One Question for Kare Anderson

Kare Anderson is an Emmy-winning former NBC and Wall Street Journal reporter who now writes the Connected and Quotable column at Forbes, and speaks on communicating-to-connect. She’s the author of Moving From Me to We and co-founder of the Say it Better Center.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Kare:   As a Wall Street Journal reporter, in my second week of work, based in London, and with no background in economics, I was told to interview one of the foremost economists in Europe.

He was so enraged by my “ineptitude” and “ignorance” that were “blindingly evident within minutes of my interview” that he stood up and started pointing and shouting at me in his office with the door open. Yes, I remember those exact words and phrases, and those are the ones that are “clean” enough for me to repeat here.

I kept asking for clarification of his terms and concepts and that irritated him more. A small crowd was forming just outside his door. I could hear tittering. The economy was bumpy then and he felt strongly about what the government should do. I simply did not understand him at first and it took quite awhile for me to decipher a couple of his views so (barely) adequately write my story.  My boss, the bureau chief was not happy with me when I returned and told him what had happened, including how he finally kicked me out of his office. Walking through that parade of chuckling staffers was not my best moment especially as he had spilled coffee on my skirt during one of his outbursts… I mean clarifications. He wrote a letter to the editor, quite articulately and vividly citing my flaws as a reporter. There were 30.

Yet several people wrote letters say they finally understood the underlying economic theory. That’s what most mattered to me, yet I know the writing was not my strongest because of the pressures I felt, being new to a news bureau and a country.

The unexpected upside for me (and I DO mean unexpected) was that his letter apparently boosted readership of my story… and many people, especially women, expressed outrage at him for his personal attacks. Even more women and men wrote letters to the editor in the coming weeks in support of me because the economist made the mistake of responding to some of the attacks by counter-attacking people by name, thus escalating it. I found it mortifying.

My boss was thankful that the battled was made personal, rather than about my “thin coverage” (his polite phrase) in my original story – and that the back and forth story had legs, getting picked up by other media outlets. My nimble French interpreter (I was moved around Europe and she spoke seven languages) and I bonded over the incident. She was wonderfully protective and reached out to her well-placed friends and family members to fan the flames of the story, I learned months later.

Ironically the visibility made people curious about me so it was easier to secure interviews. Above all it cemented my habit of doing more advance research before an interview and to grow credibility in one, specialized beat so it was less likely I had to cover stories outside my area of expertise.

It's OK to cry at work

Here's a link to my interview on American Public Media's Marketplace Money with Tess Vigeland.

The Calculus of Happiness

Can you identify what makes you happy? Did you know that there might be a loose equation that could lead you to a greater likelihood of long-term happiness? In her provocative new book, "The Happiness Myth," Jennifer Michael Hecht says three distinct kinds of happiness make up our overall sense of well-being: good day happiness, good life happiness, and euphoria.

She suggests that each of us has our own optimal personal combination of those happiness components. And it's up to each of us to determine what mix of these three elements is ideal.

As she puts it, "Live as you wish you had lived yesterday." As a person potentially entering the last third of my life, I definitely would like to optimize my good experiences.

According to Hecht, here are ways to think about the various strands of happiness in your life.

Good Day Happiness If you make it onto an air-conditioned subway just as it is about to leave the station on a searing afternoon, or find $20 on the sidewalk, or take a moment to appreciate the scent of lilacs as you walk past a bush, or revel in your team's playoff victory, then you are enjoying good day happiness.

Such chance pleasures are essential to life's enjoyment, but they're transitory and require little effort, apart from acknowledging and savoring the good fortune.

Good Life Happiness Good life happiness, on the other hand, requires effort - working hard to provide opportunities for your kids, finishing a challenging new project on the job, exercising to maintain your health, practicing the piano to achieve a level of mastery, taking care of your aging parents.

These efforts have long-term benefits and, according to Hecht, "the rewards are not merely the result of the struggle; they are the struggle, seen from a different angle, from a different vantage point in time." Without good life kinds of happiness, our lives would be less satisfying in fundamental ways.

Euphoria One's wedding or the birth of a child, climbing a mountain, or winning an award or seeing a once-in-a-lifetime concert - a quota of euphoric moments are essential to give us a sense of the sublime or spiritual.

