How Polite Are You?

How polite are you?
I’d like to advance an idea for a concept and coin a term – “Politeness Quotient” or PQ.
This would represent a range from 1 to 100 where 1 represents the most grumpy, miserable, abusive, antisocial, rude, Scrooge-like misanthrope you can imagine, to 100 which represents a saintly person who bends over backwards and is almost painfully polite and considerate - even past the point where they make you feel guilty for not being as polite. These people are SO polite that they even thought of that so they find ways to help you without offending your own vision of how polite YOU are to them.

Sometimes, it’s hard to know what the right polite thing is to do. How many times have you been walking to a door, and the person ahead of you goes through, then stops and holds the door open for you, but you are so far behind, that you now feel you have to break into a run to save them from having to hold the door any longer than absolutely necessary? So was that person being polite in holding the door? Or was it inconsiderate of them to force you into the position to have to run? And for your part, do you hike up whatever you are carrying and run for it, or wave them ahead and say, “Don’t worry about it – you go on. Thanks anyway.” Or is that throwing their offering in their face? Is that a dismissive gesture showing you don’t care about their offer? Is that a judgment on their inability to judge distance?

Consider the workplace. Have you ever noticed that there is a descending scale of greeting with a person you see in the same office multiple times per day? When you first see him in the morning, you might wave, give a toothy smile and say something like, “Hey Alan! How are you? Are you having a good day?” But then, you pass him in the hall again just an hour later, so you can’t say that again. Instead you just say, “Hey Alan…” and smile and nod. An hour later you pass him again, and now it’s just, “hey” and a smile and nod. Again, an hour later and it’s just a smile and nod. An hour later and it’s a quick nod. The next time after that it's just a raise of the eyebrows.....
If you pass each other any more than that you ignore them as background foot traffic!
The only one who is ever repeatedly excited to see you every time they see you coming is your dog. I’m thinking dogs must have a short-term memory deficit. But for everyone else, there is the Declining Scale of Greeting Energy, or DSGE.

Or how about thanking someone? This can be kind of tricky. Especially in a party scenario where multiple people are present, and multiple people have brought presents.

If you thank a person a little less than they expected, they feel slighted because they think you didn’t appreciate what they did. If you thank them a little TOO much, they again feel slighted because now they wonder if you are being sarcastic and going over-the-top in order to make a point. So learning to thank a person in the right way and to the right degree can be a bit tricky.

If two people bring you a gift, and one person brings a small modest gift, and the other person brings a huge elaborate gift, do you thank them both exactly equally? Or do you thank them appropriately depending on the gift? After all, if you thank the person who gave you the plasma screen TV the same as the person who gave you the re-gifted olive-green 2-slice toaster from Wal-Mart, is it an implied insult to the one who spent $1,000? (No one has ever given me a gift that expensive, so I personally haven’t had that extreme a case, I only use it here as an example to illustrate the point.) Is it simply rude to acknowledge one gift more than the other regardless of the value – or is it more rude to NOT acknowledge the extra effort and expense of the premium gift-giver? Also, what if someone leaves a gift at your door, or sends it in the mail? If you are busy when you receive it, and it takes a couple of days before you respond with a thank you, what exactly is the grace-period with something like that?
How do you handle a person who Over-Gifts? In other words, a person you exchange gifts with who gives you something that is clearly many times more expensive or more thoughtful than the one you gave them? Or how do you handle the opposite case where your gift to them is far more elaborate than theirs is to you – and you don’t want them to feel bad about it? Or in a new friendship that is developing, when they bring you a gift, but you didn’t think the friendship was far along enough to give them a gift yet? Or vice versa?

How about the pleasantries of conversation at work? How much do you accommodate the need of a co-worker to talk socially before you remind them you both have to get back to work? If you allow none at all, then you will have no friends, you are considered rude, and you can’t be effective at work, because you haven’t fostered the interpersonal connections and easy relationships needed to leverage your work-related interests. But if you spend too much time chatting, then you don’t get your work done, and you might be frustrating them by forcing them into “politeness overtime” in carrying the social conversation too far. When meeting with people at the office, how much of the meeting at the beginning should be devoted to the Politeness Buffer Period? When do you get down to work?

And when you do get to work, how long do you stay on the surface with the easy questions before you dive down and get to the tough ones? Where are the “Politeness Buffer Zones”? How slowly should you bring the conversation to the essential point where you are telling them that they did not live up to their promises?

Consider the situations where you are in a conversation with someone at work who likes to talk on and on. Is it polite to allow them to keep talking without interrupting them? Or is it more polite to somehow signal to them that they should stop at some reasonable point before they embarrass themselves? What about the situation where someone in the group is starting to tell an off-color joke that you know will end up embarrassing them when they get to the punchline? Do you speak up and interrupt them or let them speak and go all the way through? In one case you are preventing them from telling a Jewish joke to a Jewish person let’s say, but on the other hand you are showing everyone in public that you have no faith in that person’s ability to function in public. Which is less polite?

When you have a personal conversation, is it polite to ask personal questions? How much should you focus on the other person in order to be polite and concerned, and at what point does it start to feel like you are probing their personal life mercilessly? When a boy likes a girl and wants to see her, where is the dividing line between worshipping from afar, and stalking?

If co-workers give each other a Christmas gift of equal value, it seems nice and fair, and polite. But what if one is the boss over the other one? If the boss gives a gift to the staffer, is it favoritism? Discrimination? Foolish? Generous? Kind? Polite? For the staffer to give to the boss, is it bribery? Sucking up? Kind? Wise? Polite? Or is it impolite because it puts the boss into a position of feeling they have to reciprocate?

And now that we have so much of our interaction between people online, we have to think about politeness online. It is a different medium and has it's advantages and disadvantages. You can reach more people, in more places, even on the other side of the world. But you communicate in fewer dimensions that you do in person, and some things are lost in the translation. For example, sarcasm is hard to pull off in emails and the written form. In face to face communication, you can have a sly smile or an overly eager facial expression give it away, or even on the telephone, your voice can telegraph sarcasm by exaggerating the emphasis in the tone. (these are some of the subtle aspects of English that people from other cultures have trouble learning) But in written form, sarcasm tends to come across as sincere and therefore is misinterpreted as being very mean-spirited and disrespectful.

So the written communication has it's own rules of politeness, doesn't it?
Maybe explaining your sarcasm is one of them. Certainly not typing in ALL CAPS is one rule of politeness in online communication. PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE YELLING WHEN YOU TYPE IN CAPS.

