Authenticity Works

I'm hosting a meeting called Authenticity Works on Tuesday 6th April, 6pm to 9pm. This is an informal gathering of people who are keen to see more authentic relationships in the workplace.

At this one, David Wilcox will give a 15 minute, provocative talk to kick off discussions. He's going to review his experience as a process planner and facilitator for public sector clients on community engagement programmes. The challenges he deals with include:

- the (tendered) brief usually needs to be challenged
- there is seldom one client - usually a partnership of agencies
- effective engagement requires commitment of those agencies, whose cultures are not always sympathetic to wider participation
- the agencies may be unprepared to deal with the results of engagement, and to deliver effectively
- good people in the institutions are trapped in systems and procedures
- wider publics are now getting rightly cynical about participation processes
- but if you don't try and do some of these jobs, other people will do it anyway (worse of course)

As these are typical of the challenges facing those who want greater authenticity at work, it should be a very interesting evening. The event takes place in Islington, London N1. Details (Word Doc)

Scoble spoofed

Gotta give credit to Robert Scoble for linking to his fierce critics in his blog. Today, he's pointing to a sharp spoof of his defence of Microsoft.

Heh, David Hansson notices that I'm really Krusty the Clown, everyone's favorite corporate shill from the Simpsons.

A Networked World: Open Access

A Networked World: Open Access - Open Everything

Very good post by Earl Mardle referring to an article in The Scientist. This covers how the British Medical Journal takes the lead in placing its material online and opens them to debate and challenge, with filters only for libel and patient confidentiality. Earl comments:

Its great to see an organisation that is wholly focused on the creation and application of knowledge, being so ready to experiment positively with the idea that knowledge works best when the most possible eyeballs can see it. The British Medical Journal gets a truckload of kudos for Above and Beyond Open Access

I love especially the fact that a graduate student can participate at any level on which they are able to defend their ideas. That a student can cogently and clearly deconstruct the logical propblems behind a question, do it in public and be judged not on their position in the hierarchy but their ability to argue a case, is a very hopeful sign.

Overwhelm? What overwhelm? (And more on complexity)

Ton Zijlstra has done an eloquent blog, Every Signal Starts Out As Noise. He argues, provocatively,

Why do we call information and data coming to us noise? Because we know not all that stuff is useful, we label the unuseful stuff as noise. And because of the tilted signal to noise ratio we perceive, i.e. what little we actually use from what comes at us, we say we suffer from information overload. I say that this is rubbish.

There is no such thing as information overload. It does not exist.

The whole piece is well worth a read. Referring to Dave Snowden's thinking, Ton argues that in a complex world the priority is not analysis, requiring us to read and know everything, He identifies six rules of thumb, all of which I like.

Look at what you see, not at what you don't see

You are your own filter, important stuff will bubble to the surface at some point

It's about the few actions you do take, not all the actions you could have.

Skim, not read, all available info, don't judge yet

Combine what strikes you at first as possible patterns (barriers and attractors), and examine those more closely

Build upon the patterns, and choose one or two to cultivate and act upon

To me what's central to dealing with the the symptoms of information overwhelm is to break off from looking to outside knowledge for one's sense of self. I find it very easy to feel ill-informed in a world of so much information, and find it useful to remind myself that I know enough. Indeed, that I am enough

Ton's material has prompted me to think again about how marketing needs to think and work quite differently if we accept the paradigm of a complex world, one in which it's not easy to distinguish the signal from the noise, nor to predict with any certainty the consequences of our actions. One aspect that particularly strikes me is market research, where vast sums are spent in an effort to penetrate deep into the customer mind, as if to find a few key triggers that can turn markets. With this goes the old adman's holy grail of the "unique consumer insight". It represents an attachment to analysis as if this will usefully guide future behaviour. So often such "insights" cost a lot of money and turn out either to be either bland or misleading. (I blogged at length on this point here).

