I remain interested in the evolving role of Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, in litigation. This post discusses the recent example of Neuwirth v. Silverstein, No. B205521, 2009 WL 294737 (Cal. App. 2 Dist. Feb 9, 2009). Note that this is an unpublished opinion. In California the precedential value of unpublished opinions is limited by Ca. Rules of Ct., rule 8.1115.

In this case Wikipedia came up as part of the defendant’s argument that a particular epithet, “kahanist swine”, did not fulfill the definition of libel per se. Usually a plaintiff must establish that she was actually harmed by false statements to prevail in a defamation lawsuit. However, some lies are considered to be so ugly that severe harm to the plaintiff’s reputation is presumed. These are known as libel per se or slander per se. For example, slander per se includes falsely remarking that a woman is unchaste. Other lies that qualify for defamation per se include putting it about that someone has a horrid disease or has committed a serious crime.

The plaintiff alleged that the defendant had called her a “kahanist swine” on his web site. An organization called Kahane Chai is designated a foreign terrorist group on a roster kept by by the U.S. Department of State. The plaintiff argued this label amounted to falsely claiming  that she was involved in the heinous crime of terrorism and therefore entitled to a finding of libel per se. The defendant acknowledged using the term, but argued the meaning of the word kahanist was broader and less pejorative than in the plaintiff’s theory. He offered this from Wikipedia in support, which the court quoted in its opinion:

Kahanism is a term used in Israeli political parlance to refer, first of all, to the ideology of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and, more generally, to other right-wing Religious Zionist movements or groups that share a belief in the fundamental tenets of that ideology, chief among them being the idea that the State of Israel should be governed theocratically, should accord full citizenship only to Jews, and that all gentiles should either be deported or allowed to remain as resident aliens with full economic and personal rights, but no political rights. [¶] The central claim of Kahanism is that all Arabs are, and will continue to be, enemies of the Jews, and that a Jewish fundamentalist state, absent … a voting Arab population and that includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and also possibly areas of modern Jordan and Lebanon, should be created. The Kahanist movement proper also argues that such a state should be ruled according to Jewish theocratic law known as Halakha, but the term “Kahanist” is sometimes used loosely to describe any Zionist group which seeks a greater Israel.

The principal Wikipedia article on Kahanism has been tagged as needing additional citations for verification since March of 2007. The passage quoted above does not appear in the present version, but probably can be found in an earlier revision.  Encyclo, another online encyclopedia, does cite Wikipedia as the source of the above definition verbatim. An identical or nearly so description appears on a handful of web sites located by searching for the first sentence via Google. This highlights the importance of citing to a specific version of any Wikipedia article used in important matters such as litigation. There is a ‘permanent link’ in the toolbox menu of every Wikipedia article which makes this easy to do.

“Most businesses are overmanaged and underled” declares Frank Pacetta on page 53 of his 1994 book, Don’t Fire Them, Fire Them Up. Lending heft to what otherwise may seem a mere throwaway aphorism is the enormity of Mr. Pacetta’s accomplishments as a business leader: in 1988, he took a “disaster area” of a Xerox sales district – in Cleveland, no less – and not only turned it around in six months, but continued to build on that success with 24.9%, 14.3%, and 8.6% yearly increases in total revenue for the district in 1989 through 1991, respectively (recall that 1991 was a recession year). So when Mr. Pacetta speaks out on leadership, we are inclined to listen. And once you get caught up in his arresting descriptions of his unique leadership style, you too may begin to pick out the true leaders among the mere managers in your organization.

Fire Them Up’s only concise statement of a somewhat complete formula for successful leadership – “hard work, team building, high expectation, enthusiasm, accountability, and communication” – probably sounds like just so many more business buzzwords to place on some dusty shelf; however, Mr. Pacetta’s approach to all these lofty ideals is fresh, new, and stunningly effective. You may think you understand “hard work,” but how about Mr. Pacetta’s policies of relegating paperwork and team meetings to either before or after business hours, crafting customer proposals during evenings and weekends, exhaustively analyzing, along with each sales rep, all of that sales reps’ accounts, and making one last phone call when it’s time to go home? Even more revelatory is his take on team-building. Mr. Pacetta strongly believes in cutting lone wolves – yes, even successful lone wolves – down to size and getting production out of every single member of his team. He states this belief early on: “I want to bury the notion that teamwork means a few free-wheeling superstars setting records, on the one hand, and a bunch of weak…drones…on the other…that’s not a team; that’s an accident waiting to happen.” (p. 16). (As someone who could probably be justly accused of having been, in the Army, one of these hot shots, I have to say I am intrigued by this idea.) And as for high expectations, Mr. Pacetta shocked his cellar-dwelling Cleveland team when he declared upon arrival that “Cleveland was going to be the number one district in the region” (p. 36) (a goal which did come to fruition). Mr. Pacetta’s commitment to enthusiasm can be summed up by one anecdote: a Cleveland sales rep relates being worried he would be late to work, not because he feared reprisal for being late, but because “he was worried about missing the fun” (p. 80, emphasis added). Remember, those are the words of a guy who sells copiers for a living. It sounds like Pacetta had succeeded in his desire to “create a place with the force of a gigantic magnet that would draw us to work in the morning…a place where the atmosphere was electric!” (p. 15).

