When Hillary Clinton came out with her book What Happened less than a year after losing the 2016 US Presidential election, I was on the fence as to if I wanted to read it.

Where I was interested in hearing her own story directly through her own lens and not through that of the media, I was also hoping this wouldn’t simply be a book of excuses for why she lost. Then I got the book for Christmas that year, and it went on the shelf awaiting to be read. Somehow other books piqued my interest more, but as the Special Counsel was appointed the investigation into President Trump and the White House began, it made sense to me to read What Happened.

Shortly into the 500 plus pages of the book I formed my takeaways from it, only to be reinforced as I turned from chapter to chapter.

All of what happened is in there – This is something I was hoping for –all of the reasons for why she won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. Many times she brought up the email scandal and then FBI Director Comey as a primary reason. But among the pages she did admit that she should have gone to states like Wisconsin and Michigan, and even one line was in there that some people may not like her. As far as I am concerned, the book lived up to its title.

Insight into behind-the-scenes of the campaign – I have only been involved intensely with a political campaign and it was many years ago. There is a certain momentum and buzz about it, and many characters and scenarios as well. The story of Clinton’s 2016 campaign is told well here, in a voice and cadence that sounds like her own. My guess is some of this was written during the campaign, with some editing for how the results turned out.

Hillary Clinton will be the 2020 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States – She wanted to be President and I feel she still wants to be. Will she win? We’ll see.

What Happened was a good read, and that is coming from a non-partisan. Those who are strictly partisan will either love or loathe is book, depending on what “side” they are on. As I give away all copies of this book, I decided to leave it at a Little Free Library at a local storage facility where I have my extra stuff stored away. There have been some interesting titles there, and I may take one to replace this one on my shelf.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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There’s a phrase I see often on the little bit of remaining social media I use – “pictures or it didn’t happen.” It stems from claims that people make in these social channels, and people asking for photographic proof as they don’t believe those claims. However, I am here to say that it’s ok to not always have those pictures.

As I was driving home late last night in the rain from Milwaukee, Wisconsin (about a 1.5 hour ride) I realized I did not get a picture with my cousin whom I went there to meet. He was in the Cream City for a conference, and I wanted to get together with him as he was so close. We met up and went to dinner and had some great beer at a brewpub just next to the new arena downtown and had a nice time. After I dropped him off at his hotel, I got some coffee for the road and headed home.

It was in the process of keeping my mind off of the rain – and on the road – that I realized there was no picture of us; no selfie, and didn’t even ask our friendly waitress to take a picture. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a good time – we talked of the conference he was here for, tech, healthcare, beer, all good. We both had our phones with operating cameras on them, and it wasn’t even that I didn’t take any pictures last night – see above for the huge bowl of cole slaw that came with my brat burger, as I had never seen a serving of cole slaw that large, ever.

This is not the first time I have done something that could be considered a “Kodak moment” and didn’t capture it... yes, I am a Gen Xer and I remember that term well. Being in that age range probably means why I am not always “on” taking pictures, especially with my conscious effort to be on less social media channels and use the ones I am still on less often. Then there is the “management” of these pictures, for lack of a better term. What do you do with all of the photos you take? And what about the ones you may have taken in the dark ages with actual film? My guess is the boxes of photos and albums you have are similar to what I have.

Over the summer my family took a road trip West and went to Mount Rushmore. I was in awe of seeing the mountain carvings in person that I have seen in photos since I was a child. The pictures I took were great, especially with the family, but they didn’t quite match the magnitude and emotion I felt seeing it for myself. For me that’s ok, as I have my memories of that August night to go with those pictures to make for a complete experience.

As I was mulling all of this over in the ride home, I recalled an article by Derek Sivers where he talked about traveling without a smartphone altogether. Where he couldn’t take any pictures or use GPS for maps, he felt he remembered his time more without the device, and what it offered as well as what it could take away from the moment. Where I don’t think I would consciously do this, it at least made me feel better about the one picture I don’t have of the many thousands of pictures I do have.

By the way I highly recommend the cole slaw there; it’s made with red peppers.

