Quickthink

Did you say that you don’t need negotiation training?

This quote caught my eye today from a NYT article about smartphones

In politics and advertising, framing is regarded as essential because what you call something influences what you think about it. That’s why there are battles over the tags “Obamacare” and “death panels.” `(emphasis added)

In fact, framing is an agenda control tool. And it is a very important negotiation concept that goes beyond “tagging”. Want to know more? Let me know in a comment.

FOLLOW -There is a very good example of framing going on right now regarding Mitt Romney. Romney frames himself as a job creator and manager. But due to apparent inconsistencies in his remarks and documentation of what he did, he is being framed as disingenuous (less than fully truthful about his past). Rachel Maddow does a pretty good job of framing the discussion in her show. Check it out.

This is getting a bit of media play. BI frames this as Clintonesque.The obvious difference is that Clinton dissembled about stuff that most people thought was not essential to governance (sex). Fred Wilson chimes in with a more nuanced idea of What Mitt was really up to. But notice how Fred writes as an expert rather than as a framer of debate. It is honest, but less effective unless one accepts Fred as a referee (cloaking him with authority).

Is there a better way out? Well, Mitt needs to stop whining and re-frame the issue. Either it doesn’t matter when he left because Bain has always been great. Or it matters because Bain became less great after he left. If you are Mitt and you pick Door nr 2, you have no choice but to make the distinction and frame what was great about Bain BEFORE you left. Not just say that you left before things went to hell. Get the difference?

2d FOLLOW -  How about this effort by Elon Musk to frame why he started Space X? “You want to have a future where you are expecting things to be better not where you are expecting things to be worse”.

It happened. I walked into the kitchen and felt no inspiration. None. In the old days, I would have started pulling out cookbooks and hopefully found something new that was not too hard to make. Internet has changed my routine.

I remembered seeing a NYT article about corn pakoras. We don’t have fresh corn here in Tartu (too far north) but I thought, pakoras are like fritters. What about using a veggie that we do have - like zucchini to make fritters? Cool. A quick google search took me to smitten kitchen and a recipe. Also cool. But I wasn’t too keen on sour cream as a topping. How about humus? And what about adding a few nibbles of red pepper in the fritter? And just a bit of linghams?

Well, I was already in my car to do the shopping.  BTW, in case you are wondering, I do not add peanut butter to my humus. I am a tahini man and proud of it!

When you say that something “was like watching the grass grow”, the meaning it clear. Boring, with a capital “B”. This may be less true these days especially if you live in an urban setting.  It seems people are waking up to the value of being surrounded by growing things. Frank Bruni writes about the green renaissance in New York. He writes

It’s … emblematic of a coast-to-coast pattern of intensified dedication to urban parkland. While so much of American life right now is attended by the specter of decline, many cities are blossoming, with New York providing crucial inspiration.

I’ll stick my chin out here and predict that this trend will grow. The 20th century will be remembered as the century of the assembly line and machines. We still love machines. But we will love nature more.