Good riddance to 2008.  Everyone I know is hoping for a better year ahead than the one we just retired to the history books. But adversity is often one’s best teacher.  I’m trying to keep that in mind as I jump in to 2009.

I’ve gotten off to an encouraging start.

I spent yesterday at a holiday pot-luck brunch with six others, acquainted through our weekend patronizing of a local coffee shop, where in 2008 we conversed, railed, bantered, kibbitzed and otherwise dissected the affairs of the world, the country and the neighborhood at large.   Among the group: a retired college administrator, a financial planner/advisor, an artist, a high school teacher, a sales executive, an executive director of a non-profit and a communications consultant (yours truly).  We are male and female, gay and straight, married and single, liberal and conservative.  All of us are baby boomers and animal lovers (our pets are extended members of the club).

We talked about our hopes for the year ahead, and the one thing we want to change to improve ourselves (losing weight and quitting smoking excluded).

It was an interesting exchange.  My intent is to become less literal, to allow the full spectrum of possiblity and opportunity into my thoughts and actions – not limiting myself so much to the absolutes.  But hearing everyone else’s thoughts was perhaps more insightful.  The artist talked about cleaning out his brain so that it would be less cluttered.  The financial planner wants to be less judgmental, the sales executive to communicate more effectively. The retired college administrator wants to put some boundaries around his continued efforts to help guide and counsel others and to break free of being too closely identified with (and defined by) his former profession.  The teacher has been working on becoming more diplomatic and tactful, having been a rather abraisive boss and co-worker earlier in his career.  The non-profit director wants to be less controlling and be comfortable handing over more authority to his staff.

It occurred to me that we all have something to let go of – something that is keeping us from being our most successful in our own skin.  It’s very convenient, with all the endless bad news and tough economic circumstances, to lay blame elsewhere for why we’re not satisfied with our standing in life.  Those of us who take action to reinvent, recast and rethink ourselves are the ones who will have the advantage and the opportunity in a challenged environment.

So for the new year, I pledge to clean out my inner closet.  I’m dumping the stuff that’s ugly, that makes me look less appealing than I know I can be, that doesn’t fit me anymore.  I’m making room for a few new things, things that must be classic, timely and versatile.  In the worst of times, it pays to make the effort to be your best.

Happy New Year.

So…onward.

During the time I disappeared from cyberspace, I went to Spain, which has a vibe and sensibility like no other place on earth.  Need to see things from a totally different perspective?  You gotta go.

And boy, we could all use a different perspective right about now. 

Traveling the land of Picasso, Miró, Dalí , Buñuel and Gaudi for the third time, I had a renewed, more mature appreciation for how mind-blowingly different the country’s artistic output really is.  The “Spanish Sensibility,” filled with abstraction, surrealism, and a wicked streatk of humor, strikes a chord with me. It’s so much more interesting  not  to have every detailed explained away with perfect logic, or all the messiness cleaned up by the final page/panel/reel. 

Front view of Gaudi's Casa Mila

With all the turbulence and pain in the world, the one certainty is that there is no certainty (save the proverbial death and taxes). So what the hell?  Now is the perfect time to rethink your surroundings, your purpose, your problems and your opportunities. Mix things up and see what shows up on your canvas.

The Amazing Race, however, is another matter. I’m additcted.

Sure, you can get caught up in the storyline dramas, as you do with other reality contests. The hotties, the nerds, the goofballs, the bickerers, the nasties, the older folks, the hippies, the fitness nuts, the ethnics, the gay couple - they’re all properly represented (my favorite season, #9, is a good example). 

Barry and Fran – Two of my favorite players from Season 9

But what makes The Amazing Race special is that while it entertains, it also serves up insightful lessons in geography and anthropology; lessons that give me pause about how I might be perceived by others whose cultures are different from my own.

Between the intra- and inter-team sturm und drang and the wild and crazy team challenges that make up the show’s general “plot”, one can pick up a host of cultural tidbits - a country’s work product, tools and types of labor; sports; music, art and architecture; modes of transportation; topography, nature and climate. All in less than an hour a week.