Deconstructing Not Taking A Picture

In our constantly-connected world, moments when we are not stand out. If the fact that we weren’t connected didn’t distract from the life experience, then that’s ok. There are other ways to “capture the moment” such as recounting it to others, or even writing a blog post about it.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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When the long-awaited report on Russian collusion in the 2016 election and obstruction of justice by the Trump administration, better known as The Mueller Report, came out, I was eager to read it. I had enough of the media and political spinning and wanted the information from the source, the Special Counsel’s office lead by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

When I downloaded the PDF report from the Department of Justice’s Web site moments after its release, I was a little overwhelmed - it was over 400 pages, and I’d have to print it to read, as I certainly wasn’t going to read it on my phone or computer. Staring at the redactions that permeated the pages as I scrolled through it, I thought to myself there had to be a better way to read this.

That lightbulb over my head led me to Amazon, and to my wonderment I saw a couple of versions of said report, which just came out for pre-order. In one click I had added myself to a queue of unknown quantities of people who wanted to read the report the old-fashioned way.

The book, The Mueller Report, The Final Report of the Special Counsel into Donald Trump, Russia and Collusion, arrived a few weeks later, just in time for a work trip. But as I should have anticipated, this was no quick read - written by lawyers, why would it be? Plus I spent as much time reading it on flights as I did talking with people sitting around me, wondering about it as much as I was, so it took even longer.

Eventually I finished the 472 pages of the book, which was longer than the report as it included extra materials, such as the powers of the Special Counsel. The report itself was shorter than the original for instead of showing 33 redacted physical lines, for example, it just mentioned 33 lines were not included. My takeaways were mostly on the content with a little from the report itself.

Details on what was being called hacking – As someone who works in Web technology and social media, it was not enough for me to just hear there was “hacking,” for I wanted all the details of what was being called that. What was in the report satisfied that to a certain extent, listing accounts on Twitter and Facebook and what was posted and by whom. Where I wouldn’t necessarily call it hacking, I do believe there was a deliberate attempt to influence people. However as no analytics were presented with the account activity, it is open as to its effectiveness.

Michael Cohen was Executive Vice President of Trump Organization – In any press mention of Donald Trump’s personal attorney I ever heard, I never heard of his title in Trump’s business. I heard he was a personal lawyer, fixer, handler, bodyman and various other labels that were slang not to compliment him. Granted you can give anyone any title in your own business, but if EVP was his title, why did the media never use it?

The infamous Trump Tower meeting yielded nothing – There was a lot of talk about a June 9, 2016 meeting among Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign staff member (and later campaign chair) Paul Manafort and representatives from Russia. But after reading the testimonies from those in the meeting and what followed it, nothing came from it. Was their intent? That wasn’t even clear as it seemed like if there was to be some collusion, these weren’t the people capable of colluding!

Speaking of which, collusion wasn’t even considered – On pages 167 to 168 of the book it states, and I quote, “… this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as described in federal law, not the commonly discussed term ‘collusion.’” So all this time - years - and all of everyone saying collusion, and the label wasn’t applicable? And none of the TV talking heads who are lawyers knew that?

Richard Pinedo was jailed for fake bank accounts as a result of the investigations – There were other charges against others, but I heard very little about it in the mainstream media. One was Richard Pineda, who was sentenced to prison for providing fake identification information to the Russians who were running the “hacking” social media campaigns. Presumably this information was used to eventually make payments to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for promoted posts. Perhaps information on Pinedo was released to the media, and they chose not to promote it widely?

Trump didn’t “recall” a lot in his responses – The book includes the written responses to questions sent to President Trump in lieu of live testimony by the office of the Special Counsel. Most of them began with “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall,” all of which did not come as a surprise to me.

I got lost a lot in the second part – The second part of the report was focused on obstruction by President Trump and his staff. Much of this presented a case, then a very long description of the applicable laws and case laws that applied to the case followed by a conclusion. This was a difficult read for me as it consisted of so many legal terms, as well the phrasing of legal descriptions doesn’t exactly follow any rules of prose. As I am not familiar with any of these laws and case laws referenced, there was little meaning to reading the middle of each case, and as much as I tried not to, on occasion I skipped to the end.

