Google and the novelist: more on how technology is impacting the creative process

Any of us who work in marketing know that technology is having a dramatic impact on how commercial artists and writers work in all kinds of double-edged-sword ways, both offering amazing new tools to help us get work done and challenging our value props.

But I’ve been interviewing creative people across the creative spectrum—from poets to TV producers--and some of my more surprising findings are coming from writers and artists who aren’t involved with marketing at all. Their stories demonstrate how even fundamental elements of new media are transforming the art they make.

The writer Justin Cronin put it this way, “The easy availability of almost any fact has turned me into a different kind of novelist.”

I don’t normally think about Internet Search as having a transformative impact on the creative process, but for Justin, and I’m sure for other writers., it has.

A little background might help illustrate the dramatic nature of the change I'm talking about. Justin was a classmate of mine at the Iowa Writers Workshop where he wrote beautifully crafted lyrical stories that were in the tradition of contemporary realistic fiction. After graduation, he published two well-received, prize-winning novels which, I think he’d agree, were also in that tradition.

More recently, however, he’s been writing a post-apocalyptic Vampire trilogy which—as widely reported—he’s already sold for a big pile of money. The first volume of the trilogy—The Passage—is being made into a major movie by Ridley Scott.

Now, how does a literary writer suddenly turn himself into an instant master of high-concept futuristic thrillers? Part of the charming story is Justin's native talent. Another part is that the plot was inspired by conversations he had with his daughter while she rode her bike alongside him on his daily run. In order to help pass the time, he told his daughter they were going to plot a novel. What should it be about? She replied, “A story about a little girl that saves the world.” A winning idea if there ever was one.

But the part that interests me here--is the power of the Internet to make available a set of experiences Justin had never tried to imagine before as part of his subject.

Again, in his words, “If I need to know how to hot-wire a diesel engine, well, I can just Google it and it's right there. If I want to know what the dashboard of a military vehicle looks like, it’s there too. ”

He didn’t need to go to the library or interview people or take a trip to a military base. It’s not that Justin stopped doing original research. He told me one story about hiring a guy to take him to a firing range so he could experience what it felt like to shoot assault rifles.

But he acknowledged that the immediacy of search helped him stay in the writing process. The instant availability of facts and images and video helped him quickly fill his imagined world with the stuff that his characters needed to go out and save the world. As he put it, “I might have been able to write this book without the internet but I don’t think I could have written it as fast or as well.”

He also said that the process of imagining more unusual experiences liberated him from an impulse to rely on autobiographical material for his plots. While all artists and writers tend to draw from their own lives to some degree, especially early in their career, the Internet has accelerated or at least help enable that transformation. In this way, the title of his first novel in the trilogy--The Passage--could also double as a metaphor for his own evolution as an writer.

When thinking about technology and creativity, it’s easy to fixate on works that make use of new or sophisticated technology: augmented reality and data visualization. But sometimes it’s the more fundamental elements—like search--that make the biggest difference. It's the question I'm continuing to explore now: asking other writers and artists if Google has helped inspire them to make leaps of imagination into new genres, media and forms.

A call for new tools: starting with observations on successful Facebook applications

One of things that I've noticed about the social media revolution is that it seems to be a lot easier to find big, visionary talk than new tools and practical guidelines for how to do it. In any google search I can find thousands of blog posts about how the world is changing but when I searched for advice or models about how to write a new creative brief that would help creatives develop work for a multi-platform world, I couldn't find anything. My direct queries on the various socmed platforms asking for existing models didn't yield much either.

I think it's pretty established now that the world is changing. What we--all of us, but I'm writing for strategic/brand planners in particular--need now are some new tools to help us navigate and develop work for the changing landscape.

So, in the positive, can-do, crowdsourcing spirit of social media, I decided to try for myself in the hope others will complement/supplement/edit/critique my work as I go. I'm not going to start with the digital/platform brief because that's going to take some work. But there are plenty of smaller tools I need to develop as well.