Most fascinating to me is how the Americans function and behave in these exotic locales, and how in many cases those who embrace the experience as an opportunity to learn about and engage willingly in other cultures do better overall than the ones so focused on winning the race that they blow obliviously through town, curse out cab drivers and ticket agents and otherwise perpetuate the “Ugly American” stereotype upon all who cross their paths. 

I hope CBS keeps this show on the air.  It’s won every Emmy thus far awarded for “Best Reality Show”.   It has a commitment to top-notch quality: great production values, interesting storylines and incredible preparation.  The show has a good advertising partner in Travelocity (the little gnome makes an occasional appearance as part of a challenge or two) ; and there’s a loyal group of followers who buzz about it online.  But ratings-wise, it’s only okay; CBS doesn’t promote the show near enough, and it still hasn’t gotten a green light on shooting in high definition.  It could definitely use a better marketing push.

Today’s economic turmoil should make for very interesting workplace dynamics.  During times of stress, it’s prime territory to find more of those “bosses from hell” stories that we all love.(Note: there are also “great bosses” stories out there but let’s be honest, they’re bo-ring, and what do you really learn from them?)

Anyone working for more than ten years has probably experienced the full spectrum of boss-types, good and bad.  In trying to be a good boss yourself, it’s helpful to explore your own relationships with the bosses of your past.  Which qualities and actions did you particularly appreciate?  Which ones disappointed or downright offended you? 

In my book, there are four major great boss “must haves”:  respect, empathy, accountability and vision. 

You know you’re in for a struggle if your boss treats people like Basil Fawlty does – fawning over the bigwigs and berating those considered of lower stature. If s/he doesn’t remember (or cannot fathom) how it feels to be in the trenches, and what the view is like from this perspective, it’s highly unlikely s/he can lead a team diverse enough to successfully accomplish a task.  The buck must stop with the boss – if not, it’s just so obscenely injust you don’t want to be anywhere near this person.  And if your boss doesn’t know where you’re going and how to communicate it –  well, forget about it.

Unfortunately, bad boss stories are generally read by victims and not by offenders. Thus valuable lessons are never learned, and bad behavior is perpetuated. 

On this Boss’s Day, here’s hoping you have the “bossest” of bosses and that you are the boss you’d want to have yourself.

This attempt at a ”walk of fame” appears to be the byproduct of someone’s good-idea-at-the-time that was summarily abandoned and left to the ages. 

Walking among these worn-out slabs of concrete got me thinking about legacies. 

A timely subject, legacies. An unpopular president is leaving office soon; one of the great movie stars in history recently left the world a legacy that exceeded his performances on celluloid; the mounting problems of our economy, our environment and our energy resources leave us all questioning what we are leaving future generations.

I’m not interested in exploring the names of the rich and famous appearing on walls or lists somewhere in perpetuity. It’s more compelling to consider people’s simple legacies (and your own) in the here and now.  How you comport yourself with your family, in business and with your community.  The psychic impression you leave behind.  Take ego out of the equation – it’s less about making sure there’s tangible proof that you once passed through the world, and more about the effects of your actions.  

It’s easy, really easy, to be cynical right now.  In some weird way, walking by that forgotten “walk of fame” is a reminder to me that all individuals have some common ground; that life is fleeting; that we need to make sure our priorities are straight; and that we should be nice and play nice while we’re here.  The right actions will follow, and your legacy will flow from there.

OK, so the prose is kind of heavy-duty, but we all wrote similar letters when we were seeking our career’s first landing spot. I didn’t have an issue with that.

What I had an issue with was that she sent this e-mail to 38 other recipients, all PR people in town, all the names plainly visible to one another.  She addressed the note “To Whom it May Concern”.

Years ago, before the Internet, we researched all the companies we sent employment inquiries to. We asked people we knew who knew people who knew people.  We went to the library – remember the Agency Red Book?  The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature?  Newspaper microfiche? 

