You want to know from leadership?

To the reader: I wrote this for The Sun in 2012, headed "Take me to your leadership." The plaque mentioned in the opening paragraph was discarded when the paper moved out of its Calvert Street offices, and I left in 2021, but the rest of the article remains valid. 

 At one end of a shelf in my office at the paragraph factory a plaque collects dust, through which it can be seen that John E. McIntyre successfully participated in The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers. Twelve years ago, when there was still such a thing as Times Mirror.

Having been selected, I was given a choice of seances in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Huntington Beach, California. Not being entirely dim, I packed for the West Coast.

The Leadership Institute for Managers turned out to be a kind of summer camp for grown-ups. We did a group bonding exercise in which we were all blindfolded put through some square-dance-like rigmarole. We did team-building by figuring out how to cross the “crocodile-infested waters” in a room on pieces of plastic that didn’t quite reach. And we did a Project. We had all been run through the Myers-Briggs mumbo-jumbo, and I would dismiss it, as I have before, as astrology for Mensa, save for this: Every member of our group was a J. We nearly killed each other. And at the end, our Project was not particularly good, but because we had actually managed to complete it without the shedding of blood, Teacher gave us each a gold star.

No doubt if you have ever been a manager in an outfit that had money to throw around, you, too, have learned Leadership by similar means.

Or perhaps you have learned it through reading the vast literature. There’s a book on the leadership secrets of Genghis Khan (father hundreds of children and stack your enemies’ skulls in pyramids?). There are books on the leadership secrets of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, carefully premasticated for those who would find The Prince or The Art of War heavy going.

For my part, I mainly watched what Andy Faith did.

Andy hired me for the copy desk at The Sun in 1986. He was the chief of the copy desk, and I worked alongside him for years. What feeble efforts at leadership I’ve made have been attempts to emulate his example, and I think that his example did me more good than The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers.

First off, you have to know the job, and you work alongside your people. Andy had to attend meetings and perform administrative functions and deal with paperwork, but he was a working editor. He didn’t ask anyone on the desk to do anything that he was unable to do or unwilling to do, and he did it all.

If you have a chance to hire, you hire the smartest and most energetic candidates you can find, you show them how they’re expected to operate, and then you let them work. If they’re smarter than you are, so much the better.

When you’re asked to perform a task, you take it on. Most people start to generate lists of the obstacles and start telling you how difficult the task is going to be and all the reasons it won’t work. Andy always started to think about how he was going to manage it.

You form alliances. Some of them are with those smart and energetic people you hired, who proved their worth and moved on to other positions in the organization. (Andy had moles scattered through the newsroom.) You never make the mistake to think that you can act unilaterally or in isolation from the other desks and departments.

You take responsibility. And you take collective responsibility for your people. If one of your people gets called in on the carpet, you don’t run around to the other side of the desk to join in berating him. You stand alongside, like a lawyer with his client.

When there is pressure from above, you absorb as much of it as you can yourself, so that your people can do their work unmolested.

You cut people some slack when they’re having a hard time, but you expect them to find a way to do the work, and their share of it. You know what each subordinate’s strengths and weaknesses are and how to capitalize on the former while minimizing the latter.

You tell people the truth. Sometimes you can’t tell them all the truth, and sometimes you have to be evasive, but you don’t tell them lies. They merit your respect, and if you don’t offer it, you won’t get it.

You don’t give up, no matter how many times your plans have been thwarted, no matter how many simple-minded, wrong-headed, and dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks instructions come down from someplace higher up.

And you never forget that you are doing this because you love the work, because the work is important, and because it means something to do it right.

These are some of the things I learned by watching Andy Faith all those years. I haven’t had to perform any functions blindfolded in the past dozen years, I don’t expect to have to cross a crocodile-infested river, I try to keep a safe distance from most of the other Js, and I don’t expect to get around to reading about Genghis Khan’s leadership secrets. Andy Faith retired four years ago, but while he was here, I learned what I need to know.

On the porch

 In yesterday's unseasonable warmth I spent part of the afternoon on the porch, reading The Private Patient (P.D. James's final Adam Dalgliesh novel, which I had unaccountably missed), watching the mockingbird that frequents the viburnum in the yard, greeting neighbors walking their dogs. Later, as the air cooled, I watched the dark clouds slide in as the cold front and the storms approached. 

The 1960s Northeast Baltimore brick rancher we moved into in 1988 has a small front porch that can comfortably accommodate four people. I lounged there from time to time over the years, particularly when taking breaks from cutting the grass, but did not treat it as a place of much importance. 