We don't necessarily need frequent euphoric experiences, but can have them peppered throughout our lives; each experience can and will sustain us for a long time and we can draw on and in essence recreate the euphoric feelings for as long as we live.

But Hecht suggests that American emphasis on productivity and longevity have thrown our calculus out of balance and robbed us of some essential happiness moments. She says "there is a big difference between the value of longevity in our rhetoric and the value we give it."

She suggests that we've become a culture of denial and utilitarianism that values weird isolating kinds of drudgery like running indoors on a treadmill, dieting, or shopping in malls rather than the kinds of exhilarating festivals and pageants that sustained our ancestors.

She struck a nerve with me. I intend to think a bit more consciously about the three kinds of happiness and hope to find more opportunities to immerse myself in joyful communal celebrations of life - seeing a great play, watching 4th of July fireworks, learning to scuba dive - that fill me with pleasure and awe - and maybe spend a little less time alone on the treadmill.

What I Learned From the "Homeless Hotspots" Twitter Furor

When Emma Cookson, the Chairman of the New York branch of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), an award-winning ad agency, and her team concocted an innovative marketing program called Homeless Hotspots, they genuinely had no sense of the furor that they'd be facing when the project launched.The Homeless Hotspots program was meant to serve the needs of the super digerati who attend the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas. Inspired by the established model of homeless people earning money by selling homelessness-focused newspapers, BBH's idea was for homeless people, wearing T-shirts printed with their names and identifying themselves as 4G hotspots, to sell connectivity (an issue for conference attendees) by means of small handheld Wi-Fi routers.

Bad early-March weather kept the program mostly invisible until the third day of SXSW, when appalled commentary began to roil the Twitterverse. Cookson found herself in the unexpected position of having to react to a media tsunami — fast.

I sat down with her to explore what she learned from the experience, which she was able to distill into five lessons:

# 1. Comment Precedes Knowledge

As Cookson was putting her kids to bed the evening of Sunday, March 11 in her Brooklyn home, her Tweetdeck started "blinking very loudly," with her team on the ground in Austin alerting her that something alarming was going on. Individuals had begun negative tweets about Hotspots that cascaded into a cycle of news stories (See articles from ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times and Wired) and what started out as a small brush fire suddenly scaled up to a full-blown firestorm. The speed at which it all happened was unprecedented, given that it was generated by the tech community gathered at SXSW, and not some other big gathering.

With the event now solidly in her rearview mirror, what does Cookson understand about the situation that she didn't know at the time? "I don't think I realized how large the volume of comments without information could be," she says. "The overall effect during the first 24 hours was a very big and very noisy, but largely empty echo chamber. Most of the initial commentary got all of the facts wrong. Nobody knew that all the money (a daily minimum of $50 for up to six hours of work) was going to the participants themselves, nobody knew there was no sponsor or brand connected to the program, nobody knew how the participants felt — there were a number of pieces of missing information."

#2. You Get One Chance to React

On Monday morning, Cookson was looking at a voluminous and overwhelmingly negative set of public comments. "Obviously, the big question for us," Cookson says, "was how do you face that first storm? Do you just stop, exit and apologize? Or, do you carry on and try to explain? We had to make that call really early on — and it's a big call, because once you act on the decision, you can't go back. We decided that we needed to address the comments head-on."

#3. With New Facts and Openness, The Story Can Change

"The reason why I chose to continue," she says, "is because we thought there was a new perspective to bring to bear." Cookson knew, for instance, that nobody had actually heard from the homeless participants whose voices were going to be credible and powerful. Participants like Clarence Jones, a 54-year-old homeless survivor of Hurricane Katrina, or Jonathan Hill II, who reported that he liked being a hotspot better than "his usual work doing manual labor at music venues, largely because it offered him a chance to talk to some of the thousands of the attendees at the program, who normally ignore the roughly 6,000-strong homeless population in Austin."

Cookson describes a clear trajectory in the coverage and believes that, unlike some big corporation with a crisis management team, BBH's decision to talk to everyone proved helpful, finding "that in one-on-one conversations, people were almost always positive." She adds, "What started off on Sunday as primarily negative was by Tuesday hotly debated with new pieces like those on The Atlantic Wire or NPR's Talk of the Nation, where the majority of the call-in comments during the show were supportive and recognized the delicate tension between empowerment and exploitation. It was still a controversial story, but much more balanced. I'd say we made the right decision."

