Hyundai, rhymes with Sunday.

I loved this talk at MIT by John Krafcik, head of Hyundai’s American branch. It lasted an hour; I wished it was longer. It reminded me of Carl Willat‘s Trader Joe’s commercial: Full of emotion, in this case Krafcik’s pride in his company and what they’ve done. Toyota is the world’s number #1 car company; when a Toyota executive interviewed for a job at Hyundai, he told them that at Toyota, they are most afraid of Hyundai. So afraid that they bought five straight years of a certain Hyundai model, took them all apart, and studied how each system changed from year to year. (I used to compare New Yorker articles with their book versions, word by word, to see what the editors changed. John Updike compared two versions of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory, word by word. More recently I noticed that Zadie Smith’s On Beauty had significant differences between the audio and printed versions.)

Krafcik repeated an old Jay Leno joke: “How do you double the value of a Hyundai? Half-fill the gas tank.” So he had a great story to tell, the return from ignominy, but curiously he barely told it. Probably this was because he was working at Ford at the time. I have no great interest in cars, I’m not particularly interested in why one company does better than another, yet I was entranced. I came away thinking that most of what I’d heard about public speaking was wrong — most of the stuff in Made to Stick, for example. Sure, the advice to tell a story — and most speakers don’t even understand that — is right. Krafcik did tell a story. But that’s the easy part. I think everyone understands what a story is. The harder part is convey emotion. Carl Willat has said to me that in movies, that’s all that matters. Absolutely, and I think what’s he saying applies to talks as well. Of course an academic talk must have content. But the practical lesson for me is that when planning a talk I should pick something I care a lot about and in the talk do my best to convey how I feel. That’s all. Don’t worry about telling a joke, don’t worry about slick visuals, don’t try to impress them.
I plan to show Krafcik’s talk to graduate students (in psychology) because it makes a point I doubt they’ve heard: It’s fine if it’s other people’s work that you feel strongly about. Krafcik isn’t the head of Hyundai. He had nothing to do with their long comeback. But he’s proud of his company — and he conveyed that in spades, and that was enough. Suppose you do research on X. You’re giving a talk about it — perhaps a job talk. Maybe your research is mediocre. But you think research on X is incredibly important. Fine — just make that clear. Everyone in the audience will like you for being able to appreciate the work of others, that’s so rare. When you point them to other work that is great, you’re helping them. Suppose you’re teaching a class. Find the parts of the subject that you feel strongly about. Do your best to convey how strongly you feel. Better positive than negative but negative works. (Ask Nassim Taleb.) Avoid the parts you don’t feel strongly about.

In a sense all speaking (and all writing) is public speaking (unless we’re talking to ourselves, which is rare). The audience might be one person or a hundred people, it doesn’t matter, the principle is the same: We use the emotion in what we hear to judge how much attention we should pay to it. Zero emotion = zero attention. I once visited Alaska. While I was there I took a day trip to a glacier. Near the glacier was a building with a little slide show about the glacier, with a taped narration. It was all very dry — the glacier grows in winter, shrinks in summer, there are these animals nearby — but you could tell the speaker cared a lot about the glacier. I was terribly struck by that. How rare it is to hear someone talk about something they really care about, I thought. I’ve told that story dozens of times. But I didn’t manage to translate it into advice about how to give a talk.

In the 1990s, there was a high-end “men’s club” (strip club) in New York named Scores. Upstairs at Scores was a special lounge where you paid $500 (or so) to get in and $180 (or so) for a bottle of champagne. A friend of mine, who told me about this, knew a woman who worked there. The men who went upstairs expected to get a blowjob. But this wasn’t in the job description of the women who worked there. They didn’t want to give blowjobs — and they didn’t. She didn’t mind stripping but working in the upstairs lounge was really uncomfortable because of the differing expectations.

