If ever you’ve interviewed for a job you didn’t get, no doubt you’ve bumped into this unpleasant experience.

You interview, you send a follow-up letter—maybe even with some writing samples or references—and then you wait. A week or so goes by, and you check in, yet hear nothing. Another week passes, and your frustration mounts.

If you’re lucky, eventually you receive a form letter that the position has been filled.

Excuse me, but what the fuck?

If two parties take the time to schedule and meet for an interview—in addition to conducting any background research—doesn’t common courtesy demand acknowledging subsequent communications? Is it that burdensome to respond with boilerplate such as, “We’ll let you know if we decide to move forward”? Keeping people in limbo is just plain rude.

So what to do? A recruiter might advise you to keep your chin up and plug along. E-mails being ignored? Pick up the phone. Calls going to voice mail? Leave a message with an assistant.

Let me suggest an alternative. If a prospective employer refuses to give you the time of day, then check that company off your list.

Too often, we strain to craft the polite but pointed e-mail. “Just want to make sure you have everything you need?” “Was wondering if I should plan to uncork a champagne bottle this weekend?” “Thought I’d touch base…”

Instead, spurned job seekers would do better to take their talents elsewhere. Just because prospective employers tend to have the upper hand doesn’t mean they should abuse it. And just because prospective employees need jobs doesn’t mean they should let themselves be taken for granted.

Granted, many job seekers do not enjoy the luxury of being so choosy, especially when the unemployment rate stands at 9.8%. Yet this advice not only serves your self-respect; it’s also practical, grounded in the experience that if a company is interested in you, it will get back to you, usually promptly. When that doesn’t happen, rarely does  following-up change minds. Move on.

In an article for Fortune recounting his time leading the auto task force, Steve Rattner drops this nugget about the management of General Motors:

At GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

Contrast this with the milieu at Bloomberg LP:

The central fact about Bloomberg’s new headquarters in midtown Manhattan is that it is nonhierarchical, having no private offices; all employees, from the brass on down, sit in long rows of terminal-laden desks.

Similarly, of Mayor Bloomberg, the New Yorker observed that he “works in a cubicle no bigger than his secretary’s.” Tim Gray, of TMCnet, elaborates:

When … [Michael] Bloomberg took office back in 2002, he ripped out City Hall’s traditional “office” setup and went about constructing a “bullpen” with a series of office cubicles, where he set up shop square in the middle.

The boss … placed himself in the center cubicle right next to new hires and middle rung employees of the country’s biggest city?

You bet he did …

“Walls are barriers, and my job is to remove them,” the billionaire businessman told the New York Times at the time …

The cubicles idea, Bloomberg has said, is to create an atmosphere of openness with the boss out front without anything hidden.

“I’m CEO, bitch.” That is reportedly what Facebook CEO, Marck Zuckerberg, had printed on his initial business cards.

Immature? Certainly. Arrogant? Absolutely. Plausible? Given Zuckerberg’s penchant for wearing sandals to meetings, yes.

Yet the same charges apparently can be leveled at another tech founder, Larry Page of Google, whose fawning press clips have been the opposite of Zuckerberg’s. As reported by Ken Auletta in last week’s New Yorker, Page not only flouted common courtesy in a meeting with media mogul Barry Diller; his co-founder, Sergey Brin, seems not to have minded a whiff. (In fact, in a 2003 meeting with Viacom COO, Mel Karmazin, Brin “arrived late and rollerbladed into the room, out of breath and wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts.”)

Here’s the Diller anecdote:

Barry Diller, the C.E.O. of I.A.C., a diverse collection of Internet sites, including Ask.com and Match.com, recalled visiting Page and Brin in the early days of Google. Diller was disconcerted that Page, even as they talked, stared fixedly at the screen of his P.D.A. “It’s one thing if you’re in a room with 20 people and someone is using his P.D.A.,” Diller recalled. “I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?’ ”

“No. I’m interested. I always do this,” Page said.

“Well, you can’t do this,” Diller said. “Choose.”

“I’ll do this,” Page said matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.

“So I talked to Sergey,” Diller said. “I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed.”

Indeed. Were I in Diller’s shoes, I think I would have pulled a Johnny Drama (see above video), said “I’ll do this,” and walked out the door. Rudeness is not Googley, I don’t care who you are.

What’s more, in Google’s early days, Page was nobody. For comparison, can you imagine the President of the United States, an avid BlackBerrier himself, thumbing away on his PDA during a meeting with another head of state?

It would never, and should never, happen. Rude is rude.

