Theodore Roosevelt overreaches in a speling debait

I've been thinking about Theodore Roosevelt recently. Our summer vacation included visiting a bunch of national parks, all of which seemed to have had Roosevelt's hand in their creation. I also have seen this quote from Roosevelt in several places:

“The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.”

Which led me to wonder if there were some good Roosevelt mistake stories out there. Here's one I found in a book called "Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership: Lessons from the Bully Pulpit," by James L. Strock. Here it is:


One of Roosevelt's [mistakes], which seems almost comic today, involved the early twentieth-century movement for simplified spelling. Curiously for one so highly educated and said to be gifted with a photographic memory, TR was an atrocious speller. As president he expressed sympathy with the efforts of the Spelling Reform Association to simplify and systematize spelling. In 1906 he directed that government agencies adopt more than 300 spelling changes proposed by academic experts.

Though the reforms might be defensible on the basis of logic, public reaction ranged from derision to anger. The chief justice of the Supreme Court defiantly refused to adopt the new spelling. When Roosevelt sent his annual message to Congress employing the new spellings, opponents grasped an opportunity to focus their long-simmering rage against what they considered a pattern of executive overreaching. A typical reaction was that of the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is to hi fr himn to takl, not to lo for him to notis. He makes tretis without the consent of the Senit. He inforces such laws as meet his approval, and fales to se those that du not soot him. He now assales the English langgwidg, constitutes himself a sort of French Academy, and will reform the spelling in a way tu suit himself.

The Baltimore Sun queries: "How will he spell his name? Will he make it 'Rusevelt' or will he get down to the fact and spell it 'Butt-in-sky"? A humorist summed up the general reaction: "This is 2 mutch."

The House of Representatives, after days of debate, unanimously rebuked the president, directing that government documents should reflect "the standard of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the language." TR saw the risk that the symbolic resonance of such a non-essential issue could damage his ability to lead on more significant matters. He rescinded his executive order and abandoned the cause - other than saying he would use simplified spelling in his own correspondence. [pp87-88]

Everyone must fill out an employment application

I’m happy to present the following story from Human Resources expert Sharlyn Lauby. It first appeared in her blog HR Bartender. I’m grateful for her permission to reprint it here.


A few weeks ago I wrote a post about anti-harassment training and mentioned the time that I read about one of my employees in the newspaper – specifically their alleged inappropriate conduct. There’s another piece of that story I wanted to share with you because I learned a very valuable lesson with the situation.

Everyone needs to complete an employment application. Everyone. No exceptions.
You see, the employee I read about in the newspaper hadn’t completed an employment application. Only submitted a resume. He was a friend and former colleague of a member of the leadership team. You know how this goes…senior level manager wants to hire a former employee from a past employer. They know the person so the manager comes to human resources and says they know the person, great guy, no need to fill out an application, yada yada yada.

And because HR is constantly being accused of creating unnecessary paperwork, I figured I was being a team player and just took the resume. Wrong-o.

Now, if I had an application, would that have changed whether or not we hired the person…who knows? What I do know is, if he had completed an application, I might have at least known about the situation before reading about it in the newspaper.

Having no application, both the senior manager and I were in the dark. That just delivered a gut punch like you wouldn’t believe.

You’re probably wondering about the outcome of this situation. Well, the senior manager met the employee in the parking lot and came to my office. (Note: if your manager ever meets you in the parking lot and says “let’s go to the director of human resources’ office”, this is not a good sign.) I asked the employee one question – “Have you seen today’s newspaper?” He immediately resigned.
The outcome could have been very different. But I learned an important lesson – employment applications are for everyone. It’s not beneath someone to complete an application. It doesn’t change a person’s title or responsibilities. Employment applications contain different information than is usually found on a resume.

Having employees complete employment applications is necessary. Do yourself a favor and don’t cut corners on this one.

Steve Jobs admits Apple mistakes with location data... or does he?

I read this New York Times article with significant interest: "Jobs Concedes Apple Mistakes." The article refers to the issue of iPhone users discovering that a large file of their past locations was stored on the handset.

It's notable whenever a high-profile CEO, confronted with a public-relations issue, comes out and takes accountability for mistakes.

When I read through the article, and the AllThingsD interview Q+A that inspired it, I was hard-pressed to find a real expression of remorse or even of admitting mistakes. Here's the closest thing I read:

[Interviewer:] Is there anything that you guys have learned over the last week or so and take away from this?

[Apple SVP Scott] Forstall: One thing I think we have learned is that the cache we had on the system–the point of that cache, is we do all the location calculations on the phone itself so no location calculations are done separately. You can imagine in an ideal world the entire crowdsourced database is on the phone and it just never has to talk to a server to do these calculations (or) to even get the cache.

What we do is we cache a subset of that. We picked a size, around 2MB, which is less than half a song. It turns out it was fairly large and could hold items for a long time.

We had that protected on the system. It had root protection and was sandboxed from any other application. But if someone hacks their phone and jailbreaks it, they can get to this and misunderstand the point of that.

It’s all anonymous and cannot be traced back to any individual phone or person. But we need to be even more careful about what files are on the phone, even if they are protected.

Also, there was a hell of a lot of pushback. For example:

[Interviewer]: A bunch of folks on the regulatory side, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, said they are going to look into this. Do you guys plan on testifying before Congress? How active do you personally and does Apple want to be?

Jobs: I think Apple will be testifying. They have asked us to come and we will honor their request, of course. I think it is great that they are investigating this and I think it will be interesting to see how agressive or lazy the press is on this in terms of investigating the rest of the participants in the industry and finding out what they do. Some of them don’t do what we do. That’s for sure.

In fact, the closest thing to a mistake discussed was iPhone users' mistakes:

[Jobs]: We build a crowdsourced database of Wi-Fi and cell tower hot spots, but those can be over 100 miles away from where you are. Those are not telling you anything abut your location. That’s what people saw on the phone and mistook it for location.

So, in summary: Jobs didn't concede any mistakes, and his lieutenant made the hedgiest-possible admission that the location cache stored far more data than was needed.

This is more a lesson in good PR than in CEO candor and learning from mistakes. Jobs and his team admitted 5-10% culpability and defended the remainder, blaming users, competitors and the press for the issue. And they did it so smoothly that they convinced the NYT headline writer that Jobs himself had "conceded" location mistakes--in fact, getting credit for candor and remorse while not showing any.

John Bliss audio story - don't give away equity for nothing

John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. He sat down for a lengthy interview in 2010, from which this story is excerpted. John talks about inviting a partner in when he started his PR business, since "50% of something is better than 100% of nothing." But when the business changed, the partner's role became less important, and John had to eventually buy him out.

You can listen to the story here (3:01).

"Public relations firm took too long to change to home-based business"

Reporter Marcia Pledger of The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been collecting and publishing great small-business mistake stories for a while. Here's a nice one from entrepreneur Jeanne Bluffston about the cost of worrying too much about what others' perceptions might be:

A manufacturing company told me that if I started a public relations firm, I had its business. My next move was to find a location. Relationships are one thing, but I needed credibility for prospects.

Starting a business from my home 22 years ago was not even a thought. Back then, home-based businesses were not considered "real" businesses, so I leased an office.

I was making a lot of cold calls and one of the first things people wanted to know was where I was located. Just saying Chagrin Boulevard in Beachwood seemed to help the conversation go smoother.

I've been promoting manufacturers and service companies in the business-to-business world for a long time. I'm in the service business so I gladly go to them when we need to meet. It's all about convenience for the client.

My biggest mistake was taking so long to move my business from an office to my home. I wasted a lot of time on the road, and a lot of money on rent and gas, because I needlessly worried about perceptions....

read the rest of the story at the Plain Dealer site here.

Management Consultant Ford Harding - sharing "the good side and bad side" with a reporter.

Professional Services Sales Consultant Ford Harding, author of "Rain Making," was kind enough to share a mistake story for inclusion in The Mistake Bank.

Actually, he shared two. In the first, he relates a story that taught him there can be pitfalls in sharing the good side and bad side of things with a reporter (right-click to download).