A Little Grammar Between You and Me

A Little Grammar Between You and Me
(Keywords:  grammar, management)
Length <1000 words

Between You and Me

(First printed in GSAE Magazine.  ©Copyright 2010, JP Harrison. All rights reserved).

            With the recent passing of Edwin Newman, the great broadcast journalist, writer, and defender of the language, there may be only one force that now stands between America and grammar catastrophe:  my mother, and all the wonderful grammarians that went to school back when good grammar was part of a good education in the South. 

Two things seemed to be of great value to old Southern families:  the inherited fine china (that which wasn’t destroyed by the Yankees, that is) and good grammar. 

There must be some explanation for the good grammar emphasis.  Maybe we were trying to offset other academic deficiencies after the War between the States, or maybe while Sherman was breaking the china he burned all the books except those having to do with grammar.  Or maybe the teachers were just better.  In any case (and we’ll get to the cases momentarily), good grammar was the mark of someone in the South who had been Raised Right with good schooling. 

            Today, in honor of Edwin Newman and my mother (and her Sparta, Georgia, English teacher, Miss Bess), we are going to tackle a serious grammar problem run amok.  It’s a common mistake, but it reveals the pretender in the parlor or the rookie in the boardroom.  I speak of the inability to know when to say “So-and-so and me” or “So-and-so and I”.   At the risk of preaching to the choir, how about we review quickly how easy it is to get this pronoun problem under control and get ourselves happily back in the good graces of Mr. Newman, Miss Bess and her ilk. 

            First, let us remember our sins.  In all likelihood, it is our very own friendly English teachers who got us in this mess.  Here’s what happened:  

Little Johnny pops in and says, “Franky and me are going to the store.”

Miss Bess retorts, “You mean, ‘Franky and I,’ young man.” 

So Little Johnny now goes forth with “Franky and I” ringing in his ears, thinking erroneously it is always supposed to be “Franky and I”.   Well, Little Johnny, you’re just a little slow here.  It is only “So-and-so and I” when it is the subject.  When it is the object, it is indeed “Franky and me”.  Thus, “Franky and I” went to the store, but someone saw “Franky and me” at the store. 

Now my Aunt Wylene, another star grammar pupil of Miss Bess, would have us pause here to remember that back in ought whenever--when real men and women actually learned Latin grammar in grammar school--that English is a breeze when it comes to cases.  We have two cases (subject and object).  Latin, Greek and other languages of erudition have five and six cases.  My Aunt Wylene never went to college, but she could conjugate, decline, mince, dice and slice a host of Latin words—along with the usual country garden vegetables—and never botched a recipe or a case.

What they didn’t tell Little Johnny was that there’s an easy way to know whether it’s subject or object case—simply drop the other person from the sentence and see what sounds right, “I” or “me”.  Here goes:

1)  Franky and me went to the store.  Drop the “Franky and”, and it then becomes “me went to the store.”   Now that may work for Tarzan and the Apes, but it’s really not going to impress Jane.   So, in this case (the subject case, by the way), it should be Franky and I.  

OK, number 2)  Someone saw Franky and I at the store.  Drop the “Franky and,” and it becomes “someone saw I at the store.”  That sounds strange; it should be the object case instead, “someone saw me at the store,” and thus it is, “someone saw Franky and me  at the store.”

Let’s try another one.  “Thanks for having my wife and ___ over for dinner.”  Well, if you take out “my wife and…” (apologies to Jack Benny), how should it sound?  “Thanks for having me over for dinner,” or “Thanks for having I over for dinner?”   Right, of course---“Thanks for having my wife and me over for dinner.” 

This works even if we talk about other people (and pronouns) other than just you and—um—me:   “Sally, and he went to the store,” but “they gave a gift to Sally and him.”

Not to drive you (and me) over the edge, but there is an instance where you just have to remember the dang rule and can’t play the splitting it up game.  The case in point:   “just between you and __.”   Now, if you said, “just between you and I,” then I’m sending Miss Bess with a yardstick to visit you.  Nope.  It is always, “just between you and me.”   Between is a preposition; it needs an object.  “Me” is the object (“I” is the subject).  

