#does the show deliver on this? no i think it fundamentally fails its message and its audience actually | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bsideheart · 3 months

Note

DUNE SPOILERS!!

okayy!! dune. its a book. its the book. i am head over heals for it. its divided into books within like the bible, so ill go book by book in 3 parts. lets begin. there will be glossary at the end explaining some terms in greater detail.

BOOK 1 - DUNE

paul atreides is fifteen years old and living on the planet caladan, and is the son of a duke and a bene gesserit (sort of like a space nun whos purpose is to work towards the kiwsatz haderach). he gets tested by a bene gesserit leader, a reverend mother who works for the emperor, with a gom jabbar, which is a needle that is very poisonous and if you pricked by it you die. he has to stick his hand in a very powerful box of pain and if he pulls his hand he gets gom jabbar'd. its a test for bene gesserit who can only be woman, but he does it, survives and holds his hand in the box longer than anyone ever has. here we see our first incident of Dune Misogny (patent pending).

the reverend mother says wth you must be the messiah, the kwisatz haderach and hes like whuh and then his mother jessica says OK AWESOME BYE REVEREND MOTHER and paul is like wtf.

then we learn about this guy called baron vladimir harkonnen, who is currently in control of Arrakis, which is the planet house atreides is about to take over. he explains his evil plan to give duke atriedes arrakis then take him over with a bunch of incredibly powerful imperial soldiers dressed as harkonnen soldiers.

ok so the atreides move to arrakis, a desert planet with no life except for 'savage people' called the fremen and massive sand worms, also called makers, (a fun example of Dune Racism) and little to no water. they show up and are like waow its dry here. and then paul almost gets assassinated with a thing called a hunter-seeker that is controlled by a traitor in their midst. he tells his mother who has found a message that they have a traitor amongst them. duke leto (pauls dad) comes to the conclusion after a bunch of things that he has to make jessica think he suspects her of being the traitor even though shes not and he knows that so he can play along with the harkonnens who think theyre tricking him.

ok after a dinner party which is a fun time duke leto finds the housekeeper and fremen shadout mapes dead, and finds that its doctor yueh who is the traitor, and imperial conditioned doctor who is supposed to be unable to betray anyone. but he does and he knocks duke leto unconcious but not before implanting a tooth that emits nerve gas when he bites down on it whihc he is going to use to hopefully assassinate the baron. he gets delivered and ultimately fails in killing the baron but he kills piter, the barons mentat (a person educated and conditioned to be a human super computer and data analyzer)

during this time paul and jessica gets kidnapped and taken to the desert, and are planned to get eaten by a sandworm, but they escape using the Voice (a bene gesserit tool that makes people want to agree with u basically) which paul can use because he is bene gesserit conditioned even as a male.

they escape into the desert and are in a tent on some rocks to avoid worms when paul basically becomes a fancy kind of mentat that night, something unspecified changed and he can now see billions of lives and possiblities into the future, which is what the kwistaz haderach is. he tells jessica that he knows shes pregnant, and that she was the illegitmate daughter of the baron harkonnen. and he also told her that they had to go to the fremen, and that they would accept him, and he would be their messiah and they would call him Maud-dib.

BOOK 2 - MAUD-DIB

okay so a bunch of fundamentally unimportant shit happens here so were going dot point

thurfit hawat (the dukes mentat) allies himself with the fremen

paul and jessica get rescued by duncan idaho (a buddy or like liason type o guy of duke letos. i do not remember.) also liet kynes is there (a imperiam employed guy who is now a fremen)

the place that paul and jessica are taken to gets raided and they escape in an ornithopter and have to fly it through a storm

ok so they fly through this storm because pauls new epic haderach hyper awareness makes him cracked at everything apparently and they get stuck out in the deep desert, and they have to fucking book it to some rocks bc UH OH theres a worm and they make it yayy. they camp there over day and when its night again they head of to this like raised basin thing with a bunch of plants and they get ambushed by a bunch of fremen!

but they are so impressed by jessicas awesome bene gesserit fighting skills that they promise to protect them if she teachs them the way. this may also be because the prophecy about the messiah involves a bene gesserit mother and her strange twink child. anyway paul meets his future hot wife chani who i have many complicated feelings about. but shes super cool and also wonderfully 2 dimensional like all of frank herberts characters (he's excellent at prose and setting. god awful at characterization. they all have no feelings. strictly business i say).

but the fremen take them back to their place and their hanging out at the sietch (place where fremen live) and after something that i dont remember probably to do with political power like everything else, paul ends up dueling this guy called jamis in a fight to the death, which he wins and is very sad about. then jessica is being hailed as religious fremen leader called a sayyadina which is like the step below reverend mother. she says yes and its like yay! going fab. paul gets his fremen name whihc is usul and can only be used by fremen and his other other name which is maud-dib whihc is a desert mouse or 'one who guides the way' or sm like that

they hold jamis' funeral, paul and jessica get told of the big plan to return dune to a liveable planet with plants and stuff whihc it used to be then paul sings a love song on the baliset to chani. infinite charisma buff for paul, apparently. paul gets given jamis' wife as a servant and hes kind like uhm okay but she is CLAMORING for him more evidence to my therory that paul is frank herberts self insert. but i digress.

jessica goes through the ceremony to become a true reverend mother, which involves drinking some uber duber poisonous water and then transforming the molecules to survive it. she does this while pregnant so her fetus daughter is also now a reverend mother and she will end up being basically a tiny adult by the time she can speak because becoming a reverend mother involves absorbing the knowledge of all reverend mothers previous to you.

paul then leaves the ceremony and chani follows him back to his chamber and he tells her all about his future of him loving her and also them fucking so i think they do that also? its a tasteful fade to black but im relatively sure they get a lil jiggy w it. also chani fremen name is sihaya but only paul calls her that it means desert spring

BOOK 3 - THE PROPHET

ok we skip forward a bit paul is now 18-20 ish im not positive but in the time since we last heard of him the harkonnens have fully regained arrakis and paul now has a son whos name is leto II but technically leto I because he has a another son who he also calls leto II it is fantastically confusing

also feyd-rautha (oops i havent mentioned him yet he's the baron nephew who he wants to rule arrakis some day so hes like making his other nephew rabban be rlly mean to the arrakis people so that when feyd rocks up they love him bc hes not a total dickbag. also feyd is an excellent fighter) tries to assassinate the baron whihc doesnt work but the baron does make him not in line to be baron so uhh W i suppose

ahh oops i also forgot to mention that the harkonnens now have thurfir hawat who they have mindfucked into being on their side aorta and they posion his meals but also antidote them so if he goes without their food for a few days he dies so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

anyway paul wakes from a weird dream where its revealed that chani straight up killed a guy so that he wouldnt bother paul and its not obvious but this is more Dune Misogyny

but hes about to ride a sand worm for the first time and yayy he does woop woop but they see an ornithopter and have to get off and by god its gurney halleck!! (also havent explained him but he was a general and buddy buddy with paul) hes been hanging with smugglers and thought paul was dead but here he is and he is about to become the most powerful man in the fucking galaxy so buckle up

they go into a fremen cave because they was a storm but some of hallecks smuggling crew were imperial soldiers which are defeated and taken as hostages. then the people want him to defeat the sietchs current leader stilghar who is also pauls buddy but he says no im not gonna cut down one of the most powerful men we have for a custom so suck it and everyone is like ... FUCK YEAHA !!!!

halleck then tries to kill jessica bc he still thinks she was the traitor and paul was like no you idiot it was yueh jesus do i have to do this with every man i need (that was almost verbatim what he said)

he then leaves them alone and descided to have some of that reverend mother poison to make himself more powerful but he actually nearly kills himself and is in a deep coma for 3 weeks but chani comes and wakes him with her feminine wiles jk its actually more of the poison whihc is called the water of life and is made by drowning a sandworm.

paul then wakes and is like ok so i am the kwistaz haderach and i can do things better than every woman ever. and also every man so diversity win. APPARENTLY every woman has the ability to give but struggles with taking and vice versa with men but paul is the balance? (this too is a trans allegory)

anyway they go to war against the harkonnens and win but not before pauls son dies and his adult-baby-sister-thing alia gets taken to the emperor and baron and fucking kills the baron with a gom jabbar and the emperors reverend mother is like EW WTF IS THAT which honestly gaius helen same

well they win and defeat the harkonnens because the fremen fucking rule and they take the ducal house again and they hang out their and they see hawat again who dies from that poison and paul is negotiating with the emperor and i dont remember how but he ends up fighting feyd-rautha and killing him so yippee!! he then asks to marry the emperors daughter princess irulan so he can be emperor and the emperor is like sure whatevs bc if he doesnt then paul will destroy all the spice (a very important substance) and chani is like..... but bb... will u still love me.. and paul is like ofc bbg she sucks shes political and chani is like ok <3 yay <3

and uhh thats pretty much where the first book ends. i skipped some boring and unnecessary shit and barley even mentioned the motivator of everything in this book. the spice melange. oopsies. also i would like to make it very clear that frank herert is a terrible people writer and all of his characters never feel any emotions like paul never actaully grieves his son nor does chani but that what fan fic is for. anyway hope you enjoyed i just splayed a bunch of autism on your table and tried to lean aganst the wall like a cool dude.

GLOSSARY:

bene gesserit: a woman devoted to finding and creating the kwisatz haderach, imbued with many almost mystical talents

kwisatz haderach: the man said to be the messiah, the one who can see where the bene gesserit cannot and who can balance everything and the thing the bene gesserit have been breeding people for.

mentat: human super computers educated into being supreme data analysers, they behave rigidly and are not often treated as humans and rather as tools.

fremen: the native people of arrakis, who work towards turning it back into a liveable paradise again and are the strongest people in the galaxy, second only to the maud-dib himself

maud-dib: the strongest man in the galaxy, paul atreides, leader of the fremen. see also desert mouse

spice melange: a substance only found arrakis. powerful hallucinogen and enhancing drug, sought after by all in the galaxy. prolonged exposure turns the iris and sclera blue and prolongs life as a whole

and thats all i can thing of. personally i am team arrakis' ecosystem is still worthy even though it doesnt have water but WHATEVER. sigh. sorry for long ask

THAT SOUNDS SUPER INTERESTING ACTUALLY :0 space fantasy/sci-fi is pretty cool and i’ve heard a lot of things about dune (some good some bad), thanks for summarizing it !! maybe i should read it

#my post #asks #danny #long post

1 note · View note

emptymanuscript · 3 years

Text

The Cat

I’m about 9 minutes into the movie Bright, and all the criticisms are kind of crystalizing. But one of the things that’s killing me is how they’re setting up the MC, Daryl Ward.

My bet is that the film makers thought they were setting up Ward as the cat. And they’re not.

The Cat is the term for a story abstraction from the book Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder and its sequels.

The Cat itself, is something (and it can be nearly anything that the audience will value) in need of aid that doesn’t HAVE to get it. A random cat up a tree can be the Cat. The cat that belongs to the person you want to get with, who has promised carnal relations if their cat is returned, can’t be the Cat because there is a significant reason and reward beyond simple morality for it to be helped.

If a character saves the Cat, gives it aid, helps it out, etc. when it’s just out of the goodness of the heart, that character is defined in audience perception as heroic. Most action stories will have the MC Save the Cat! in some way within the first few scenes. It’s a short hand way to show that they are “good.” And if you have a Save the Cat! moment then followed by them doing something “bad” you’ve SHOWN the audience the trajectory of the story: this person is a good person underneath but they’ve gone astray and need to find their heroism again to save the day. You’ve told the story in miniature. So it’s very useful.

But that’s not the only way to use the Cat.

In many stories the main character IS the Cat. The story in the first few scenes shows a moment where the character is clearly in need of aid and doesn’t really quite get what they need. They get enough maybe to survive but no one is saving them. This signals to the audience that this story is about growth and confidence. The MC will start out in a relatively helpless state and figure out how to come to their own rescue.

One of my all time favorite examples of that is the movie Ms. Congeniality. The opening scene, which is only about 90 seconds, is playing hard with the Cat.

youtube

The set up starts with the typical over the top Save the Cat set up. Our hero is going to ride into the rescue, save the cat, and be awesome. And then it turns. She’s not saving the cat, remember, the cat is something helped without reward, and she very much wants a reward. She IS the Cat. The real person in need of aid in this microsmic story is her. And she doesn’t get it. To keep going, she turns to her strengths and just barrels through. But, again, in miniature, this scene has told us everything we need to know about the trajectory of her story. She has all of the wrong kind of power, she uses it to mask her need, and what she is going to have to find is the “impossible” how to get what she really needs and how to draw helpers to her.

That’s the power of being the Cat. It draws sympathy. It paints expectations. And it communicates problems very clearly.

Unfortunately, many storytellers seem to believe that injury and/or pain is enough to make a character the Cat, and that just isn’t so. Cats are about choices and character trajectories. So, if you have someone shot in the first few minutes of a story, even though, yes, they NEED help and yes, they’re going to continue to need help to get back to where they were or better, it’s a non optional help. It carries with it its own reward. They’re better for no other reason than that they are recovering.

Go back to Ms. Congeniality and that’s not true. Her “saving” doesn’t intrinsically give her her reward. It gives her the key to then go out and get what she wants. They’re two separate goals. And that’s why it works. Her choice gives her another choice and that gives her her happy ending. If the story was merely a search for feminine power and getting it, it just wouldn’t feel as satisfying because it wouldn’t get the resonance of WHY feminine power is a necessity for her. As a really excellent rule of thumb, think of the Cat as representing the NEED of a character which must be fulfilled in order for them to get what they WANT. This allows for both happy and sad endings that are satisfying because they each deliver on the premise, even if it is a radically different outcome.

Ms. Congeniality has four fundamental outcomes arcing from that initial scene.

She can get the Feminine Power she needs and a boyfriend she wants - that’s a happy comedic story.

She can get the Feminine Power she needs but not get a boyfriend - that’s an “unhappy” comedic story, which can still be funny if she still pops the new not-boyfriend in the nose, happy and unhappy are textures as much as anything.

She can FAIL to get the Feminine Power she needs but get a boyfriend who appreciates her for who she really is - “happy” tragedy. Remember that comedy and tragedy in the literary sense don’t mean funny and tear jerker. Comedy means “what makes you sick but you get better” it’s about having trouble obtaining a goal but getting it in the end. Tragedy means “what kills you,” it’s about not being able to ever obtain the goal. So this kind of ending is really about saying that the goal was stupid all along.

She can Fail to get the Feminine Power she needs and because of that FAIL to get any boyfriend she might want. This is the pure tragedy. It’s both “sad” and tragic. She gets nothing. BUT this can still be funny. If you watch them closely, a LOT of slapstick comedies conform to this architecture. The characters enter the story as fools and leave the story as fools without having been enlightened one wit.

My extreme suspicion is that Bright wants to set up this kind of situation. Since the first thing we see of Officer Ward is that he feels under threat. All of his motions are indicative of someone who recognizes he is in extreme but non-immediate danger. He’s waiting for it. And then he’s shot. And then he’s clearly still having issues after he has recovered because his wife is urging him out of bed in the afternoon. He is the Cat, right?

Well, there is another relationship to the Cat that I think they’ve actually set up harder and is overriding that narrative.

Kick the Cat

You don’t usually see Kick the Cat in genre fiction. And there’s a very good reason. Genre fiction tends to lean toward “physical” action. By which I mean that the main conflicts of the plot happen outside of the Main Character’s body. The characters either go out and do something or something comes into their lives and forces them to do something. So, even though character growth is likely necessary and choices will be based on what they learn about themselves as people, that is expressed through the exterior plot. The Detective goes and solves and crime and that action results in the Detective’s change. Which means that internal character change is relatively harder to show because it doesn’t take center stage.

This means that a flawed person becoming a kind person works. But a deeply flawed, nearly broken person, who needs to grow into a kind person usually doesn’t. Because genre fiction doesn’t have enough cameras in that area where you can show it.

So when it happens in Genre Fiction, Kicking the Cat is generally an announcement that said character who does it is one of the villains and the reader should prep themselves for the sudden and inevitable betrayal.

Now that isn’t as true in Literary Fiction. Because Literary Fiction is the opposite of Genre Fiction in this way. Instead of the conflict generally being “physical”, the conflict in Literary Fiction is generally “mental.” The main conflict happens inside the body of the Main Character. So the majority of the action and most of the cameras are there. So Literary Fiction allows that kind of deep, essentially broken, flaw because it gives the story the space and insight to work with it. So it’s not as necessarily a trumpeting warning that you’re dealing with a villain. It can mean that this MC has a long way to go to fix themselves, if they can make it at all.

Unfortunately for Bright, it’s a Genre Film. AND I think that this is much more what they’re broadcasting. Remember I’ve only seen nine minutes so far. But the first nine minutes are saying a lot.

