Derek Scruggs

An excellent secret-to-my-success post that I found via the Office Zealot Getting Things Done feed, which is back up after a few months of silence. Here’s his advice on how not to get ahead.

So many people I meet are unresponsive. They don’t return their phone calls promptly. They don’t answer their emails quickly. They don’t complete their assignments on time. They promise to do something and never follow through. They have to be reminded, prodded, and nagged. This behavior creates work for everyone else and eats into their own productivity. Sadly, they seem oblivious to it.

I’ve always been reasonably responsive, but since implementing GTD about three years ago I’ve found that I rarely let something slip through the cracks. As an example, my email inbox almost never has more than 10 messages in it, and by the end of the day it’s usually down to one or two. Every message is either answered, delegated or assigned to a task, usually within a couple hours of receiving it.

This practice has not only been helpful in establishing my trustworthiness as a business partner, but it’s also allowed me to manage my clients better. Too often I send an email or leave a voice mail with a client who doesn’t respond, or only half-delivers on the request I made to them. By not letting my inbox become a dumping ground, I’ve been able to keep both myself and my clients on task and thus deliver better results for both of us. (The concept of the “waiting for” has been crucial in this game.)

This headline jumped out at me today and for a moment I thought I was reading the Onion:

Pro-abstinence youths gather as pro-sex convention wraps up

The article is here.

After seeing Fred Anderson’s post about PersonalDNA, I had to give it a try myself. As it happens, I came out with the same macro result as Fred (Animated Leader, Myers Briggs’ ENTP – you can see my full results here).

As Fred mentioned, one of the cooler things about PersonalDNA is that you can invite others to complete an assessment and thus get something akin to 360° feedback. If you think you know me reasonably well and would like to assess me, click here.

I haven’t followed the whole Dubai port thing enough to have an opinion, but it’s striking that some Republicans see this as part of a pattern of abuse from the White House.

“This was a sound business decision,” said a senior Republican operative of the Dubai deal, “and an absolutely inept political decision. But this is what happens when you’ve spent five and a half years telling your Republican friends to go screw themselves.”

(Emphasis added.) Source: New York Daily News via Andrew Sullivan

Even right-wing whackos like Michelle Malkin are raising a stink. Though yesterday Rush Limbaugh accused opponents of it of racism:

Isn’t it ironic that we have this dumb, Texas rube, frat boy defending tolerance and the rights of minorities, and we have the Democratic Party and the nuanced elitist, smarter than everyone else in the room liberals acting on blind racism and profiling?

(Emphasis added.) Read the whole thing here. I guess Malkin is now a liberal.

Today in Gmail I clicked on the Spam folder to make sure there were no false positives. Check out the RSS item at the top.

…so of course it must be the fault of the Jews. I can understand (but not agree with) the American flag, but why drag Israel into this? Sigh…

The Samarra Shrine, before and after. Imagine a similar attack on, say, Notre Dame or St. Peter’s Basilica

Update: TIME has a good photo essay here.

I’ve heard several informed reporters comment that a low-level civil war has been under way in Iraq for quite sometime. Today’s apocalyptic attack by Sunnis against Shiites looks like Iraq’s version of the attack on Ft. Sumter, though bloodier.

Even Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, long a voice of restraint in the face of violence against his Shiite followers, hinted that the attack on the shrine required a militant response.

“The Iraqi government now is supported more than ever, and if its security apparatuses are not able to offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it, with the help of God,” according to a statement released by Sistani’s office in Najaf.

I just came across this site courtesy of Brad Feld: Save Google Free China

Let me state at the outset that I am disappointed that Google is censoring results in China. However, I don’t believe they have a choice. If you set up shop in a foreign country, you have to follow their laws. Period. The only option is for Google not to set up in China. Some argue that they shouldn’t be there at all. Here’s my take on why China’s citizens are ultimately better off with Google there.

I believe that a democratic revolution in China will not be because of people yearning for abstract concepts like democracy and freedom. Rather, it will be driven by kitchen-table issues such as the environment (safe drinking water), workplace safety (China loses a tremendous number of people in mining accidents every year) and property rights (the government is quick to condemn old neighborhoods in favor of developers).

Contrary to the image of China as an authoritarian place with no free speech, there are already thousands of protests every year, usually around these issues.

Because of this, I think the value Google brings to China is not pictures of Tianenman Square crackdown, but rather information about, say, PCBs, or how workplace safety is managed in the West. Or even better, tips for organizing a protest. These real-world issues are not censored in China to the same extent that politically explosive (embarrassing, face-breaking) things like Tianenmen Square are.

Many things are openly discussed. For example, everyone there agrees that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were disasters, and they’re free to say so on web sites, in print and on TV.

Don’t get me wrong: China is far from a model of liberty and democracy. But it’s better today than it was 10 years ago, and the Internet (along with western investment) has helped create that reality. I would bet all kinds of money that will be saying the same thing 10 years from now, and Google will have played an important role, much more so than if they stay out.

I agree with David Velleman at Left2Right. Having had my own recent brush with kooky holocaust deniers, I know that they see things through the crackpot worldview and looooove conspiracy theories, especially about Jews (of course).

David Irving has been shown to be a fraud in a court of law, and he has no one to blame but himself because he brought the lawsuit.

That said, I think it’s wrong to proscribe even crackpot speech, and provided there is no incitement to violence, certainly no one should ever go to jail. The Austrian courts have escalated Irving to martyrhood and he’ll be a rallying cry for the next generation of neo-Nazis.

Historians, humanities professors and scientists should all speak out against this. Irving must not be allowed to become the Galileo of the Holocaust denial industry.