The Crack-Up of The New Republic

Watching old industries get disrupted is a painful thing, and nowhere is this more evident than with established media companies.

From the New York Times to the New Criterion, everyone is feeling the pinch from digital disruption and “vertically integrated” media companies, such as Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, who rely on click-bait articles to justify the spending of advertising dollars.

And all of this is happening in a world of declining audience attention spans, increased distractions and with the ever present specter of “content shock” on the horizon.

In case you missed it, The New Republic, recently purchased by Chris Hughes, is cracking up. The media driven articles about the methods and responses to this change, serve as another sign that, what was once thought secure and assured in an open market, is now not so much.

This is what happens, when digital replaces physical, all methods and modes of communication have to change in order to adapt to the new market realities.

In other words: It had to happen.

Content distribution channels remain the ultimate arbiter of content market value. They are—as they always have been—agnostic on the substance of that content: uplifting or entertaining; progressive or conservative; educational or vapid.

Look, digital disruption is taking out everyone, even the old gray lady is offering payouts to journalists who want out because they can’t adapt to the new rules. Say what you may about the direction of The New Republic, and about whether or not it becomes “vertically integrated,” the underlying hand-wringing for “educational long form content” getting out to “the masses” is misplaced.

Content, is content, is content. Long form, investigative, journalism has never been immune to forces of digital market disruptions.

This is a time for excitement, not dread. A time for hope, not fear. A time for response, not blind, reaction.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Eating Ramen to Pay the Light Bill

Generating enough revenue to pay the bills is the ultimate goal of making peace as a conflict consultant.

Without revenues, there is no business and without business, there is no opportunity to engage in the hard work of making a dent in the universe and making peace in someone’s life.

So, if the savvy conflict consultant has to eat ramen noodles to sufficiently build up enough revenues to build the business, then she should eat the noodles.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

Systems of the 21st Century

For many organizations, the 21^st century has proven to be pretty much the same as the 20^th century.

People still get hired and fired in much the same ways that they did 20 years ago.

Organizations and businesses still do the core processes of their businesses—sales, finance, marketing, accounting—in the same way that they did—with some minor cosmetic changes—30 years ago.

And, unfortunately, organizations and businesses still handle conflict in the same way that they did 30 years ago. They still view conflict as a process rather than as a product.

They still view the resolution of conflicts—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This is reflected in either the avoidance of the process, the accommodation of the tradition of the process, or the attacking of outside interveners with new ideas as “not understanding how we do things here.”

Many organizations still pay outside consultants or have internal offices and departments, designed to “handle” conflicts in the ways that the organization sees as comfortable and preserving the status quo.

In order to do the brave work of the 21^st century, peacemakers must become more and more involved in developing bleeding edge systems for organizations, because the changes to systems that on the surface appear cosmetic, will have deep ramifications for the future.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] The Center is Holding

The signs of the post-American (some would say post-empire American) world, are all around us, from Trayvon Martin to the latest corporate hacking issues at Sony.

The center is holding culturally and economically, in “flyover country,” where—outside of a very few areas in the economy—failure is still not tolerated, taking risk is still frowned upon, and steady, 40 hour a week values, are still being inculcated into the young.

At the edges though, things are fraying and the Sony hack is the latest example of the fraying edges. Data illegally obtained and then released to the tabloid journalistic community.

And Sony isn’t the only one. JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Kmart, and now Staples have all experienced this phenomenon.

For the people at the cultural, political and even economic center, this represents a watershed shift from the America that they knew—and that they still want to believe in—to an America that they do not understand.

We have said before that the large looming 21st century conflicts will be between those who have access to technology and software and those who do not, or even between those people who seek to define the future through search (Google) instead of connection (Facebook).

At a global level this will be true, but in the US, the battles coming are between those who believe and seek to shape the culture in post-empire ways, and those out in “flyover country” who are still raising children and inculcating them to believe in the values of empire based thinking: God, family, country.

The role of the peacemaker at the policy table, the entertainment industry, and even in the digital space, is now more important than ever.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Politik With The Addition of Other Means

The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz noted, about 230 years or so ago, that “War is the continuation of Politik with the addition of other means.”

In a digitally connected world, hacking, data thefts, downloading intellectual property without previous permission, plagiarism without appropriate attribution, are all “added on means.”

Depending upon your frame of reference— of the person or organization being victimized, or of the person or organization doing the victimization—these acts can also be framed as war.

Students of peace in the digitally connected world should become students of the new boundaries of warfare in the 21^st century, in order to educate the masses on the nature, depth and breadth of future conflict.

Because someone is going to have to stop the black hat actors, before they become black hat actors in the first place.

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-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] WATNA and BATNA

A negotiated agreement is the endpoint of many crucial conversations.

There are always alternatives—worst and best for each party—to getting to that endpoint. The alternatives are detours a negotiation can take that allow parties to migrate away from the endpoint.

