Taming the groupies

Hard on the heels of The Wisdom of Crowds comes Steve Davis' Master Facilitator Journal with a feature on Groupthink. Here's the summary

When Does Groupthink Occur?
Group think is likely to occur when the following conditions exist:
When groups are highly cohesive.
Isolation of the group from outside influences.
Examining few alternatives.
Not being critical of each other's ideas.
Not examining early alternatives.
Not seeking expert opinion.
Being highly selective in gathering information.
Not having contingency plans.
Under considerable pressure to make a quality decision.
No systematic procedures for considering both the pros and cons of different courses of action.
With a directive leader who explicitly favors a particular course of action.
Symptoms of Groupthink.
Having an illusion of invulnerability, morality, and unanimity.
Collective rationalization of poor decisions.
Believing in the group's morality.
Pressure on dissenters.
Self-censorship of dissent.
Self-appointed mind guards.
Sharing stereotypes which guide the decision.
Not expressing your true feelings.
Maintaining an illusion of unanimity.
Using mindguards to protect the group from negative information.
Solutions to Groupthink Include:
Establish an open climate.
Leaders should remain impartial and avoid being too directive.
Using a policy-forming group which reports to the larger group.
Using different policy groups for different tasks.
Divide into groups and then discuss differences within the larger group.
Use outside experts.
Use a Devil's advocate to question all the group's ideas.
Hold a "second-chance meeting" to offer one last opportunity to choose another course of action.

Intuitive/Perceiving vs Sensing/Judging

Tony Goodson has an interesting take on the success of the Olympics in Athens:

Did the Athens Olympics go well? You bet they did. Was there a big stink and lots gloating going on 100 days before the Olympics and with the countdown? Yes. So what happened?

I'll tell you what happened. It's the difference between SJ and NP. Yes, you Myers Briggs people know what I'm talking about.

Greece is very NP. Intuitive and Perceiving. They leave task completion and planning to the last minute, and take an intuitive approach to it.

Australia is SJ. Sensing and Judgement. Lots of planning and pre-planning, and what are my five senses telling me.
They both succeeded. So just a note to those SJs, that an NP approach can work and last minute completion is sometimes ok. Much as you hate to hear this, and gloat, and predict gloom and doom, for not having lots and lots of planning.

You don't think there's a place for a bit of spontaneity do you?

I'm hopelessly biased of course, falling into the INFP pattern myself. Not that these typologies should be taken too seriously...

Trying out...

I'm trying out a couple of new bits of software. The first is ecto, an offline blog editor. Previously, I have tried Zempt which was pretty good but would occasionally not work. ecto seems a bit more sophisticated with some nice touches including a WYSIWYG preview which can refer to the site's stylesheet. I'll see if I feel like paying for it in two weeks. Thanks to Rob Paterson for the tipoff.

I'm also trying out Klipfolio, a neat information update... thingy. You program it to track newsites, rss feeds, mailboxes, weather reports etc. Has a nice user interface and it's free. Thanks to Robert Scoble for mentioning it.

Strong opinions, lightly held

Evelyn Rodriguez has written some great material lately. I really liked the title of her most recent post, Strong opinions, lightly held.

Dogma is all around us. One definition of dogma: A tenet is that which is maintained as true with great firmness. I endeavor to do more to cast off my own dogmas from my mind than to defend against others.

Everyone filters and colors things according to their own perceptions and preconceptions and beliefs and agenda and conditioning. It's safest to assume you never read or heard anything truly objective. Be doubly wary of anyone that believes they're objective. But so what? I'm not exactly a big fan of extreme dogma myself, but like Emerson I would find I'd be turned off every few minutes if I let it get to me. There is often some value to be gained if one bores through the dogma and drills a little deeper (yeah, heaps of sawdust is the main outcome once in a while).

Be willing to be influenced. Be pliable, be flexible, be open, be curious. Yet don't buy into everything verbatim either. A friend told me that a motto of Paul Saffo, Director for the Institute for the Future, is: "Strong opinions - lightly held."

Since reading the Wisdom of Crowds, I've been more conscious of the value of maintaining an open mind. I like blogs that take passionate positions, even if they're not "right". Even a crazed opinion may still have value as part of community intelligence. Actually, even if your opinions are rigidly held, they may still be ok! Paradoxically, so might weak opinions held anyway you please... I think the best thing to do is show and say more of what you really think, with whatever true vehemence seems fitting to you at the time!

Joe Trippi on future of organisations

Rob Paterson has posted a good review of Joe Trippi's book, The Revolution will not be Televised. I'm not a fan of lists but I like most of Trippi's "7 Inviolable, Irrefutable, Ingenious things your business, or institution or candidate can do in the age of the internet that might keep you from getting your ass kicked but then again might not", as summarised by Rob:

1. Be first...... The first car company to let people pick the colors, the first beer company to let people design the label, the first candidate to embrace people on the net - the first everything has a head start building a community. Go now

2. Keep it moving. Do not be static. .... Don't let your website be wallpaper. Your Internet presence should be an organic flowing, daily dialogue with your customers, back and forth. If you aren't regularly emailing customers, if you aren't responding to their emails, if you don't have a blog, if you are not using your website to engage the people.... then you are wasting your time on the Net.

3. Use an authentic voice .. ... The Internet is not the place for safe vetted corporate communication........ Sacrifice some of the slickness of your web site for the real, sometimes messy quality of the best blogs. .. Have real people write real stuff.

4. Tell the truth ..... The internet has an inherent transparency. .... but if you invite people in, you had better be prepared to have them look in the medicine cabinet. So don't hide anything. Tell them what you want. Don't manipulate. Put what you want up high. Put it on the first page of your web site at the top of your emails.

5. Build a community .... Create a commons, a town square, a pace where people can come together to talk about their Ford Mustangs or their Kodak cameras. If you are running the Kodak website and you don't have an online photo gallery for people who buy your digital cameras or an online photo contest ... then you should give up now. Because someone is going to do it. Get people involved. This is not top down one to many anymore. The internet is a side to side, upside down, many to many. Use it that way. It's the dialogue stupid.

6. Cede control ....... Once you let the people in, they are going to want to do more. I know this violates everything they taught you at school but you have to let go of the old command and control style of business. Let the edges blur between customer and company.....

7. Believe again ... The days of condescension toward customers and citizens are over. have some faith in the American people again. Democracy is based on the principle that if we give the citizens control over their common future, they will choose the right path. The same is true for consumers.

Crowds and experts

I'm enjoying The Wisdom of Crowds a lot. The author knows how to write, with lots of wonderful stories to illustrate his argument. (See Dave Pollard's useful review here.) It provides powerful evidence of the value of diversity, arguing that decision made by large, diverse groups are better than those made by experts. Sorowiecki says

Suggesting that the organisation with the smartest people may not be the best organisation is heretical, paticularly in a business world caught up in a ceaseless "war for talent" and governed by the assumption that a few superstars can make the difference between an excellent and a mediocre company. Heretical or not, it's the truth: the value of experise is, in many contexts, overrated.

