Mandy de Waal

Who are you, really?

There’s a scene from Little Miss Sunshine that has stayed with me for the longest time. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll remember it instantly. Miss Sunshine is of course the film about a family on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the scene in question is between Dwayne and Frank who are musing on the meaning of life.

Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap-high school and everything-just skip it.

Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is?

Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.

Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.

Before I knew better, like Dwayne I thought that life was curative. That the smarter and older you got the less pain or problems you would experience. I thought that self awareness would bring progression and healing to the point of Nirvana. Of course life has an amazing sense of humour, and evolution isn’t curative. That’s a childish fantasy we are sold or begin to believe in thanks (in part) to the Disneyfication of fair tales. The more self actualized you become the better the quality of the struggle you experience. Of course you still experience a whack of mediocre type challenges to ensure you’ve been paying attention in class, but for the most part self evolution is about finding your truth - a journey that never ends.

Apart from writing that one incredible book 'that almost no one reads' Marcel Proust created an interesting questionnaire in his teens that serves as a personality confessional. Proust returned to the questionnaire frequently during various periods in his life and with good purpose.

The original manuscript of Proust’s answers entitled “by Marcel Proust himself” was auctioned in 2003 for €102,000. Then those questions, marginally modified, are used in every issue of Vanity Fair to get into the minds of modern day ‘luminaries’ like Alec Baldwin, Emma Thompson, John Cusack and David Mamet. My favourite Proustesque interviews of all time are with Norman Mailer and Umberto Eco.

I’ve done the Proust Questionnaire at various stages during my life and found that the degree of thought and self revelation in the exercise intriguing. It’s a bit like having an intelligent confessional diary, that’s stripped of early angst and self pity. Small wonder that Proust returned to his questions again and again and again.

Although self awareness isn’t a safeguard against misery or a guarantee of happiness, Socrates’ guiding value has significant merit. As the non traditional Latin inscribed on a plaque above the Oracle’s door in the Matrix film trinity advocates: “temet nosce” ("know yourself"). Growing self knowledge, fostering self insight, and developing self esteem is a worthwhile journey that can lead you to truth.


My adaptation of the Proust questionnaire for you to answer if you dare:

What is your favorite virtue?

What is the principal aspect of you personality?

What are your favorite qualities in a man?

What are your favorite qualities in a woman?

What is your chief characteristic?

What you admire most in your friends?

What do you appreciate most about your friends?

What is your main fault?

What is your favourite occupation?

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

What would be your idea of absolute misery?

If not yourself, who would you be?

Where would you like to live?

What is your favourite colour and flower?

Who is your favourite author?

Who is your favourite poet?

Who is your favourite fictional heroine?

Who is your favourite fictional hero?

Who is your hero in real life?

Which historical character do you most dislike?

Which historical hero do you most like?

What do you hate most in the world?

What talent would you like to be gifted with?

How would you wish to die?

What would your tomb stone read?

What is your present state of mind?

What fault do you have that you tolerate the most?

When do you lie?

Who or what do you hate?

What is your greatest achievement?

What’s your most treasured possession?

Your motto?

Buckland's second act

Matthew Buckland commands envy and respect. Envy because he's created a remarkable career for himself, captured the limelight, and been a driving force behind some of South Africa's more spectacular Web stories. More often he's respected because of a steady stream of successes, and the contribution he's made to the local industry during the past 15 years.

And the hard work is paying off. The former Mail & Guardian poster boy has stepped onto a global platform at Naspers, with the kind of mandate any member of the local digerati would have given their right arm for.

As the head of 20FourLabs, a division he founded, Buckland has his greatest opportunity in what will also be his biggest challenge to date. Buckland will be pressed to deliver if his career at Naspers will flourish. Not shy about bringing down the axe on non-performing human resource, Naspers has a ruthless reputation for culling staff when they get in the way of profitability and shareholder returns.
Fresh-faced

I caught up with Buckland as he edged towards his 200th day in his 'new' job. The first thing we chatted about was 20FourLabs, which has amalgamated of some of 24.com's top talent into an inventive, entrepreneurial hub, as well as bringing in fresh new talent.

“We recognised that as a major player in the Web industry, we needed to be more agile and nimbler when it came to developing Web applications and Web sites. Big organisations tend to generate quite a bit of bureaucracy that is often a necessary evil, but limits a business' ability to innovate and be experimental. However, in this market, you see a lot of innovation coming from start-ups. At 20FourLabs, we want to capture some of that mindset and culture.”