Along with this is the delusion that by massive promotional expenditure, you can impact in some predictable way how markets will operate... that somehow a brand is created by the brand manager, based on his/her alleged deep insights into their market. A feature of complexity is that cause-and-effect can only be discerned retrospectively and cannot be used to predict the future. Many an adman will cite questionable case histories, out of context, to justify big expenditure now. Such approaches often blind management to the subtle signals out there in the real world where real brands are created in a myriad of conversations. (Leading me back to Ton and his arguments for the value of blogging as means of participating in those conversations, rather than hypothesising about them.)

Getting out of the way

For some time now I've been arguing that marketing should be more concerned with the facilitation of relationships, and less obsessed with polishing images.

Likewise, for some time I've believed that good facilitation is often not very visible. Because a good facilitator knows to get out of the way when good stuff is happening, and not feel the need to make himself the centre of attention. Poor faciliators make themselves and their processes more important than the people they're working for.

And more and more, I wish that marketing people would just get out of the way. Because so much of what they produce - rebrandings, promotions, special offers - are just clutter and noise that can only reduce the quality of conversations.

Ton Zjilstra gives an eloquent riposte to just the kind of promotion I'm talking about. After being offered an incentive (in the form of "free" bits of kit for his computer) to subscribe to a magazine , he counters:

Promotional campaigns like these do nothing to establish new and real relationships between people, in this case you and me, and so do not help at all to leverage any value such a relationship between us might contain. In fact, these campaigns destroy value as they make perfectly clear that, even though you open your message with 'dear Anton' you're in no way interested in establishing a real connection, only in pushing your publication and thus increase revenue. Otherwise you would not have resorted to cheap tricks (well, cheap, 100GBP) to get me to subscribe.

Another bizarre example was a phone call I got the other day from Burnley Football Club. They identified me as a supporter and offered me the chance to switch my telephone to "Turf Moor Telecom" (Turf Moor is the Burnley ground).

I would still remain a BT customer, only the billing would change to TMT and I would be charged a bit less.

I wonder what BT is up to creating deals like this? They probably rationalise it in terms of affiliation building but to me the real message is clear: we are currently charging you more than we need. Our excess margin is, indeed, even more than the 5% discount TMT offers you, because there's enough slack in our budget to cover:

paying a call centre to pester you;
paying for additional admin of switching your billing;
paying our marketing guru and his consultants to cook this nonsense up

And after wasting all this money, you get... to use the phone the same you already are.

Both of these schemes bear the fingerprints of conventional marketing. It's in the way. It needs to clear off.

The frustrations of consulting... and the need to laugh

Robert Paterson's Weblog: The Consultant's Trial - Do your clients drive you mad? Does the world depress you? Roger Harrison's View

Thanks, Robert, for picking up John Husband's posting. Much of this resonated with me. For example

In the early nineties I was burned out and discouraged with the results of my long career as a consultant. I turned to my autobiography as some people turn to their journals, in an attempt to work out the meanings in my life. The work was fueled by th paradox in which I found myself. I was at the peak of my powers as a consultant, but my passions and values were less and less shared by actual and potential clients, It was increasingly difficult to find work that felt worth doing, in the sense of promoting the three values mentioned on the first page of this paper.

I'm not sure what the height of my own powers is (or was) but I have become disillusioned with much of the work I used to do. I form the impression that a great many of my contemporaries share this disillusion and we each try different ways to resolve it. The author of this piece refers to the Monk's choice and I know that I'm not really up for that degree of solitude; likewise, he emerges from this period of reflection to re-engage with the corporate world on new terms.

In all this, a decent degree of humility is called for. And I was delighted - on another tip from Robert's blog - to discover Doug Manning's blog - this bit in particular:

How is it that we get so serious about life? The answer is simple – we take ourselves too seriously. We lose our ‘objective perspective’. Literally, we get too close to our life to see the humor. When you are very focused on anything, you lose your open-minded view. It is easy to fall into the habit of taking everything too personally, even the weather. This prevents us from seeing the great humor in our own imperfections.