This is partly because expertise can be narrow; crowds can aggregate a lot more varied information.

There's more on the trouble with experts: evidence that they are are little better at forecasting than laypeople (psychologists are worse at predicting behaviour than non-psychologists); and "studies that have found experts' judgements to be neither consistent with the judgements of other experts in the field nor internally consistent". What's more

Experts are also surprisingly bad at... calibrating their judgements... much like normal people: they routinely overestimate the likelihood that they're right.

Surowiecki cites surveys showing expert group after expert group overstating their knowledge.

And one more problem with trusting experts:

We think that experts will... identify themselves, announcing their presence and demonstrating their expertise... (but) experts are no more confident in their abilities than average people are, which is to say they are overconfident like everyone else... knowing and knowing that you know are apparently two very different skills.

It's interesting to compare this view with the recent post by the ever-provocative Hugh at Gaping Void: Seek out the exceptional minds

I will spend the rest of my professional life working with visionaries. I know who they are, they know who they are. Everybody else I will toss out like old furniture.

Might not be such an exceptional strategy!

Crowd wisdom in solitude

On Tuesday, I started reading The Wisdom of Crowds in the ironic setting of an empty train.

I decided to travel from London to Manchester by the marginally slower Midland Mainline. Under the disastrous privatisation of our railways, the main route to Manchester fell under the spell of Richard Branson, and his Virgin Trains have fallen well short of expectations. The last time I travelled Virgin the ride was at times rollercoaster-like over badly maintained track. The other - possibly trivial - memory was of being served instant coffee at breakfast. I was left underwhelmed by the mismatch between promise and reality.

One of the alleged benefits of rail privatisation was that it would introduce more competition. In most cases this has proved illusory, though not on the London Manchester route. I compared fares and found I could go First Class with Midland Mainline for less than half what Virgin asked for, for a journey time only 10 mins longer at the time of day I was leaving.

In return, I got a very pleasant journey… on a near empty train. At seat service, free drinks and papers and a rather nice dinner of salmon for £6. For the last half of the trip, there were about 10 passengers on the whole train, almost outnumbered by the staff. Not, apparently, a rare occurrence on that route.

Perhaps Virgin was suffering too yesterday, but I'm guessing that swathes of business travellers on expenses didn't care about the costs and went Virgin because there are more services and it's a little bit faster. Or maybe Midland Mainline are having problems marketing what struck me as a pretty attractive alternative. Or perhaps, in this instance, the Wisdom of Crowds wasn't working…

(More on the Wisdom of Crowds will follow.)

Printed Pringles

In case you know a child who's not getting enough marketing messages these days, here's the latest. Printed Pringles. Procter & Gamble are putting Junior Trivial Pursuit questions on the crisps.

"Pringles is the leader and founder of the stacked crisp category and now we're taking it to a whole new level," said Jamie Egasti, Vice President of Procter & Gamble's North America Snacks Division. "With the introduction of Pringles Prints, we have developed a new way to delight consumers by adding fun and excitement to one of kids' favorite lunchtime snacks while delivering incremental volume growth for our customers."

Thanks to Junk Food News for this exciting update, and to Bernie deKoven for knowing there is such a thing as Junk Food News.

On narcissism

Is it possible to wonder out loud if I am being narcissistic, or is that itself narcissism?

A question prompted by Andy Dexter's comment on a previous post, High Status BS. Andy's having a bit of a go at me for having a go at his company's promotional blurb.

Hello from Incepta Marketing Intelligence. We did have a bit of a chuckle at your comments.

Narcissistic?

A quick word count on your Guiding Principles page shows 35 mentions of "I", "me", "my", "myself" etc... In fact, this solipsism amounts to one in every twelve words written. That's a lot of the big "I am" to cram into a short piece of text.

Anyway - we still like some of the other things you write. Particularly the bit where you admit to having blind spots...

Keep it up!

Well, I was being provocative in that post (classified as a Rant at the time) so it's fair enough for Andy to defend himself, albeit by changing the subject from pot to kettle.

As you might guess, I think his comment is a bit of a red herring. Sure, I use the first person a lot on this site. For the simple reason that it's only me writing it. I suppose the alternative to saying "I think x is y" is to simply state "x is y" as fact. I'm not one for high-faluting philosophy, but I'd say the latter is more solipsistic than the former. (Solipsism ="The theory or view that the self is the only reality" - I had to look it up).

Alternatively, I could avoid saying what I think altogether.. but as Harry Hill would say, "What are the chances of that happening?" Still, perhaps my "guiding principles" are a bit waffly. I must admit I take most other people's with a large pinch of salt.

Comments, as ever, welcome...

Idea amplification

Hugh at gapingvoid continues to provoke. This morning, he offers this thought:

A company's primary role is to function as an "idea amplifier". Making and doing are mere subsets.
Most things companies make are actually pretty dull. Most things people buy are fairly mundane.

A computer is just a plastic and metal box you use to send e-mail, write papers and whatnot.

A pair of running shoes is just some cloth and rubber that allows you to go jogging.

Coffee is just flavored hot water with some caffeine in it.

Yet Apple, Nike and Starbucks excite us. Why?

When I read this first, I really liked the idea of companies as ideas amplifiers. It put me in mind of the sort of fierce conversations that an organisation might have if it is to be a hothouse for creative thinking. As I read on, my initial enthusiasm waned. Because I for one don't feel excited (well, not in a good way) by Nike and not that much by Starbucks. And in marketing, I have a soft spot for mundane products that do what they're supposed to and spare me a whole lot of hoo-haa about changing my lifestyle.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Ideas are exciting but in marketing I think the big idea is way overrated. Hugh says

Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential. What statement about humanity does your product make?

The bigger the statement, the bigger the idea, the bigger your brand will become.

I like the idea of connecting what we do with its impact upon our fellow man. It's the "big" word that bothers me. My own experience of Starbucks is that it does a good job of big thinking about the environment... but its cafes in London are often messy. Take a look around and I think most brands are also-rans with ideas above their station.

What they need is not one monolithic idea but the honesty to pick up on the detail. Not one ring to rule them all, but sufficient variety of conversation that individual staff feel they can bring their own ego to work as well as assuaging those of the ad agencies. Idea amplifiers? Yes, if they build communities. No thanks if it's just a megaphone for the self-deluding...

Reasons to be cheerful

I enjoyed this post by Dave Pollard- Ten Reasons to be Optimistic. Dave writes powerfully on issues that threaten to make life on earth hard to bear in future, and it's good to hear the upside too.

