A modest(y) proposal

Johnnie Moore has the first of what looks to be a very nice series of posts "...talking about alternative ways of creating brands that are socially useful and economically sustainable." I like the comparative angle he chooses between Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks and Jim Collins' Good to Great. The gist is the fallacy of visionary leaders and their supposed "epiphanies", often related in grandiose tomes like "Lovemarks." As Johnnie points out, Roberts is CEO of the UK's Saatchi, the self-proclaimed masters of the Grand Gesture. On the other hand, Roberts' polar opposite, Collins' prototypical CEO from Good to Great, is a master of the understated style. Translation: According to Collins' data and premise, successful leaders find and make people (employee, consumer) and their products the hero, not themselves or their kitschy formulations. What the hell, here's Johnnie:

Beyond Lovemarks: Modesty

...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....

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.

"Thousands of also-rans."

Indeed. More often than not, the books are really the reverse engineering of happy accidents or stubborn intuition into the wisdom of seeming rocket science. Similarly, the 65 out of 100 CEOs whose merger brainchild born of hurry or ego or 'synergy" is wheeled straight to neonatal intensive care (and worse)--well, they don't seem too anxious to share their "vision" either.

Strange. Guesswork and gluttony masquerading as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Except, of course, that's not the acceptable "spin." It is the un-love that dare not speak it's name. Like Johnnie, and probably like you, I've witnessed plenty of the hairy stepchildren we shunt off to the basement, and maybe sired a few. As a guy who's helped wrangle strategy, marketing, or just plain ideas for small businesses of 10 people and for behemoths of tens of thousands, it seems to me there's a certain "East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet" affliction that prevents the majority of companies from making the leap from merely meeting requirements to creating actionable meaning and compelling loyalty:

The ingredients are curiosity mated with honesty. The mixing bowl, if you will, is a company structured to exalt and serve up to people--customer and employee and world--the fruits of those ideals, consistently and well executed. The result is an enviable confidence or sureness of identity rooted in common human purpose. With this primary goal in place, one could switch from making tires to toasters tomorrow and, beyond the expected technical obstacles, be reasonably assured that people would have no problem believing in the worth of what they do.

Now, to me, that statement makes sense. It covers product differentiation and an ethic of craft over simply "punching in." It relates and merges the truth that employees must part with energy and enthusiasm just as customers must part with money and, perhaps, an "old friend" in the form of a previously preferred product or brand. It acknowledges that companies exist in communities outside themselves, with roles and obligations akin to other community citizens. It states that consistent, quality execution is the result, but that service by and to people is the means and the end.

There's not a lot in the above that any self-respecting business-person could disagree with. Some might even say, "Yeah, that's what we believe." No, it certainly doesn't cover the minutiae of production, or of getting your salespeople to reliably transcribe and track their orders. It doesn't describe the process of judging what's a sensible ROI vis a vis marketing and sales dollars spent relative to inquiries and conversions.

No, it does something better, and here's the East-West problem in a nutshell--It broaches the questions:

• Does what we do matter?
• To who?
• And how?

Sound like any conversation you've been privvy to lately? Probably not. We claim ideals. We talk about customers and delight. We seminar on employee engagement. We drumbeat consistency, quality and execution. But to follow the analogy, the ingredients are often separate and therefore, inert. Today, we practice "delighting the customer." Tomorrow is "employee engagement day." Next Thursday, we'll be running around like nutcases screaming "Execute, execute!"

Each claim will have its champion and its moment; its cheerleader and mouthpiece. Each will bleat its entitlement as the "Real" top of the pyramid. Each will suggest "it" matters most. Each will say "East is Best" or "West is worst."

Each will want to be "The Hero."