For instance, one of the things I need right now is a set of high level strategic guidelines for developing successful applications. Chances are, like me, both your creatives and your clients are looking for help guiding the development of branded applications on facebook and iphone. The interest has only heightened as we approach the holiday season in which (as my creative director partner Jason Gaboriou recently pointed out) we are assuredly going to see a hailstorm of holiday-themed gift-finder-ish apps.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about technical guidelines for developers (e.g. what to do with uninstalls) but rather clues to what makes a good experience based on current consumer behavior (though of course the areas overlap these days). Here's my working list. I'm starting at a very high level of generality, because I'm finding it's what my clients and some more traditionally-trained creatives need.

I'm absolutely positive there are people out there who know more than me on this subject so hope they jump in and correct me either here or on twitter @copia

• Support with marketing, both online and off: the early fantasy of digital media (that people will just find it for themselves) is over. In this very crowded field, you need to help even your loyal consumers find your stuff.
  

• Be social: Doh! Facebook is a social medium. App’s should have a social component which means there is a built-in reason to spread it around. Ideally, it should facilitate an exchange of information rather than just a dissemination.
  

• Fads are real: We always complain about fads in marketing, but the majority of apps tend to move in and of popularity pretty fast. Consider linking to timely events and don’t expect it to last forever.

• Keep it simple: Most successful apps do one or two things well. Facebook is simple. It shouldn’t be more complicated than Facebook itself

• Utility and entertainment is better than utility or entertainment. App’s which actually offer something useful tend to have longer shelf lives. Many app’s have succeeded by just entertaining but they need to be pretty funny.

• Profiles as content: Facebook connect now enables app’s to customize experience based on user data. Think of user profiles as content

• Online behavior is still behavior: extend, enhance, supplemnt the most popular and frequent online behaviors: searching, shopping, playing, flirting, (though of course this changes fast as diagram below from 07 indicates).

How technology is changing the creative process in not always great ways: the other side of the coin

Earlier this week, I shared some early observations on my research exploring how technology is changing the creative process for creative people from poets to producers.

I started with the good stuff: how the technology is energizing artists and encouraging them to explore more forms of self expression. But all transitions—and this is a major one—brings as much anxiety and ambivalence and euphoria. Today I wanted I share a few early observations about the other side of the double-edged sword we’re all dancing down.

1. Speed may be the essence of the war but is it the essence of art? Every single writer and artist I spoke to acknowledged that technology has sped up their deadlines and accelerated their working process.

Several were exhilarated by the challenge of speed—especially those blessed with natural high-speed wit like @awohl—but others—both commercial and non-commercial artists--acknowledged that the pressure of speed wasn’t always leading to their best work.

We traditionally think about creative work as something that depends on a little time and personal reflection to develop. Around the office, we say that some work isn't "cooked" or "baked" yet. Around the classroom, we sometimes refer to Wordsworth famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” And while of us who work in creative businesses have found ways to accelerate the process--we take 6 hours or 6 minutes rather than 6 months to develop ideas--it’s worth asking if there’s a limit to how fast certain kinds of good work can come.

One sign of the speed of the culture was the fact that some of the writers I spoke to couldn’t remember the work they’d recently done. It just passed by too fast.

Quality is harder to judge. Artistic appreciation is of course subjective. But one copywriter put it bluntly: did you look at this year’s Cannes’ reel? It’s a joke.

2. Does originality matter? The question of originality has always vexed the world of art in general and marketing in particular. On the one hand, most acknowledge that every idea has been done before, on the other, people still complain when they feel someone has "stolen" their idea. So which is it?

So while the issue is nothing new, it does seem to be amplified by our ability to instantly access all the work in the world on almost every media and subject imaginable. How do artists feel about this new access to all the abundance out there? Are you inspired or overwhelmed? A little bit of both.

The vast majority of creative people did not test the“originality” of their idea with the internet archives before proceeding. On the contrary, as @eproulx eloquently put it, “I have to pretend it's my idea until it's too late.”

