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As a writer and as a citizen, I’m passionately in favor of freedom of speech. There are some unfortunate individuals, however, from whom it should be withheld for their own protection. Take, for example, the case of Walden O’Dell.

O’Dell chose this unfortunate turn of phrase in an invitation to a Republican fund-raiser: “[I’m] committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Which would be no big deal if he weren’t CEO of Diebold Election Systems, the company that delivers more voting machines to our polling places than any other.

Oops. Hey, I’m sure O’Dell was referring to fund-raising and not Diebold’s software engineering. Still, he would have been better off keeping his mouth shut.

As would we all.

Next time you’re in a meeting, divert some of your attention to noticing who are the most effective participants. I did this once and noticed something disconcerting: It wasn’t me. I was too busy talking.

How about you? When a subject comes up you’re passionate about, what do you do? A lot of us act like Harry Potter’s friend Hermione, desperately waving her hand in the air hoping to be called on for the answer. Except that in business settings we don’t raise our hands waiting for the facilitator to call on us (I hope!) — we just grab the floor and talk until we run out of words or breath, or until others interrupt us with their own pithy commentary.

That’s what most of us do. What do the most effective participants do? Mostly, they wait.

Yes, I know you have a lot of knowledge about (for example) which DBMS is the best on the market. Yes, you’re doing everyone a disservice by not sharing that knowledge with the group. But it’s okay. Really.

The question you have to ask yourself is what your goal is. If it’s to share your knowledge, talking is a clear necessity. Repetition isn’t, but saying what you know once is a prerequisite to everyone else hearing it.

If your goal is more than that — if it’s to prove to everyone that you’re the smartest person in the room — talking early and often might be the right strategy. Probably not, but it might be.

But if you want everyone in the room to choose the course of action you think is best, hold your tongue. If necessary, pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and don’t let go for awhile.

There will come a time when the discussion starts to either wind down or repeat itself. That’s when it’s your turn. Here’s the formula: (1) Get the floor; (2) Summarize what’s been said; (3) Find a way to agree with ideas you don’t like that removes them from consideration; (4) Present a way out of the impasse. Like this:

“Can I say something? Thanks. Clearly, this is a complicated subject. Here’s what I think I’ve heard. Fred, you made the excellent point that Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft dominate the market. Just as a pulse-check — does everyone here agree with Jill that Microsoft’s software doesn’t scale to the enterprise as well? Yes? Me too.”

“Jim, I know you’d like us to explore open source alternatives. I have to say, I find the notion attractive myself, but listening to everyone here it’s pretty clear that using open source at the heart of our architecture is a bit too adventurous for this company. What I’d suggest is that we hold off, and look for an opportunity for a smaller scale proof-of-concept project for open source software and take it off the table here. Does that make sense to everyone? Jim, can you live with that?”

“Good. Then it looks like we have a toss-up between IBM and Oracle. We need some way to break the tie, and from everything I heard it won’t be their relative technical merits. If we expand our conversation to include which company we’d rather do business with, does that get us anywhere?”

Whether the subject is database management systems or what to have for lunch, people will follow your direction far more often if you keep your own counsel while waiting for most of the shouting to finish. Then, as a non-combatant, you can get everyone to the right answer.

Make sense? Good. I’m going to sign off now, and spend the next month working hard to take my own advice.

Adios, Cingular.

So far as I can tell, AT&T just repurchased itself from itself for a lot of money. I’m sure that can’t really be the case, though.

I just can’t handle the math.

Math can be useful. It can help us understand when circumstances we don’t like are built into the fabric of the space-time continuum. That’s particularly handy for companies that have a blame-oriented culture and are wondering whose fault it is.

For example:

Combinatorials: I’ve mentioned the formula n(n-1)/2 before. You can use it to calculate the number of pairs of objects in any collection. It explains why an entrepreneurial startup venture can operate as a “band of brothers.” Until, that is, it succeeds.

Imagine the startup consists of five old friends who know and trust each other. n(n-1)/2 means it contains 10 pairs of people. With only ten pairs, everyone can maintain trust; everyone knows what everyone else is good at, and the company operates smoothly.

So the company succeeds. Pretty soon it has 100 employees — 4,950 pairs. There’s simply no way every pair will exhibit mutual trust. Some pairs are total strangers; others consist of people who just plain don’t like each other; who see each other as rivals; or otherwise can’t work together effectively.

Surface area to volume ratio: Blow up a balloon — for simplicity, imagine it’s spherical. When it’s an inch in radius, its rubber surface covers 12.566 square inches (4*pi*radius^2) and encloses a volume of 4.189 cubic inches (4/3*pi*radius^3). Surface Area/Volume = 3.

Blow up the balloon to a five inch radius. It now has a surface area of 314.159 square inches, and encloses 523.598 cubic inches. Surface Area/Volume = 0.6.

Small balloons have a lot of surface area for each unit of volume. Big ones have very little. It’s why we’re made out of many itty bitty cells instead of being big globs of protoplasm. The quantities of oxygen and nutrients cells need (and wastes they must dispose of) depends on how much stuff they contain — their volume. Their surface area limits how fast they can exchange it all with the outside world.

If this still doesn’t make sense, compare the five-inch balloon to 125 one-inch balloons. Both enclose about 524 cubic inches. The five-inch balloon contains it in 314 square inches of rubber. The 125 one-inch balloons need about 1,570 square inches — five times the surface area.