Not adverse to risk, Naspers' investment strategy in emerging markets like China is yielding strong results, with the likes of Tencent contributing R1.2 billion to the group's earnings for 2009. However, recent discussions with Internet division head Antonie Roux shows that the pipeline for growth by acquisition or investment has been badly affected by the recession. Although share prices have dropped, good companies are sweating out the storm. In view of this, an internal hub that can spark start-ups, seed inventions and inject innovation into the wider group makes great sense if it delivers to mandate.
Fear factor

“Innovation is all about not having a fear to experiment and not having a fear to fail,” says Buckland. “From a business perspective, you need an environment where the cost of failure is low. If the cost of failure is high, this stifles innovation. If the cost of failure is low, then you have much more experimental activity. The focus we use is to create Web applications where the process is not over-complicated. We're using open source resources; we don't over plan, and build iteratively. We're not afraid of plugging into another Web site's API, and don't shy away from aggregating content from other sites,” says Buckland.

Since creating 20FourLabs, Buckland's biggest lesson has been the benefit of simplicity, and understanding the different phases that products go through. “Fewer people are more effective in the emergent phases of products, so we start off with a small team to incubate. Only when we see traction do we take the decision to build the start-up into a much bigger business. The philosophy here is less is more.”

The team of 30 people, which includes the 'wunderkids' from Naspers' Blueworld Communities acquisition, has been mandated to ignite the start-up flair and entrepreneurial culture within the bigger media group. The lab is also busy building apps and extensions for existing Naspers offerings.

“The Web is levelling the playing field, and it's cheaper and easier than ever to create your own business and to create your own media online,” says Buckland. “What this means is that the Web – more than any other industry – is an entrepreneurial medium. Here you often find smaller and nimbler start-ups beating slower corporations because they lack agility.”

A key focus for the lab will be mobile, given the reach of this medium. “We're looking at local and international products and start-ups, and our focus is on social projects, because these enable us to build audience in a viral manner. We're working on aggregation and user generation content projects, as well as multi-media projects, because this is the next phase of the local Web, which has, up until now, been an under-performing area,” adds Buckland.
Flirting for fun

What has Buckland delivered in the past four months?

One of the lab's first start-ups is a mobile flirting and dating site called Flirtaroo.mobi. “Flirting and dating sites are social networks where there is a settled business model, and users actually want payment mechanisms to keep the quality of the social network up. The business model is a 'freemium' model, with micro payments that are SMS-based. What's interesting about the offering is that it is locative.” Buckland says on Flirtaroo.mobi, people can find friends within a certain location. “The offering includes messaging, profiling and will be cross-platform. It was launched for mobile but a Web version is imminent.”

iPhone apps and a Nokia widget has been built for News24, while an Android App was launched for News24, Sport24 and other related content sites. Then 24.com blogs were relaunched, getting a much-needed upgrade. “24.com's blogs had become dated and were very basic. They needed a complete overhaul. We introduced LetterDash.com with templating for users, more intuitive navigation, and features where users can promote their blog. In the pipeline, a more sophisticated dashboard and the ability to combine social networking with blogging. The aim here is to add a social networking layer onto LetterDash, and develop relationships between bloggers and their readers. We have made some revenue off the platform, but it hasn't been significant. We'll only aggressively pursue a business model once we're happy with usability and audience numbers. When we do look at monetising blogs, this will include giving users a cut.”

Buckland says the biggest project they've tackled is an aggregator-cum-social network called “The Hub”.

“This is essentially a social network wrapped around a content site, which is currently in development. Content publications have natural networks around them, but traditionally do a bad job of formalising those networks. For example, Facebook and I have a sophisticated relationship because it knows all about me, but if I go to CNN.com they don't know who I am, and when or why I was there. The idea is to build a social network around content sites that capture and formalise that network, allowing us to provide a richer experience with targeted content and services, but also to allow users to connect with each other. Our initial focus will be to create a better experience for the user who will be able to broadcast and interact with other users more meaningfully. The second will be to monetise the relationship with these communities.”

Other projects include j2me apps, a new mobile portal, revamping 24.com's mobile offerings, a local Twitter aggregator, a niche social network maker, and a personalised homepage offering.