In these digital times, people expect customization.   If you want a job, show me that you care enough to know my company and have something to say about it.  Employers always have and still to this day expect anyone seriously interested in working for them to do their homework.  It’s a hell of a lot easier to do research now, and so it’s rather bad form for a job-seeker to send a generic letter and not even try to hide that she’s sending it simultaneously to 38 others.  And if she isn’t aware enough to realize and understand her faux pas, then perhaps she’s not ready to take on communications work.

If anyone thinks after a day like yesterday that job security exists, they’re deluded.  Even eBay is laying off employees (I love the cartoon that accompanies this story – so simple yet so…effective). But I know they’re out there, even now, thinking it just won’t happen to them. Or perhaps they’re simply in deep, deep denial.

Beyond the immediate shock that comes at the moment you’re out of work,  there’s no excuse anymore for not being prepared for the next chapter of your career. 

You are the only thing in the world that you can truly control. So you have to take control of you and make you the best “you” you can be.  Some tips:

• Differentiate yourself from your job.  If you work for a company, especially a big one, you can easily disappear inside it, to the point where it and you are indistinguishable.  Make sure everyone knows that the individual performing your job is indeed an individual, and a memorable one at that (in a good way, of course).
• Assume no business, even if it’s a family business, is family.  As a department head at a large public corporation I was really surprised at how many of my staff would say earnestly, ”I know the company will take care of me.” I felt kind of mean trying to re-shape their (nay, our) reality, while walking that fine line as boss-lady.   No matter how warm and fuzzy the envrionment, the companies that truly do take employees under a protective wing are rare. Even if you’re fortunate enough to find one, anything can happen at the top to disrupt the harmony – death, merger, sale, scandal, nepotism…Be prepared. 
• Identify your own specialness. Lest this sound too Mr. Rogers-ish , we all have our strengths, and you should make sure you’re widely known for yours.  They don’t even have to be connected to your profession. 
• Be an expert, but don’t be obnoxious about it. Explore a subject in extreme depth, share your expertise with a non-profit, give a presentation, offer up advice to students.  Seek out a niche and try to fill it. Yes, this is all extra-curricular, but think of it as an investment in securing your future.
• Connect the dots. List your passions, your interests, and your skills/capabilities.  See any patterns?  Give yourself a chance to brainstorm on how they interrelate, and try to find ways to blend them and carry them over to strengthen all of your different “selves”.   

Developing a professional network, having a good mentor, working for a supportive company and having a clear career path are all very helpful.  But you can’t depend on these to always take care of you, especially in a bad economy. You alone must be accountable leading your own charge, for creating, improving and promoting your own distinct brand.

So you could say that from an early age, I was editing myself.  I still strive to apply good editing to my work – writing a blog has challenged me big time, believe me – and I’m hoping more content creators will also take heed, because a lot of work out there could use the equivalent of the proverbial red pen. 

Good editing is more than just cutting out the chaff, but run-on content runs rampant these days, so that’s the focus here.  As Thomas Jefferson said, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Editing is a subjective art. Let it not be said that, like the Emperor in Amadeus, you or I deign to tell Mozart his ballet has “too many notes.” The editing buck should stop with the creator.  But oftentimes the creator doesn’t have the objectivity to do right by his own work.  Hence the reason that there are so many genuinely good movies, novels, speeches, blog entries, PowerPoint presentations and the like in circulation today that would be even better if their length were curtailed by 10-20 percent. 

Affordable tools and infinite distribution have enabled us to be 24/7 creators.  Want your work to rise above the rabble? Be its harshest critic.  Review it with an unwavering eye, and edit it more than once.  Like removing the clutter from your home before you sell it, it may feel a little funny at first, but in the long run you’ll be the better for it.

A couple of suggestions to exercise your brevity muscles:  Twitter; some writing tips from Copyblogger; the blog Just Five Words and Tara Parker-Pope’s Seven Word Story contest in the New York Times.

Just Five Words:  I’m done – word count, anyone?

How fitting it is, then,  to hold the Democratic Convention here this year.  For me, Denver has always meant energy, possibility, renewal, a clean start.  And optimism. No wonder so many entrepreneurs start businesses here. 

