiences happen with an online app."

Dash says desktop apps continue to offer obvious benefits: the ability to work offline and responsiveness that's not dependent on the performance of distant servers or network traffic. Then there's the issue of trust.

"I think there's something a little deeper behind people's attachments to desktop productivity software," he writes. "Documents created in Word are often lengthy, involved efforts, ones that people put a lot of investment into. The combination of browsers and AJAX applications isn't yet a platform that most people trust."

Nick Bradbury had a great take on my Office post, too:

Usability is the most important feature of any application, and the improved usability of the new MS Office is by far its best new feature. I agree with Anil that Microsoft has made a risky bet by so radically changing Office's UI, and it's a bet that will pay off.

That post also had the side effect of putting me right under Microsoft for search resuls on "Office 2007". I really should do something with that, but I'm struck by the fact that, despite the marketing team's efforts to rebrand as the 2007 Microsoft Office System, this is still what people are gonna search for. Shouldn't you also be posting info under that name?

Anyway, it's not all butterflies and hugs, some of the feedback has ranged from "Who the hell calls software brave?" to Could you possibly be any more of a corporate sycophant? This is your life? I can't imagine why some people think the blogosphere is an unkind place. Sure, that's a normal reaction to a conversation!

I've been thinking a lot recently about how to be a good advocate or evangelist for an idea, movement, or cause. The short version is, you gotta have a Malcolm, and you gotta have a Martin. I've used the phrase before in referring, of course, to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., but more broadly to the idea that change requires both revolution and evolution.

Any cause or effort starts with people who are suggesting that we tear down the old and replace it with the new. But most causes actually succeed when someone who's more conciliatory helps make the change seem palatable, or even better, inevitable.

The downside of a movement requiring both an extremist and a moderate in order to advance is that many times, those two viewpoints, even though they share a common goal, can tend to see each other as their worst enemies. This is why a lot of more radical efforts are plagued by infighting and big egos. Progressives tend to be the worst in this regard -- instead of seeing the establishment or conventional wisdom as their enemy, they fight hardest against the person that's 99% in agreement with them. I guess that last 1% can seem like a big deal sometimes.

Now, this idea is pretty obvious to a lot of people. But I'm always surprised how often people don't realize they're playing one of these roles and are unwilling to consider the importance of their complement. The other thing that's surprising is how often people switch; It's often noted that by the time Malcolm became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, he was closer in words and spirit to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas than to where he started.

This is true in much more mundane realms than civil rights, of course. It can be as simple as trying to get people to pay attention to work you're doing, or to care about an issue that matters to you. Be aware whether you're the moderate progressive or the radical revolutionary, and recognize the value of those who have the same goals but are taking a different path. Being effective at persuasion is a really tricky thing.

But as I mentioned in my post the other day, you need to have someone hold an extreme position to get a moderate change. And whether you're being an extremist or not, you have to have pretty thick skin. The hard part with both of those constraints is that they make it easy to lose perspective when you're trying to make an argument.

I'm still a beginner at this stuff, but I thought it might be interesting to share what I've figured out so far. It helps me when I'm talking to a group of people and want to make sure I'm not antagonizing them or alienating them with my own position. And I figure having jotted this down here means I can refer to it in the future myself the next time I forget.