Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Chrysler Crash - So different this time

I am among the alumni of the Iaccoca-led turnaround at Chrysler.  Management experts, including those at Harvard Business School, who deconstructed that success story attribute part of it to luck.  About the same time that Iacocca and his financial wizards such as Gerry Greenwald and Steve Miller got their systems revamped, the car market began its recovery.  The K-car was cheap and sold like hot cakes with all that pent-up demand out there.  The revolutionary Mini-Van, which had a very nice profit margin, also was a brisk seller.  

Nevertheless we are still proud of our endurance and courage.  Days we headed into work we never knew if that one would the one the security guards in the parking lot turned us away, "Place shut down."  One of the public relations themes was Chrysler, which was the smallest of the BigThree, as the feisty underdog.

That old mood can't be recaptured, not now, not when there has been so much lackluster leadership by Nardelli and seemingly so little endurance and courage.  When I was a contract employee at Home Depot during Nardelli's time there the place seemed to also be going downhill.  I didn't have high hopes for my alma mater when Nardelli took charge.  I was on the money.

The theme of the feisty underdog would also be a bad fit.  Today, we're all underdogs and not all that feisty after almost two years of economic uncertainty.  In my little business, which is holding up, new accounts are harder to get and take much longer to close.  Just like a growing number of the Fortune 500 which won't issue earnings estimates, I am clueless about tomorrow.

And, luck may not be on Chrysler's side this time around.  The pent-up demand might burst open but when, no one knows.  When it does, buyers might play it safe and stick with a company which they know will be in business for decades.  The U.S. government can guarantee this and that regarding Chrysler cars.  But that doesn't mean that the $4.98 part that's needed will be stocked by too many auto suppliers.

This is sad.  It didn't have to happen.  The company Iacocca et al. turned around could have stayed turned around.

"Resilience" by Elizabeth Edwards - The parts about forgiveness

Hurt people hurt.  We know that now. 

So, there's a push for how to teach ourselves and teach our society to forgive.  Not easy, after decades of Freudian psychology with its obsession on our woundedness.  

But, we can sure try.  And in her second book "Resilience," Elizabeth Edwards provides some compelling lessons.  As we know, there are few better-equipped teachers than Elizabeth whose husband cheated on her while she was suffering with cancer.  Because of her warmth, high intelligence, and confidence - I spoke with Elizabeth on the phone during her husband's presidential run - she just might be able to free us at least just a little from our collective chip on our shoulder, as well as our individual ones.  [There are boulders on my less-than-five-foot-high shoulders.]

Public humiliation is tough.  It's tougher when you're a national figure, as Elizabeth was and is.  And it's even tougher when you have a fatal disease and fear leaving your children with the legacy of a philandering father. 

But, in "Resilience," Elizabeth explains that no transgression against the self is unforgivable.  At the end of that progress of letting go of resentments the door could be thrown open to new kinds of joy.   

Of course, this shrewd woman could and probably does have a hidden agenda: Restoring the good name of and the career possibilities for the father of her children.  They deserve that.  And she could and likely will make that happen.  After all, if The Wife can forgive John Edwards, why can't the nation?

But that doesn't undermine the power of this upfront look into not holding on the wounds of the past.  In conjunction with "Resilience,"another useful read is "Stuck" by Anneli Rufus.

"Criminal Minds" - Can a sociopath develop a superego?

Maybe the producers and writers for "Criminal Minds" wanted to give us something hopeful and uplifting in these days of Swine Flu, a stalled economy, and record heat.  Whatever.

Last night's episode was about a sociopath who offs a woman a year for many years.  Then he encounters a blind boy, the child of one of the women he murders.  This pathology seems to go back to the time he witnessed his mother being murdered by his father.  He stayed with the body 24 hours.

Well, the blind boy somehow awakens or provides him with a superego.  He leaves a message for the authorities "Help me."  The trusty FBI folks interpret this as "Stop me." 

The murderer takes the blind kid for a ride on a Ferris wheel and thanks him for helping him "see."  Then he dies of wounds suffered when he was shot bopping around the ghetto hunting for a fresh victim.  The episode ends with the blind boy asking the authorities if the man was the person who murdered his mother?  Now, given the heightened sensitivity of the blind to non-visual cues and the fact that the murderer and the blind boy were together at the scene of the mother's murder, wouldn't the kid have picked that up?

Well, even the most creative producers and writers have an off week.