3. Clusterf*ck, Committee or Collaboration? Related to the above is the question of the relationship between the number of people involved and the quality of the work. In the old days, we used to say that work by committee was bound to get “watered down." Or worse.

Many artists and writers these days feel the opposite is true, including those who work at Pixar who describe their process of collaborative development as Amplification. See, e.g., article in June HBR. A preview here. And a post on the subject here. (Tx to @edwardboches for noting the relevance of this topic ) The emergence of crowdsourcing as a vehicle for innovation and creative development has called additional attention to this changing definition of the creative process.

My early conclusion is that most artists and writers today agree that collaboration is a good thing early in the process. But many involved developing and executing work, as opposed to generating the idea, still hunger for that old-fashioned time by themselves, listening to a music, or going for a walk to let the idea churn around inside them.

4. But how much is it worth? The simultaneous adoption of crowdsourcing models, new distribution models, the explosion of amateur involvement and the economic crisis have raised questions across the artistic committee about the value of their work in strictly economic terms. Because it directly impacts their ability to make a living, this issue obviously leads to strong opinions on both sides.

Crowdsourcers argue that it’s good for clients who wouldn’t pay as much as they used to anyway. Others lament that artists and writers are rushing to participate in their own exploitation, calling the emerging group of people giving away their work, digital sharecroppers.

This issue is particularly charged among designers, perhaps because technology has allowed un-trained amateurs to approximate a decent, if not that good, design. (Check out the brewing storm on @edwardboches blog here for a front-row seat.)

Recently, the crowdsourcing machine has taken up the task of translating, with a similar reaction among the crowdlovers and the old-line experts. Here's one post on the recent linkedin controversy.

Almost everyone agrees that most fields of artistic expression are due for a leveling or perhaps a hollowing out, with a lot of the work being commodified. Stars in every field of artistic endeavor will always command top dollar for their unique forms of cultural expression. And amateurs and small creative companies can now deliver decent work for value price. But most of us who make a living writing, painting, producing, designing are not big stars. But we don’t want to give away our work either. We’re in the big middle.

And life in the big middle is a big question, which is why so many artists and writers are diversifying.

How technology is changing the creative process for the better (for some creative people): early observations

There's obviously a lot of talk about how creative content is changing for just about every media that uses it, from advertising to music to film to publishing. So many people are making so many bold pronouncements on the subject, usually by declaring the death of one thing or another (the agency here, publishing here, DVD's here) that I could just about link to anything my stumble upon button stumbles upon and find a strong opinion on the subject.

Many of the commentators are celebrating these changes in the spirit of creative destruction: often noting how this is good for both brands and marketers—b/c they can source work at lower cost and accelerate innovation--and good for audiences/consumers--b/c it gives us abundant access to so much free content.

But I also noticed that not too many people seem to be asking the actual cultural producers themselves—all the poets and writers and artists and designers and producers—who are making the creative content in the first place. (Though it's true these writers and designers often make guest appearances as forward thinking futurists or anxious critics in the sidelines of debates raging around crowdsourcing, like the recent one here).

I noticed this partially because it’s my job, as a planner at an agency, to help guide and inspire the development of creative products and partially because I have lots of semi-anxious friends who happen to be poets and writers and screenwriters and art directors and designers. So I thought it might be interesting to hear how they felt about all these changes.

I started with a simple question. Has technology changed your creative process? And if so, how? And because the answers were so interesting they quickly led to a set of follow-up questions about whether technology had influenced how they get inspired and whether it impacted their relation to their audience and how they felt about the wave of hyper collaboration and even some questions about the old-fashioned idea of originality.

I’ve done about dozen interviews so far, and I thought I’d post some early observations both because I hope other people find this subject as interesting as I do and because I’m hoping I can lure other artists and writers into sharing their thoughts on the subject.

