Different ... but not better

 I’ve been writing for publication on and off throughout my life. Started at 14 for a local newsletter, then a community paper (a “shopper”), then in college and beyond.

My experiences in journalism informed my attitude as a copywriter. I’ve never been afraid of editing, nor felt my words were too precious or perfect to be improved. In fact, one of the best things I’ve done (in my opinion) was a piece on a local food market for the Miami Herald, where the editor had a question about almost every paragraph I wrote. Rather than resent it, I loved it because it made me dig a little deeper and improved the article immensely.

As a marketing copywriter, I’ve dealt with advertising salespeople and managers with (as they say) varying degrees of expertise regarding copywriting. (I will have to devote a full entry to my first experience at my initial copywriting gig after I left the music biz. I still have scars from that one!)

I value a fresh set of eyes, and the experience and expertise a sharp editor brings.

One job I had a while back involved a wide variety of writing. I did everything from web copy to emails, ads, banners and signage, magazine articles, blogs — you get the idea.

Many of the things I wrote went to whoever requested them and were never seen again, at least not by me. I mean, I assume the copy I wrote for a sign at a convention was used at the event, but once it was approved, I went on to the next thing. Of course, I tried to add a bit of panache and creativity whenever possible but sometimes it wasn’t an option and that was fine. I was (and am) a pro.

The longer pieces involving a bit of research AND creativity were another matter. I really enjoyed the investigative part of it, and the interviews and data-mining, as such, were fun. And since they were almost always for internal clients, putting a sales spin on them engaged my creativity, so it wasn’t pure journalism, though it was fact-based. And since most of them were for publication — either online or in print — I was able to see the finished product.

Invariably, I’d discover that they had been rewritten. Not enhanced, corrected or amended ... just reworded. Were they improved? Clarified? Made more compelling? Nope! I even showed a few before-and-afters to colleagues ... who told me the same thing was happening to them.

I was on pretty good terms with the rewriter (a manager), and after the second or third time, I asked why they’d done it. The response was vague: “Oh, I just tightened it up,” or something to that effect. I soon gave up and went with the flow until I was let go I was laid offmy position was eliminated a couple of years later, give or take.

One of my colleagues, a person who’d been there far longer than I, said that the rewriting manager was just another dog that needed to mark its territory. No more and no less. An apt metaphor, I think.

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke, as Freud famously didn’t say.

Originally published on Substack.

Book review: Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World.

 

Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World. Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval, Delia Marshall. Doubleday. 256 pages (Click here or on the cover image to purchase this book.) BY RICHARD PACHTER Originally published on Monday, October 27, 2003 in The Miami Herald. Hey you! Pay attention! If only it were that easy. For advertising, the challenge is attracting eyes, ears and imaginations to inspire purchases. But in a world of competing messages, cutting through the clutter is nearly impossible. Now more than ever we are inured to most advertising, yet somehow ads do get through to their target audience and are effective. They are remembered, discussed, and even move merchandise. How is this alchemy possible? There have been a number of recent books advising marketers in these endeavors, including Seth Godin's Purple Cow and Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks, but it has always been tough creating ads that work. It's harder now, since customers' time and attention is severely diffused and limited. Advertising executives Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, aided by writer Delia Marshall, contribute a bright, breezy, but deadly serious guide to creating a buzz -- and a bang. They possess more credibility than many other authors; their agency is responsible for some of the most impressive, high-impact ads seen in recent years: Clairol's Herbal Essence Shampoo, AFLAC Insurance, Toys R Us, the Red Cross and more. And how does one make effective ads? They write: "According to The Economist magazine, people see over 3,000 messages each day but, like cooked spaghetti, only a couple of them stick to the wall. As a result, no one is sitting on the edge of his or her seat waiting to hear what you have to say. You need to disrupt the established paradigm to get through. Edward De Bono, the father of lateral thinking, noted that problem solving involves abandoning accepted, logical thought processes and rearranging and reevaluating the status quo. You must forget about what makes sense and open yourself up to the real reason why a particular brand or product is appealing. Great, explosive marketing or advertising ideas will only rise to the surface when everyone at the company is able to reject what worked in the past and embrace this kind of counterintuitive thinking.'" In other words, emotion beats logic, and a product or service's true ''Unique Selling Proposition'' is often counter to what the company thinks it is. The smart solution is not always the obvious one (and it's sometimes the dumbest one imaginable). This is not entirely new; advertising guru David Ogilvy would surely agree with much of what they say. Rather, Thaler and Koval adapt many of the strongest, most basic principles of marketing and promotion to modern media realities and aesthetics, and they provide plenty of anecdotes and examples to make the journey a pleasant one. Can you apply their approach specifically to your business? Perhaps, but even if you can't, their freewheeling and challenging notions will surely stimulate your own thoughts, and you may come up with your own marketing eruption.