The same thing happens at UC Berkeley (and no doubt other research universities). When I was a grad student, and went to Berkeley to give a job talk, I met with grad students there. One of them asked: Which do you like better, research or teaching? Research, I said. The grad students were amused. The proper answer to that question is “I like both equally” — but, as all faculty and grad students knew, about 95% of Berkeley professors like research more than teaching. You just weren’t supposed to say so.

Why? Just as it was in the interests of Scores management to conceal the fact that you were not going to get a blowjob upstairs, so it is in the interests of those who promote UC Berkeley to the outside world to conceal the fact that the vast majority of Berkeley professors care little about teaching. UC Berkeley undergraduates, who have paid far more than $500, often realize this basic fact only when it is too late — after they have come. Just as at Scores, the difference in expectations makes both sides uncomfortable. It bothers the average undergraduate that the average professor doesn’t seem to care very much and doesn’t try harder. “Isn’t it part of their job to teach us?” the students say. The average professor dislikes that the average undergraduate doesn’t “care about learning” — a fancy way of saying that they want to be entertained. What goes unspoken among Berkeley professors — just as I imagine it did among Scores employees — is that what the students want is seen by professors as demeaning. It would be demeaning to try hard to give the students what they want; it would be like being their servant.

In library school, future librarians are taught the saying “every book a reader, every reader a book.” They are not taught — by example or otherwise — to point out the flaws in books. Nor are they taught to impose their own preferences on those who come to them for help. Professors — who are in the same business, the spread of knowledge — could learn something from this. John Taylor Gatto has pointed out that the same teenagers who are disruptive in class are well-behaved in libraries.

The Naysayers.

1. Conduct smear campaign.
2. Condemn smear tactics (“it seems horrible, this anonymous campaign”)
3. Praise the person you smeared (“a very good poet”)

When this comes to light and you are forced to resign, be sure to

1. Say you did nothing wrong (“I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the election”).

This short article about Edward Skyler, Deputy Mayor of New York, mentions four times (headline, led, body, final quote) that he tackled a mugger. I have a similar story. Had I known it was so interesting . . .
I was in Paris — same trip that inspired the Shangri-La Diet. It had been raining, the streets were wet. I heard a shout: Stop that man! A man came running toward me. I tried to stop him but I slipped on the cobblestones and fell in front of him. Perfect tackle. Lying on the ground, he asked: Why did you do that? Nobody came. He got up and ran off.

As I walked away a woman came up to me. “Are you okay?’ she asked. A man said to me,”That was unusual what you did.” I felt really good for an hour or so.

I was stunned how good I felt. I had accomplished nothing — the thief wasn’t caught. Nor was there any obvious reason I should care what two bystanders thought of me.

The lesson I drew was this. Praise alone won’t make you happy. Accomplishment alone won’t make you happy. But their combination — praise for a genuine accomplishment, however small –is enormously potent. If I’m right, a teacher has enormous power to help his students by praising them for what they do right.

The new TV show — I like it. It is based on the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who lives in Berkeley. It is a new sort of reality show. It isn’t a 50% reality show (as most reality shows are), it is a 10% reality show. Perhaps 10% of the show involves discussion and illustration of actual research. You learn about it painlessly.

When I was in college, I tried to learn about stuff by finding fun-to-read books on the subject. Genetics, for example. TV was worthless. Educational TV (opera concerts, televised lectures) was dreary and ordinary TV was completely non-educational. Since then, the gap between educational TV and ordinary TV has narrowed a lot: the History Channel, the Food Channel, the Weather Channel, not to mention Frontline, are moderately entertaining and Top Chef and Survivor are mildly educational. But it is still easy to put all these shows on one side or other of the education/entertainment divide.

Lie to Me bridges the gap. Although meant to be seen as entertaining, it’s undeniably educational. I wish there was an entertaining show I could watch to learn Chinese. There isn’t even an entertaining book!

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Preston McAfee, a Caltech economics professor, writes:

These schmucks are offering a bribe to the professor for using their text. It had to happen, but students in courses using their books ought to be extremely irate — you should feel the same way if your physician took a bribe from a pharmaceutical company for giving you a prescription.

If?