Imagine a person waking up in the morning, stumbling to the kitchen, and pouring coffee on their cornflakes. The moment that occurs, that individual has a choice. They can get really angry with themselves, raging over the loss of time, image, and good cornflakes. Or they can laugh at their mistake, enjoying the reality of being human. They can even go to work and tell all their colleagues about the funny thing they did this morning, modeling the healthy way to view ourselves. Laughter really is a choice.

Laughter has a direct correlation to personal well-being. However, it is different than many people understand. People don’t laugh because they feel good, they feel good because they laugh. Laughing creates a sense of personal well-being. Shared laughter creates a sense of belonging. Laughing happens because you open your perspective, not because the world picked you to be amused today.

The things they say...

Leafing through the latest mag from the Market Research Society (yes, I know, I need to get out more) I found this comment in an article on humour. It's made by Danny Josephs of the agency that does the ads for Tango. This a celebrated and controversial campaign here in the UK, for a range of fizzy drinks. Most of the ads involve slapstick hits of one sort or another. Most ad people hold it up as a triumph of the art.

Anyway, here is Danny's comment.

Tango is about the real hit of the fruit. Without the product it's just a sponsored gag from Tango - and that's not good enough

Well, it's a memorable campaign. And Danny may be in many ways a lovely chap. But here he is talking complete bollocks. If we're going to use the real word, can we at least acknowledge that a fizzy drink with vast amounts of additives and CO2 cannot possibly convey the real hit of the fruit. I also find it absurd that Danny pretends to champion this product with his "that's not good enough" line. Like the ads wouldn't work for any other fizzy drink with the money to spend!

Bizarrely, John Grant in his book The New Marketing Manifesto, holds Tango up as an example of authenticity. Give me a break. If the admen continue to flog us Tango and Sunny Delight as if these things have real value, then little wonder no-one believes the ads any more. Wasn't it Scott Fitzgerald who described something valueless as the biggest waste of talent outside of an ad agency ?

It reminds me of a great story, of a turning point in his marketing career, told by Rob Earls. This is in his entertaining book Welcome to the Creative Age. He stopped at a service station in East Anglia and found in the shop a banana. This banana was encased in a banana-shaped thick polythene box, labelled as a "Fresh Banana Snack" and branded, (yes, branded) "Fruit on the Move".

It occurred to me that a significant group of people must have been involved in the development of this "added-value" banana: not just the growers, shippers and distributors, but the marketing team, packaging designers and printers. I could imagine the amount of hot air and photocopying paper involved in creating this new wonder product. The "competitive analyses" and the "positioning statements" discussed and debated. And somebody must - at some point - have sanctioned the project as a good thing to do. Who was that masked man?

Polarity Management

I went to a fascinating presentation yesterday, given by Cynthia Haddock and organised by AMED. She talked about Polarity Management and her experience of working with it. Here's a snippet from the Polarity Management website which captures the central point rather well:

Intuitively, those of you who have "been around the barn a few times" know that:

Leaders need to be conservative for stability and revolutionary for change.

Organizations need centralized coordination and decentralized initiatives

Managers and employees need training and must do their work.

We need to support team development and reward individual achievement.

We need to reduce our costs and improve quality.

All of us are faced with work commitments and home commitments.

None of the above are problems to solve by choosing one and neglecting the other. They are what we call polarities (dilemmas, paradoxes) which are inherently unavoidable and unsolvable. The on-going, natural tension between the poles can be destructive and debilitating or can be managed, and channeled into a creative synergy that leads to superior outcomes.

Cynthia used a metaphor of breathing to ground the idea of polarity in something very human. We breathe in to solve the "problem" of lack of oxygen; this creates a new "problem" of too much carbon dioxide, so we breathe out, creating the "problem" of lack of oxygen, etc etc. The solution is not to breathe in more or out more, but to do both.

In too many business meetings, we get stuck in arguments metaphorically, arguing about breathing in versus breathing out when a paradoxical solution has more wisdom.

Browsing the site, you'll find a lot of intelligent points about the virtues of recognising and working with polarities. These have strong echoes for me of what I've learnt from psychotherapy training and from working with Improv; that wisdom will often lie in escaping the Either/Or, Binary, Adversarial model that often gets inculcated in our schools.