Book review: Business: The Ultimate Resource by Daniel Goleman et al

 Pound for Pound, Goleman's Book is the Best Around.

Business: The Ultimate Resource. Daniel Goleman et al. Perseus Publishing. 2,200 pages.

BY RICHARD PACHTER
rpachter@wordsonwords.com

Chances are, you're never going to read this book, but that's all right, I haven't read it either - at least not the whole thing. But if you buy this giant compendium of business wisdom, you'll probably refer to it on a daily basis.

Created by an international team of writers, editors and authorities on a variety of aspects of business and management, this authoritative and comprehensive volume is encyclopedic in scope. Old business, new economy - it's all here, with contributions from Warren Bennis, Peter L. Bernstein, John Seely Brown, Jim Collins, Charles Handy, Thomas Petzinger Jr., David Weinberger and many others.

Goleman, the putative frontman for this ambitious endeavor, which is a collaboration between American publisher Perseus and the United Kingdom's Bloomsbury, offers a thoughtful explanation of the rationale - and practical value - behind this huge undertaking. He writes "business literacy [is] a working familiarity with the key thinking and writing that business people need to keep up with. Given the thousands of books and articles published each year for business people, it's virtually impossible to keep current with the explosion of new ideas and concepts - not to mention weeding out the quickly fading fads of the moment. The majority of that unwieldy mass of ideas and insights offered up each year will fall away like leaves in autumn. But year after year there are thinkers whose insights prove worthwhile, because they make a practical difference — they add to business intelligence, and prove their worth by ways they matter at work. Business advantage is gained by harnessing smart ideas — not just amorphous data, the latest technology, or a larger-than-life CEO. As each of us goes through the ups and downs, crises and triumphs, of a life in business, the brain automatically extracts lessons for confronting similar situations in the future. Over the years we each build up a set of tacitly learned decision rules - life's lessons - which constitute the sum total of our wisdom on the matter. But each of us has only a specific, limited set of life experiences - and so a restricted set of lessons — informing our business wisdom. We can each benefit from expanding the pool of lessons learned, given the unpredictable nature of challenges we will face tomorrow."

This 2,200-page extravaganza is loaded with all kinds of interesting and useful sections, including a world almanac covering 26 industry-sector surveys, profiles of the United States and 150 other countries and every U.S. state; dozens of best-practice essays; biographies of business leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, Adam Smith, Henry Ford, Estée Lauder and others; digests of what the editors consider to be the 70 most influential business books; a lexicon of business terms; an anthology of quotations; and backgrounders on dozens of topics like accounting, intellectual property, mission statements, team building, venture capital and (as they say) much, much more
.
All in all, it's an extremely well done effort. Pound for pound, in fact, it may be the best purchase one could make for a business library.