If you are interested in hearing something from the horses’ mouth, as the phrase goes, I would recommend reading The Mueller Report yourself. Again it is not a quick read, and not always an easy one, but everything is in there in its source that has been translated by the media for the general consumers.

As I give away every book I read, I will give this one to the first person who makes a comment to this blog post. Don’t post your address, as I will follow-up with you outside of this. Note I have moderation on comments, and they will not appear right away. This offer is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. Make sure to follow the comments to see if you are the lucky winner!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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It’s been said if you can’t find anything on the Web by searching for it, it may as well not even exist. Since Google’s launch over 20 years ago that has certainly been the mantra, as their single search box with precise search results trumped all other search engines out there to become the dominant search destination it is today.

Around that same time, I felt the same about search, but on a slightly smaller scale, though with an international reach. I was literally promoting search for the Intranet portal for a global professional services firm in 1999.

Search Hidden and With Good Reason

In 1999 I became the manager of the front-end development team for this portal, which meant I was responsible for leading the team creating and enhancing its Web pages. As part of the role, I had to evaluate the functionality and design we had already, as the portal was being developed by a consulting team that was rolling off the project. When I evaluated the search function, by my best approximation it was poor to non-functional and of no value to anyone using it.

As I quickly came to learn, search was not a priority for the portal. The business sponsors didn’t even want people to simply search for content, rather to use a complex, nested set of 3 drop-down lists to select a category for which content would be presented. If that sounds convoluted, it was. The categories, or taxonomy, mirrored the structure of the firm. The idea was you would navigate to where you “worked” and voila, there would be content waiting for you.

Or so one would think, however this wasn’t always the case. Many times there wasn’t any content there, especially in the early days to months of the portal. But that wasn’t that my concern, as we had an entire other team working on getting content into the portal. The concern for my team and I was to ensure the front-end of the portal worked and was usable.

There was no real urgency to make search function well and have a great user experience as accessing it, as it was literally tucked behind an unlabeled icon of a magnifying glass on the second page of the portal, one you would miss on first glance. There was an option on the first page of the portal prominently labeled search, but it simply led users to a list of public Internet search engines, such as Lycos and Yahoo. Remember, this was 1999.

A Better Way to Content

After the launch of the portal, we decided to tackle search. The task of working on the search engine went to our top developer. He had both a programming and mathematics background, and was eager to get search working. After some time, he was successful, and it was a highly functional and useful feature of the portal, though most people still didn’t know about it. We added a text label to the search icon and others near it where it wasn’t obvious what their functions were. Even then, you had to click the icon which took you to another page where you got a search box, adding steps (aka barriers) to get to the content you want. Over time we found that portal users were using search, and we on the development team used it to validate testing for content. Even with this new label, search was still not a prominent feature on the site, nowhere to the degree I felt it should be.

Making the Case for Search and navigation

With the initial launch of the portal and other changes including the search function behind us, it was on to version 2.0. There was a laundry list of features wanted for the portal, and one was a new user interface. As my team worked through designs and functionality, they proposed putting a search box in a prominent position on the Web site, at the top left corner, literally promoting it from obscurity. Studies of people using Web pages have shown consistently over the years people start at the top, go across the top and down the left side. By placing the search box and button at the top left, there was no extra step needed to get to search results.

I was pleased with the work and designs we put together, and then we started the process of presenting it up the food chain of the leadership for review and approval. We knew we would have tweaks and adjustments to make, but we were hopeful much of the work we did would persist, especially search.

When we presented it to the director of the development team, my direct manager, he liked it. The next step was to present it to his manager, who was the overall director of technology. But he didn’t like it. He felt it went against the goal of navigating to content and wouldn’t be approved by the top leadership of the team. We pointed out the 3 drop-down lists remained, and people could still choose to use them, as well as the work we did to improve the search function. My director was also reinforcing this, from a usability standpoint, so the busy consultants in the field could get to the content they wanted. After hesitation he agreed we could present the search box design to senior leadership but that he would not back us up on it. This was fine by me, as myself and my director would be the ones presenting it.