Of course, taking a polarised position is fun, I know I like to polemicise. But as Jennifer Rice is pointing out in her continuing response to the Guru Red Manifesto, let's not throw babies out with the bathwater.

Another customer-centric myth

Lee at Headshift picks up on my entry on customer-centricity. He identifies another myth...

which is the idea that innovation and production is demand-driven. Why is it so hard to buy single or even double-blade razors in supermarkets? Not because consumers demanded 3 or 4 blades on their razors, I guess, but because the suppliers need to find new ways of maintaining revenues from their customer base, regardess of the waste of resources this creates.

I agree with Lee about the 4 bladed razor (which I think is becoming a bit of poster child for the absurdity of marketing). I'd also say that there's nothing inherently wrong with innovation being supply driven; it's the pretence that it's consumer-driven that bugs me.

Healthy relationships have a dynamic exchange in which the "lead" can shift from one side to another. Ahh, and there's the rub; because that very dynamism is what challenges the command-and-control fantasies of those who think that they control brands, and the agencies that flatter them.

TypeKey

I like MovableType (the software I blog with), and I like Six Apart, the guys who created it. It's a good piece of software and it has a great support community that got me up the fairly steep learning curve in the early days.

I like them a bit more now, because of their creativity in putting together TypeKey. This is largely a response to the blight of "Comment Spam" (the burden of phoney comments made to weblogs simply to highlight porn and viagra websites).

On the face of it, it seems a highly creative solution to the problem of spam comments that is a doddle for bloggers and commenters alike. One, once-off registration and you're done. And lots of flexiblity in setting the rules for each blogger. And another solution that seems to show a deep understanding of the power of community.

"The customer is not always right" Discuss...

Jennifer Rice points (by way of Heath Row) to the Guru Red Manifesto and in particular to The Customer is not your Friend

The customer is not always right. The relationship between customer and vendor by definition is built on tension. Tension characterized by the customer who wants to minimize price. And the vendor who wants to maximize price. These are conflicting objectives. Customer-centric strategies that focus on delighting the customer ignore the economic realities of delivering this strategy. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMER OR RESPOND TO CUSTOMER NEEDS. It means the customer voice is one of several voices that need to be reconciled. Any customer strategy first and foremost must begin with the objective of maximizing short-term profit. It is not possible to lead a sales force schooled in delight and collaboration into a market share battle demanding tension and confrontation.

Jennifer warns us she's going to disagree with this statement, at least part of it. I'm of like mind... there are bits I don't like... and bits I do.

For starters, I agree with Red Guru that the customer is not always right, and customer-centricity becomes either naive or dishonest if it obsesses with customers. All relationships are based on an exchange within boundaries, and if one side sets no boundaries the relationship starts to suck. I think there is always going to be some kind of tension between customers and other stakeholders though I balk at the idea that the relationship is built on that tension; I'd say that good marketing resolves these conflicts in ways that work for all parties.

So when Messrs Guru talk of a market share battle demanding tension and confrontation I would challenge that way of describing the world. First, some great entrepreneurs avoid market share battles by reframing their market; when Body Shop went ethical, they created a new market which they had to themselves for a while. I also notice that tension has been conflated into confrontation. The confrontation word suggests a Mexican stand off, a game in which one side can only win by the other losing. That's not the ideal of conflict resolution which aims for win:wins. By focussing on the money, the RedGurus may well be giving a good pragmatic steer against idealism and fantasy on the part of entrepreneurs; but they may also be missing how people actually create real value in relationships.

So much for the philosophical. Actually, looking back over my own career by a country mile my best customers were, if not my friends very close to being so. I'd like more like that in the future. Some people say that this is wrong, that I shouldn't confuse business with my personal life... but I think that's wrong. The idea of divorcing my working life from the rest of my life seems to me to go with the unpleasant notion of "it's business" generally trotted out to defend shitty behaviour on the part of someone in business.

I might add, as a sidenote, that as I start to see more signs of business being done between fellow bloggers, the idea of friendship with customers becomes increasingly important.