POWER LUNCH Cajun/Creole fare will brighten your day

 

Published in The Miami Herald on Monday, 1/05/04 POWER LUNCH Cajun/Creole fare will brighten your day Creolina's has been a fixture of Himmarshee Village for years. Its New Orleans-style cooking may be ideal cuisine for a business lunch. BY RICHARD PACHTER The atypically quaint area of Fort Lauderdale known as Himmarshee Village features a lively mix of restaurants and clubs. It's just a few blocks from the Broward Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Discovery and Science on one side, and Las Olas Riverfront on the other. It's also within walking distance of numerous downtown offices, making it a perfect getaway for a noontime break or a business meeting and meal. Creolina's is a fixture of Himmarshee's colorful Southwest Second Street. Its New Orleans-style cooking may be the ideal cuisine for a business luncheon. If you're experiencing an unpleasant day, it's sure to improve it, and if you're having a good one, it will only make it better. On a recent weekday visit between Christmas and New Year's, Creolina's, which seats about 60 inside and maybe another dozen outside, was uncharacteristically quiet, with only about four interior tables occupied for lunch. Upon arrival, I was instantly and warmly greeted by assistant manager Rosemary O'Neal, who invited me to sit wherever I liked. My two guests, Aventura sedation dentistry guru Dr. Howard Hoffman, and his brother, Neil, the founding publisher of Florida Design magazine and other publications, arrived shortly afterward. Rosie was occupied with other guests, but another server quickly moved in, handed out menus and took our drink orders, giving us a chance to study the décor -- an eclectic mix of hanging wall art and plants. The dining room has a pleasant, funky-but-chic ambience, wholly in character with owner-chef Mark Sulzinski's deft interpretation of New Orleans' fabled Creole and Cajun fare. But is this food for everyone, or specifically, is it suitable for business lunches where hosts may be ignorant of guests' likes and dislikes? Though some might expect a menu replete with hellishly fiery and strange cayenne-laden concoctions, Sulzinski and executive chef Kevin Guay cook up a nice variety of fish, poultry, red meat, pasta and more. Befitting its Louisiana roots, red beans, rice, shrimp, crayfish, jambalaya and gumbo are featured prominently, but the heat is held to a minimum, and one can raise the temperature accordingly with a plethora of bottled hot sauces that are available upon request. Creolina's lunch menu is, naturally, a more concise version of its dinner offerings. Jambalaya, grilled chicken and smoked sausage in a spicy Creole sauce served over rice, is a bargain at $7.95 (or a dollar more with shrimp). Crayfish etouffée features the tail meat of the tiny freshwater crustacean, also in Creole sauce with rice, and bread and butter for just a nickel under ten bucks. Simpler fare, such as a plate of red beans and rice topped with scallions, is a mere $6.95. A Cajun combo, combining all three of these plates, goes for $10.95. Gumbo, the red beans and rice, and crayfish bisque can be ordered as starters for $2.25 a cup, and double that for a full bowl. Salads include grilled teriyaki chicken, grilled or blackened shrimp, blue crab or Caesar with grilled or blackened shrimp or chicken. These prices would be remarkable for competently prepared food served in a cafeteria setting, but the quality of Creolina's offerings is first rate, and the service is professional and accommodating. The restaurant also features a different lunch special every day. On the day of my visit, it was Maryland crab cakes: two jumbo cakes with a dollop of chipotle cream sauce served with that ubiquitous rice, cold roasted corn and black-eyed pea salad, and garlic toast -- all for just $7.95. If Creolina's sounds too good to be true, it's not entirely without fault. After we finished our lunch that day, Neil asked for a cup of espresso. Sounded good to me, too. Oops; our server said that she'd been meaning to pick some up for the last week or so, but they were out, and she didn't offer any alternatives -- not even a cafecito. Maybe not a deal breaker, but still, business is business. BUSINESS LOGISTICS • Rating:  (The highest rating is four stars.) • Details: A little off the beaten path, though not hard to find. Metered street parking is plentiful in the area. THE BASICS • Address: 209 SW Second St., Fort Lauderdale. 954-524-2003. • Type of Food: Cajun, Creole fare. • Average Prices: $15 per person for main course, appetizer and drinks. • Service: Pleasant and familiar, but professional. • Atmosphere: Bourbon Street transplanted to Broward County. • Best for: Entertaining clients who are bored with the usual. Dutch treat lunches with co-workers. • Linger Factor: Let the good times roll. • Hours: Lunch: 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. Dinner: 5 to 9 p.m., Sunday and Monday; 5 to 10 p.m., Tuesday to Thursday; 5 to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday. Sandwich window (gyros, Polish sausage, chicken pita wraps and salads): midnight to 4 a.m., Friday and Saturday. • Credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express. • Reservations: Usually not necessary, but not a bad idea.