The opening credits play out over a visual depiction of a race war between the Orcs and the Police. This is, in visual language, the announcement that the Orcs are poor and oppressed and should be read as the equivalent of POC in our own world.

Ward, played by Will Smith, could open up a whole can of worms with that reading, and there’s clearly some intent to considering his neighbors are absolutely what you would see in a shot of the ghetto in another movie, but instead we go pretty much straight to:

He kills a fairy. It’s not depicted as innocent, it’s clearly a pest. But it’s also not exactly powerful. He kills it with a zealous slap of a broom. This is very plausibly the Cat. Especially with the reaction from his neighbors, who also have zero affection for the fairy but all react viscerally to Ward’s aggression. The essential problem with Cats as devices is that the audience takes them in subconsciously. There’s no opportunity for a sophisticated discussion when butts are in the seats. So the only way to control what the audience thinks is to be careful not to send conflicting messages. And this is a doozy. If it is read as a Kick the Cat moment, which I’ll be honest I am seeing it as, I can’t see Ward as the hero after this. I am waiting for his sudden and inevitable betrayal because he is absolutely one of the cops meant to be depicted up in the graffiti that slid past during the opening credits.

At this point, I’m not looking for his redemption. I’m looking for how he is going to pose a problem for the advancement for the story. Which makes him a villain and not a hero.

Worse, this is set between two discussions about his partner. I have to admit what I was really expecting was an action packed version of:

Not really the comedy aspect but that his partner was new and they had to work through their problems to get along and be their best.

There’s a reason that’s pretty much the gold standard. Because learning to get along is a standard useful storyline and commands both characters to grow. It’s the same basic dynamic as a Romance. The joy is in seeing people figure out how to click together in spite of their difficulties. The tension is ‘will they / won’t they?’ and you know they will but it’s very entertaining to see them work it out.

But that’s not what’s going on in Bright.

By the time the movie starts, Ward and Jakoby are already partners. Coming in in media res communicates that this isn’t really a story about a relationship forming. Which means they can’t really show the full arc of a relationship, and so that’s unlikely to be the focus of the story. Which communicates to the audience that they should have reason to doubt any kind of ‘will they.’

This is cemented by the three conversations immediately around the fairy killing. Ward explains to his wife that Orcs are different, not stupid, just that they think different. It is not him actually saying that the Orc isn’t stupid compared to a human just that they’re naturally different and can’t be held to the same standard.

He then tries to give that as a lesson to his daughter. Orcs are different so you have to keep Orcs in their proper mental categorization.

At which point Jakoby shows up again.

He is not welcome. Pretty much at all.

But here’s the thing, like his initial introduction:

Jakoby is depicted as kind and considerate. Up to where I’ve stopped, I haven’t seen him commit a single act of even aggression. He wants to know what kind of sauce Ward wants on his burrito.

He wants to pick up Ward to help him along. He responds with affection and magnanimous giving to Ward’s daughter. In other words, he’s coming across as the innocent in all this. Which really starts to qualify him for the Cat category. That may be ruined in the next ten minutes but right now, I’m looking at a guy who has been insulted and yelled at for doing nothing, who has only shown concern and kindness, and who exists around a framework of his established partner killing a fairy. If Jakoby is a Cat, then what I’m being taught to worry about by what the film is presenting is that Ward is going to try take him down. Because maybe tomorrow, Orc Lives Don’t Matter.

I’m being taught by the first 9 minutes that Ward is, at best, a potential villain. But that the story is going to be from his point of view. And it’s just not a great look. And I would suspect that’s a lot of what people were responding to when this movie first hit: that it is setting up a very unpleasant story line that usually doesn’t play out in the type of story that it is.

So, no matter how it works out in Bright, which I am probably now returning to, when it comes time for you to work with your own story, be aware of the messages you’re sending and what story arcs you’re selling. Cats as an abstract concept, no matter what they are, exist whether you love or hate Blake Snyder. They existed long before he coined the name. At an even deeper level it’s simply that your character’s actions and events in a story naturally carry a “moral” weight. We, as an audience, expect what your characters do to be representative of who they are, for good and ill. Where what they do conflicts with who they are, we’ll expect an explanation and a counterbalance. So be wary of doing something else. Sending the wrong message with the wrong set up can drive away audiences who would be perfectly content with your story without the conflicting information.

#writing #creative writing #writeblr #Bright #racism #movie

3 notes · View notes

3smuth · 5 years

Text

To the Champions of Kamigawa

Not too long ago, Blogatog slipped back into a familiar discussion about Kamigawa and its popularity – more specifically, the lack thereof. In the process, a lot of old arguments arose about the set’s power level, about its proximity to Mirrodin, and the state of Standard at the time it was released. And as true as all of those things are, MaRo has made clear that when he refers to the popularity of Kamigawa as a setting, there are several axes on which they grade a set, and that Kamigawa was unpopular in all of them. And yet, people continue to claim that the creative, the setting, the world of Kamigawa just wasn’t given a fair shake. The fact is, that’s just not true.

Now to be completely clear, I personally liked Kamigawa block. At the time I was no good at evaluating the power level of cards so that hardly mattered to me, and many of the elements of the block seemed cool, different, and just ~weird~ enough to catch my attention. But the thing that’s important to understand is that “weird” is – almost by definition – not popular. There is a certain amount of weirdness, of newness, of difference that players expect and even demand from every set, but every degree of just weirdness you put into your work beyond that actually just makes the finished product more inaccessible to a general audience. When you play up weird for weird’s sake, you just make it hard for people to connect with it.

Kamigawa turned ~weird~ up to 11. I think a lot of the champions of Kamigawa underestimate just how off-putting the setting really was for an average consumer. So I thought it might be useful to go through piece-by-piece and try to evaluate how much weirdness there really was in the set, and how much of that weirdness was going needlessly beyond what the average player demanded.

Kami - We might as well start with the elephant in the room – or perhaps the unrecognisably surreal mass of tusks and trunks that would be the Kami of the Elephant in the Room. The Kami introduced more weirdness into the set than every other element combined, and this was actually by design: they were fully intended to seem otherworldly, that was how they were selling the premise of the plane. The problem here is not with that intent, but with the execution: the Kami were not only very, very weird, they took up so much of the set that they would have pushed the set over its weirdness quota entirely on their own. Nearly half of all the creature cards on Kamigawa were Spirits, and the art for nearly every one of them looks like it was contrived by Salvador Dali – while this is a cool effect individually, forcing players to try and wrap their brains around this several times in every pack they open is just way too taxing. Again, even with none of the other things on this list, the Kami (as they were executed the first time around) likely would’ve turned off enough players to make Kamigawa a middling set. But, of course, they didn’t stop there.

Characteristic Races - While the Kami were designed to feel alien and otherworldly, the other side of the conflict was intended to feel material, corporeal - to feel familiar. Additionally, it had the responsibility of communicating the theme of the set, delivering on tropes that would allow players to recognise the setting as inspired by Japan. This overloading of responsibilities - serving as both the familiar contrast to the surreal Kami, but also as the unfamiliar contrast to a normal Magic setting - would've been a difficult task for any setting, but let's consider how well it was delivered upon here.

Kitsune - I’d consider the Kitsune a 'success', insofar as foxes are something the average person might actually be able to see a connection to Japan in. The problem with the execution here is that while the typeline clearly claimed these creatures were foxes, the creatures themselves were designed around a stylised representation of foxes used in traditional masks – a very specific element of the culture that the average person wouldn’t be able to connect. Red elements on actual anthropomorphized foxes would’ve been cool; having some of the Kitsune wear actual masks would’ve been cool; but taking away nearly all the identifiable features of foxes for the sake of a reference most players were never going to get? Needlessly - and unsuccessfully - weird.

Soratami - Whereas the Kitsune were something some portion of the audience would find resonant with Japan that was simply executed in a way that made them inaccessible, the Soratami were inaccessible from the ground up. The association of rabbits with the moon is much less well-known, and the Soratami are even more ambiguously rabbits than the Kitsune are foxes – the typeline isn’t even used to inform it. That said, the idea of Moonfolk is actually cool enough that I think this would have been a successful application of weirdness in isolation, but in practice it just became one more inaccessible reference that most players couldn’t follow.

Nezumi - An outlier on the plane, the Nezumi actually succeed – amazingly enough – in looking like what they are. The biggest issue here is that there’s no particular resonance between rats and Japan for most of the audience, but offbeat anthro races are something they still do from time to time, and I can’t lodge a specific complaint about it here. Probably not coincidentally, the Nezumi were my favourite characteristic race on Kamigawa.

Akki - Many planes have Goblins, and apparently Kamigawa is no exception. The goblins of Kamigawa look relatively little like traditional Goblins, instead drawing on folk stories of the kappa and adopting shells. This is doubly weird: most players aren’t going to know anything about the kappa, and those that do are going to know them as amphibious, river-dwelling monsters, not analogs to Magic’s Goblins. Now personally, I quite like when they change up the look of familiar characteristic races to show the differences between planes – Tarkir and Ixalan did so pretty successfully – so I’m not highly inclined to complain about the Akki, but I can’t help but feel it’s a little forced when the change doesn’t even make sense to those familiar with the source.

Ogres - These aren’t technically a characteristic race, but they show up in enough numbers that they’re worth mentioning. Interestingly, the oni tropes that Kamigawa’s ogres play into actually line up reasonably well with traditional ogres, so they don’t actually seem particularly weird. I actually think the Ogre/Demon execution on oni was pretty successful, with most of those cards being understandable even to those who aren’t familiar with the source material, yet still unfamiliar enough to communicate that we aren't in Kansas anymore. Again, one of my favourite aspects of the original block.

Orochi - The Orochi, however, somehow manage to do everything wrong at once. They fail to look like the snakes they claim to be, trading in snakes’ single most identifiable feature (all tail with no limbs) for the literal opposite of that (six (!!) limbs with no tail), but even if they did look like snakes, nobody particularly associates Japan with snakes anyway. I honestly can’t even figure out what they were trying to do with these, but whatever it was I can't say that they succeeded at it.

Humans: Given the strangeness of the other races, the bulk of the responsibility for familiarity fell upon the humans of Kamigawa - and in a sense, they achieved that: the Samurai felt like Samurai, and the Ninjas felt like Ninjas. But bear in mind that these things would themselves be the ~weird~ elements of any other set. These things on their own would have met much of the demand for new and different that most players had, but instead of serving that role they were forced to provide comfort and familiarity – a role they weren’t particularly well-suited for, and actively prevented them from capitalising on how cool and different they were. When the most familiar part of the set isn’t actually fundamentally familiar, it makes the entire set feel inaccessible, which is exactly the effect that Kamigawa had on so many players.

Other denizens: In the entire block, there are exactly three creature cards that are not one of the types listed above: one hound, one insect, and one beast. What this meant, more than anything, is that there was no real refuge for players who weren’t into what the block was doing. If a player who loves Green creatures found the Kami too surreal, and the Orochi too confusing, and just didn’t particularly resonate with the monks of Jukai, there was next to nothing for them in the entire block. One card in the last set, and even that is more than Red, Blue, or Black got. Modern Magic sets make sure to have individual cards that are individually appealing, so that when players don’t buy into the set as a whole, there is at least something there to catch them. And this was probably Kamigawa’s biggest failing overall: not only did it force players to ante up to a lot of weirdness, but when they weren’t willing to buy in it sent a clear message that they weren't welcome. If you really want to understand why so many players felt like Kamigawa wasn’t for them, it’s because the set told them it wasn’t. They just listened.

Now, there are lots of things they could have done better. A lower density of Spirits, and toning down some of the more surreal aspects, especially in the common ones: a tangled mass of human limbs with multiple faces and floating, disembodied eyes can certainly be a thing that exists in the world, but does it need to exist in every pack? More resonant and relatable characteristic races would help: make foxfolk enjoyable for people who just think foxes are cute, or introduce a characteristic Green race that doesn’t make you wonder how someone forgot the name for a snake with legs is “lizard”. They could have thrown in more random Japanese tropes, rather than tying every element of the set so tightly together that nothing else fit: it looks like they came accidentally close to including a Boar-Deer-Butterfly trio in Saviors, but loosening up the themes could have allowed for much more of that. There are lots of things they could have done, but didn’t – and the world they would’ve ended up with if they had would be different enough from the Kamigawa we got as to be largely unrecognisable.

And that becomes the fundamental question going forward: is there a way to completely rework the 90% of the setting that didn’t go over well without it feeling like something fundamentally different? And if 90% of the setting needs reworked anyway, should we really bother constricting ourselves to the 10% that was decent? I won't pretend Kamigawa didn't have successes (the Spirit Dragons, for example, are still quite popular to this day) but whether revisiting those successes warrants the limitations that a return would demand is a question that has to be approached very critically. And it's a question that many of Kamigawa's champions may not like the answer to.

[NOTE: I actually wrote up this post about a week ago, and I resolved that I'd simply post it whenever the topic cropped up again. Mark answered a question about Snakes that led to a small discussion about the Orochi in the comments, and I figured that was cause enough for me. Enjoy!]

#magic #mtg #kamigawa #blogatog

30 notes · View notes

mentalwise · 5 years

Text

Orthorexia - Infos

Orthorexia: If Healthy Eating Masks an Eating Disorder

Why healthy eating can mask an eating disorder

One of my readers asked me to write an article about Orthorexia. So I'm starting the new year with my maybe most important text, yet.

Orthorexia, when healthy eating turns into an eating disorder.

It might be a little bit frightening to find out what could happen if you go too far with what´s supposed to be healthy.

Before I go into the topic, I would like to point out that this is not going to be an anti-healthy eating article! “Healthy” eating and an attentive, mindful lifestyle are crucial. I am against antibiotics in animal feasts, and eating fast food every day is definitely not beneficial for our health. It is not a good idea to “indulge” the media instead of actively living your life. Eat balanced, get all nutrients your body and soul need, but: food is food; it´s for nourishing your bodies, not for coping issues. Healthy eating is not only about what we choose to eat. It is also how we think about nutrition and our bodies. An unrestricted attitude towards food means finding a balance that satisfies our physical and emotional needs.

Unrestricted eating means eating consciously and yet, let food be just food.

Those who feel the need to constantly check their intake, because it might contain something that is supposedly "harmful," those who react with unpleasant emotions, fear, evasive reactions, feelings of guilt and with the urge to compensate as soon as something does not comply with the self-imposed rules, should be alert. Then something goes wrong!

Orthorexia nervosa has only been known since 1997. The physician Dr. Steven Bratman, who according to his own words, suffered from this disorder, coined this term. Orthorexic behavior can be the beginning of an eating disorder career. This article is intended to raise awareness of this disorder and is, therefore, important prevention.

🔗 Orthorexia and anorexia have something in common.

The biological reactions, which we can´t control, can also lead to binge eating or bulimia. Orthorexia comes in any sex, size, and age. Children show orthorexic traits as they are forced into their orthorexic parent´s patterns.

The onset of orthorexia is apparently harmless and almost always goes unnoticed. However, the course of the disease steadily worsens and often leads to a long period of physical and psychological suffering.

In our western world, food is always available and we are bombarded with all the different messages about what and what not we should do or eat.

The worst, most harmful and, above all, most false of all proclamations is that we can no longer trust our bodies!

In fact, it's not our bodies that are failing. It is our thoughts and emotions that cause us to subordinate our intuition and knowledge to false beliefs, to messages that manipulate our brains, and hit our biggest fears.

What should nourish our bodies and our souls becomes one of the most significant stress factors, hidden and unnoticed under the mask of an apparently healthy lifestyle.

People with orthorexia always strive for the perfect diet, the absolute way of living, which is controllable and thus defeats all fears and inadequacies. Orthorexia does not focus on appearance or weight, although weight loss and malnutrition are common consequences. The primary goal is to cleanse and keep the self and the body pure.

"Food, no matter how pure, cannot fill the space in your soul that longs for love and spiritual experience. If you are trying to use it for this purpose, you may have gone astray on your journey." S. Bratman

In fact, it is about control. A need for control that attaches itself to food. Later, it usually comes to excessive exercising and other compulsive behaviors. Good is never good enough.

Control leads to obsession, and obsession is cumulative: a little less fat becomes no fat. A little less sugar becomes no sugar. Less coffee becomes no coffee, fewer carbohydrates become no carbohydrates, and eating less from time to time, becomes several days of water fasting.

Exercising a little bit more turns into an obsession with sports, and a healthy lifestyle turns into orthorexia. Obsession with food becomes a masked identity.