“Success is a lousy teacher,” Bill Gates once quipped. We learn so much more by studying our failures than we do by sipping champagne.

Sadly, this lesson seems to be lost on the organizers of Gov 2.0 conferences. As my colleague, Steve Radick, observes, we don’t need another event to learn about the virtues of transparency or crowdsourcing; we need an event to learn how to secure and expand buy-in for these things from the C suite. Specifically, Steve suggests, we need to:

1. Realize that not all is perfect in the land of Gov 2.0. While we’ve had a lot of success, let’s not sweep our weaknesses under the rug. Let’s identify what’s going wrong and talk about it. We have showcases to talk about all of the successes—why don’t we have an event to talk about the challenges we’re facing and how to overcome them?

2. Identify the skeptics and open up a dialogue with them. Let’s stop talking about how great we all are amongst ourselves. I want a conference where that CIO who continues to block access to social media talks about why he’s blocking it. I want to hear from that Admiral explaining why he’s banned his sailors from using social media. I want to go to an event where I can talk with the guy who decided to shut down the UGov e-mail system and learn more about the pressures he’s facing.

3. Hear the war stories of the people who have gone before us. Listen, I know that there have been people who have been fired, reprimanded, demoted, moved to another project, and just flat-out yelled at for some of their Gov 2.0 efforts. What happened and why? What are the battles that people are facing? What are the battles that have been won and lost? I know that I’ve dealt with people yelling at me, laughing at me, and/or dismissing me for my Gov 2.0 efforts over the last three years—I’m sure there are others out there who would be able to learn from these experiences, just as I have.

Happily, it appears that a remedial confab, The Shortfalls of Government 2.0, is in progress. Here’s hoping this shortfall will become our windfall.

Last week, Google announced better-than-expected earnings for Q3 2009. Predictably, its stock rose 3.76%.

Yet in our worship of the search giant, we overlook that 11 years after its founding, Google remains a one trick pony. As Jonathan Last recently observed,

Its home-grown products, such as Orkut, Knols, Lively, and Google Checkout (knockoffs of Facebook, Wikipedia, Second Life, and PayPal, respectively), have been failures. Google’s biggest successes have come from acquisitions. For instance, Google bought YouTube after its own attempt at video on the web, Google Video, crashed and burned. And did the same with Blogger after its blog platform, Pyra Labs, failed. Even the “successful” acquisitions Google has made—Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Docs, and Blogger were all purchases, too—have taken up resources without creating significant revenue.

Indeed, Google’s latest—the much-heralded Google Wave—has been a flop, and the market share of its much-publicized Chrome browser is a rounding error. Despite restless ambitions and an ever-growing footprint, the company remains stunningly, unhealthily dependent on a single revenue source: advertising.

“Yet even here,” Last continues, its results are mixed.

Those text ads are dynamite, but Google couldn’t master the banner ad business and eventually resorted to simply buying DoubleClick, the industry leader. Eager to extend their tentacles into other ad mediums, Google started selling print ads, TV ads, and radio ads. The print and audio divisions performed so badly that they’ve already been shut down. The TV division is still limping along lamely.

By contrast, Microsoft owes its success not only to Windows, but also to Office.

“And here’s another reality check,” adds Chris Thompson. “Plenty of tech firms are still head and shoulders above Google, at least in terms of revenue.” Apple’s at #71 on the Fortune 500, Intel’s at #61, and Dell is swaggering around at #33.

We may live in a Google world, but that world fades when we unplug from the Internet.

Published on LindsayOlson.com.

Would you hire this self-described Internet strategist? He rarely blogs, doesn’t much tweet, and uses YouTube for quick and dirty videos filmed with a Flip camera.

No? Would your mind change if you knew he were a veteran of Microsoft and Yahoo, whom the Washington Post described as “one of the elder statesmen in the … class of online political operatives”? What if NationalJournal.com credited him with expanding the Republican National Committee’s e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million, and “dramatically improving the party’s social media outreach”? His name: Cyrus Krohn.

What about this guru? He, too, rarely tweets, much less blogs, and enjoys only 285 Facebook friends. Yet he’s spent the past two and a half years building, from scratch, what the Politico ranks as the fourth best e-mail list in politics. Last year, PoliticsOnline and the World E-Democracy Forum named him one of the “Top 10 Changing the World of Internet and Politics.” His name: David Kralik.