The hero metaphor is wildly in play every day in business near as I can tell. That's not a bad thing. In fact, in a world where people increasingly perceive themselves as cogs in a machine that churns out celebrity and values spectacle, silicone or chutzpah over hard work and dues paying, the need for identifiable opportunities for workaday heroism are only becoming more profound. But real heroes are heroes for others, not for glory or narrow greed. Heroes remind us of the better reasons for our day-in, day-out efforts. And just as there's a thin archetypal line between hero and outlaw, cop and criminal, joker and king, there's plenty of opportunity for folks to step over the line and buy into their own "omnipotence" or to justifying means with ends. It seems the media bent toward simplification and compression of stories into soundbites abets this "unnatural", artificial, unearned "Voila!" that Roberts and others traffic in. Voila!: The Obvious. Voila!: The natural order of things, like grandma said they are and should be.

In searching for the meaning of brand, the meaning of work and trade--their human import--is pulled out of the equation leaving a brand or company persona that speaks the words of Hallmark-variety feeling, but doesn't go deep enough to mine the true source of the power of the words and concepts. But why? Workers consume. Consumers work. Each group, at different times, wants to feel they are maximizing their energy, loyalty and limited resources. A product question addressed to, say, a befuddled and shrugging WalMart employee leaves us unsure and uneasy of their commitment to us and our concerns. That same employee, deep down, damnably wishes they had the knowledge to help us, or the luxury of gaining it and the sanctioned time to spend with us imparting it. But the model does not value or permit it, even though the hunger is patently there, on both sides of the register. A purchase may happen; a need may or may not be met, but in human satisfaction terms, the deal has not been sealed comfortably. This transfer of commitment and concern, this trading of compassion and aid for cash... well, it's the true Mark of Love many of us, perhaps Roberts included, stumble around looking for, but miss for fear of being labelled a kook by Wall Street, our Directors, our peers, or our competition. But hey, don't take it from me. Get it from Drucker talking about mopping floors:

For 150 years, from 1850 on, society moved inexorably towards being a society of organizations. In 1900, nobody worked in an "organization." It's a 1950s term. Lots of people were employed -- hired hands on the farm, domestic servants, journeymen in their shop, but they worked for a master, not an organization. And the work was very personal.

[I'm sure it goes without saying; Drucker uses "master" in this context as a stand-in for personal connection and communication -- transparency and two-way accountability; leading by example -Ed.]

Since then the organization has become the organizer -- though not necessarily the employer. Now we have all kinds of dangerous liaisons. One of the things to understand ...is that the woman who works for the hospital, cleaning floors, is very bored by the job. But if she works for ServiceMaster... she's very excited by it because people listen to her, people challenge her. She is expected to improve the job and gets paid for doing it -- whereas before no one would listen.

If you look closely--and not to the pages of MBA 101--you find the simplest truths and the oldest truths are the drivers behind all great brands: Humility, harmony (or shared ambition), authenticity, and an implicit agreement that we all want a postive legacy. The rest is merely modernist backfill to justify slackness or selfish or immoderate choices. Our ways of working, raising our kids, choosing mates, or, creating and selecting products either support that inherent humanty and humility, or they don't. 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. I believe the saying goes "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over again."

"It."

"It" is finding what matters, and aligning our business accordingly, not folding, spindling and mutilating what matters to us in order to make our methods and practice at least seem more palatable. The keys to making powerful, worthy, resonant and sustainable brands and companies are right under our noses. The levers and nerves are well noted and time-tested: Language is key, feeling is fuel, exploration is mandatory, assumptions should be suspended, connection and community are our real products.

Of course, this is "business" and fleshing out those things would be heretical to "efficiency" and a rational distribution of assets, wouldn't it?

On second thought, the keys aren't right under our noses. They're under glass, like those fire alarm boxes, the ones that say "break glass in case of emergency." Problem is, we only bash the glass when our ass is on fire and we're all out of rationalizations. That's too bad. For a lot of people, all of whom deserve better.

I don't know if he counts as a visionary leader, but Henry Kissinger once said something that cuts most professional corporate "visionaries" down to size:

A lack of options clears the mind marvelously."

Amen. And pass the modesty. And some other fundamentals, too.