My two cents. Over to Jennifer...

Skype conference

I tried Skype conferencing today for the first time.

It happened spontaneously. I was skyping Tony Goodson when another call came from Bruce Lewin, so I just turned it into a conference. And hey presto, Tony and Bruce are speaking to each other for the first time. Bruce is in Bow, I'm in Islington, Tony's in Melbourne. And the conversation has the quality of a water cooler meeting. This is one of the ways I think Skype is powerful, it can set up spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment chats in a way that's different from a phone call.

Procurement

Tony Goodson is back on the stump. His postings from inside a corporate (where he's been for just three months) continue to amuse and enlighten. His rant against corporate procurement rings bells with me.

Our procurement has been outsourced. I contacted our contact. I emailed him a price I had agreed with the only supplier in Australia for this software product. He emailed my email to their outsourced software supplier, yes you got it, an outsource of an outsource! And yes that means the price is doubled or squared! And even though I'd given them both the price and contact name, number and email, they managed to come back with a price significantly higher than the one I told them they could get it for!!
That takes some beating.

I've several times experienced the rigours of organised procurement and I think if often sucks. If you grasp sand too tightly, you end up losing more of it through your fingers. Some tendering processes squeeze out the scope for ingenuity. They confuse rule-following with excellence. I worked for a government agency a year ago helping them procure market research according to EU tendering rules... what a palaver, an enormous amount of time spent ticking boxes instead of a more subtle human process of engaging in dialogue. The result: a costly process and an inflexible contract. I wouldn't go so far as Tony in labelling all procurement people as idiots; I am sure some do their job well by allowing some flexibility and humanity into the process - but as in so much of business, excessive efforts at control can be completely counter-productive.

Authenticity Works

Authenticity Works is the name I've given to an informal group that's now met a couple of times. Both have been really satisfying meetings of people who are interested in developing authenticity in organisations and exploring what it means (and there's no simple definition). Attendees have included coaches, authors, a journalist and consultants. Client-side folks would be extra welcome. The next one is in Islington, London on April 6th, 6pm to 9pm. Email me if you're interested in coming.

Awesome improv

David Weinberger found this gem of musical improvisation, from the GoodExperience Newsletter. I really recommend following these instructions!

Jennifer Lin is a fourteen-year-old pianist from southern California. She began her presentation by playing two very difficult classical pieces; to my untrained ears, she sounded as good as any professional performer two or three times her age.

It was her third piece that brought the house down. She announced that she would like to improvise a song... and asked an audience member to select five notes, at random, from the C scale. She got the sequence C, G, B, A, E.

Fourteen years old, with a live audience of 800 adults awaiting a brand new piece of music, based on a theme of five notes just handed to her. She had ten seconds to prepare.

It was a masterpiece.

Chris Anderson, TED conference host, was nice enough to post the performance online at the TED site. I highly recommend spending a few minutes listening to the whole piece, to get a touch of the experience that Jennifer created.

1. Go to http://www.ted.com

2. Click "Magic moments from TED2004". (If the link disappears suddenly, roll the mouse over the "Home" link and it will reappear.) [Yeah, the UI is problematic - dw]

3. A window called "TED 2004 Summary Slides" will appear and start loading. Slide 1 should play momentarily.

NOTE: Slide 2 of 5 is the beginning of Jennifer Lin's performance, where she gets the five notes (yes, that's Goldie Hawn) and sits down to play. When that slide finishes playing, you're JUST about to get to the good stuff.

If Slide 3 doesn't start playing, click the right arrow-button on the bottom of the window to advance past the end of Slide 2.

Slide 3 plays the audio of Jennifer's incredible improvisation, and shows a slideshow of TED photos on top of that. Enjoy the photos but pay close attention to the music: remember, Jennifer is playing this multi-movement piece "cold", with no prior knowledge of the five-note theme, in front of an audience of several hundred.

You can't see it in the video, but many audience members were crying at the end of the performance.