These patterns influence not only the lives of those affected, but often also those of their fellow human beings. In contrast to anorexia and other eating disorders, Orthorexia is not a hidden illness. Those affected feel the urge to carry their convictions into the world. All those who do not comply with them get instructed, corrected, and, worst case, excluded. Anyone who does not follow their instructions is perceived as a threat. In the end, they are only around people who live according to the same rigid rules. This is why orthorexia is well camouflaged in groups. Everybody or no one. All or nothing. People in these groups convince each other that symptoms have different reasons than their diet. They prevent each other from leaving this path by addressing the fundamental fear that promotes this disease: Not being good enough. This is why even those who already show apparent symptoms do not notice that something is going incredibly wrong. This makes diagnosis difficult and a cure inaccessible for many.

What people with eating disorders have in common is that they don´t recognize that what they are doing is hurting them. Eating disorders are not logical. They are not accessible to reasonable arguments. So it is, therefore, all the more important that we not only keep an attentive eye on our own thoughts and actions but also on those of our fellow human beings.

How can orthorexia be recognized?

The eating habits of people with orthorexia are beyond reasonable and balanced.

Whole food groups are avoided. Nothing is eaten that is produced in a certain way. There is an official or unofficial list of foods that must not be ingested. All members of the family must adhere to this dogma. The more the disease progresses, the more the food choices are being limited.

Other habits

For example, food may only be prepared in a certain way with certain spices. Eat only warm food. Or it may no longer be eaten in the evening. There must be no more frying. It must not be eaten before noon or only once a day... etc.

Exercising

Exercising moderately slowly becomes an obsession with sport. They must work out a certain number of hours. They have to run x km, stopping before reaching their goals is perceived as a failure. The must workout every on Monday or every day. Even rain, cold, pain, and fatigue are no longer considered reasons to literally slow down.

Other compulsions

Any kind of compulsive behavior can follow orthorexia.

Constantly thinking about nutrition

Orthorexics are occupied with their diet, always looking for the perfect solution. They keep counting micro- and macronutrients until the brain becomes a nutrition table and the subject dominates every conversation.

Fear of eating food prepared by others.

If people with orthorexia can´t control the ingredients of their food, they avoid eating, or they feel guilty or afraid of being poisoned or damaged if avoidance is not possible. They are compensating with for example 🔗cleansing. It gives them the feeling to regain control. Fasting before an event or a meal that is not prepared like they need it to be ready is also quite common.

Criticizing others for their diet and lifestyle

As said, people with orthorexia consider their rules to be generally valid and expect their environment to fit in. Orthorexic people not only control their own intake, but they also try to control their fellow human beings. The others should confirm the correctness of their behavior by doing the same. If they refuse to obey, they are shunned.

Other physical and psychological symptoms:

Frequent or intensified headaches/migraines, brain fog, concentration problems

🔗 The brain needs carbohydrates because it can live almost exclusively on them. Our neuronal functions depend on a stable glucose level. Our brain needs 60% of the body's blood sugar to maintain its functions. If it can´t keep this level because of malnutrition, it first empties the stores in the liver, but they are also limited. Muscle substance is then broken down and at last, the fat stores.

When this happens, the liver converts the body fat into so-called ketones. It is not yet clear what ketones do in the long term in the brain and body. We know from studies with anorexia patients that a brain in a state of hunger, i.e. in ketosis, loses a massive amount of its functionality.

Unfortunately, the 🔗ketogenic diet is very popular. In fact, this is pseudo-science. There are only a few medical reasons for a massive reduction of Carbs.

Mood swings and depressions

Too little intake of carbs has a negative influence on serotonin, a hormone we need for our mood regulation. Depression might be a side effect of not eating enough carbs.

Hypersomnia

The body needs carbohydrates to produce tryptophan. We need this substance for healthy sleep; otherwise, we feel tired during the day, we don´t have any energy and we are in a bad mood. Sleeping saves energy, so our brain sends us into 🔗 hibernation.

Low energy level

We need all the nutrients we can get to keep our body functioning, even when we do nothing at all. The more we move (or think 😉), the more nutrients we need. Protein, carbohydrates, and fats are essential to store and deliver energy if required.

Isolation

Those who are afraid of other peoples food avoid social interactions, because they are often associated with food. Some orthorexic patients only meet with their peers, which reinforces the feeling of doing everything right and fixates the disease. The can feel a massive fear of being excluded from the group.

Bad breath

Bad breath occurs when the liver breaks down fat cells, i.e. when the carbohydrate intake is too low. The breath then smells like acetone.

Digestive problems (diarrhea, constipation or both)

Too much raw food, too many grains, too many seeds (chia and co.) is usually not easy to handle for the gut, and the biome needs carbs.

Irregular or painful menstrual cycle or no cycle at all/ erectile dysfunction in men

A sufficient supply of fat and carbohydrates is necessary to ensure and stabilize hormone pro-duction (sex hormones and others) in both men and women.

Weight loss

This is the highest risk that orthorexia turns into anorexia. At any age and for any sex! Affected people often eat large quantities of food and still stay thin. This is because what they eat usually has a very low energy density, i.e., few calories. In fact, they typically eat far less than they need, or they fast regularly to make up for their "nutritional sins." In case of genetic predisposition, this behavior plus malnutrition could cause anorexia.

Cravings and binge eating as a biological response

Our body is always striving to maintain its balance. We get cravings and eat huge amounts of our forbidden food. If we compensate (fasting with intestinal cleansing, vomiting or excessive exercise), this can lead to bulimia or anorexia of the binge/purge type. This is often the onset of the binge-purge-cycle. The metabolism turns down from restriction, weight gain is the result. This is another reason to fast or restrict.

Reduced bone density, even at a normal weight, even in men.

If carbohydrates are not available, the body extracts calcium from the bones to fight acidosis. Fatigue fractures are often the first signs

Muscle pain and tendon injuries

Muscles need protein and carbohydrates for proper functioning.

They break down when they are deficient in nutrients, injuries no longer heal and tendons can tear especially if doing sports in a malnourished body (=RED-S relative energy deficit in sports.)

(Pseudo)food intolerances

🔗"When food intolerances appear and the patient has an eating disorder, then the primary reason for failing to tolerate these foods will be too little energy within the body available to produce adequate amounts of digestive enzymes.

The more you cut out, the less you can digest properly. The less you can digest properly, the more you cut out. It's a vicious cycle that keeps orthorexia alive. Pseudo intolerances can always heal, but it is a long and painful process that requires consistency.

🔗Carbs, 🔗Protein and 🔗Fat are essential.

I´ve just told you a lot about carbs.

Protein another macronutrient is necessary for the production of enzymes, it s needed for the healing-, growing- and functioning processes of all organs and all body tissues and for the supply of energy when carbohydrates are not available.

Fats provide energy, protects our organs, maintains constant body temperature, helps with hormone production and cell growth. It keeps the insulin metabolism stable and makes some of the vitamins available for the organism.

In addition to macronutrients, micronutrients, i.e. vitamins and trace elements, are also vital for our organism in certain quantities and compositions. We cannot really do without any food component without causing long-term damage to our bodies, as even the most effective compensation possibilities are limited! Depending on the nutritional status and stage, the same problems occur with orthorexia as with all other restrictive eating disorders, sometimes even more so, as they go unnoticed for too long or are classified as a "fluff" by those affected, because: Neither shall it be.

Who is mainly at risk for orthorexia?

Orthorexia has not yet been sufficiently researched. However, it seems that genetics plays a rather subordinate role here. Orthorexia is mainly about false beliefs and compulsive behavior.

Obsessive self-control, self-observation, and self-optimization are the main goal.

The behavior that leads to orthorexia often occurs immediately after a stressful, frightening event that gives the feeling of no longer being able to make decisions. Illnesses, separations, loss of a job, the death or serious illness of a relative are massive triggers. Certain sports, such as bodybuilding, ballet or martial arts, which require special dietary habits, are considered to be the starting point for this disease. Even people who are professionally concerned with health and nutrition and the consequences of a less than optimal lifestyle are in some ways more at risk than the average.

Personality traits, that promote this eating disorder:

Perfectionist people who do not allow themselves to make mistakes are particularly at risk

People with low self-esteem, low self-esteem, and negative self-image

People who are very determined

People who set no limits, not even to themselves

People who tend to exaggerate

People who are prone to compulsive behavior

Anxious personalities

And highly sensitive people who think a lot about life, themselves and their fellow human beings.

Orthorexia, like other eating disorders, is also a bio-psycho-social disease.

Conclusion:

IMPORTANT:

Life circumstances, physical reactions, and personality traits interact in a way that triggers and sustains this disease. Not everyone who maintains healthy nutrition and a mindful lifestyle is at risk. Not all vegans have orthorexia, and even fasting from time to time is not necessarily harmful if the thought behind it, the intention, is not about compensations.

If you find yourself in these descriptions, whether in most of the symptoms or just in tendencies, see the red flag and/or get help if you can't do it alone.

Eating disorders are treatable and they are nothing to be ashamed of. Not even if you are a man, or adult, or working in a profession where such a problem could almost be a violation of honor.

Turn to someone you trust and who is not in these pseudo-healthy patterns. This can be your best friend, or your partner, if not affected him/herself. If you don't want to open up to your loved ones, go to a doctor, or psychologist/psychotherapist specialized in eating disorders. Don't wait until the illness is stronger than you are.

If you know someone who is behaving as if he or she could have orthorexia, talk to them carefully and offer your help. Don't be discouraged if the person denies his problems. The most important thing is that these people know that they are not alone. Keep in mind that orthorexia is often seen in groups and family structures. To break free then takes even more courage and willpower. They will come if they are ready, even if it might take some time!

I put some links to sites of eating disorder coaches below the text. Unfortunately, I don´t have addresses from German ED Coaches but if you know someone, please contact me. Whenever you need my advice or support, feel free to email me😉Life is for living, not for counting nutrients.

🔗Links:Video:

Kayla's Story

Steve Bratman

Orthorexia Self Test. The information on his site has not been updated since 2017.

Elisa, Recovery Coach

She was herself affected by orthorexia and other eating disorders. She does online coaching and puts many videos on YouTube. She is a very nice, affectionate and non-judgmental person you can trust in any case.

Kayla Rose is my favorite for everything about and around eating disorders

At Seven Health you will find excellent advice and podcasts (real health radio) on all topics of eating behavior and nutrition. Coaching is also available.

Becky Freestone, Co-founder of the Triple- R- Recovery- Center, Info, YouTube and Coaching

#orthorexia Orthorexie eating disorder recovery ED Anorexie AN ANA informations about eating disorders what causes eating disorders

3 notes · View notes

hydrus · 6 years

Text

Version 324

youtube

windows

zip

exe

os x

app

tar.gz

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. The downloader overhaul is almost done.

pixiv

Just as Pixiv recently moved their art pages to a new phone-friendly, dynamically drawn format, they are now moving their regular artist gallery results to the same system. If your username isn't switched over yet, it likely will be in the coming week.

The change breaks our old html parser, so I have written a new downloader and json api parser. The way their internal api works is unusual and over-complicated, so I had to write a couple of small new tools to get it to work. However, it does seem to work again.

All of your subscriptions and downloaders will try to switch over to the new downloader automatically, but some might not handle it quite right, in which case you will have to go into edit subscriptions and update their gallery manually. You'll get a popup on updating to remind you of this, and if any don't line up right automatically, the subs will notify you when they next run. The api gives all content--illustrations, manga, ugoira, everything--so there unfortunately isn't a simple way to refine to just one content type as we previously could. But it does neatly deliver everything in just one request, so artist searching is now incredibly faster.

Let me know if pixiv gives any more trouble. Now we can parse their json, we might be able to reintroduce the arbitrary tag search, which broke some time ago due to the same move to javascript galleries.

twitter

In a similar theme, given our fully developed parser and pipeline, I have now wangled a twitter username search! It should be added to your downloader list on update. It is a bit hacky and may be ultimately fragile if they change something their end, but it otherwise works great. It discounts retweets and fetches 19/20 tweets per gallery 'page' fetch. You should be able to set up subscriptions and everything, although I generally recommend you go at it slowly until we know this new parser works well. BTW: I think twitter only 'browses' 3200 tweets in the past, anyway. Note that tweets with no images will be 'ignored', so any typical twitter search will end up with a lot of 'Ig' results--this is normal. Also, if the account ever retweets more than 20 times in a row, the search will stop there, due to how the clientside pipeline works (it'll think that page is empty).

Again, let me know how this works for you. This is some fun new stuff for hydrus, and I am interested to see where it does well and badly.

misc

In order to be less annoying, the 'do you want to run idle jobs?' on shutdown dialog will now only ask at most once per day! You can edit the time unit under options->maintenance and processing.

Under options->connection, you can now change max total network jobs globally and per domain. The defaults are 15 and 3. I don't recommend you increase them unless you know what you are doing, but if you want a slower/more cautious client, please do set them lower.

The new advanced downloader ui has a bunch of quality of life improvements, mostly related to the handling of example parseable data.

full list

downloaders:

after adding some small new parser tools, wrote a new pixiv downloader that should work with their new dynamic gallery's api. it fetches all an artist's work in one page. some existing pixiv download components will be renamed and detached from your existing subs and downloaders. your existing subs may switch over to the correct pixiv downloader automatically, or you may need to manually set them (you'll get a popup to remind you).

wrote a twitter username lookup downloader. it should skip retweets. it is a bit hacky, so it may collapse if they change something small with their internal javascript api. it fetches 19-20 tweets per 'page', so if the account has 20 rts in a row, it'll likely stop searching there. also, afaik, twitter browsing only works back 3200 tweets or so. I recommend proceeding slowly.

added a simple gelbooru 0.1.11 file page parser to the defaults. it won't link to anything by default, but it is there if you want to put together some booru.org stuff

you can now set your default/favourite download source under options->downloading

misc:

the 'do idle work on shutdown' system will now only ask/run once per x time units (including if you say no to the ask dialog). x is one day by default, but can be set in 'maintenance and processing'

added 'max jobs' and 'max jobs per domain' to options->connection. defaults remain 15 and 3

the colour selection buttons across the program now have a right-click menu to import/export #FF0000 hex codes from/to the clipboard

tag namespace colours and namespace rendering options are moved from 'colours' and 'tags' options pages to 'tag summaries', which is renamed to 'tag presentation'

the Lain import dropper now supports pngs with single gugs, url classes, or parsers--not just fully packaged downloaders

fixed an issue where trying to remove a selection of files from the duplicate system (through the advanced duplicates menu) would only apply to the first pair of files

improved some error reporting related to too-long filenames on import

improved error handling for the folder-scanning stage in import folders--now, when it runs into an error, it will preserve its details better, notify the user better, and safely auto-pause the import folder

png export auto-filenames will now be sanitized of \, /, :, *-type OS-path-invalid characters as appropriate as the dialog loads

the 'loading subs' popup message should appear more reliably (after 1s delay) if the first subs are big and loading slow

fixed the 'fullscreen switch' hover window button for the duplicate filter

deleted some old hydrus session management code and db table

some other things that I lost track of. I think it was mostly some little dialog fixes :/

advanced downloader stuff:

the test panel on pageparser edit panels now has a 'post pre-parsing conversion' notebook page that shows the given example data after the pre-parsing conversion has occurred, including error information if it failed. it has a summary size/guessed type description and copy and refresh buttons.

the 'raw data' copy/fetch/paste buttons and description are moved down to the raw data page

the pageparser now passes up this post-conversion example data to sub-objects, so they now start with the correctly converted example data

the subsidiarypageparser edit panel now also has a notebook page, also with brief description and copy/refresh buttons, that summarises the raw separated data

the subsidiary page parser now passes up the first post to its sub-objects, so they now start with a single post's example data

content parsers can now sort the strings their formulae get back. you can sort strict lexicographic or the new human-friendly sort that does numbers properly, and of course you can go ascending or descending--if you can get the ids of what you want but they are in the wrong order, you can now easily fix it!

some json dict parsing code now iterates through dict keys lexicographically ascending by default. unfortunately, due to how the python json parser I use works, there isn't a way to process dict items in the original order

the json parsing formula now uses a string match when searching for dictionary keys, so you can now match multiple keys here (as in the pixiv illusts|manga fix). existing dictionary key look-ups will be converted to 'fixed' string matches

the json parsing formula can now get the content type 'dictionary keys', which will fetch all the text keys in the dictionary/Object, if the api designer happens to have put useful data in there, wew

formulae now remove newlines from their parsed texts before they are sent to the StringMatch! so, if you are grabbing some multi-line html and want to test for 'Posted: ' somewhere in that mess, it is now easy.

next week

After slaughtering my downloader overhaul megajob of redundant and completed issues (bringing my total todo from 1568 down to 1471!), I only have 15 jobs left to go. It is mostly some quality of life stuff and refreshing some out of date help. I should be able to clear most of them out next week, and the last few can be folded into normal work.