That changed in 2008 when I was laid off by The Sun and spent a year unemployed. There was time to sit there and read and notice things. I noticed that the redbud I had asked the city to plant at the curb the year before looked dead; I spent the summer watering and fertilizing it, bringing it back to life. I noticed that the light of the late afternoon sun turns the leaves silver on the oak trees in a neighbor's yard. I noticed birdsong. 

Later, when I was back at work, Kathleen and I developed a custom of sitting on the porch on my days off and sharing a bottle of prosecco, sometimes with a snack or with dinner, sometimes just a couple of glasses apiece as we sat quietly and watched the sun go down. 

During the pandemic, the porch became the starting point and ending point of our walks down the middle of the street through the neighborhood, usually to Herring Run, the creek at the bottom of the hill, to see a pair of ducks or a heron, or the neighborhood hawk circling elegantly overhead. Or watching the leaves on a gingko turn jade green in the summer and gold in the fall. 

I am seventy-five now, on the porch after more than forty years of editing and twenty-four years of teaching editing to undergraduates, and I feel entitled to it. (Yes, still a little off-and-on editing and the occasional blog post, and the household chores and yard work have not gone away.)

And I am inside with books while the current cold snap endures. For now. In a few weeks the air will warm again as the leaves come out, and Kathleen and I will once again be able to sit together in the afternoon with a glass of prosecco each, murmuring to each other and greeting passing neighbors as the day slowly fades to dark. 

But, as I said, the porch will seat four. If you should want to arrange to drop by, I could offer you a coffee, or a cup of tea, or a Manhattan or martini, so we could while away an afternoon, chatting companionably about the things of the day, feeling the warmth of the sun. 

Yes, it's a quibble, but dammit

 Let me be clear. I do not want to disparage Karen Hao, to whose Empire of AI I have turned for information on the despicable tech bros who appear to be dismantling civilization for their profit. But I do want to question the abilities of the people at Penguin Press to whom she entrusted the editing of her book. 

I settle for the moment on a single sentence. One of the things I discover day after day, not only in casual online texts but in presumably edited work by professional writers, is a failure to make subjects and verbs agree in any sentence that is sustained longer than half a dozen words. Here's that one sentence:

"Bold declarations that it was within reach enough to invest in it presently was viewed largely as pseudoscience and quackery."

Declarations ... were.

Most of the time what I see is a prepositional phrase with a plural object interposed between a singular subject and a verb, as if the writer had a goldfish's span of attention between subject and verb, but this example will do as well. I fix these on a regular basis in editing, but they litter my reading. 

So let me just inquire: IS ANYONE OUT THERE STILL PAYING ATTENTION?

O Day of Grammar, draw nigh

 On a weekday afternoon in a quiet bar, a glass of Smithwick's is one of the benisons of retirement. I was pondering a second pint when a wild-eyed character burst in, ordered a shot of whiskey, threw it back, and pounded on  the bar with his glass for another.

"Rough day"" I asked.

"Rough day? Rough day?" he answered, knocking back another shot. "You know what day it is?"

"It was March fourth this morning."

"March fourth! National Grammar Day! And out there it's just another Wednesday."

"You observe?"

"Observe?" He beckoned the bartender to leave the bottle. "You have any idea how it used to be, how we marked National Grammar Day? The minute gun fired from the Citadel. The Te Deum at the Cathedral. The Semicolon Ball at the Belvedere."

"I remember. I was present at the creation."

"And now. Now. It's not just low-grade prose proliferating all over social media. You remember when The New York Expletive Times dismantled its copy desk? Now all the damn corporate news organizations, along with the private-equity boyos, have not only eliminated copy desks--they've been eliminating writers altogether so they can publish cheap AI slop."

"I know."

"And the universities! Shutting down the humanities courses to turn themselves into trade schools for STEM and business administration. Nobody being taught to think, much less to write." He poured himself another slug.

"Yeah, I know."

"Yeah, you know, I'm sure, sitting here nodding and nursing that beer. Don't you understand how far we have fallen?"

"I think that playing a voice crying in the wilderness can be fun, but you may be exaggerating."

"Exaggerating? Can't you see what is in front of you?"

"What I can see is Grammar Girl still writing and talking about the language and making sense. I can see Ellen Jovin setting up her Grammar Table all over the country and engaging people with their questions. She even has a documentary film about her travels. And it's only four years since Bryan Garner brought out another damned, thick, square book."

"Yeah, but--"

"And even in Baltimore there's that cranky fellow, McIntyre, who ran The Sun's copy desk until they dismembered it, still throwing rocks at pompous and slipshod writing."

"That smartass--"

"Well, we take our allies where we find them. Now pour yourself another while I order a second Smithwick's, and we will raise a glass to the glory of grammar, as it was and ever shall be."

"Oh, all right."

"Here's to: May your subjects and your verbs live always in agreement."

"Damn straight."