I remain a hopeless idealist and optimist. There is much to be done, and urgently, but we can do it. Some reasons to be optimistic:

1. There are more people writing, articulately and eloquently and with the weight of excellent information and argument behind them, about the need for radical change to our culture than ever before. This is a groundswell of awareness and deep caring, possibly unprecedented in the history of man. Something important is happening here.

2. The Internet has given us two powerful weapons for change: knowledge exchange and organizing capacity. We're learning to use them well.

3. Women are slowly gaining power and influence in our society. Young women are better educated and better informed than any generation in our history.

4. Not having children is no longer, for the first time in our culture, considered selfish or anti-social.

5. The Wisdom of Crowds.

6. In the next decade much of the baby boom generation will be retiring. That means a huge number of people, a generation with a penchant for change, will suddenly have an enormous amount of time to think, to learn, to do things for reasons other than financial gain.

7. Stories have immense power to change minds. We are learning the process of crafting astonishing stories.

8. The Power of Community.

9. In our search for models and leaders and inspirations, we are becoming skeptical of arrogance and glibness and the cult of personality, and looking instead for humility, honesty, flexibility, collaboration.

10. A World of Ends. There is a large and growing appreciation that small and decentralized just works better. And is smarter and more agile.

So there is great reason to be hopeful. But not complacent.

Lost soldiers and collaboration...

Piers Young posted this wonderful poem by Miroslav Holub "immortalising a bizarre incident that happened to a group of soldiers on military manoeuvres"

"The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees"

Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps. TLS, Feb 4, '77

Piers says, "Perhaps good information gets too good a press?"

Tragedy or comedy?

Chris Corrigan interprets it as a tragic allegory of how people become dependent on external authority and lose a sense of their own resources.

I see Chris' point and I find it very thought provoking - although I was a bit startled by it at first. My own response is to focus more on the men's intuitive success rather than the falseness of the pretext. And I do find his argument thought provoking.

I think as humans we often tell the tale of our lives as if they are logical and explicit. Occasionally, an incident like this jars that illusion. I find those incidents sometimes funny, sometimes awe-inspiring. I believe that the way human beings collaborate together and make stuff happen is a wonderful mystery that can never be fully captured in the complicated rationalisations of experts. Indeed, so great is that will to "go on together" that it has enabled many organisations to do quite well, even though their leaders and their gurus weigh them down with complicated rules and models. There will always be experts taking the credit for things that I believe happen despite, not because of, their efforts.

Truth or fiction?

Ton Zijlstra, in a comment at Piers' site, wonders if the story is a "urban legend". Not very urban I suppose, but let's say it is a legend. Then I ask: whether or not it's true, what is it about this story that makes us want it to be true and want to repeat it? I think because it speaks to the part of us that knows intuitively there is a lot more to life than the dull, logical tale we are sometimes told...

Moore Improv...

The (other) J Moore continues our Improv conversation. He makes this point really well:

I've found the biggest misnomer about Improv in business is executives believe Improv is acting. Improv is not about acting ... it's about looking, listening, and reacting.

Spot on. Acting is suggestive of a script; what Improv is about is the experience of the unscripted. So much business thinking plans for the planned; so much real life is figuring out what to do with things that aren't going to plan.

And I love this anecdote

In 1998, Mark McGwire, former St. Louis Cardinals home run hitting first baseman, walked into a Starbucks and gave the barista at the register a “gift” by commenting on how cool his Starbucks logo cap was. The barista took the “gift” and responded by giving the cap to McGwire.

A few nights later on the broadcast of the World Series, an NBC television camera spotted Mark McGwire in the stands proudly sporting the Starbucks logo cap the barista had given him. The television camera fixated on McGwire for over a minute as the announcers cooed about McGwire’s home run heroics of that year.

Needless to say, the marketing and PR departments at Starbucks were overjoyed at the visibility the company received during the World Series without having to fork over advertising dollars.

Improv: more than laughter...

John Moore at Brand Autopsy and I have been having a good email conversation about Improv in marketing. I was delighted to discover that he and his fellow coroner are big fans of Improv and have worked to use it more in organisations. I thought I'd open the conversation up...

John made this point

The conventional business set seems to immediately connect Improv with comedy/humor. One can't blame them. Most, if not all, of the improv business folks have experienced has been from a comedy act, comedic television show, or an offsite corporate retreat game involving Improv which is used as a funny icebreaker "get your mind loose" activity.

Before gaining a better understanding that Improv is more about listening and reacting than about delivering on an off-the-cuff punchline, I too associated Improv with more with comedy

I think John's identified a view of Improv that means organisations are likely to overlook much of its value.

Of course, I want to say that I’m in favour of laughter at work and I think there’s a crucial difference between solemnity and seriousness.

And then there’s laughter and laughter.

An important nuance in Improv is the difference between telling gags on the one hand, and the laughter that arises inadvertently, not deliberately instigated by the players. This relates to “scriptwriting”, which is the label my teachers used to identify the behaviour of a player who moves out of the moment and is working to control the story.

A lot of brands are doing that sort of scriptwriting: after doing too much research, they try to formulate the perfect outbound communication and in so doing actually stifle the sort of dialogue that might hold a brand together.

A friend also offered me this thought: that the laughter at good improv is often not because the words said are funny; in a script, they might not raise a laugh. He said people often laugh because something deeply satisfying is happening. That satisfaction is – I believe – that in true Improv, human beings are truly present and spontaneous. An experience organisational life often suppresses. If Improv is just seen as a just a funny way to warm up a group, something really important is overlooked...

Houston: It's worth it

A friend just sent me an article from the Houston Chronicle. The original seems to be in the paid-for archive, but here's the gist:

Throughout its existence Houston has struggled to come up with an effective image campaign. There have been many attempts, but none like the latest.

Calling attention to flying cockroaches, pollution, flooding, construction and billboards, it's called "Houston. It's Worth It."

Houston. It's worth it is the brainchild of a local adfirm, ttweak.

"Houston. It's Worth It" spotlights Houston's 20 "afflictions," which
include: "The heat. The traffic. The sprawl. The ridicule. The air. The no mountains."

Its intent isn't to focus on the negatives, but to create a vehicle for which people can express their reasons for liking Houston despite the hardships, Thompson said.

E-mails from residents explaining why Houston is worth it will be a central campaign component

The campaign is, apparently, self-financed rather than ordained from on high.

I like the sound of this. Ads coming from the grassroots up - and acknowledging reality instead of painting a phoney ideal. This sounds like the sort of marketing I'd like to be part of!

Update A few links I found via Google: Houston Chronicle Article (free); PubliusTX blogs ; Charles Cuffner blogs

Improv and service recovery

Rich from Hello World in South Africa adds a nice riff to yesterday's post on Miles Davis. He relates the idea of improvising to service recovery, recalling his days as a waiter.

I remember a lot of the other waiters getting overly upset with the grillers when they made the occasional mistake with an order. It never bothered me though. I was almost always guaranteed an extra 5% tip when there was a mistake, because I got to show how well I handled it. Damage recovery is one of the very few times you get to show-off. It's often difficult to shine when all is running as expected.

