Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (44 page)

If the person is really great, hire them. For a weekend. Pay them to spend another 20 hours pushing their way through something. Get them involved with the people they’ll actually be working with and find out how it goes. Not just the outcomes but the process. Do their behavior and insight change the game for the better? If they want to be in sales, go on a sales call with them. Not a trial run, but a real one. If they want to be a rabbi, have them give a sermon or visit a hospital.

Yes, people change after you hire them. They always do. But do they change more after an unrealistic office interview or after you’ve actually watched them get in the cage and tame a lion?

Classical music wasn’t always “classical.”

Geeks spend a lot of time worrying about the cutting edge, focusing on creating Digg bait, reaching the early adopters, making something cool enough and fresh enough to capture attention and to spread.

We spend very little time thinking about the other end of the curve.

That’s where culture gets stuck.

Once something makes its way to the mass market, the mass market doesn’t want it to change. And once it moves from that big hump in the middle of the market to become a classic, the market doesn’t just want it to not change, but insists that it not change.

So classical music gets stuck because the new stuff isn’t like the regular kind, the classics. French food got stuck, because no restaurant could risk its three stars to try something new. A convention can’t change cities or formats. Schools can’t start their curriculum over. The culture gets stuck because the masses want it be stuck.

That’s because the late adopters and the laggards have plenty of money and influence—while the early adopters have a short attention span and rank low in persistence.

Inside most fields, we see pitched battles between a few people who want serious change to reinvigorate the genre they love—and the masses, who won’t tolerate change of any kind. Hey, there are still people arguing vehemently about whether Mass should be in Latin or not.

History has shown us that the answer is crystal clear: if you want change, you’ve got to leave. Change comes, almost always, from the outside. The people who reinvented music, food, technology, and politics have always gone outside the existing dominant channels to create something new and vital and important.

It’s hard to remember back 23 years ago, but back then, when dinosaurs walked the earth, a few things were true:

1. Commercials were commercials—they sold stuff.
   
2. Content was content—it wasn’t filled with commercials.
   

The famous 1984 Apple ad changed everything. It was now commercial as content, commercial as event. The Apple ad was seen by more people
after
the game, via free media, than saw it during the game itself.

So, as you waste an evening watching television, understand that the media game you’re watching (as opposed to the football game) is not about selling anything per se. Instead, it’s about creating a short little movie that spreads. Yes, it’s permission marketing. Permission marketing because viewers are asking for the ads, they want the ads, they look
forward to them. BUT we’re not watching them because we want to buy or even to learn (the way, say, Google ads work). We’re watching because we want to be in on the joke, to have something to share. It’s big enough that there are entire Web pages about the commercials. I’ll be contributing to the one at
Adweek
. At least until I get too bored with the game …

The commercial aspect of this is fascinating as well. Who wins? Probably not the shareholders. Someone at Frito Lay told me that they can prove that enough people buy chips during halftime (they leave their house and race out to the store) that the ads pay for themselves. But insurance?

The winners, I think, are the agencies and the pundits and those that would like advertising to be more than it actually is.

Since he was written up in the
Times
last week, No Impact Man has been causing shockwaves. Here’s a guy who, with his family, is going without; he’s restricting his intake to local foods, and his output to a tiny fraction of the typical American’s.

I was at the Union Square Market last week, buying some local eggs. A well-dressed woman marched up and handed two empty cardboard egg trays to the farmer, for reusing (a step better than recycling).

Suddenly, $40 an ounce for raspberries flown in from Chile isn’t so sexy anymore.

Now, people look at someone driving a Chevy Suburban the same way they look at a fit person parking in a handicapped space. “Why,” they wonder, “do you need to do that?” It’s sort of a mix of suspicion and pity.

The richest and best-educated people in our economy are shifting, and pretty quickly. They’re just as willing to spend money as they always were, but now it’s not focused on fancy organic stuff at the Whole Foods Market or giant bulletproof cars from Germany or private jet travel. Instead, the market is trying as hard as it can to spend time and money without leaving much of a trace.

I think this story has legs and is going to be around for a long time. Zero is the new black.

I got more mail about the
Washington Post
story of violinist Joshua Bell playing in a DC Metro station than about any other non-blog topic ever. I saw it when it first came out but didn’t blog it because I thought the lesson was pretty obvious to my readers. World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station; almost no one stops to listen. The experiment just proved what we already know about context, permission, and worldview. If your worldview is that music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is invisible.

But why all the mail? (And the
Post
got plenty too.) Answer: I think it’s because people realized that if they had been there, they would have done the same thing. And it bothers us.

It bothers us that we’re so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that we’ve created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world most of the time, even when we suffer because of it. It made me feel a little smaller, knowing that something so beautiful was ignored because the marketers among us have created so much noise and so little trust.

I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and to offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin to trust.

I had breakfast today with a senior executive who estimates that she spends more than 30% of her time in internal meetings.

My guess is that many marketers (who seem to go to more meetings than most people) might envy a number that low.

Despite the time spent, most people don’t seem particularly happy with the results the meetings create. In that spirit, I want to share some radical thoughts on how you could completely change the meeting dynamic in your organization.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEETINGS. It’s a huge mistake to just show up in a conference room and have a meeting. If the expectation is “yet another meeting,” then the odds are, you’ll have yet another meeting.

Here are a few very distinct types of meetings:

• Just so everyone knows:
  This is a meeting in which one person or small group tells other people what’s already been decided and is about to happen. These meetings should always have a written piece to go with them, and in many cases, it should be distributed a day before the meeting. The meeting should be very short, take place in an auditorium-type setting, not a circle, and have focused Q&A at the end. Even a quiz. It’s the football huddle, and the running back isn’t supposed to challenge the very premises the quarterback is using to call the play.
  
• What are you up to:
  This is a meeting in which every participant needs to present the state of their situation. It probably happens on a regular basis and each person should have a strict time limit. Like two minutes (with an egg timer). After presenting the situation, each attendee can send their summary in an email to one person, who can sum it up and send it out to everyone.
  
• What does everyone think?
  In third place, a meeting where anyone can speak up. People who don’t speak up on a regular basis should not be invited back. It’s obvious that they are good at some other function in the office, so you’re wasting their time if they sit there.
  
• We need a decision right now:
  These are ad hoc meetings that have a specific agenda and should end with a decision. A final decision that doesn’t get reviewed.
  
• Hanging-out meetings:
  These are meetings with no real agenda, lots of side conversations, bored people, people instant messaging and just sort of hanging out. Sometimes these are fun, but I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t been to one in three years.
  
• To-hear-myself-talk meetings:
  You get the idea.
  

There are more, of course, and your situation is special, but in general, you ought to be able to clearly delineate what an ideal meeting is like, and then make it happen.

TIPS: I think most of the time, most meetings should be held without chairs. People standing up think more quickly and get distracted less often. And the meetings don’t last as long.

All-day meetings should be banned. Meetings that attempt to accomplish more than one of the tasks above should be banned.

Bonus tip: Last person to walk in the door pays $10 to the coffee fund.

Extra bonus tip: Hire someone to come in and videotape a few of your standard meetings. Watch what happens.

Last tip: If there’s someone senior in the group who comes to meetings, spouts off, and then either changes his mind or doesn’t take action, start asking people to sign in to meetings (with a pen) and then, when the meeting is over, sign out (with a pen) on a document that you create in the meeting that says what you did and what’s going to happen next.

If it’s not worth doing this stuff, then you’ve just signed up to keep wasting 30% of your day.

Even in the Web 2.0 world, marketers need money. We need money to create remarkable products and to tell stories that spread. We need it to hire the best people and, most of all, to stick it out until our ideas spread.

Which is why all but the largest companies need to learn a key lesson of personal finance.

The chart opposite shows what happens to two people. The smart person, we’ll call him Gallant, manages to save $100 a month for five years.

The other one, we’ll call him Doofus, spends $100 more than he has every month.

After five years, Gallant has almost $7,000 in the bank. Even with only 5% interest, he’s building an asset that keeps him out of trouble with his mother-in-law and gives him the freedom to invest in the next part of his business.

In the same period of time, Doofus has used his credit cards to finance his debt of $100 a month. That tiny nut has now added up to about $13,000 in 24%-interest credit card debt. And every single month it gets a lot bigger.

If this isn’t interesting to you, consider the company that spends $10,000 or $100,000 extra every month.

A lot of organizations decide to skip the “rice and beans and studio apartment” step. They decide to “go big or stay home.” More often than not, they end up going home.

I spent many years window-shopping restaurant menus and driving all night to get to meetings where the plane ride cost just a bit too much. I thought at the time that I had no choice, but now I realize that I could have borrowed money on my credit cards and lived a little easier. I’m glad I didn’t.

When I talk to people who want to become marketers, I almost always tell them to go start something and go market something. The same advice for 15-year-olds and seniors. Turning off the TV and building a CafePress store is not only free but starts to build a professional-skills asset for the long haul. Pay as much as you need to for things that matter, and as little as you can for things that don’t. And never borrow money to pay for something that goes down in value.

It turns out that it’s a lot easier to peel a banana if you start from the “wrong” end.

You don’t even have to use your teeth.

Here’s the thing: I know this. I’ve tried it. It’s true.

I still peel a banana the hard way. It feels like the right thing to do.

Selling change is much harder than you think.

Many people are arguing for a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the world. This isn’t a post about whether or not we need smaller cars, local produce, smaller footprints, and less consumption. It’s a post about how deeply entrenched the desire for more is.

More has been around for thousands of years. Kings ate more than peasants. Winning armies had more weapons than losing ones. Elizabeth Taylor had more husbands than you.