Is Your Content Generalizable?

I attend a fair number of education programs and, as a result, listen to a fair number of speakers and presentations. Sometimes, the most rewarding kind of speaker is someone from outside my industry, speaking on how they address and solve challenges in their industry. I can often find nuggets of wisdom or new ways of approaching my own challenges by listening to these kind of speakers. Innovation frequently comes, after all, straight out of these attempts at cross-fertilization.

To make this kind of thing work, however, it is important for both the speaker and the participant to understand which parts of the presentation are generalizable and which are not.

Let's say you're listening to a presentation from a speaker outside your industry. She's talking about a common problem -- something facing organizations of all types in all industries -- and she's presenting a case study of her own business. When faced with X, my company does Y.

You recognize X as the common problem that it is, but you also realize that Y won't work in your organization or perhaps in your industry. It relies on a resource or a tactic that you don't have access to. Let's call that resource or tactic Z. So you ask the presenter a question. Let's assume you don't have access to Z, and therefore can't use Y as a solution to X. What do you do then?

You're essentially looking for the speaker the generalize her strategy. To step up and out of the specifics of her own situation, and help you tackle the challenge you actually face from a fresh perspective.

In my experience, some speakers can do this and some can't. Some will accept the challenge you've given them and start brainstorming with you. Don't have Z? Hmmm. Then you can't do Y. In that situation, I would probably do A, or maybe B. In this situation, A and B are the nuggets of gold you're looking for, potentially new ways of tackling difficult problems in your industry.

But some will retrench on Y. They can't generalize. They are so myopically focused on their own situation and the solutions they've created that they'll simply reject, perhaps unconsciously, the premise of your question. They'll start talking about Y again. Even though you've told them Y is impractical in your space, it's so practical in theirs that they won't be able to abandon it.

Whenever this happens, I usually find myself asking if the speaker in question really understands her own content, or the audience she is speaking to. Her purpose in speaking, after all, is not to just relay information, but to teach me something new.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Exception to the Rule by Peter Rea, James K. Stoller, and Alan Kolp

This one was sort of assigned reading. The association I work for is working to define the culture of its Board of Directors, and the Board chair recommended that everyone read this book. I think he both likes its conclusions and wanted to invite one of its authors to come speak to us.

To be honest, I had a difficult time with it.

Its thesis, if I understand it right, is that the best culture is one based on virtue, and specifically, the seven classical virtues first described 2,500 years ago by Plato: Trust, Compassion, Courage, Justice, Wisdom, Temperance, and Hope. Regardless of the competitive circumstances, the team that unfailingly acts in a virtuous manner will beat any other team that is sown with uncertainties and suspicions about the intentions of its own people.

And I can go along with that. The problems come when we start unpacking each one of the seven virtues, describing what it is and what it means to practice it as a part of an organization’s culture. That’s where the attractive simplicity of the book’s thesis begins to lose its coherence.

Trust gets linked to concepts like engagement and empowerment. Compassion gets linked to concepts like safety and accountability. Courage gets linked to growth. Justice to selflessness. Wisdom to leveraging strengths and managing weaknesses. Pretty soon it doesn’t feel like we’re talking about the seven classical virtues any more. It feels like we’re talking about the things that dozens of other management books talk about. In other words, it’s not really about the seven virtues; it’s about fifteen or so best practices, which we have loosely organized under the seven virtues. After all, you can position anything as wisdom by simply saying “Wise leaders want a highly engaged workforce.”

At one point, the authors even wander into the philosophical minefield of brain science.

We can learn to be better teammates by gaining insights into how our brain works under pressure, when our interpersonal skills and teamwork are tested. The architecture of our brain is built on emotions. We feel first and think second, making it unrealistic to control our emotions under all circumstances. Executive functions, which include working memory, self-regulation, and flexibility, are the neurological building blocks that underpin resilience and perseverance. It is very difficult to achieve resilience, curiosity, and tenacity without first developing a neurological foundation of executive functions and the capacity for self-awareness forged by practicing virtue.

Did you catch the uncited linkage to virtue at the end? Practicing virtue may or may not leverage neuroscience, but what follows is a few paragraphs of seemingly practical advice about how to take advantage of the fact that our brains often feel before they think. In wrapping the section up, the authors say:

In the end, we can only control one brain -- our own.

Now, perhaps it’s best not to ask philosophical questions when reading a book about management -- but that sentence literally stopped me in my tracks. Shouldn’t it be, “In the end, our brain can only control one person -- us”? And what does such an inversion -- that we are controlled by our brains, not the other way around -- mean for management science in general?

I, for one, would love to read a book about that.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Contacts of Quality, Not Just Quantity

I lead a trade association. That means that our members are technically companies, not people; but, of course, the companies in question are made up of people, and we work hard to maintain good contacts and communications with those people.