It is because small objects have a much higher surface-area-to-volume ratio that iron dust is highly flammable while iron bars are not (nor do a prison make, not that it’s relevant).

It also explains why it is that in small entrepreneurships, every employee has a clear view of real paying customers and what they need, while in large enterprises almost nobody does. The surface area has become far too small relative to the company’s volume.

AND logic: Back when I was studying electric fish I learned to wire together simple electronic circuits. Many included AND gates. Feed nothing but 1s to an AND gate and it outputs a 1. Make any input a 0 and it outputs a 0.

AND logic extends to any number of operands. (A AND B AND C AND D) is only true if A, B, C and D are all true. If any are false, the entire proposition is false.

The executive suite is one big AND gate. In order to proceed on an idea suggested by an employee, the employee’s manager, the employee’s manager’s manager, and the CEO, CFO, COO, and CAO all have to say yes. If any say no, the entire corporation has said no.

Big companies become risk-averse, not because their individual executives are excessively timid, but because of AND logic.

Sympathetic vibrations: Pluck a string on a guitar. It vibrates. Place the guitar near another identically tuned guitar and the same string on the other guitar will vibrate, too.

It’s called a sympathetic vibration.

In business, sympathetic vibrations are why bad ideas can take on lives of their own. It works like this:

A superficially attractive idea (move our factories to China, perhaps) creates good vibes. An executive with vision but no attention to detail picks up on it and repeats it, making it louder — and therefore better-able to induce sympathetic vibrations in yet more executives. Soon, everyone repeats the idea, and it sounds just like an informed consensus.

But really, it’s just one boneheaded idea that, through the physics of sympathetic vibration, ends up filling the company.

Don’t agree? How else do you explain it?

We went to see the Rolling Stones open their A Bigger Bang tour in Boston. It put to rest an event that’s haunted me for 16 years: Walking through the halls of my then-place of employment, a friend gleefully brandished his two tickets to the Stones’ Steel Wheels concert. I nearly burst into tears — I’d just bought four tickets to Sesame Street Live.

A Bigger Bang was, if you’re wondering, phenomenal but that’s not why I’m bringing up the subject. You’ll have to wait for that while I tell you about Larry Brody’s new book, Turning Points in Television. (I hope you appreciate me. What other IT column bases its content on the Rolling Stones and the history of television instead of XML and web services?)

Larry, a creative force in the television industry for several decades, wrote Turning Points in Television to be less a walk through memory lane than an insightful analysis of the history of an industry. (One of the more minor insights, given an overly kind mention, came from a column yours truly published some years back — that in most media businesses, you and I are neither customer nor consumer. We’re the product, sold to advertisers. The material we consume is not the product — it’s bait.)

The history of television is, sadly, the history of every industry. Founded in a burst of creative energy and fostered by periodic injections of brilliant innovation, it was run by the creative innovators. But only for awhile.

In the case of television, the writing was on the wall in 1978 when Larry met with Deanna Barkley, vice president of “long form development” at NBC. “What’ve you got that’s generic enough for NBC?” she asked. Now we have Survivor Guatemala. Having lived in Guatemala for six months, I feel comfortable asking this question: What’s the point? Just give the money to the millions of Mayans whose ancestors survived the Spaniards. What’s next — Survivor Mall of America?

An unsettling aspect of the industry’s evolution is the nature of the early innovators. They were characters, and that describes those toward the middle of the pack. Many of the most important were bullies, screamers, and head cases. Larry describes, for example, David Gerber — one of his mentors. Faced with a network market researcher who tried to change their hit series Police Story, “the Gerb” screamed, ranted, raved, swore, knocked his chair down and stormed out. Then he screamed, ranted, raved, swore at and threatened his writers (the threat: working at NBC). “In the TV business,” Larry explains, “that’s called being a mentor.”

Meanwhile, the business punditocracy is very fond of concepts like “Emotional Intelligence,” measured by EQ — an even more pseudoscientific measure than the IQ its proponents want to supplant. EQ is supposed to be a Good Thing to have. In most industries, EQ is, in fact, a valued trait. I wonder, though, whether that’s healthy. The Gerb’s EQ was un-measurably low. His value was immeasurable.

We’ve come to treasure a near-robotic persona in our business managers and leaders, and we’re in danger of extending this preference to those who do real work. The synonym for professionalism is, too often, blandness.

Which brings us back to the Stones. It occurred to me while pondering the value of EQ, individual skills, group process and so on (don’t worry — it was after the concert, not during) that not one member of the band is the best at what he does. Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler are better guitarists than Keith Richards and Ron Wood (and just about the entire rest of the guitar-playing world, too). Charlie Watts is a competent drummer, no more. Jagger’s singing voice is, by any objective standard, awful.

But together they’re a killer touring band and have been for more than forty years. A management theorist would probably use them as an object lesson in the value of teamwork over individual skills. Who knows — maybe Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood all have high emotional intelligence.

This management theorist thinks the point is different — that the Stones aren’t bland. They aren’t the most talented performers, but they’re among the most flamboyant, and you have to give a 62-year-old guy credit for running around on stage for two and a half hours without a break like, as someone once said, a rooster on acid.

I figure these guys have something more useful than being good at getting along — they get along with each other.

Or maybe it’s only rock and roll. But I like it.