In many (most?) organizations, “being a team player” is code for “being nice” &emdash; which, in turn, is often code for “not contradicting anyone.” The problem with this is that it leads to groupthink and mediocre (or often just plain wrong) results.

I think that this Slashdotter has it right: (emphasis added by me)

I’ve worked for years in highly effective teams, and with success. I can tell you what made all the difference: The presence of equals to debate issues with, so that we could talk each other through the problems and emerge from the session with the feeling that we had defined better solutions. Perhaps we are all arrogant nuisances, but as long as we understand and respect each other we keep each other in check, and can function as effective team members.

The “respect among equals” also translates to “respect among people above and below you in the hierarchy” when such hierarchies exist:

• Listen to & consider what your boss says, but call him out on it when he’s wrong or hasn’t justified his assertions.
• Listen to & consider the objections of those below your skill and/or station, but correct them when they’re mistaken and clarify the reasoning behind your positions.

You should only be stating agreement when you reach the same conclusions based on the available information. If you don’t think you have enough information to defend a contrary position, it’s better to state that outright rather than agree by default. The lack of agreement, even without the presence of opposition, might be enough to show that the position is potentially unreliable.

Being a helpful member of a team means working to achieve the same goal as the other team members. It does not necessarily mean following the same process.

Update: Fixed the link to Slashdot. Sorry for that.

My sister-in-law’s friend is over for a visit, and she got a spam for penis-enlargement pills. This one was notable because it apparently came with before-and-after pics. (Why she bothered opening it in the first place is beyond me.) The novelty caused a minor stir with the women in the house.

Here’s how the following conversation went. Keep in mind that Laura has a very gross sense of humor and barely cringes at anything.

SIL: “I didn’t even want to see that. Now I’m afraid of the Internet.”
Laura: “There’s nothing to be afraid of on the Internet.”
Craig: [Starts snickering]
Laura: “What?”
Craig: “Oh there’s some things.”
Laura: “Like what?”
Craig: [Ponders] “…no, I can’t show you.”
Laura: “No, show me!”
Craig: “No, I can’t, it’s too bad.”
Laura: “Come on! Show me!”
Craig: [Gives into temptation, loads a certain link, and then ponders getting his camera].
Laura: [Shock and Horror]
Laura: “I didn’t want to see that.”
Craig: “I told you so.”
Laura: “I didn’t like that. Can you show me something happy?”
Craig: “How about the Serta sheep? [Which under most circumstances would cheer her up.]”
Laura: [Frowning] “I wish I didn’t see that.”

Indexed is a pretty self-explanatory blog, once you see it.

I like this one in particular, which Jessica Hagy did custom for Freakonomics Blog:

I’ve just discovered that the guys behind Freakonomics have a blog on the New York Times Website. And the peasants rejoiced.

I liked this post in particular: Freakonomics v. Lolita: Can You Tell the Difference?

Here’s your bit of meta for today:

I’ve come to rely on other people rather than RSS feeds to point out the really important stuff to me.

From I Need Smart RSS by Bruce Eckel

It’s been a long, sad story that the Powers That Be generally didn’t give a rat’s ass about any other browser than Internet Explorer on Windows. If they were enlightened, they might say “make it work in ‘both browsers’”, which meant Netscape 4.0 (which was such a crappy and divergent browser that you are better off not worrying about it).

Times have changed. The combined efforts of FireFox, Opera, Apple, Google, and mobile devices mean that you can’t just target IE/Win any more; you have to consider all user agents. This quote sums it up nicely:

Things are easier now that we no longer have to appeal to companies to be “better Web citizens,” which was like asking Nestle to promote fruit as a healthy alternative. Now we simply point out that over 90 million people don’t use Internet Explorer, and some of them just might have money to spend on your services.

From Interview with Firefox Founder and Creator Blake Ros, via Cafe con Leche.

It’s the “money” that’s the key here. PTB’s typically won’t listen to “this is better for all of us in the long run” but they will listen to “you’ll lose money directly if you do this”.

The irony of this is that making your site IE-only is typically more difficult than it is to make it standards-compliant. It’s quite easy to make a site that is workable (although not necessarily visually perfect) in all major browsers. The reason many sites intentionally lock out non IE/Windows users is that they want their site to perfectly match what the Graphic Designers cooked up for them in Photoshop. A lot of times, you can’t do that without resorting to IE-only hacks. If you show them how bad it looks in any other browser, at best you’ll get “we don’t care”, and at worst you’ll get “then let’s block them from seeing it”. Either way, you’ll get “they’re only 0.1% of the market, they don’t matter.”

Until now, that is.

Guy Kawasaki is another one of my favorite bloggers (of the ones I don’t know personally). He’s a technically-savvy business guy and venture capitalist. To me, he represents the “other side” (ie: marketing) to a business (versus the technical/implementation/operational side that I’m on most of the time). Unlike many people in that industry though, he’s thoughtful, logical, and eloquent. Today he writes about the things websites/companies do to ensure that potential users leave and current users remain frustrated. Here’s an excerpt:

2. The long URL.When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long - or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.

…

The justification often goes like this: “We create a long URL because people with Crays might break our code and see private pages. Seventy characters that can be twenty-six lower case letters, twenty-six upper case letters, or ten numbers ensures that no one can break our code since the possible combinations outnumber the quantity of atoms in the universe.” This is what keeps sites like TinyUrl and SnipURL in business.

This is the sort thing that usability evangelists like Jakob Neilsen have been saying for a while now. The significance, I think, is that now marketing-focused people like Guy are beginning to take it seriously, and speak of it in terms of customers, competition, and money. Guy reaches a different audience than do those that normally speak on subjects like this, and so it helps spread the word to the people that matter. That’s a good thing.

I’m signing up for Technorati. On one of the configuration pages I see this:

Quick Claim

What is it?

It’s quick! Just enter the username and password for your blog. This information will only be used to verify that you own the blog, and it won’t be shared or stored.

Dear lord, who are they kidding?

In any case, they do offer a sane alternative:

Technorati Profile

RSS is a wonderful thing. Here’s the URLs for the feeds:

• FeedBurner
• Atom
• RSS 0.92
• RSS 2.0

I guess I should be asking you to prefer the FeedBurner URL over the others, as it gives me all sorts of nifty statistics. That would be hypocritical of me though; whenever I grab a feed I cut out the middleman an go straight for the Atom feed (which is standardized and supposedly a big improvement over the mess that is RSS). So, take your pick.

Get rid of the top and bottom default margins on header elements