Nice story.

By the way, I get a child-like thrill that a post by a guy in Texas is picked up in London and embellished in Johannesburg.

Sports vs Fun

Bernie DeKoven has an interesting post on Sports vs Fun, about an increase in violence around youth sport. What caught my eye was this:

Of the three participant groups — players, coaches and spectators — players are the least often cited as the source of poor conduct.

Three-quarters of critical incidents reported originate from the adults. Coaches tend to be responsible for roughly 40 per cent and spectators for 33 per cent, while just over 25 per cent are caused by the players.

Fascinating. Bernie goes on to report on one creative solution: which is to get the spectators playing too! I love the simplicity of that, so much better than a lot of handwringing...

It also makes me wonder about all sorts of other human activities where people are spectating when deep down they'd rather be playing... Traditional business conferences come to mind, a few speakers and everyone else forced to listen and, if they're lucky, ask a question - in contrast to Open Space where everyone can participate.

The next note

At Brand Autopsy, John Moore quotes Miles Davis

When you hit a wrong note it's the next note that makes it good or bad

I like that and it reminds me of one of the fun things about Improv work.. When doing Improv exercises, people often make mistakes - and it's not the mistake itself that affects the game, but how they respond to the mistake. For instance: suppose their task in the exercise is to say a word and they can't think of one... if they panic at this mistake and bury head in hands, it slows everyone down. If they don't give themselves a hard time and just go with whatever comes into their head, the game moves on.

Beyond Lovemarks: Fouroboros engages

Mark at fouroboros has fired off another batch of conversation grenades, partly in response to my continuing anti-Lovemarks postings. I'm on the record as a big fan, and this post is a cracker, a mix of elegant thought and blunt language.

A few more complicated diagrams than I can normally handle but great ideas in here.

The explicit steals attention

Here's one that resonates with me.

In fact, I've been using the same iceberg metaphor myself in conversations for a while. The focus on the bit we can see is part of the tyranny of the explicit, on which I've commented before here and here.

A friend was trying to sell a creative thinking course to a corporate and in response was told that unless the "deliverables" were made clear, the person wouldn't buy in. Because she was "accountable" to her colleagues. A client asked me to list the exercises I would use on a training in one column, with the intended learning points in the other. I refused. Bascially to do so is to deny the reality of any kind of creative learning - which is that WE DON'T KNOW where it will take us.

Do we always need solutions?

Another manifestation of the tyranny of the explicit is the insistence that if someone only identifies a problem, without offering a solution, they are being "negative". It's part of a mentality that can't abide confusion, uncertainty and the stage of creative chaos that precedes leaps forward and growth. It also ignores the way that groups of people can solve problems - in collaborative thinking, if one person takes on the role of critic, maybe someone else gets to play the role of synthesier or solution provider.

Throwing ourselves at the problem

Here's another blast from Mark

many of us become economic irrationalists viewing it more wise to throw money at a problem or situation, because our organizations do not sanction or structure themselves to allow us to throw ourselves INTO a problem or work. But collectively, we don't and won't do any throwing when bosses... insist on ghostwriting every bit of the dialogue and scripting "acceptable" denouements before the adventure's even begun

That's a great turn of phrase: throwing money at a problem instead of showing up and having the courage to state what one really thinks.

Now there may be times when teams function better when there is a shared explict goal and agreement on how to get there - but I'm increasingly convinced that this is but a superficial rationalisation of something at once more complex and more simple. The more simple bit is (I think) that basically people want to get along, and prefer to travel into the unknown in company rather than alone. The complex bit is all the bits of human interaction going on out of awareness, stuff that can never really be mapped explicitly, and doesn't really need to be.

Here's an example. A friend explained to me that he's learning to manage the phase of parenthood where his daughter is now 18 and must be treated as an adult, yet in some ways is also still a child. He was on holiday and she rang him from her mobile. She was in a town he'd never been to, but she was lost and couldn't find her destination. Now if we focus on the explicit, there would be no point speaking to her father, who has no map of the town and could only offer the advice to ask for directions, which would hardly be rocket science. Nevertheless, they engaged in a ping pong conversation where he offered suggestions like this, and she didn't act on them. After four minutes, she suddenly announced "Oh, I've found it now" and rang off. Was this a pointless conversation? I say No. The point was she had a simple human need for a little companionship in uncertainty, she didn't really need - or probably expect - an explicit answer even though on the surface that's what she was looking for.

Similarly, my friend described the challenge of adjusting to this new uncertain phase of parenting. Did he want, or need, any of the no doubt thousand of books written by experts on how to manage this important transition. No! Because - I think - we are actually humanly programmed to muddle through these things, and it's more fun to work it out for ourselves than be told how to.

Maybe this is the point of all this...

What on earth has any of this got to do with branding? Well, I think if we look at what really gets people working together, it may be none of logical things that most consultants draw those wretched spidery diagrams about. It may, indeed, be the opposite of that. I think that most of this brand strategy just gets in the way of answering the more interesting challege we each face daily: how shall we go on together?

Indeed, it occurs to me I may have reached the nub of what I dislike about Lovemarks. Which is that this simple desire for, and ability to create, companionship in uncertainty; this basic human instinct for collaboration - this is Love. It is the very opposite of the shallow, adrenalised attachment to material things and abstract ideas that Kevin Roberts' tiresome book eulogises.

And if you don't understand, don't worry. Neither do I really. It's not a problem.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Dave Pollard has posted a great summary of The Wisom of Crowds. I'd like to focus on this bit:

The group's answer, he shows, is almost invariably better than any expert's answer, even better than the best answer of the experts in the group. The group's answer is the collective answer, a term Surowiecki prefers to 'average' or 'consensus' answer, which aren't always the same thing. And the superiority of the collective answer depends importantly on the group's members having three qualities:

- Intellectual diversity: Different opinions and perspectives (unlike most management teams and boards, who tend to select others who think the same way they do),
- Independence: Freedom from the tendency to want to agree automatically with what one or more other group members says, and
- Decentralization with Aggregation: Individual access to different, specialized knowledge, and a mechanism for effectively sharing that knowledge with the rest of the group.

...Surowiecki drops his first bombshell early: "There is no evidence that one can become expert in something as broad as decision-making, policy, or strategy...or perhaps even management. ... Large groups of diverse individuals will make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled decision-maker." The implication of this is that business executives, expert consultants, investment analysts, egomaniacal doctors and heads of state are not competent to make important decisions related to cognitive, coordination or cooperation problems, and should always defer to the collective wisdom of large diverse groups when such problems arise.

