^∞Fouroboros

The Smoking Gun reports:

MARCH 18--Donald Trump, reality TV star and rapacious New York developer, has filed to trademark the phrase sweeping an underemployed nation.

No word yet on the pending Cradle-robber™ or Over-compensating Yutz^® applications

East is East and West is West and guess where McDonald's latest ad campaign was born?



Via Adland/Ad-rag comes this China Daily story on the country's burgeoning Advertising and Creative industry. Asian locales like Singapore and Hong Kong have long been notable thanks to their minimalist art sensibility mated with a certain colonial-leftover British wit and influence from guys like Neil French, but this piece gives some depth to Chinese marketing's current state of maturity. Funnily enough, it also proves once again that geography is a technical detail when it comes to people: Suits are suits, and creatives are creatives, and never the twain shall meet. Even in China. Take that, Rudyard.

Re-engineering Siblings

The Scene: An American home.

The Players: An 8-year old girl; a 5-year old boy

The Situation: At each other's throats.

The Solution:



Any parents reading this? If so, I'm sure you'll empathize. The key here is Media Placement -- frequency and reach: bedroom door, coming and going. Over bathroom sink and toilet paper holder. Insides of exterior doors so as to catch young eyes leaving for school in the morning. All strategically placed at the eye-level of a 5-year old.

This is actually the re-introduction of previously effective campaign. Our now almost 9-year old daughter was of course, once a 6-year old. One who had issues with her then 3-ish little brother. You know the story, "my toys are my toys, his toys are my toys." Ditto: My tv channel, my french fries, my juice, etc. Also, it seems the little guy was to blame for everything from a family dog covered in motor oil to the Johnsonville Flood. The boy, not being a very developed debater at the time, got the raw end usually. And strangely, he kept coming back for more. (Having grown up with an older brother who made sport of mugging me from time to time, I always thought it would have been "neat" to have a big sister instead. The last 6 years have cured me of that silliness.)

After a month of saturation coverage (pantry, bookbag, miniature versions for "Barbie's Playhouse", a copy taped over the TV screen) we started to note a decline in customer service complaints. The HR department seemed less stressed at the end of the day. The final check against placebo effects came with a call from a strategic alliance: A first grade teacher. It seems that word of mouth had traveled. Our erstwhile Angelica had been posting gains in her citizenship numbers and with her peers and the teacher was curious what the "care, share thing" was.

Victory! We hoped. We crossed our fingers and began slowly phasing out the horizontal media channels but stuck to verticals like bedroom doors and the bathroom mirror.

Result? The 6-year old was allowed to remain in the Fouroboros corporate fold and moved on to become a valued SBU, posting winning gains in core competencies as judged by certified educational regulatory bodies. Additional gains accrued to outreach activities such as swimming and soccer, nicely adding to goodwill and market awareness. She also does her homework and feeds the dog without complaining. Sometimes.

Of course, this is management.

The boy will be 6 in May.

The art for Care-Share 2.0 went to the printers this morning.

A 100-year old nail making company had grown to mega-size and was getting rocked by competition. The Chairman called his directors together and said, "We're stodgy and boring! Nails are boring! We need personality. We need to advertise!"

His executives called in all the top creative agencies. They picked the best one and told the chief, "it's gonna be great!" 3 months later, the Chairman gets a memo from the company CEO: "Our spot airs tonite. First slot, first break, during the six-o-clock news. It's brilliant!"

The boss gets home that night and settles in front of his big screen just in time for the commercial break: The spot opens on something tan and out of focus with the sound of wind and crows squawking under. As we pullback, we see it's dirt we're looking at as the camera begins to pan and tilt up to reveal a post--it's a post in the dirt. The camera reverses direction, still tilting, and we see sky, then another reverse and another piece of wood, only it's horizontal this time. We pan along and see fingertips, and slowly pull back to reveal fingers, and a palm, and a big honking nail through the palm. The company logo comes up and a booming biblical voiceover says: "Try...Hobson's...Nails."