I should be clear when I say creative, I'm not limiting myself to the ad agency job title. I'm defining “creative” people in a pretty broad sense, from those who work in commercial professions (art directors and copywriters and designers and producers) to poets and writers and painters and musicians and filmmakers and conceptual artists to those creative people who work in the medium of technology itself: programmers and game designers.

So far I’ve spoken to 2 novelists, 2 poets, 2 copywriters, 2 art directors, 1 creative director, 2 screenwriters/producers, 1 dancer, 1 musician/producer ( several of the above overlap in a couple categories) So special thanks to @eproulx, @jonkranz, @edwardboches, @gretchenramsy, @adamwohl, @lauracarterbird (and a bunch of people who aren't on Twitter yet!)

My first observation has to be resounding confirmation of the generous spirit of the artistic community on the interweb in general and social media in particular. Everyone I’ve interviewed, whether I knew them before or not, has been more generous, thoughtful and helpful than I could have hoped.

So with that, I'll start with the good news or those things most artists and writers agree were more or less positive about the influence of technology on their work.

1) They might still be tortured but aren't lonely: Remember those stories of Romantic poets who needed to retreat to a rustic cabin in order to dig deep into their creative soul, uncorrupted by the distractions of civilization. Well, that ideal or fantasy doesn't seem as relevant to artists today. Almost all the artists and writers I spoke with were energized by more direct and frequent contact with other artists, their audience, as well as the culture as a whole. This was true of producers as well as poets. Maybe especially poets, who in the past felt particularly cut off from feedback on their work. We seem to be finally getting tired of the the long-held Romantic ideal. Both artists and audiences like to be connected.

2) Nor do they plan on starving: Technology seems to have jump-started the entrepreneurial spirit among artists. Whether they like the digital revolution or not, almost all the artists I spoke to agree that you have to diversify. They aren’t relying on one job or boss or patron or income source, but are developing multiple projects both within traditional frameworks and on their own. As one copywriter put it (I’m reserving attribution until I get permission), we always knew it was bad for an agency to only have one or two clients. Now we know that's true for all of us.

2a) It's a deal: Social media has also given artists more direct access to decision makers in almost all fields, inspiring them to send their work and ideas to places they didn't have access to previously. In the past the long odds at ever getting some muckety mucks attention tended to discourage these efforts. It's still too early to tell with my small sample, but technology seems particularly valuable for those in managerial positions, creative directors and producers, or anyone who spends more time making deals about cultural products than actually creating art.

3) Artists are diversifying their media/mediums: After college I went to an MFA program where people applied to be either “poets” or “fiction writers.” And most of the writers/artists of my gen-x gen generally took this narrow route. Most of us thought it was important to specialize early in order to develop the necessary skills to succeed.

But specialization seems less important to artists today. In fact, technology has made previously inaccessible (both complicated and expensive) tools much more accessible. Several writers I spoke with have turned their hand to film-making and while modest about their accomplishments, were frankly surprised at the relative success and professional quality of their efforts. This seems even more true for youngsters in their teens and twenties who I’ve encountered on research projects for clients. In fact, as I’ve posted before, many wanted to be managers/producers rather than artists per se.

4) The end of writers block? Probably not. Everyone goes through dry-spells, but several of the writers and artists I spoke with, mentioned that the constant stream of inspiration does seem to jump-start their thinking. Twenty minutes cruising a twitter stream or reading some blogs almost always generated some kind of response which gets the creative energy flowing. Whether the inspiration leads anywhere interesting is another story, but most agree it's almost as good as coffee.

5) You can be anywhere and so can your partner: There's no longer any need to restrict your creative partnership with people in the same room, town, company, country. Especially for those who work with partners in commercial production of some kind, technology has made it possible to work with just about anyone, anywhere, on any project.