Another interesting anomaly is the exclamation point. There was a man originally from India that worked for me at my last company for years. He used exclamation points in just about every sentence, in every email. He generally ticked people off, and was usually not so well-liked by others. I had to tell him about this while giving him his review one year. He was bright - he had a PhD, 2 masters degrees and 2 bachelor's degrees, etc. but he had never figured out the cultural significance of an exclamation point. He said that in India they use it as a period (full stop).
When we finally had that discussion it suddenly made years of difficulty with other people clear. He had wondered why so many people seemed to dislike him. They thought he was rude and demanding.

Politeness can be tricky. Considering all these pitfalls of polite social behavior, it’s easy to see how we can all make a little social faux pas from time to time.

I think it would not be too much work to take these situations illustrated above, study them, analyze the pros and cons, and decide the correct behavior in each case, pose the questions in a questionnaire format and then measure people’s responses against the right answers, and have that score be the PQ for that person.

So, what do you suppose YOUR PQ would be on a scale of 1 to 100?

Have you any answers to the above questions? And have you ever made a politeness error like these you can talk about?

Great Songs

The following is an article written by Joe Parr. My friend and the rhythm guitar player in the band with me. This is his point of view about what makes a song "great". The stuff of legend and history.

Joe Parr:
Great Songs


How many times have you heard someone say, “Oh man, now that’s a great song”? Probably a few thousand times at least. Seems like the term ‘great song’ is even more overused than the term ‘hero’. There are definitely many great songs that have been recorded over time, just probably not quite as many as are proclaimed.

But what makes a ‘great’ song? We all have our favorites and everyone can recognize what they consider to be a great song when they hear it. But what is it that makes the difference between a truly great song versus just a really good song? The simple answer, of course, is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and what I consider a great song versus what someone else considers a great song are likely to be very different. Fans of every genre out there will likely consider songs from their favorite genre to be great songs. But beyond personal tastes, I do believe there are specific characteristics that most (if not all) truly great songs share. Some of these are very hard to define because they deal with how the song affects the listener. Some, although they may be hard to measure, can certainly be identified.

There are some basic criteria that I think most would agree (regardless of genre) that a song must meet in order for it to be considered truly great. Beyond these criteria, which I consider to be ‘table stakes’, then there are less measurable qualities that are those magical differentiators that elevate a song to great status.

But first, let’s talk about the ‘table stakes’:

Crossover / Mass Appeal – I do not believe that a song has to be a ‘hit’ to be considered great. In fact, what defines a hit in 2006 and what defined a hit in 1945 are very different so it would be difficult to judge a song purely on whether it made it on the charts. It’s certainly a factor. Conversely on the other side of that coin, just because a small group (regardless of their credentials) deems a song great, if at least a significant portion of the general population doesn’t agree, then the ‘great’ claim is just hot air. This goes for any creative endeavor whether it’s a book, movie, TV show or painting. The concept that the general public to too stupid to recognize greatness when they see or hear it, is condescending rubbish.

A song needs to viewed outside of its genre or cult following as a worthy song. I may not be a particular fan of a certain genre, but I should be able to listen to a song from that genre and determine if it’s a quality song. If the rest of the world listens to something and considers it nothing but noise (sorry Punk Rock), then it can’t be considered a great song. I’m not saying that niche genres such as Punk Rock or Death Metal haven’t impacted music and aren’t important genres. They have. I’m just saying that I’d be hard pressed to find any truly great songs that have come from these genres. I realize this puts some genres at a slight disadvantage but we are differentiating between ‘good’ songs and ‘great’ songs and if a song can’t rise above a small following, how can it be consider truly great?

Test of Time – A song doesn’t have to be ‘old’ to be great but eventually a song has to pass the test of time to be considered great. You should be able to listen to a song and ask the question, “will anyone be listening to this song 20, 40, 60 years from now?”. It is fairly safe to assume that the classical music that has survived through the centuries was the truly great music of their time. Even in the modern music era, we are already seeing the time filtering process with songs from the 40’s, 50’s & 60’s. There are songs from these decades that are still being played routinely and are finding new fans on a regular basis.

Base Talent – I don’t think a song must complicated or require a tremendous amount of talent to perform. In fact, I would tell you that some of the greatest songs of our time are fairly simple in their structure. However, I do think that most great songs do require at least some level of talent to produce them. If you’ve never played a particular instrument before in your life and I can teach you a song on it in with minimal effort, that song likely isn’t going to be one that goes down in history as a great song. This again makes it difficult for some genres to elevate songs to the great level. At the same time, songs that are incredibly complex with multiple melodies, counter melodies, harmonies and that require a Chinese Acrobat with twelve fingers to play are not necessarily great just because they are difficult to play. They may, by definition, be impressive but then so is juggling chainsaws.

Original – In order to consider a work to be great, it really should be original. I’m not saying that it can’t be based on traditional forms or patterns such as in Blues or for that matter, use chord progressions or note patterns within reason that have been used before. After all, if you eliminated songs based on traditional patterns, scales or progressions, there wouldn’t be much past the 1950’s that would qualify. What I am saying is that the song should be your material and all your material. If you’ve taken (copied, sampled, stolen, etc.) all or part of someone else’s song and merely changed or added something (sorry Beyonce, sorry Rap), then it’s not a great piece of art. While it might be good music and fun to listen to, you are going to have to make significant changes to it for it to be elevated to great status.

Remakes of a previously recorded song may be the exception to this rule. There are some remakes of songs out there that are impressive. Some maybe even better than the original, but great? I guess it’s possible. There are certainly a number of Beatles songs that have been remade over the years that many would considered better than the original. But in all of these cases, the ‘song’ itself is still the ‘song’ and the performer is merely taking a great song up a notch. It’s not a piece or part of the song that is taken out of context and twisted into something different.

There are some remakes out there that eventually became the identified version of the song. Jimi Hendrix’s remake of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’, James Taylor’s remake of Carol King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ and Garth Brook’s version of Billy Joel’s ‘Shameless’ are all classic examples of where the ‘remake’ became the signature version of the song. Those are also all three songs that many of their fans would classify as ‘great’.

Transferable – I think one of the true marks of a great song is when that song can be transferred to different instruments, styles and genres and still maintain its greatness. I can best convey my meaning by an example. The song Amazing Grace is a song that almost everyone in the English speaking modern world has heard. Not only have they heard it, I’d bet they’ve heard dozens of different versions. Whether it was performed as a solo piano or guitar instrumental, a chorale piece, an orchestral arrangement or maybe as a single soulful acapella voice, the song retains its beauty. I even once heard a Bass solo version of Amazing Grace that absolutely blew me away. My point is that a truly great song can transcend its original form.