Shortly after this less than exciting meeting, we had the meeting with the senior leadership and business leaders for the portal to present our proposals for version 2.0. We were in a beautiful and expensive conference room with cutting-edge functionality, very expensive for that time. We had an orchestrated presentation where myself and my peers would be presenting their team’s work on the next version of the portal, with the onus on me to present the new design and the search box.

When it was my turn, I was ready – the design was cleaner and more modern, at least for standards of that time. As I presented it, I talked to the major features in priority order, and search was near the middle of it. When I brought it up, I talked to the search improvements we made, the gain in traffic to the search page and how users could still navigate to it as they have before. As I finished saying this, I saw the director of the technology literally turn away from the table, though I don’t think anyone else noticed it. As I concluded the lead partner who oversaw the entire portal looked down, and I could tell he was thinking it over. He said he liked it. Relief doesn’t begin to describe the feeling I had, and I was excited for the meeting to end to share the great news with the team.

Another Search Goal Fulfilled Years Later

As we worked on version 2.0, we did a lot of talking about the future of the portal and how it could be enhanced. I had the idea of putting a “header” or section on the pages of other portals within the firm. This header would be a thin bar across the top of the page with links back to our portal as well as a search box. It was an idea that was batted around my team, but one I was not there to even take to any design phase, for not long after version 2.0 was released, I left the firm, being lured by a dot-com startup that folded a mere half-year later (and a topic for another time).

About a half-dozen years later, my wife got a job with this same firm, but working with a consulting practice. In between those years the portal itself had gone through significant change, namely not being the focal point for the firm it was previously. One night as she was catching up on some work at home, I looked over her shoulder to see what she was doing. Much to my surprise she was on a page of the firm’s Intranet, where our portal had lived, and across the top of the page she was on was a header bar similar to what I just described. Needless to say it made me smile, and I was patting myself on the back as I walked away.

Deconstructing Promoting Search

Technology and the way we interface with it is always changing. New ideas must be encouraged, embraced and tested to truly see their effectiveness. Search is one of those areas, and its importance is even more important today. In this case the functionality of the search box was not the innovation, rather promoting it to a position of prominence on the Web pages. Where I cannot take credit for the design of the header bar that evolved over time, it in itself was an evolution of what we started with and presented with mixed results now over 20 years ago.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Where I have always considered myself a history buff, I am by no means fully knowledgeable of all events in US and world history and their nuances. That being said, I am aware of most core events in US history, and of those abroad with a focus on the impacts here in America.

When I got a copy of How to Think Like Churchill as a gift from a relative, I was eager to read it. I was aware of Winston Churchill’s ascent to Prime Minister of the UK during at the time of World War II, his role immediately following the war and his love for cigars. But that was about it. My hope was this book would fill me in on the life and career of this pivotal world leader.

Fortunately this book lived up to my expectations, and then some. What went to and beyond my expectations were my takeaways from it.

I didn’t know about his earlier life – From being a soldier to a journalist to his early political offices, Winston Churchill lived a full life with a great breadth of activities. The majority of my knowledge of him begins with being UK’s Prime Minister following Neville Chamberlain and ends after World War II. This new knowledge of his upbringing, career and time in and out of office provides context to understanding who Churchill was and what he did.

Quotes and more quotes – I have known for years the quote, “If you’re going through hell, keep going” and that it was attributed to Churchill. After reading this book, which is sprinkled with his quotes throughout its pages, I learned many more of his famous sayings, as well as how he was able to sum up his thought process succinctly. Churchill would have done well today in the age of the sound bite and social media.

Soldiering On – To say Winston Churchill’s career bounced back from obscurity to be one the best known world leaders of the 20th century is an understatement. Personal loss, public defeat and challenges at home were just part of what plagued Churchill, but despite all of these he made a return unlike no other. The details of his challenges and his triumphs are nothing short of inspiring for anyone facing great odds.

How to Think Like Churchill is a small but mighty book at 203 pages. It’s larger than life subject made this an enjoyable read. The book is part of a series of “how to think” books on the likes of Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela and is worth your pursuit whether you’re a fan of Churchill or other great personalities of history. As I give away all of the books I read, I left this one at the local coffee shop where I wrote these takeaways.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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