A common objective for trade associations is to grow the number of contacts that they have at each of their member companies. Frequently, even though the decision to join or renew membership in the association rests with one individual, it is seen as advantageous to have a number of other "champions" within the company who find value in the association's programs and services. In making her decision, the boss may very well ask around her organization. "Is anyone getting any benefit from this expensive dues payment we make every year?" If the answer is yes, the boss is much more likely to keep writing those checks.

In this spirit we recently did an inventory of the contacts in our member database. We typically classify our contacts based on the role that they play in their company -- for example, are they an Executive? a Marketing Professional? an Engineer? a Human Resource Professional? And in our first pass we focused almost exclusively on quantities. How many contacts do we have? How many in each category? How many per company? How many in each category per company?

It was a good first dive into the subject, but the quantitative focus immediately revealed some weaknesses. For many companies, we have almost an overabundance of contacts in our database. Names and emails no one in my staff organization is familiar with. Some of them dating back years and years.

My initial reaction was that we need to inventory the quality of our contacts as well as the quantity. For how many companies, for example, can we say we have a solid Executive, Marketing, Engineering, and Human Resource contact? Solid as in someone on staff can put a face with a name and that they participate in some activity of our association?

Whatever that number is, working to increase that -- rather than just the raw number of contacts per company in the database -- seems much more likely to pay dividends when it comes to our member retention and engagement objectives.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Dragons - Chapter 11 (DRAFT)

It was quite a day, even for a company as dysfunctional as that one. Amy Crawford got fired. Caroline Abernathy got both a tongue lashing and a write up. And Susan Sanford resigned in protest. With the benefit of hindsight, I would say it was clearly the beginning of the end.

I was in all three meetings, although my final encounter with Susan could be better termed a brush-off than a meeting. By the time I caught up with her she was already in her office, taking some books of her shelf and putting them in an old copy paper box.

“Susan, wait a minute,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I quit, Alan,” she said plainly, her tone incredulous, probably at the idea that I may not be smart enough to have figured that out. “I’ve never left a job so quickly before, but I’ve had it. This place and I do not share the same values. The sooner I’m gone the better.” She stooped to pull her purse out of her bottom desk drawer and she dropped it into the box next to her books.

“Susan, please,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mary. We’ll address the situation with Wes.”

Susan gave me a skeptical look, and then moved around me to remove her coat from the hanger on the back of her door.

“You may talk to her, Alan,” she said as she shrugged into her coat, “but she’s not going to listen. She’s made her decision. She’d rather defend the abuser than protect the abused—and I won’t be a part of that.”

She walked past me again and retrieved her box from her desk. I felt a little like a turnstile at the entrance to the subway, constantly spinning in place while the people who mattered buzzed by and on to better things. With her box tucked under one arm and her coat already buttoned, she turned smartly back towards me and extended a hand. Not knowing what else to do, I shook it.

“Good luck, Alan,” she said. “I should be mad at you for the way you set me up in there, but I think you might’ve actually done me a favor. If you do decide to go up against her, watch your back. Mary strikes me as the kind who poisons her prey before eating it.”

And with that she was past me again, leaving her office behind and striding victoriously down towards the elevator. Moving out to her doorway, I watched with the rest of the office as she calmly waited for the car to arrive, then entered and vanished with the pneumatic hiss of the closing doors. In our last image of her, she was holding her head high, gazing out over the heads of those of us who remained.

The meetings with Amy and Caroline quickly followed. Susan’s dramatic exit had caught everyone’s fascination, but as soon as she was gone, Don popped out of his office and began weaving his way between the pods, telling everyone to get back to work.

When he got to the pod where Amy, Caroline, and the rest of the Education staff sat, he told Amy to report to his office and Caroline to stay at her workstation until she was called. I watched as Amy seemed to quietly collect herself, absently arrange a few files in her workspace, and then rise and begin making her way towards Don’s office. Once she was moving, Don’s eyes came up and found me standing in Susan’s office door. His face was expressionless, and he pointed at me and then hooked his finger down towards his office.

A minute later we were all gathered around Don’s conference table, Amy sitting where Susan had most recently sat, the rest of us in our same positions. Amy looked nervous but a little resigned to her fate. She was a young woman with long, flowing hair—the kind you might see in a shampoo commercial—but she had been with the company for a while and surely knew what was coming next.

An odd quiet settled over the room as we all waited for Don to begin, but Don’s eyes were downcast, his fingers busy fiddling with his class ring, and stopping every once and awhile to crack one of his thick knuckles. Mary sat looking directly at me, her stare at once dispassionate and unsettling, and I found myself wondering what she was thinking. Influenced by the rumors usually spread about her, I considered the possibility that she might not be thinking at all—at least not at that precise moment. Like Don seemed to be, I thought perhaps she was just passing the time until the meeting could officially begin and they could move forward with the task they had set before themselves. Until then, there was simply nothing to think or do. There was only waiting. Waiting for the moment when they would terminate one of their employees; waiting exactly like they would in line at a busy restaurant to use the restroom. In such circumstances, at such moments of empty time and inactivity, Don’s habit was evidently to crack his knuckles and play with his class ring—and it made some sense to me that Mary’s habit would be to study the people around her for weaknesses.