,,,The book describes at length the phenomenon of groupthink and how it biases groups' decisions and gives collective wisdom a bad name. In fact there are four phenomena at work: The tendency of groups to excessively rationalize away minority views as improbable, the shyness of individuals to voice the first opposing view in the face of an apparent consensus, the tendency to accept consensus of a small number as inherent 'proof' of that consensus' validity, and the bandwagon tendency of groups to be infected by what Gladwell in The Tipping Point called an 'epidemic'.

I like this! I'm interested in the distinction between a collective decision and a consensus and I've long been fascinated by groupthink and have many times experienced groups where the consensus is a low common denominator, with many responses suppressed in favour of cosy agreement.

This seems to provide more evidence of the value of people really "showing up" to relationships, being willing to express contrary views and bring more of their responses, emotional and intellectual, to bear in group decision-making.

Beyond Lovemarks: Restoring the power of language

Mark at fouroboros has posted a passionate response to my earlier post on modesty. I want to pick up on this robust observation:

Lying, fudging, or corporate cosmetic surgery in the form of PR can't change what we intimately know of the character of the organizations to which we loan our lives. But--and here's the real tragedy--they can vastly increase our levels of guilty knowledge and rob our willingness to help haul employers and their brands out of the fire. Obvious, to those with eyes to see, isn't it?

Those old and simple truths, as ideals, are self-sustaining and extremely socially relevant, if not always self-starting or self-clarifying, hence the need for leaders who simplify--and do it ethically. The absence of these relevant ideals means you resort to constant spot applications of the cattle prods of fear-mongering, jealousy, pride, greed etc. We destroy the village in our misguided efforts to prop it up. In this, business, branding, politics, etc are no different. Despite being counterproductive in the short term, and destructive in the longterm, coercion is far easier than cooption or understanding to the narrowminded, hurried, or inattentive. (Read: Decisionmakers.) But, sure as night follows day, the alternatives do break through like a daisy in the concrete, and the institutionalized venality and laziness are shown in high relief. In this way, those "voila!" moments describe the finding of something that was never really lost.

Good stuff. Few things are more corrosive to morale than leaders touting versions of reality that do not correspond to people's experience. Vision and aspiration are fine, indeed necessary, but if they become a denial of reality they are demoralising.

One of my favourite examples is from a book published by Interbrand, which blandly states, "Today, Kelloggs is synonymous with health and vitality." If this kind of casual lying goes unchallenged, I believe it corrodes the power of language in an organisation and thus diminishes the force and power of its conversations. The continous challenging of this kind of wishful thinking is - for me - be a mark of an organsation that has some vitality and purpose.

The language of death

So much of the language of branding (and business in general) is the language of death - it is abtracted, disembodied, dessicated. Typically, speakers present themselves not as responsible actors with their own beliefs and opinions, but as marionettes. When asked for an opinion, they tell you what the organisation thinks, or what their boss thinks, and not what they think. When you get to meet their boss, they need to brief you for 15 minutes on what you can and can't say to them. Mantras about accountability, core competences, ROI are trotted out with apparent vehemence - but if you ask them to give specific examples, they can't answer, because they don't actually know that these mantras actually mean to them.

At a profound level, people who are unable to articulate their experience are likely to lose touch with it. In doing so, the best motivation they will find is the motivation of the slave. Grandiose brand visions, if unchallenged, create a culture of denial and disengagement. We only need to observe the typical level of engagement of people working in our shops and banks to assess the desperate paucity of vision of the branding of these organisations.

Challenging conversations

One of the most effective ways I can help organisations change the way they speak is in the way I speak to them. I believe that's a choice that each of us has for any brand we are connected with. We can all make a choice to go along with its half-truths or we can choose to challenge them.

People high up in organisations freqently see change as something that takes place outside the room. It happens to other people, rather than to themselves. Much of the talk about organiational change is just a set of shadow conversations - talk about problem people outside the room, instead of the doubts, fears, passions and beliefs of those who are inside the room.

The experience I have of Pret a Manger, Sainsbury's, NatWest bank, whoever, is not a given. It's something I collaborate in or collude with. I increasingly decline the choice of colluding with rubbish brands. That's a choice that any stakeholder in any brand can make. Brands are only the sum of our individual choices of how to engage with each other. We can choose to engage passively or we can be active. We can go along with bland half-truths or we can ask for more.

Beyond Lovemarks: Things/Ideas or People/Relationships?

I was chatting with a friend this morning. She commented that in the Lovemarks book, Kevin Roberts talks a great deal about Love, but we get very little sense of who are the people he loves (except, of course, himself), and an awful lot about the things he loves.

We learn, for example, of his love for Head & Shoulders shampoo and Steinlager beer. Rob Paterson made a great comment about Head & Shoulders

H & S is merely a portfolio filler that fits somewhere between P & G's 9 other shampoos!

http://www.pg.com/product_card/prod_card_hair_care.jhtml

There is no love here! Only calculation.

The path of Lovemarks is not the path of love

I'm not for one for rigid rules, but on the whole I prefer to reserve love for living creatures. Love for things sounds more like lust to me, or addiction. My friend this morning said she uses a brand of shampoo that she "quite likes", and I think that seems a pretty appropriate level of loyalty to feel to a thing.

Indeed, when you get into the love of things, you start down a path that is going to end in treating people as objects. Consider this comment, taken from Fast Company's somewhat fawning review

General Mills, for example, was looking for a way to give Cheerios a boost a couple of years ago. After applying the lovemarks research, "we realized there was an opportunity to take Cheerios to a higher emotional ground, moving it from being part of the kitchen cupboard to part of the family," says Mike Burns, co-CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. To ramp up the brand's love quotient, General Mills replaced the bowl on the package with a heart and retooled its advertising to focus less on the product's functional benefits (oats are good for you) and more on its emotional ones. "It became very much about motherhood and nurturance -- that Cheerios is an expression of love and doing the best for your family," says Burns. "That's when the brand took off." Cheerios is now the top cereal brand in the country, and occupies a position that's the equivalent of beachfront property on the lovemarks graph.

This story captures the kind of shoddy philosophy we are dealing with here. Saatchis take pride in making Cheerios "part of the family". This notion is either (a)utterly ludicrous or (b)utterly despicable. Maybe both. (Though of course this is also yet another example of Saatchis showing off how clever they are so let's take it with a pinch of salt.)

This is also a good instance of how brand gurus get fixated with abstractions and hyperventilate. There is little sense of feet on the ground here, or any responsibility for the notion they are championing. Lovemarks are about the abuse of love, not the practice of it.

Lovemarks lure organisations into silly or unpleasant promises they can't or shouldn't live up to. The philosophy espoused here is at best a con, and at worst a pretty crappy conclusion to several thousand years of human civilisation.

Surely to god if the makers of Cheerios really wanted to express love (instead of manipulating how other people express it) they would find a more productive use of their time and talents than this.

I also believe Lovemarks can't even work financially over time. Simply because the more an organisation spouts mantras that defy the reality of stakeholders lives, the less likely it is that they can host the sort of real conversations that actually make lives productive, engaging and satisfying.