But enough talk about you and me, let’s talk about why this matters.  Edwin Newman sums it up well:  “Since nothing is more important to a society than the language it uses -- there would be no society without it --we would be better off if we spoke and wrote with exactness and grace, and if we preserved, rather than destroyed, the value of language.”

I think we’re done here.  I’ve tried to honor Mr. Newman and Miss Bess.  I’m not sure how they had the grammar defense territory strategically divided up with my mother, but we’re probably safe for the moment.  However, someday in the future, it will be up to just me and ___.  You.               

-30-

©Copyright 2010, John P. Harrison.  All rights reserved.

Association Marketing:

Association Marketing:   After including some very relevant updates to today's markets, ASAE just published my article on international association marketing at http://www.asaecenter.org/AboutUs/content.cfm?ItemNumber=169574 . 

Follow the Leader

Follow the Leader

(first printed in GSAE magazine, JP Harrison 2011)

            “How about writing something on leadership?” came the editor’s request to me.

“OK, but why not something on ‘followership’?”   Leadership is always grabbing the spotlight,” I replied.

            “Followership?”  came the surprised reply from the editor.  “Who cares about followership?”

            “Hmm.  Probably the leaders,” I said.

            The editor replied, “Go ahead.  Suit yourself.  I suppose they’re connected somehow.”

            Yes, they are connected: they’re actually inseparable.    The press wants to cover the leader—the star, the hero—to sell a story, but as a famous leader once said, “if we’re all marching as heroes in the parade, who will be on the curb to cheer?”  All of us have leadership positions as part of most every role we play.  Some get recognition—often unduly—and some don’t. 

            An excellent leader is one who can get others to follow.  In so doing, the leader must know all about followership, not so much on leadership.  It seems we get confused about that.  There’s a lot of excitement about leaders making good or bad decisions, and that makes the history books or at least the tabloid pages.  However, the “rightness” of a leader’s decision is only part of the story.  

In war movies leaders run around barking orders in tough situations.  Granted the “correctness” of what they’re ordering is important, but their success is only partly about the content of the orders.  This “competence” of the order comprises the field of decision science (but let’s decide to follow another lead).  What is even more important are the followers; the followers in this case have been trained to follow the leader’s orders conscientiously in the belief that so doing will prosper the mission.  The art here is on the training of the follower and only partly about the actual competence of leader’s order.   

Though important, such battlefield situations are the exception rather than the rule even in the military.  My late stepfather, a general in the army, told me that—in a non-battlefield situation—if he had to go around explicitly ordering people what to do, then he would have failed as a leader. 

            Let me repeat that.  A decorated US Army leader, one of the youngest and brightest to achieve his high rank, told me that if you have to order folks to do things in other than a battlefield protocol, you’ve failed somehow.  You haven’t understood their followership and how to shape it.       

             Now understanding followers is not some touchy-feely-whatever-goes kind of thing.  Let’s take the example of a dog trainer and his understanding of the dog which needs to be led.  I have it on good authority (some dog trainer dude on TV) that dogs admire a leader who provides consistent discipline, exercise, and affection—in that order.  So, perhaps one of the reasons Aunt Matilda’s little fluffy-piece-of-doodle lap dog is such a terror is because it gets only the last item from that list: affection from Aunt Matilda.   It then becomes a really lousy follower. 

            Why then do we spend all this time on the characteristics of great “leaders” when we should be thinking about building more good followers?   Here’s the answer:  there’s no one to build good followers except, well, other good followers who are willing to be leaders at least for a time.   It’s like the kid applying for a prestigious college who on his application essay described himself as more of a follower than a leader.  The response comes back from the school:  “Congratulations we have accepted you into our elite class of 100 new freshmen.  We felt we needed at least one follower for the 99 self-described leaders.”

            To get at good followership, I believe the dog trainer on TV has some elements we can use.  Good followers need at least three things:

·        Structure (discipline)—people want to know what’s expected of them, what the rules are, what they’re responsible for.  And everyone deserves such clarity and fairness.

·        Something meaningful to do (exercise)—despite some appearances to the contrary, people are at their best when they are engaged in productive activity.  Shackleton, the hero explorer who led his stranded sailors through the long Antarctic winter in 1914, did so by keeping the men busy with assigned tasks as they clung to life on a floating ice shelf.

