All Posts in Business Ethics

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Since you have now abused the trust I placed in you when I subscribed to your newsletter by using my address for unauthorized purposes (e.g. marketing), please unsubscribe me from your mailing list.” — From a now-former KJR subscriber, in response to the recent e-mail promoting our upcoming seminars.

Juxtapose it with “IS Survivor Publishing’s Complex Legalese Privacy Policy”:

By registering at ISSurvivor.com and providing your name and e-mail address, you give IS Survivor Publishing blanket permission to send you occasional e-mails describing new products, services or other offerings available from IS Survivor Publishing. That’s the price you pay for getting Keep the Joint Running for free. If you don’t like it … heck, tell us what you’re willing to pay to get KJR without our exercises in self-promotion. We’re open-minded about such matters.

In exchange, we commit to the following privacy policy: You’ll only hear from us (“us” is defined as IS Survivor Publishing and our parent company, IT Catalysts, Inc.), and not more than a couple of times each month.

We won’t sell or rent our list to anyone else. If we change our minds about this we’ll notify you and give you a chance to opt out.

I’m not feeling particularly apologetic, having sent a mere two promotional mailings in the past eleven months. Still, the half-dozen or so complaints I received got me thinking about spam, how it’s defined, and what to do about it.

The common definitions of spam include three characteristics: It’s e-mail that’s (1) unsolicited; (2) sent for commercial purposes; and (3) transmitted to a large distribution list. The common definitions are worthless. Here’s why:

If all unsolicited e-mail is spam then all e-mail is spam. What are you supposed to do — only send e-mail after a friend has spoken to you on the telephone requesting it? Every e-mail thread begins with an unsolicited message. That’s the nature of communication.

If all e-mail sent for commercial purposes is spam, then no vendor is ever allowed to send an e-mail to a client. That serves nobody’s interests.

Now about that mailing list bit. That doesn’t help either, or Keep the Joint Running, and every other e-mail newsletter received by people who chose to subscribe, would be considered spam.

So it’s a Boolean “and”: All three criteria must be present. Except for this: More recipients registered for my seminars than complained, even though it was unsolicited, commercial, and sent to a list. (There is, however, still room — feel free to register!)

If the standard definition is wrong, what’s right? When I talk about spam, it’s about the collected mass of all e-mails I receive that I don’t want, not the individual message. It’s the clutter that makes it spam, which is what makes this a hard problem to solve.

Spam is a bit like a bunch of men crowding around a beautiful woman, asking her for a date. She finds most to be drunk, obnoxious, and disgusting, and the group as a whole to be offensive. But she does date someone, and eventually most of these guys find a woman who wants to date them. Which is to say, no matter how obnoxious or disgusting each spam message you receive is to you, someone somewhere wants to buy what each seller has to offer. And it’s possible that among the mass of messages are one or two offering products and services that are of interest to you.

If ISPs charged by the byte — if there was a cost for the stamp — spammers would start targeting their lists. It can’t happen. Without legislation it would be collusion and a violation of the antitrust laws. Presumably, in these anti-regulatory times, nobody wants legislation requiring it. And even if Congress were to pass such a strange law, all that would happen would be that spammers would sign up with ISPs in Bulgaria or the Caymans that aren’t subject to U.S. laws.

The magical curative properties of the marketplace, too-often espoused as the panacea that will cure all ills, are what cause this problem. The marketplace can’t solve it. If that isn’t clear, read Garrett Hardin’s classic paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. Spam is a perfect example.

How about a legislative solution? The CAN-SPAM act, whose double entendre of a name is entirely apt, isn’t going to fix very much, although I hope it puts a dent in the now-popular practices of spoofing and system hijacking.

So if neither the marketplace nor legislation can fix the problem of spam, and unit pricing, which could, will never happen, what’s the solution?

Nothing. There is no solution. Spam is a problem that will be with us for a long, long time.

I hope you have a good spam filter.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

This column marks the start of my ninth year of weekly public musings. It seems appropriate, in a hard-to-explain-exactly-why kind of way, to mark the occasion by completing the When To Keep Your Mouth Shut trilogy.

You should keep quiet, you might recall, in (1) contentious meetings, where speaking too early turns you into a partisan, eliminating your ability to construct a solution at the end that everyone can accept; and (2) negotiations, where speaking too quickly lets the other person off the hook. In both of these situations, silence can literally be golden.

So golden, in fact, that others in the room might well understand the speak-last strategy just as well as you do. What do you do then, when everyone in the room is waiting for everyone else in the room to make the first move?

Rather than suffer an entire meeting in collective silence, here are some tactics you can use to break the logjam without yielding the advantage.

The first, the Process Ploy, is superior, if you can make it work: When it’s clear nobody will make the first move, ask whether it makes sense to first discuss how the group will go about making its decision. Proposing a decision process doesn’t make you a partisan, so long as you’re willing to abandon your process in favor of someone else’s without heat or argument.

If it’s a yes/no decision, propose the “Ben Franklin” method: two columns; reasons to say yes in the first and no in the second. If you’re comparing alternatives, suggest a decision matrix in which the group evaluates each alternative according to a list of group-devised and weighted criteria.

The Process Ploy has one disadvantage: You have to respect the process too, whether or not it delivers the results you want. The good news about the bad news: Presumably, your own preference is the result of an equivalent logical analysis, so what you’re really doing is leading the group through the thought process you’ve already gone through yourself.

What makes this tactic particularly desirable is that however it comes out, you’ll get credit for breaking through the impasse and getting the group moving — far more useful than getting your way in the decision itself.

Another way to take charge without becoming a partisan is the Facilitation Gambit. It’s easy: Assume leadership of the meeting by asking another participant’s opinion. When you do so, it’s very hard to respond, “Gee, I dunno. I haven’t really thought about it much.” If your first victim does say this, just choose another.

And if everyone plays dumb? Suggest a task force to report back to the committee. If possible, recommend three members, exactly one of which is (a) looking for an opportunity to shine; and (b) thinks as you do. (Ideally, the other two will be both strong stakeholders and too busy to work on the problem.) As a fall-back, choose three people you think will do a good job.

But whatever you do, don’t volunteer for the task force yourself. Instead, volunteer to help them: “If it will help to have another pair of eyes look at things, feel free to call me — I’d be happy to give an advance reaction before we reconvene the committee.”

Before we move on, how should you react if someone turns the tables and puts you on the spot? Answer thusly: “I’m in a quandary. I can see several ways we could go on this and see both advantages and disadvantages to each of them. To be candid, I was hoping that if I listened to some of the rest of you who know the subject better, things would come into focus for me.”

Both the Process Ploy and Facilitation Gambit leave something to chance. If you can’t afford to do so, use an old standby — the ever-effective Two Cop Tactic. Yes, it’s the old good cop/bad cop routine: Arrange in advance for another participant — one you trust — to act as a passionate partisan during the discussion, pushing everyone else in the room to become a partisan as well. You stay out of the fray until the end. (Make sure you both agree who has which role before the meeting. “Me? I thought you were going to be the bad cop this time!” would be bad.)

Right about now you’re likely thinking that all three of these stratagems sound more than a bit manipulative. Of course they do. They can’t be otherwise.

Leadership means getting others to follow. Strong leaders rarely compel — most often they get others to choose to follow them.

The difference between this and manipulation is a mighty fine line.

Comments