Finally, while our third executive is active on Twitter, he has only 271 followers. He suspended his personal blog more than a year ago, and only rarely comments on the blog he helped found, RedState. His day job? Executive Vice President at Edelman, the largest independent pr firm, where he runs the digital public affairs practice and his clients include Wal-Mart and the American Petroleum Institute. His name: Michael Krempasky.

Clearly, these guys are major players in digital media. They speak at conferences, command sizable salaries, and boast enviable records of accomplishment.

Yet their efforts at personal branding—their own PR—are relatively lackluster. They’re behind-the-scenes operators, who keep their heads down. They’ll give a quote to a reporter, but client work is their priority.

And yet, if these folks were job searching, today’s recruiters no doubt would advise them to raise their own profile—to beef up their LinkedIn page, optimize the search engine results for their names, and start publishing thought-leadership pieces.

This advice is well taken, but perhaps overdispensed. Even if you work in digital media, you need not have 500 Facebook friends, as David All asks of his potential employees. While understanding the medium requires engaging it, you’d do just as well to help a client gain 10,000 Twitter followers than attain this feat for yourself. As Sean Hackbarth can attest, even being a well-connected blogger with nine years of experience does not guarantee gainful employment.

Put another way, Show me what you’ve done for others, and I’ll discern who are.

Addendum: Tim Cameron refers me to another underbranded expert: Blue State Digital Founding Partner and Obama for America New Media Director, Joe Rospars.

The other day, a friend who I haven’t talked to in a while asked if I am still active in politics. The answer—no—came easily, but the reason necessitated some introspection. Why, after spending four years in college and two years afterward immersed in the field—professionally and personally—have I soured on the subject?

Obviously, that I’ve changed professions accounts for a lot. Yet I think my disenchancement runs deeper. Here’s why.

1. Hyperbole is more common than thoughtfulness. I first commented on this trend in 2007, when I questioned three things: (1) the historically ignorant use of the words “totalitarian” and “authoritarian,” (2) the title of a new blog, TechRepublican, as opposed to TechConservative, and (3) Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandant.

A year later, I lamented that, literally and figuratively, the pugilistic partisan, Grover Norquist, had replaced the courteous intellectual, William F. Buckley.

Finally, on a prominent ListServ of conservative bloggers to which I belong, few seem to mind when the e-mailer calls a politician with whom he disagrees a “douchebag” or “scumbag.” Never mind that the issue is usually trivial, or that the pol is usually a Republican; the rancor toward one’s own party is palpable.

As one who prides himself on no straw men, I find such discourse repugnant.

2. Winning has become more important than doing what’s right. An excerpt from Taylor Branch’s new book, The Clinton Tapes, illustrates this point:

[President Clinton] treated posturing as a natural element. He remarked, for instance, that he had no idea what Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas thought about the merits of gays in the military. “He may genuinely be for it or against it,” said Clinton. “All our discussions have been about the politics.” He said Dole advised him quite candidly that he intended to keep the issue alive as long as he could to trap Clinton on weak ground, where he would “take a pretty good beating.” Similarly, the president said Dole consistently advised that budgets were the most partisan matters between Congress and the White House, and that Clinton could expect to get few if any Republican votes for his omnibus bill on taxes and spending. Clinton said Dole spoke of the opposition’s job not as making deals but rather making the president fail, so he could be replaced as quickly as possible.

Indeed, as a recent article in the New York Times suggests, the advocacy group, Americans for Limited Government, seems more interested in thwarting Obama than thwarting big government. The subtitle of the blog of the libertarian scholar, David Boaz, “Independent thinking in a red-blue town,” makes more sense to me every day I’m here.

In his book, Politics Lost, Joe Klein deplores “the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days.” Wise words. What a shame they’re so true.

Addendum (10/6/2009): In a recent op-ed, Steven Hayward, of the American Enterprise Institute, elaborates on my point:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

A high school valedictory I delivered provides the explanation, in words, of this declaration. Now, 10 years later, comes the videotape, filmed this past summer in Alexandria, Va:

Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.

Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.

1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.

2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.

3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”

4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.

5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.*

6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.

7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.

On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.

8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?

For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the results can well repay the effort.

Related: Should Blogs Be Independent of or Integrated in Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

* Addendum (9/5/2009): The secret to the success of the many blogs on nytimes.com? Editors.

After all, aren’t all communications “strategic”? Do nonstrategic partnerships even exist?

The truth is, these are differences without a distinction. As any semanticist will tell you, if you can remove the adjective without changing the meaning of the noun, chuck the adjective. It’s a buzzword, ”an important-sounding, usually technical word or phrase, often of little meaning, used chiefly to impress laymen.”