6) New technology, new forms: Several writers and artists I spoke with are exploring new media that wouldn't be possible at all without new technology. Everything from printing images on bread to new forms of social storytelling being explored at MIT's medialab. It's too early to tell whether these forms will go the way of computer art of the 70's or amount to something more interesting. But there's no question that technology is opening up possibilities for self-expression

7) oh, almost forgot: The 24/7 focus group: creative people whose success depends on high speed production and hconsumer approval (e.g., marketers) also relished the fact that you could find out almost anything all the time. They barely remembered the day when they had to call an account person or a planner to look something up. And Twitter provides constant and instant feedback to any idea they want to throw out there, to see if it generates any interest, before the develop it.

Of course, it's not all good. For instance, many writers and artists I spoke to seemed ambivalent about how technology was accelerating culture and tightening deadlines, but I'll save thatanxiety for another post.

Again, would love to talk to more poets, writers, artist, musicians, game designers, etc or anyone who'd like to talk about how technology is impacting their creative process. Get in touch here or at scott.karambis@gmail.com.

Webinar hell or some elements of a good class I wish were in more them

The power of education in general and the ability of a good teacher to change lives is one of my last idealisms, so I find it particularly frustrating when i get subjected to presentations by people that haven't given any thought to what constitutes a class or seminar, from the perspective of the teacher or the student... While I've experienced a couple good classes/lunch-in-learns/webinars (notably Avinash Kaushniks clear, informative, concrete webinars), the vast majority of them suck. The most I've been in/to are:

--Some thinly-veiled PR for the organization with a couple generic recommendations (I recently read "advertising" listed a key way to drive traffic! That's a revelation! ) followed by "contact us for more insight/info/consulting"

and/or

--A summary of past work/successes, usually bullet pointed, usually just thinly reformatted case studies that were used for an awards submission or new biz pitch.

For example: I recently "listened" to webinar that claimed it would provide advice on how to successfully apply for a certain kind of award (yeah I know, god punishes), but it was nothing but a description of the winning submissions by people that wrote them. No inside info on why they won. No explication of the decisions they made while preparing the submission. No other evidence or analysis of the kinds of submissions that generally win or don't win. Just more communal back slapping.

So as an effort to be positively productive, here are some fo the basic elements that make up a good class, derived from many years on both side of the class room.

1) Tell me something new/challenge or advance conventional thinking. Business courses/webinars seem to be under the delusion that people all agree about how to approach a problem or alternatively that they all share your company's pov. A good course first establishes the range of pov's on the subject. It actually orients the student in relation to past thinking before telling the student how the class is going to challenge or supplement or advance that thinking. And if you aren't going to add anything why are you wasting my time?

2) Address a particular problem and tell me how to solve it with particular details. Don't tell me about a general problem. No problems are general. All problems are particular. Even if I haven't had the particular issue being discussed and am not likely to have it, I'll learn a lot more from the particular choices you made, then general statements about "being transparent" which can mean just about anything. (75% are marketing blog posts are like this too in my snotty opinion) If you want to generalize from the particular experience, that's fine, people love it, but still give me some examples that support the general point.

3) Tell me about your mistakes: We all know that we learn more from our mistakes so why do businesses act like they never make them. I suppose the obvious answer is liability. If you confess publicly to having fucked up, your ex-client and can come back demand reparations (which raises a question about whether you can ever really tell the truth about a business experience and why case studies always read like half the story.). But let's assume it's still possible. At the very least, describe how you made a difficult decision between two equally good choices.

4) Give me some evidence for your point: One of the things that drives me insane about the whole kool-aid drinking aspect of social media is that everyone is always preaching the same gospel to the converted. The only time I've ever seen the writers at Mashable actually muster up the energy for an argument with actual evidence is when they were responding to some criticism about the value of social media. And I'd much prefer if the evidence was more than a charming anecdote about something funny your children did when setting up a lemonade stand. (yes, this is an actual example of a blog post supporting the trendy C. Anderson thesis in "Free")

5) Tell me how your approach resolves a contradictory piece of data: The test of any theoretical or practical framework is its ability to resolve a contradiction by reframing the opposition in a new way. Very few things are more intellectually satisfying than resolving these kind oppositions So if you are a making a point about how easy it is to get people involved in social cause and I happen to know that MOST people are not actively involved in a social cause, then tell me why what you're saying is true in a way that I previously didn't see. What do you see that I don't?