So I am now planning the login manager. After talking with several users over the past few weeks, I think it will be fundamentally very simple, supporting any basic user/pass web form, and will relegate complicated situations to some kind of improved browser cookies.txt import workflow. I suspect it will take 3-4 weeks to hash out, and then I will be taking four weeks to update to python 3, and then I am a free agent again. So, absent any big problems, please expect the 'next big thing to work on poll' to go up around the end of October, and for me to get going on that next big thing at the end of November. I don't want to finalise what goes on the poll yet, but I'll open up a full discussion as the login manager finishes.

#release

1 note · View note

orbemnews · 4 years

Link

Was the Diana scandal a bigger crisis for the monarchy than Meghan and Harry's interview? Harry told Oprah: “What I was seeing was history repeating itself, but more, perhaps — or definitely far more dangerous, because then you add race in.” For Meghan, the feelings of loneliness and isolation that drove her to suicidal thoughts were only compounded when, in her last months of pregnancy, she was told their newborn would not be given a title. Being a prince or princess was of little consequence to couple — except that that withholding a title meant their child wouldn’t have the security that comes with it. “It’s like, okay, well, he needs to be safe,” Meghan explained. “But if you’re saying the title is what’s going to affect their protection, we haven’t created this monster machine around us in terms of clickbait and tabloid fodder. You’ve allowed that to happen, which means our son needs to be safe.” Meghan then disclosed that there had been “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.” Visibly shocked, Oprah pressed the Duchess, who explained Harry had several conversations with unnamed royals. “It was really hard to be able to see those as compartmentalized conversations,” Meghan continued. When asked by Oprah if the concern was that “if he were too brown that would be a problem,” Meghan said she wasn’t “able to follow up with why.” “But that — if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one, which was really hard to understand,” she added. Harry refused to elaborate on the specifics of the conversation later during the interview and only added that “at the time, it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.” The Duke did offer that it wasn’t the first time the subject had been raised; in fact, it had been broached “right at the beginning.” “There were some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard,” Harry added. CNN has reached out for comment from the palace but had not heard back by the time of publishing. However, any statement will be viewed by many as a response to the charge of institutional racism. Then there’s the claim the monarchy failed in its duty of care for Meghan when she had “very clear and very scary” thoughts of suicide. Meghan says she tried and failed to appeal to a senior staff member and the palace’s human resources department, but wasn’t offered any support. “I went to the institution, and I said that I needed to go somewhere to get help. I said that ‘I’ve never felt this way before, and I need to go somewhere.’ And I was told that I couldn’t — that it wouldn’t be good for the institution,” the Duchess revealed. It was only after they were married that Meghan truly appreciated what she had taken on. “Not only was I not being protected but that they were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband,” she said. Meghan used a story that leaked many months after her wedding as an example. The report claimed Meghan had made Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, cry during a dress fitting for the flower girls but the Duchess of Sussex said it was actually the other way around. “The narrative about, you know, making Kate cry, I think was the beginning of a real character assassination,” she said. “And they knew it wasn’t true. And I thought, well, if they’re not going to kill things like that, then what are we going to do?” Meghan said it was a stressful time and opted not to elaborate further as Kate had apologized and all was forgiven between them but “what was hard to get over was being blamed for something that not only I didn’t do.” The tete-a-tete with Oprah was billed, in the weeks leading up to it, as a bombshell broadcast and it did not fail to deliver. When compared to Diana’s interview, it will easily go down in history as being as (if not more) disruptive, given the shocking revelations around race and the prevalence of social media today. For many Black and mixed-race people both in Britain and around the world, Harry’s choice in life partner really held meaning. For some, the fact that a biracial woman was marrying into the royal family was something they never imagined, and it made the family more relevant. To now discover that the perceived optics surrounding the color of their future children’s skin was being considered will horrify people. The question now is: How will the palace respond? And, more importantly, will it take any action on the accusations of racism leveled at it? It’s already faced questions about its relevance, it must now rebuild trust and show that it can hold itself to higher standards. The royal family was able to survive the Diana scandal because it restored the public’s faith in the institution — aided by the world’s interest in her two sons, William and Harry, and the women they married. What “The Firm” does next, in response to this profound interview, and the revelations in it, will determine if it can long-term overcome the damage sustained from losing Harry and Meghan — two of its most loved senior royals — from its ranks. The duty of any monarchy is to represent all its subjects but some people will feel today that it no longer applies to them. NEWS OF THE WEEK A Commonwealth Day coincidence It was business as usual for the Queen on Sunday — despite the looming Harry-Meghan interview — as she and other members of the royal family united for Commonwealth Day. Elizabeth paid tribute to communities across 54 countries — commending them for coming together in response to the pandemic. “Whilst experiences of the last year have been different across the Commonwealth, stirring examples of courage, commitment and selfless dedication to duty have been demonstrated in every Commonwealth nation and territory, notably by those working on the frontline who have been delivering healthcare and other public services in their communities,” the Queen said in a pre-recorded address from Windsor Castle. The day is usually celebrated with a service at London’s Westminster Abbey. This year’s event was canceled due to Covid-19 and replaced with special celebratory programming on British TV. While it has struck some as odd that the commemorations and the Sussexes’ Oprah interview fell on the same day, the timing is purely a coincidence of TV scheduling, we’ve been told. However that won’t stop people from drawing comparisons. After all, last year’s Commonwealth service was the last engagement Harry and Meghan participated in before stepping back as senior royals. Much was made at the time of the apparently frosty reception Harry and Meghan received. And in 2018, the Commonwealth service was also the setting for Meghan’s first official engagement where the monarch was in attendance, a couple months before she tied the knot with Harry. Prince Philip on the mend? The Duke of Edinburgh was transferred back to King Edward VII’s Hospital last Friday following a “successful” procedure for a pre-existing heart condition at St Bartholomew’s Hospital earlier this week. This has been the longest hospital stint for the Queen’s 99-year-old husband to date. He was first admitted to King Edward’s on February 16 “after feeling unwell,” where it was later confirmed he was being treated for an infection. He was moved to St Bartholomew’s last Monday. While undoubtedly there has been much concern for Philip due to his advanced age, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall said his condition was “slightly improving” after his transfer, despite his treatment hurting “at moments,” according to PA Media. And as the Duke recovers from his operation, he was clearly in the thoughts of those in Buckingham Palace, which shared a family photo of the Queen and her husband smiling as they posed together in the library of Balmoral Castle in Scotland in 1976 to mark World Book Day. FROM THE ROYAL VAULT The royals have been the subject of countless movies, TV shows and documentaries but it’s their rare one-on-ones that are often the most revelatory. In 1995, Diana participated in an explosive interview for the BBC’s Panorama program. Prince Charles and Diana had separated three years prior and Charles had sensationally admitted to having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles after years of tabloid speculation in a documentary released in 1994. But it was Diana’s simple utterance “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” that turned her sit-down interview into of the most-watched moments in UK broadcasting history. More recently, the Panorama interview was back in the news after the BBC launched an internal inquiry amid allegations that journalist Martin Bashir had used dishonest practices to acquire the interview with the Princess of Wales. However on Thursday, British police announced they were not going to pursue any further criminal investigation into the claims after obtaining legal advice from their lawyers, independent counsel and from the Crown Prosecution service. A WORD FROM THE ROYALS “This pandemic has shown us the true nature of a global emergency. We have learnt that human health, economic health and planetary health are fundamentally interconnected and that pandemics, climate change and biodiversity loss are existential threats, which know no borders.” Prince Charles The Prince of Wales praised the response of the Commonwealth’s people during the pandemic and took the opportunity to highlight the crisis’ link to climate change. Standing alone for his pre-recorded message at Westminster Abbey, he was one of several senior royals who paid tribute to the Commonwealth over the weekend. What do you think about Harry and Meghan’s decision to speak to Oprah? Drop us an email on [email protected]. And let us know what you think about our trial run of the newsletter. Source link Orbem News #bigger #crisis #Diana #Harrys #interview #Meghan #Monarchy #Scandal

0 notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. It is the second in a multi-part series about working conditions at the USPS. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as exclusive articles and the paid zine.

This is Part II of a multi-part series looking at working conditions at the post office. If you missed Part I, click here.

For a brief period, it looked like the post office would finally be changing. On Valentine's Day in 1992, eight union leaders and USPS management signed the Joint Statement on Violence and Behavior in the Workplace (JSOV). Spurred by the Royal Oak shooting we covered last week, the one-page document was much more than the "thoughts and prayers" style platitudes we have since become accustomed to after a mass shooting. Instead, the JSOV declared that "grief and sympathy are not enough. Neither are ritualistic expressions of grave concern or the initiation of investigations, studies, or research projects."

The statement went on: "This is a time for a candid appraisal of our flaws and not a time for scapegoating, fingerpointing, or procrastination." It affirmed that "every employee at every level of the Postal Service should be treated at all times with dignity, respect, and fairness…'Making the numbers' is not an excuse for the abuse of anyone."

But among the missing signatories was the American Postal Workers Union, one of the biggest and most influential unions representing postal workers.

Years later, APWU Eastern Region Coordinator Mike Gallagher wrote a position paper to stewards about the continuous problem of workplace violence at the post office. He explained that his union chose not to sign because "quite frankly, we knew that the USPS would apply the principles of the Joint Statement against bargaining unit employees and not against managers." The APWU's position was this statement wouldn't change much, because the causes of workplace violence at the post office were fundamental to how it operated. Even a blanket zero-tolerance policy wouldn't change that.

Over the last few months, I have been interviewing postal workers about what it is like to work for the post office. They express a range of sentiments, from pride to gratitude to frustration and exhaustion. As I have said before, the post office is an impossibly vast and diverse organization that defies simplicity.

The most common sentiment I hear is postal workers are proud to work for the post office because it is inherently meaningful work. But they also wish it was a more humane place to work, that problems actually got fixed instead of ignored or passed along. Most of all, they wish the USPS was a place where being a good boss or being a good worker actually mattered. There is a maxim at the post office that doing your work well only gets you more work. It was a maxim 30 years ago, and it's still a maxim today.

I found the most revealing part of this reporting process came when I asked a few of the postal workers I interviewed what they thought of a 1994 Government Accountability Office study, its results succinctly summarized by the title: "U.S. Postal Service: Labor-Management Problems Persist on the Workroom Floor."

The seven postal workers from around the country who volunteered to read the study unanimously agreed the basic characterization of the postal service from 1994 is still accurate. It is an authoritarian, top-down organization in which policy is set by higher-ups who have often never done the work of sorting and delivering mail. The people actually doing the work—or even the people managing the people doing the work—have little to no say in how the work is done. There is a widespread perception that supervisors are not selected based on their management skills. As a result of the basic metrics and incentives upper management creates for both supervisors and workers, an "us vs. them" mentality between labor and management dominates daily routines.

To the question of "have things gotten better since the 'going postal' era?" I received a resounding "no."

"I cannot even begin to tell you how incredulous I was reading this," a 27-year-old mail handler at a processing and distribution facility in Oklahoma wrote in an email. "To know that my same daily complaints and laments were a problem back nearly as far as when I was born—and that they haven’t been resolved in the slightest!!—is so disheartening to me."

Another processing and distribution facility worker from the Pacific Northwest echoed similar sentiments. "That was 10 years before I started, and I have to say overall, No. It has not changed much."

Today's edition of The Mail is going to be about why so little has changed even after the rash of shootings that resulted in dozens of dead and wounded and permanently tarnished the post office's reputation. But it's important to acknowledge this is not just about the post office. Violence—both verbal and physical—in the American workplace was not a new phenomenon when Patrick Sherrill killed 14 coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986. The U.S. workplace too often treats workers as little more than extensions of the machines they operate, measuring success and failure by "hitting the numbers," callous to what that sort of treatment does to human minds and bodies. We often think of the post office as a quintessential American institution. Unfortunately, when it comes to how it treats its workers, it is.

In 1994, two different letter carriers filed grievances against supervisors who were allegedly harassing them. The cases were consolidated into one national-level arbitration hearing in 1996. The national-level arbitration was not about the specific harassment allegations, but whether the JSOV, by then four years old, was an enforceable agreement. In other words, could a carrier file a grievance against an abusive manager for violating the JSOV and have that supervisor disciplined, transferred, or even fired? Or was the JSOV just another empty promise from management?

The JSOV itself appears to be quite clear on this question. "Let there be no mistake," the statement concluded, "that we mean what we say and we will enforce our commitment to a workplace where dignity, respect, and fairness are basic human rights, and where those who do not respect those rights are not tolerated."

But by 1996, USPS management didn't see it that way. They argued the JSOV was merely a "pledge" and did not override its right to manage the workforce as they see fit. They said the JSOV was nothing more than an effort to "send a message to stop the violence."

Just as the APWU predicted, management was using the JSOV to punish rank-and-file employees for offenses like cursing at managers while simultaneously arguing the JSOV was nothing more than a toothless document when wielded against abusive supervisors.

The arbitrator sided with labor. "The Joint Statement marked a departure from the past and pointed the way to organizational change," the arbitrator found. "This was a document that evidenced an intent to take action rather than a mere statement of opinions and predictions."

It's difficult to objectively evaluate the JSOV's effectiveness in curbing workplace violence at the post office. But the broad consensus among postal workers and union stewards I've spoken to is the JSOV is better than nothing but hasn't done much in practice.

On the one hand, there is some evidence that working conditions at the USPS have gotten better. In 2000, there were 10,553 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints filed against the USPS by employees out of a workforce of 786,516, or a rate of 1.34 percent. By 2018, the latest year for which these statistics were available, there were just 4,081 complaints out of 633,641 workers, or a rate of .64 percent, less than half what it was in 2000. But factors besides working conditions at the USPS—such as the perceived worthiness of filing complaints with the EEOC—can also impact those rates.

Likewise, grievances that went to arbitration show some tentative signs of progress. Since 1996, when the JSOV became contractually enforceable, there have been 1,195 grievances involving the National Association of Letter Carriers with a JSOV-related complaint, or about 50 per year on average, according to a copy of the grievance database reviewed by Motherboard. Of those, 611 of the complaints were denied by an arbitrator, leaving 584 cases ruled at least in part a violation of the JSOV.

But, again, this data is not capturing the whole picture. These numbers are not the total JSOV-related grievances, just those that reached arbitration for this one union. And although the years with more grievances came prior to 2000—the most was 145 rulings in JSOV cases in 1997—this is probably because workers had this new avenue to file grievances they didn't previously have, so it captures events dating back several years and conflicts that have been stewing for a while. Rulings per year gradually declined until 2008 with a low 14, before rising again to about 35 per year in recent years.

Source: NALC arbitration database obtained by Motherboard

Moreover, some of the rulings detail that postal management continues to look the other way on problem supervisors, a key issue highlighted by the Congressional investigation into the Royal Oak shooting.

For example, in 2008, an arbitrator found a supervisor in Oakland, CA had "a history of cease and desist orders…at stations throughout the Bay-View Postal District." Management was aware of these previous violations of the JSOV and the history of worker complaints against this one supervisor, but management "failed to take appropriate action." The arbitrator said the supervisor's actions of calling his employees "muthafuckers" and "bitches" was "exactly the type of work place behavior that the JSOV was intended to prevent." The arbitrator ruled the supervisor could no longer be anyone's boss, but only in the Pacific Area region.

Sometimes, the arbitrators themselves do little more than shuffle off problem supervisors to other locations. In 2009, a supervisor in Gaithersburg, MD repeatedly threatened and harassed workers, which the arbitrator found to be "abusive behavior which holds open the potential for violence." Nevertheless, the arbitrator's ruling was to reassign the supervisor to another nearby post office and receive sensitivity training.

Also in 2009, a union steward and postal supervisor in Stockton, CA got into a physical altercation when, after an increasingly escalating shouting match, the steward accused the manager of sleeping with the postmaster in order to get her job. The manager then slapped the steward, who restrained the supervisor and left. Despite the police being called and a statement taken, the supervisor received only a written warning while the steward was suspended for 21 days without pay. The arbitrator discovered this was not the first time local management had looked the other way on complaints of this particular supervisor violating the JSOV.

And these are just a few of the examples that have been documented. More often, postal workers and union officials say, violence and harassment in the workplace goes unreported as an accepted part of the job. In 2018, NALC Branch 343's newsletter succinctly summarized just how little has changed since the "Going Postal" era:

It has been my experience that seasoned carriers often times will ignore or shrug off this type of behavior because they have been exposed to it for such a long time. This speaks volumes. Many of these carriers have seen worse and nothing happened.

Why is the post office such an enduring hotbed of workplace conflict? This is a question I've asked postal workers around the country over the past few months. And the most surprising element of reporting this story, at least to me, is there is absolutely no mystery about it. Everyone knows exactly why the post office is rife with workplace conflict. It's even right there in the JSOV: "making the numbers."