NY-Style Offense

 

I’m in a Facebook group where someone (an admin) posted their disappointment with a slice of pizza and mentioned they’re from Brooklyn. That was basically it. No, “it wasn’t as good as a NY slice.” They merely referred to their Brooklyn origin and got torched by someone who took offense to an imagined (though unstated) comparison to something local. 

Why would that be offensive? 

When someone came to the OP’s defense, they got a similar — and ruder — response from the self-aggrieved person. The rude comment and subsequent thread were deleted after a few hours, presumably by an admin (but maybe the original commenter sobered up). 

But if anyone watches TV, you'll see commercials for at least one national pizza chain touting its “NY-style” product. Yet saying pizza (or Chinese-American fare) is “NY-style” seems to offend some non-New Yorkers. 

I’ve seen pizza called NY-style touted in California, for example, and I don’t know if Angelenos are as upset as some Floridians are by that reference. It’s really a selling point, a shorthand for the style of food.

I've seen "Boston-style Chinese food" and it evoked curiosity, not offense. Same with "Montreal-style bagels." 

But there's clearly an anti-NY vibe in South Florida, probably because New Yorkers are rarely bashful. And the obnoxious ones are often really obnoxious. But that doesn't mean they all are or that anything "NY-style" isn't good — or better.

If any eatery thinks they’ll get extra customers by saying they sell “Lake Worth-style pizza,” “Tamarac-style Chinese food,” “Boca-Raton-style bagels,” etc., so be it. Not holding my breath, though. 

Interview with Legendary Superman artist, Wayne Boring

A Rare Interview with Superman's Godfather, 
The Man Who Took You to Krypton;
WAYNE BORING

by Richard Pachter 

Interview first published in Amazing Heroes 41 February 15, 1984

Wayne Boring calls himself "the cat who started this whole mess with Jerry and Joe!" — with an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence — just like in a comic book word balloon. He's right, of course. After Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman and started the super hero genre, Boring's art gave the character power and grace and put him in a realistic-but-fantastic setting. His Superman is actually the definitive one. All other artists who've drawn the big guy from Al Plastino to Curt Swan to Dick Dillin to Joe Staton to Jose Garcia Lopez or anybody consciously or not follows Boring's example. 

When artist Joe Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel, two teenagers from Cleveland, first put the strip together, it was intended as a newspaper feature. Comic books weren't even considered at first, since most were reprints of material originally prepared for the daily and Sunday press. After gettting rejected by the syndicates, who distributed the strips around the country, Jerry and Joe placed their Man of Steel with Irwin Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz's Detective Comics, Inc. 

When Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), he was an immediate hit. The demand for original material by DC obliged Jerry Siegel to find an assistant for Joe Shuster. He placed an advertisement in Writer's Digest. 

Wayne Boring recalls: "I carried the magazine in my back pocket for a couple of weeks until I dropped them a line. And I got an answer back. I sent some samples of my work." 

At the time, Boring lived in Norfolk, Va. working as an artist advertising salesman at the Virginia Pilot. Born and raised in Minnesota and South Dakota, Boring attended the Minneapolis Institute of Art after high school and studied anatomy at the Chicago Art institute with J. Allen St. John, the illustrator of the original Tarzan stories. 

Although Wayne made a decent living at the Pilot, he wanted to be a cartoonist like his idols Frank Godwin and James Montgomery Flagg. When jerry Siegel asked him to come to New York, he jumped at the chance, secured a leave of absence from the paper, took a train to the Big Apple, and met Jerry at Grand Central Station. Siegel met him there and they went to see Joe Shuster. 

"Joe was living over on Third Avenue in a real rat-hole right on the elevated (subway)," Wayne laughed. "He had a room with a cot that you had to walk over to get to the other end! And there was the elevated right outside his window! Joe was a very timid little guy who wore elevator shoes. He got up and we shook hands on the bed." 

Jerry and Joe asked Wayne to move back to Cleveland with them. They set up a shop and were joined by three other artists — Paul Cassidy, Leo Nowack and John Sikela. DC had sold a daily and Sunday newspaper strip to the Bell McClure Syndicate, which placed it with hundreds of papers around the country. Boring pencilled, inked and even lettered the strip, which, like virtually all the Superman material during the time, was written by Jerry Siegel. Wayne also worked on stories for Action and Superman comics. 

I asked Wayne how they'd work. Did Jerry write the scripts and then have Joe lay them out? Boring replied, "At first, Joe would sketch it out pretty lightly and we'd work over it. Later, he developed something wrong with his hand and his eyes were very bad. He already wore very thick glasses. Now, he's almost blind. But he came in one day and started to delegate the work to someone else. He wore a gadget a doctor gave him -- a leather glove that completely immobilized his hand!" 

Boring laughed as he talked about the studio. "We had an office about 12 by 12 with four drawing boards set up there. Jerry had a desk in the anteroom. But it was the smallest office in Cleveland. 

"Once, some reporters came out to interview Jerry and Joe for an article for the Saturday Evening Post. they had photographers and everything. So they were photographing Joe and talking to him and here I was working with my back to the.em. One of the reporters came over and said, 'Would you please leave because we need the room!'" 

I asked Wayne if, in the beginning, DC knew that he had been drawing Superman. 

"No,," he replied. "They kept that pretty much in the dark, and I didn't sign it at that time." 

In addition to Superman, Jerry Siegel wrote other features for DC, including Slam Bradley and Spy. But the company wanted him to spend all his time chronicling the adventures of The Man Of Steel. 

"Donenfeld and Liebowitz came out to Cleveland and had a hell of an argument with Jerry," Wayne recalled. "They were paying him a fee for writing and they said 'Jerry, stop writing all this other crap! All we want you to do is write Superman' and Jerry had grown up poverty-stricken and said 'Look, I'm gonna write it all!' I think they paid him ten dollars a page for writing and they said they'd make up for it by paying him more to do Superman, but he said no. He was going to hang on to Slam Bradley and the others. Of course that didn't last." 

In 1940, the Siegel and Shuster shop moved to New York City, at the urging of DC. Wayne, along with his bride Lois, made the trip to New York, too. 

As Superman grew in popularity, a series of animated features were made by the Max Fleischer Studios for Paramount. A radio show also went on the air and was quite successful. 

Siegel and Shuster and their team of artists continued to supply DC and Bell-McClure with hundreds of pages of material a year. Even after World War II broke out and Siegel went into the army, he continued to send in scripts to be drawn, although others started to contribute to the Superman legend around this time. 

Despite the war, comics were booming. In addition to the usual pre-teen market, millions of servicemen now read comics, too. And after the war, the famous post-war baby boom continued the upward sales spiral. 

Superman brought in millions of dollars for DC, but not nearly that much for its creators. Boring and the other artists were relatively well-paid by Siegel and Shuster, who in turn were paid by DC. But Dc owned Superman and didn't share the revenues generated by the outside merchandising, the cartoons, the radio shows, and (later) the movie serial and the television show. 

Wayne Boring recalled the origin of the situation: "Donenfeld and Liebowitz knew that Superman was a hit, so they called these kids (Jerry and Joe) in and told 'em, 'Here, sign this' and they did and they signed away all their rights. Of course it was a swindle." 

Why didn't Siegel and Shuster fight it? Boring's opinion is that the company "scared the hell out of these kids. DC had a whole pack of lawyers. These guys would come in with their briefcases and there would be these two kids from Cleveland...!" 

Eventually, Siegel and Shuster brought suit against DC. But they sued Wayne Boring, too. 

He recalls: "Jerry hired a lawyer, the lousiest lawyer I've ever seen. I was sued for abrogation of contract and told that I was fired. Why his attorney advised him to do that, I don't know, but he said, 'You're no longer drawing Superman!'" 