6) Tell me what your course or theory doesn't explain: As we used to say in graduate school, every theory explains only so much. It's important to acknowledge those things that are simply irrelevant to your topic. Don't delude yourself into thinking your theory explains everything. Once your terms become big general inspiring metaphors, they become relatively useless for anything else.

Which is maybe just a long-winded and pretentious way of making big general points like: clearly define your terms, tell me something new, provide evidence, demonstrate a solution with particular details, tell me about your mistakes and what you still don't know....

That would be a nice way to spend a lunch hour

The Media Lab explores the future of storytelling

Had a fascinating and fortuitous chat yesterday with my Acela seatmate, who turned out to be Frank Moss, Director of the MIT Media Lab. He told me that, among all kinds of other characteristically cool projects, they were also developing a research area around the future of storytelling, exploring multi-platform and/or transmedia and/or buzz-word of your choice ways of telling stories.

He said he’d just been out in Hollywood and many studios were experimenting with ways to expand the traditional formal elements of the film: from its duration (very short to very long) to the way you encounter it (multiple screens in your life), to some feedback mechanisms that allow the film to be shaped by the viewer’s own personal data or feedback.

It sounds “cool,” in the classic nerdy sense of the word: technologically innovative, visually striking, full of potential. I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

But at the same time, it’s worth remembering that storytelling in its basic form, with all the traditional elements (plot, character, scene, etc) has been around for a very long time and historically, it has been durably conservative.

For one thing, traditional storytelling in both literature to film has weathered very many cultural and technological challenges to its conventional structures from surrealism to modernism to the French New Wave and while these movements influence its development and often lead to great innovative works of art (e.g., Ulysses) they tend not to create new pathways. Rather, the dominant culture tends to steer storytelling back to the center.

Even new technologies have had only a minor on narrative form. We have bigger explosions and better special effects, but we still have heroes and villains and beginnings and ends. And let's not forget that other new technologies have made big claims about the transformation of storytelling as we know it but after a few fledgling efforts (technologically "cool" and artistically primitive) they basically went away or became the pet projects of subcultures. Remember hypertext and the create your own story fad?

The development of video games is a bigger question. There is a long and surprisingly heated debate on whether games count as stories (they do in some ways and don’t in others) which you can read all about here (Check out pdf entitled "Ludologists love stories, too). But listening to Frank, it sounded like many of these experimental modes were taking their cues more from video games than film or other narrative forms.

And it’s certainly possible that games will become the dominant cultural form of entertainment moving into the next century. Of course nobody knows what’s going to happen. That’s why it’s great that places like the media lab are exploring these questions. Traditional narrative storytelling has lasted at least 5000 years and it may be here to stay. But it’s possible we are just at the very very beginning of something totally new.

Lay off fiction (Black Box 1a, vers 2)

My second-to-last job for Spartan involved a start-up which had made its final stand on the cheap real-estate fringes of the Chicago. It been launched with great fanfare a few years back, but I didn’t remember the name until I got the call from our CFO. It was one of those made up words created by a computer or someone trying to sound like one. Even when I was staring at the name, it was hard to remember. The syllables kept sliding around in my head. From a business perspective these invented words made sense (no history/no ownership) but I couldn’t escape a pang of sadness over the fact that we’d so exhausted our language that we had to make up words to name our ventures. We’ll call it Company X which at least has advantage of describing its fate.

At its launch, X was heralded as a next-generation real-estate portal, a paradigm-shift in how we buy and sell. It was originally developed as a content play, providing access to information previously restricted to professionals. Disintermediation. Consumer empowerment. Transparency. There were the words of the day. But when their content failed to draw a crowd X tried to evolve into a data aggregator, drawing multiple listings into a single place. But they never got rights to use all the listings. After another round of funding, it tried a b2b model, selling what they described as a superior version of the standard competitive evaluation. The comp may well have been better but there’s no point in using a comparison unless other people do too, which they didn’t. It had been easy to disguise the gaps in logic a couple years ago, when anything seemed possible. But no one was confused any longer, especially Spartan, who had poured over 20 million into it. They were ready to cut bait.