Until recently, Josh Sponsler was a letter carrier in Ohio. He decided to quit the post office despite being a "career" employee with solid pay, good benefits, and a decent pension waiting for him at the end of the road. But he quit because the mounting stress and tension in the workplace took a toll on his mental health. When I asked what it was about the workplace that made it so stressful, Sponsler brought up "the 96."

The 96, officially known as Form 3996, is the form carriers have to fill out if they expect they will have to work overtime to deliver the mail that day. In the morning, when carriers show up for work, they will look over the various types of mail they have to deliver: the pre-sorted mail, the magazines and other "flats," and the packages. If they think work that day will take longer than eight hours and therefore trigger overtime, they reach for the 96.

But supervisors also have their own opinion about how many hours each route should take. The machines that pre-sort the mail automatically generate statistics about how much mail is going to each route. Those stats are then sent to supervisors each morning. Then, supervisors literally measure each route's unsorted mail with a yardstick. After plugging that number into the same software, the computer generates a final estimate for how long the mail should take to deliver.

Often, Sponsler says, the carrier's estimate will be very different from the computer's. For one, neither the computer programs nor measuring mail by the yard captures the most important factors about how long it takes to deliver mail. For example, what's the weather like? Are there mailers going to every business along the route? Every residential address? Is there road construction along the route?

And the computer's estimate is based on the regular inspection every route gets, where a postal supervisor will literally time with a stopwatch every move the carrier makes to determine how long that route "should" take. This estimate then becomes the baseline for that carrier's route estimates until the next inspection is done. But, for various reasons, that inspection may not be representative of the route year-round.

These two estimates for how long the day's mail will take to deliver is, as Sponsler put it, "the first thing that would cause tension" every day.

The tension is heightened because these estimates, multiplied by the thousands upon thousands of mail routes around the country are, in many ways, the main metric for how the modern post office functions. Supervisors are not given budgets in terms of dollars but in terms of work-hours. The more hours carriers say they'll need to finish their routes, the harder it gets for supervisors to meet their work-hour budgets, which will get them in trouble with their bosses.

The same goes for supervisors overseeing workers who don't deliver mail, such as mail handlers and other workers in processing facilities. In fact, for them it can be even worse, because they never leave the facility and are therefore constantly watched by their bosses. Throughout the JSOV grievances reviewed by Motherboard, workers report supervisors timing their bathroom breaks with stopwatches, looming over them so the workers can "feel their presence" while they work, or filing official warnings if they're too slow on a machine by a matter of seconds.

When carriers, union stewards, and post office managers talk about "making the numbers," they're talking about these numbers, the work-hour budgets. And they're also talking about the increasingly unreasonable requirements postal management puts on supervisors and postal workers alike, bringing mail to more and more delivery points every year with fewer and fewer workers, relying more and more on overtime that management consistently wants to slash. Talking to postal workers, an analogy that often comes up is that working for the post office feels like working in a pressure cooker. Everyone is being squeezed.

Reaching for the 96 has become an increasingly common occurrence. In August, the USPS Inspector General reported on the agency's soaring overtime costs which it largely attributed to "staffing challenges." Because the post office has consistently cut the number of people it employs even as it delivers to more locations, it relies on overtime to deliver all the mail every day. But, in many ways, keeping employees from filing their 96's is the most important thing a supervisor does from USPS management's perspective, because it saves the post office money.

Source: USPS OIG

There are, of course, good ways and bad ways for managers to handle this dynamic. Most postal workers I've spoken to said they've had at least one good boss who was reasonable and treated workers with respect. But, they are the exception, not the rule, because doing so requires actively ignoring or competing with the incentives put forward by their bosses.

For the not so great bosses, they have every incentive to bully workers that take longer to do the job, have routes with the greatest discrepancy between the computerized stats and the carrier's own work pace, or, as is all too often the case, just pick on someone they don't like for whatever reason. And they often do it under the guise of achieving operational efficiency, of hitting the numbers.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, this conflict by design can easily devolve into being about anything other than delivering mail. Mail carriers get frustrated and feel like they're being gaslit into doing a job that cannot be done. They get frustrated being told to do a job in a way they think will be slower while also being told to work faster. Their bosses think they're a liar for saying the work can't be done in eight hours. Supervisors tag carriers who they perceive as constantly asking for unjustified overtime as problem workers who need discipline.

This dynamic was represented in an extreme but not anomalous way in the Gaithersburg case. The supervisor testified to the arbitrator on the record that he "thinks that Carriers that apply for overtime are 'thieves.'" This view, he added, was the reason he felt empowered to harass carriers who said they would need overtime to finish their rounds. It was also backed up by his postmaster, who expressed similar sentiments.

"You just know there's a very good chance that, by filling this sheet out, you're getting into an argument about time," Sponsler said. And sometimes those arguments get out of hand.

If things haven't gotten any better at the post office, it's fair to wonder: why don't we hear about "going postal" anymore?

I put this question to Northeastern University Professor James Alan Fox, who has studied mass shootings and workplace violence since the early 1980s. He said shooting trends are more like a "general contagion," in that once they get publicized, a small group of people identify with the shooters and replicate their actions. For example, once the Edmond shooting was covered by the media in 1986, other postal workers started to think that might be a way for them to address their grievances, too. In a situation where these shooters likely saw no way out of their problems, they now had one.

But these trends pass just like any other. "There are fads in crime as there are in other aspects of life," Fox said. "Back in the 80s, the way that postal workers expressed their anger and grievance was with a gun…but that is not part of the culture now."

There is, however, a cohort of postal workers who report regularly higher job satisfaction than everyone else. They're called rural mail carriers. They do the same job as the so-called "city" carriers, even many times out of the same offices with the same supervisors, but for complex historical reasons, they fall under different salary structures. Whereas city carriers are hourly employees that get overtime for working more than eight hours in a day, rural carriers are given an annual salary to deliver the mail however long it takes. As a 1994 Government Accountability Office report put it:

"Rural carriers do not have to negotiate daily with supervisors regarding the time it will take to complete mail sorting or delivery, and their performance is not closely supervised. Rural carriers generally control their own workdays as long as all the mail is delivered on time each day."

I asked Sponsler if he thought putting everyone under the rural carrier structure would solve the workplace issue. He said he had never thought about it before, but he doubted it could ever happen because the entire organization, workers and management alike, have become too addicted to overtime. Many of the workers like the extra money and management won't hire enough people to avoid it.

Instead, he proposed different solutions, ones I had heard many times before. Abandon the autocratic management structure. Get rid of the computer metrics, or at least drastically curtail how they're used. Empower supervisors to run their post office the best way they see fit, not just follow orders from on high that apply to all the post offices in the area. They're big ideas, but not impossible ones.

Sponsler ended our interview by saying he didn't really want to quit the post office, but he had to. He liked most of the people he worked with. The carriers really do care about delivering the mail in that cheesy way you always hoped was true but never wanted to ask. It really is true, he said.

"Even with my experience, it can be a very good place to work," he assured me. But it's a far cry from making sure that experience applies to more than just a select few lucky ones with a good supervisor. "The service needs to work on a lot of stuff to get there."

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes

sterlingarcher23 · 7 years

Text

First of all: as a fan of the comics I might be a bit biased. Although I haven’t read them all yet because when I was younger I lend them from the library but missed the later volumes - still could get the money to buy them all. A shame!! But does somebody have a 130 bucks??)

But a fair warning because:

The cast:

Yes, Dane and Cara seem to be younger than their comic counterparts. It is actually never said how old they are in the comics - my guess is that Valerian is in his early 30s in the beginning. Later, he might be between 35 or older and he is different from the one in the start

Just read Vol. 0, yes, Zero. In the comics he is a Jean-Paul Belmondo-type, edgy faced, tanned skin, but even Belmondo was once young and smooth. And Valerian becomes edgier over time. So, are the actors to young? Maybe not. Besson has two other scripts / two more movies in mind. - If we do the math and give the films 3 years each, Dane could be 36, maybe older, edgier and in the “correct” age. In short: “Valerian and the city of the thousand planets” is, and the film does not make even a secret out of it, the beginning of Valerians voyage, because he and Laureline are relatively new partners in the film.

But age aside some may have their problems with Dane’s acting. I also thought sometimes that it isn’t quite the right tone but then he was just perfect. Is his acting inconsistent? Occasionally, yes. But if he is meant as a young Valerian it even makes sense. A bit of an asshole, a joyful rascal and dedicated to his work yet not so much into it than Bruce Wayne in his “work”. And not yet the Valerian readers are used to. Think of James Bond in Casino Royale. That Bond is odd, isn’t he? He even wants a stable relationship. Bond!! Many had their problems with this new Bond, allthough he is exactly what Bond is in Flemings work.

Back to Valerian : The examples are from the later comics of the first series - yes. There is a split, everything before Hypsis and after. Read it, it would be to complicated to explain. And Valerian is also not all but the same. So , Dane is not yet the “old” Valerian. He could play out his strenghts in later films (if hopefully done), when Valerian as a dedicated Time-travel agent sometimes shows a “Kiss my ass” attitude as he seem to have not a real care in the world or beeing mentally absent or clueless (see: Metro Chatelet/Brooklyn Station or Wrath of Hypsis).

Or doing what ever is necessary for the mission!

He does care and he loves Laureline but still he is just a human being (meaning he can be a complete ass) that can get “distracted”. And on other occasions Valerian wants just one thing: going home and leave the work behind. Yet, he doesnt. (see: Ghosts of Inverloch)

This results in a odd finale in “The Wrath of Hypsis” in which he has, except for his outburst of “WTF is going on?” nothing else to do. Strange? Yes. And that’s the key. The first major decision was made by Laureline and later Valerian has no real say in the finale but others, like Monsieur Albert, an agent who lives in the 1980s, and Laureline do.

Valerian cares but what is the main character doing in the finale of one of the most important stories with literally nothing to do besides asking the question for the reader: What’s going on here?? - Good question. He is just stands there in the background.

Weird, but I wanted to give you a hint on how franco-belgian comics sometimes work. Like the fact that the 2nd act is more important than the 3rd e.g. the climax is in the 2nd act like pointed out by "Pipelinecomics". That can be seen also in the film, as it follows a more european (in this case franco-belgian) way of storytelling!

Back to Valerian as a character: That doesn’t mean that Valerian is constantly as described above. These are just facettes of him, he is a character that is let’s say “different” from what the broader US-audience might be used to see and that is the reason why the film got more praise in France and Belgium.

I mention this because some say that Dane Dehaan doesn’t work as an action-actor. But looking up Valerian especially when it gets to this little undertones of his personality I’d say Dane is a perfect match. Because he is untypical.

And don’t forget: in the film Valerian seems (!) to be driven by his own ambitions. But is he? Or do we see sort of two different personas in one character? Actually we do. And with that in mind Danes acting, sometimes looking like he is mentally absent, makes sense.

My guess is that Luc Besson knew exactly what he did in the way he directed his main cast - that is btw. his job. And in a project of this size you don’t leave it to pure chance how your actors deliver their roles.

And they do it with passion, Dane’s rascal-mimic and Cara with her fiery look are just a perfect embodiment of of Valerian’s and Laureline’s reactions in the comics. They even work as a very odd not-average couple. (It’s not what you would expect.) Yes, they are a bit different from their drawn counterparts but as a basis for more adventures it’s fine. I give Besson, Dane and Cara the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because there are hopefully more films up ahead.

The Universe & message:

That universe is odd, the storytelling, the creatures… Which leads to something else.

Diversity. Thats the main topic of the story, that and immigragtion of people that where forced to leave their country because of the deeds and wars of others.

For Valerian they created round about 1000 species (=Thousand Planets - makes sense) mostly put in the background, and beside the fact that many of them we see have a humanoid shape of some sort (although not all if you remember), they have not much if not nothing in common.

In order to do this Besson contacted several (Dozens? Houndreds? Do the math.) artists from all over the world and everyone was given one task: Here is an object e.g. nautilus-seashell, make an alien out of it. And every artist worked independently…. And the result are aliens created by different people from all over the world. I have to point out that without MatPat from the YouTube-channel “Film Theorists” I would have not known.

This just screams it into your face that Valerian is an intercultural film, celebrating diversity yet states that we are all one, that we share the similar needs and rights: living together in one giant city. This is underlined by a “humanitarian” crisis of one species whose people are just refugees seeking a new home and that not helping and even beeing hostile towards them threatenes us all: it paves the road for more conflict.

Besson just honors the source material that was e.g. about diversity or feminism. - Wait? Then why is Laureline’s name missing? Several reasons: 1) obviously its the name that could confuse people. How do you pronounce it? 2) the original comics actually just have Valerian’s name in the title and 3) because you should ask the question. (Like: Why is Laureline just a Sergeant?) I might be wrong here but it could actually be just the case that it should provoke. It might be trick by using a title closer to the original: putting something offensive in your sight that raises a question. And that is the entire goal.

Why does Laureline fall for Valerian in the end? In this schmaltzy, teeny love setting? That’s not feminist, some might say. Feminism has nothing to do with that. - It’s about equality not the question if a woman should be a romantic type or not or even fall for a guy like Valerian. As it is established in the whole movie. Valerian tries to use (sort of) his position as a superior officer (he is a major, she is just a sergeant) to get Laureline, he tries his charme but nothing really works. In the end she says yes to his proposal but not because he tried every trick he has up his sleeve and his winning “charme” but because Laureline likes him with all the good and bad sides of his personality. - That is a fundamental difference.

There is also something else: Valerian appears to be a creepy stalker, trying to get the next best girl into the horizontal position. His proposal looks like a lame trick to win Laureline over. But is that so? No. Valerian is actually honest. So, his character is up to change from the very beginning but the audience is quick in judging him. It’s a interesting way of writing a character.

Think about Venkman from Ghostbusters, he is this creepy stalker through the entire film - there is no change or development of any kind with this womanizer but Valerian is a different kind of “stalker”. He is a ladies man. Venkman lies to girls to win them over, thats what a womanizer does. … But Valerian doesn’t lie to Laureline at least meaning he wants to change. If people think that he is a womanizer then this is just prejudice.

And this “little” truth about the main character coincides with the story of the movie and Laureline’s decision as a feminist character. - It feels like Besson is holding up a mirror to us and showing his audience that they also can have prejudices.

The villain:

Valerian is more than an sci-fi flick, it’s a political statement about humanity as a whole. And because of that it stays true to its source material.

Diversity, feminism etc. where always topics between the lines and panels.

But it might only work for you if you like both Besson and are open to storytelling and characters that are not like your average superheroes. Besson’s movies are different, and the characters are and so are the topics. That doesn’t mean that you will, have or should love every movie he made.

But it’s a bit different if you are exited about a bunch of superheros lumped together to fight a villain that looks like something formed out of a chewed Hubba-Bubba, who is lazy as hell, sitting in his big chair and sends his cronies (really I do prefer “Spießgeselle”) that fail him again and again… And wants to do what exactly?? Oh, yes, reign the world. Universe, I mean. So, nothing new in the Superhero-universes. Screw that Thanos, really, that guy is ….Yawn

But now I’m going to use “Whataboutism”… Nothing original there? What about (told you I would use that weapon) a villain that wants just one thing: No one must ever know what kind of atrocious things he did. And to accomplish that he is willing to do even more bad things!!

So, actually that kind of guy might not be really bad or villainous at all. That guy would be just: human. What he does is despicable but nothing far fetched. It’s a relatable concept.

Like Loki in the the first Thor-movie before his character was butchered by Whedon for the Avengers (seriously, do you know anything about characters? "What does not fit will be made to fit." ) Or even the motives of the main characters in that “Civil War”-garbage (and yes, I watched that recently again and its still garbage) are more relatable than a crazy guy who wants to reign the universe.

Photography/Images & Director

For the first part: Just watch the damn movie! - But to tell at least something: Yes, its eye-candy. So are the comics, especially the space-adventures. Which I highly recommend.

But underneath that eye-candy there is more as I already pointed out. And that is what people seem to overlook, even if it is a clear reference to e.g. the Syria refugee crisis. Or the people fleeing Africa.

The movie is just done with real love for the characters, the universe and the source material. - And that is a rare thing.

It’s just crazy what Luc Besson did. Like that artists-from all over the world-make-alien thing I mentioned. What he pulled up to make that film.

The movie is just done with true love for the characters, the universe and the source material. - And that is a rare thing.

Just watch the beginning of the movie: this is not just brilliantly made concerning cinematography and soundtrack, it tell’s you something about the City of a Thousand Planets without flat out saying it. The city is the Universe. And it is everyones home. A metaphor for earth which is, and that’s a truism, the home of us all. Hurt one and you hurt all. By diminishing or nearly wiping out whole civilizations like our ancestors did with e.g. the Native Americans, we are less as a whole species.