Just how did Mr. Pacetta make a copier sales organization that fun to be a part of? The key, he says, is to plug into humanity’s instinctive will to win. He asserts that “humankind’s survival depends on two instinctive highs,” (p. 44), one of which is winning (can you guess the other one?). The thrill of winning, he avers, “ensures that we keep moving, keep hunting, keep foraging, fighting, farming, inventing (and selling copiers)” (p. 44). From the outset in Cleveland, he constantly “remind(s) everyone how good it feels to win” (p. 44), using tactics ranging from verbal recognition of good performers to showing sports highlights to pump up his team to staging elaborate internal incentive contests. He hastens to add, though, that the contests can be a frivolous distraction in the absence of proper attention to the basics of leadership.

Mr. Pacetta stresses the importance of people to an organization, and to leadership: “Leadership starts and ends with people” (p. 55), he states, harping on “respect for people” (p. 55) and admonishing those who do not have it to discard the notion of becoming managers. Later, he quizzes the reader on “what the most important word a manager and leader should always keep in mind that begins with the letter ‘P’ “ ( p. 212) and twice proclaims his unwillingness, upon arriving in Cleveland, to make “wholesale personnel changes” (p. 213), and thus institute a “reign of terror” (p. 23) (hence the book’s title). If all this sounds a bit wooly, know that he is by no means a coddler – the flip side of his commitment to people is accountability (similarly, he is serious about empowerment as well – as long as it is duly coupled with inspection). Pacetta goes into great detail about his performance appraisal process, which amounts to a contract between him and his managers and between his managers and their sales reps. He does not hesitate to coach and motivate – two actions he sees as key to being a leader – employees who stray, even to the point of putting them in Xerox’s formal “corrective action” process. “Corrective action has nothing to do with being ‘a nice guy,’ he states, “It’s not nice to fail. It’s not nice to allow others to fail” (p. 277). Pacetta makes it clear that with him, you always know where you stand. I contrast this behavior with my personal experience of observing “nice guys” deliberately keeping a “deserving” NCO from getting enrolled into the Army Weight Control Program, which is the Army’s formal corrective action program for helping soldiers who fail to maintain proper military bearing and appearance – attributes the Army justly believes are essential to living up to one’s potential as a soldier and leader.

The U.S. military is a surprisingly people-coddling institution. I found this to be true in the Army and I hear the benefits (such as training) and creature comforts afforded to Air Force servicemembers are even better (one soldier, who had worked in a joint-service environment, stated bluntly that “The Army invests in equipment; the Air Force invests in people.”). However, the crucial element of accountability, so excellently cultivated by Mr. Pacetta, is sorely lacking in the military. The result is an entitlement-driven culture rather than a performance-driven one. A “dirtbag” soldier or NCO or officer can coast along sponging off the organization nearly indefinitely (you have to seriously screw up to get kicked out of the military) while the “hooah hooah” soldier (i.e. a highly motivated soldier, and yes, I was one of them) may not see it as worth their while to give their all when it is so easy to coast. (Funny enough, it seems the “dirtbags” realize how good they have it and make up a disproportionate number of those who decide to re-enlist and make it a career – this only serves to further demoralize the hard workers and discourage them from staying in.) Pacetta nails this point when he states, “If you flinch from moving the dysfunctional people, the message is demoralizing: ‘Hard work is for suckers’” (p. 276).