Reproducible (live) – One of the core aspects of music throughout time has been the fact that music has always been performed live for audiences. I personally hope that never changes. It’s one of the great joys in life. With that in mind, if a song is so fabricated that it can’t be reproduced by real musicians in a live setting, then how can you consider that a great song. Maybe it can be consider a great audio creation, but a great song? Once again, this may limit some genres (sorry Electronica) that are so heavily dependent on computer generated sequences, sound effects and rhythms that they would be impossible to recreate in the real world. I’m not saying you can’t dance to it. I’ll just need some major convincing before I can consider it great.

So now I’ve put forth what I consider to be the basic requirements that a song should meet before we can consider it a great song. I’m sure I would get many disagreements on whether these basic requirements are valid. For that matter, you may have additional basic requirements that I haven’t consider but these seem like a pretty good start. After all, I haven’t dismissed any single genre out of hand. Nor have I dismissed any style or instrumentation. I think all genres, styles and instruments have the potential to create great songs and in fact I would tell you that most have.

With these criteria in place, are we any closer to defining what makes a truly great song? Not really. We have managed to filter out an awful lot of music. In fact, I’m sure we’ve filtered out some songs that I might personally even consider to be great. But we really haven’t gotten to greatness yet.

I think in order to discuss that next step, we have to explore the purpose or purposes of music. Why does music exist? Now that’s a big question, isn’t it? If we look at history, we will learn that music, in its most basic, original form was created as a means of communication. Drum rhythms to send messages from tribe to tribe or to warn people to stay away. Songs passed down from generation to generation telling the history of the people. Even when you look at today’s music, most songs are still trying to communicate something. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh, there are certainly songs that are for just pure entertainment but how many of those do we classify as great?

When a song is trying to communicate something, that ‘something’ usually falls into two categories – songs telling a story and songs promoting an idea.

Story Songs – This is one of the oldest forms of music dating back to a time when the average person didn’t read or write and therefore in order to pass on stories or history, it had to be passed on verbally from memory. As educators learned a long time ago, it’s easier for someone to remember something if it’s made into a song. This style of song is especially prominent in Folk, Country and Blues music. However, you will find it in almost every genre. Our national anthem would be considered a story song. It tells the story of a battle fought during the revolution.

Story Songs can be great if the story is told well. Much like a book, the great Story Song is going to have a beginning, a plot, an end and often either a twist or a moral. Great Story Songs paint a picture so vivid, you feel like you can reach out and touch the people or place in the song. Of course, the average story song might just tell about a wild Saturday night. Harry Chapin’s ‘Taxi’ tells the story of a cab driver picking up an old girl friend as a fare. A pretty simple story but told in a very compelling fashion that reads almost like a short novel.

Idea Songs - Idea songs may be the most prevalent form of song in existence today. They range from the political to the plain old everyday pop song that is saying I Love You. You can pretty much look at any week of the Top Forty charts and most of the songs on the charts would fall into this category. One of my favorite examples of an idea song is John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s got to be the most beautiful depiction of Communism ever painted. The irony of course, is that the Capitalist Americans made it one of his biggest solo hits. I would imagine that most of them never paid close enough attention to the lyrics to understand what it was saying. There are certainly some great songs that would fall into this category but just based on the sheer number of songs in this group, there is also a tremendous amount of mediocrity. The mark of the great Idea Song is believability. Does the performer make you believe in what they are saying? In addition, is the idea itself important enough to worry about? Love is certainly an important idea and I’ve got to believe there are some truly great love songs out there.

Beyond communication of a story or an idea, another historic use of music was to create some sort of reaction from the audience. Usually those reactions would be either physical or emotional.

Emotional Songs - The Emotional Song may be one of my favorites. That may be because as a musician and a song writer, it may be the hardest form of song to write. Of course, this type of song way back in the beginning wasn’t usually about making someone melancholy or happy. It was usually about scaring the crap out of them. The jungle war drums telling the enemy to get ready eventually evolved into the marching drummers of later armies and then into the bugles blaring out the ‘Charge’ call. Of course, the art of scaring someone through music hasn’t been lost on the movie industry. Can anyone say Jaws?

Emotional songs run the gamut from happy or proud to sad or angry. It really runs the gamut. Some songs can make you feel all kinds of emotions all at the same time. If you didn’t cry the first time you heard Alan Jackson sing Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning, you’re a tougher man than I. I’ve heard that song now dozens of times and I still have a hard time making it to the end.

The mark of a truly great emotional song is one that can actually change your existing mood. If you’re happy, a truly great sad song can bring you down and keep you there for a while. The opposite is true. If you’re sad, a truly great happy song can bring you and keep you there for a while. Emotional songs may be one of the easiest types of songs to consider great because their impact is so obvious and immediate.

Physical Songs – The Physical Song provokes a physical reaction from its listener. Does it make you want to get up and dance? This is more than just feeling the need to tap your foot or mildly bob your head. This is “I’ve got to get up and boogie” or “I’ve got to bang my head ‘til it hurts”. A great dance song will fill the dance floor by the third note with people who normally wouldn’t be caught dead on a dance floor.

There are also songs that can provoke riots, make you want to go punch someone or make you want to go run, ride, swim or climb. These are great motivational songs.

At this point, you might be wondering, “What about songs that have no purpose other than to sound good or to entertain?”. There are certainly an enormous number of songs that would fall into this category.

For that matter, one type of song falls almost exclusively into the group is the Instrumental. After all, it is very difficult if not essentially impossible to tell a story or to put forth an idea in an instrumental. Sure, there are instrumentals that may accompany a story and even some that were written solely with the purpose of telling a story (Peter And The Wolf) but without the visual or the story presented with the music, they can’t ‘tell’ the story.

As for evoking a physical or emotional reaction, instrumentals can certainly do this. An instrumental can set a mood, get you on the dance floor or raise your tension level but it is pretty difficult to pull off without any other aspect (visual, lyrics, spoken word, etc.).

There are, without a doubt, some amazing instrumental music in this world and I’m sure that some of it elevates to the Great status. But you have to ask yourself, when was the last time you just couldn’t wait to get home and put on that instrumental? When was the last time an instrumental made you cry, made you smile, made you want to go overthrow the government? I’ve certainly been deeply affected by instrumentals. Those occasions are certainly few and far between.

So, if it’s so difficult for an instrumental to have that kind of impact on a person, what does that say for genres such as Classical or Jazz? Two genres that most would agree require an amazing level of talent to perform. There are obviously Great Classical and Great Jazz songs. I’m not sure what to think about that question.

