Employer Trouble – Most of the Book – Page 5 – education and deconstruction.com

Apologies to My Censor

The Book of the Week is “Apologies to My Censor” by Mitch Moxley, published in 2013. In this ebook, the author, a Canadian journalist, describes the six years he spent in Beijing.

Moxley arrived in Beijing the spring of 2007 to work at an English-language state-owned newspaper. The reporting was limited to upbeat topics. Articles on Taiwan, Tibet or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre contained propaganda rather than true statements. Ironically however, in everyday conversation, the Chinese people were brutally honest.

Many foreigners– who were paid triple the Chinese natives– worked at the paper at the time. In order for any native to prevail at a journalism career, joining the Communist Party was mandatory. This involved attending Party conferences on some weekends. For a short while, the author played basketball with his colleagues. When the Chinese players took a breather, they smoked courtside.

While in China, Moxley did various kinds of labor, more than just journalism. Most were unfulfilling for him. He engaged in the lucrative trades of: reading while having his voice recorded for the creation of English-language education-materials; posing as a foreign businessman working for a Chinese company for public relations purposes; and acting, dancing or singing in various videos to be broadcasted on the internet or TV.

Read the book to learn about the author’s life in Beijing– his workplace, living quarters, recreation, social life and romantic pursuits, and half-hearted attempts to learn Chinese– and his ambivalence about returning to Toronto.

On the Firing Line

The Book of the Week is “On the Firing Line” by Gil Amelio with William L. Simon, published in 1998. In this informative book, Amelio chronicles his short tenure as Apple Computer’s CEO from early 1995 to mid 1997.

Some might say Amelio made a foolhardy decision to take on the challenge of turning Apple around, when he had a secure and promising future as the CEO of National Semiconductor, whose recovery he had spearheaded. Throughout the book, he discusses the series of difficulties he faced and admits his errors in judgment.

Amelio handed grist to his critics on a silver platter because he allowed his employees to talk to the media, which had a field day on many fronts. The media also played him for a fool.

There were numerous factors out of the CEO’s control that also gave him a tough time. His predecessor allowed extreme price cuts on Apple’s products, and the sales team was playing a short-sighted game– a vicious cycle every holiday season, whereby they would give deep last-minute discounts to retailers to move inventory, putting a better face than otherwise on the financial condition of the company, as its fiscal year started on October 1.

Amelio was distressed to find that the corporate culture was fragmented along departmental lines. The engineers worked on products the sales department had no intention of selling. “Apple never had an official statement of strategy – which inevitably means that every executive, and most managers, design their own versions. Everyone pursues their own goals, rowing frantically but each pulling in a different direction.” One reason was that managers knew the company was in dire financial straits and feared their projects were going to be cut.

Some thought Amelio desperate and a sellout for holding meetings with the enemy, Bill Gates, to propose making Apple products compatible with Microsoft products. Nonetheless, he was wary of Gates because Gates was unreasonably stingy in his negotiations.

With Amelio at the helm, performance of the desktop models improved tenfold but sales fell. He attributed this to the presence of a subjective element in people’s reaction to Apple “…irrelevant to product quality, and has … a lot to do with what they read in the newspapers and how comfortable they are with the state of the company.”

Read the book to learn: how Amelio was too trusting when he negotiated his employment contract; about the fronts on which he did make progress, and how he was done in by Steve Jobs.

The Hoax

The Book of the Week is “The Hoax” by Clifford Irving, published 2006.

This is a personal account of an incredibly talented, savvy phony and writer, who, starting in 1969, with a co-conspirator, Dick Suskind, proceeded to write the autobiography of reclusive businessman Howard Hughes; phony, because he had never met Hughes.

McGraw Hill, Irving’s publisher, believed Irving when he told them he had actually spent time with Hughes. McGraw wanted to believe that it was going to produce an exclusive work on a billionaire businessman who, up to that point, had refused to let anyone publicize significant information on his personal life.

Irving and Suskind perpetrated their deception because: trying to get away with preying on the gullibility and greed of the publishing industry was a challenge that would make them feel alive.