The chairman drops his scotch, falls out of his chair and leaps at the phone. He calls the CEO, "Idiot!!! You don't sell nails by saying you helped kill the world's biggest religious figure! Pull it, now! Get another agency and get it right, or you're fired!" 3 months later, the Chairman gets another memo: "The spot airs tonite. First slot, first break, during the six-o-clock news, we've got it right this time, and it's brilliant!"

Same setup: Chairman, bigscreen TV, scotch and first commercial break: Open on an aerial shot, moving high over a shimmering desert. On the ridge of a huge sand dune in the distance, we see a dust trail. As the shot moves in, we see tiny figures running; closer still we see it's 2 people chasing somebody. Still moving in, we see the guy in front has white, flowing robes and a beard as he runs out of frame. Closer still and we see the two chasers are wearing .... dresses? ....no, they're roman soldiers. Camera cuts to the two, now stopped and exhausted, trying to catch their breath. One soldier turns to the other and says: "should ... -huff- ... have used ... -wheeze- ... Hobson's Nails."

[Update: When I told my brother I was going into advertising 15 years ago, his response was to tell me this joke. He's an allegorical dude.]

---

NYT: Hollywood Rethinking Faith Films After 'Passion'

As the overwhelming success of "The Passion of the Christ" reverberates through Hollywood, producers and studio executives are asking whether the movie industry has been neglecting large segments of the American audience eager for more openly religious fare.

More tales from the OODA Loop

In addition to the usual fare of know-it-all-ism here at Fouroboros Worldwide, today seems to be Political Macro Economics Day too. This comes from The Big Picture...

This is the chart that can swing the election. It's the key White House vulnerability: The economic structure of both the job market and indeed, the entire economy has changed. There are fundamental reasons why jobs are not coming back post-recession. These involve structural changes, like outsourcing and increased productivity -- as well as more mundane factors. I have yet to hear anything from this administration recognizing these structural changes.

As this chart shows, a seismic shift has occured in a basic aspect of the economy. THAT is the vulnerability of any incumbent -- when something very different is occuring, and the White House fails to notice it.

Great post. It's well sourced and well explained. "What Will Determine the Outcome of the 2004 Election:" Here.

Somebody's gotten inside somebody else's OODA Loop

WaPo: In recent weeks, the White House has had to endure its chief economist's positive comments about job "outsourcing," or sending work overseas; controversial passages in the annual Economic Report of the President; questions over the legitimacy of Bush's 2005 budget; a California swing in which Bush bragged about the possible addition of two or three jobs to a 14-person business in Bakersfield and a flap over a job-creation forecast that not even the president could stand by.

But the non-naming of Anthony F. Raimondo on Thursday as assistant commerce secretary for manufacturing and services has brought the concerns to a boil.

The long-anticipated announcement of a manufacturing czar was supposed to be a good-news day for a White House struggling with its economic message. Instead the planned, smiling photo op fizzled when it came to light that a year ago Bush's choice had opened a major plant in Beijing.

Ooops.

"This is a hyper-charged political environment, and they have not adapted," the former official said.

And Karl Rove, who is on the government payroll as the White House senior adviser, is stretched thin between trying to watch what the administration is doing and overseeing the ramping up of a campaign that has accelerated its plans in response to Kerry's early lock on the Democratic nomination.

Machines don't fight wars. Terrain doesn't fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the mind of humans. That's where the battles are won.

-Col John Boyd, USAF

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

As you know, Battles, Campaigns, Wars, Corporate Initiatives, even Live Television take on unexpected characteristics once you flip the switch and the train is in motion. And, like a train, they are very hard to stop, unable to offer time-outs so you can sit and ponder which switch to throw when presented with a "Y" in the tracks. This is the strength and the weakness of OODA. Strength, because if you're in control and shaping events due to your superior assimilation of landscape data and ability to execute, you can figuratively create endless "Y"s for your opponent. In fighter pilot terms, even in athletic terms, it's called being in the zone. Time slows down for you in a sort of zen serenity: you're calm while your opponent is sweating every minute detail, and losing it with each reactive bead of sweat. Weakness? You run the risk of believing you're omnipotent, relative to your competitors perceived abilities. Call it, uhh, operational hubris.