Given Naspers' online and mobile focus in key emerging markets, this creates a much bigger platform for Buckland to step up to the plate. Creating an innovation hub at Naspers was his first clever move. Delivering quickly and smartly, his second.

Originally commissioned by ITWeb.

Borderline bosses

One out of a hundred people that you work with will be a psychopath.

In short:
- Psychopaths aren’t just killers
- Workplace psychopaths leave a trail of destruction
- How to spot workplace psychopaths
- CEOs should be screened to weed out psychopaths

At the start of my career, one of my first bosses was an out and out psychopath. A narcissistic lay-about, this person’s career was driven by hiving off the talent of others, taking credit for work that was not hers and bullying her staff to the point of abuse. She was a pathological liar who was highly manipulative and destructive. Because of that she had a turnstile at the door of her department. People just didn’t last long because she made working conditions absolutely intolerable.

I didn’t know too much about psychology then, all I knew was that she was disturbed and dangerous. It was only later when I began to study the phenomenon of work place bullying that I discovered that she fitted the profile of a psychopath perfectly.  

Thanks to movies and televisions when most people think of psychopaths they get a disturbing image of a serial killer with a violence-filled childhood that remorselessly hacks people to death for fun. Shows like “Dexter” serve to fuel this image, but the truth is a lot scarier. We live and work and walk past psychopaths every day of our lives. They are our neighbours, run the lift club or can often be our colleagues or bosses.

Euphemistically termed “borderline personalities” it is a startling fact that the majority of psychopaths aren’t emotionless killers but seemingly average people who hold down 9 to 5 jobs like you and me.

“The common misconception with psychopaths is that they're all violent extreme kind of criminals. The majority of them are living and working around us in jobs psychologically destroying the people that they work with,” says Dr John Clarke an Australian based psychological profiler and author of the book “Working With Monsters”. The book offers advice on how to identify and deal with work place psychopaths.

More common than you’d think workplace psychopaths charm and manipulate their way through business, often leaving a lasting mark on their victims. They are often extremely narcissistic, lacking in empathy, highly destructive, ruthless and can make life hell for those that work with or for them. According to Clarke up to 3 percent of adult males are psychopaths, while less than 1 percent of women are.

How do you spot a psychopath? Well there’s the Hare Psychopathy Checklist that was developed by Dr Robert D. Hare, professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia. The checklist was created by Hare as a diagnostic tool to rate people’s psychopathic or antisocial tendencies.

In short psychopaths display anti-social behaviour that is evidenced by pathological lying, a completely lack of empathy, no sense of guilt, a lack of a conscience and very superficial emotions. Psychopaths enjoy what they do so will have a history of victimisation and will leave a trail of destruction in their wake.

Hare’s Checklist:
- Glibness/superficial charm
- Grandiose sense of self-worth
- Pathological lying
- Cunning/manipulative
- Lack of remorse or guilt
- Shallow affect
- Callous/lack of empathy
- Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
- Promiscuous sexual behaviour
- Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
- Parasitic lifestyle
- Poor behavioural control
- Lack of realistic, long-term goals
- Impulsivity
- Irresponsibility
- Juvenile delinquency
- Early behaviour problems
- Revocation of conditional release
- Many short-term marital relationships
- Criminal versatility

Obviously the checklist isn’t a tick box for laymen diagnosis and interpretation, but is a good departure point for understanding borderline behaviour.

Hare has often called for Chief Executive Officers to be screened to weed out psychopaths saying that financial scandals could be prevented if CEOs where profiled to ensure they were psychologically fit to lead multi-million corporations, and steer the fate of thousands of employees. Hare says that the average psychopath easily moves through head hunting interviews and HR processes which don’t reveal enough about candidates psychological profiling. 

If you need a little more help identifying a borderline boss, Clarke says you can spot workplace psychopaths by looking out for the following:

1. They are guiltless: Workplace psychopaths will back stab and victimise without showing any remorse.

2. They are cunning and manipulative: They can justify breaking rules and bending corporate systems to their benefit, and they prey on weakness and people’s lack of self esteem.

3. They are emotionally erratic. According to Clarke psychopaths are unable to nuance their emotions and only experience primary feelings such as happiness, sadness and anger. They shift very quickly and erratically between these feelings.

4. They are charmers: They have the gift of the gab, are good orators and prefer dealing with people one-on-one than in groups.