I’m a huge Jazz fan and I think Jazz musicians may be the most talented single group of musicians on the planet. But when I listen to Jazz, I’m usually listening with a musician’s ear and wanting to hear great musicians ‘show off’ a bit. I’m rarely moved emotionally or physically other than the occasional smile when I hear a musician pull off some amazingly cool melody line over a series of impossible chord changes. I’m also at a bit of a deficit because while I enjoy listening to Jazz, I’m not overly knowledgeable in the genre. So maybe I just need to be exposed more to the genre.

As for Classical, I would propose that, since Classical music is predominantly a genre of the distant past, we really can’t judge greatness in the same way we do for modern music. Yes, I know there is new classical music being created and performed everyday throughout the world but it is not the popular music of the day as it was during the time of Mozart. There are no doubt great Classical songs and songs that do move the listener emotionally. The William Tell Overture immediately comes to mind. It is an incredibly moving song. Performed in the right setting, it will rock your world. There are more. Again, as with Jazz, I’m not an expert in the genre. If I was, I’m sure I could provide a list a mile long.

I think in the case of both of these genres, the technical expertise and musical skill required do have to be factored in. After all, some credit has to be given to the composer who spent years writing a classical piece for a hundred piece orchestra as opposed to the singer songwriter who poured his soul out over three strummed chords.

We can talk all day about criteria and what should or shouldn’t be a part of great song, but in the end it really comes down to what moves you. To paraphrase Carlos Santana, music has the ability to affect people at a molecular level. The right notes or lyrics at the right moment with the right instrumentation can reach into a person’s soul and change them. When it’s all said and done, if a song does that to you, then it’s certainly a song that should be put on ‘your’ list of great songs. If it does that to a large part of the population, then there’s no doubt it belongs on the list of Great Songs.

The mark of a great book is one that consumes the reader to such a level that they become completely engrossed in the story and they “can’t put it down”. Similarly, a truly great song has the ability to consume a listener to the point of distraction. When was the last time you had to stop a conversation because a song was being played near by and it was so consuming that you couldn’t converse and listen at the same time? When was the last time you heard a song whose lyrics took your mind off to a distant land or made you feel like you were living the story being told? Those songs are out there. They are the truly great ones.

So, with all that in mind I think I’ll grab my iPod, slide on my Bose headphones, listen to some really good music and see if I can find some truly great songs. Surely, out of the 3,000+ songs on my iPod, there’s got to be a least a few.

The Dirty Little Trade Secret

They released the trade numbers recently to show that we are behind again. We are trading at about a trillion dollar deficit level per year. That means that we give out a trillion dollars more for foreign goods and services than we take in by selling our goods and services to other countries.

A lot of people use this to determine how we are doing as a country, and to see if we are falling behind, or how healthy our economy is compared to others, etc.

The big secret here is that I don't think there is any reliable way to measure this at all. Consider the following:

1) A retailer here here might buy a refrigerator from a company in say, Germany. So it looks like we send $2,000 to Germany. But what if the German company is actually owned by a parent company in the US? Whose money is it then? Germany's or the US'?

2) The refrigerator, like most manufactured products, is itself a collection of other parts. There is a compressor, there are electrical components, there is the gas used, there is sheet metal and plastic extrusions, etc. etc. etc. Any of these parts may themselves be manufactured anywhere else in the world - including the US. So is it a German product? Or is it an American product because the parent company is American? Or is it the nationality of whatever the brand name is that gets glued to the door? Or is it the nationality of the conglomerate of manufacturers of all the parts down to the screws and nuts and washers?

3) What if the company in Germany is owned by a consortium of other companies, SOME of which are American and some of which are not?

4) What if the collection of companies that owns the German company are themselves partially owned by other American companies, and partially from other countries?

5) What if the companies that own the German company are themselves multi-national companies operating in many countries throughout the world?

6) I can't even tell what constitutes an "American company" anymore! Oracle, my old company, is a company that has a headquarters in California, BUT it has offices in 109 other countries, and of the 50,000 employees, over 35,000 of them live outside the US. The vast majority of the company is NOT in the US. The largest population of employees is actually in India now. And in each country they have bank accounts and assets and staff.
Is General Electric an "American" company? They are also all over the world. What about Toyota? Are they a Japanese car manufacturer? But they manufacture their cars like Camry's in a factory in the US. So when you buy a Toyota Camry, you buy it from a local dealer in the US, staffed by Americans. They bought the car from the distributor which is Gulf States Toyota, which is a company based in Houston. And they bought it from the factory which is ALSO in the US. SO which part of this is in Japan, exactly? Apparently, some corporate headquarters which gets a very small piece of the pie from the sale. They are mostly just selling a brand these days in that case. Even the design shops are in California much of the time.
And then even the companies we THINK are American, like General Motors and Ford, etc. have stockholders, and those stockholders could be anyone anywhere in the world.

So what makes it an "American" company exactly? They have owners everywhere, factories everywhere, staff everywhere, customers everywhere, bank accounts everywhere.... They have truly become global entities.

And when a number of these massive multi-national entities are trading back and forth, who can say how many of the dollars actually end up being 'owned' by a country or not?

Even if you try to ignore all the comings and goings of buys and sells and invoices, and just measure it by deposits to an American bank, how can you tell how "American" THAT is? If it's a large bank like JPMC Bank One, they have international branches and offices and processing centers in a host of other countries, just like any large company. And bank deposits are not actual tangible gold bullion or even cash in a vault somewhere. They are nothing more than electronic signals flying around the planet through the internet servers. The bank balances for accounts are just a series of numbers stored in a database. They are not cash or gold - they are the pale electronic after-image of financial transactions. They are a record of activity. They themselves are not money - but then they are as well. Do we have to figure out which series of computer hard-drives a given database resides on to tell if the "money" is in the US now? What if parts of the database resides in several systems around the world? If JPMC transfers it's database to a processing center in the UK, does the US trade deficit suddenly take a trillion dollar hit?

What if a company here in the US transfers 100 billion dollars from it's accounts here in a US bank to it's accounts in a UK bank? Does that affect the US Trade deficit? Does it count? After all, it is one company moving it's own asset around - no trade occurred. What if it even stays in the same bank and it's merely a move to a different account within the same bank? What if it's even still in the same database - but just somehow tagged as being through a UK branch? There was no trade, no movements of anything into or out of the country, but the records might make it look like there is - and it might affect income taxes and government revenues in 2 countries - even though nothing was bought or sold and no money changed hands!

