Chicken, or Egg? Goal, or Ambition? System, or soft squishy things called people?

My new Skype pal and longer-term much-admired blogger, Johnnie Moore, has been pondering some good stuff. He began by wondering after Southwest Airlines' success, then the meaning, matter and mirage of "goals"...

I think what happens is that brands emerge out of the soup. After the event, a large number of Alpha Males lay competing claims to having invented them (success has many parents, failure is an orphan). As the history is written, many happy accidents are reinvented as the results of smart goal setting and thorough planning.

(I used to be a planner in ad agencies; every planner I ever met acknowledged that our real speciality was post-hoc rationalisation of creativity).

Couldn't agree more. Stan Richards of the Richards Group (Southwest Airline's longtime ad agency) once said, and I paraphrase: Creatives may come up with a deeper truth that's far more relevant and powerful, but "off strategy." In those cases, we rewrite the strategy. A very wise man. Johnnie continues...

All this creates the Myth of the Goal. A story is told that suggests the only way forward for any grown-up organisation is to idealise a future state, compare it with a present state, and do the gap analysis. As Ben so shrewdly observes, that analysis of the present state will very likely fail to capture the multiple, apparently small, details that make any organisation what it is.

Johnnie then relates his frustration with "idealized futures," which I can't fully agree with. Idealism has been dumbed down and denigrated in popular culture to the point where someone saying "there are no good movies anymore" or "we want to lead our industry" counts as Idealism. Nah. As I read recently on a friends blog, that reduction and cop-out is akin to saying a Porsche makes a good paperweight. Johnnie then bridges things nicely with a follow on post about Fundamental Attribution Error -- judging our insides by other peoples outsides or their actions; allowing our feelings to align and react to what may be an innocent but not obvious chain of events that we don't understand but get to feeling victimized by and about. FAE: the inability or unwillingness to understand context and subtext in others, instead, we prioritzing our own bag of junk, our pathology and agenda--it's the kiss of death for marketers and managers, as just scribbled in Johnnie's comments:

Isn't FAE the result of us wanting to deny the obvious: Shit happens for reasons we often didn't see coming, usually because our heads were down working on some "officially important" trifle Two choices, embodied in a phrase some wise person once sent me: When you come to the edge of all things that you know, you must believe one of two things: There will be earth on which to stand, or you wil be given wings to fly.

*Knowing* in this instance is less about encyclopaedic knowledge of facts but more understanding what people inherently want. Business policies and systems don't take this fundamental man-hole into account, or rather, they create an even more dangerous one by implying that more "linear" rules are the answer. Customer and employee understanding begin at the beginnning, with people understanding. Which as we know, managers don't learn in B-school. There's your invisible 90% of the iceberg, Johnnie. But not unknowable.

To follow on the earlier theme of LUV's success, I give you JetBlue's David Neeleman from October's Chief Executive magazine: "When I get treated poorly, it really pisses me off. Then it pisses me off that it pisses me off."

See, Neeleman knows that if he can get his people to agree on the fundamental injustice of bad service, of "pissing people off," then they can use that simple, yet firmly held idea, and act nimble in ways that make obvious sense to JetBlue's mission, the same way Kelleher said, "If we're not enjoying ourselves, what's the point?"

For similar examples, scroll down a post to the Metaphysics of Work. In simple terms it means that marketers and the executives who hire them are makers and finders of meaning, makers of means to ends, not of "media buys" or "passenger miles." Our consumers are employee and ticketholder.