Pursuant to the writers’ scheme, the book was “…based on fact and yet we had the freedom and power to infuse fact with the drama of fiction.” The writers did extensive research– spent hours poring over old city telephone directories, old maps, surveys, society columns and classified documents in order to perfectly embody Hughes’ voice in print. When they were concocting anecdotes, they inserted (real) people who were dead because dead people couldn’t sue for libel.

Incidentally, a whole other book could be written on the name for the marital anguish: soul-vomit, that Irving caused his wife with his adulterous behavior– that has so much female appeal on the big screen and in books.

Read the book to learn what was becoming of Irving and Suskind when Irving was heard to say, “You know, I’ve had a lot of experience in this past year burning manuscripts. It takes a long time and it’s not easy.”

In the Garden of the Beasts

The Book of the Week is “In the Garden of the Beasts” by Erik Larson, published in 2011. This ebook describes the ill-fated German ambassadorship of William E. Dodd, who was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A history professor at the University of Chicago for more than two decades, Dodd possessed no public-service experience. As a D-list candidate for other reasons too, he reluctantly accepted the post anyway. Nevertheless, he believed in speaking out against injustice, and in the past when he became embroiled in a controversial situation, he said, “…to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man.” He moved his wife, teenage son and grown daughter to Berlin in the summer of 1933.

Part of Dodd’s job as ambassador at the time was to get the German government to pay its reparations to the United States from WWI. Germany owed more than $100 million in bonds through National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) and Chase National Bank. Dodd failed to do so.

Dodd was also ill-suited for other aspects of the position. Foreign Service officers were an independently wealthy lot– golf-club members with fancy cars and mansions– who threw lavish parties at their own expense, unconcerned with the cost. The German ambassador lived frugally.

As well, Dodd’s daughter caused diplomatic embarrassment, as she became romantically involved with a series of men of political intrigue through the years. These included the chief of the Gestapo, a Soviet political operative, and Fritz Haber, who first formulated the poison chlorine gas that was used at Ypres in WWI. He proved that cumulative exposure to small quantities of gas in the long run was just as lethal as large amounts of a short duration.

Sadly, Dodd and a colleague, George S. Messersmith, America’s consul general, were two of only a very few prescient government officials who understood that Germany posed a serious and growing threat to world peace. The U.S. government was more concerned with Germany’s war reparations.

In the mid-1930’s, lurid stories of extremely uncivil behavior of Germany’s law enforcement apparatus were leaked to the international press. People rationalized that the violent acts (mostly against Jews) were just isolated incidents because they did not want to believe that an evolved society such as Germany’s could be so evil.

Read the book to learn the details of how Dodd became the prophetic, tragic figure in an existentialist drama that set the stage for WWII.

Jimi Hendrix

The Book of the Week is “Jimi Hendrix” by Sharon Lawrence, published in 2005. This ebook is the biography of the world-renowned guitarist.

Hendrix suffered numerous hardships and deprivation in his childhood. Born in 1942, he was shuttled among various relatives, including his alcoholic father– divorced from his mother when he was 9; she died when he was in his mid-teens. He developed a passion for music, which was his one solace.

By the mid-1960’s, he had formed a band with two other musicians, and they were touring and recording on an unusually rigorous schedule. This prompted them to resort to partaking of pills, marijuana, hashish and LSD to mitigate severe sleep deprivation and stress.

Hendrix was afforded the opportunity to meet or play music with many other rock stars of his generation. Due to his incredible talent, he experienced tremendous fame very suddenly. Unfortunately, he was too passive and nice. Read the book to learn the details of how Hendrix fared after he allowed numerous greedy, manipulative and ungrateful people to enter his life.

Brooklyn Zoo

The Book of the Week is “Brooklyn Zoo” by Darcy Lockman, published in 2012. This is a personal account of an internship of a PhD candidate in psychotherapy.

Lockman started her internship in summer 2007 at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York State, the final leg of training before she got licensed to practice. Throughout the book, she reveals the lingo, issues and people encountered by clinical psychologists.