In contrast, effective brands don't deny reality, they embrace it. They don't legislate for conversations, they provoke them. Many brands I've worked for have been shams, where their people are awash with unspoken frustrations with each other. A few have been vibrant, where people seem to share genuine passion and can tolerate or even enjoy conflict and challenge.

Beyond Lovemarks: Spontaneity

In the last post in this series, I talked about brands as living systems. Their meaning can't be determined by management, but is created moment by moment among stakeholders. It's in the detailed interactions everytime someone buys from, sells to or in some other way interacts with the organisation that a brand's meaning is made. And one person's meaning is going to differ from another's.

Now plenty of brand consultants get this and then leap to the conclusion that, therefore, all the "touchpoints" must be closely controlled, in an effort to stop the brand story from going off at a tangent.

For instance, consider this horrendous list of topics for a conference on internal branding, which I quoted before:

Equipping your leaders with tools and techniques... for Successful Delivery of Brand Values

Achieving consistency.. to ensure everyone is speaking the same language inside and out... ensure management team are using the same vocabulary, look, feel and tone of voice in all forms of communication from post-it notes to emails

Driving change in colleagues behaviour

I'm not against organisations having rules and procedures, but this is absurd and unpleasant. It harks back to the idea that the brand is a fixed thing that can be controlled. Taken to extremes, this kind of thinking is going to squeeze the spontaneity out of all human transactions, a sort of IBM dark suit of language for the 21st Century.

It seems like everyone these days is talking about "storytelling " in brands, and cultivating "word of mouth". But they don't want natural word of mouth where people get to add variety. No, they want a consistent, rigid retelling of the tale according to on-high.

We live in the most heavily branded culture ever known, yet my own day-to-day experience, as well as copious amounts of data from Gallup, suggest that most employeers are disengaged from their work.Brands are supposed to be interesting, but mostly they are boring us to distraction. I think it's because the likes of Kevin Roberts come along with their egocentric formulae that want to drive the spontaneity out of branding.

They distrust spontaneity because it threatens the perfection of their formula for how things should be. It's one example of the reverence for the abstract and the material, over the relationship and the people (more on this soon). It leads to the deadening formulaic "have a nice day" customer service instead of allowing human beings the possibility of creating some fun together in a way that works for them in the moment.

I work a lot with Improv because it provides lots of experiences of going with the spontaneous, without the earth swallowing us up. Improv exercises allow us the thrill of discovering life can actually be more fun when we're not totally in control but are open to what happens in the moment. I remember trying to explain to a client that I wouldn't give him a list of the exercises I would run for his offsite with a matching list of the "learning points" because such thinking ran totally counter to what Improv was about, at least for me.

Audioblogging

Tony Goodson tips me off to Audioblogging.

Suw Charman is trying it for a week, and I'm going to see how it works.

First reaction: I like hearing her voice; it does add another human dimension to the blog. It won't replace the written word, but I think it would be fun as an occasional thing. (Not sure what I get for my $5 a month though).

Beyond Lovemarks: Emergence

This is the third post in a series putting forward an alternative way of creating socially useful and economically sustainable brands.

Although I have a reasonably clear intention in writing this series, I haven't decided how many instalments there are going to be. I haven't even drawn up a shortlist of possible sections, though some are starting to come to mind.

And after each of the first two entries, I've spent some of the next day worrying about what I left out, thinking of interesting exceptions and different interpretations. And one or two people have started adding comments and questions of their own. So I'm allowing my Beyond Lovemarks thinking to emerge.

Brands Emerge

Similarly, I've said before that I think it helps to think of brands as emergent. Not things that unfold according to the master plan, but that emerge as a result of all the encounters between people who belong, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or loathing, to the community around a brand.

That doesn't mean, that there is no role at all for strategy and planning but to my mind it should shift attention towards responding rapidly to what's going on at the chalkface (I hate that word "touchpoints"). Because your brand is not created in the boardroom or marketing department, it's being created by us ordinary folks who stack your shelves or pick our cornflakes off them.

Marketing departments and agencies love talking about customers. But the nearest some come to them is through the one-way mirror of a viewing facility in Surbiton. Often through a drink-fuelled haze. (See The Flaws of Focus Groups)

I believe with passion that something marvellous takes place when people are truly present to each other, something that cannot possibly occur in mediated conversations. Something that cannot possibly be distilled into a report, or reproduced by a seven-stage process following a consultant's flow chart.

It's interesting that the CEO of Tesco (biggest UK supermarket) is known for frequently walking the floor of supermarkets, wherease the now-deposed CEO of Sainsbury (former top dog, now in long decline) was more associated with a box at the Royal Opera. I suspect that the Tesco guy was more present to his brand's daily reinvention than his rival.

It's alive, I tell you

Where I'm heading with this is: maybe we should think of brands as more like living systems not machines. This makes them harder to explain on paper and a lot more challenging and fun to play with.

So what?

Commenting on yesterday's effort, Robert Paterson said:

I wonder also today as to who creates the brand in reality?

...Soon what a brand means and how the underlying product or service performs will not be as the owner says it is but as the public says it is.

What do branders and marketers do in response?

Which sums up what I've been saying so far and where I want to go next. I think in the next posts I'm going to talk about these responses: about the power of presence (really showing up to relationships); avoiding making dreams your master; having an attitude; balancing the known and the unknown; and pleasing yourself. You can be sure that collaboration and improvisation will be in the mix too.

Beyond Lovemarks: It's not yours to own

A while back, a client told me he would be too busy to take meetings for a while as he was going to be "building the brand". He seemed to mean that he needed time alone to do this. I imagine he would be putting together an impressive powerpoint with proposition and values statements, all the brand jargon we're so used to.

Also a few years ago, I worked on a campaign to promote investment trusts in the UK (they're a kind of mutual fund). The trade association for ITs paid an agency millions to do this with branding. A snazzy new logo was created. I remember the agency mastermind informing clients: "we've now created your new brand, the next step is for us to fill it with meaning." Extraordinary - as if the mere creation of a logo could somehow wipe the slate of any existing meanings people made for investment trusts; and as if the new meaning would be entirely of his agency's making.

Both these stories characterise a common misconception: that brands are things, things that the people at the top create, determine and control. What goes with this is a reverence for strategy documents and for tomes of market research. The idea is that by painstaking (and deeply dull) analysis of consumers, it's possible to develop the "killer" concept that will transform the market.

The stimulus is not the response

But the real world doesn't play that game.

Consider this blog post: the words that I am now typing and that you are now reading. In writing this, I intend to convey some kind of message to you. Whilst what I say will influence you in some way, I have no control over what you make these words mean. Look at the comments to mine, or anyone's posts, and you will see how each reader focusses on different ideas and makes different stories.