In a few moments Peggy Wilcox appeared on the other side of Don’s door. She was the Director of Human Resources, but in that small company that meant little more than being Don’s executive assistant. Don didn’t formally have one—no such position existed on the company’s perplexing organizational chart. Like his humble office, Don liked to pretend he was a man of the people who eschewed the trappings of power, but everyone knew Peggy was at his beck and call and handled all of his formal correspondence. She was a kind-hearted person, but had kept her position in the company through a combination of quiet competence and abiding loyalty that both Don and Mary appreciated. She stepped into the room without knocking, handed Don a slim file, and took up a position beside his closed door. She stood at attention, her chin quivering slightly before her clenched teeth forced it to be still.

The meeting did not last long. Once Don began speaking it was over in less than two minutes. It was a testament to the company’s brutal efficiency that such an action could be so well coordinated in such a short period of time—every legal requirement fulfilled and a practiced script used to keep any tinge of human emotion from soiling the cold proceedings.

Don told Amy they were letting her go—that was the phrase he used, letting her go, as if charitably releasing her from some terrible burden. He opened Peggy’s file and slid a piece of paper across the table at Amy. It floated over the veneer surface like an air hockey puck and fell practically in her lap. It was a release form, Don said, freeing the company from any liability. If she signed it, they would treat her departure like a resignation. They wouldn’t contest her unemployment insurance and would give her the standard reference should anyone call during her quest for a new position.

Amy held the document up and I watched her eyes dance across it for a few seconds. When they flashed back up there was a shine of defiance in them. “What if I don’t sign it?” she asked.

“Then you’ll be terminated for cause,” Don said simply, as if he really didn’t care what Amy decided to do. “No unemployment insurance and no good reference.”

“For what cause?” Amy persisted. “Susan just walked out of here with a box under her arm. And I’m guessing she didn’t take the time to write anything in my file before she left.”

I looked at Mary, surprised that Amy was playing this as coolly as she was. Although no one had mentioned it explicitly, it was obvious that she knew her conduct with Wes at the recent client meeting was the reason she was being let go. But Mary didn’t seem surprised. She didn’t even turn away to meet my stare, her cold and calculating gaze focused squarely on Amy. Weaknesses, I thought again. She’s looking for weaknesses.

“There’s already enough information in your file to warrant your dismissal,” Don said easily. “You have a well-documented history of inappropriate conduct. You were issued a written warning just two months ago for a similar incident.”

Amy looked down at the document again. She seemed to consider her options for a moment or two, and then set the release form back down.

“Does Wes know you’re doing this?”

To me, it was as if Amy had turned over a box of scorpions on the table. I couldn’t believe she would be so brazen. It seemed little more than a flat-out confession that there was something inappropriate going on between her and Wes Howard. Mary might have taken it that way, too, but she seemed to view it more as an opportunity than as a threat. Rather than recoil from its implications, she leaned forward, apparently willing to let the scorpions sting her.

But it was Don who spoke next, and Don was all business. “You don’t have to sign it now,” he said, ignoring Amy’s comment and bringing our attention back to the release form. “In fact, I would prefer that you didn’t. The offer it contains is good for the next seven days. You can sign and return it any time before then and we’ll honor our end of the deal. I would encourage you to take a few of those days to consider your situation, and even speak with your own legal counsel if you prefer. We’re striving for an amicable separation, and believe our offer will best help facilitate that. But ultimately, it will be your decision that determines what happens next.”

I watched as Amy looked at Don coldly, her mascaraed eyelashes blinking slowly. Don had stuck to his script, had refused to take Amy’s bait and, as a result, had extinguished the fire in her eyes. In that moment Amy looked slow-witted, like a kind of cold-blooded lizard just coming back to action after a long desert night.

Don let the silence build in the room for three seconds and then called an end to the meeting. He announced it like it had been within his ability to do so at any moment. He said that Peggy would walk Amy back to her workstation, let her collect her things, and escort her from the building.

And that’s exactly what happened next. At first, I didn’t think it would. I didn’t think that Amy would get up and leave without saying another word, but the defiance that had flashed in her eyes was no longer there. There was nothing she could do at that moment that was going to change the situation, and she probably realized that whatever cards she still held were probably better played at another place and time. Peggy’s presence undoubtedly helped. As soon as Don finished talking, Peggy attentively positioned herself at Amy’s side. She scooped the release form off the table, helped Amy push her chair away, and then guided her out of the office with an expert hand.

Things did not go quite so cleanly with Caroline. Peggy returned a few minutes later with Caroline in tow, and even before she sat down the tears were flowing. I remember thinking, no, NO, Caroline. Don’t cry. She’ll destroy you if you cry.