Blogs and jobs

I'm very glad to see Ton's announcement that he's found a new job. And excited by his reflections on the part blogging played in the process. Just lately I've had serious discussions about a work project which has arisen directly from blog conversations and It's very good to see signs that this activity could generate work - even thought it's not my main motivation for writing...

Riding a bike and knowledge...

Thanks to a post from Lee at Headshift by way of Joy London I read Zen and the Art of Knowledge Management. I particularly enjoyed this:

In the courses we teach about knowledge management we have our students attempt to write a set of instructions about 'how to ride a bicycle'. What they come up with are inevitably awful. And that, of course, is the point. What we are really trying to do with this exercise is show the course participants the limitations of explicit knowledge. In this regard, the exercise is our own kind of Zen koan.

Once we demonstrate the inadequacy of their instructions, we then get the participants to tell us how they learned to ride a bike (or how they taught their own children to ride one. Their answers commonly involve a mix of the following elements:

They were instructed by someone who knew what they were doing
There was some modeling what to do as well as instructing
They were taken somewhere where it was safe to make mistakes
They attempted to do what they were told and shown
Mistakes were made
More instruction and modeling followed
After a number of trials, they were successful
In this example, what our course participants have done is demonstrate that it is possible to pass on tacit knowledge even though it is problematic to turn it into the kind of explicit knowledge that would fit with a knowledge repository. For organisations to be able to do this all they need to do is recreate the same kind of learning culture and environment that is present when people learn to ride a bike.

Great lesson. I find myself increasingly sceptical about complicated models that purport to explain how to lead, how to market etc according to formulae - becasue they simply cannot capture the the tacit things that underpin human experience and behaviour. I'm more for rules of thumb and a willingness to be wrong than hard rules that make bogus claims to precision about the imprecise...

Customer service wisdom

Neat little factoid from the ever-excellent newsletter of ecustomerserviceworld.

“Customers were ten times more likely to buy jams when only six varieties were on display as when there were twenty-four.”

- Psychologist Barry Schwartz, illustrating his new research that shows too much choice is making people miserable, and that some feel so paralysed they go home empty-handed. Nothing to do with ghosts and machines, but important.

Oh, and this lovely story too:

“We had a legendary member of the cabin crew who people still talk about at Virgin Atlantic. While preparing the in-flight ice-creams in the galley, she would smear one around her mouth as if she’d just secretly scoffed some. Then, she would proclaim loudly as she handed the ice-creams out, ‘I’ve never tried these myself, but people tell me they’re delicious.’ Passengers would be doubled-up with laughter. You simply cannot put a price on that kind of memorable customer experience.”
- Lyell Strambi, Executive Director of Airline Services, Virgin Atlantic

Top brand, poor performer

According to this ISR report, top brands underperform financially and have poor levels of employee engagement. They have compared companies rated by Business Week as having the highest brand value with a set of "high performing" companies - and the branded businesses are found seriously wanting. Conclusion?

Many top brand companies are vulnerable. They are performing poorly on the cultural dimensions that deliver success under a brand/image strategy. This exposes them to low levels of employee engagement and to inferior levels of financial performance.

Now I take these kinds of surveys with a large pinch of salt, since there must be so many variables affecting ratings, and there's some danger in averaging the ratings of what are very diverse businesses. Nevertheless, I find it very intriguing that ISR identifies a low level of employee engagement in top brands. Could it be that these highly image-conscious organisations have become so mesmerised by their outward appearance that they have lost sight of satisfying their own staff. Are they, perhaps, experiencing the emptiness inside that afflicts all narcissists?

Zen Entrepreneur

Thanks (again!) to Curt Rosengren for pointing to the Zen Entrepreneur.

...Most Americans are caught in jobs that they do not like and would rather not be doing. We see our work as a necessary evil so that we can earn money to do the things we really enjoy. Each Friday, millions of us chant the mantra of the twentieth century: TGIF! Each morning, we pump ourselves full of coffee and sugar to help us get through to lunch. We use lunch as a catapult to get us through to 3 pm. Then we hit the caffeine and sugar again to get us through until the "end" of the workday. And some of us routinely work until well into the night!