What if amounts are stored here is a local bank but in Euro Dollar accounts? Does that mean it belongs to Europe? What if a bank account in France is in US dollars? Does that mean it belongs to the US tally of dollars? Do we count all the US dollar accounts in the world, and go with that? In that case, China has over one trillion US dollars right now - but it is on the other side of the planet. Or is it? Where is it physically? It probably should be counted as part of China's holdings, since they traded for it.

What if an American company, like GE, buys a compressor from a company in Brazil, and a motor from a company in Australia, and nuts and bolts and other parts from companies in China and Korea. Then they assemble a refrigerator in Germany, and sell it to a retail chain based in the UK, who sells it to a consumer in Italy? How much of that series of transactions is consider part of the US trade scenario? How about if even the profit from it is kept in a bank in Germany? Or Switzerland? THEN how much of it is considered American just because the company that orchestrated the dance is based in New York?

Nothing is physical, everything is everywhere. You can't even really count bank deposits by an American company to an American Bank because we cannot tell what the percentage of foreign ownership is for the company OR the bank, OR what percentage of which international transactions are represented in which deposits, or how much is there temporarily before moving on (in from one subsidiary in Spain, and out to another subsidiary in Indonesia...)

My point is that international business and the global economy is all so network-matrixed and integrated, that it is no longer possible to really tell national "ownership" for sure. Therefore, I believe the numbers they quote for the news are outdated measurements and in the light of this interdependent international business trading model, they have now been rendered obsolete, and even virtually meaningless.

We have to reinvent macro-economics for a post-internet, post-global outsourced business model.

The War over Raising the Minimum Wage

It seems that there is some disagreement between economists on the subject of whether or not to raise the federal minimum wage. At present, it is $5.15 per hour and has not been changed since president Clinton increased it from $4.25 in 1995.
Health care costs alone have risen over 80% in the past two years. Gasoline was about 99 cents per gallon back in 1995. It's well over $2.00 now. Housing has gone up, electricity, heating, clothing, everything has gone up since then. But despite cost increases and everything that has happened in the past 11 years, we have had that same income rate without matching increases for those unskilled workers who rely on the minimum wage jobs across the country. The Democrats hope to increase this into the mid-$6.00 range when they assume control of the house and Senate in January. Republicans want to see it either stay as it is, or they would drop the minimum wage guidelines altogether.

Economists are split roughly down the middle on what they think the effects of raising MW are. The basic argument in favor of it is that it is impossible to live on that and it’s therefore unfair. The basic argument against it is that if you raise the rate, then employers drop the numbers of people employed, and so jobs are lost altogether. But things are a little more complicated than that. Let’s look at it a little more deeply.

In favor of a decrease or elimination of minimum wage:
Those who do not want an increase of the minimum wage suggest that increasing the wage increases the costs for small business owners, and therefore forces them to lay off some workers, thus decreasing the overall number of jobs available and this hurts rather than helps the people who would normally work at these jobs. Further, they suggest that these people do not have a political voice and therefore could not very well attack the politicians who make this policy, to show their displeasure. So they suggest that politicians who advocate the higher wage are taking advantage of them by appearing to be helping the poor and appearing to be humane, but actually they are helping themselves at the cost of those not in a position to complain. They argue that if increasing the wage from 5.15 to 6.50 is a good thing, then why not increase it to $10? Why not $25 per hour? Why not $100/hr? The reason is because there is a balance of needs, and currently things are in balance, and raising the rate would put things out of balance.

In favor of an increase:
Those in favor of the increase note that, in real dollars, the buying power of today’s minimum wage is $2.00/hour lower than it was in the 1960s. It is virtually impossible to live on this wage, and that is why there is a grass roots movement afoot across the country that is advocating a so-called “living wage” of at least $10 to $12 per hour. This actually reflects the costs of living at the lowest levels of society in this day and age. They argue that if 5.15 is too much and the republicans say it should be lower, then why not make it $1/hr? Why not $1 per day like in China? Why don’t we do that? Because then those workers would starve.

My own analysis:
Let’s look at why we have a minimum wage in the first place. It exists because otherwise, the jobs would be held only by teenagers that are supported by their parents. All others who need to actually support themselves on their income would not be able to. This eliminates their legal, law-abiding methods for supporting themselves and they then must choose to either starve to death, or be forced into a life of crime to survive.

People who cannot survive in our system don't just suddenly disappear. They don't evaporate into thin air. They must still find SOME way to get food to eat for themselves and their families. It is up to society to provide a legal and moral way for people to do that. There should always be a legal, moral, ethical way for a person who chooses not to become a criminal to support themselves in this society.

Not everyone is cut out for college. Not everyone can perform at that level, and frankly, with the dramatic rise in college tuition fees in recent years, not everyone can afford higher education. So we have to expect that a certain percentage of the population will always have to do unskilled labor, or at least jobs that do not require high education. And typically, these jobs are at the lowest levels of income, and we are talking here about how low that lowest level should be.

If business owners had their way, with no controls whatsoever, then they would choose to maximize profits by lowering payroll costs, and the levels would drop to nothing. This is because there are some people who would work for nothing to gain experience, or to work for other reasons. These would be people who are supported by their parents or a spouse. Employers would have a virtually free workforce, and that is what we used to call slavery. Those who lack the education to get the skilled jobs, but also don't have someone else to pay the way for them, would be trapped in a position where they literally could not support themselves legally in this country. We would have taken away their only option.

A wage that is lower than what it takes to survive is not only unfair – it is very unwise, because it FORCES people to use crime to supplement their income to survive. A decent minimum wage is not only fair and humane, it is also prudent because it protects the rest of society from a whole large sector of the population being forced into crime.

Crime is both dangerous AND expensive, since fighting crime is also not free, and the costs are further passed to the rest of us to pay through increased taxes.

Remember that it costs $66,000 per year to keep a prisoner in jail. That includes the room, bed, food, clothing, guards, medical needs, etc. And that does not even begin to approach the costs of police work to capture them, or the courts to prosecute. Nor does it begin to talk to the costs of insurance and loss in the community for the things that are stolen, broken, or lost through the direct effects of the crimes themselves.

Given all this, I wouldn't doubt if the real total cost per criminal/prisoner to society is around $90,000 to $100,000 per year. By comparison, it is FAR cheaper to pay that person a living wage of $10 per hour, which translates to $20,000 per year, and it stimulates the economy, because, at that rate, ALL of their money is put right back into the economy to buy food, clothing, transportation, and all the essentials of living. Paying a salary to a worker stimulates the economy. Paying costs to capture and incarcerate them, is only a drain on the economy.

To my mind, the argument that increasing the minimum wage loses jobs is weak, and a thinly-disguised attempt to protect profits of business owners, and pander to their interests, and therefore to their votes and their financial support. So it is more a politically motivated argument. The so-called "balance" that some talk about really means that for business owners, things are in "balance" when they are coming out ahead. Back in the days of slavery in this country, the wealthy landowners thought society then had a "balance", and that by freeing slaves, they were upsetting that balance. So the "balance" argument is also flawed and highly subjective.

Raising the minumum wage does not really lose jobs. After all, by that reasoning, if we lowered the minimum wage to $2.50 per hour, could we then expect the business owners to suddenly hire twice as many people than what they have now? Of course not. They would simply take the higher profits.

Some states, such as Illinois, have already raised their state minimum wage levels to $6.50 per hour. There was no increase in unemployment attributable to this. Nothing changed in that state except that people at that level of income were better off.

Let’s think about this in very real practical terms. I used to own a fast food restaurant, so I have some experience in this area.

Let’s say you own a fast food restaurant like a McDonalds franchise location. You have 6 people working each shift and you have 2 shifts to cover the business hours.
If the minimum wage was increased by $1.35 from $5.15 to $6.50/hr, what choices would you have to compensate for the increased payroll? Would you fire 1 person on each shift? How could you? It takes 6 people to run the restaurant. If it really only took 5, would you have hired a 6th person in the first place just because you were only paying them $5.15 per hour? Of course not. You have 6 now because it takes 6 people to do it. So, to manage the store properly, all along, you only had the minimum number of people it took to run the restaurant. And now, if you want to continue to run the restaurant, you STILL need the 6 people. Nothing has changed there.

Would you fire the whole second shift? Of course not. You need the business revenue from those hours of operation. The equipment and real estate bills can only be paid if there are two shifts worth of business hours to bring in revenue per day. That's how the business model works.

Therefore you would NOT be able to reduce any jobs. You are already operating at minimum staffing.

So what are your other options? Well, you could either reduce your profit margin expectations, or increase your prices to force revenue up to cover the increased payroll cost. What is the negative side of increasing the prices? Usually, it reduces some of your revenue because some customers will choose to go to the competition. But in this case, their costs were ALSO increased by the same amount and for the same reason. A higher minimum wage affects all businesses equally, therefore they would also have to raise their prices slightly in order to offset the extra cost. This brings you back into sync again.

And how much would the meals cost? Well, at $1.35 more per hour for 6 employees, let's round it up to $1.50 for each employee including FICA. That's $9 per hour times the 16 hours per day they are open. That's a total of $144 spread across let's say 1,000 meals for the double-shift day. That's about 14 cents per meal at that rate. So a meal that costs $5.81 today would cost $5.95. A mere 2% increase in the price of a meal. Would that make a huge difference to your customers? I don't think it would affect sales. Especially if all the competition were doing the same increase. But it sure would make a difference to the employees! It's a 26% increase in pay for them!

As a business owner, suddenly, your people are making more money and it doesn’t really cost you anything because you raised prices to cover it, but so did your competitor, so you lost no business.

No jobs lost. No business lost. Happier employees. Less crime. And frankly, guess who buys your hamburgers? A lot of people who work at minimum wage. Do you suppose they might eat out more often – at your restaurant – if they now have a little more money? Of course they would.

Henry Ford had two brilliant, forward-thinking initiatives to help make America become the great and powerful country it eventually became. First, he created mass production – the factory manufacturing process that allowed us to out-perform and out-produce all the other countries in the world. We could simply manufacture more things, and make them faster and cheaper than anybody else. That gave use both economic power and military power in the world. It allowed us to make more planes and ships and tanks, and other equipment than any of our competing countries.

The other initiative was that he stated specifically that he wanted to pay his workers enough money that they could afford to buy the cars they were building. This built the middle class. This created the huge group in the middle of the economy that then eventually became a huge economic driving force that catapulted us onto the world scene with the strength of materials, and resources, money, etc. that helped us to win World War II.

Those were key inflection points in the development of this nation. Without those two things happening, we would have remained a largely agricultural country of wealthy landowners and peasant workers – like so many other nations of the old world.
Instead, we became industrialized and developed our middle class and eventually built ourselves up to become the most powerful nation on the planet.

That is the lesson that history teaches us on this subject.

Sure, there is a limit. We should probably raise the base salary to $10 or $12, but not $25. We have to remain competitive. Fast food companies don’t compete for local business with overseas companies, but manufacturers do. And with the US dollar in decline, our manufacturing base might start to build up again. We have to keep our wages manageable for business owners trying to survive in a globally competitive environment.

But, at the same time, it pays to pay workers enough to stay legal and legitimate. To send their kids to school. To stay away from committing crimes.

Basic decent humanity pays back both in the short term AND the long term.

At least that’s my opinion.

Revolutionizing the Music Publishing Industry

Last Wednesday Dec 6, the following letter from the President of the Music Publisher's Association was posted on a music forum to which I belong. I answered with a legal comment, and then also a radical new idea for how the music publishing business could change to keep up with the new world and still be profitable. Here is the letter and my response:

~~~
The Music Publishers' Association of the United States, Inc. (MPA) is the oldest music trade organization in the United States. The MPA is a non-profit association. Many MPA members are music publishers who specialize in producing printed sheet music products for educational, concert and recreational purposes. Accordingly, the MPA is particularly concerned with legal and business issues affecting the printed sheet music industry.

The members of our Board have received numerous e-mails in response to media reports that the MPA is embarking on a campaign to shut down web sites that make sheet music and/or guitar tablature of songs available to the public. We greatly appreciate hearing from those members of the music community who have taken the time to write to us or to our Board members. Although we regret that we may not be able to reply to each inquiry individually, all inquiries are read. Most of these e-mails express similar concerns and those issues have been discussed by the members of the MPA Board. We ask that you take the time to read our explanation of our position that follows, and thank you for your interest and consideration.

In December, the MPA Board decided to take action against web sites that post unauthorized sheet music and tablature versions of our members' copyrighted works. We are doing this to protect the interests of the creators and publishers of music so that, the profession of songwriting remains viable and that new and exciting music will be continued to be created and enjoyed for generations to come.

As with any event that has been reported in the press and discussed among the public, a certain amount of inaccurate information has been circulated. To be clear, neither the MPA nor its member publishers will take any action to shut down any legitimate web-based business that is authorized to distribute our members' music. Rather, MPA is concerned with those web sites that offer music without the permission of the creators and owners of that music.

Our members are in the business of creating printed sheet music and tablature products and making them available for sale in music stores and on line. Our members pay substantial sums to the creators and owners of the music we represent for the right and privilege to bring this music to the public in authorized sheet music products. Our members also put tremendous effort and incur significant expense in arranging, engraving, editing, marketing and distributing those products. Our members work closely with the creators and their musical representatives, to ensure that the finished products accurately represent the music as the creators wrote it.

Our members take great pride in the products they create and sell, and in their relationships with the creators and owners of the music they publish. Moreover, the creation and distribution of legitimate sheet music and tablature products is how our members and their employees feed their families, and it is also how music retailers and, of course, the creators of the music earn a living.

Many of those who have written to us have expressed frustration at the possibility of losing access to "free" guitar tab files that have been posted on various web sites. While it is true that tablature for some of the songs on these sites have not yet been produced legally by a music publisher, it is the presence of the unauthorized free product that is largely to blame for that situation. Accurate and complete notating of songs, whether in traditional sheet music format or in tablature, is a time-consuming and expensive activity. It is very difficult for a music publisher to make the investment needed to produce and sell an accurate, high-quality tablature version of a song when an unauthorized competing tablature version can be downloaded for free on numerous illegal web sites, even if the illegal tablature often is not accurate.

Moreover, it is simply wrong and unjust that many illegal web sites are able to make money, whether from selling advertising, other products or by other means, by giving away music that does not belong to them. Remember, unlike legitimate music publishers, these unauthorized web sites do not pay the creators of the music. It is like a store giving away stolen merchandise to attract customers to buy other things in that store.

Many of those who wrote to us seem to be under the impression that the guitar tabs (or lead sheets or other similar works) posted by individual players are the personal interpretations of the songs by the person who made them and therefore are not subject to copyright. Nothing can be further from the truth. The U.S. Copyright Law specifically provides that the right to make and distribute an arrangement, adaptation, abridgement, or transcription of a copyrighted work such as a song belongs to the copyright owner of that work. Virtually all of the songs on the tab and other music web sites are protected by copyright. Thus, any player, whether an amateur or a top professional, needs the permission of the copyright owner of a song to make an arrangement or a tab version of that song and to post it on the Internet. Otherwise, the arranger and the web site are infringing that copyright.

We have also heard that it would be too expensive to purchase legitimate tablature or sheet music for all of the songs that a player may want to learn. We are sure that these same individuals would not feel entitled to steal a sheet music book or a guitar from a music store simply because they want it but cannot afford it. Yet, anyone who patronizes these illegal web sites is stealing just as if he or she walked out of the music store with sheet music or a guitar. And by doing so, those people are taking money from the creators of the music they say they love.

The MPA is taking action to protect the rights of the creators and owners of music against people who would take the value of their music for their own commercial purposes without compensation. Our members are ready and willing to work with any web site owner who wants to build a legitimate on-line business to make music available to amateurs and professionals while providing compensation to the people who create and own that music. We look forward to developing new ways of distributing our products through the Internet for the benefit of everyone in the music community.

We hope that your reading of this message has left you with a better understanding of our position and that we have been able to clarify some of the myths and misinformation regarding the distribution of copyrighted music on the Internet and our members' position. We are always interested in hearing the views of the music community, and would welcome your comments at admin@mpa.org.

(Mr.) Lauren Keiser
President
Music Publishers Association
~~~