·        Affirmation (affection)—people want a genuinely supportive atmosphere (not contrived recognition).  At this, some will no doubt point out that avoidance of pain is viewed as a stronger motivator than some type of pleasant community, and this may be true for the short term. However, followers motivated by fear and terror instantly abandon the cause when the fear stimulus is gone.  The speed at which the Soviet Union fell—a union held together primarily by fear of martial reprisal—should not have been a great surprise.  

We have now covered the topic of followership within the deadlines and space allowed by our dear editor (structure).  We’ve been kept busy productively reading or writing (exercise).  And, absent any outright hate mail, there’s normally a warm thought or two generated by this magazine (affection).  Plus my two fine hounds are keeping a benign eye on the endeavor (they have a keen understanding of good followership).  I feel good having followed you through this and appreciate your having led the effort.               

(c) Copyright 2011, JP Harrison, All rights reserved.

Quick and Valid Do-it-Yourself Surveys

Quick but Valid Member Surveys Done In-house
(c) Copyright 2012 JP Harrison.

            Taking the pulse of the membership is crucial.  Until a few years ago, a consultant or a research department was needed to do exhaustive studies on mail-in paper surveys to periodically find out what it is the members really want and other descriptive data about the members.  Not anymore. 

            With the advent of the survey websites and services, almost anyone with a few IT skills and a set of instructions can launch a survey (see below).  This may sound a little too easy, but if done with diligence and proofed carefully, such surveys can be valid (warning:  you have to stick with the rules to claim fairly that a survey’s results are statistically valid).  We’ll see why statistical validity is important.  It may sound onerous, but most associations can perform a statistically valid survey of the membership quickly and easily, and most of all, cheaply. 

Why then do we need the experts?   We don’t necessarily need them for the short annual survey sent to the membership for a few targeted questions.  We would, however, need those with strong data analysis skills for advanced research, drill downs, and simulations and experiments using data (such as risk analysis, decision trees, regression analysis, or other complex comparing and benchmarking of groups).  With more and more science and business graduates getting fairly advanced statistical studies in school, in-house data analysis will become the norm even in small associations.  

What’s statistically valid and what’s not, and why do we care?

            I once worked with an association of liberal arts scholars.  I did a decent study of the opinions about their annual meeting, with a careful treatment of the data which indicated what the attendees liked and their preferences for the next year.  These were valid data upon which we could make decisions.  What did this particular conference committee of scholars do with my well-researched data?   They skipped over the loud and clear numeric results (they were liberal arts academics, after all) and went right for the handful of wild open-ended comments which came back in the surveys.  Unfortunately, they acted on the comments, which were in fact in opposition to what the data said.  It didn’t take long for problems to follow since the committee based their decisions for next year on the scanty anecdotal comments.  Much of their time later on had to be spent undoing the damage. 

            We’ll save you the detail here, but survey statistics is all about predicting what the whole population of your group (that is, your organization’s entire membership) would say based on what a small representative sampling of your group says.  There are conventions and parameters which describe how sure you can be that the sample reflects the population.  You’d be amazed at how reliable a small, properly-taken sample can be, especially if the population is large (it may be counterintuitive at first, but the larger the population the easier it is to draw conclusions in general).     

            One key sampling matter is randomness.  If there is a general session in your conference of 500 persons, and you let them voluntarily fill out and hand in surveys you might get 200 turned in on a good day.  These will by and large be the 200 people who loved it or hated it enough to fill out the survey and hand it in.  This is how a lot of conference organizers gather their surveys.   They collect the voluntary occasional survey and use the results as if they’re deeply meaningful.  They’re probably not deeply meaningful- unless, of course, almost every participant turns in a survey.   It may be better than nothing, but those types of survey results lack rigor.    However, if you randomly picked 200 people from the audience and enticed them to fill out a survey (good luck), you would have fairly representative results.  We would say, in statistics parlance, that you could be 95% confident that your data from the random group would be ± (plus or minus) 5% within the population’s answer (or some other percentage, depending on the number of responses collected).

            Now if the entire membership of your association is say 10,000, and if you randomly select and get responses from 370 persons, then you have statistically valid data (check Chart 1).  The data could be described as being CL 95%, MOE ± 5%.  This means Confidence Level 95% and Margin of Error of 5%.  The footnote in the polls done at election time just says MOE at 3% or 5% (3% obviously being preferable), and the Confidence Level is understood to be 95% unless stated otherwise. 