John Boyd, creator of the OODA Loop, recognized that in an age of increasing information gathering potential, the opportunities to exploit what you know could only be taken if you can adequately and wisely assimilate and categorize the incoming data. In essence, you must know what you know, know what you don't now, and always be aware that there's one more worry: things you don't know that you don't know. Confused? Exactly. That's why it's called complexity theory. But we like simplicity around here, so let's translate:

Don't believe your lying eyes and ears. Never accept the answer you expected to hear. Accept input from atypical sources. Insist on it. The more strongly you feel about a certain event or outcome the more widely you should entertain alternative futures. Overlay information to find patterns and rythmns, because they're there. Keep your head on a swivel, not up your ass. The brain gets more oxygen that way.

Well, that's probably how Boyd would have said it (a bit of a maverick, Boyd.) Much in the way that, for the want of a shoe a kingdom was lost, or Mrs. O'Leary's cow changed Chicago forever, God and victory is in the small, seemingly innocuous details. And, of course, you must leave out any ideological biases when assimilating the data and generating strategy--or you short out the loop. In other words, sometimes you use the tool, and sometimes the tool uses you.

Did I mention Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove are huge fans of Boyd's work?

Too bad the Colonel died in 1997. Methinks the Bushies are in need of a refresher.

Something tells me Tom Friedman would really like Imaginary Girlfriend™!

Via Corporate Engagement comes this from The New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

A bottle of bottled water held 30 little turtles. It didn't matter that each turtle had to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles, a total turtle delicacy. The problem was that there were many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles.

...I was sitting in on an "accent neutralization" class at the Indian call center 24/7 Customer.... I gave these young Indians an authentic rendition of "30 Little Turtles," which is designed to teach them the proper Canadian pronunciations.

[snip]

There is nothing more positive than the self-confidence, dignity and optimism that comes from a society knowing it is producing wealth by tapping its own brains -- men's and women's -- as opposed to one just tapping its own oil, let alone one that is so lost it can find dignity only through suicide and "martyrdom."
    Indeed, listening to these Indian young people, I had a deja vu. Five months ago, I was in Ramallah, on the West Bank, talking to three young Palestinian men, also in their 20s, one of whom was studying engineering. Their hero was Yasser Arafat. They talked about having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all "suicide bombers in waiting."
    What am I saying here? That it's more important for young Indians to have jobs than Americans? Never. But I am saying that there is more to outsourcing than just economics. There's also geopolitics. It is inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs. To the extent that they go to places like India or Pakistan -- where they are viewed as high-wage, high-prestige jobs -- we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds.

Pitiful elitist myopia derived from tenure. In his usual fine job of gee-whizzing the obvious, what Friedman misses is that in the absence of bling-bling, security becomes a rather academic abstraction. 20 year olds in Ramallah and Sarajevo braved withering crossfire to get to any job. Safety is a luxury when your kids or brothers and sisters are hungry. Scarcity also generates a preterantural social structure that points down, whether you're a 20 year-old in Khe Sanh, or just in Kokomo. William Golding wrote a very interesting book on the tendency.

I guess this means we're about due for Friedman's follow-up to The Lexus and The Olive Tree. Perhaps, "The Rice Rocket and the RPG"?

Read this CEO quote. Then, I have a question for all comers

In December, the CEO of a California-based high tech firm told me that "there is no amount of overtime that we will not pay, there is no level of temporary services that we will not use, there is no level of outsourcing or offshoring that we will not do, in order to prevent us from having to hire one new, permanent worker in the U.S." As I travel around the country, meeting with business leaders, I hear similar, though less succinct thoughts in almost every sector and every part of the country. U.S. wages, health care, and other benefit costs have gotten so high -- and the press by investors for high stock prices is so great -- that the premium is on wringing every last bit of work out of as few employees as possible, to do anything but incur the costs of adding permanent employees.