5. They are pathological liars and can often talk their way out of trouble.

6. They are parasitic in that they live of others' good deeds and good work. They often take credit for innovations and ideas that are not their own.

Speaking to psychologists when writing this article I asked whether real psychopaths could be reformed. The answer I got was that therapy simply makes psychopaths more cunning because it gives them the tools to become better manipulators, liars and teaches them how to fake socialisation or empathy to get what they want.

The expert’s advice on what to do if you come face to face with a psychopath in the workplace?

Quit, leave or get out the way before you get hurt.

The power of deep listening

"It is better to be interested than interesting."

I've been chatting to Ronnie Apteker by email for the past few weeks, and a couple of gems have risen to the surface. What’s been twirling around my head though is the advice that guides him, something that a wise mentor said to him that speaks to hearing the world.

It the quote about being interested and listening. Deep listening. Being so absorbed by what the other person is saying that you depart your own shore and travel into their story.

I have been thinking a lot about listening today and whether we listen enough or whether we listen in the right way, and what happens when we start to listen deeply.

As a journalist it is part of my job to listen. More so, to listen to what is said and not said – to listen beyond the speaking. Then as a parent so much of what I do is to listen. What I have found is that the way in which I listen changes the relationship I have with my world, and the people in it. Deep listening opens doors. It enables me to walk far into the story of the other. Whether that's my son, step-daughter, husband, a person I am interviewing or a stranger I am talking to.

We're all busy people so there are times when you have conversations that are drowned out by your own 'self talk'. The laundry list of things you need to do, the books you are reading, the response you are formulating in your head and so it goes on. Then the ego is a big mitigation against listening. Of course our egos are dynamic – up and down – growing and receding like the swells of a tide. When the ego is high then often meaningful listening gets drowned out by your own self-talk or sense of your own importance. When this happens listening becomes even more difficult, or at time impossible.

Fortunately life is a great leveler and the school of hard knocks helps to control the ego together with other practices like meditation, service and of course deep listening.

The amazing thing about surrendering the self to listening is that it creates a crucible in which you are changed and can be changed. But rather than reading what I have to say, listen deeply to what Pauline Oliveros has to say about the subject.

A composer, humanitarian and pioneer in the field of sound, Oliveros says that listening can be quantum:

"Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening.

Deep Listening is active. What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener I call this the 'listening effect' or how we process what we hear. Two modes of listening are available - focal and global. When both modes are utilized and balanced there is connection with all that there is. Focal listening garners detail from any sound and global listening brings expansion through the whole field of sound.

Listening shapes culture locally and universally. Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action. Quantum listening is listening to more than one reality simultaneously. Listening for the least differences possible to perceive - perception at the edge of the new. Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit - creating a new orbit - as an atom occupies both spaces at once one listens in both places at once. Mothers do this. One focuses to a point and changes that point by listening.

Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously - changing and being changed by the listening. I see and hear life as a grand improvisation - I stay open to the world of possibilities for interplay in the quantum field with self and others - community - society - the world - the universe and beyond.

Our improvisations will soon include accelerated artificial evolution - hybrid humans - new beings born of technology - new challenges, consequences, dangers, freedoms and responsibilities - all of this in addition to the life we lead through the habits of our own traditions.

How will we meet the genius of more rapidly evolving interactive cultures? - A genius of culture that could give us freedom of perception, physical and mental limitations. Will we stop the evolution with destruction and annihilation or embrace it courageously to go forward into the new world we are creating with all its edges?"

Read the full article by Oliveros here.

Lingham on life, VC's, the Webverse & everything

He's busy spending the $5 million he got from Compagnie Financière Richemont’s subsidiary, the Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital company, on building another successful start up. This time in Silicon Valley. But what did it take for Vinny Lingham to get those five bars in foreign currency? What does he think of deal making, and what advice has he got for local net start ups? Look out for for Lingham's take on negotiating, running global companies and cricket, which will be up on ITWeb soon. Or follow me on Twitter to know when it's going live.

In the mean time here's Vinny Lingham on...

Innovation is iterative, not instant.

I love a good conversation.

I hate failing, but it spurs me to succeed.

Thinking. I think too much!

Technology is life.

I use a Mac.

Search marketing is about buying customers, not selling products.

My ambition is to change the world.

I fear horror movies!

I hope that we understand much more about our universe in my lifetime.

The internet is a meritocracy - survival of the fittest.

I dream of South Africa winning a cricket world cup!