            This should be enough theory to help you handle the statistics of a quick survey; the next issue is the design of the instrument.  There is a very easy to use book on designing surveys:  Designing & Conducting Survey Research--a Comprehensive Guide by Rea and Parker (sold by ASAE) which tells you everything you want to know about designing questionnaires (the survey instrument).  If you’re designing a survey to use year after year with only minor adjustments, then reading the chapters on how to construct a good question would pay off. 

            One tried and true approach is to have easy-to-rank questions on a scale of 1 to 5 (generally called a Likert scale) with one being “poor” and 5 being “excellent”.  If you steer clear of labeling the middle values (2, 3, and 4) with any adjectives, then you stand a better chance of getting a useful and easy to understand score on the question.  You will get a useful mean, say 3.7 or 4.2 on a scale of 5 for each question. This can be a meaningful way to prioritize services or to see how you’re doing relative to last year.  Be sure to have a Not Applicable option to help keep your data clean (if not applicable is applicable to the question, that is).    Here’s an example:

Question #1

 Please rate the quality of the Association’s offerings on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent:

               Poor                                         Excellent 

                  1          2          3          4          5                      Not applicable   

a. Website       □          □          □          □          □                                  □
b. Magazine     □          □          □          □          □                                  □
    etc..

Question #2

            Please rate your overall satisfaction with the Annual Meeting on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being very satisfied:

Very Dissatisfied                                  Very Satisfied           

                        1          2          3          4          5                      Not applicable   
                        □          □          □          □          □                                  □

            It is vitally important to have several staff and/or members review the questionnaire before it goes out.  Remember, it’s going to be used repeatedly for longitudinal results’ sake, so get the questions right. Results can be unreliable if any scales are not fair or are confusing.  For instance, confusion will ensue if one question has the scale as 1=poor and 5=excellent and another question flips the scale to have 1 being excellent (or the “best”) and 5 being the “worst.”  Ask only a few questions (try to have it take no more than 5 minutes), and explain in the cover email the purpose and the importance of answering this random sampling.   Drawings for free gifts for participating, by the way, have made little difference in getting responses to the surveys I’ve run.  Instead, explaining the nature of the survey, how quick it is, and that the person has been chosen at random to represent the whole membership has been the best approach to getting responses. 

            The Nitty Gritty Instructions on Conducting the Survey

        1)       Find the number of responses you need to get a valid response for your population.  Use the number of members (total members or paying members, or other population you want to find out about) and the following chart to figure out how many responses are needed for 95% confidence at 5% sampling error (good enough, if you want to be real impressive go for 3% error, like the Gallup Polls you see on TV).  You may have to interpolate (gulp) to get the exact number of needed responses if your population is in the middle of two intervals (say it’s 8,000, instead of the 5,000 or 10,000 which are listed on the chart) or you could go for the higher number’s (in this case 10,000) sample size if you believe you may hurt yourself from too much interpolation.  Interpolation sounds a lot worse than it is; it’s basically drawing a line between two points and using that line to see where the value you want would be (get someone who’s good at math or that staff person who brags on their MBA to earn their keep here).

                     [see chart 1 at end of article]

2)       Figure out how many surveys to send to get that number of responses.  To sample for the whole 10,000 membership, we’ll need to get 370 responses according to the chart.  We’ll need to send surveys to about triple that number at least if we normally have about a 30% response rate (a good rule of thumb). 

3)       Get the needed number of random members. We’ll need to send out probably 1,000 surveys to get 370 responses, so we need 1,000 random members to get our 370.  Use an online randomizer to get 1,000 random numbers between 1 and 10,000.  10,000 because that’s our population.  My favorite randomizer is at http://www.randomizer.org/form.htm and is very easy to use.

4)       Match up the 1,000 random numbers to 1,000 members.  You’ll need a list in Excel of all your member ID numbers.  Drop those 1,000 random numbers in a spreadsheet next to your member IDs to get your 1,000 random members. 

5)       Check for a fair sampling.  Most of the time the sampling will be fine.  To double check, take a look at the 1,000 picked to make sure they are in line with the general demographic profile.  If a particular demographic, say age, is important in the membership population, then make sure the average age of the sample group is similar to the average age of the total membership.  Check other important parameters if desired to make sure the sample doesn’t look more skewed than the population.  