Don and Mary and I had passed the few uncomfortable minutes between Amy’s departure and Caroline’s arrival in almost complete silence—Don again playing with his class ring, Mary studying me with her clinical detachment, and me trying to figure out some way to ask about what had just happened with Amy. I wanted to know what they thought about Amy’s reference to Wes, if they thought it revealed what I thought it did, but I had a difficult time finding the right words to break the odd silence they both seemed so intent on keeping. As my mind searched for the solution, my eyes strayed between Don and Mary and fuzzily focused on Don’s solitary bookshelf. As typical for Don’s office, it was crammed with all manner of materials—his books maltreated with broken spines and tattered covers, and even his precious policy binders bulging with their contents, less than half of the documents actually secured in the rings.

“What do you think she meant by bringing up, Wes?” I finally managed to croak.

Don and Mary exchanged glances, a little surprised, I think, that I had spoken up at all. Don seemed to defer to Mary with an obsequious nod of his head, and Mary turned to me, her eyes bright and penetrating.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said abruptly. “I called Wes while you were off following Susan. He’s not going to cause any trouble.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but Mary’s terse tone chased them out of my mind, and in a moment the tear-streaked face of Caroline Abernathy appeared on the other side of Don’s door. Peggy escorted her inside and directed her to sit in the chair Amy had just vacated. Caroline was only a year or two out of college and usually looked like she was still pulling all-nighters at the student union. She had a couple of balled-up Kleenexes tucked in the cuff of her wrinkled cardigan, and now she pulled one out and used it to dab at the tears as they fell out of her eyes.

Don showed her no mercy, berating her savagely as she wilted and withered under the strain. The most sympathetic thing he said to her were the first four words out of his mouth—What were you thinking? He sounded initially like an angry father who had caught his teenage daughter trying to sneak into the house a few minutes before dawn after being gone all night, but he transitioned quickly into the strident taskmaster he was, simply outraged by the negligence of others.

“You obviously weren’t thinking, were you? I don’t see how you could have been, at least not thinking about your responsibilities to this organization. Travelling to client meetings is a privilege, Miss Abernathy, not a perk, and company policy clearly states that you are to conduct yourself professionally from the moment you leave the office to the moment you return. You are a representative of this company for that entire time, and your conduct must reflect the high ethical standards upon which our business model is based. By acting the way you have, you have jeopardized the reputation of this organization and may have damaged the relationship we enjoy with one of our longest-standing clients. Those are actionable offenses, and we have terminated employees in situations far less severe than this.”

It’s hard for me to recall those words and not now think about how full of corporate gobbledygook they are. In many ways, I believe, they are actually nonsense words, like something out of a Dr. Seuss story. But I watched them destroy Caroline, shriveling her up in her chair like a dying flower, and I listened as Don shouted them at her in full knowledge of the power they had—a power not unlike the one that good Doctor Seuss has warned generations of children about. The best kind of Sneetches, after all, are the ones with stars on their bellies, and Sneetches like Amy Crawford and Caroline Abernathy—well, they didn’t have any stars on thars.

It was a difficult scene to witness, and in my discomfort I averted my eyes, first seeing Mary’s vindictive sneer, and then Peggy’s look of anguished commiseration. If Don was the father punishing his daughter for some violation of the family’s moral code, then Peggy was the mother who knew the penalty was necessary but hated to see it delivered, and Mary was the sister who had jealously ratted out the daughter in the first place.

Don went on for a good ten minutes, basically repeating the same two minutes worth of material in ever louder and more incredulous performances. By the time he was finished he had half risen out of his chair, his large knobby fingers splayed wide on the table for balance and the veins in his temples pulsing with a life all their own. Spent, he collapsed heavily in his chair, tipping it momentarily back onto its rear legs and straining its loose bolts to their limits. He looked at Caroline in silence, his head shaking in disappointed frustration and his eyes staring vacantly into the space between them, as Caroline blubbered and sobbed, her face practically hidden in her hands. Eventually, he stood up, retrieved a box of tissues from on top of his bookshelf and slid them across the table to Caroline.

“Come on, now,” Don said with some small tinge of discomfort in his voice. “Get a hold of yourself.”

Caroline looked up, a pair of red and puffy eyes rising out of her hands. The tissues she had brought with her had long since disintegrated, and she pulled three fresh ones out of the box in quick succession. While wiping her eyes, her cheeks, her nose—her voice came forth, hitching with her spastic breath, hopeless and submissive. “Are you going to fire me?”

It was Mary who answered—Mary, who had not said a single word during the entire meeting with Amy, and had so far not spoken during this one.

“That depends on you, Caroline,” she said regally, not a drop of human compassion in her voice. “I am not making the decision to fire you today, but this incident will be written up and placed in your personnel file. You will receive a copy of this document later today, and it will serve as your official warning against this sort of behavior. If you demonstrate any kind of unprofessional conduct in the future, either here in the office or while travelling on business, you will be terminated immediately. Is that understood?”