A few aspects of the personalities of humans include developmental level (psychotic, borderline or neurotic), and character applicable to it (“masochistic or obsessive or narcissistic or depressive, etc.”). Patients might be diagnosed with a thought disorder, mood disorder or personality disorder, or a combination thereof. These were documented in a reference guide for psychiatry, the “DSM IV.”

During her training, the author saw what she perceived to be a disturbing trend– of treating all ailments, even ones suspected to be psychological in whole or in part, by prescribing drugs with little or no accompanying psychotherapy. The psychiatric professionals at the hospital perceived part of their jobs to be to instill “medication compliance” in patients. Lockman was taught that treatment should include “the talking cure.”

However, it is controversial how effective psychotherapy is in treating addicts, because drugs and alcohol can permanently change the brain chemistry that controls learning. Lockman describes one alcoholic patient’s case: “angry young man plus bad neighborhood plus psychosis equals short life expectancy.”

Since psychotherapists themselves are human, they sometimes cannot help but become emotionally affected by their patients. One time, Lockman realized she was biased by the socio-economic level of a patient she saw: “…upper-middle-class and white… familiar to me.” Lockman later momentarily broke down in front of her supervisor, who told her, “Never apologize for having an emotion. Just make sure you give it some thought.”

Some patients, such as a narcissistic-borderline (personality disorders) married couple, recounted stories of extreme past behaviors, some of which were laughable. The two consisted of a male narcissistic ex-convict and borderline, pregnant female who had four kids total; the oldest two had a different father. The husband had been a pimp, and had committed adultery with one of his employees. The couple ended up at the hospital because they had become physically violent with one another. They had shamelessly revealed this information to Lockman. The husband said, “I’m a shooter, not a hitter.” The wife said she had committed a bank robbery to save her kids from starvation.

Another issue the author had to deal with was the hierarchical nature of the career field. ‘We all needed somebody to buttress our professional worth.” People in different specialties put other ones down. The medical doctors feel superior to psychiatrists; psychiatrists to psychologists; psychologists to social workers.

Read the book to learn the slew of other issues Lockman had to face in her quest for experience in clinical psychology.

The Good Girls Revolt

The Book of the Week is “The Good Girls Revolt” by Lynn Povich, published in 2012. This short ebook discusses what happened when a group of female employees sued Newsweek magazine’s parent company in March 1970, for gender discrimination.

Shortly thereafter, similar litigation followed at other publications– at Time, Inc., Reader’s Digest and various newspapers across the United States. The author briefly describes the historical backdrop before, during and after. One of many cultural phenomena she relates is that the year 1973(!) saw the elimination of classified ads divided into “Help Wanted– Female” and “Help Wanted– Male,” the former of which were mostly for menial and/or low-paying jobs. “Saying you worked at Newsweek was glamorous compared to most jobs available to college-educated women.”

The author says that from the early 1920’s up until the aforementioned lawsuits, periodicals publishers relegated women to dead-end positions. At Newsweek, the vast majority of female employees held the title “researcher”– a fact-checker, who could never become a reporter or editor like, or get paid as much as, the male employees. Besides, many of the men were hired “…as reporters and writers with no prior professional journalistic experience” and most of the female researchers had the same qualifications as they did.

One reason many women did not protest or were not even consciously angry about their situation, is that they were conditioned by the workplace and society in general to comply with gender stereotypes. Four decades ago, women were limited in their opportunities and criticized if they chose a male-dominated career field. They were given to believe they should not aim too high, but stay where they were, because otherwise, they would encounter difficulty. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy for most of them. Even many women’s colleges at that time had the goal of providing an education with the assumption that a graduate might get a job, but she would quit the workforce when she had children.

Even today, in the American workplace, there is an environment in which women are jockeying for position and power. According to the book, they are less well-liked, the higher up the corporate ladder they climb. The opposite goes for men. In certain aspects of their lives, such as weight-loss groups and fitness, women band together and cheer each other on. But not usually in the workplace.

Read the book to learn about the consequences of the initial legal action, and whether Newsweek’s workplace policies changed when, in 2006(!), three female employees recognized the recurrence of gender discrimination.