I often think branding committees should be made to play games of chinese whispers before each meeting, to remind them of the way human beings hear one thing and pass on another.

Branders typically think in terms of big ideas with the idea of more-or-less dictating to the market what their brand is.

As Cluetrain pointed out, markets are conversations. Why do branders think they are lectures?

(In a post on the language of branding I talk about the crazy way brand experts focus on obsessive control of the message, as if this somehow will determine the response of customers).

The truth is out there

We use the word brand as if it refers to something concrete. In reality, it's shorthand, an averaging out of all the different stories in each of our heads about what an organisation means. Now you can influence these stories by what you do and say, but you can't control them.

It's only human nature that branding experts tend to put their focus on the things they can see and can measure, rather than the bits they can't. Hence the ridiculous way they get in a lather about the profound meaning of the logo, how this colour "means" so-and-so, how that change of font will represent a new informality/formality/whatever.

The dance

But the interesting stuff is what isn't controlled. A marketing director talked about "dancing with customers". I liked this metaphor, but what sort of dance are we talking about?

For conventional branders, it's an 18th century ball. This is to be the introduction to society of a young lady. Her attendants fuss about each detail of her attire, her girdle is tightened, last-minute tips are whispered explaining exactly how to move. This is important, because upon her entrance to society, everyone will be watching. There is a certain way of doing things that will make the crowd at the ball behave in the desired way.

But our debutante is in for a shock, when she discovers the real world is not an elegant ball, but a rave party in Ibiza. Her grand entrance goes quite unnoticed amid the uproar. Her elaborate and cumbersome costume is an encumbrance. As she looks around at the scantily clad crowd having fun, she realises she'd much rather have a lot fewer layers. And it would be more fun to drop the predetermined pose and stary gyrating with whichever body comes closer. She throws off her clothes, drops the posture, and gets sweaty.

The dance is not some preprogrammed, choreographed bore. It is created between the participants moment-to-moment. Yes, there is some kind of structure holding it together, but there is invention and variety. Brands are not built in the heads of the experts; they're actually made up by each of us as we go about our lives.

Beyond Lovemarks: Modesty

(This is the first of a series of posts talking about alternative ways of creating brands that are socially useful and economically sustainable)

I want to talk about modesty, a quality somewhat lacking in many branding practitioners, and certainly in Kevin Roberts, whose book, Lovemarks, I and several others haven been protesting about lately.

The "great man" view of history

I imagine Roberts subscribes to the "great man" version of history. He speaks of the importance of the big gesture:

I have never believed that extraordinary results come from ordinary actions so I am attracted by extremes. I demonstrated the point when my Canadian Pepsi Team blew away Coke to become number one in the market. We celebrated by machine-gunning a Coke vending machine on stage at a conference. Risky? Yes. Stupid? Possibly. Memorable, inspiring? You bet.

This, of course, makes him ideally suited to be CEO of Saatchis. This agency has long sought to be the poster boy for the grandiose gesture. This is the agency that launched itself with a two-page manifesto in the Sunday Times, that took most of the credit for Margaret Thatcher's election success in 1979, that gave us the iconic adverts for The World's Favourite Airline. I have always doubted Saatchi's credit for the success of these clients, but no-one could accuse them of advocating modesty.

Yet there is quite a lot of evidence that extraordinary results very often do come from ordinary actions. Jim Collins' Good to Great provides ample evidence that ordinariness and being down-to-earth are common qualities of sustainably successful businesses and in particular of their CEOs.

I'm also reminded of Chris Corrigan's reflections on the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. This provided an awesome example of the revolutionary power of the cumulative, ordinary actions of ordinary people. Vaclav Havel describes how each time, for instance, a shopkeeper declined to have a "Workers of the World Unite" slogan in the window, they played their small part in dismantling the communist dictatorship.

Branding experts are not usually very modest

They say that history is written by the victors. They also say that success has many parents, while failure is an orphan. Put these two thoughts together and add to it branding people's fondness for exaggeration, and you get trouble.

For every successful brand, there are a myriad of boastful individuals trying to take the credit - either for a supposed act of dramatic leadership in bringing it about, or for having cracked the secret formula that led to its success. Look at most agency websites and stories are almost always ones of a series of unmitigated triumphs.

Sadly, some clients are clawing around for the magic formula and easily fall prey to such approaches.

Yet most branding fails

But most branding is not successful. For every great brand you or I could nominate, there are probably thousands of also-rans. In my experience, these failures are quietly covered up, rationalised or scapegoated by their perpetrators. And, of course, go largely unnoticed by the rest of us.

Thus the story of branding is a tale usually told by an egotist, and thus we get the conventional narrative of heroic leadership, blinding customer insight blah blah blah.

Typically, it is told as a series of highly rational decisions made by insightful gurus.

Modesty may work better

The conventional response to our overnoisy media environment is to make even more noise. This, of course, is very much in some people's financial interests. But I believe that powerful brands don't need to brag. The ones that do only risk the wrath of disappointed customers who find them falling short.

Collins' book has highlighted the role of the understated CEO. In his contrasting list of good-to-great and not-so-great companies, it was the latter whose CEO's turned up on magazine covers.

My favourite evocation of a more modest version of success is the account given by Jason Porter, founder of Friends Reunited.

I urge you to watch him talk in this .wmv movie. (You might want to skip the 2m45s introduction). His story of this pheonomenally successful business is told as a chapter of accidents, guesses and near misses. He tells how they created Friends Reunited almost as an afterthought, with little expectation of success, and assuming that they should really be doing something else. It has a smack of authenticity that is often lacking in such accounts.

Implications

Sadly, modest people often fail to capture public attention. Immodest ones, like Kevin Roberts, are thus allowed an undue degree of attention. But if modesty works, surely we should not look to the likes of Roberts for guidance on how to create a successful brand.

Indeed, nor should you look to me or anyone else for that elusive, "How To" of branding. Because "How tos" belong in the boring world of best practice. (And as Ton Zijlstra recently pointed out, best practice generally leads to being second best at someone else's game).

Perhaps it would be best to pay less attention to the noisy, confident brand experts and more attention to some of the quieter voices...

Another modest suggestion is that creating the next successful brand, or making your current one at least a tad more effective, is about being willing to take a step into the unknown. In such circumstances, the best companions will not be those who claim to know the unknown. Nor, in all likelihood, those with dubious but detailed rationalisations of other brands' successes.

You'd be much better off travelling with those who are excited by the idea of exploring the new and will be good companions in that process. On which I shall no doubt be saying more soon?

Are brainy people allowed to rant?

My last post on Lovemarks stirred up some strong responses. Most seemed to agree strongly, so it's welcome when someone comes along to disagree, as Stuart Henshall does in the comments.

Stuart is - in my book - a good blogger who puts a lot of work into very well considered posts. I have a lot of respect for his views. I also want to challenge what I feel is one implication of what he says. Stuart argues: "Here is a collection of brainpower being wasted with ranting and personal attacks," and continues "My suggestion is to be challenging in a more positive way."