#4. It's Not Just What You Say, It's How You Say It

Cookson says they made a deliberate decision in the planning stages of Homeless Hotspots that they needed to make the fact that the participants were homeless apparent upfront in the name — thus, Homeless Hotspots. "But," she says, "it's not a surprise to someone who works in advertising that what people respond to is not just what you say but how you say it. I work in the communications industry — the execution, the style and the expression are a vast part of what people respond to. The T-shirt message was received very differently when stripped from its original context and broadcast as tweets."

#5. There's Real Value in Clear Leadership

One of Cookson's big lessons was in experiencing the value of her corporate culture through the prism of a crisis. There was a small team of people involved, but she was the decision-maker. "While I was facing an extremely high-volume challenge and criticism externally, I realized after a while that I wasn't facing criticism internally. When the story went big on Sunday night, I e-mailed the global leadership to tell them what was happening and what we were doing about it, but then, I was pretty much left to manage it. What I didn't have — that I think many companies would have had — was any internal challenging or questioning of my judgment." Cookson says that not having to deal with that bureaucratic operational complexity was really critical, because it was a very fast-moving situation. "If' I'd had to keep reporting back, it would have been disabling, and it would have been further disabling if I'd been distracted by a worry that I or my team was being judged internally. We talk about needing to embrace risk to do fresh, innovative stuff," she says, "and this was a living embodiment. Lots of companies talk about embracing risk but don't mean it. How we reacted was a validation that we meant it."

What Would You Do Differently Knowing What You Know Now?

Cookson says she still finds it hard to answer the question of whether she would do anything differently in hindsight, and has thought a lot about how controversy drove the story. Businesses generally don't like controversy, but to Cookson, Homeless Hotspots proved that controversy has enormous power — driving the comments, the outrage, and the conversation. "If you ever need to get a message through, controversy cuts through like nothing else." Then, of course, you have to judge the costs and benefits, deciding whether you want to endure the downside in order to get the upside.

Also posted June 18th, 2012 on the Harvard Business Review HBR Blog Network

One Question for Jim Morin

Jim Morin, whose work is distributed by Morintoons Syndicate, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1996 and shared the Pulitzer with other members of the Miami Herald editorial board in 1983. He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1977 and 1990.

Q:What's the most significant risk you've taken professionally?

Jim: The most significant risk I've taken was dedicating myself to the profession I chose in the first place. Editorial cartooning is a specialized field in many respects. Your drawing involves caricature, usually one that is negative or highly critical of its subject - not the kind of depiction that would make you popular at parties or county fairs. Your drawings ideally communicate strong, often controversial opinions as opposed to the safe illustration desired by newspaper and magazine editors. What other profession requires such skills? Putting "political cartoonist" on a resume hardly seems relevant for any other employable position. Those that do pursue this path walk on a high wire above a very small safety net. With the precarious state of the print journalism business I've worked to make that net a tad bigger by producing animated editorial cartoons for the Herald's online pages as a sort of insurance in the event journalism shifts its platform from paper to computer screen. Regardless, the employment security risks of drawing cartoons for a living are not a laughing matter.

Reading Now

ARTICLES 09.02.12 No Easy Day for Secrecy -Foreign Policy magazine

A Vast Frank Lloyd Wright Archive Is Moving to New York -The New York Times

The Robot Greeters, Cardless ATMs, And Touchscreen Transactions Are So Money At This Bank Of The Future -Fast Company

What the F***? -The New Republic

(Below are some comments on swearing I made in an interview.) [audio:http://www.annekreamer.com/audio/Swearingv1.mp3]

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BOOKS 09.02.12

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BOOKS 08.21.12

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BOOKS 08.16.12

Have you read any of these? What are you reading? Speak your mind.

A Permanent Residency

My Midwestern family, vastly more “Leave It to Beaver” than “Addams Family,” enjoyed one notable quirk. We loved cemeteries. While other families visited museums or churches on their summer vacations, when we traveled, we’d seek out the oldest graveyards we could find, wandering happily among the headstones, reading aloud to each other as we went, imagining the lives of the people buried beneath. History was written in those stones: town politics (the fanciest mausoleums or best sites revealed which families were considered important), epidemics (waves of young deaths), wars (generations of boys wiped out; the stark immensity of the cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy where my father landed), tragedy (five out of eight children predeceasing the parents)and poignancies (couples entombed together after 60 years of marriage).