If the endpoint of agreement isn’t the point of a conversation, then maybe being satisfied with the best (if we “win”) or the worst (if we “lose”) is good enough.

There are two concerns with this point of view though:

Even though parties can acknowledge with their mouths that the world of negotiated conversations exists in gray areas, very few lived actions following the conversation back that up. Plus, it’s not enough to just be good enough. Now, the challenge is to either be the best or to suck.
Going beyond getting the BATNA or the WATNA (you know, “agreeing to disagree”) there’s a concern as one party seeks to emotionally, or psychologically manipulate, the other party to a previously staked out “truth” through the misuse of persuasive power.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/
Website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Advice] In The End is Not Soon Enough

Mapmaker William Smith and Mennonite Wilma Derksen were recognized for the impact they created with their projects, their perspectives and their approach to life.

They “got their due in the end.”

Depending upon your frame of reference, their due came either too late or way too late.

It used to be that elites ridiculed innovation because the pedigree from where innovation came wasn’t “right.” Once mass media and mass culture really took off in the middle of the last century, the middle masses began to exhibit the same ritualistic cultural shorthand of dismissing self-belief. The masses also rejected the counterintuitive nature of becoming uncomfortable in order to do the right thing.

Now however, in the midst of the ongoing fracturing of mass media and mass culture, ridicule of innovation has splintered, emanating from multiple areas simultaneously.

People in the field of software applications like to talk a lot lately about “unbundling” and about how “software is eating the world.”

We believe that this is happening, but the real revolution will come when fractured audiences start giving all innovators their due—attention, respect, relationship, revenues—before they are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil instead of after they are gone.

-Peace Be With You All-

Negotiating With Outrageous Confidence: The Diplomacy Issue

Recently, we keynoted the Ithaca College 2014 BOLD Conference.

We had a great time talking with the student attendees at the conference about negotiation and performing that act of active asking, well and with confidence.

And not just confidence, but outrageous confidence.

We have found in our entrepreneurial journey, that too many people—the majority of whom are women and/or members of minority groups—don’t ask for what they want even meekly, much less outrageously.

But, after the keynote, a point was raised to us, around the issue of using the tactics of outrageousness to boost one’s self-confidence, in order to gain only win-win outcomes.

The person wanted to know about how to maintain diplomacy when going into a negotiation while also maintaining equanimity with self—and others—while also maintaining self-assurance.

This is a great question and, in the context of the wider world, the answer is that, the spate of recent college graduates “asking for too much” or “being unwilling to work hard for advancement” does not spring from a great well of self-assurance.

Instead, both of these meta-employment-phenomena are occurring in response to the messages that older, job holding generations, have provided an entire current generation. These messages have been absorbed and we are beginning to see the results of that absorption.

In the context of the smaller world of the keynote, however, we would respond by noting that, of course there are times in a negotiation, any negotiation, that the cost of disrupting a potential future relationship, must be weighed against the benefit of moving toward a win-lose outcome.

But, until many more people (including women and minorities) begin acting with a little more self-confidence, self-awareness and even outrageousness, we believe that encouraging others to ask period, rather than to not ask for too much too soon, is the better route.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Active Listening as Post Modern Art

Paintings, music, stories, and speeches used to be considered artistic pursuits; but, in a world consumed with art as entertainment and media, listening carefully becomes an artistic effort on its own.

In a networking situation, the artistic dance to truly beginning to connect with another person, involves actively listening.

Words are like brushes and the canvas is the networking event. But the person at the event is the artist.

And in a world of shortened attention spans, artistic practice has to filter into everybody’s life, not just the vaunted few who have a TED Talk, or make a movie, or cut a “hit” record, or paint an image in a museum.

Our advice to you: Listen carefully.

Honesty in Human Memory

As they fade into the rearview mirror of memory, events of the past tend to be mythologized, canonized or misremembered entirely.

On a global scale, the one class of people who used to rely on this fact of human memory—politicians—are finding it difficult to deal with the current state of constant remembering that’s going on with the Internet and social media.

On an individual scale, we still have the expectation that other people will forgive us our trespasses, even as we can forever hold their trespasses against them, with the help of our new tools.

However, all of this electronic remembering hasn’t led to more honesty. In fact, as the tendency toward tribal social sanctioning has grown exponentially to a global scale, there are more and more media driven conflicts over who owns the narrative, rather than whether or not the narrative was honest and truthful in the first place.

This is part of the core reason why the masses no longer really pay attention when it’s revealed that someone—most importantly politicians—lied about something consequential, because honesty is no longer the coin of the realm.

Instead, who owns the narrative, for the next 24-48 hours, is what’s important. After that, well, the masses can repost in their Facebook feeds all they want, because it won’t matter whether truth (capital “T” or small “t”) was served or not.

At an individual scale, cries of hypocrisy still ring out, but the sound grows hollower with each passing year, as individuals learn from the masses, that ownership of the story is more valuable than the veracity of the content.

-Peace Be With You All-