Think of this speciousness the next time you’re tempted to employ such jargon.

Some editors balk at publishing details of their reporters’ fruitless attempts to interview a source. So as to let the story speak for itself, not appear whiny, and/or not burn a bridge, they prefer to summarize such sausage making through boilerplate. “Repeated phone calls and e-mails were not returned,” is a line I often read.

But when the subject of a major story in a major magazine continually stonewalls and reneges, the publication does its readers a diservice by omitting these salient details. Thankfully, in its current issue, Vanity Fair bucks this trend, and allows its contributor, Nina Munk, to divulge her stymied efforts to report on Harvard’s shrinking endowment.

As you may have guessed by now, Harvard refused to cooperate when I was reporting this story. At first, the university’s public-relations apparatus ignored me. Week after week, e-mail after e-mail, I’d be assured that someone or someone else was unavailable—in meetings, or on vacation, or away from his desk, or out of the office, ill. When I did manage to track someone down, I was thrown a sop of evasive prose. (“I don’t feel we’ve made a decision about how to best engage for your piece,” the vice president for public affairs told me in an e-mail.) A formally scheduled interview with the dean of the business school was canceled at the very last minute. (“Glitch” was the subject heading of an e-mail informing me that the meeting was off.) Even requests for basic, public financial information were bungled. When I asked him a simple question about Harvard’s debt, one of the university’s many communications directors stonewalled: “I’m not a numbers person at all,” he said, wide-eyed.

No doubt, most reporters will empathize. As readers, we should too.

By now, it’s a cliché that Twitter has real-world value. Yet if you really want to appreciate both the usefulness and hipness of microblogging, try participating in a social media conference where live Tweeting is not only encouraged, the Tweets also are displayed on JumboTrons flanking the on-stage speaker.

Such was the case earlier this week at the Open Government and Innovations Conference. Held at the Convention Center in Washington, DC, the two-day conference brought together 700 “gov 2.0” types from the federal government and the consulting community that supports it. As such, not only did most attendees pack a Twitter-appified PDA; many also toted laptops or netbooks.

To meet such demand, the conference organizers established a hash tag—a unique series of characters (e.g., “ogi”), prefaced by a hash symbol (#)—to group together all #ogi Tweets. Tags, of course, are nothing new; what was new (at least for me) were the two JumboTrons that showcased, in real time on a 3×2 grid, each #ogi Tweet, coupled with the Tweeter’s headshot and user name.

Initially, this setup was overwhelming. With so many things competing for attention—the speaker, his PowerPoint presentation, Twitter, the JumboTrons, the legs of the blonde two tables over—distraction was easy. Yet as the conference proceeded, information overload gave way to information empowerment.

How? Instead of indulging our inner ADD, participants stayed focused. At the same time we typed, we listened. At the same time we listened, we read. Multitasking was not optional.

Yes, of course, such juggling can be dizzying. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not for philosophy seminars. But social media isn’t philosophy, especially for those of us who do it for a living. And when we attend a conference on a subject with which we’re already familiar, we learn not only from the speakers but also from our peers.

For instance, after a panel on how to make the federal acquisitions process more transparent, I carried out a Tweeted conversation, with Jaime Gracia, on how to make RFP responses public. When I wanted to attend multiple panels that were taking place simultaneously, the #ogi tag allowed me to be in two places at once. When questions were being solicited for Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, even though my colleague, Steve Radick, was back in McLean, his tagged Tweet appeared on the JumboTron and soon made its way to Kundra.

The beauty of this live Tweet showcase is its combination of transcriptions with punditry; that is, while some record what’s being said, others prefer to add their own thoughts. Put another way, a live Tweet showcase crowdsources note-taking. The best notes are re-Tweeted, the best note-takers are followed, and, in the end, there’s a digital trail, complete with headshots and links, of contacts made, water cooler gossip, enlightened dialogue, and everything in-between.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself at an upcoming gov 2.0 confab.

Addendum (7/27/2009): Ludo Van Vooren notes that the software used for the live Tweet showcase is called TwitterCamp.

Addendum (8/11/2009): Here’s another innovation from the OGI conference: The first-ever TweetBook, a compilation of hashgtagged tweets (in this case, #OGI). Don’t miss the pull-tweet on page 45.

As legislation to reform our energy use and health insurance winds its way through Congress, it’s worth pausing to ask if we should tweak the system before overhauling it?

To be sure, there’s no reason why an overhaul can’t include these reforms. And there’s no reason why an overhaul can’t be incremental. Yet as two recent articles point out, there’s no reason why we can’t carry out these reforms now.