Once I had my own family, we embraced my parents' legacy (and my in-laws’ similar graveyard love despite their preference for cremation) with even more gusto: picnicking—off-the-beaten path cemeteries are far less populous and more interesting places to eat than parks—and even going so far as to ritualize a headlights-off-spooky-soundtrack-on nighttime drive through the old cemetery close to our Upstate New York farm.

My husband and I had always thought we’d have our ashes scattered on that farm. But when we sold it, I found myself longing for the green calm of country life and began taking walks in the closest verdant place to my home in Brooklyn: Green-Wood Cemetery.

(MORE: A Guide for Funeral Planning and Expenses)

Green-wood is a 478-acre paradise—a National Historic Monument and part of the Audubon Sanctuary System (home to horned owls and Quaker parrots)—deep in the heart of dense urbanity. And it’s the “permanent residence” for the famous and the infamous: Horace Greeley, “Boss” Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Morse, Louis Comfort Tiffany and, my personal favorite, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets” Montez, the 19th-century adventurer and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

The truly great thing is that it is not a depressing place. Unlike most cemeteries, where people visit only on national holidays, Green-Wood is teeming with life and energy—from its magical-seeming fauna to cemetery-sponsored events like moonlight tours accompanied by accordion players to 1950s-feeling Fourth of July brass bands and picnics to people like me enjoying their daily constitutional. When it was founded in 1838, it was part of a new trend in American cemetery design: to turn them into rural, park-like destinations where people could go on weekends to picnic and stroll.

Although I was raised Catholic and don’t really believe in an afterlife, I have found that as I’ve grown older, the need for some kind of a marker that acknowledges that I lived has begun to insinuate itself into my consciousness. And while my husband and I hope to be above ground for a long time, over the past few years during my walks, I've begun to hear a little whisper in the back of my mind that Green-wood might be a place where we’d want to have an enduring presence.

So when I read a piece in The New York Times that reported that Green-Wood was “close to capacity” and that the president of the “organization” was hoping to “recruit” distinguished literary types, I turned to my husband, an author, and said, “Kurt, I want you to contact that man right now and let him know we’d like to be buried in Green-wood.”

Perhaps that's not the most romantic thing a wife can say to her husband before coffee, but he, too, loves our walks and, like the awesome husband that he is, immediately dashed off a letter. And the president promptly responded, “No introduction necessary, Mr. Andersen, your reputation precedes you.”

It was a classic New York moment. Maybe we aren’t quite A-list enough to score a table at Per Se at the last minute, but as authors we had enough mojo to secure a burial plot at the exclusive Green-Wood Cemetery!

The most amazing thing? Unlike any other piece of real estate I've coveted in New York City, it turns out that cemetery plots are surprisingly, shockingly cheap. Really. You could buy a third of a Kelly bag…or get a magnificent little bit of Brooklyn forever. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Last month, we went for an official visit. A sales counselor showed us around, and after much family discussion, we’ve just about settled on a beautiful little wooded depression in the heart of the cemetery where you cannot see a building or hear any traffic. Our daughters, used to picnicking in cemeteries, have come to accept the fact that we’re buying a burial plot. My dream, in fact, is for them to collaborate on a design for a bench they can sit on as our headstone.

(MORE: Family Reactions When a Loved One is Dying)

Interestingly, friends far closer to the horizon line tend to put their fingers in their ears, nah-nah-nah-nah’ing so they can’t hear us, obviously squeamish when we describe our recent adventure in real estate.

None of us wants to think actively about death, but I can honestly report that wandering through the hills and dales of Green-Wood with Kurt on warm spring days, listening to the birds chirp, marveling at the virtuosity of the sculptures adorning the gravesites and contemplating the precise place where we might lie together was impossibly romantic. We held hands, celebrating the life we’ve lived in our chosen city, planning to go gently into the good night.

Brain Over Brawn

What to do if your boss yells at you If someone is screaming at you at work, just imagine him or her as a 2-year-old.   What seems like a funny idea has serious science behind it.

What scientists call metacognition, or the ability to change the way you’re viewing a situation, allows you to If I can step back and see my big boss screaming at me as just a kid having a tantrum, it will empower me.”