Just Plain Dick

The Book of the Week is “Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking Socking’ Election of 1952” by Kevin Mattson, published in 2012. This ebook details the 1952 U.S. presidential election in which vice presidential candidate Nixon became more the center of attention than presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower.

The dirt that generated bad publicity for a candidate in that election was of a slush fund of Nixon’s. When the news broke in September 1952 about Nixon’s alleged campaign finance impropriety, there was lots of hand-wringing among Eisenhower and his advisors as to whether Nixon should be dropped from the ticket.

The nature of the new medium of television– a visual, collective, simultaneous experience for a large audience– was a game-changer. It allowed Nixon to deliver directly to the American people, what turned out to be the perfect message in a way that repaired his reputation and ultimately helped him and his superior win the election.

Nixon’s emotional appeal persuaded his audience that he was a member of the middle class– not an elitist. Mention of his wife’s cloth coat and his dog struck just the right tone. To top off his speech, he skillfully initiated crowd sourcing by inviting voters to contact the Republican Party to express their opinion on whether he should withdraw from the race.

Read the book to learn the details of this memorable, fascinating episode in American political history.

The Intern Blues

The Book of the Week is “The Intern Blues, The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor” by Robert Marion, published in 2012. This ebook documents the internship experiences of three medical school graduates in the mid 1980’s.

At that time, interns were “on call”– had to work eighteen to twenty-four hours in a row, usually overnight, in a hospital every three days. Every month for an entire year, the interns in this ebook were assigned to a different unit such as pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, or the emergency room, at a medical center in the Bronx in New York City.

The hospital staff was kept busy treating patients with conditions whose causes were poverty-related— people in poor health, and those who suffered physical harm from violence and drugs. Many patients and their families had psychological problems. One intern remarked, “…we have two psychotic crackheads roaming around the ER, we also had two psychotic crackheads who were paranoid and had no idea what was going on, which is a wonderful combination.”

Severely sleep-deprived, along with doing a ton of paperwork and presentations, the interns had to admit patients, keep “…track of names, symptoms, physical findings, lab results, and treatments…” They witnessed life-or-death situations for which they felt they were not psychologically prepared. They had to tell patients’ families that their loved ones had died, make serious decisions on whether to report child abuse to the authorities (which was a whole bureaucratic process itself), deal with difficult nurses and lab technicians, not to mention their supervisors; all this, along with the extremely stressful circumstances surrounding the AIDS epidemic.

On top of that, one of the three interns became pregnant during her internship. Read the book to learn how that worked out for her, and to get an insider’s view of what it was like to be a medical intern a few decades ago.

Dot Bomb

The Book of the Week is “Dot Bomb” by J. David Kuo, published in 2001. This ebook details the business dealings and the ensuing suspenseful power struggle at a dot-com company called Value America between 1996 and 2001.

The online retailer’s intended brand image was to boast maximum selection of merchandise shipped directly from sellers. This delivery-on-demand arrangement allowed the company to remain inventory-free, and thus minimize overhead costs. However, in reality, it needed to use resellers for many of the supposedly infinite products it sold.

Value America’s founder and leader, Craig Winn, was a charming megalomaniac who had grand plans to partner with various major corporations in order to attract investors and make the company worthy of an IPO. Unfortunately, Winn had planned to sell stock to the public just after the peak of the dot-com boom, when brokerages’ confidence in internet companies had started to wane.

After Value America went public, Goldman Sachs issued a report that Amazon.com was the internet retailer with the highest potential for success because it had high sales margins on its then-merchandise consisting only of books; a $30 billion valuation was not out of the realm of possiblity. Goldman went on to say Value America had the worst prospects, with sales margins of 1% and runaway costs. It would have to achieve revenues of billions of dollars in order to make any money.

Toward the end of the story, the author realized “Despite the hype, headlines, and hysteria, this was just a gold rush we were in… a lot of us were kin to those poor, freezing fools in Alaska who had staked everything on turning up a glittering chunk of gold.”

Read the book to learn the fate of the author, his family and the other Value America employees with dollar signs in their eyeballs.