It's no wonder that we arrive at home too tired to do or accomplish much else in life. We don't like our work, or would generally prefer to not be working if it could be avoided (and we could afford it!), using weekends to recuperate from the week; and we take 2 weeks vacation once a year to recuperate from the other 50 weeks. Life becomes an anti-climactic dance of struggle followed by recovery!

Most people spend their entire working lives with a strange notion that there must be something more to life than what they experience each day, but unsure how to go about finding it. For some, this strange notion develops into a strong yearning for meaning and purpose in life. For the few who start to search in earnest, the last place they expect to look for answers is at work!

The author poses the question: what if we saw our work as a place for our spiritual practice, instead of thinking we have go away from work for enlightenment? He says

I've come to an unexpected result: I am most effective in my career and my personal life when my spiritual seeking leads not away from, but rather toward my daily life.

I liked this site and I think it contains some well expressed wisdom - much needed in a world where employee disengagement appears to be the norm (see my past entryuninspired, disenaged).

What sucks?

I'm doing a talk on Wednesday and, just for fun, looked up one of the companies attending on Google. I just searched on "(Name of company) sucks". And what an extraordinary range of stuff I found. A non-objective set of links deep into bits of the organisation's life...student boycotts based on associations with prison services; bitter employees gossiping online about the drug addiction of their colleagues; as well as some impressive and open bulletin boards run by the company supporting health and safety

What you quickly realise is much of this stuff is very opinionated and not the truth - but it does show how transparent business is becoming and how the world is not such easy territory for the spin doctors to operate in. The proliferation of media and the rise of the net mean that it's just not possible to centrally control a business's image, if ever it was.

I think these things tend to undermine further the credibility of those who talk about brand images as something that companies control. They only influence them... and they can influence them better by getting better (a la Cluetrain) at getting more people talking with a human voice - and spending less on image advertising and more on real service and products.

By the way, here are some more things that allegedly "suck" (found by Googling on the word "suck")

School sucks
AOL sucks
Milk sucks
ClearChannel sucks
Fencing sucks
O'Reilly sucks

Whose authenticity ?

Tony down in Melbourne asks a good question today. Why do we praise and worship false beauty, but not false athletic achievement?

How come it's abhorrent for an athlete to take performance enhancing drugs for material gain, but an actor/actress can have plastic surgery and drugs to improve their looks for material gain!!!!!!
At first thought it sounds like I"m crazy, but some of those drugs help athletes recover from injuries quicker, and may not have the long term shock of looking at Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett!!

I write and talk a lot about authenticity and I'm constantly struck by paradoxes like this. I think most of us humans have a love-hate relationship with truth. Like Tony, I sometimes feel despair at our celebrity-fixated world and its enthusiasm for what is laughingly called reality TV. I liked that lyric made famous by Baz Luhrmann - about beauty magazines making us feel ugly.

Mind you, I think it's possible to get too puritanical about this stuff. My niece loves the tawdry gossip about Big Brother et al, and she has her feet planted very firmly on the ground. So I'm going to try not to go all "Why oh Why?" today.

Skype Experience

I'm becoming more and more enthusiastic about Skype (the peer-to-peer voice conversation over the net thingy). Stuart Henshall blogs a lot about it and I agree with him: this is much more than a cheaper way to make a phone call. (Consider his entry here).

I've been a light user so far, but have used it to talk to folks in Australia and New York and got pretty remarkable voice quality. This morning, Jen from Mutual Marketing signed up and we had a great chat. These conversations become more like chats with people in the same building. I feel the qualitative difference in sound quality makes these a different category of communcation from a phone call. I shan't bother analysing why (Stuart does this really well in his blog) - I just know that the experience is very different and more satisfying.

Hitherto I've not left Skype always on, but from Stuart I can see that this adds a further dimension.

I'm one of the ever-expanding number of "portfolio people" trying to make satisfactory sense of how to work effectively in an overstimulated, conversation economy. I feel that Skype is one of the building blocks that makes collaboration more effective and opens new possibilities for working together.