6)       Get the draft survey ready.  Pull the draft survey from Excel or Word into the online survey software ( SurveyMonkey, etc.), being sure to use the feature to run a test beforehand.

7)       Get the cover email ready.   Prepare a short one paragraph cover email to introduce the survey.  This email from staff and will contain the link to the online survey and an appeal for their response to help the association get a meaningful random sampling. Be sure to give a deadline for responses.  If you have to send out a reminder, by the way, it will have to go to everyone surveyed (if you’re guaranteeing that the survey is anonymous) since you won’t be tracking who’s responded and who hasn’t.  You should also mention in the cover email that since the survey is anonymous, there can’t be any follow-up to requests made by the respondents in the comment section unless they give their name, of course. If you send the survey out directly from a software (like SurveyMonkey), you can often--depending on the settings-- send reminders to only those email addresses (or IPs) who have not yet responded.    

8)       Launch the survey.  Once the survey is all lined up in SurveyMonkey and has been tested, use the list from step four and launch the survey to the emails corresponding to the random members.  Hope your response rate is the minimum needed.  If not, randomly survey some additional members to get to the number of responses needed.

9)       Examine the results and close the survey.  The online software does a decent job of presenting the results after the survey response period is done.  There are some filter tools and such if you want to more closely analyze the data.  Examine the results and export them to Excel for compilation.  You will need to calculate the mean for any Likert scale questions on the spreadsheet once exported, but it’s a breeze to cut and paste the formula if you’ve kept the question format consistent.   If the same questions were asked before, then longitudinal (year to year) results can be drawn. 

10)   Interpret the results – it would be a good idea to bounce the interpretation off others to double check.  There should be a footnote with the response rate, the sampling error and the 95% confidence interval as part of the results.  Voila, if you’re diligent, then the experts don’t need to be brought in.

Make sure there is a consistent survey process from your staff, so surveys don’t become too frequent or appear sloppy.  There’s nothing that shoots down your credibility more than tossing poorly thought out questions to the membership.  It is best to have someone on staff responsible for reviewing all surveys before they are launched.   Remember to explain that a random survey differs from the usual participant’s satisfaction survey because it provides much more reliable results.  I’ve even run surveys which also surveyed the Board members as a separate group in the same survey.  We compared the Board’s results to the membership’s results.  Surprise!  There were some important deviations.  Showing this to the Board was very helpful to them as they formulated policy on particular issues.  After all, what we’re chasing here is simply an efficient and reliable way to find out what the members really want. 

Chart 1 (note:  there are a lot of these type charts found in an Internet search of "sample size charts"; this is a compilation, owing much to researchadvisors.com)

Population Size	± 3% Sampling Error	± 5% Sampling Error
100	92	80
250	203	152
500	341	217
750	441	254
1,000	516	278
2,500	748	333
5,000	880	357
10,000	964	370
25,000	1,023	378
50,000	1,045	381
100,000	1,056	383
1,000,000	1,066	384

                       Number needed at 95% Confidence Interval

A Lot of Executive Action

A Lot of Executive Action

(reprinted from GSAE, Spring 2012)

            Executives, unlike soldiers and athletes, are rarely involved in acts of physical performance.  Our moments of courage most often feature attack by buzz words or death by Powerpoint.   I’m proud to report, however, that I’m fresh back from the airport with a daring physical escape story of my own.  I liberated a parking lot full of sniffling execs from their captivity.  Here’s how it went.

            First, the foreshadowing:  I was on a return flight from the West Coast.  I took my seat and buckled in.  It was a nice plane, each coach passenger having an individual TV monitor.  Then commercials for cars and then commercials for computers started playing on the screens.  The off buttons on the monitors were apparently automatically disengaged during the commercials.  The sound for the commercials was blasted over the PA.  There was no way to not watch the commercial.  We were a captive audience.

            Scene two:  airport economy parking lot.  The flight was on time; weather was good; I’m out to my car in no time; I was going to beat traffic; all was well.  I drove to the exit gate, and was just a few cars away from the exit.  There was no attendant, of course, it was a fully-automated entrance and exit situation.