There was no HR department to speak of so I was sent out to manage the exit interviews with the founder. We met first in a coffee shop around the corner to avoid too much of a stir. We had crossed paths before but I doubt he’d remember me, and he didn’t.

“This just sucks,” he said, as we sat down the counter.
“Never shut down a shop?”
“Yes, no, yes. You know. Not personally. But I feel,” he paused, “like I need to be here.”

He pursed his lips together in a boyish pucker of regret. It was the expression of a man who knew he should care, and did, up to a point, but had also put the whole thing in perspective. His stare settled onto the middle distance somewhere beyond the diner window out in the soybean fields that still carpeted the land around the office parks.

This loaded silence went on for a good twenty seconds and I let him have his moment. These lapses into sentimentality were more common than you might think. It’s hard to know what do with failure in America. It always seems to call out for some ceremony or ritual that acknowledged that a dream had come to an end. But there was no ceremony. Plus no one wanted to get bogged down in nostalgia.

The waitress brought our coffee and broke the spell. Then, to help move the conversation along, I asked him about his plans.

He turned away from the window, his eyes brightening and began drawing on the paper napkin as he spoke, a rapid sketch of vectors shooting out from a central circle. He described a platform for sharing energy resources. It was completely on trend with the new global They could do for X what Y had done for Z. It was a potential game-changer. Companies were clamoring for new options. He was having trouble keeping up with the calls.

As he described the potential, I felt my heart racing despite myself. Bruce was a great salesman, a born entrepreneur. By the end, I think he forgot why we were there. I had to interrupt him, glancing at the clock.

“Any advice?” he said, looking a little sheepish.
“Don’t take offense. It’s not about you.”
“Isn’t it?
“Not anymore,” I said, adding “No offense” with a gentle pat on his shoulder.
“I suppose that’s right. That’s fair.”

When it comes to lay-offs, people like to imagine that these things can end “well” or ‘badly.” If you’ve been part of one (and if you haven’t you will) you will hear a lot of talk about the style of the event. Someone will undoubtedly say, “I just wish they would have handled it better.” But the grim facts being what they are, this is a fantasy. When you’re getting dump by a boss or lover or anyone else, you're never going to feel particularly well-handled. In my experience , the range extends more from “badly” to “very badly” to “actionable.” My job was to keep it on the bad end of the spectrum

We walked into the office in mid-morning. I am used to being met with stares of fear, anger, contempt. Sometimes worse. So I was surprised to find the room so animated. Despite the doom hanging over the place, there was a giddy energy in the air. The faces were wide-eyed, eager, expectant, maybe a little confused. The small staff clearly sensed that not all was not right with the world, but they moved through tasks with a jittery alertness as if they could all make it right again with a little gumption and positive attitude.

I soon realized that I was dealing with a gathering of innocents. Many had come in the company’s first incarnation, recruited from other careers: journalism, publishing and other institutions known for intellectual capital. These were talented people with high ideals and expensive educations. They had worked for institutions with long histories and iconic names: Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Ford Foundation. Companies that had been around for decades. They probably didn’t imagine that something could disappear so fast. The majority reacted to the news with stunned perplexity.

“Like for good?” said a young woman named Linda, eyes welling up in astonishment. She turned to Bruce, face slowly settling into a grimmer mask. “I thought you said ....”

I gave Bruce a moment, but when he began with “I want you to know that your special contribution…” I had to cut him off.

The package was generous. Entrepreneurial ventures were risky. This experience would undoubtedly be perceived as valuable by future employees. We wished everyone well.

Expeditiousness was crucial. When it came to avoiding trouble, time was not on our side....