Caroline did not speak, but she nodded her head.

“I’m giving you one more chance,” Mary said, sounding like the decision served Mary’s interests much more than Caroline’s “Do not disappoint me.”

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Explaining Red Lights Is Good, But That Doesn't Make Them Not Red

This article on Forbes.com caught my eye this week. It's titled Why Companies That Embrace "Red Is Good" Get The Best Results, and it makes that very argument -- that companies that rigidly adhere to an honest and unflinching measure of their success, even if it means putting those dreaded red lights on their color-coded dashboards, do better than those that purposely or otherwise fudge their yardsticks to make sure their dashboards are always covered with those pleasing green lights.

I found it reminiscent of a blog post I wrote almost six years ago. In, When Red Lights Mean Go, I describe how I typically sort the green, yellow and red lights that appear on our program performance dashboard into an "innovation matrix," where the level of risk associated with each program can more easily be taken into visual account. In that post, I made the following observation about this technique, and about red lights in general:

The red lights always scare people. By themselves, they represent failures. They indicate that we failed to meet the identified metric of success of some of our programs--and some people don't like to admit that. But in the context of our innovation matrix, the red lights also become part of our success. After all, innovation doesn't happen without them.

All of this is a timely reminder for me, as my association is beginning to assemble our final assessment of progress that will be reviewed and discussed by our Board at their strategic retreat at the end of our current fiscal year. As the data comes, we're seeing what we typically see, mostly green, a few yellow, and a handful of red lights, reflecting a year of solid success with a few areas where we fell short of the stretch goals we had set for ourselves.

For me, this is always first and foremost an opportunity for exploration. Why? Why did we not reach this goal? Typically, the answer falls into one of three buckets: lack of resources, lack of opportunity, or lack of effort; and usually in that order. Like many associations, ours is one in which our goals often outstrip the time and financial resources that we have at our disposal.

But that reality doesn't protect us from the often subliminal forces described in the Forbes.com article. People have responsibility for achieving the goals we assign to them (or that they accept themselves), and people don't like having red lights associated with their names. There is an attendant loss of prestige and, depending on the goal's connection to our bonus and compensation plan, also the possible loss of financial reward. Often, when explaining the factors that went into missing the goal, the plea will be made to change red to yellow, or sometimes even to green.

The factors are always taken into account when setting goals for the future, but the process of explaining why a light is red should never lead to changing the color of the light or the substance of the goal in question. Doing so risks creating a false level of success for the organization and, most damaging, a false understanding of the organization's execution capability. Because at the end of the day, that's what all these green, yellow, and red lights are actually measuring -- the ability of the organization to first say what it is going to achieve, and then achieve it.

And if you don't have an accurate view of that capability, how can you ever set realistic goals in the future?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-20/traffic-light/9277328

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

The version I read was one of those Norton Critical Editions -- which include not just the text of the work, but information on its backgrounds and sources, and an overview of its reviews and critical essays. And I’m glad it was, because all of that extra information helped me pull a lot more meaning out of the text and what it seemed to offer by itself.

Everyone, I think, has read Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which, if memory serves, was only this young author’s second novel. Maggie was his first, and although imperfect, is considered by many critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism.

Here’s what Crane himself said about the novel, written on a copy of the work sent to his friend and fellow author Hamlin Garland.

It is inevitable that you will be greatly shocked by this book but continue please with all possible courage to the end. For it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.

Naturalism was a literary movement that sought to show people as they were, not as they had been idealized to be for decades in drama and fiction. Maggie is definitely a novel that embraces that trend. Its characters are raw and unfocused creatures, as susceptible to their own foibles and the cultural snares that surround them as any of us. But in writing Maggie in this style, Crane is attempting something more than just fidelity to an emerging movement. As Eric Solomon says in one of the volume’s pieces of analysis and criticism:

Maggie involves a complete reversal of the sentimental themes of the nineteenth-century best sellers that dealt with the life of a young girl. These novels, from such active pens as those of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and E. P. Roe, displayed a manifest religious bias; Maggie is scorned by a clergyman and Jimmie finds organized religion abhorrent. The conventional novels treated romantic love and the salvation of female honor; Crane’s heroine is sexually betrayed and falls to the lower depths. A key scene in the sentimental novel was the slow, beautiful death of the heroine’s mother; here, Maggie herself dies, off stage, and her drunken, blaspheming mother survives. The villain in the sentimental novel was generally regenerated by the heroine’s good influence; Crane’s Pete the bartender becomes increasingly degraded and ends in a drunken stupor, mocked by thieving streetwalkers. The essential lesson of the sentimental novel was that happiness (and wealth) came from submission to suffering; suffer Maggie does, but the result of her pangs is only further misery, poverty, and death.

It was interesting for me to find out that the tradition of what Solomon calls above the “sentimental novel” was very real -- with he and many other critics providing numerous examples of both authors and titles dedicated to the theme. As shown above, it puts the plot of actions of Maggie into sharp relief, a sharpness that may very well be lost on a modern reader without this background understanding. As, indeed, it seems to have been lost on many of Crane’s literary contemporaries.

Missing the Point

Here, for example, is the first long paragraph from the original review of the novel than ran in the May 31, 1896 issue of the New York Tribune.

Mr. Stephen Crane in “Maggie” studies New-York tenement-house life with the pretence of aggressive realism. He puts on paper the grossness and brutality which are commonly encountered only through actual contact with the most besotted classes. Oaths, drunkenness, rags, stained walls, cut heads, black eyes, broken chairs, delirious howlings, the flat staleness of a police report are his properties. In his finished book they are still raw materials with the edge of their offensiveness in no way taken off; for Mr. Crane entirely lacks the ability which has enabled some other men to deal with sordid, disgusting and vicious themes in a way that made them at least entertaining. He has no charm of style, no touch of humor, no hint of imagination. His story is one of unrelieved dulness in which the characters interest neither by their words nor acts, are depraved without being either thrilling or amusing, are dirty without being picturesque. There is nothing enticing in their lives nor uplifting in the contemplation of their sorrows. There is nothing alluring in the evils they exhibit. They are not even piquantly wicked, and their talk is as dreary as their lives are empty. Mr. Crane has attempted the accurate reproduction of the tenement dialect, but has succeeded in presenting only its brutal side. He has learned its billinsgate. He does not know anything of the quaint idiom and odd inflection which made Mr. Townsend’s slum talk at once alive and pleasing. Nor does he show any knowledge of the interesting human traits, the quick wit, the self conceit, the local sense of the cockney which make the Bowery Boy a character. He sees only dulness and dirt. The book shocks by mere fact of its monotonous and stupid roughness. To read its pages is like standing before a loafer to be sworn at and have one’s face slapped twice a minute for half an hour.

Talk about missing the point. One can well imagine Crane with a crumpled piece of newsprint in his fist, shouting “Exactly!” over and over again. The world, at least the one caretaked by the New York Tribune, was clearly not ready for literary naturalism.

Just as others were not ready for the inversion of the sentimental novel about young girls. Here’s a passage from a longer work by Charles Loring Brace, a theologian famous for his missionary and charity work among the poor children of New York.

A girl street-rover is to my mind the most painful figure in all the unfortunate crowd of a large city. With a boy, “Arab of the streets,” one always has the consolation that, despite his ragged clothes and bed in a box or hay-barge, he often has a rather good time of it, and enjoys many of the delicious pleasures of a child’s roving life, and that a fortunate turn of events may at any time make an honest, industrious fellow of him. At heart we cannot say that he is much corrupted; his sins belong to his ignorance and his condition, and are often easily corrected by a radical change of circumstances. The oaths, tobacco-spitting, and slang, and even the fighting and stealing of a street-boy, are not so bad as they look. Refined influences, the checks of religion, and a fairer chance for an existence without incessant struggle, will often utterly eradicate these evil habits, and the rough, thieving New York vagrant make an honest, hard-working Western pioneer. It is true that sometimes the habit of vagrancy and idling may be too deeply worked in him for his character to speedily reform; but, if of tender years, a change in circumstances will nearly always bring a change of character.

With a girl-vagrant it is different. She feels homelessness and friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on affection; the street-trades, too, are harder for her, and the return at night to some lonely cellar or tenement-room, crowded with dirty people of all ages and sexes, is more dreary. She develops body and mind earlier than the boy, and the habits of vagabondism stamped on her in childhood are more difficult to wear off.

The the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in. It has often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading, its inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of cleansing!

On and on it goes like this, layering the cultural zeitgeist of the times over the differential manifestations of sin between young men and young women. Girls are to remain pure, and even one sexual encounter outside the sanctioned socio-religious boundaries will tarnish her forever. It is thought that the longer work may have served as a source or inspiration for Crane’s Maggie. If so, I can only believe that it was Crane’s intention to subvert, not support, this view of the world.

Social Insanity Creating a Moral Madhouse

Here, I think, is the point. Crane’s naturalism and sentimental inversion combine in Maggie to show not just the reality of people in New York’s tenement district, but also the social insanity that traps them there. And it is that combination, not just the naturalism nor just the sentimental inversion, that truly makes Maggie a remarkable novel.

Here’s another critic, Charles Child Walcutt, making the point better than I can.

A dominant idea that grows from this landscape of hysteria is that these people are victimized by their ideas of moral propriety which are so utterly inapplicable to their lives that they constitute a social insanity. Maggie is pounced upon by the first wolf in this jungle and seduced. When she is abandoned and returns home, her mother’s outraged virtue is boundless:

“Ha, ha, ha!” bellowed the mother. “Dere she stands! Ain’t she purty? Look ut her. Ain’t she sweet, deh beast? Look ut her! Ha, ha! Look ut her!” she lurched forward and put her red and seamed hands upon her daughter’s face. She bent down and peered keenly up into the eyes of the girl. “Oh, she’s jes’ dessame as she ever was, ain’t she? She’s her mudder’s putty darlin’ yit, ain’ she? Look ut her, Jimmie. Come her and look ut her.”

Maggie is driven forth with jeers and blows and presently commits suicide. Crane tells how her mother responds to the lugubrious consolations of her neighbors in this classic paragraph:

The mourner essayed to speak, but her voice gave way. She shook her great shoulders frantically, in an agony of grief. The tears seemed to scald her face. Finally, her voice came and arose in a scream of pain. “Oh, yes, I’ll fergive her! I’ll fergive her!”

The impressions that these people are not free agents, and that their freedom is limited as much by the conventional beliefs as by their poverty, are naturalistic concepts completely absorbed into the form of the story. One might object upon sociological grounds that Crane’s ideas of the family are unsound, but his literary technique here is a triumph. It creates a coherent if terrible world, and there are no serious loose ends -- no effect of tension or contradiction between abstract theory and human event. Crane’s hallucinatory inferno is a gift of his style. What he says and what he renders are one. Indeed, he does not comment because the whole work is one grand roar of mockery and outrage. The hysterical distortions symbolize, image, and even dramatize the confusion of values which puts these social waifs in a moral madhouse.

OK. First. In my book, there is no higher praise for a fiction writer than what Walcutt just offered Crane. Essentially, Crane has dramatized abstract truth, and done it without preaching. “Preaching,” as Crane is quoted elsewhere in this volume, “is fatal to art and literature.” The goal, in this case, is not to describe moral outrage, but to depict it -- depict it only in the speech and interactions of dramatic characters. And in this regard, Crane’s Maggie truly is a triumph.

But the more direct point of Walcutt’s essay is that the characters of Maggie, and the real world tenement dwellers that they represent, hold themselves to moral absolutes that no longer serve the grim isolation and harrowness of their existence. Maggie’s mother is cajoled into forgiving her daughter in a naturalistic but still maudlin scene, oblivious to the reality that if she hadn’t shunned Maggie after her “fall from grace,” she very well might still be alive.

And in this sense, Crane’s early and still flawed novel manages to transcend its form. For it is not just Maggie’s mother that is bound to a moralistic farce. The reader, especially the contemporary reader who may be more prone to take sides, is revealed as being equally bound. As critic Frank Bergon helpfully explains:

By the end of the novel, then, the reader is caught in the position of realizing that it is as absurd to forgive Maggie as it is to damn her. Her only transgression is against moral and social codes that are in themselves transgressions or moral and social reality. Yet Maggie shares these codes with other characters whom the reader would never forgive. Like them, she is a victim of self-deception; and, like them, she adopts moral poses so as to appear on a higher social plane. Her errors are so perfectly those of her society that forgiveness of Maggie should be extended to others. The forgiving reader is caught in a moral contradiction, or like Maggie’s mother, becomes bound to noble sentiments that are in themselves self-serving deceptions.

Allegory Lost in Editing

Maggie’s suicide is the last thing I want to comment on. It, like many other gruesome aspects of the novel, happens off-stage. And this, as I came to learn through reading the commentary that accompanies the text, is only partly a result of Crane’s intent. A big part of it is the frustrating influences of Crane’s more traditional publishers.

There are, in a way, two versions of Maggie included in this volume. The presented text follows the author’s original intention, the way the novel was cast and published in its first printing in 1893. But a second version of Maggie was published in 1896, and in that version many mollifying changes were made, each and every one footnoted and explained in this volume.

It’s fascinating to see the changes. The 1893 version was self-published by Crane. The 1896 version was done by a respectable publishing house, who insisted on the changes, believing the original version was too honest. References to “micks” were changed to “mugs,” “hell” was changed to “h--l” or deleted entirely, “Gawd!” was changed to “Gee!” These are all relatively minor, although in the aggregate, they do create a different kind of novel than the one Crane intended.

But the biggest problem comes in Chapter XVII, the one in which Maggie commits suicide. It’s fairly short, so here it is in its 1893 glory.

Upon a wet evening, several months after the last chapter, two interminable rows of cars, pulled by slipping horses, jangled along a prominent side-street. A dozen cabs, with coat-enshrouded drivers, clattered to and fro. Electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance. A flower dealer, his feet tapping impatiently, his nose and his wares glistening with rain-drops, stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums. Two or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements. Men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars to their ears. Women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the storm. People having been comparatively silent for two hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the glowings of the stage.

The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men stepped forth to hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms of polite request or imperative demand. An endless procession wended toward elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just emerged from a place of forgetfulness.