That’s heart Besson put in here. Others however do just there job. Not even really good btw. Unlike other movies directors and executives, Monsieur Besson created a consistant universe he dedicated himself to.

When I gave King Legend of the Sword a 6.5, I was very generous.

The movie ranks near 7 at IMDB or 4 stars on the German Amazon page. WTF? This mess gets a higher rating than Valerian?

Take the assassination/chase-sequence for example, this takes 25 minutes of the movie. ¼ of the movie for a sequence that contains no story- or character-relevant elements. You might argue with the swordscene. Yes, but first, it’s not really relevant and could have been placed somewhere else and second you don’t make a 25 minutes long sequence just for that. What Guy Ritchie takes 25 min and repeatingly scenes with Uther for, it takes a few seconds in the film Excalibur. What is the point here, Guy? And worse: how can people rate this overall higher than e.g. Valerian??

If I was honest than Legend of the Sword would just be a 5. But I gave that movie more credit than it deserved…maybe because I liked its game references.

Rating

But how to rate Valerian than?

Unlike others I don’t have such a big problem with the actors and the rest speaks for itself as it is a scifi/fantasy film that gives you more than some others of the recent years, not just on it’s surface but in it’s core.

The actors are fine and enjoyable, the optics amazing and it has more to tell about humans and humanity then many other movies in recent years.

You might remember that I rated Wonder Woman 8-8.5? And if Legend of the sword is a 6, well, then Valerian is a 9 out of 10.

#movie review #movies #movie #valerian #valerian and the city of a thousand planets #valerian and laureline #valerian und veronique #luc besson

13 notes · View notes

losbella · 4 years

Text

0 notes

monishacreates-blog · 4 years

Text

Can online pharmacy increase profits and save money?

When you develop and implement the following, your efforts will be concentrated on achieving results. You will have an unstoppable pharmacy; one capable of becoming renowned in your community, and delivering the level of financial freedom you wish.

Boost your bottom line by looking beyond prescriptions

With some savvy marketing, you could boost front-end sales and get your patients to leave your store with more than just their prescriptions.

1. Reduce overhead.

2. Focus on high-profit services.

3. Drive sales to high-profit front-end products.

4. Increase medication adherence.

5. Know and track your metrics.

6. Focus on the top 20 percent.

7. Increase front-end sales.

8. Greet patients with friendly staff.

While we get more information over this topic stay tuned to 3meds.com, india’s best online medical store providing absolute best healthcare and medical services.

1. Vision. Your vision depicts what your pharmacy is all about. It describes the products and services you offer, who your team is comprised of, and the ambiance of your facility, as well as your marketing and community relationships.

2. Goals. Your goals should consist of both long-range and short-range objectives, and have the strategies in place necessary to reach those goals. To be effective, each goal should be specific and contain a measuring unit, as well as a timeline. For example, increase sales of nutraceuticals by 30% by June 30th.

3. Strategies. These are your action plans showing how you will achieve your goals. If goals tell you where you’re going, strategies tell you how you are going to get there. Having the right strategies is basic and fundamental to your success.

Pursuing the wrong strategy not only can lead to chaos and confusion, but it can cost you money and time. The road to achieving your goals should be carefully chosen.It’s about allocating scarce resources, such as your time, to create a fail-safe pathway to your goals.

4. Business model. Your business model represents the way you do business and the way you serve your customers. It also relates to the products and services you provide and what you get paid for, as well as how you get paid. The most productive, the most profitable model I have encountered for independent pharmacies is as follows:

* Natural meds. Higher quality and broader assortments than are found in chains and big box stores.

* Compounding. Offering your patients customized scripts for whatever is ailing them. It beats the one-size-fits-all traditional scripts.

* Fee for services. When you become significantly knowledgeable about chronic diseases, you can and will get paid for your expertise, just as a medical doctor does for his or her knowledge.

* Marketing. You can be the greatest pharmacist in the country, but you will remain a secret, unless and until you present your community with compelling marketing messages.

5. Marketing business . Your marketing is the only element of your business that creates significant results. Everything else is just a cost. In order to be effective, it must be meaningful, that is, marketing that gets read and creates a response.

To the degree that you have some alternative solutions to patients’ aches, pains, and maladies that go beyond prescription meds, don’t remain the best kept secret in your community. Get the word out that you are the go-to pharmacy for chronic diseases in your community. You’ll notice a decided improvement in your cash flow.

When you have all the components of a total marketing machine, which should include both online and offline marketing, direct mail, and a website that sells, you will increase sales of your high margin products and services.

6. Analytics helps you keep score. You wouldn’t expect a football game, baseball game, or a basketball game to be played without their keeping score, would you? Neither should you attempt to run your pharmacy without being analytical. You need to know the score.

Here are a couple of examples of where your analytics should be focused:

* Your gross profit as a percentage of sales

* Your gross profit dollars—are they adequate to cover your expenses? Pay you an adequate salary? And leave you a sufficient residual profit? Does the profitability of selected departments justify their existence? Have you done the complete analytics to determine your answer?

Knowing your analytics provides you with leverage and accountability. It improves your effectiveness, efficiency and profitability.

7. Never, ever, do that which can be done by someone else equally as well, if not better, and at a lower cost. Few things are as destructive to an organization as having its leader do work that could—and should—be done by its employees. The opportunity costs are just far too large. Think of it this way, if you want to be worth $250 an hour, then why are you spending your time doing $15 an hour work?

* Pocket Friendly:

Online pharmacy in India is a niche and upcoming sector for now, which means that there are very few authentic pharmacies and they offer brilliant discounts and cashbacks. A part of it has to do with a reduced cost of maintenance on the company. No matter what model of business an online pharmacy adopts they generally save on the cost of maintaining infrastructure for offline pharmacies in the cities they function, making it easier for them to offer attractive discounts and better services without incurring huge loss.

For enhanced medical assistance like never before, make an immediate switch to 3meds.com an online medical store with benchmarked services.

Conclusion.

Time is the scarcest resource we all have. Your scarce time is best spent by doing the things that build your business bigger and more profitable. Concentrate on results, not just efficiencies. Start making your pharmacy work for you, not the other way around.

0 notes

glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

Text

The Power Worshippers: A look inside the American religious right | Religion | Al Jazeera

For 40 years now, the religious right has been a fixture in American politics and for all that time it has befuddled observers who continually misunderstand it, beginning with its support for Ronald Reagan, a divorced Hollywood actor, against Jimmy Carter. Reagan was the first US president to describe himself as a "born-again Christian".

But Reagan - whose wife consulted an astrologer for guidance as first lady - was a virtual saint compared to Donald Trump, the most recent presidential beneficiary of their enthusiastic support, and someone that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical protestants rewarded with their votes.

The secret to making sense of them is simply stated in the title of Katherine Stewart's new book: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. It draws on more than a decade of first-hand experience and front-line reporting that began when her daughter's public elementary school was targeted to house a fundamentalist Bible club.

"The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith," she recalls.

The struggle to stop them, and what she learned in the process about the broader plan to undermine public education and make way for sectarian religious education led to her 2012 book, The Good News Club.

But that was only one facet of the larger Christian nationalist movement The Power Worshippers explores, complimenting her own up-to-the-minute reporting with vital historical backstories that contradict and correct much of what most Americans think they know.

Christian nationalists have betrayed what might have been their strongest suit. Christianity, as most people understand it, has something to do with loving our neighbours. But leaders of this movement have thrown in their lot with a bunch of selfish economic reactionaries who tell us we don't owe anybody anything.

Katherine Stewart, journalist and author

She argues (echoing Karen Armstrong's argument about the nature of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam) that it is not premodern, as both adherents and critics commonly assume.

It is, in fact, modern in its methods and doctrines, which "notwithstanding their purported origins in ancient texts have been carefully shaped to serve the emotional needs of its adherents, the organisational needs of its clerical leaders, and the political needs and ambitions of its funders".

Stewart is hardly alone in writing about Christian nationalism, but this formulation of how it fits together as a powerful power-seeking movement is uniquely clarifying, and provided the starting point for this interview with her.

Al Jazeera: In your introduction, you write that the Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated, that: "It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement and its ultimate goal is power." Can you explain that distinction?

Katherine Stewart: We are kidding ourselves if we just look at this through a "culture war" framework.

It is helpful, in understanding this movement, to distinguish between the leaders and the followers. The foot soldiers of the movement - the many millions who dutifully cast their votes for the movement's favoured politicians, who populate its marches and flood its coffers with small-dollar donations - are the root source of its political strength. But they are not the source of its ideas. They may believe that they're fighting for things like traditional marriage and a ban on abortion.

But over time, the movement's leaders and strategists have consciously reframed these culture war issues in order to capture and control the votes of a large subsection of the American public. They understand if you can get people to vote on just one or two issues, you can control their vote.

So they use these issues to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction and to enact economic policies that are favourable to their most well-resourced funders.

As your reporting shows, conservative-leaning churches are targeting voters with messages about how they need to vote with so-called "biblical" values. How does this fit in with the movement?

A lot of people attending conservative churches would not characterise themselves as members of the movement but large numbers of them have nevertheless allowed their voting habits to be shaped by its leaders.

Generalising about what draws people to the movement is difficult because people come for a wide variety of reasons. These reasons include questions about life's deeper meaning, a love and appreciation of God and scripture, ethnic and family solidarity, the hope of community and friendship, and a desire to mark life's most significant passages or express feelings of joy and sorrow.

People also come with a longing for certainty in an uncertain world. Against a backdrop of escalating economic inequality, deindustrialisation, rapid technological change and climate instability, many people, on all points of the economic and political spectrum, feel that the world has entered a state of disorder.

The movement gives them confidence, an identity and the feeling that their position in the world is safe. Yet the price of certainty or belonging is often the surrendering of one's political will to those who claim to offer refuge from the tempest of modern life.

What are some of the ways in which the emotional needs of adherents are exploited by movement leaders?

Among the emotional needs of some adherents is a desire for a certain empowerment as members of a special or uniquely virtuous group of people. So religious nationalism goes overboard in insisting on the unique virtues of the religion and culture with which its followers identify.

An additional emotional need of some adherents, exploited by leaders of the movement, is to validate feelings of grievance and resentment, and to focus them on some imagined impure "other," a scapegoat.

Christian nationalism, like other forms of religious nationalism around the world and throughout history, delivers a set of persecution narratives that represent the "good" religious people as under threat and as victims of an evil "other".

How have the doctrines been shaped to meet the needs of the movement's clerical leaders?

Fundamentally the doctrines of religious nationalism reinforce authority - of scripture, of course, but also the authority of religious and political leaders.

This is what religious nationalism does around the world. Their doctrines make an absolute virtue out of obedience to a literalist or strict interpretation of their religion.

This is very handy both for the clerics and the politicians and elites that they serve, as it reinforces their authority, power and privilege.

Who funds the movement, and how have the doctrines been shaped to meet their needs?

The movement has multiple sources of funding, including small-dollar donors, various types of public subsidy and funding, and affluent donors.

Many of those affluent donors belong to super-wealthy hyperextended families. So it is not surprising that many of the doctrines the movement favours are about money. They say the Bible and God oppose progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes and minimum wage laws. That the Bible favours low taxes for the rich and minimal rights for the workforce. They argue that environmental regulation, regulation of businesses, and public funding of the social safety net are "unbiblical" or "against the biblical model".

In this way, I think, Christian nationalists have betrayed what might have been their strongest suit. Christianity, as most people understand it, has something to do with loving our neighbours. But leaders of this movement have thrown in their lot with a bunch of selfish economic reactionaries who tell us we don't owe anybody anything.

These doctrines, of course, preserve plutocratic, often nepotistic fortunes. This is why religious nationalism often goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, which around the world frequently exploits religious nationalism to suppress dissent and keep the disempowered members of their societies in a subordinate position.

The third chapter of your book is titled, "Inventing Abortion". Christian nationalists did not invent abortion itself, but they did invent it as a defining political framework. How did that come about?

When Roe v Wade was passed, an editorial in a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention hailed the decision.

Most Republican Protestants at the time supported liberalisation of abortion law.

Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967. Billy Graham himself echoed widely shared Protestant sentiments when he said in 1968, "In general I would disagree with [the Catholic stance]," and added, "I believe in Planned Parenthood".

Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. That process, which I cover in detail in my book, took several decades.

You note that the pre-abortion origins of the modern Christian nationalist movement defended segregation and you also trace the origins of Christian nationalism back to slavery and its theological defence. Can you expand on this?

The theological defence went in both directions. In my book, I discuss the contributions of maybe a dozen abolitionist theologians, including Charles Grandison Finney, William Wilberforce and Adin Ballou. It is important to note, however, that at the time of the Civil War, most of the powerful denominations in the South had either promoted slavery or had at least made their peace with it, and many conservative theologians of the North concurred.

Pro-slavery theologians consciously refrained from making any judgement to upset the established order or else they supported it outright. For instance, the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church said that slavery, as it existed in the United States, was not a moral evil. Episcopalians of South Carolina found slavery to be "marked by every evidence of divine approval". The Charleston Union Presbytery resolved that "the holding of slaves, so far from being a sin in the sight of God, is nowhere condemned in his holy word".

Yes, folks like Wilberforce and Ballou argued for abolitionism, and they did so in the name of religion. But Frederick Douglass observed at the time that these religious abolitionists tended to be a distinctly disempowered minority in their own denominations.

Furthermore, abolitionist theologians also tended to support women's equality, while pro-slavery theologians were unabashedly patriarchal, arguing that the subordination of women, like subordination of Black people, was a part of God's plan. Some abolitionist church services, at which women were allowed to speak with authority, were attacked by pro-slavery theologians as "promiscuous assemblies".

James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina, a pro-slavery theologian, described the conflict this way: "The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders - they are atheists, socialists, communists, red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other." Here, he is identifying "order" and "regulated freedom" with the enslavers, and "atheists" with the abolitionists.

What is most important for people to know about these origins of the Christian nationalist movement?

Pro-slavery theologians, like Christian nationalist thought leaders today, were intensely hostile to the principle of equality, plurality and critical thinking. They endorsed an austere biblical literalism and rigid hierarchies, which they asserted were ordained by God.

The idea the US is a Christian nation, chosen by God; that it should be an orthodox Christian republic; that women should be subordinate to men; that at some point America deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of atheist and/or liberal elites - these ideas are still at the heart of Christian nationalism today.

How did segregation fuel the birth of the modern Christian nationalist movement?

Movement leaders may have sold us this idea their movement was a grassroots reaction to abortion. But one of the key issues that animated the movement in its earlier days was the fear that racially segregated academies might be deprived of their lucrative tax exemptions.

Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow Southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities. The influential pastor Bob Jones Sr went so far as to call segregation "God's established order" and referred to desegregationists as "Satanic propagandists" who were "leading colored Christians astray".

As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people based on their skin colour but to also receive federal money for the purpose. So they coalesced around the fear that the Supreme Court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools.

They knew, however, that "Stop the tax on segregation!" wasn't going to be an effective rallying cry to inspire a broad-based hyperconservative counterrevolution. There is a fascinating episode where they got together and basically wrote down a laundry list of issues that they thought might unite their new movement. I'm talking 1979 or so, about six years after Roe v. Wade. Number one was what they viewed as a threat to the tax privileges of racist academies. The women's rights movement was another. There were several others on the list, and they crossed one after the other. Then they came down to abortion and basically said, wow, that could work.

How do the battles started then affect us today?

The basic question we are still struggling with is whether we can build a republic based on a universal idea, or whether we have to fall back on some kind of petty ethnic and religious nationalism. The idea of the American republic is that we can find unity on the basis of being human and thus deserving of dignity.

Can we find unity in this principle of humanity and equality, or are we compelled to coalesce around mythological ideas about ethnic and religious greatness - an impossibility in a society as inherently pluralistic as ours?

What ails us is not something specific to the United States, but rather a condition that plagues many parts of the modern world. The lesson from history we haven't yet learned is that whenever we try the latter, we spread injustice. And whenever we hold true to the former, we reach for justice.

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

theadmiringbog · 7 years

Photo

When most people hear the word “price,” they think of a number. That's a price point.

When we use the term price, we are trying to get at something more fundamental. We want to understand the perceived value that the innovation holds for the customer. How much is the customer willing to pay for that value? What would the demand be?

Seen in this light, price is both an indication of what customers value and a measure of how much they are willing to pay for that value.

Every company has a chance to create Cayennes and reduce the risk of Darts. The key is to rigorously determine the market for a new product long before the products are built, and making sure the market is willing to pay for that product before embarking on a long journey of productizing the innovation.

