Mr. Bullet Point

For this high-powered Yale networking conference I'm going to next weekend, featuring such luminaries as David Gergen and Nicholas Brady, the organizers had us fill out professional biographies and lists of personal interests to facilitate getting to know you and you and you. I like.

So I laid out my life in the style to which I've become accustomed: bullet points. Then a whopping 100-page document arrives in my email with the bios and interests of all those who had taken the time (or had their admin person do so) to fill it out. And lets guess how many did it in a bullet-pointed, resume-like style. You guessed it. One. The chewer of grouse.

When I first left academia, I was outraged at all these bullet points, all this PowerPoint. "Why are we boiling complexity down?" I asked. "We should revel in it and its cousin ambiguity." But I've unlearned that. Neither complexity nor ambiguity is the modern corporation's middle name. So I learned to love and appreciate the bullet point. Succinct. Economical. But it is, in fact, also a subordinate means of communicating, meant to respect the more expensive time of the executive being addressed or to grab the eye the many passing by the poster next to the elevator or lunch trays.

At some point in time in one's career, it seems, one re-accedes to the paragraph, luxuriating in its calm pace and relative freedom. I may yet get to the place where I can write interesting professional paragraphs, on top of these blog ones that I will let the reader characterize.

But my biographical bullet points certainly leap off the page. They've got that going for them.