How did he feel about being sued for no apparent reason by his employers? "I didn't care about it. Not really. I also worked for Johnstone & Cushing, an advertising agency. I got 600 bucks for a half-page, which Stan Kaye would ink for me. Remember How to Fly a Piper Cub? I did that. 

"But I went to see Jack Liebowitz at DC and said, 'Look, what the hell is this thing?' And he said that they were being sued by Siegel and Shuster and that I should continue to work for them (DC) until it was straightened out." 

So Wayne Boring worked directly for the company now, while Siegel and Shuster went ahead with their case. But their suit never got off the ground. Jerry Siegel wrote for several other comic companies until returning to Dc in 1959. He wrote many more Superman, Supergirl, and Superboy stories as well as The Legion of Super-Heroes. 

Joe Shuster didn't fare as well. With his bad eyes, he was unable to draw or do any other graphic work. He left comics completely. In the late seventies, Neal Adams and other comic creators and fans crusaded for Jerry and Joe. Warner Communications, who owned DC by then, agreed to pay Siegel and Shuster a yearly pension. They also receive credit on every Superman splash page for creating The Man of Steel. 

Wayne Boring continued drawing Superman for DC into the 1960s. Originally, he was able to ink his own pencils, but because of all the scheduling demands, he eventually had to give it up. The DC bullpen occasionally inked his work, but Wayne eventually took on Stan Kaye as his regular embellisher; working closely under Boring, Kaye's inks kept the art clean and sharp and beautifully enhanced the lucid layouts. 

Wayne now worked with writers other than Siegel. Bill Finger, the original Batman scripter, wrote several Superman stories, as did Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton, Leo Dorfman and a very young Jim Shooter, who sent in little self-drawn and scripted comics to DC. 

Boring says that Edmond Hamilton was his favorite writer. "No doubt about it. He wrote good pictures. I could always visualize his descriptions. There was no effort to draw. Always smooth. His stories sang." 

Boring's work continued to mature. Whether he depicted downtown Metropolis or uptown Krytonopolis, it was always realistic. Steranko, in his History of Comics, refers to Wayne's "towering cities." However, the realism he brought to this fantastic otherworldly feature made Superman visually compelling throughout the '50s and '60s. 

Editorially, Wayne worked first with Whitney Ellsworth and Jack Schiff, but later (and finally) with the legendary Mort Weisinger. 

Weisinger, originally a science fiction fan, agent and editor, came aboard as writer for the Sunday Superman strip, according to Boring. He eventually became editor of the line and stretched the Superman legend to include many more survivors of Krypton, as well as a host of Bizarros and other looney heroes and villains. 

Boring recalls a stormy but productive relationship. Weisinger was somewhat difficult to work with and bullied artists and writers, he said. 

One day in 1966, Weisinger told Boring he was fired. Wayne was astonished and asked, "You mean I'm not working for you anymore?" 

Weisinger repeated: "You're fired!"

Boring persisted, "Fired? What do you mean? All you've got to do is stop sending me scripts!" 

Weisinger then said, "Do you need a kick in the stomach to know you're not wanted?" 

Weisinger said he'd call Stan Lee and try to find something for Boring at Marvel. Wayne said he liked what he called Marvel's "punchy style," but after doing some sample work for the company, didn't get any work just yet. 

The day after he was sacked by Weisinger, he contacted Hal Foster, and went to work for him as his assistant (and ghost) on Prince Valiant. Wayne later worked with Sam Leff on Davy Jones, another newspaper strip, and with John Prentice on Rip Kirby. 

But it must have been a shock to be fired from Superman. Wayne recalls, "I was kind of down after 30 years." 

As for Weisinger, "I was afraid I'd die and go to hell and he'd be in charge! That would have been the capper!" he laughed. Wayne eventually did do some work for Marvel Comics, including some Captain Marvel art, with a Roy Thomas-scripted issue of Thor a few years back. 