The above is via Charlie Cook, and his political newsletter "Off To The Races". (Go here to subscribe. It's free but there's a 2 week lag to get it.) This snippet is currently hot on several economics blogs. Decembrist. DeLong. Sawicky.

My query is this:

C-Level executives and industry are in danger of losing some vital artillery: Politically, companies and industries have used the "apple pie" fig-leaf of job creation to wheedle policy makers into tax cuts, tariff gymnastics, subsidies and free range on a lot of issues like the environment, copyright, safety regs, zoning etc.

Is this not undeniable?

Viewed this way, Outsourcing has the potential to create the Grange Wars all over again. Don't laugh. If CEOs can only winge and moan about balance sheet health and the abstract need for their companies to survive, yet offer no domestic employment growth benefit to prove their American commitment and cement their standing in society, they're going to have a hard time getting calls returned from Mayors, and State and National legislators.

In short, business has a very big problem that's been handed them by the natural course, nay, the March of economic evolution. And this one has the potential to create more headaches--far more--than the advent of IT and the personal computer had on the business scene.

Firstly, whomever (McKinsey?) gave global job transfer the name out-sourcing couldn't have done a better favor for its opponents. What finer way to characterize an Archetypal image of a malignant enemy at the gates than outsourcing? If you're not in, you're out. With the exception of maybe dining, when has out ever been a "good" thing? And when attached to something as fundamental as people's livelihoods, outsourcing has all the appeal of forced organ donation. Bad mojo. A loser.

Language matters in this case. Witness the vocabulary of state and local economic development: Quality of life. Right to work. Good schools. Competitive housing. All those terms apply to people, specifically, to attracting and retaining them. They are predicated on an Additive, not a Subtractive jobs model for American business. If there is even an implication that that is shifting, and the implications are sprouting like mushrooms after summer rain, what are the dominoes that are gonna fall?

Set aside national pride or the noble civic place of corporations. Instead, ask yourself: Where are you and I, as business people, gonna hide our money when they come for it to prop up wheezing social and health services sectors? Are we more interested in pious political speechmaking only to then have our future dictated to us? Or do we drop the bullshit and address reality in time to have a say?

That's not to say some businesses don't see the trouble coming or don't acknowledge its impact in their forecasts. But those are very large businesses--Globals or MNCs for the most part. And to date, their answer has been to "go around" the problem. It's an interesting route. The journey takes you to exotic places like Bangalore or Guangdong. Others are self-admiringly talking of "boot straps" and the need for American workers to be more "self-reliant". "Why can't workers realize they live in a contract labor world?", I've heard plaintively asked--even angrily asked--more than once.

Yeah, right. Interestingly, when I work with companies to help create these kinds of employees in-house, the first shriek we hear is "We can't do that--it would be anarchy!" Similarly, which schools are teaching kids to be these budding McGuyvers capable of living off the land, highly flexible and resourceful? Certainly none I know of and I'm in them almost daily--and this is to oversee programs we've developed for some of the more "gifted" students, no less.

There is a conundrum in this situation for sure. It starts with the fact that globals can operate internationally. Small business-owners can't, no matter what smoke Microsoft and others may be trying to blow up your skirt. Smaller businesses need the products of their local school systems--you know, those can-do warrior-explorers with freshly minted diplomas and the resourcefulness of Grizzly Adams. And yes, smaller businesses need some semblance of access to even the most rudimentary healthcare benefits for their people.

Gee, it seems smaller and mid-cap businesses have a dog in this fight.

But I only hear them voicing their "business person" personae, the stereotype and the received wisdom, rather than speaking up for their selves and their self-interest. In fact, when it comes to many current issues--I see more dream-state wishing and hoping from businessfolk than they'd ever accept from their own people.

What we have here is business environment that University of Michigan biz school professor Karl Weick says presents leaders with seemingly unforeseeable "Cosmology" events. (A simpler analogy might be "Tidal Wave".) That is, these things are there to see if you have eyes. In fact, they usually herald themselves with all the warning of a children's garbage can orchestra coming over the hill.