Hospice

SHORT SHORT FICTION by Jane Genova

"Think of this as the last stop on Metro North - heading home, not to work."  That's what the Manhattan public relations executive said to himself.  He had to say it to himself several times before his hands stopped trembling. 

But stop they did.  His jolly roommate -who joked about the bucket list - did the rest to shift him into this new reality. 

"My daughter brings the meanest chocolate chip walnut cookies you'll ever taste," the roommate gushed. 

"A gusher."  The man took the cookies and didn't dare use the power technique of freezing his face into a disapproving WASP look.  He had worked very hard to insulate himself from gushers like those he had grown up with in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey.  No, they're not good-natured, he had decided years ago.  They're, well, simply gushers.

The next day two colleagues and an intern came to the hospice to visit him.  The gusher siphoned off any awkwardness by sucking up all the oxygen.  "Why not write a book about this," suggested the intern.  "Like Art Buchwald," she added.  He knew she would keep coming back, visiting him, the only one.  Big heart, along with big boobs. 

"Will that cutie take pity on two dying men?" the gusher asked. 

"In college I did one of the those two girls things.  I wonder what it would be be with two guys, one girl?" 

The book was about two action heroes from Planet Neptune who get stranded in a hospice on earth by clerical error.  Only they don't know it was a hospice or why so many pretty young things were putting out.  Whenever they attempted to leave and move on with their planet wanderings some earnest folks would talk them out of it.  Continually they transmitted messages back to Neptune about the unusually high death rate on earth.

The book was and remains a best-seller.  The proceeds keep going to the gusher's daughter, the intern and scholarships for Jersey City residents who want careers in hospice care.   The man's former wives fought the will, unsuccessfully.

"Nobody wants to hear about ad-supported models," Robert Ackerman, quoted in FORBES, 5/11/09

Just two years ago, the world was still thinking ad revenue.  As Rebecca Buckman reports in the May 11, 2009 edition of FORBES, tech entrepreneur Glenn Kelman "got the cold shoulder from many Silicon Valley venture capitalists."  That's because his model did not include earning revenues through advertising.  A well-meaning soul even took him aside and essentially told him, buddy you gotta think ads.

That was then.  Today, the smart money wants to see revenue coming in from just about anything but ads.  Buckman quotes Palo Alto, California venture capital firm Allegis Capital representative Robert Ackerman as observing, "Nobody wants to hear about ad-supported models."

The implications of that are chilling for most of old media.  Already we're seeing the collapse of ad-supported traditional media in the magazine category.  PORTFOLIO just folded.  And the future of many other Conde Nast glossies - which require plenty of ads to support - is very iffy.  THE NEW YORK POST reports that July could tell the tale on that.  July is when the books close on the September issue.  That issue is the equivalent in publishing of retail's Black Friday.  If there are too few ads there could be few issues remaining for the glossies.

So far things aren't looking too hot.  THE NEW YORK POST provides these numbers on the decline of ads in individual publications:

• ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST - Down 49%
• WIRED - Down 50%
• VANITY FAIR - Down 37% [will there be the gala Oscar party in 2010?]
• VOGUE - Down 31%.

Do those with decision-making power in old media have the courage and strength to change?  Or will they allow their once thriving empires to become the GMs of media?

JERSEY JOURNAL - Hudson County, NJ Icon

What ketchup is to Heinz, the JERSEY JOURNAL is to Hudson County, New Jersey, including those of us who have migrated out to seek our fame and fortune. 

No surprise, given the hustler ethos of northern NJ, many of us have done unusually well.  Think Martha Stewart.  In this brutal downturn, we Hudson County Kids are among the few who get it that the game has changed and so must our individual one.  Here is an e-book on what I learned growing up with the JERSEY JOURNAL as my daily bible-reading Download CUsersjasneDocumentsjg.

Can the JERSEY JOURNAL be saved?  Former publisher Scott Ring tried. [Six degrees of separation: My sister Anne Genova Murga has a long-term relationship with him].  He focused on all systems. 

But now salvation might come from radical digital outreach into all the communities the newspaper serves.  Make them digitally literate.  There's more.  Make them the media.  Then make the JERSEY JOURNAL totally a digital platform for all these communities to post their own news, commentary, photos, classified and display ads. 

How to monetize this can be worked out.  And if FORBES is on the money [see May 11th edition], it won't be through selling ads.

"Without a Trace" - Sam, Brian get chummy

Tuesday night's episode of "Without a Trace" was ripe with potential romantic trouble for Jack and Samantha. 