When I arrived here from New York, I marveled at how clean everything was, how wide and open the environment felt and how friendly folks were.  And affordable to boot.  For me it was paradise.

But back then, the oil industry had gone bust, and the town was hurting.  Shops and restaurants were closing right and left.   I met a lot of people who’d never been to the east coast before, let alone New York; I couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into men in western attire; and not having a single Macy’s, Nordstrom, Saks, etc., I had a heck of a time finding a decent pair of shoes for work (I’m not talking Manolos, Choos or Louboutins – just something kind of stylish).

In short, Denver was a cow town.  And while I didn’t mind that, I’ve been very happy with how the city has evolved – there’s a lot more culture, shopping, entertainment, restuarants, nightlife, etc., here now than ever before.

So I have to laugh at how Denver is being painted by some of the high-profile media.  Gawker had a very funny piece about the less-than-stellar local sports bars co-opted by CNN and Fox News as their convention headquarters.  Gawker’s follow-up piece to this story commenting on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show remote from Sam’s #3, a local diner-type place, was also pretty funny, and it included a “News You Can’t Use” segment from the show of a visit to legendary local strip joint Shotgun Willie’s. 

OK, so this is what the media have decided to showcase about our fair city.  And we sure don’t help ourselves – our local TV reporters look so bush league (pardon the pun) next to the national ones; one of them continuously mispronounces “pundit” (she calls it “pundent”), which drives me crazy. I have a good sense of humor about it, though.  Denver isn’t New York, but that’s what I love about it. Every time I look outside my window (see below for the view), I feel hopeful.  Fingers crossed that everything will go well throughout the week.

The senior executive editor of the National Enquirer went on NPR’s Talk of the Nation show last week, discussing his paper’s breaking the John Edwards extramarital affair scandal back in October of last year, and why the mainstream media failed to pick up on it until recently.

Given America’s general view of the National Enquirer as a low-brow gossip tabloid rag, one might expect Plamann to come off as a sleazy, defensive jerk (think Dan Ackroyd as Irwin Mainway in the Saturday Night Live “Consumer Probe” skits), but in fact, he was quite the opposite. He balanced his justifiable right to claim victory and defend his tabloid realm with a straightforward, yet unassuming telling of the background story behind the story. 

When asked by host Neal Conan if he felt vindicated for having several mainstream media outlets grudgingly acknowlege the Enquirer‘s scoop, he responded, “Yeah, a little bit.” In explaining the resource-intensive process of getting and reporting the story, he said, ”We got a little bit lucky…and we were also a little bit good.”  

He matter-of-factly addressed the media’s continued concern/ complaint that the paper pays its sources (emphasizing that payment is made only for information that proves to be truthful). 

He harbored no delusions of grandeur. Commenting on a New York Times editor’s description of the Enquirer as having a “hold your nose quality,” he took it with good humor, adding, “In hindsight, it made them look pretty bad that they didn’t follow our coverage…Is the National Enquirer sensationalist? Certainly we are – we’re a supermarket tabloid. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get the facts right in stories such as this.”

And throughout his interview, he would continuously slip in his assertion that Edwards is indeed his mistress’s “baby daddy” despite Edwards’s on-the-record denial and the nervous repeated reminders by the other journalists in the discussion that the identity of the baby’s father is not at this point factually confirmed. But he did it with such low-key, humorous finesse, I actually got a kick out of his little tweaks to the system – especially since we all know that it’s likely he’ll eventually be proven correct on this front as well. 

In his more business-focused New York Times piece on the Enquirer (which I found to be, on balance, balanced), David Carr cites a couple of the tabloid’s high-profile misses.  Well, sure.  But Carr didn’t mention the Times story about John McCain’s relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman that earlier this year put the paper in questionable journalistic waters usually more suited to the tabloids .  The National Enquier ain’t the New York Times.  It doesn’t profess to be. But fair is fair, and Plamann has every right to be proud. Besides, as Carr himself wrote, “The world would be a little less interesting if it weren’t for the Enquirer’s prurient inspection, and a little less well-informed, as well.”