Now 66 and working as a part-time security guard, Boring draws a bit and started painting several years ago. He says, "Painting has improved my drawing 1000 percent. Now I'm cussing myself that I didn't start years ago. By God! I've still got some punch yet!" 

He frequently hears from fans and loves to talk about his work on Superman. The fans, of course, love to talk to him. Ultimate fan Fred Hembeck, in fact, met Wayne at a comic convention a few years back in Orlando and the two artists swapped sketches. 

Sitting on his patio, I told him that Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane returned to DC, once again drawing and entertaining a new generation of fans, and also about the company's new enlightened and benevolent management which seems to be far more considerate towards it artists than its predecessors. I wondered if Wayne would want to draw Superman comics again. 

He paused for a few seconds and said, "You know, I'm pretty well situated now. This is a mild job I've got, as a day security man. They're the nicest people I've ever met. They pay me well." He paused again and looked me in the eye and said softly, "Of course. Yeah, I'd like to get back to drawing, now that you mention it." 

Will the man who drew the classic "Superman's Return to Krypton" himself return to DC Comics and the Man of Steel? Stay tuned ...

(P.S. He did, but that's another story ... )
 

The No Asshole Rule

 

Book stresses curbing vile workplace behavior

It may no longer be necessary to tolerate really bad behavior in the workplace, according to this new book, which also discusses how to modify the behavior of habitual offenders.

BY RICHARD PACHTER

 

Originally published in The Miami Herald on 4/2/07

 

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. Robert I. Sutton. Warner Business Books. 210 Pages.

 

Are you an asshole?

 

Of course not.

 

But if you were, you probably would not admit it. After all, bad guys rarely consider themselves villains, and even the most misguided or murderous dictator usually claims a higher purpose. The people that author Robert Sutton writes about in this bracing new book are often oblivious to the unacceptability of their behavior.

 

Yet, almost every workplace seems to have several jerks who regularly run roughshod over others' rights and feelings. Most of us have toiled with weasels who blamed us for their own incompetence, laziness or malfeasance. Some may have even messed with us for the own amusement — or just because they could. I sure could tell you a few delightful stories, in fact, but as Don Corleone wisely declared, "This is business, not personal.''

 

SAY IT LIKE IT IS

 

In recent years, a new term for this stuff has gained popularity, both in the workplace and in academic settings: bullying. That's what it is. Employees who abuse their authority are craven bullies. Just as principals and teachers have come to recognize the corrosive and dehumanizing effects of such behavior, so too, have a growing number of employers.

 

It's not just bosses abusing subordinates; hostile words and/or actions directed at co-workers are also counterproductive and a waste of time and money. Sutton tells of a company in the UK that itemized the costs of the aberrant and abhorrent behavior of one such scoundrel and presented him with a bill for the expenses the company incurred as a result of his antics. Though commendable, the author points out that it's still a half-measure and that the firm really should have just fired the bad bloke.

 

Sutton provides a very solid and honest examination of the phenomenon but is not above recounting his own behavior when it veered near the precipice of iniquity. And there's a large dose of good-natured humor throughout the text, as any genuine discussion of human behavior must include, but he's also pragmatic. Despite his solid academic credentials, he is well acquainted with the world beyond the ivy-covered walls.

 

HUMOR AND SOLUTIONS

 

While the diverse examples and knowing asides Sutton invokes are interesting and reveal the ubiquity and universality of purposefully intemperate conduct, he also discusses a number of possible reactions and remedies. There is a lot of humor in his anecdote about the put-upon office worker whose boss always ate the food on her desk. The disgruntled employee left some chocolate laxatives for the transgressor -- with the expected results -- but the ideal approach to handling such situations varies, Sutton explains. Too often, however, management can't or won't take matters seriously until a subpoena or lawsuit serves as a wake-up call.

 

Even more interesting to me is Sutton's informal survey of organizations that actually implement the dictum of this book's title. It's tough, for example, to toss out a top performer who is otherwise a total SOB, but companies that are truly serious about creating and maintaining a positive and non-threatening workplace are well worth exploring.

 

Don't you wonder if any of 'em are hiring?