It emerged explicitly when Sam mentioned to Jack on the cell phone that they hadn't talked for a while.  Jack ducked that with saying that he was busy with his daughter.  Then there were all those chummy scenes at Sam's between her and her son's father Brian.  As Brian recovers from his car-accident injuries, he, Sam and his son become more and more comfortable together. 

Meanwhile, Jack seems to be looking old.  He also was acting old when he disciplined Fitzgerald about not writing up the gun incident with his former lover Kim.  As we know, the latter turned out to be a bad guy.  Will a more detailed explanation be offered in a later episode about her law-breaking behavior.

Will Fitzgerald learn from this error of judgment?  Jack is keeping him on a short leash for six months.

The overall theme of the episode was when a job costs a sensitive human being too much.  This wasn't the first time it knocked viewers between the eyes.  Jack was in mandatory therapy because of this matter.  This time around it was about how career had a journalist around the throat.

It remains to be seen if allowing a job to take us over can be cured.  Jack is as into his job as ever.  We wonder how long the journalist can continue to smell the roses

"Let the day perish wherein I was born," Job, Chapter 3

We Baby Boomers aren't cut out for this serial occurrence of Black Swans or those unexpected developments which Nassim Taleb tells us become game-changers.  Well, the economic meltdown, vanishing of our retirement nest eggs, inability to earn anywhere near what we used to, and now Swine Flu have certainly changed the game.  Actually, what is and the fear of what could be have become so scary that some of us are comparing our lives, at least in 2009, to that of Job in the Bible. 

In a short time-frame, Job who was "perfect and upright and eschewed evil" became the universe's dump stop for misery.  Yeah, it got that bad.  Job "spake and said, "Let the day perish wherein I was born."  Me?  I discussed with another Baby Boomer the possibility of being taken out by Swine Flu.  "No way," she answered.  "We're immune from years ago." She added, "No fast exit for us, Jane."

In undergraduate days some of us had deconstructed Archibald MacLeish's interpretation of the "Book of Job" in his play "J.B."  It was a Roman Catholic [RC] women's college which morphed into Seton Hill University.  The professor, a nun, gave it the traditional RC spin about God's testing us and our faith would help us survive spiritual, emotional, and even financial rites of passage.

The Beatles were asking us to hold their hand.  We knew the technology of the pill freed us from those large ethnic families [some of my classmates came from a litter of 12].  And, thanks to Betty Friedan's warning, we weren't going to get trapped in the suburbs.  So, we blew off the nun, J.B., Job, and any other forecast of darkness. 

Aside from bumps here and there [females were still expected to be trim and most of my buddies and I were porkers], life went well.  Until 2008.  Then there has been 2009.  And there's no telling what will come down in that breakthrough year of 2012.

Reflection:  No, I can't say no one warned us that life could be this hard.

Teaching Writing Porn - and other non-gravitas career changes

The bulletin boards on Mediabistro.com are filled with great gravitas about the End of Journalism.  Absolutely wrong attitude.  The only productive mindset in this era when everyone's cheese has been moved is irony or bemused detachment.  Examples of this attitude include:

• So ironic.  We made all the right moves and landed up in Professional Paradise Lost.

• That loser in high school who became a plumber has the folks in Greenwich, Connecticut cooling their heels and holding their noses as they wait for him to show.

• No one cares that we're unemployed, underemployed, lost our businesses, have student loans from MFA programs, and are way too narcissistic to sell ourselves.  So much for the self-esteem movement.

So, how do we migrate from great gravitas to the lack of self-consciousness which can open us to spotting opportunity and pouncing on it?  Apparently it's the new genre, which I invented, of Short Short Fiction which positions career change as not all that serious, but successful.  The site for that is my syndicated blog on career change in general.

For those who can't or won't navigate from the serious pursuit of everything professional, there's the book "Stuck" by Anneli Rufus.  In addition, presentation coaching is available, from Genova Writing, Coaching and More.  Complimentary consultation available for career changers to check out by email or phone if I can be helpful [MGenova981@aol.com, 203-468-8579].

"CSI: Miami" - Ugly underbelly of reality television

Reality television isn't quite that.  At least that's the message from tonight's "CSI:Miami."  The plot line depicted a version of those bachelor shows in which possible soulmates are eliminated, one by one.  Fights between the competing women were rigged - and filmed.  The lion's share of the competing women are professional actresses. Deals were made under the table.  And in the end the to-be-bride is murdered by a competitor envious of her happiness.

For ratings, I wouldn't doubt if much of this - sans murder - goes on in real reality shows on television.  A sad commentary on a dying medium.