It's like a new literary form

Another busy day at $WORK, busy enough that I missed the Judea Pearl lecture the CS dep't was hosting. On the way out the door I grabbed the copy of "Communications of the ACM" with his face on the cover, thinking I'd catch up. The two pieces on him were quite small, though, so it was on to other fare.

"The Myth of the Elevator Pitch" caught my eye, but as I read it I became more and more convinced that I was reading literary criticism combined with mystic bullshit. Example:

At first glance, it appears that the elevator pitch is a component of the envisioning process. The purpose of that practice is to tell a compelling story (a "vision") of how the world would be if the innovation idea were incorporated into it. [...] But the notion that a pitch is a precis of an envisioning story is not quite right. A closer examination reveals that a pitch is actually a combination of a precis of the envisioning story and an offer. The offer to make the vision happen is the heart of the third practice.

Ah, the heart of the third practice. (I feel like that should be capitalized: "the Heart of the Third Practice." Better!)

The standard idea of a pitch is that it is a communication -- a presentation transmitting information from a speaker to a listener. In contrast, the core idea in the Eight Practices of innovation is that each practice is a conversation that generates a commitment to produce an outcome essential to an innovation. [....] The problem with the communication idea is that communications do not elicit commitments. Conversations elicit commitments. Commitments produce action.

Mistaking it for communication -- yes, an easy mistake to make.

We can now define a pitch as a short conversation that seeks a commitment to listen to an offer conversation. It is transitional between the envisioning and offering conversations.

And back to the literary criticism. I feel like I've just watched a new literary form being born. I'm only surprised that it seems the CompSci folks scooped the LitCrit dep't.

(Of course, while I'm busy spellchecking all this, I am most definitely not being published in "Communications of the ACM". So I suck.)