But alas because there is no "consensus" on "what it all means", we find ourselves clucking and swappping facts to refute or minimize the fact that something of note is happening. Denial in other words. I mentioned a dog-fight earlier. It makes me remember the story of the Dog that growls at a passerby. The passerby turns to approach the dog. The dog bares its teeth. The passerby moves closer. The dog growls some more. The passerby thinks better of it, and moves on. And the dog returns to chewing off its tail.

In this way, we all talk about "change" being the driver of opportunity but bark when the real thing approaches. Or get run over when it arrives. Weick also has a comparative for this: High Reliability Organizations.

Nuclear Power plants are HROs. So are Aircraft Carriers. They are places where a "normal" operations day is knife-edge dangerous. Where failure can be catastrophic. The result is that these types of organizations build and practice a heavy ethic of "what if?" They become masters at imagining potential failures or changes of course. And they use the knowledge for good.

Naturally this requires a certain admission of fallibilty. A rare commodity I know, but one that opens doors to the honest, courageous and wise.

Ahh, The courageous. And the wise. They don't rest on their laurels. They don't look to crucify alternative viewpoints. They are Idealists, not Idealogues; Realists not Reactionaries. (One can pooh-pooh single provider systems or villify HillaryCare of the 90s for instance, but how many are storming the Business Roundtable or the National Association of Manufacturers now that they are endorsing the same damn thing?) It seems, of late, there are a lot of people making political hay by championing the interests of the courageous and the everyman. But very few are willing to point out the obvious fact that one needs the other, and that inertia or ignorance is a poor excuse for allowing the distance and distrust to grow larger.

You see, my final question is: If the everyman looks to the courageous, and he does, where are the courageous? Are there any real business leaders out there, or are we all merely satisfied with appearing as such?

It's an important question. Time's a wasting.

Just a little office thought experiment on The Future of Man & Commerce for a project. (Odd: No happy meal toys.)


[click to enlarge]

I'm sure we missed lots. Any additions?

[3-15: edited for a bad cut and paste]

Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand.



Part I
Part II
Part III - TBA

This series explores the relationship of personal motives to corporate brand identity. A core premise is that brand is as much a leadership and operational tool as it is a means to sell product. In fact, by relegating Brand to afterthought status you create real problems for yourself and your people. The examples and ideas in the series move from historic to current, business to metaphysics, psychological to geometric. The central fact of brand from this perspective is that it is dimensional and real and packed full with primal meaning and opportunity. It is far more powerful than we suspect.

Brands, as well as people, function more effectively when they're connected to something other than themselves. It's called "context". Carefully considered, contextually resonant companies do several things well, and often automatically: They generate a sense of ownership and pride which reinforces a self-regulating culture of merit. The more this approach is imbued in an organization, the less complex the challenge of management becomes. Likewise, the more connected that consumers, employees and stakeholders are in their purpose, the clearer and more fundamental each relationship becomes.

But this only happens when brands are allowed to reach formulations where certain relationships are accorded equal weight and value. Only then do we approach what equates to a sustainable, meaningful brand model in terms that people care about: Dimensionality. 3-D. That's the real world, messy and emotion-laden as it is.

Again, self-identification and brand identity are intricately joined. We're all looking for some thing, some need to be filled, some group to identify with, some reason for sharing our energy and effort and money. Companies, through their brand identity, have powerful opportunities to be part, if not necessarily all, of the answer to that search. The benefits of a company placed in this indispensable position should be obvious. The requirements are geometrically simple. And they include four elements any sensible business person should insist on when judging the utility of a message, idea, project or plan:

1. Coherence
2. Relevance
3. Resonance
4. Internalization.

It must make sense. It must apply to what we do. If must be meaningful enough that we don't forget. It must be powerful enough that it points out and crystalizes what we already think, but couldn't enunciate before. It makes us damn proud. It feels right, because it's already "us". Lastly, it moves people because they handle the moving.

I hope you enjoy the series. Any comments are welcome.