I would like to revisit and expand upon another point which hits home for me as an Army veteran: Pacetta’s policy of making one last phone call when it is time to go home. His rationale for this seemingly small detail is that “(w)hen it becomes easy to stop and go home, it will become easier and easier; 4:30 becomes 4:15, and it’s 4:00. Suddenly it’s a habit, and you’ve lost focus and discipline” (p. 140). I could not agree more; recently, I privately coined a term for this phenomenon: entitlement creep.” My inspiration came from observing how the Army operates regarding federal holidays. Not only do we get the Monday off for, say, Columbus Day, but we get the preceding Friday off as well! (To be fair, this does not happen during deployments, at least not in my experience.) This had a direct impact on my training once, as Columbus Day weekend occurred during a crucial point during Airborne course and as a result we crammed our five jumps into three days rather than four; furthermore, our trainers “pencil-whipped” a fully-laden jump into our jump record, stating officially that we had made two laden jumps when in fact we had only made one. By way of contrast, very few private-sector U.S. companies (besides those in or related to the banking industry) even take Columbus Day or other minor federal holidays off. However, entitlement creep does not only occur in the military (though it is definitely pervasive there); I am guilty myself of goofing off and trying to get out a little early on Friday afternoons at civilian jobs I have held. (On a lighter note, perhaps the epitome of this approach can be found in a song sung by the inhabitants of Oz: “We get up at twelve and start to work at one / Take an hour for lunch / And then at two we’re done / Jolly good fun!”) Such an attitude, however, is poison for an organization that is trying to instill a “mission”-based (as we would say in the Army) rather than an entitlement-based culture.

At the heart of opposing the natural human tendency toward entitlement creep is respect: respect for your job, respect for yourself, respect for your co-workers. Therefore I think I understand what Pacetta is getting at when he concludes, in his surprisingly moving open letter to his children found at the end of the book, “It’s all about rispetto” (p. 285). Do you really just want to be another schlub wishing away the hours of your life while at your job, just another guy or gal waiting for the weekend? Or do you want to respect yourself, respect the people you find yourself thrown together with (I always felt a profound baseline respect for my fellow soldiers qua soldiers, even when this feeling was by no means mutual and I did not particularly like the fellow soldier as a person), respect what you do and respect the effort you put into it? Critics of Mr. Pacetta, though, question with snide pity how someone could be so serious about working for Xerox and selling copiers: “(W)ho on earth – what sort of person – wants to sell for a living?” (Reeves, 1994) one critic writes, while raising the inevitable specter of Willy Loman, the pathetic loser of a salesman from Arthur Miller’s famous play. (Of course this begs the question of whether writing book reviews for a newspaper is inherently more meaningful than marketing useful, productivity-boosting business equipment.) To be fair, though, it does appear as if the outsider-with-access’s account penned by David Dorsey of Pacetta’s organization, The Force, should be read alongside Fire Them Up in order to get a more complete and perhaps sobering view of what exactly went on in Cleveland.

Whatever excesses Pacetta may have been guilty of in Cleveland – apparently The Force uncovers many – Fire Them Up is a gripping read which offers invaluable lessons to anyone in the workforce, whether an employee or manager. Pacetta sells himself as a true leader, a man who has “no patience for people who want to run things just for the prestige and the big paycheck” (Pacetta, 1994, p. 15) and who deplores the “selfish, thoughtless, mean-spirited, ego-driven, lazy, by-the-book nonsense that passes for management in many businesses today.” (Pacetta, p. 14). If nothing in his book fires you up, provokes you toward self-examination, or makes you reconsider your approach to work or life, then you are a jaded soul indeed.

Eva Arnold is an undergraduate student in business administration at American Military University.

References:

Pacetta, F, with Gittines, R. (1994). Don’t Fire Them, Fire Them Up. New York: Simon and Schuster

Reeves, Phil. (1994). Depths of a salesman. [Review of the book The Force]. The Independent (London). July 19, 1994, 9.

When you discover friends on Facebook who have recently joined there is a pop-up window that allows you to suggest mutual friends who are already using the site. A ’suggest friends for [so and so]‘ link usually appears on a new user’s profile too. But, after some time or a certain threshold of friends connected these features disappear. Sometimes it’s useful to suggest connections between established friends. Facebook doesn’t make this as handy as it should be. But, you can force the ’suggest friends’ pop-up to appear by playing with the URL directly.

Login to Facebook. Browse directly to the URL of the profile to whom you would like to make the suggestion. Append ’suggestfriends’ as an extra query parameter to the URL. Like so: 

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=[PROFILE_ID]&suggestfriends

For example, to suggest friends for me you could use this url:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=5410844&suggestfriends

 It seems there are quite a few features of Facebook, like this and the public facing RSS status feed, that can most directly be exploited via the URL as an ad hoc commad line. I’ll continue to post about these as a I learn of them.

1. The Fifth Amendment requires that the government provide just compensation when private property is taken for public use.
2. The government is not required to pay compensation for regulating property, e.g. restricting the way land can be developed.
3. Regulation that severely reduces the value of property does not necessarily amount to taking.
4. Regulation amounts to taking if there is no reasonable and viable economic use of the property remaining.
5. Regulation amounts to taking if the regulation does not substantially advance a state purpose.
6. Just compensation means the reasonable market value of the loss to the owner.