            Something was going wrong up front, and the first car in line started to back up.  OK, so the dude’s credit card was not working, and now we all had to back up to let him get out of the way.  It was like an amoeba going in reverse, but we pulled it off and the next car pulled up to the machine. 

            The next guy, the same problem.  Hmm, this didn’t look good.  A parking lot attendant on a bicycle pedaled by, and started talking on his walkie-talkie.  He looked like he was officially doing something for us, so we all went back to our phones and emails to keep busy; it would just be a few minutes, we believed. 

            A little-old-lady cashier soon showed up to open the cashier booth.  The heck with those pesky machines; now we had a real person to fix things.  The cashier motioned for me to move from the existing line to be the first in the new line. I made pleasant chitchat and gave her my credit card.  The computers weren’t working, so it didn’t do much good.   Without the entrance data from the computer (there were no entrance tickets, just a credit card swipe to enter the parking lot), she could not process a charge.  I told her when I had arrived, showed her my itinerary as evidence, and offered to pay in cash.  She said she couldn’t open the gate without a transaction, and the computer was not working to process a transaction. 

            Flashback:  years ago I lived in Jerusalem and helped manage a sprawling complex in the middle of the town.  On the property was an old parking lot, and our management team decided to generate some extra revenue by redesigning the lot and opening it to the public for parking by the hour.  We pored over plans for the layout of the lot, and I argued for a simple plan which had an automatic entrance gate and an exit gate at the other end with an attendant.  I mentioned that back in the States we had this great technology whereby one drives up to the entrance gate, pushes a button, takes a time-stamped ticket and then parks.  When one is ready to leave, just drive to the exit booth and present the ticket and pay. 

            My colleagues laughed and laughed at that suggestion.  Right away, they saw a hole in it big enough to--- well, drive a truck through.   With no attendant at the entrance, one could push the button, get a ticket, enter the lot, and park well enough.  However, when ready to leave, one simply walks over to the entrance gate, pushes the button and gets a new ticket to present upon exit.   The new ticket has but a few minutes on it, and the cost is much less.   From the beginning of the plan considerations, we had all agreed that an attendant was definitely needed at the exit.   After their laughter about the entrance gate, I understood that we also had to put the entrance and the exit at the same place so the attendant could watch both.  As an aside, they also told me that an attendant was needed at the exit because the gates were fairly easy to break or lift up (this information might prove handy some day). 

            Scene three –  Flashback over, and back to the airport parking lot.   By this time several of the strandees had gotten out of their cars and were gathered at the exit booth.  The cashier and I were by now on good enough terms with me having tried to charm her into opening the gate.  She was trying to call the manager, but couldn’t get anyone.  The inconvenienced executives started to grumble.

            “I’m supposed to be somewhere; we’ve got to get this fixed,” said one.  
   
            “You can’t just keep us here.  This is your business problem; we’re ready to pay, but your system is down so let us out,”  said another. 

            “Let us out presently, or I’m on the phone to my attorney,” one woman chimed in, and began to search her cell phone’s speed dial.

            “I am an attorney, and you can bet I’ll file suit,” came the comment from the best dressed of our lot. 

            “They need to let us out.  This is false arrest, without a doubt,” said another, I didn’t know if he was an attorney or not, but he sounded good. 

            Then it struck me.  I was embarrassed for my kind.  Here we were stuck in a parking lot, and all we could do was whine about litigation while the machine cast our lot.  I hadn’t been this ashamed to be an American since I witnessed a guy in a Hawaiian shirt ordering his steak well done in a restaurant in France.  We have become a soft lot—our fighting spirit relegated to calling for legal counsel to review the replay footage on handy monitors. 

            I knew from experience (refer to a certain flashback) that with the exception of border crossings like Checkpoint Charlie, parking gates are a pretense. I got out of my little hybrid car, took my credit card back from my powerless friend the cashier and walked over to the parking gate.  I approached the free standing end of it and prepared to heave it heavenward with all my might.  It was no big deal at all, it flew right up and stayed up. 
          
            No one said a word except for the cashier, who was still trying to get a manager on the phone.   I heard her leave a message that the customers were starting to leave.  I got back in my car and drove off, hoping to beat traffic.  At least for once—on a sunny afternoon—I had escaped the lot.

(c)Copyright 2011 JP Harrison.  All rights reserved.