To boil it down, these companies conduct product development this way: They design, then build, then market, then price.

What we will teach you in this book is to flip that process on its head: Market and price, then design, then build.

In other words, design the product around the price.

Monetizing failures fall into only four categories:

Feature shock: cramming too many features into one product—sometimes even unwanted features—creates a product that does not fully resonate with customers and is often overpriced.

Minivation: an innovation that, despite being the right product for the right market, is priced too low to achieve its full revenue potential.

Hidden gem: a potential blockbuster product that is never properly brought to market, generally because it falls outside of the core business.

Undead: an innovation that customers don't want but has nevertheless been brought to market, either because it was the wrong answer to the right question, or an answer to a question no one was asking. The fact that new product monetization failures come in only four varieties should give you comfort. Imagine having to do postmortems that could point to dozens or hundreds of factors!

9 Rules for Innovation Success

We have boiled these secrets down into the following nine new rules for innovation success. The rules are contrary to what most executives have learned about product development:

Have the “willingness to pay” talk with customers early in the product development process.

Don't force a one-size-fits-all solution.

Product configuration and bundling is more science than art. You need to build them carefully and match them with your most meaningful segments.

Choose the right pricing and revenue models, because how you charge is often more important than how much you charge.

Develop your pricing strategy. Create a plan that looks a few steps ahead, allowing you to maximize gains in the short and long term.

Draft your business case using customer willingness-to-pay data, and establish links between price, value, volume, and cost.

Communicate the value of your offering clearly and compellingly; otherwise you will not get customers to pay full measure.

Understand your customers' irrational sides, because whether you sell to other businesses or to consumers, your customers are people.

Maintain your pricing integrity. Control discounting tightly.

Companies with strong product-driven or engineering cultures tend to be the ones that develop feature shocks. Firms with a culture of playing it safe and avoiding big risks typically suffer minivations. Hidden gems most often afflict companies that coddle the core business. And undeads are born in firms whose top-down cultures discourage feedback and criticism from below.

The component company failed to ask this question: “What value does this component bring to our customer and its customers, and what portion of that value can we capture?” Instead, it asked, “What does this component cost to make, and what minimum margin do I need to add on top of that?”

Have the “Willingness-to-Pay” Talk Early. You Can't Prioritize without It

Discussing pricing with customers before you have a product ... How does one do that? The simplest way is to ask direct questions about the value of your product and its features, for example:

“What do you think could be an acceptable price?”

“What do you think would be an expensive price?”

“What do you think would be a prohibitively expensive price?”

“Would you buy this product at $XYZ?”

Then follow each question with the most powerful question of all: “Why?”

Top Five Methods for Having the Willingness-to-Pay Conversation (from Easiest to Most Advanced)

In Figure 4.3, we detail the five methods we have found most useful that you should use when you have the conversations

Below are the 10 most important insights we have learned from them:

1. Don't forget to tap into pockets of internal excellence:

Before you have customer conversations, form a group of internal cross-functional experts (product, sales, marketing, finance, and engineering) and conduct an expert judgment workshop.

Ask the questions you would ask customers.

Send out the questions before the meeting and ask participants to show up with answers (to avoid behavior in the room that generates biased answers). Then conduct an objective discussion of why people answered the way they did. Position customer discussions as the “value talk:” Don't position the talk as “pricing” or “willingness to pay.”

2. Ask questions like “Do you value these products/features?” and then ask why.

Then switch gears to ask questions like “What would you consider an acceptable price?” Switching from value to price is an easier transition to make in determining customer WTP.

4. Make 25 percent of the questions “why” questions:

As simple as it sounds, the “why” question is the most powerful one. If someone says, “I would pay $20,” ask them, “Why do you say that?”

7. Avoid the “average trap:

When you analyze the answers to your WTP questions, look at the distribution, not just the average response. The average response can be misleading.

8. Be precise in your language:

The questions “Would you buy this?” and “Would you buy this for $20?” are totally different.

CEO Questions

Does our product development team have serious pricing discussions with customers in the early stages of the new product's development process?

If not, why not?

What data do we have to show there's a viable market that can and will pay for our new product?

Do we know our market's WTP range for our product concept? Do we know what price range the market considers acceptable?

What's considered expensive? How did we find out?

Do we know what features customers truly value and are willing to pay for, and which ones they don't and won't?

And have we killed or added to the features as a consequence of this data? If not, why not?

What are our product's differentiating features versus competitors' features?

How much do customers value our features over the competition's features?

There are many flavors of segmentation that may be good for customizing sales and marketing messages, such as persona, behavior, attitude, demographics, and more. But when it comes to innovation, there is only one right way to segment: by customers' needs, value, and their willingness to pay for a product or service that delivers that value.

A Paper Company's New Segmentation

A Segment-Based Product Offering in a Business-to-Business Market

When you configure and bundle your new product, you may get overwhelmed with deciding which features to include in each segment offer. In a different way, it is easy for customers to become overwhelmed trying to decide which offer is right for them. Designing your product with leader, filler, and killer features in mind will help you with that first challenge. Creating good, better, and best options will address the second.

The leader/filler/killer classification is the most important aspect of configuring your new product. We described methods for doing this in Figure 4.3.

The classic approach to product configuration and bundling is to create a three-tier model, sometimes referred to as good, better, best or G/B/B.

Typically, the good version has the most important core features, and the best has all the bells and whistles (the all-in product/bundle). You have probably come across this concept many times in everyday life: bronze, silver, and gold offerings. For example, the pro, business, and enterprise products offered by online file sharing website Dropbox are a G/B/B offering. Ideally, no more than a quarter of your customers should opt for the good option, while 70 percent should opt for the better or the best.

You can steer customers to a choice based on whether they are price conscious (good), quality conscious (best), or somewhere in between (better). The core philosophy behind a G/B/B is that a significant portion of people avoid extremes when they are presented a choice; they choose the compromise option. Playing on this psychology, G/B/B configuration/bundling maximizes revenue.

Don't make it too big. Once you go beyond nine benefits or four products, your product configurations and bundles run the risk of exceeding psychological thresholds. Your product will start making customers' heads spin, and you will be heading toward producing a feature shock product!

Hard bundling works when you have market power and are the dominant player. In almost all other cases, you should go with a mixed bundling approach (sell the products as a bundle and as standalone products).

Bundle with integration value so that 1 + 1 = 3. Bundling is not always about discounting. In certain industries, such as software, you can sometimes charge a premium for bundling products together because customers are willing to pay for integrated product experiences (such as common user interface and seamless interoperability between products). In these situations, if you offer a discount on the bundle, you will hurt your bottom line two times over!

4. Alternative Metric Pricing/Pay As You Go

Software companies have also successfully employed alternative pricing metrics. A software company that produces lab reports increased revenue by 20 percent just by changing its pricing metric from fixed perpetual license to charging per lab report.

5. Freemium pricing

The land-and-expand approach fails for 90 percent of companies. (For an exception to the rule, see the LinkedIn case study in Chapter 13.) In fact, the number of free customers who convert to premium is typically below 10 percent in software companies.

...

If you decide to offer a freemium service, you must double down on your efforts to convert customers to the premium version. It is extraordinarily difficult to get consumers to buy something they previously received for free. One need only to look at the scores of Web-based businesses that failed to monetize free online offerings in the last two decades. For example, most newspapers (apart from ones like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) have failed to convert free readers en masse to paid online subscribers.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

The reason to ask this question is not to mimic your rivals' monetization approaches but to set yourself apart. Wherever possible, use your monetization model to create a competitive difference.

A solid pricing strategy document

Building Block #1: Set Clear Goals

Which goals are most important for your new products? Revenue? Market share? Total profit? Profit margin? Customer lifetime value? Average revenue per unit? Something else? Whichever goals you choose, you cannot maximize all of them at the same time. In setting goals, you must make trade-offs.

Forcing trade-offs in goals is crucial. A workshop task we call Goal Allocation Exercise helps companies do that. Every workshop participant is ideally from a company's C-suite. We ask them to allocate 100 points to a series of goals. That puts each executive in a trade-off mindset.

Examples of Principles for Promotion and Competitive Reactions

The most important input for optimizing your price is the price elasticity curve (also known as the demand curve and price–demand relationship). It shows how much the sales volume of your product decreases and increases if you move your price up or down: Price Elasticity = Change in Sales (%)/Change in Price (%) To calculate the price elasticity and profit curve for your new product, you need two sources of data: your analysis of what customers are willing to pay (discussed in Chapter 4) and your costs (both variable and fixed). Everything else is simple math. Here's an example. Figure 8.5 describes a product launch. At a price of $100, you would sell 1 million units per period. If you charge less, sales go up (1.35 million at a $70 price point). If you charge more, sales go down (to 600,000 at a price of $130). Figure 8.5 Price Scenarios for a New Product Launch With that information,

Every product—from a Rolls Royce to a pack of chewing gum—has a price elasticity curve. If you don't determine the elasticity curve for your product and use it to price that product, you will not get to your optimal price.

Your business case must model the linkages among the four elements of price, value, volume, and cost. When you do that, your monetary forecast will be far more precise.

Nine Steps to Build a Living Business Case

2. Assemble the basic ingredients. Incorporate market size, volume, customer segments, offer structure (configurations and bundles), value, WTP, a monetization model, costs, and competing products and their pricing.

3. Include price elasticity. Most companies avoid exploring price elasticity at this point, but we find it to be the critical element in business cases.

4. Apply data-verified facts. You need to use figures based on real facts. Without data, many are tempted to overstate the size of their target market, for example, or to create unrealistic adoption assumptions. Such guesses will come back to haunt you later, when you have to explain why sales are grossly under target. Topics that typically require data-validity checks include market size, ramp-up times, churn, and cannibalization assumptions.

5. Add risk assumptions. You need to attach risk assumptions to any input parameters that are inherently uncertain. For example, your manufacturing cost per unit will increase if a key supplier goes belly up and you must source from higher-priced suppliers.

SmugMug's Pricing Page with benefits > features

We have created an online diagnostic tool to help you diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of your overall innovation process (http://www.monetizinginnovation.com). Ask your innovation team to go through each task in the tool and report back with the results. The results should give you a high-level gauge for the status quo.

A key factor in the company's monetization success was appointing a monetization hero to the team and putting that person in charge. The monetization hero should have solid product experience and be familiar with your firm's existing innovation processes. This person should also have a broad perspective on the organization—especially the strengths, weaknesses, failures, and successes of the current innovation process. The monetization hero should listen for best practices that emerge in the cross-functional innovation meetings during the pilot phase.

#Monetizing Innovation #book review #business

3 notes · View notes

labourpress · 7 years

Text

Jeremy Corbyn speech

Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, speaking at a rally in Leicester today, said:

***Check against delivery***

There’s no doubt that Thursday’s local election results were disappointing for our party. We had welcome victories in Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, Doncaster and elsewhere but too many fantastic councillors, who work tirelessly for their communities, lost their seats.

We face a huge challenge in the next five weeks.

But this General Election campaign is also a great opportunity. A chance to break free, to create a society in which people are no longer held back by a system that is rigged for the rich. A chance to rebuild Britain for the many not the few.

There is also a huge danger – that the Tories’ fearmongering and spin machine will make some people settle for less than they should. Resign themselves to things the way they are - underestimating just how many more burdens the Tories could impose if their mission to rig the system for the rich isn’t halted.

The stakes are high. We know from yesterday’s election results that the gap between us and the Tories is not as great as the pundits have been saying.

But we still have many people to convince. We have four weeks to do that. Are we up to the challenge?

Millions are still sceptical and undecided, not sure which way to turn.

And who can blame them.

Andy Burnham – who had a brilliant victory to become the new Mayor of Greater Manchester yesterday – spoke last week of how alienated people are from the political system.

He said we can’t just carry on doing what we are doing; the time has come to do something different.

He’s right. Our Westminster system is broken and our economy is rigged. Both are run in the interests of the few.

Things can and must be different.

Labour is under attack because we are standing up to the elites who are determined to hijack Brexit to pay even less tax and take even more of the wealth we all create.

Labour is under attack because we are standing up to the corporate interests plundering our NHS - £13 billion of the NHS budget is already privatised – how much more will be if the Tories get another five years?

That’s why Labour is under attack. We’re drawing a line. Three decades of privatisation – from energy and rail to health and social care – has made some people very rich but it has not delivered richer lives for the vast majority.

In this election, we will be outlining a plan to transform Britain – an upgraded economy run for the many not the few.

It will mean standing up to powerful vested interests. But we are ready for the challenge.

The Conservatives only stand up when taking orders from their billionaire friends, who hoard our country’s wealth for themselves in tax havens.

Theresa May thinks she can win the General Election by claiming she cares about working people.

She talks about building a fair society. Does she think people will forget what the Tories have done to this country, how they’ve actually treated working people?

This Tory leader sat alongside David Cameron in government for six years.

She was in the cabinet room when they introduced the bedroom tax. So were the Liberal Democrats as part of Cameron’s coalition. What was fair about that?

And what was fair about racking up tuition fees?

Or about taking benefits away from people with disabilities?

Or about closing Sure Start Centres? Or starving schools of cash? Or opening up the NHS to be plundered by profiteers?

And what was fair about giving big business and the richest in society tax giveaways worth tens of billions of pounds - while the rest of us were told to tighten our belts, to accept a big dose of austerity?

The Tories are hoping everyone has short memories.

But if that fails, they have another card they are playing. That this election is about Brexit and who can play at being toughest with Brussels.

But Labour will not allow the Tories to put their party interests ahead of the real national interest. The interests of the British people.

This election isn’t about Brexit itself. That issue has been settled. The question now is what sort of Brexit do we want – and what sort of country do we want Britain to be after Brexit?

And who can really be trusted to put working people first?

Labour wants a jobs Brexit, a Brexit that safeguards the future of Britain’s vital industries, a Brexit that paves the way to a genuinely fairer society and to an upgraded economy.

Labour’s plan to transform Britain will mean:

· investing in infrastructure and new industries,

· rebuilding our NHS and social care services,

· giving our children and young people a chance to fulfil their potential.

We won’t be paying lip-service to working people.

We will introduce a comprehensive programme to strengthen rights at work, make sure new jobs are good jobs, and end the race to the bottom in pay, conditions and job security.

Low pay and insecurity have spread like an epidemic under the Tories.

Labour will invest in skills and jobs, and take action to enforce a floor under employment standards across the board – so that all jobs are decent jobs, so that all workers – the true wealth creators - can play their part in transforming Britain and benefit fully from it.

Transformation means that, instead of a country run for the rich, Britain will be a country in which people are not held back, in which everyone is able to lead a richer life.

And that’s why we are fighting to win this election. Fighting to win, not because I yearn for the trappings of Downing Street office but because I want a better Britain

A country for the many not the few.

The local election results yesterday leave us in no doubt about the scale of our challenge.

We know this is no small task - it is a challenge on a historic scale. But we, the whole Labour movement and the British people, can't afford not to seize our moment.

We have five weeks to win the General Election so we can fundamentally transform Britain for the many not the few.

When we win, we form the NHS.

When we win, we introduce the Equal Pay Act.

When we win we establish a National Minimum Wage - one of my proudest days in politics.

When we win, the British people win. The nurse, the teacher, the small trader, the carer, the builder, the office worker win.

Labour is offering a real choice, a real alternative to the rigged system that is holding us back and the Conservatives who are running our country down in every way.

An alternative for the many not the few.

And we need to be that real alternative because too many people in our country worry that voting won’t change anything, that all politicians are the same.

We are not all the same but people are frustrated that the system remains rigged for the few, that the lives of the many don’t seem to be getting better.

They vote, nothing changes.

The economy is still rigged in favour of the rich and powerful.

We have to show that we are different, that we will transform Britain. That we are for the many not the few.

When Labour wins there will be a reckoning for those who thought they could get away with asset stripping our industry, crashing our economy through their greed and ripping off workers and consumers.

When did the Conservatives - Osborne, Cameron, May, Johnson - ever stand up to their financial backers and demand our money back?

Never and they never will.

Instead, they make our nurses, our carers, our soldiers, our disabled, our young people trying to get a home of their own, our elderly looking for dignity in retirement and those working hard to get on, foot the bill instead.

It makes me angry. It makes me really angry. And I know it makes the people of Britain angry too.

So today, I say to tax cheats, the rip off bosses, the greedy bankers.

Enough is enough.

The people of Britain are taking our money back.

We have always stood up for the many not the few.

And I will always stand up for our beliefs.

That can be lonely, I know.

I campaigned against privatisation, tax cuts for the rich, letting the banks become all powerful and the Iraq war when many politicians were pushing them through or not standing up against them.

We stood up for workers’ pay, better public services, a fairer society, a more equal economy and for peace and justice.