My response on that same day of Wed Dec, 2006 follows. I also sent this note directly to the President of the MPA as a suggestion for a way to fix the current business problems of the music publishing industry. Here is what I said:
~~~
I have at least two things to say about this.

I have a legal comment, and I have a radical new idea to help the MPA.

1) First, I believe that the MPA's claim would probably not survive a legal argument that quotes the "Fair Use" clause of the US Copywright laws which specifies that any works can be used free of charge if they are used for "educational purposes".
I think it would be possible for a copyright attorney to make the fundamental argument that sheet music, especially guitar tabulature is used to LEARN the music. It is therefore educational and therefore exempt from copyright fees. After all, no one goes into a bar to see a bar band show them TAB music on the overhead projector. They go to hear the music. Also, the written TAB music is not used on stage as part of the performance. And the music is being played by musicians who may or may not have learned it using TAB. They may have learned it by ear (as I used to learn it when I played in bar-band cover bands), or they may have picked it up using tab sheets, chord charts, or whatever. The point is, that the tab sheets are not integral to the actual performance of the music where there might be monetary compensation. Rather, they were only used in the educational context of learning the songs ahead of time, for which there was no monetary remuneration.
There MIGHT be a weak argument that states if the TAB is actually used DURING a performance, then that is PART of the performance and therefore not merely educational and therefore entitled to a fair portion of the proceeds. But since that rarely if ever happens, it is immaterial, and that argument is rendered academic and moot. In the case of orchestras, they do in fact use the written music in standard notation during the performances, but I am fairly certain that they are paying for their sheet music.

So - bottom line - tabs are educational and exempt from copyright claims and fees. I think a strong copyright attorney could make that argument.

2) As a songwriter and musician myself, I fully understand, appreciate, commisserate, and empathize with the MPA. The music industry itself is in turmoil in this modern world where recorded music and sheet music is free to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. It's one of the main reasons why being a musician is no longer economically viable as a full-time vocation for most people. (in other words - you can't expect to make a living as a music performer anymore). Therefore, most musicians actually make their living in other ways, and perform music either as a hobby, or as a part-time occupation.

But, it's time that the MPA and others in the music industry just accept that this is where we are now in the world. We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Understandably, they would like to hold on to the old model where they could make money from selling printed music, or even selling written music online, but those days are, regrettably, now gone. If they think they can legislate us back to a behavior and a business model that existed 20 and 30 years ago, just because it treats songwriters and the music publishers more fairly, then they are mistaken.

The internet has been a huge agent of change in society. It is the great equalizer in some industries. For most things, money now flows to the lowest cost provider of goods and services because the buying public has the options of seeing all the competitors and their prices, then comparing features and service levels and making informed decisions. So those with inferior offerings are eliminated and do not survive. Wal-Mart has a physical model of the lowest cost provider and survives by offering their goods immediately. Their value proposition is that people can get what they need immediately, without waiting for shipping, and at the low cost. That is how they survive against the internet providers.

In the world of selling information - the internet is HUGELY valuable to the consumer because almost everything is available online, and mostly for free if you look around. Why would ANYONE now buy a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica books, when they can look up anything they want on the internet? (I actually own a set of Britannica, btw. Bought before the Internet really came into it's own.)
As a published author, I know that my own book would not sell very many copies if copies of it were available for free on the internet. If someone took the time to scan all the pages or re-type it into a document, and made that available to the world for free, I probably would not be selling the thousands of books per month I am no doubt selling right now.

Sellers of sheet music, tabs, maps, and fictional works, reference works, and other forms of information all have to learn to survive in a different world now. A world where everything they can offer is simply available for free 24 hrs per day, online, to everyone, everywhere on the planet. It's that simple.
The internet is there. It's not going away. Everyone can contribute to it and connect to it, and use it, and most do. So millions of people can usually get whatever information they want for free. Game over.

- or is it? -

One of my main jobs is as a high-level business analyst. I analyze large enterprise-level businesses, find the flaws in the offerings, and their processes, and their systems, and then design newer, better solutions. At the moment, I am working in the travel industry to design a better, more streamlined process for finding and booking hotel rooms. This includes merging and consolidating systems and processes from different independent business units. (don't ask details - it's secret)

So let me do a little of that kind of analysis here, right now, for the MPA.

The key is to come up with a NEW business model. A NEW paradigm for your information-based product. You have to change your value proposition to the potential customers. Just as the internet and online access to millions of tabs made the old printed sheet music obsolete, we need something new that makes the internet-based online tabs obsolete. We need the NEXT logical step. We need a vision for the future of this business.

And I have one. Here it is:

If you want to get them to pay you money, you have to provide something that has more value than what they can already get for free. Bottled water sells for more than soda drinks, even though tap water is free, because it is pre-filtered, clean water, and is marketed as a tastier alternative - and safer. It's also packaged in a handy, convenient way.

Here is a simple idea:
How about if we bundle all the TAB music electronically and load it into a small notebook-sized device that a musician can take with him everywhere. Memory is relatively cheap. It could store literally thousands and thousands of songs easily. The ultimate fake-book. This is an e-book that contains TAB music that can zoom in or zoom out to show as much of the music or as little as needed, and can auto-scroll as the musician plays. It's portable. He takes it to practice. It includes the lyrics, and could actually be set on the stage or on a monitor, and light up and scroll so he can see the lyrics as he plays or even performs. In fact, if the whole band can sight-read from the tab, or standard notation sheets, then, the band could take requests from the audience and have the music right there ready to go.

An enterprising guitar amplifier manufacturer like Line6 could even build it into their amp as a pop-up unit, so it's always handy, always there. A HUGE value-add to an amp. If it's a digital modelling amp, you might even consider having the modeling patches for original guitar tone used pop into memory for the amp to match the tab selected. So you bring up All Along The Watchtower, and also, your amp suddenly has Jimi Hendrix's settings and sound for that song available as a preset.

How about THAT? THAT provides value that he can't get by downloading tab sheets off the internet.

The MPA could set up and provide a central database and update download service, which is supplied by all the member music publishers. Since new music is always being created, the musician now also has an ongoing download service that allows him to hook up to the MPA-sanctioned central database and get his updates for a set monthly fee. That means he is a regular customer. In the online industry, a named, regular customer that can be recognized when he logs on to your service - is like GOLD. That ALSO means that the people who provide the music TAB updates, now have him as a potential audience for their advertising. A tightly targeted market.

Now, I believe THAT is a value proposition for the music publishing industry for the 21st century.

By contrast, trying to force people to do it the way it was done 40 years ago back in the 1960's, just because musicians and publishers made more money then, isn't going to work. This is a way to USE the new technology and the new methodology to make money in a new paradigm.

Give more value - get more money. That's the fair and logical way to attack the problem.

Men and Women - Who is Smarter?

When I first started managing people in my career, I was a computer operations shift supervisor running the banking systems for several of the smaller banks in Canada. I had a group of men and women doing the same job as operators (this was a mainframe environment in a large centralized services company. Computing was different those days. It was 1981 to 1983 and the PC was only just being invented at that time and was not a serious business machine for several years yet. Everything was about mainframes. We even wore white lab coats in the computer center.).
One thing I noticed that I found interesting was that women thought differently and functioned differently than men. There were a number of different kinds of tasks to be done at all times, and they worked as teams on each shift and could share the tasks any way they wanted to at the time. I could easily see which ones the women gravitated to and which ones the men preferred. I found that all the women were better suited to working on several things at once. They could multi-task much better than the men. They would keep track of 15 jobs running at the same time, manage the scratch tape pool, figure out which reports had been run, which ones had not run, which mainframes were up and which ones were down, which tape drives and disk drives (in those days a disk drive was a machine about the size of a dishwasher) were up and online and which were down and waiting for service, which vendor had been notified of equipment down and when they expected to arrive to fix it, etc.

The men could cope, but it wasn't as easy for them, so they didn't prefer that constant switching from task to task across many different types of things all the time, and the constant interruptions from one thing to another. Instead, the men tended to gravitate toward the in-depth thinking required for problem solving. When a job failed, a woman would typically not want to spend the time and effort to try to figure out why, so she would hand it over to a man who would then drop anything else he was working on and dive in. He might spend a half hour or an hour creating a hex dump and running traces, or whatever diagnostic activities were needed to drill down into the details and finally figure out the bug in the program or the system or whatever. He would finally discover that one particular field had alpha data going into a numeric field and there was no error management routine clause in the program to handle it, or a buffer had over-flowed, or an error message was the wrong error message and the real problem was something different, or some such similar problem. He could then usually fix the problem, rerun the job and then go on to the next problem. As I said before, the computer field was much different back then - but that is another, longer, different discussion.

I saw clear distinction along gender lines. Men preferred in-depth logical analysis and problem-solving - but one problem at a time. Women preferred light, shallow work, but multi-tasked across many things at once. I saw this repeated over and over with many women and many men over the 2 years I worked there.
Men would not get interested in just running a bunch of jobs and checking them off as they completed, etc. Women would not get interested in learning to read hexadecimal memory dumps and do hex arithmetic, to perform in-depth problem solving.

I came to believe that perhaps women were better suited to jobs such as secretarial work or nursing or possibly traffic controller, where there is a lot of multi-tasking and managing many un-related facts at once and fast switching between different discrete activities. And men seemed better suited to jobs where they could sit down with just one tricky problem at a time and go deep to logically solve it. Women worked shallow but wide, men worked narrow but deep.
One is not better than the other. There is no relative "value" associated with one activity type over another. Both have their uses and applications. It was just a very clear trend I noticed. They could each do either kind of work to a degree, but each gender did have it's preference and comfort zone. The pattern was obvious, repeatable, and predictable.

Now things in the computer industry are different, and Women and Men have both changed slightly, they are less polar opposites than 25 years ago, but still there are differences in how the genders think and operate.