1. Strengthen energy requirements in building codes. Today’s energy requirements in building codes remain weak across half the country, and at least seven states have virtually no rules. That means that in many places, particularly the nation’s heartland, almost every new home, store and factory that goes up locks the country into unnecessary energy use for years to come.

No new technology needs to be invented to make major gains in saving energy. Products already available permit the construction of homes at least 30 percent more efficient than the national average. With enough political will, a new law can be put in place anywhere with the stroke of a pen, and made even more potent if it is coupled with tough oversight, as in Austin, Texas.

2. Eliminate hospital-acquired infections. Scrupulous adherence to simple but profoundly important practices like hand-washing, proper preparation of surgical sites, and assiduous care and maintenance of central lines and urinary catheters would save tens of billions of dollars every year.

John Gillespie Magee Jr.:

[To] slip[] the surly bonds of Earth … [and] touch[] the face of God.

Aaron Sorkin:

‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave. And we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean. And we pioneered the West. And we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration, and this is what’s next.

Charles Krauthammer:

We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things—send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong—you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

In a rare public appearance Wednesday, CIA Director Porter Goss said he is overwhelmed by the many duties of his job, including devoting five hours out of every day to prepare for and deliver intelligence briefings to President Bush.

“The jobs I’m being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal,” Goss said. “I’m a little amazed at the workload.”

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported on the similarly overwhelming responsibilities of Attorney General, Eric Holder:

[F]ormer colleagues around the District … say they are watching him age before their eyes.

Always lean, Holder has dropped weight from his lanky frame, as he eats less and climbs five steep flights of stairs to his office in a routine that leaves younger aides breathless. His dark hair is graying, and his forehead displays new lines. He travels constantly, sometimes boarding an airplane three times a week even as he fends off a persistent sinus infection and a bad back. He struggles with working long hours away from his three children and his wife, prominent D.C. physician Sharon Malone.

“Under normal circumstances, the attorney general is one of the hardest jobs in government,” said Reid Weingarten, a prominent D.C. lawyer and longtime friend who sat directly behind Holder at his marathon confirmation hearings in January. “There is a constant stream of impossibly difficult policy, case-related, bureaucratic and personnel decisions crossing your desk every minute.

The result of such work-life imbalance is predictable. To continue the quotations, recall a scene from the West Wing, wherein Leo McGarry, the White House chief of staff, explains to his wife why he forgot their anniversary:

LEO: This [my job] is the most important thing I’ll ever do, Jenny. I have to do it well.

JENNY: It’s not more important than your marriage.

LEO: It is more important than my marriage right now. These few years, while I’m doing this, yes, it’s more important than my marriage.

Sure, you can argue that Goss is a lightweight, that Holder should delegate more, that Leo is a workaholic. Each statement is true. Yet the fact remains that as government grows, so do the responsibilities of its top officials.

One solution is to hire yet more bureaucrats, entrenching and perpetuating the status quo. Alternatively, we can rethink the scope and size of the state, and pare back both so that those who run our country can at least get a good night’s sleep.

Two months ago, Hank Buntin, the longtime head coach of the Summit Area YMCA Seals Swim Team, retired. Upon hearing the news, I e-mailed Hank the following letter, which I thought I’d share here.

Hank,

My mother told that your retirement party was richly deserved, well-attended, and fun. I wish I could have been there, so that I could have shared my respect for your steady, storied leadership of the Seals.

Swimming was the rock that, from age eight until 18, brought together therapy, exercise and camaraderie for a couple hours each night. Indeed, had you not chosen me to be part of the Seals after I showed up for try-outs in a baggy, decidedly un-Speedo-like swimsuit almost 20 years ago, my life might have taken a far different direction.

Swimming taught me myriad life lessons–the importance and fruits of hard work, of ethical behavior, of esprit de corps. And you, Hank, taught me that fun and purpose are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

I still wear my Seals t-shirts to the gym, still think of myself as a swimmer, and still experience great pride and fond memories whenever I enter the Summit Y.

Thanks for taking a chance on me, for staying with me, and for inspiring me.

Very respectfully,
Jon

In his Pulitzer-winning biography, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Barton Gellman recounts a conversation between former vice president Dan Quayle and newly sworn-in VP Dick Cheney:

“Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising,” Quayle [said]. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. We’ve all done it. You go back and look at what I did, or what Gore did.”

Cheney did that thing he does with one raised eyebrow, a smile on just the left side of his face.