In other words, you might not be able to change his bad behavior, but you can change how upset you get and whether you feel like a victim. You can take that lesson home from the workplace too. “We all have our personal narratives that we keep repeating over and over again about where we are in the world or who is to blame for different situations,” Anne says. “But as you get older, you realize you can change your view of yourself and your window on the world.” It’s not easy, and we don’t do it a hundred percent of the time, she says, but it helps us weather crises and move on gracefully.

How to Get to Mars

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the sending of two rovers - MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity - to explore the Martian surface and geology.

Live Differently

My husband and I have contentedly lived in the same two-mile radius of New York City for more than three decades. And while we certainly aren’t bored with life, in recent years the daily grind has somewhat inured us to its swellness. The winters had begun to feel more onerous, the leaks and creaks of our late 19th-century townhouse a little more problematic, the people and streets and buildings just a bit routine. So when our youngest daughter left for college in 2008 and my husband was serendipitously offered a four-month residency at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, we jumped at the chance to experience living in a new place. Southern California beckoned us with everything New York was lacking: warmth in the winter, accessible natural magnificence of all sorts (hiking, swimming, aromatic flora and unfamiliar megafauna), and an abundance of exquisite mid-20th century architecture, which we both adore.

As writers, fortunately, we can work anywhere there’s an Internet connection, which at this point is pretty much anywhere on Earth, so that meant that our stint in Los Angeles would not be a vacation so much as a no-risk opportunity to experience what it would feel like to live in a radically different environment.

Friends offered us, at well below the market rental rate, their Rudolph Schindler house in Studio City, just over the mountain ridge of Los Angeles proper. In New York we lived vertically, on four floors; in L.A., horizontally, on one. The house was compact, filled with light, and a short walk from miles of trails through thousands of wild acres.

Rather than trudging along the treadmill in the basement of my grotty, urban gym, I began to hike in actual nature, coming across coyotes — within the city limits. Almost every daily pattern was jettisoned, and it was positively thrilling. By letting go of decades-long habits I started rediscovering the more fun, creative version of myself that had been buried under the weight of tasks, like managing tedious college admissions and keeping our household afloat.

It’s as if dormant synapses in my brain were suddenly rebooting. We developed new routines that didn't feel routine at all: breakfast in the garden, work until lunch, an adventure each afternoon, dinner with new people. Even driving had its upsides: My husband, a novelist who also hosts a public radio program, had the pleasure of listening to more of his colleagues' shows in real time during our four months in Los Angeles than in the previous several years in New York.

We began to find that everything from the most mundane — where we had our prescriptions filled or clothes cleaned — to the most awe-inspiring (a day spent in the Mojave Desert with visionary airplane and spacecraft designers or an afternoon wandering the Museum of Jurassic Technology) was fresh and inspiring. And 30-plus years into our relationship, my husband and I were experiencing this exciting newness together.

At the risk of sounding TMI New Age-y, it was sexy. We are not natural extroverts, but we made a decision to say yes to practically any invitation, which meant that we ate in a few subpar places and drove on some hellish roads. But saying yes also allowed us to meet some phenomenal people who have become friends, and to expose ourselves to very different ways of thinking and working and living.

The time together felt remarkably similar to the days when we were first dating, but without all the angsty “does he like me?” drama. It was plain old fun. By opening ourselves to the new, we stumbled into rich moments of enhanced happiness — “Wasn’t the hummingbird beautiful this morning?” “Didn’t the air smell amazing last night?” Even parking, like teenagers, on Mulholland Drive to watch the full moon rise — at a rate we would not have experienced in the familiarity of our adopted hometown.

The location need not be exotic or expensive. Once, when our home was being renovated, we stayed in the house of a friend who was out of town for a few weeks. Just living a few miles away was a complete novelty: Nothing was the same; everything seemed alive in a new way.

Tips for Successful Transformative Travel

1. Let your heart guide you to the destination. Where have you wanted to go, what have you wanted to experience? You don’t have to be young or recently divorced to craft your very own Eat, Pray, Love journey.
2. Rent or swap a house or apartment, go couch-surfing, but do not stay in the bubble of a hotel, where you'll meet only tourists. Immersing yourself in a new environment takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to interact with locals and the richness of their everyday life.
3. Say yes to new food, to new vistas, to  any activity you might not do at home.
4. Do your homework. Before you leave, research whether there are any courses or schools that might have an interesting program — cooking classes, a painting or photography program, walking groups — and enroll in one.