Standing up for your beliefs in any circumstances, takes great determination. It can be frustrating. It takes its toll. It is far easier to compromise your beliefs and go along for the ride.

But strength is holding on to what you believe in. Standing up for the many against the few means a struggle against the odds.

Looking out for the few is easy; winning for the many is hard.

I have a message for Theresa May. If you feel the need to go on about what a great leader you are, then show it by debating with me in this election campaign. We are for the many, you’re for the few.

But this is about so much more than Theresa May and me.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you, the people, to decide what sort of country you want to live in.

We are full of so much potential, which is being stifled and held back in favour of the few.

Together, we can transform Britain.

And we must transform Britain because now it is rigged for the few.

In this election, Labour is standing for decent jobs, investment for the future, shared wealth creation, security at work, affordable homes for all, a fully funded NHS and schools, training and skills, an end to rip-off privatisation, fair taxation and a fairer, more equal country.

As we set out our detailed plans for Britain, the scale of the change we are offering will become clear.

So let’s turn our country around. Let’s come together to transform Britain. Together, we can win for the many not the few.

Make sure you are registered to vote.

Please help others get registered to vote.

Make sure you use your vote.

Talk to your friends, family, neighbours and co-workers about this General Election.

It is so important.

This election could be a great and proud moment in our national story.

Don’t wake on up on 9 June to see celebrations from the tax cheats, the press barons, the greedy bankers, Philip Green, the Southern Rail directors and crooked bankers that take our wealth, who have got away with it because the party they own, the Conservative Party, has won.

We have five weeks to ruin their party. We have five weeks to have a chance to take our money back. We have five weeks to win so we can transform Britain for the many not the few.

We must seize it. Thank you.

29 notes · View notes

ncmagroup · 5 years

Text

by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback

Am I good enough?”

“Am I ready? This is my big opportunity, but now I’m not sure I’m prepared.”

These thoughts plagued Jason, an experienced manager, as he lay awake one night fretting about a new position he’d taken. For more than five years he had run a small team of developers in Boston. They produced two highly successful lines of engineering textbooks for the education publishing arm of a major media conglomerate. On the strength of his reputation as a great manager of product development, he’d been chosen by the company to take over an online technical-education start-up based in London.

Jason arrived at his new office on a Monday morning, excited and confident, but by the end of his first week, he was beginning to wonder whether he was up to the challenge. In his previous work, he had led people who’d worked together before and required coordination but little supervision. There were problems, of course, but nothing like what he’d discovered in this new venture. Key members of his group barely talked to one another. Other publishers in the company, whose materials and collaboration he desperately needed, angrily viewed his new group as competition. The goals he’d been set seemed impossible—the group was about to miss some early milestones—and a crucial partnership with an outside organization had been badly, perhaps irretrievably, damaged. On top of all that, his boss, who was located in New York, offered little help. “That’s why you’re there” was the typical response whenever Jason described a problem. By Friday he was worried about living up to the expectations implied in that response.

Do Jason’s feelings sound familiar? Such moments of doubt and even fear may and often do come despite years of management experience. Any number of events can trigger them: An initiative you’re running isn’t going as expected. Your people aren’t performing as they should. You hear talk in the group that “the real problem here is lack of leadership.” You think you’re doing fine until you, like Jason, receive a daunting new assignment. You’re given a lukewarm performance review. Or one day you simply realize that you’re no longer growing and advancing—you’re stuck.

Most Managers Stop Working on Themselves

The whole question of how managers grow and advance is one we’ve studied, thought about, and lived with for years. As a professor working with high potentials, MBAs, and executives from around the globe, Linda meets people who want to contribute to their organizations and build fulfilling careers. As an executive, Kent has worked with managers at all levels of both private and public organizations. All our experience brings us to a simple but troubling observation: Most bosses reach a certain level of proficiency and stop there—short of what they could and should be.

We’ve discussed this observation with countless colleagues, who almost without exception have seen what we see: Organizations usually have a few great managers, some capable ones, a horde of mediocre ones, some poor ones, and some awful ones. The great majority of people we work with are well-intentioned, smart, accomplished individuals. Many progress and fulfill their ambitions. But too many derail and fail to live up to their potential. Why? Because they stop working on themselves.

Managers rarely ask themselves, “How good am I?” and “Do I need to be better?” unless they’re shocked into it. When did you last ask those questions? On the spectrum of great to awful bosses, where do you fall?

Managers in new assignments usually start out receptive to change. The more talented and ambitious ones choose stretch assignments, knowing that they’ll have much to learn at first. But as they settle in and lose their fear of imminent failure, they often grow complacent. Every organization has its ways of doing things—policies, standard practices, and unspoken guidelines, such as “promote by seniority” and “avoid conflict.” Once they’re learned, managers often use them to get by—to “manage” in the worst sense of the word.

It doesn’t help that a majority of the organizations we see offer their managers minimal support and rarely press the experienced ones to improve. Few expect more of their leaders than short-term results, which by themselves don’t necessarily indicate real management skill.

In our experience, however, the real culprit is neither managerial complacency nor organizational failure: It is a lack of understanding. When bosses are questioned, it’s clear that many of them have stopped making progress because they simply don’t know how to.

Do you understand what’s required to become truly effective?

Too often managers underestimate how much time and effort it takes to keep growing and developing. Becoming a great boss is a lengthy, difficult process of learning and change, driven mostly by personal experience. Indeed, so much time and effort are required that you can think of the process as a journey—a journey of years.

What makes the journey especially arduous is that the lessons involved cannot be taught. Leadership is using yourself as an instrument to get things done in the organization, so it is about self-development. There are no secrets and a few shortcuts. You and every other manager must learn the lessons yourself, based on your own experience as a boss. If you don’t understand the nature of the journey, you’re more likely to pause or lose hope and tell yourself, “I can’t do this” or “I’m good enough already.”

Do you understand what you’re trying to attain?

We all know how disorganized, fragmented, and even chaotic every manager’s workdays are. Given this reality, which is intensifying as work and organizations become more complex and fluid, how can you as a boss do anything more than cope with what comes at you day by day?

To deal with the chaos, you need a clear underlying sense of what’s important and where you and your group want to be in the future. You need a mental model that you can lay over the chaos and into which you can fit all the messy pieces as they come at you. This way of thinking begins with a straightforward definition: Management is the responsibility for the performance of a group of people.

It’s a simple idea, yet putting it into practice is difficult because management is defined by responsibility but done by exerting influence. To influence others you must make a difference not only in what they do but also in the thoughts and feelings that drive their actions. How do you actually do this?

To answer that question, you need an overarching, integrated way of thinking about your work as a manager. We offer an approach based on studies of management practice, our own observations, and our knowledge of where managers tend to go wrong. We call it the three imperatives: Manage yourself. Manage your network. Manage your team.

Is this the only way to describe management? No, of course not. But it’s clear, straightforward, and, above all, focused on what managers must actually do. People typically think of “management” as just the third imperative, but today all three are critical to success. Together they encompass the crucial activities that effective managers must perform to influence others. Mastering them is the purpose of your journey.

Manage Yourself

Management begins with you, because who you are as a person, what you think and feel, the beliefs and values that drive your actions, and especially how you connect with others all matter to the people you must influence. Every day those people examine every interaction with you, your every word and deed, to uncover your intentions. They ask themselves, “Can I trust this person?” How hard they work, their level of personal commitment, their willingness to accept your influence, will depend in large part on the qualities they see in you. And their perceptions will determine the answer to this fundamental question every manager must ask: Am I someone who can influence others productively?

Who you are, shows up most clearly in the relationships you form with others, especially those for whom you’re responsible. It’s easy to get those crucial relationships wrong. Effective managers possess the self-awareness and self-management required to get them right.

José, a department head, told us of two managers who worked for him in the marketing department of a large maker of durable goods. Both managers were struggling to deliver the results expected of their groups. Both, it turned out, were creating dysfunctional relationships. One was frankly ambivalent about being “the boss” and hated it when people referred to him that way. He wanted to be liked, so he tried to build close personal relationships. He would say, in effect, “Do what I ask because we’re friends.” That worked for a while until, for good reasons, he had to turn down one “friend” for promotion and deny another one a bonus. Naturally, those people felt betrayed, and their dissatisfaction began to poison the feelings of everyone else in the group.

The other manager took the opposite approach. With her, it was all business. No small talk or reaching out to people as people. For her, results mattered, and she’d been made the boss because she was the one who knew what needed to be done; it was the job of her people to execute. Not surprisingly, her message was always “Do what I say because I’m the boss.” She was effective—until people began leaving.

If productive influence doesn’t arise from being liked (“I’m your friend!”) or from fear (“I’m the boss!”), where does it come from? From people’s trust in you as a manager. That trust has two components: belief in your competence (you know what to do and how to do it) and belief in your character (your motives are good and you want your people to do well).

Trust is the foundation of all forms of influence other than coercion. You need to foster it.

Trust is the foundation of all forms of influence other than coercion, and you need to conduct yourself with others in ways that foster it. Management really does begin with who you are as a person.

Manage Your Network

We once talked to Kim, the head of a software company division, just as he was leaving a meeting of a task force consisting of his peers. He had proposed a new way of handling interdivisional sales, which he believed would increase revenue by encouraging each division to cross-sell other divisions’ products. At the meeting, he’d made an extremely well-researched, carefully reasoned, and even compelling case for his proposal—which the group rejected with very little discussion. “How many of these people did you talk to about your proposal before the meeting?” we asked. None, it turned out. “But I anticipated all their questions and objections,” he protested, adding with some bitterness, “It’s just politics. If they can’t see what’s good for the company and them, I can’t help them.”

Many managers resist the need to operate effectively in their organizations’ political environments. They consider politics dysfunctional—a sign the organization is broken—and don’t realize that it unavoidably arises from three features inherent in all organizations: division of labor, which creates disparate groups with disparate and even conflicting goals and priorities; interdependence, which means that none of those groups can do their work without the others; and scarce resources, for which groups necessarily compete. Obviously, some organizations handle politics better than others, but conflict and competition among groups are inevitable. How do they get resolved? Through organizational influence. Groups whose managers have influence tend to get what they need; other groups don’t.

Unfortunately, many managers deal with conflict by trying to avoid it. “I hate company politics!” they say. “Just let me do my job.” But effective managers know they cannot turn away. Instead, with integrity and for good ends, they proactively engage the organization to create the conditions for their success. They build and nurture a broad network of ongoing relationships with those they need and those who need them; that is how they influence people over whom they have no formal authority. They also take responsibility for making their boss, a key member of their network, a source of influence on their behalf.

Manage Your Team

As a manager, Wei worked closely with each of her people, who were spread across the U.S. and the Far East. But she rarely called a virtual group meeting, and only once had her group met face-to-face. “In my experience,” she told us, “meetings online or in-person are usually a waste of time. Some people do all the yakking, others stay silent, and not much gets done. It’s a lot more efficient for me to work with each person and arrange for them to coordinate when that’s necessary.” It turned out, though, that she was spending all her time “coordinating,” which included a great deal of conflict mediation. People under her seemed to be constantly at odds, vying for the scarce resources they needed to achieve their disparate goals and complaining about what others were or were not doing.

Too many managers overlook the possibilities of creating a real team and managing their people as a whole. They don’t realize that managing one-on-one is just not the same as managing a group and that they can influence individual behavior much more effectively through the group because most of us are social creatures who want to fit in and be accepted as part of the team. How do you make the people who work for you, whether on a project or permanently, into a real team—a group of people who are mutually committed to a common purpose and the goals related to that purpose?

To do collective work that requires varied skills, experience, and knowledge, teams are more creative and productive than groups of individuals who merely cooperate. In a real team, members hold themselves and one another jointly accountable. They share a genuine conviction that they will succeed or fail together. A clear and compelling purpose and concrete goals and plans based on that purpose are critical. Without them, no group will coalesce into a real team.

Team culture is equally important. Members need to know what’s required of them collectively and individually; what the team’s values, norms, and standards are; how members are expected to work together (what kind of conflict is acceptable or unacceptable, for example); and how they should communicate. It’s your job to make sure they have all this crucial knowledge.

Effective managers also know that even in a cohesive team they cannot ignore individual members. Every person wants to be a valued member of a group and needs individual recognition. You must be able to provide the attention members need, but always in the context of the team.

Effective managers know that even in a cohesive team they cannot ignore individual members.

And finally, effective managers know how to lead a team through the work it does day after day—including the unplanned problems and opportunities that frequently arise—to make progress toward achieving their own and the team’s goals.

Be Clear on How You’re Doing

The three imperatives will help you influence both those who work for you and those who don’t. Most important, they provide a clear and actionable road map for your journey. You must master them to become a fully effective manager.

These imperatives are not simply distinct managerial competencies. They are tightly integrated activities, each of which depends on the others. Getting your person-to-person relationships right is critical to building a well-functioning team and giving its individual members the attention they need. A compelling team purpose, bolstered by clear goals and plans, is the foundation for a strong network, and a network is indispensable for reaching your team’s goals.

Knowing where you’re going is only the first half of what’s required. You also need to know at all times where you are on your journey and what you must do to make progress. We’re all aware that the higher you rise in an organization, the less feedback you get about your performance. You have to be prepared to regularly assess yourself.

Too many managers seem to assume that development happens automatically. They have only a vague sense of the goal and of where they stand in relation to it. They tell themselves, “I’m doing all right” or “As I take on more challenges, I’ll get better.” Consequently, those managers fall short. There’s no substitute for routinely taking a look at yourself and how you’re doing. (The exhibit “Measuring Yourself on the Three Imperatives” will help you do this.)

Measuring Yourself on the Three Imperatives

Don’t be discouraged if you find several areas in which you could do better. No manager will meet all the standards implicit in the three imperatives. The goal is not perfection. It’s developing the strengths you need for success and compensating for any fatal shortcomings. Look at your strengths and weaknesses in the context of your organization. What knowledge and skills does it—or will it—need to reach its goals? How can your strengths help it move forward? Given its needs and priorities, what weaknesses must you address right away? The answers become your personal learning goals.

What You Can Do Right Now

Progress will come only from your work experience: from trying and learning, observing and interacting with others, experimenting, and sometimes pushing yourself beyond the bounds of comfort—and then assessing yourself on the three imperatives again and again. Above all, take responsibility for your own development; ultimately, all development is self-development.

You won’t make progress unless you consciously act. Before you started a business, you would draw up a business plan broken into manageable steps with milestones; do the same as you think about your journey. Set personal goals. Solicit feedback from others. Take advantage of company training programs. Create a network of trusted advisers, including role models and mentors. Use your strengths to seek out developmental experiences. We know you’ve heard all this advice before, and it is good advice. But what we find most effective in building the learning into your daily work.

For this purpose, we offer a simple approach we call prep, do, review.

Prep.

Begin each morning with a quick preview of the coming day’s events. For each one, ask yourself how you can use it to develop as a manager and in particular how you can work on your specific learning goals. Consider delegating a task you would normally take on yourself and think about how you might do that—to whom, what questions you should ask, what boundaries or limits you should set, what preliminary coaching you might provide. Apply the same thinking during the day when a problem comes up unexpectedly. Before taking any action, step back and consider how it might help you become better. Stretch yourself. If you don’t move outside familiar patterns and practice new approaches, you’re unlikely to learn.

Do.

Take whatever action is required in your daily work, and as you do, use the new and different approaches you planned. Don’t lose your resolve. For example, if you tend to cut off conflict in a meeting, even constructive conflict, force yourself to hold back so that disagreement can be expressed and worked through. Step in only if the discussion becomes personal or points of view are being stifled. The ideas that emerge may lead you to a better outcome.

Review.

After the action, examine what you did and how it turned out. This is where learning actually occurs. Reflection is critical, and it works best if you make it a regular practice. For example, set aside time toward the end of each day—perhaps on your commute home. Which actions worked well? What might you have done differently? Replay conversations. Compare what you did with what you might have done if you were the manager you aspire to be. Where did you disappoint yourself, and how did that happen? Did you practice any new behaviors or otherwise make progress on your journey?

Some managers keep notes about how they spent their time, along with thoughts about what they learned. One CEO working on a corporate globalization strategy told us he’d started recording every Friday his reflections about the past week. Within six weeks, he said, he’d developed the greater discipline to say no to anything “not on the critical path,” which gave him time to spend with key regulators and to jump-start the strategy.

If you still need to make progress on your journey, that should spur you to action, not discourage you. You can become what you want and need to be. But you must take personal responsibility for mastering the three imperatives and assessing where you are now.

Go to our website: www.ncmalliance.com

Are You a Good Boss—or a Great One? by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback Am I good enough?” “Am I ready? This is my big opportunity, but now I’m not sure I’m prepared.”

0 notes