“I have a different understanding with the president,” he said.

What exactly what was this “different understanding”? Gellman captures it perfectly in another reported nugget:

Days after [Hurricane Katrina] had passed, when he finally returned to Washington from Crawford, [President] Bush assembled his senior staff in the Oval Office. He was going to form a cabinet-level task force, he said.

“I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this,” Bush announced. “Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.” Bush nodded ironically toward the vice president, putting on a show for the others: Card, Rove, Bartlett, Condi Rice. His expression, the tone of voice, had a hint of edge. Can you believe this guy?. . . .

“Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.

“That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise,” Cheney replied.

Leave aside for the moment whether you like or agree with Cheney. Can’t we all appreciate the sui generis power he wielded? The consequence-free autonomy? The chutzpah? Consider:

• He maneuvered the search committee he was leading to select a vice presidential candidate for then-Governor Bush such that he himself became the running mate—while maintaining a treasure trove of personal information about his would-be competitors.

• He argued, all the way to the Supreme Court, his right to keep private the names of those with whom he had devised a national energy strategy.

• He, rather than the president, issued the order to shoot down the unknown jetliner racing toward Washington on 9/11.

• He unilaterally exempted his office from the presidential order that requires executive branch personnel either to submit periodic reports on the classified information held in their offices, or to allow National Archives staff to conduct in-office inspections.

• He accidentally shot a friend in the face while quail hunting, and kept the incident under wraps for a full day.

• He, rather than the president, ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterrrorism program from Congress.

Others have written at length about Cheney’s predilection for secrecy and executive power. But what fascinates me is Cheney’s psychology. He doesn’t care what you think. He’s a millionaire in his 60s who’s survived four heart attacks. He does what he wants, when he wants, and lets the chips fall where they may (for instance, a 13% approval rating upon leaving office).

There’s something wondrous, if not necessarily wonderful, about that.

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4. The Potomac Strategy Group

5. The Capital Communications Group

6. Amplifico

Clearly there’s a pattern here. Less clear is why, given the double whammy of a recession and the GOP’s status as minority party in the executive, legislative and, soon, judicial branches of the federal government.

Addendum (7/11/2009): Not only does this influx further saturate a shrinking market (GOP PR); these firms also are competing with at least nine center-right consultancies that specialize in the fastest growing niche in the field, new media:

1. The Adfero Group

2. The Bivings Group

3. The David All Group

4. DC Signal

5. Dialog New Media

6. Engage

7. Fresh Vision Media

8. iWeb Strategies

9. Kithbridge

The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.

Addendum (9/29/2009): Google recently celebrated its 11th birthday. To honor the occasion, the Next Web dug up Google’s first release, dated June 7, 1999.

In college, I began experiencing severe headaches. The symptoms were classic migraine: Lightness is blinding, one side of my head (the right) is throbbing, and relief arrives only after at least an hour lying in bed in a dark room.

A physician at the health center clarified the causes. I had been pulling a series of all-nighters, during which I didn’t eat and stole but an hour or two of sleep, after which I rushed to class without breakfast. To wit, sleep deprivation + lack of food = migraine. (To paraphrase George Orwell, Sometimes it takes a MD “to see what is in front of one’s nose.”)

Several months later, a consultation with a neurologist made me aware of Excedrin Migraine. If taken preemptively rather than reactively, this over-the-counter medicine proved to be a panacea for what turned out to be an occassional flare-up.

Of course, pills don’t address root causes, and for the past week and a half, I’ve found myself back in migraine misery. A chart I kept of the time of the episodes, what I ate in the preceding 12 hours, and how many hours I slept the night before, revealed my good old friend: Sleep deprivation + lack of food = migraine.

Now, common sense says the solution is to sleep better and eat better.  Yet there’s a broader point about living better.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve pooh-poohed my health. While I’ve never smoked or drank coffee, or even much alcohol outside of social settings, I’ve lived off fast food and Coke. I stopped going to the gym after graduating, I nap regularly because of an erratic sleep schedule, and I seek out stressful situations. While these bad habits don’t cause headaches, they bring about an environment that facilitates them.

Accordingly, if there’s an upside to my recent bout of migraines, it’s that I’m convinced any road to recovery must be holistic. I can’t just start swimming again (as I’ve done); I need to establish a daily exercise routine. I can’t just stop napping after work; I need to become an early riser, on both weekdays and weekends. I can’t just stop eating at Wendy’s; I need to change my diet.

The road to a migraine-free life goes through a moderate lifestyle.