Crane describes this scene to show the contrast with what is to come next.

In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park, a handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was scattered among the benches.

A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces.

This girl is Maggie, although Crane will never name her as such. She is both the Maggie of the novel’s title, and an archetype of her class.

Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the pavements.

She is well clothed. She must have found some success in her new line of work.

The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.

A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening.

A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a mustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned that she was neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical. He wheeled about hastily and turned his stare into the air, like a sailor with a searchlight.

Maggie’s first potential customer of the night; a well dressed gentleman; rejecting her.

A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went solidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl.

A belated man in business clothes, and in haste to catch a car, bounced against her shoulder. “Hi, there, Mary, I beg your pardon! Brace up, old girl.” He grasped her arm to steady her, and then was away running down the middle of the street.

Two more potential customers in the crowd; both with no time or consideration for her. It seems clear that Maggie no longer belongs in respectable society.

The girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants and saloons. She passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled.

A young man in light overcoat and derby hat received a glance shot keenly from the eyes of the girl. He stopped and looked at her, thrusting his hands in his pockets and making a mocking smile curl his lips. “Come, now, old lady,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me that you sized me up for a farmer?”

A laboring man marched along with bundles under his arms. To her remarks, he replied: “It’s a fine evenin’, ain’t it?”

She smiled squarely into the face of a boy who was hurrying by with his hands buried in his overcoat, his blonde locks bobbing on his youthful temples, and a cheery smile of unconcern upon his lips. He turned his head and smiled back at her, waving his hands.

“Not this eve -- some other eve!”

A drunken man, reeling in her pathway, began to roar at her. “I ain’ ga no money, dammit,” he shouted, in a dismal voice. He lurched on up the street, wailing to himself, “Dammit, I ain’ ga no money. Damn ba’ luck. Ain’ ga no more money.”

A lower class neighborhood; four more opportunities; four more rejections. Where will she go next?

The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons. In front of one of these places, from whence came the sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched features.

“Ah, there,” said the girl.

“I’ve got a date,” said the man.

Further on in the darkness she met a ragged being with shifting blood-shot eyes and grimy hands. “Ah, what deh hell? T’ink I’m a millionaire?”

Are you getting the picture? She is moving through the ranks of society, and each one is rejecting her in turn. The entertainment district, the working classes, the riverfront slums. None will have her. Where will she go next?

She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, at other things. Afar off the lights of the avenue glittered as if from an impossible distance. Street car bells jingled with a sound of merriment.

And now, at this crucial moment, the texts of the 1893 and 1896 versions diverge, the original containing the following amazing paragraph, the subsequent deleting it entirely.

When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions.

At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against the timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to silence.

Who is this figure, the one Maggie “perceives” to be a huge fat man, the one who escorts her to her death in the black and oily river? Just a dark denizen of the city’s underbelly? Or something more, something allegorical like the journey Maggie makes through the layers of her society? And why, whoever or whatever he is, was he cut from the 1896 version?

The novel is so much richer with him.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

I Want the Right Pageviews

This week's blog post is partly inspired by this post on Seth Godin's blog. In it, he makes the case that the idea of "reach" is overrated.

Why do you care if you can, for more money, reach more people? Why wouldn’t it make more sense to reach the right people instead?

I agree entirely. Here's a specific case in point.

My association has a website. There's a lot of good content up there, most of it intended for our members. But there are a few pages that focus on what fluid power (the technology my association represents) is. Those pages aren't really for our members. They already know what fluid power is. We don't have much of a public relations or advocacy focus, but as the trade association representing the fluid power industry, it feels wrong not having some information up there about what it is and what it does in the market.

Here's the problem, though. Every time we go to look at our web analytics, guess what comes up as the page with the most pageviews? That's right. It's our "What Is Fluid Power?" page. There are some in the organization who track and trumpet this. Look at how many pageviews our website got last month! We must be doing a really great job.

I have a different view. Let me phrase it in striking terms so I can underscore how strongly I feel about it.

I don't care about the people visiting the "What Is Fluid Power?" page of our website. They -- whoever they are -- are not our members, and our website is not for them.

Do you know how I know they are not our members? Look at the traffic source for all those pageviews. The vast majority are coming from organic search -- meaning that they are typing "what is fluid power" into Google or Bing or some other search engine and finding our page in the results that come back to them. Our members aren't doing that.

Show me the pageviews of the people coming to our site because they've bookmarked it, or they clicked on one of the links in our member e-newsletter. Those are the right pageviews to watch and pay attention to, because those are much more likely to be our members.

As someone whose job depends on connecting our members to the programs and services of my association, I can't get complacent about this. I simply do not want more pageviews for the sake of having more pageviews. I want more of a certain kind of pageviews -- the ones that reflect our members reading and accessing our programs.

When I talk about the "right" pageviews, those are the ones I'm referring to.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgdlWhMZAw