Crossroads Dispatches

These Are Not Conversations, These Are Not Relationships

It's very surreal and astonishing that the only two people I've sent a final draft of my essay Marketing: What's Love Got to Do With It? before it was available at the More Space blog are the author and the citation in this post. Doc chimes on the post too:

I am so sick of marketing and marketers.

Me too. Have been for a long time. In fact, that's why we wrote Cluetrain six years ago.

It's even more surreal that what instigated my essay in the first place was the divisiveness and lack of respect and dialogue I witnessed prior to the 2004 U.S. elections. And I saw the very same in the media, in society, and in the blogosphere itself that went far beyond the political. I saw it in dividing my own family:

I struggle to find the spot of land - a little patch of grass swaying in the canyon gusts - across the ever-widening gulf to build a bridge.

Many people won't even have a conversation with me because they obviously know me: because I am in marketing, because I am a blogger, because I'm one of those technocrats, because I am an American, because I was raised by first-generation immigrants, because my last name is Rodriguez, because I'm religious, because I'm not Christian enough, because I sound like green organic granola new-agey, because I sound like a ruthless capitalist, because I am a woman, because I'm young, because I'm old, because because because...you have me pegged. Alas, the ironic thing is that is what far too many marketers are trained to do: Peg people. Peg our motivations. A professor writes:

You, Ms. Rodriguez, appear to be an enemy. I teach philosophy and literature at various schools here in the South, and one of my principal difficulties is instructing young minds to be mindful of people in marketing, for such souls buy and sell the anima and animus of our cultures as if we ourselves were mere commodities... A marketer with integrity though???? Possible?

Dave stopped speaking to me offline. No biggie. I figured he was busy. I really like what he has to say: I'm not big on the conversation meme myself. But his post got me wondering why the silence: Aha, I'm one of them. One of those marketers. In what passes more like an attack than a conversation re: Squidoo in the comment stream at Buzzmachine, Seth Godin himself chimes in: "Not sure why people feel so angry..." (Well, don't you know you know your people - ahem marketers - are scum of the earth?)

I'm not surprised that last election day I quoted Rumi (fuller version via Hip & Zen):

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing & right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other, don't make any sense. - Rumi

In the essay I write:

For the first time ever, we now see at least three worldviews, or decision-making frameworks, clashing in the media. [I had to grossly oversimplify in the essay, in truth there are five; but three are predominant in a business context within developed nations.] And even more in the marketplace. The working assumption that everyone holds the same frame of reference used to work just fine—when a single predominant worldview governed business and media.

I used the word clashing on purpose. There's a lot of clashing.

I'm not here to defend marketers or marketing. Nor any mere label. Funny that today Yvonne writes: "Labels slide off of her like melting ice." The truth is I try much harder to do same for others: I don't see anyone's identity as a marketer and another as an anti-marketer.

Anyway, labels don't mean much. Within the label business or marketing, there are those for whom a world of competition is actually not their reality. Tomorrow I'll share a story that exemplies a business that does not subscribe to a winners and losers worldview reality either.

Other posts that instigated the essay are: Beyond Cluetrain Conversation: The We Story; Evangelism is Dead, Long Live Conversationalists; Highest Common Denominator; The Casualties of Ideological Warfare; and Never Vote Straight Party: The Origins of Ideas, Part 2.

Bonus: If you read Jory's essay to the very brilliant end, you'll see she is also singing the same beyond competition tune when an unlikely mentor, Calvin, enters her life.

Ultimately, my essay is on compassion in business. The essay begins with and I'd say is framed by this Peter Drucker quote:

Society needs a return to spiritual values—not to offset the material but to make it fully productive... Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share.

In addition to Drucker, Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now perfectly nails my own view:

Compassion is a deep bond between yourself and all creatures. But there are two sides to compassion, two sides to this bond. On the one hand, since you are still here as a physical body, you share the vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every other human and with every living being. Next time you say, "I have nothing in common with this person," remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make a difference - both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and every other creature.

One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: Die before you die. Go into it deeply. Your physical form is dissolving, is no more. Then a moment comes when all mind-forms or thoughts also die. Yet you are still there - the divine presence that you are. Radiant, fully awake. Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.

The realization of this deathless dimension, your true nature, is the other side of compassion. On a deep feeling-level, you now recognize not only your own immortality but through your own that of every other creature as well. On the level of form, you share mortality and the precariousness of existence. On the level of Being, you share eternal, radiant life. These are the two aspects of compassion. In compassion, the seemingly opposite feelings of sadness and joy merge into one and become transmuted into a deep inner peace...

True compassion, as I have just described it, is as yet rare. To have deep empathy for the suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or sympathy. It does not happen until sadness merges with joy, the joy of Being beyond form, the joy of eternal life.

p.s.  Sometimes you stay: 'You're running away. You don't have the guts to stay and change it.' This post is about A.G. Lafley, the Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble, nearly leaving P&G twenty years ago. I nearly left business and technology three to four years ago myself.

tags social media cluetrain marketing business spirituality

Dismantling Walls, From "Marketing: What's Love Got to Do With It"

Without further ado, here's the short excerpt from my essay, "Marketing: What's Love Got to Do With It" from the to-be-released October book with contributions from nine business bloggers, More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complancy in Business.

It seemed like a good thing to share right now. Since this piece is out-of-context, I just wanted to add the quote from Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, from “Waves of Compassion" was written in direct response to reactions post-tsunami.

Update: Just noted that Jennifer over at What's Your Brand Mantra is echoing my own thoughts: "Instead of reinforcing our walls and levees in a losing battle to keep the flood waters out, we can build a boat instead. It’s better to float with the current rather than drown in our disappointment and betrayed expectations. It’s better to be flexible in the wind rather than be snapped into pieces due to our rigidity and insistence on control. It’s better to open our heart and risk the inevitable hurt… for when we close ourselves off to selected parts of life, we really close ourselves off to all of it."

Excerpt begins:

Marketing people talk about emotion. They present charts and diagrams, even raise their voices and wave their arms, but fundamentally they treat emotion as... out-there, felt by someone else and able to be manipulated. Analyzing other people’s emotions and refusing to acknowledge our own dumps us in the same old rut. What a waste.—Kevin Roberts, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands

PHUKET, THAILAND, 27 December 2004: I lay weeping into my pillow at 4 A.M., curled on a green vinyl-covered twin bed in the fully lit hospital rehab room. The nurses attempted to muffle their chattering and the tsunami news streaming from the TV around the corner was turned down low. Were they OK? And what of the gypsy families on Koh Jum we saw near the boat bar weaving their nets and fashioning bamboo squid and shrimp traps days before? What of the Danish family in the bungalow closest to the sea? What of every single person that donned one of the Santa hats that Phen, the bungalow operator, passed out at the Christmas Eve party? I shook the thought. Yes, yes, they must be fine.

The unparalleled depths of sorrow, grief, anguish, and despair that rose like an angry sea dragon in the hours, days, and weeks that followed threatened to consume me even as the tangible tsunami did not.

At times like this we are tempted to draw up the bridge and fortify the walls, where in fact the thing to do is seize opportunity—while the heart’s soft spot is palpable—to further crack open the fortress walls that keep us distant from others. This was the first time in my life that the temptation to run from intense emotions didn’t win out. I didn’t “let go” of feelings—rather the pithy advice was “let be.” I simply rode the waves out. I sat with whatever came up without resistance and surprisingly I learned that the way out was through. Buddhists concertedly cultivate their capacity for empathy via openheartedness, or bodhichitta.

Fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. —Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

Strangely enough, I’ve found that my ability to remain present to pain, grief, and sorrow has made me less hooked by these emotions; I’m able to withstand others’ dramatic outbursts and intense expressions of suffering without triggering unresolved emotions within myself. Meeting our own intense emotions without resistance allows us to skillfully and gently handle others’ emotions without our own getting in the way.

Recently I witnessed a woman standing at a church service topple right over. She was having a seizure. While a doctor ran over and paramedics were called, I found that my presence of mind was uncharacteristically unwavering in its calmness and loving healing thoughts extended outward without thinking. Normally, I’d be more panicked and worried. As spiritual teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche noted after the tsunami tragedy, “We want the suffering to go away because it scares us or it causes us personal pain” (italics mine). Our own anxieties and fears, along with undealt-with and frozen emotions, come back to the foreground of our memory. Thawing out can be painful, but I wouldn’t choose to go back to tundra of numbness.

Empathy can become second nature. The facial photographer and researcher introduced earlier, Dr. Paul Ekman, developed another test measuring how well someone can read people’s emotions from watching a videotape of rapid-fire, fleeting changes in expressions and attempting to correctly identify the emotion. This test’s results are known to correlate with empathy. Most people do very poorly, but two Buddhist meditators in the study received nearly perfect scores.

One of the two monks, Matthieu Ricard, was shown a film clip used in psychology tests to trigger and elicit disgust. The clip was of severe burn victims having dead skin carefully, painfully stripped from their bodies. When one has cultivated openheartedness in repeated practice as Ricard has, it’s not surprising that rather than the self-referential anxious and reactionary response of disgust, he felt “caring and concern, mixed with a not unpleasant strong, poignant sadness.” Ricard insists he is not an extraordinarily gifted monk—in fact, compassion and empathy are the entire point of practice. The Dalai Lama has said he does not practice a religion so much as he practices loving-kindness.

Chances are, you will not be in a tsunami. But any day you’re facing a separation can open your heart up to others located anywhere in the globe who are facing similar relationship endings and feel lonely, scorned, confused, or any other emotions that you are feeling. The day you go to the ATM machine and discover you’re down to your last ten bucks, you may suddenly feel your heart lurch out to those millions that contend with poverty on a daily basis. Whether you are in a minor car accident, lose a pet, go through a layoff, struggle with your teenager’s drug problem, file bankruptcy, lose a best friend to cancer, or any number of tragedies large and small, it’s an opportunity to connect with the soft spot within and wedge into the hairline crack to further dismantle the wall that separates you from others. You may only have a few opportunities—use them wisely.

As our technology becomes more sophisticated we perhaps think that our emotional responses need to be more sophisticated as well. But what seems best is simple, direct feeling that is not padded with logic or twisted concepts, such as, “Maybe they deserved it,” or, “I’m glad it’s not me,” or, “They should have known better,” or even, “That’s their karma.” These contorted responses reflect poorly on our own state of mind. If compassion feels unnatural, it’s probably because we’re still thinking of ourselves. –Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, “Waves of Compassion,” Shambala Sun, May 2005

Besides riding out the waves of emotion, I’ve been practicing metta—the meditation for cultivating loving-kindness and compassion that monk Ricard uses—lately myself. It begins with extending loving-kindness toward ourselves, then moves out in a circle to mentors and those who’ve supported us, then further on to loved ones, then strangers, and then even those we dislike (advanced practice!) until the loving thoughts extend to every sentient being in the universe. “It’s compassion with no agenda, that excludes no one,” says Ricard in an interview with Marc Ian Barasch in Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. “You generate this quality of loving and let it soak the mind.”

Excerpt ends. The metta I'd advise now would encompass all the people and animals in the Gulf Coast immediately before you extend out to all beings in the universe. Essentially you could look at metta as a way of extending love and prayers out from your heart. And this state of caring and benevolence makes it easier to be with and talk with others without our own defenses getting in the way - whether they are an irrate customer or a person suffering from catastrophic loss. Metta is also a Pali word for loving kindness, and can be used as a closing much like signing off 'Love, Evelyn'.

Metta.

Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina, Marketing | Credits: Flickr photo by keylime

Markets in Flux: You Gotta Go Back and Understand Where Blogging Came From

Robert Scoble has an insightful "Viral Marketing Manifesto" triggered by MSN Found's viral marketing campaign landing like a lead balloon.The section below particularly jumped out to me. He hits the nail on the head around the essence of why blogging arose and how its ethos impact marketing.

It comes down to this: for many, we've moved from seeking prosperity as a primary motivator to seeking authenticity and integrity.

We've moved away from spitting out polished thirty-second pitches to dropping the burden of a facade. We want to be accepted for ourselves (or even better, reach a juncture where praise or criticism is besides the point), have richer conversations, heartfelt connections and reclaim our voice.

Below Robert says we were disgusted with how corporations were behaving. Maybe that's half of the equation. In addition, I was disgusted with how I was behaving (inauthentically) and the dissonance finally gave way.

You've gotta go back and understand where blogging came from. We were disgusted with how corporations were behaving. Blogging started really taking off after the dotcom boom and bust. It started taking off after WorldCom and other corporate scandals.

It started taking off because corporations seemed to only care about themselves and didn't seem to be listening anymore to anyone around them including the government or even other corporations.

It started taking off because we are always being marketed to, but rarely listened to. There are so many commercial messages raining down on our heads that we wanted to have our own way to talk back to the world. A way to push back on the marketing and the lies and the hype. Look at last night's comments on this very blog. People don't like it when I hype something up. They want to be in control and hate it when those of us in big companies try to manipulate them.

Why do you think so many people have been cheering on the blogging movement at Microsoft? At least now there's a start of a conversation between the people who work at companies and the rest of the world.

So, viral campaigns need to show they are sensitive to those values. - Robert Scoble, "Viral Marketingn Manifesto"

In my (very long) essay, I attempt to chart out the progression of values (and define the term value-memes), types of media (broadcast/passive to interactive to participatory) and the business landscape since 1995 and how that's changed and changing people -- and thus markets and marketing.

Here are a few relevant sections from the essay below:

Machiavelli echoes, “I believe that we are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not.” Over the course of history we’ve steadily moved from an egocentric to an ethnocentric to an increasingly world-centric perspective. Our minds cannot help but be informed and influenced by the memes of our time.

The historical evidence is clear: New times produce new thinking.

In an early age we found refuge in clans and safety in a threatening world by awakening the capacity to sense the spirits and placate them through magic. New times, new thinking.

When the magic and ritual become stifling, we escaped by asserting a raw sense of self and slaying the dragons that lurk in the dark. The powerful individual sought to dominate kith, kin and nature. New times, new thinking.

When chaos and anarchy then reigned supreme, we sought meaning and found peace of mind in the absolute and unquestioned order of a Higher Power or rightful authority, the organizing principle greater than any individual or group. New times, new thinking.

When that absolute order became oppressive and repressive and we grew wearing of waiting for future rewards, individualists challenged the authorities and tried to create the abundant ‘good life’ here and now. New times, new thinking.

When this progress-oriented materialism failed to bring happiness, we became lonely. Then we wanted to rediscover human feelings, recapture spirituality, and find ‘ourselves.’ New times, new thinking. – Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, from Spiral Dynamics

New times, new thinking. I’m just getting the hang of the rhythm, and whoa - we’ve come to an abrupt halt in history. It’s now 1996 – the year that Spiral Dynamics was published. Beck and Cowan probably submitted their final manuscript before Netscape went public on August 9, 1995. And certainly before the November 1995 launch of Fast Company. And the blogosphere wasn’t even an apple in our eye yet. SoMa had cheap rent space and my mom hadn’t heard of Sand Hill Road yet. The twin towers were intact and media was the bailiwick of hip New Yorkers (or is that Silicon Alley) not scraggly “citizen journalists”. I hadn’t joined the Internet revolution, er, I mean industry as yet - unless you count being addicted to online communities. Nor had I yet been married…or divorced. Ah, 1996. That’s the same year that Cindy Olsen joined as VP of Corporate Affairs in charge of Enron’s 401K program – oh so many light-years before she would “diversify” her own personal holdings and withdraw her millions. Geez, perhaps everything happened after 1996.

I skip ahead in essay to this section: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

More Space Essay Wiki Up

The More Space Essay wiki is up. You can comment to your hearts content, and in addition to the essay I intend it to be a collaborative space to gather resources and materials to expand on the topics and themes in the essay. It's bare to date except for the essay itself and additional resources page. I'll work more on getting up a skeletal collaborative framework up within the week.

The essay is not intended to be read online - and I don't recommend it (we're talking 17,000 words and big themes that I build up on in a holographic manner). Keep in mind this is a pretty raw first draft ;-)

If you were reading it on the blog thus far, you can pick up again beginning on page Part5EverythingHappenedAfter1996 and scroll to Seeing Through the Kalideoscope. (Next week, they'll upgrade the version of JotSpot so I can put up the essay in its entirety in just one page. It's chopped into 8 sections right now.)

Enjoy! Just go to evelyn.jot.com and use the username and password, morespace.

The Grand Canyon of the Blogosphere

Hit another (b)logjam on a tough part of the essay - basically I lost my voice (an euphemism for "writing crapola"). (And the new stuff needs a lot of rework.) Re-reading the first chapter of The Journey from the Center of the Page (highly recommended) and going for a run contemplating "What am I writing for?" produced this:

Design is the first signal of human intention. – William McDonough

The blogosphere was designed for creating and expressing. And then with each dawning day, we are invited to create anew. It drips with freshness: the present moment fleetingly captured and then dissolved into the next moment.

It builds on the resilient infrastructure of sharing and linking we call the Internet. And adds a rich earthy layer. The ethos: immediacy, express, create, produce, participate, engage, voice, choice, real, raw, scratching for truth.

Before I saw the Grand Canyon it was easy to envision a contiguous cavernous monument. Once you are on the edge of the Grand Canyon it is obvious it is layers of amethyst, vermillion and caramel canyons within canyons within canyons without end. Descending further you are defined by walls of an intimate labyrinth you have stepped into and the "Grand Canyon" disappears; you know of only this canyon nestled within.

And in the same way, it is easy to believe that the blogosphere is one single entity. Reputation, citations, ranking and rating definitively provide the snapshot of what has bubbled up in importance, in popularity, in urgency, in merit as a whole. But have you ever tried to photograph the Grand Canyon in its entirety? Descend within the blogosphere, and canyons within canyons and rankings within rankings emerge.

For those who have desired, it is always been possible to create and express. And so what is different now, I wonder.

You see children scurrying in the backstreets of Calcutta armed with cameras. They are the children of prostitutes. And they express their world through their eyes in the images that they capture. One black-eyed girl, eyes downcast, says she cannot attend the gallery opening displaying her signed photographs at the local Oxford Bookshop. I must baby-sit my baby brother. It would cost 25 rupees to find another sitter. She frowns. They only understand about money here.

This defies everything the almighty pyramidal hierarchy of needs says about climbing up the ladder towards self-actualization. Perhaps expression of our soul is needed most in a soulless environment. I like to paint my thoughts into colors, says the boy-artist dipping the brush into the watercolors in the nondescript room tucked in the brothel. The boy-artist is invited to an exhibit to interpret photographs for visiting children. And this photograph is important because… Because it shows us truth. A photo can capture a glint of the symbols of truth: the ugliness, the beauty, the sublime, the grotesque. What Is.

Perhaps, like many, we create and express in order to make sense of the world and ourselves.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. – Anais Nin

What are you writing for? Author Jeff Davis asks us to consider this question before a writer puts pen to paper, fingertips to laptop.

When you privately ask “What am I writing for?” the ego can rest (and it’s rare for our writer’s egos to rest). You don’t have to impress anyone. In this space, you can be more honest with yourself about what leads you to write. Recently, my father-in-law (a retired stockbroker), my wife, and I were talking about books and writers. My father-in-law said, “Well, you know, most writers publish books for one reason: to make money.” My wife immediately disagreed. He looked at me and said: “Well, all right, Jeff, why do you write? When you’re writing, aren’t you thinking about making money?” I grinned and told him that I ask myself every morning why I write and never does “to make money” surface; otherwise, I would’ve stopped writing long ago. He smiled back and said, “You known, you’d make a lousy stockbroker.” I didn’t detail to him exactly what I write for, because sometimes the reasons are difficult to articulate, but I should have told him about my father’s journal.

When I was five, my father gave me possibly the most important gift he’s ever given me: one of my grandfather’s datebooks that my father had used as his own daybook. In contains my father’s scribbled boyhood descriptions of mowing the lawn and walking to the lake with his friends as well as such sketchy observations of my own as I saw a hobo by the tracks today. I wonder where he goes. What he sees. I want to ride a train someday. I’ve been riding the train of language and imagination ever since…

Fiction writer Ellen Gilchrist says there is next to “nothing the outside world gives me in exchange for my writing that is of value to me. I do not take pleasure in other people’s praise, and I don’t believe their criticism.” - Jeff Davis, from The Journey from the Center to the Page

So, what are you writing this essay for? What are you blogging for, I ask myself. The echoes of psychological motivators swirl: prestige? belonging? expression? unity?

I blog to establish my reputation and build credibility (yes) so that…

I blog to draw others in to share and commune with (yes) so that…

I blog to express the wholeness of my being (yes) so that...

I blog to experience that Thou and I are...

Yes.

When water joins with water, it is not a meeting but a unification. - Swami Prajnanpad

I blog for the one person seeking this invitation to stretch beyond their edges and dwelve in possibility and is, ultimately, my own reflection.

To 'dwelve' defined: The experience of simultaneously deep delving and grounded dwelling.

More: And I've finally answered the question above I said I would in this post. And next week I'll email all the contest winners (there were numerous ties - I'll just send a 800-CEO-READ gift cert to each and every one that reminded me clearly of my own intentions). Speaking of dwelving into possibility, I'll announce details of Dwelve 2005: The Personal Innovation Advance coming up April 8-12th next week. (A heads up in case you need to book flights, etc.)

Bonus: Go see the Academy Award nominated documentary film Born into Brothels.

[T]his is a work of art so deep and resonant that it puts most narrative films to shame.

Taking pictures may be the first chance these kids have had to express themselves.

The kids call [photographer and teacher Zana] Briski Auntie Zana, and witnessing the love she brings to them, which they return, is like experiencing a clearing in the clouds.

Bottom line: A labor of love on every level. – Hollywood Reporter

Essay Part VII: Everything Happened After 1996

Truth in writing is something more intuitive that has to do with a work’s ability to become timeless in its timeliness and universal in its particularity. – Jeff Davis, from The Journey from the Center to the Page

Timeless in its timeliness. Universal in its particularity. Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Spielberg come to mind. In writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck traveled along Route 66 among the migrant farmers of the Dust Bowl to delve into the personal details, the absolute facts and the objective truth of a specific era and specific place. Intuiting the epic proportions of the story at hand, the agnostic author used the dispirited peoples of the Bible as the framework for the novel. Steinbeck reworked the factual story to distill the truth, honed into one family and wrought a classic.

His venturous reflections upon humanity’s perseverance he weaves throughout the novel, and its structure reflects a shift in the character’s humanity from being selfish and competitive to selfless and cooperative. – Jeff Davis, from Journey from the Center to the Page

I was going in a different direction with this universals in the particulars theme. Probably something about symbol, myth, story, brand perhaps. Or using it as an introduction to my own hesitant quest story.

But I'm floored by the theme of Steinbeck’s novel. (It had been buried in my memory as I last read it as a teenager.) Is Steinbeck suggesting a startling different impetus than the Machiavellian notion of self-interest as our driving motivation?

I believe that we are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not. For one sees that, in the things that lead to the end which everyone aims at, that is, glory and riches, men proceed in different ways. – Niccolo Machiavelli, from The Prince

It’s difficult to argue with Machiavelli sometimes. I couldn't have said this better myself: "We are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances…” (The Prince was written in 1513.) And I thoroughly agree that we are driven by self-interest. But I’ll challenge: What exactly is in our own self-interest (and can I ever have all the information to truly know)? And what is this elusive self?

In Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright he sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial ooze to the World Wide Web."

Using the backdrop of game theory, you should know that a sum-zero game divides the world neatly into winners and losers. As we move from cavemen survival to tribal clans to feudal empires to church states to nation states to corporate states and onward, we’ve become increasingly interdependent. Wright isn’t chanting a Woodstockian chorus of harmony and world peace. It isn’t exactly geared around altruism – we’ve simply become so intertwined and interdependent in our social structures that my self-interest is enveloped and enmeshed with your self-interest.

In a non-zero game it comes down to this: we all win or we all lose.

The one thing that sticks in my mind about this book is that the theme of expanding cooperative self-interest captured the imagination of the attendees at the first Accelerating Change conference a few years back. This is an audience of ardent futurists, uber-geeks, and a few financiers of the future. On the surface the audience appears to be concocted of a Darwinian-Machiavellian brew where the fittest cyborg triumphes. But following Richard Wright’s keynote, the conference bookstore tucked into the Stanford University hall was sold out of his book within minutes.

Machiavelli echoes, “I believe that we are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not.” Over the course of history we’ve steadily moved from an egocentric to an ethnocentric to an increasingly world-centric perspective. Our minds cannot help but be informed and influenced by the memes of our time.

The historical evidence is clear: New times produce new thinking.

In an early age we found refuge in clans and safety in a threatening world by awakening the capacity to sense the spirits and placate them through magic. New times, new thinking.

When the magic and ritual become stifling, we escaped by asserting a raw sense of self and slaying the dragons that lurk in the dark. The powerful individual sought to dominate kith, kin and nature. New times, new thinking.

When chaos and anarchy then reigned supreme, we sought meaning and found peace of mind in the absolute and unquestioned order of a Higher Power or rightful authority, the organizing principle greater than any individual or group. New times, new thinking.

When that absolute order became oppressive and repressive and we grew wearing of waiting for future rewards, individualists challenged the authorities and tried to create the abundant ‘good life’ here and now. New times, new thinking.

When this progress-oriented materialism failed to bring happiness, we became lonely. Then we wanted to rediscover human feelings, recapture spirituality, and find ‘ourselves.’ New times, new thinking. – Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, from Spiral Dynamics

New times, new thinking. I’m just getting the hang of the rhythm, and whoa - we’ve come to an abrupt halt in history. It’s now 1996 – the year Spiral Dynamics was published. Beck and Cowan probably submitted their final manuscript before Netscape went public on August 9, 1995. And certainly before the November 1995 launch of Fast Company magazine. The blogosphere wasn’t even an apple in our eye yet. SoMa had cheap rent space and my mom hadn’t heard of Sand Hill Road yet. The twin towers were intact and media was the bailiwick of hip New Yorkers (or is that Silicon Alley) not scraggly “citizen journalists." I hadn’t joined the Internet revolution, er, I mean industry as yet - unless you count being addicted to online communities. Nor had I yet been married… or divorced. Ah, 1996. That's the same year that Cindy Olsen joined as VP of Corporate Affairs in charge of Enron’s 401K program - oh so many light-years before she would “diversify” her own personal holdings and withdraw millions. Geez, perhaps everything happened after 1996.

Essay Part VI: The Conversations We Aren't Having

If “markets are conversations” as The Cluetrain Manifesto asserts, there are an awful lot of intensely important conversations that aren’t even being whispered about in the presence of business. (Have you really listened to what your customers' stories reveal? For innovation's sake, I'd turn Cluetrain on its head: Conversations are Markets. And thus there are plenty of markets being entirely ignored.)

I’m not speaking of the “let’s tiptoe around the elephant in the room” issues that plague all companies in regards to internal issues and debating appropriate strategies. More precisely, I’m talking about the conversations that get to the heart of the matter for your customers. Even if those conversations appear completely (debatable, but I’ll humor you…) irrelevant to the tangible product at hand – they are where the symbol, the brand reside. At the end of the day, no matter what industry you are in or what you are selling, the bottom line is your customer is ultimately…a person.

We are embarrassed by sex. We’d rather not think about death. And if we bring up God (or god or gods), noses will get out of joint. Yet sex, death, and God are the most profound considerations of mankind. How can companies hope to remain relevant if they won’t discuss them? – “Breakthrough Ideas for 2005: A Taboo on Taboo”, from Harvard Business Review, February 2005

It’s impossible to really hear your customer’s burning issues and their stories if they sense that there are taboos - conversations where they’d be judged for even considering the content matter much less expressing their authentic feelings and viewpoints.

Lest you think I live in an alternate touchy-feely universe, most of my friends and astonishingly every single romantic relationship - from that high school beau turned mechanical engineer and on - is an engineer or scientist by training. Unbeknownst to me at the initial meeting – whether at a ski shop or running club, no matter - they’ll later announce themselves to be, surprise, nerds too. (I stumbled onto marketing through the backdoor of product development and management. Yup, I too have a degree in electrical engineering). The most ‘rational’, ‘analytical’ people in your workplace – yes, even the guy whom has a couple of patents in digital encryption or the one that runs the strict quality assurance for the lab or the physicist in the high energy accelerator - yes, even they think and talk about these subjects. A lot.

These are the deepest aspirations of human beings, aspirations for immortality – that is, for an experience beyond time and space, for we are the only beings that are aware that we shall die. Even if we are good scientists, we know we are going to die. The diversions we create for ourselves cannot prevent us from thinking of the fact that sooner or later we shall die. No diversion can prevent us from that truth. – Seyyid Hossein Nasr, “In the Beginning Was Consciousness”, from Harvard Divinity Review

Your blog is the “deepest” one I read, recount two different readers recently. (I have plenty of friends to keep my ego in check, fortunately.) At a lunch meeting the aforementioned QA manager shares, “You haven’t written anything profound in quite a while.” He's the same one who muses that if he had his own business he didn’t see much need for consultants, nor executive coaches – ah, but a spiritual advisor, that’s different. He’s comparing our face-to-face conversations with what I’m writing. Yes, I hold back in public. And the most sublime and intense thoughts would be too much to share.

The truth is we are all holding back more than we can bear. The dam is bursting at the seams – people are yearning to talk and share and hear more about what truly matters. And there’s hardly anyone around willing to listen.

This is not the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand. - David Whyte, from Loaves and Fishes

The conversations we most want to have are hushed behind closed doors – or they’re not happening at all. A Croatian woman I met in Italy was convinced that the United States was the hotbed of spiritual discussions. She made that assumptive leap based on the fact that many New Age and spiritual bestsellers come from American authors. For instance, what about the Celestine Prophecy? I said I had no idea where those purportedly millions of readers were – perhaps they're all closet readers. We don’t discuss these matters in polite company. Or that is to say, in business.

We read to know we are not alone. – C.S. Lewis

Companies scramble to find out what “matters” to their customers and what makes them “tick” all the better to sell to them. But business folks are typically entirely left out of any of these vital conversations. And why is that?

If I sense that it’s not ok to talk about any litany of taboos – well then, I’m not going to broach any of those subjects. We’ll only chat about what’s deemed acceptable by you. You will never even know I’m self-censoring myself. None of us go out of our way to be judged and condemned.

After a one-day writers workshop I went out to dinner with a few of the attendees – all complete strangers, as they say. We delved with intensity into the amazingly intricately interwoven topics of sex, death and God. What started out as a breezy comic discussion on writing erotica quickly went to the bone. Two sisters shared their father’s last words: “I’m ready to come to you” and how they’ve grappled with death and God since. Another woman’s voice quivers as she shares the ups and downs as they take one day at a time while she and the husband she clearly loves very much cope with his Parkinson’s disease. Yet another reveals how her own buried grief rose up when a best friend lost his wife.

Buddha chose for his sannysins [his disciples – the monks] the yellow robe. Yellow represents death, the yellow leaf. Yellow represents the setting sun, the evening. Buddha emphasized death, and it helps in a way. People become more and more aware of life in contrast to death… Three months’ meditation on death, then coming back – that was the beginning of sannyas. – Osho, from Buddha: His Life and Teachings

I don’t bring up death now from a sense of overriding grief or morbidity. But death has a particular way bringing a stark focus on life. A friend recently shared that her marriage separation was precipitated after her sister’s unexpected death at the age of 38. “I looked at my life pretty closely after that.” Are we living life with gusto? Are we settling? That’s the appeal of mega-bestsellers like Tuesdays with Morrie and The Purpose-Driven Life. The message: Life is precious. Life may be short. And questions we may have buried rear up again: What on earth am I here for anyway?

These conversations would all seem to be an anomaly. But I can assure you they are not. I’m surrounded by these kinds of conversations all the time. And I’m just a marketer - not a clergy member, not a nurse or a doctor, not a counselor, not a therapist, not a masseuse, not a psychiatrist, not a social worker, not a coach. Simply another human being willing to listen without judgment, with compassion – and that’s enough.

Essay Part V: The Stories Our Customers Live By

Twenty-first-century organizations have to compete on brands because they have nothing left. They can’t get product differentiation; they can’t get superior pricing, distribution or promotion, so branding strategy is it. – Don Schultz, from Measuring Brand Communication

Brands were developed to create differences for products that were in danger of becoming as hard to tell apart as chunks of gravel. – Kevin Roberts, from Lovemarks

So who needs to worry about myth and symbol and that mushy brand thing if we actually have the gumption to innovate? I’ve spent most of my career in the tech industry, so I understand that line of thought fairly well. (And yes having a remarkable product is a very primo position to be in.)

Knowing our customers’ stories always make us better innovators.

Branding became imperative after the surpluses of World War II. And it was cemented as a marketing vehicle in the June Cleaver era of the 1950’s when everyone scurried to watch the very same television shows. Back when mass media really did attract mass audiences.

Even tried and true brand mavens like P&G are picking up the pace of innovation. CEO A.G. Lafley has said, “[W]e don’t care where the ideas come from.” And that includes customers.

P&G, Samsung, and others like them put great energy into learning what their customers crave [via new ethnographic and behavioral practices from anthropology and psychology] - and into designing their innovation process to satisfy them. So close are they to their customers that they are beginning to co-create with them.... Success increasingly goes to those companies who focus on creating better things with their customers, not for them. – “The Innovatioon Economy” issue editorial, from Business Week, October 11, 2004

And P&G’s revenues have climbed steadily since Lafley’s tenure.

In the “Just Do It” heyday of Nike, then head of advertising Scott Bedbury made sure that Nike’s marketing was sitting down with its customers to understand their lives. “We craved more information about how certain key consumer groups viewed a number of burning issues – as opposed to specific advertising ideas – that might greatly impact our business.” Finding out whether they preferred the silver or black trim on next year’s model was very much secondary. They wanted to get into their customer’s world and inside their minds. Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist doing exploratory research for new product directions at Intel, calls this “deep hanging out.” Bell says, “"It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful to consumers.” Listening to the stories of your customers’ lives is where new product conceptions are hatched. “Doing ethnographically inspired work allows us to get at that disconnect between what people say they do and what they are really doing." Bell continues, "It gives us a powerful voice for thinking about our consumers, in their own voice, in their own language, from their own perspective.”

There is something magical about a truly useful product or service with an indescribable “je ne sais quoi” that dares to go beyond a compulsory bullet list of features directly to our hearts and minds. A great product ought to be enough. But it isn’t. We want the symbol and the story too. And that’s partly because we spend an inordinate amount of our brain capacity in sense-making and meaning-making – some would say practically all of our time.

What is life about? What sense can we make of the events that befall us? At every instance, our brains work overtime to provide us with answers, with causal explanations that create a feeling of meaning, of knowing, of understanding. This brain work proceeds automatically, unconsciously, and as we ponder the reasons why things happen, from the blissful joy of true love to the nightmarish horror of a terrorist attack, the answers seem merely to pop into our heads, for we cannot glimpse the hidden mental machinations that produced them. In recent years psychologists have begun to unlock the mysteries of those unseen mental processes. As people make meaning of the events in their lives, they sometimes fall prey to predictable biases, as in the case of whether to follow your first gut hunch. Yet even with such biases recognized, it is worth pausing to marvel at the majesty of the ability to make meaning that is a core component of each and every human brain. – Neal Roese, Ph.D., from If Only

The Industrial Revolution didn’t suddenly make us want things and the stories that went along with them. The Industrial Revolution was the result of our materialism, not the cause of it. But we don’t always know we want. If we knew what things meant, we could choose among them on the basis of some inner need. But we don’t know. So in a sense we are not materialistic enough. That’s why stories can get between us and objects. We desperately want meaning; things can’t supply it, so we install it via narrative, via branding. – James Twitchell, from Branded Nation

My point is it’s not simply about product innovation. Nor is it simply about the brand. A winning combo is an innovative product that fulfills a need and stands for something even greater. Hitting the mark on both the product front and the symbol front requires a firm foundation in actually knowing your customers’ stories. And that starts with a bit of “deep hanging out.” Perhaps a conversation or two that doesn’t skirt around the “burning issues.”

Essay Part IV: The Stories We Live By

More competition just elevates Apple's brand to another seductive, unquantifiable, cool-factor level that consumers are willing to pay for... When it comes to consumers -- image can be everything. When image is everything, it's harder for companies to compete on price and features. That seems to be the market today. There are competing products that are cheaper and offer more features. But Apple's brand is just too strong to sway anyone [away]. – Bambi Francisco, from “Why Apple Keeps on Shining”, CBS Marketwatch

[B]rands and images [are] becoming more important than the products themselves, spirituality has become the new currency in the task of winning human minds and hearts.” – Jeremy Carrette & Richard King, from Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion

I once wrote: “A brand is a story. And the customer puts him or herself in the role of the hero or heroine.” I’d modify that definition slightly. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Marc Lesser, author of Z.B.A.: Zen of Business Adminstration, writes elsewhere: “A brand is simply a story or symbol, a way of describing or characterizing an idea, a product or service.”

A brand only exists in the conceptual realm of imagination, story and symbol. Plato taught his pupils that the realm of concepts and ideas was the seat of reality. One has the concept of a table in their mind. A carpenter can construct a specific table. And if an artist paints a still life sketch of the table, they’d be thrice removed from reality in Plato’s view. (Of course, plenty of artists are hip to Plato’s view.) "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me," said Henri Matisse.

Words are the way we complicate the simple. The deepest aspects of life are about wordlessness – something you can’t articulate. - Pico Iyer

My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, "The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts. The third best are what we talk about." And myth is that field of reference, metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent. - Joseph Campbell

Being a symbol, an image, a metaphor for the deepest aspects of life, a brand is more potent than the tangible product or service itself. Myth is riveting not because they are pleasant entertaining diversions. These symbolic stories resonate with the human condition and our wordless longings and desires -- and with our own personal story and the collective story we all dwell in.

New myths are unfolding around us. In A Whole New Mind, author Daniel Pink makes the case that the highly paid knowledge worker’s world of left-brained, analytical information-crunching is becoming commoditized; and lowest price is the overriding buying criteria.

The knowledge worker’s external world is evolving to one where the complementary and (I’ve made these words up) “unstandardizable”, “uncommoditizable” skills of design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning take on new importance as valued differentiators.

And this knowledge worker - staring into the abyss of uncertainty in an age of rampant offshoring and automation - is confronted with the ubiquitous hero’s dilemma.

In his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell argued that all myths – across time and across cultures – contain the same basic ingredients and follow the same recipe. There are never any new stories, he said – just the same stories retold. And the one overarching story, the blueprint for tales since humankind’s earliest days, is the “hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey has three main parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero hears a call, refuses it at first, and then crosses the threshold into a new world. – Daniel Pink, from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Informational Age to the Conceptual Age [p. 102-103; check final version for exact quote – this is from a galley proof]

One of the classic hero stories is that of Jonah, the biblical prophet that was stranded in the belly of a whale. What you might not know of the story is that Jonah refused to listen to the faint voice within him (some would call that voice God) that told him to go to Nineveh to help the people there. If only the voice had counseled him to get his warriors together to destroy Nineveh – that would have aligned with his inclinations. Nineveh, being a major city in the enemy country of Assyria, was the last place a leader of Israel desired to head. So he did the sensible thing and booked passage on a ship going in the opposite direction towards Spain. To make a long myth short, a perfect storm rose up and nearly capsized the ship. Jonah was certain he was the cause of the storm and pleaded to be thrown overboard in order to spare the other passengers. And that’s how he ended up in the belly of a whale. After three days, the whale spit Jonah out on the beach where he had departed to Spain.

Refusing the hero’s call is so prevalent in universal myths and in individuals’ lives that psychologist Abraham Maslow - most commonly known for his hierarchy of needs pyramid – named the phenomena the “Jonah Complex.”

We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moment, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities. – Abraham Maslow, from The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

So finally we depart. Often unwillingly - I’ve been unceremoniously kicked out on my ass as the beginning on my heroine’s journey more often than not. What can we say of the hero’s return?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding" (last of Four Quartets)

One of the paths of inner work in biblical myth is called teshuva. A hard word to translate, its closest equivalent might be “return.”

To return is one of the prime goals in biblical myth. The most profound return is the return from the exile of the self. Teshuva is an act of spiritual excavation, digging beyond the buildup of dust to the authenticity that has always rested deep within. One of the great gifts as well as dangers of spiritual movements of return, whether it be the Great Awakening Revivals of 1800s America or the waves of New Age religiosity presently washing up in the world, is that when hearts are stirred, they are stirred en masse. Though the call may be addressed to the individual person, all too often the call of the community triumphs over the quiet call of the individual’s own heart. – Biblical scholar Marc Gafni, from Soulprints

Departure, Initiation, Return. Whew, we’re finally done, eh? Not so fast. Psychologist and researcher Clare W. Graves interviewed thousands of people and found that:

At each stage of human existence the adult man is off on his quest of the holy grail, the way of life he seeks by which to live… As he sets off on each quest he believes he will find the answer to his existence. Yet, much to his surprise and much to his dismay, he finds at each stage that the solution to existence is not the solution he has come to find. Every stage he reaches leaves him disconcerted and perplexed. It is simply that as he solves one set of human problems he finds a new set in their place.

The turbulence and chaos that enters the hero’s life and leads him or her to embark on a self-questing self-questioning dialectic lands them at a higher level of order. At this new plateau, the view is clear again and we may notice that there is another set of hills you couldn’t possibly spot from below. What may have originally started as a quest for basic safety when achieved becomes the departure point for the next quest. For instance, I heard a wealthy person remark that he once thought money would solve everything - but, he said, there are problems that money cannot solve.

We have not even to risk the adventure alone,
for the Hero's of all time have gone before us.
The Labyrinth is thoroughly known;
we have only to follow the thread of the Hero's path
And where we have thought to find an abomination,
we will find a God.
Where we have thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves,
Where we have thought to travel outward,
we will come to the center of our existence.
And where we have thought to be alone,
we will be with all the world. – Joseph Campbell

Essay Part III: Market Enigmas?

[Getting lazier. The essay in progress thus far is in the previous few posts. This post nearly stands alone, and I've added two links for context.]

We study and pour over marketing case stories for clues we can use. And often we re-enact the behaviors without fundamentally understanding (and better yet, fundamentally donning) the underlying mindset that drives those actions. When we share much in common with a mindset and its similar decision-making framework, we nod in recognition and can quickly grasp how we’d adapt the ideas within our unique context – and our market, products, and company. When we’re coming from an entirely different mental map, we may toss the advice because it’s confusing and goes against almost everything we believe about marketing, about business, about the way the world operates and about who we are. Or seeing that it “worked for them,” we copy it superficially and verbatim because it’s such an utterly foreign language that we’ve got to stick close to the phrasebook.

One of the major misconceptions about Red Bull is that it chases cool. Instead, it simply targeted anyone in need of an energy boost. It became cool because of the way it was marketed, not to whom it was marketed.

Ultimately, Coke, Pepsi and A-B [Anheuser-Busch] have entered the energy drink category by attempting to mimic Red Bull’s tactics. Although they got a lot of the particulars correct, they couldn’t copy the spirit of Red Bull. – Alex Wipperfurth, from Brand Hijack

Re-read: They couldn’t copy the spirit of Red Bull. And thus the big boys have gunned for Red Bull without much inroads into the marketplace.

That said, questions abound. What the heck is the spirit of Red Bull? And exactly what is the spirit of the Seasons Bungalows’ owners and staff of whom I wrote about earlier? And is fellow essayist Jory des Jardin’s friend Calvin simply an enigma?

Self-realization is not a sudden superimposition of a particular knowledge; it is the culmination of the evolutionary process in man. - Swami Chinmayananda