Yes, I've been thinking I want to add a post or two setting out an alternative view and I mean to do so. And what follows is provoked by Stuart's comment but I'm not suggesting that he is taking an entirely opposite general position.

I think some of the best blog entries - my own and other people's - are the rants. This is not an accident, nor is it a mark of some fatal moral flaw. I believe the world of organisations gets stymied if we subscribe to a narrow view of politeness and being positive. There is more to life - much more - than the purely rational, yet much business discourse avoids completely many powerful "negative" emotions.

I really distrust the idea that some emotions are "negative" and others "positive".

What makes blogs fun - at least for me - is when I get a sense of a real flesh and blood human being behind them.

I love Improv and its principle of "Yes, And" - but this doesn't mean that we simply go around being agreeable. That would be deeply dull. Sometimes the best way to show up to a relationship is to say No. Sometimes we won't even see the way forward until we Stop doing what isn't working. One or two of my strongest friendships are with people I strongly disliked and disagreed with when I first met them.

Also, consider this. Until a week ago, I just felt queasy about Lovemarks. I wrote a couple of mixed cautious posts elsewhere about my views. Then I read Chris Lawer's original post which definitely qualified as a rant on the subject. (Chris has toned it down a little since, pity). This catalysed my views, energised me, and made me realise that I don't have mixed views on Lovemarks, I have a deep gut dislike of it. Then I post a rant, and several other people come out in support. It isn't reason alone that has brought us together, it is passion - in this particular case, in the form of anger.

A few years ago, I sat in an encounter group whose facilitator said "I like anger, it can be very energising". At the time, as an anger-phobic, I felt rather alarmed by this view. Not any more.

And no, I am not saying all expressions of anger are good. But I am saying that Anger gets a bad rap a lot of the time. Used well it can be powerful force for good. (Consider Jesus and the Money Changers; What is that got Bob Geldof to create Band Aid?)

Debate welcome.

Chinese cars

Seth Godin has a provocative question:

The thing about China is that the government isn't shy about being authoritarian.

So what if the Chinese government decided to decree what it meant for something to be legally sold as a car?

He goes on to list some smart features that they could legislate into all their cars to make them safer and more environmentally friendly. Then suggests we apply the same model to lots of industries, arguing that a lot of them need to be reversioned. Good thought provocation. What I like is his attention to the externalities, the adverse community impact of selfish, status-driven car buying.

Actually, such an approach would be death to a lot of advertising that is almost wholly reliant on status games to cajole us into buying stuff.

Lovemarks panned again

Chris Lawer fires another salvo at Lovemarks. This time he quotes a review in Eye Magazine by Rick Paynor. This is cracking stuff:

'I love Head & Shoulders. I won’t buy or use anything else. It’s a Lovemark of mine.' By his own admission, the man who wrote this touching tribute to dandruff shampoo has very little hair. He believes, like the Beatles, that ‘All You Need is Love’. He also wants us to know that he has homes in New York, St. Tropez and Auckland. His name is Kevin Roberts and he is CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi

...Now Roberts has written a book in which he expounds this not very hard to grasp idea at wearying length. Lovemarks (powerHouse books) is by turns wince-makingly sentimental, infuriatingly self-satisfied and intolerably patronising. Its design suggests that it might be aimed at six-year-olds.

...It’s not enough that business enjoys unwarranted levels of power and influence and bestows vast rewards on the lucky few, while deluging us with idiotic propaganda. It now seeks to present itself as some kind of well meaning global saviour, even as it tries to annex just about every worthwhile aspect of life – mystery, sensuality, intimacy, love – for commercial purposes. ‘At Saatchi & Saatchi,’ Roberts reports, ‘our pursuit of Love and what it could mean for business has been focused and intense.’ If that sentence doesn’t make you feel even a little bit queasy, then they have got to you already.

The more I think about Lovemarks, the more I dislike it.

Like me, you probably get those dodgy emails from supposed relatives of deposed African dictators offering you millions of dollars for a bit of dubious account shifting. The con is that you get stung for all sorts of processing fees and the money never shows up (the so-called 419 Scam). Well, apparently, the one-in-a-bazillion guy who falls for the scam loses quite a bit of money. And then what happens is the conmen contact him again, in the guise of policemen who will help him recover his money... they just need some help with admin fees.... So he gets taken all over again.

Well, that's pretty much what Saatchis are up to with this Lovemarks racket. They're saying, oh, isn't it dreadful all that dishonest unloving advertising of the past. Oh dear, we're just as appalled as you are, honest. But now we believe in Love. So you can trust us now!

Roberts himself comes across as a raving egomaniac. Quite apart from the Lovemarks website, he has his own temple, Saatchikevin. Here's a snippet of it. Personally, I can't read this without hearing it in my head with a very pretentious accent.

Great brands infiltrate your life and your identity. It's that life-long love affair thing again. That's why I still shave with a Gillette Sensor and will fight anyone for the last Steinlager in the fridge.

I have never believed that extraordinary results come from ordinary actions so I am attracted by extremes. I demonstrated the point when my Canadian Pepsi Team blew away Coke to become number one in the market. We celebrated by machine-gunning a Coke vending machine on stage at a conference. Risky? Yes. Stupid? Possibly. Memorable, inspiring? You bet.

And take a look at this picture of our Kevin. Pretentious? Lui?

This is not love, it is delusion. Self-delusion.

And yet thousands of people are going out and buying this book, in many different languages. It makes me want to weep.

Dell letdown

Dave Pollard writes a scathing report - My Dell Story - which reminds me of several of my own experiences trying to get "support" from PC companies. Going beyond his own difficulties, he challenges the wider impact of the industry

The big seven produce about 200,000,000 new computers each year, which on average end up in landfill sites in four to five years (the fastest growing and one of the most toxic components of our garbage problem). The vast majority are made from shoddy materials in third world countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore, by workers who get paid a few dollars a day, using components that wreak environmental havoc from slipshod and reckless mining and refining techniques. Why bother making a quality product when it will be garbage so soon anyway?

The drive to reduce costs clearly has all sorts of negative impacts. What we save on the initial purchase, we rapidly lose in wasted time and stress when it fails us. To say nothing of the wider issue Dave raises.

The phrase "customer care" is bandied about a lot by consultants, but I wonder how many organisations take the time to reflect on what care means.. what it's like to really care for a person, rather than devise tactics for short-term gratification on the one hand, followed by organised avoidance on the other.

Direct experience

Thanks to Evelyn Rodgriguez via Rolf Potts for this

"Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that is becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world -- our traditional source of direct insights -- is rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man's place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty-four hours, is denied to them. It's no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about." -- Michael Crichton, Travels

Future of organisations

Rob Paterson blogs a great article from Fortune: