In praise of the auto-didact

Thomas Paine.

In 1995, Wired's Jon Katz wrote a very prescient article on the power and possibility of the Internet, and, most specifically, to it's historical mirroring of Paine and his brother pamphleteers' poking a finger in the eye of the established order. Paine recognized that the "mass media" of the time was often subservient to political or business interests and therefore often peddling what people in power wanted to happen or be "true," not necessarily what was true.

Paine, and his pen-pal Thomas Jefferson, believed information wanted to be free (as in unfiltered, free-flow of.) In fact, they both believed it was a requirement in order for man to be free and capable. ("Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Thomas Jefferson in a letter to another friend, Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819)

Paine was a man of conviction and ideals. But his ideas had resonance and symmetry with how humans regard themselves and their natural rights. To this end, he reserved his right to write and share what he thought, on politics, on business, on religion, on bridge building, on you name it. That his ideas were often so spot on and compelling, so naturally sensible and cognizant of the way people really are and want to be, only made the culture and power establishment of the time fear and despise him: he made their compromises appear not wise, but lazy; their words and claims to integrity, a sham. The few and satisfied viewed his words and brashness as an affront, but the many ("Common Sense sold 500k copies in a country of 3 million, many illiterate) found strength and validation in his willingness to point out, curse and smash priveleged feet of clay. He gave voice to their deeply held, powerful but ignored, ideals.

Thomas Paine, Pamphleteer, revolutionary, seeker--the father of blogging, of Digital pamphleteering--would get the message: refusing status quo, denying official "reality," insisting on speaking his own mind. With the freedom to do so and the urge to follow through.

240-plus years later, Paine's legacy is a new means and a New Conversation about age-old old desires, ambitions and hopes. It's called Blogging and you're welcome to join. To speak your thoughts, not somebody else's. To raise your hand and signify. And what you say, is completely up to you.

A snippet from Katz's article:

Tom Paine's ideas, the example he set of free expression, the sacrifices he made to preserve the integrity of his work, are being resuscitated by means that hadn't existed or been imagined in his day - via the blinking cursors, clacking keyboards, hissing modems, bits and bytes of another revolution, the digital one. If Paine's vision was aborted by the new technologies of the last century, newer technology has brought his vision full circle. If his values no longer have much relevance for conventional journalism, they fit the Net like a glove.
The Net offers what Paine and his revolutionary colleagues hoped for - a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds. That was part of the political transformation he envisioned when he wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Through media, he believed, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used."

.....

His writing is infused with the sense - especially relevant now as the digital culture spreads across the world - that a new age was about to burst open all around him. This would be an unmistakable, great awakening, even if it came in stages. Instead of seeing a single bud on a winter tree, he wrote, "I should instantly conclude that the same appearance was beginning, or about to begin, everywhere; and though the vegetable sleep will continue longer on some trees and plants than on others, and though some of them may not blossom for two or three years, all will be in leaf in the summer, except those which are rotten." It is not difficult to perceive, he wrote, "that the spring is begun."

....

Asked about the reasons for new media, Paine would have answered in a flash: to advance human rights, spread democracy, ease suffering, pester government. Modern journalists would have a much rougher time with the question. There is no longer widespread consensus, among practitioners or consumers, about journalism's practices and its goals.

Of course, the ferociously spirited press of the late 1700s that Paine helped invent differed from the institution we know today. It was dominated by individuals expressing their opinions. The idea that ordinary citizens with no special resources, expertise, or political power - like Paine himself - could sound off, reach wide audiences, even spark revolutions, was brand-new to the world. In Paine's wake, writes Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, "every conceivable form of printed matter - books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers - multiplied and were now written and read by many more ordinary people than ever before in history."

....

Reading Paine is eerie after spending time online and in political conferences on The Well, say, or after poring through the most provocative BBS postings. From reasoned arguments to raging flames to the staccato shorthand (LOL, IMHO) of countless e-mailers, digital communications are spare, blunt, economical, and efficient. Paine's style is the style of the Internet; his succinct voice and language could slip comfortably into its debates and discussions.

Funereal Flotsam

Roughly how many people attended Benjamin Franklin's funeral?

150
2,000
20,000
100,000

Answer: Here

We remain... Analog

Monitor

Return of the trades

With technology jobs tarnished and more careerists now searching for 'meaning,' specialized, hands-on work gains new allure

When Billy Cleland drives in and around Washington, D.C., he sees more than monuments and grand buildings: He sees the fruits of his own labor.

Mr. Cleland has been a stone mason since 1940, and his work has included building the columns of the National Gallery of Art; setting the stones at John F. Kennedy's grave site; and serving as master mason of the National Cathedral in its final years of construction, setting the last stone finial in place in 1990.

"I've been very fortunate," says Mr. Cleland, now retired. "I've had the privilege to help build this city and many of its monuments.... Any craftsman who's worth his salt is able to stand back at the end of a hard day and look at his work and say, I did that."

Scott Holloway has never met the master mason, but he wants to be able to say the same things about his own work one day. Cleland's junior by more than 40 years, he is just embarking on what he hopes will be a lifelong career as a skilled tradesman. Mr. Holloway recently tired of office work and decided to find something more meaningful. He's now enrolled in a trades program where he is learning to make terrazzo - a specialized tile floor that involves mixing crushed tile with concrete and pouring it into place.

"It's exciting, I feel more of a sense of worth," he says of the 12-week course he's taking at the International Masonry Institute in Cascade, Md.

The terrorist attacks tore up New York City, he adds, "and that's where I'm from - and I could be part of rebuilding it."

Holloway isn't alone in his enthusiasm for the skilled trades. During a decade in which the media's career-and-workplace coverage has been dominated by Wall Street and the dotcom generation, the skilled trades have quietly been enjoying a renaissance in this country - attracting renewed public appreciation for their craftsmanship and quality, as well as a new generation of workers eager for the hands-on satisfaction of creating work that is meant to last generations.... [read more]

Remember: Getting the most from your people is "Weakness."

NYT via EFCA

To Reach the Heights, First Be Male

THE glass ceiling has been shattered so often in the last decade that you might think that metaphor for the limits many women in business confront would have lost its power. But as some women in the media business found out last week, once you get through the ceiling, you find a secret glass treehouse suspended far above your head. That's where the men sit.

Last week, Martha Nelson was promoted by John Huey, Time Inc.'s editor-in-chief, from editor of People magazine, that large, reliable A.T.M. for Time Inc., to corporate editor in charge of People and its offspring. When Mr. Huey ascended from editorial director earlier this year, some thought Ms. Nelson would get his old job as No. 2 and act as his adviser and confidante, as Mr. Huey had for Norman Pearlstine.

But People and magazines like InStyle - another cash machine that Ms. Nelson had helped create - are responsible for almost half of Time Inc.'s profit, and Mr. Huey was reluctant to kick her upstairs, far from the action. It makes business sense: Mr. Huey just got the job and he does not need to train his successor.

But you have to wonder if Ms. Nelson were a man whether she would have been brought up into the executive clubhouse on the 34th floor. (It's worth mentioning that Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., already resides there.) For the time being, the glass ceiling is a skating rink, an arena in which she can show off her substantial skills, but it could contain unseen trapdoors.

[snip]

....That's one way to do business, but not exactly the Condé Nast way. Most executives, men and women, end up losing out for the top slot just by virtue of the numbers. But in the instance of Ms. Berner, the assets she brought to the job - a willingness to share ideas and credit, an ability to build a civil and productive work culture - are viewed as weaknesses. She might be good, but she wasn't in the club.

A modest(y) proposal

[The previous post sent me to the vault - found it...]


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.

Numbers guys try road less traveled

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Values, morals also important

Corporate leaders tell UR audience that in business, it's not always about the numbers

Richmond - To find out where a company makes a major mistake, take a close look at its DNA.

The problem lies in thinking "Deliver the Numbers Always," said W. Thomas Matthews, president of the global private client division at brokerage and investment banking firm Smith Barney and an adviser to Citibank.

He was implying that executives need to find values and use morals and critical thinking to get ahead instead of always chasing the money.

It was a comment that laid the foundation at yesterday's corporate pep talk at the University of Richmond, sponsored by the Jepson School of Leadership Studies.

He and two other members from the high ranks of corporate America spoke to about 70 members of the business and school community on the challenges facing companies and the importance of values and accountability.

"The post-Enron business climate has really opened up the question of values in a big organization and why they're important," said Eva S. Hardy, senior vice president of external affairs and corporate communications at Dominion Resources Inc.

One value that can't be overlooked is honesty, said William R. Johnston, the former president and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange.

"Exchanges have a simple core value, and that is one of honesty," he said. "If [traders and companies] do not believe that what you are providing is an honest marketplace, they will go elsewhere, and they will not play in your ballpark anymore. Your word is your bond."

And not only should bosses hold employees accountable, Matthews said, but they should be "brutally honest" with everyone to help them grow. Hardy encourages executives to look beyond the résumé to find the people who can do the job right.

Executives developing the right teams, the three said, will make for better successions as management steps down. And succession planning "sure as heck doesn't belong in HR," Matthews said.

Finally, the trio said, it is important nowadays to diversify companies and give back to the community.

"I see a disturbing trend sometimes in our country not wanting to let different people in," Hardy said. With increasing globalization, "I find [not being diverse] is going to be very difficult for businesses."

On the topic of social responsibility, she ended by mentioning that Dominion is active in giving to educational causes.

Matthews said his company does the same.

Smith Barney considers all charities, he told the UR crowd, but with an education cause, "if you really want to get our attention, recognize that there is no better cause."

Well, good effort. But what a rather tame selection of quotes. DNA, huh? Well, yes, and no. I just got through venting on a similar subject here in our office not 20 minutes ago, approximately thus....

You stand on the shoulders of those who came before you. If those who came before were thugs and liars, you can dresss up real pretty in an angel outfit but you'll still be on the shoulders of thugs and liars. They won't notice the halo, they won't give you benefit of the doubt. They'll see the "knife" they expect you to have. Gee, you don't have a knife?

"Prove it, asshole!"

That's what they're gonna think, even if they don't say it....

Yes, people around here are used to goofy analogies. That particular one was me venting on the folly of a developer of some tangential acquaintance, spinning, yet again, about his group's intent with regard to some very notable infill property sandwiched in between some established and influentially populated neigborhoods.

If this particular investment/development group wants to screw around and play to type, they're not only dissing the neighbors, they're giving any potential investor/buyers of their white elephant a difficult-times-three job.

And that, in my opinion, is the point the Jepson speakers quoted above missed that Thursday night: The machine of institutional trust is seized-up in many quarters. Yes, quarterlies and EBITDA are a curse, I scribbled about it here (Corporate Anorexia) 2 years ago. In many situations, the physician is being asked to heal thyself, in cases where they abjectly refuse to admit that previous prescriptions have brought them to the ER. The question is, what do you do with a frozen machine?

Answer: You tilt.
Result: You may--just may--have knocked it closer to plumb.

To be, or not to be, Born in the USA

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said "Son don't you understand"

Chiefexecutive.net

The Quiet Debate Among CEOs: Are We American Companies or Not?

As a young correspondent for United Press International in Lansing, Mich. In 1975, I drove up to Midland to interview Carl Gerstacker, then CEO of Dow Chemical, about his statement that he wanted Dow to have its headquarters on its own island out in the ocean. He didn’t want to be domiciled in a single country.

In short, the debate about whether major U.S.-based companies with extensive global sales should consider themselves “American” has been going on—quietly—for at least 30 years. CEOs whose companies have 80 or 90 percent of their sales in the U.S. don’t ponder this question very much. It’s clearly the big guys like Intel, United Technologies, Coca-Cola that may have 60 percent or more of their sales outside the U.S. that are at the eye of this philosophical storm.

We see threads of this debate in the storm over outsourcing of Information Technology jobs and Business Process Outsourcing jobs, as well as the debate about the investments that major companies are making abroad. Microsoft is investing $1.3 billion in India; Intel is investing aggressively as well in India and other emerging markets. Craig Barrett of Intel has come out and said, in effect, if we can’t find the skills sets we need in the United States, why should we invest here? General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner is sending much the same message to Washington: if you don’t implement better health care policies, we’ll keep closing plants and moving jobs elsewhere. And as expressed by George David of United Technologies, his company has an obligation to governments and societies wherever the company operates. One isn’t necessarily more important than another.... (empahsis mine) [more]

Take it away, Bruce...

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go

I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.

Good to Greater Genghis

BBC

He killed and pillaged and is widely seen as the epitome of the tyrannical ruler, but was Genghis Khan all bad?

As the BBC prepares to broadcast a revisionist history of the 13th-Century Mongol leader, one historian speculates that Genghis possessed "many of the qualities of a good chief executive."

Disregarding what this might say about the management style of some businesses today, would you want him as a boss?

"On one level, he is a megalomaniac," military historian Dan Snow says. "But on another level, given that you have to judge him by the standards of his time, he was a very good manager."...

Atilla? A prisoner of Visio® and Powerpoint™. Hannibal? Wouldn't shut up about fractional elephant ownership. Alexander? Mergers & Indigestion. But Genggy? A pro all the way. Check out the rest of the piece, including details on his 5 Habits of Highly Effective Marauders:

Here are five reasons you might wish your manager was a megalomaniacal dictator with a taste for world domination.

1. PROFIT SHARING
2. HATED OFFICE POLITICS
3. RAN A MERITOCRACY
4. EMBRACED CHANGE
5. THOUGHT AHEAD

Fluff it up to 100 pages. Call it "The 5 Claws of Conquest: Rules of the Jungle, Traits of the Tiger." Next, wave it under the noses of Jack Welch and The Donald.

Galzuu!!

You've got a bestseller and 2 years of speaking gigs.

Shad & Freud

New study from the British peer-review journal Nature, out today, seems to have caught several editorial eyes:

NYT

Study Shows Men Have Sweeter Feelings of Revenge Than Women

NEW YORK (AP) -- Bill Clinton said he felt others' pain. But a new brain-scanning study suggests that when guys see a cheater get a mild electric shock, they don't feel his pain much at all. In fact, they rather enjoy it.

In contrast, women's brains showed they do empathize with the cheater's pain and don't get a kick out it....

More detail at brainconnection.com

Revenge Replaces Empathy in Male Brain

The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude, loosely translated as "taking joy in the misery of others."

It's what many folks feel when movie villains get blown away or a nasty co-worker gets fired.

Now a new brain-imaging study suggests that schadenfreude might be a distinctly male phenomenon.

Reward areas in the brains of male volunteers -- the same areas that delight in food, drugs or sex -- lit up when bad or unfair competitors appeared to be given jolts of pain. The same areas lay dormant when "innocent" individuals got zapped, however.

The schadenfreude effect did not surface in the brains of female volunteers, the British researchers found.

"You saw that there was a lot of pleasure that these males were seeking when they were able to watch this bad-behaving individual get pain," says John Hibbing, a University of Nebraska political science professor whose work focuses on the emotional and neurological forces driving human social and political behaviors....

[SNIP]

When the "fair" players got jolted, areas of the brain's frontal, executive centers associated with empathy lit up in both men and women, the researchers reported.

Then the cheaters got zapped.

Empathy centers in the brains of female participants lit up just as they had when they watched the "fair" players endure pain.

"However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain," the researchers noted.

What's more, "this effect (in males) was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge," they added.

These reward areas include more primitive brain regions such as the striatal system and the nucleus accumbens, they said.

This means that "for men, at least, the brain's reward system is activated when there's punishment of the bad guys," says neuroscientist Dr. Paul Sanberg, director of the Center for Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa. "These are the same areas that are involved in reward for drugs and other things we want badly."

In fact, a similar brain-imaging study reported in Science last August found that revenge activates neurological centers linked to other strong urges, such as cocaine abuse or sexual attraction....

These are the times that try men's souls. Chicks too.

Zyman Group. (Yeah, that Zyman.)

10 Former marketing execs and where they are now

1. Denis Beausejour
He stepped down as VP-marketing of Procter & Gamble Co. in 2000; in 2004 became pastor of the Mariemont Community church near Cincinnati.

2. Roy Bergold
The former VP-chief creative officer for McDonald’s USA opened an equestrian center in Payson, Ariz., last year.

3. Chris Clouser
Former chief global marketing officer for Burger King and CEO of the Minnesota Twins is now president of the Association of Tennis Professionals.

4. Mary Elizabeth Donaldson
The former marketing executive at Young & Rubicam, Sydney, Rapp Collins in Edinburgh and DDB, Melbourne, in May of this year became HRH Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.

5. John Hommeyer
The former CMO of Pets.com, who commissioned the sock puppet that became an icon of dot-com-era excess and failure, in 2004 became VP of Clorox Co.’s laundry business this year after a stint as CMO of Hotwire.

6. Jim Mack
Resigned as chairman of Publicis Groupe’s Frankel in August 2003 to open Jemrose Vineyards, named for his and wife Gloria’s two daughters.

7. Muktesh ‘Micky’ Pant
Resigned as chief marketing officer of Reebok in February. Reportedly intended to return to his native India and start a yoga-related business.

8. Kirk Souder
The cancer survivor left as president-executive creative director of Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, to get a masters degree in psychology.

9. Bill Westbrook
The retired president-creative director of Fallon, Minneapolis, runs the Hope & Glory Inn in Irvington, Va.

10. Sergio Zyman
The former chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola, known as “the Aya-Cola,” is now an author and head of the Zyman Group, which consults corporations on marketing matters.

Round World? Flat World? Spiky World?

From Gordon Houseworth @ Intellectual Capital Group blog

It is clear to a growing number of US nationals that our failure to keep abreast of scientific and technical education and research and to build and retain a substantive manufacturing capacity in those emerging sectors is going to soon put the US on the declining end of the robust nationality of other states. The most piercing analysis of the implications of offshoring rise from Alan Blinder (former vice chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and former member of the Council of Economic Advisers, now at Princeton). Unlike many economists whose works seem remote from politics, Blinder blends them both in what I submit are essential reading to understanding the economic and political implications of offshoring. The horizon is not attractive.

Comparative advantage is the name of the game and ours has been allowed to lapse. Always an obscure concept save for economists, comparative advantage is not well understood by lay readers and certainly not by those whose jobs move overseas. Blinder does as good a job as I've seen in presenting economics in political human scale. All things being equal, world per capita incomes will indeed level in globalization. The US will have a painful economic and political adjustment for its failure to retain its advantage. From Blinder's Fear of Offshoring:

The furor over [N. Gregory] Mankiw’s remarks [on offshoring for which he was excoriated in the press and by Congress] was grotesquely out of proportion to the current importance of offshoring, which is still largely a prospective phenomenon. While we have no reliable national data on the extent of offshoring, the fragmentary studies that have been done to date have concluded that fewer than a million U.S. service-sector jobs have been lost to offshoring up to now. A million jobs may sound like a lot. But in the gigantic U.S. labor market, with its rapid turnover, a million jobs is less than two week’s normal gross job losses.

But here’s the great irony. Looking to the future, I believe that Mankiw and other economists who interpret offshoring as nothing more than international business as usual are greatly underestimating both its importance and its disruptive impact on Western societies. Sometimes quantitative change is so large that it brings about qualitative change. Indeed, I will argue in this paper that we have barely seen the tip of an offshoring iceberg that, as the rest of it is revealed, may prove to be something to behold.

Excellent and well-linked article by Gordon showing the dangers of credentialism and breathing your own fumes (Friedman, et al.) You can easily extrapolate from the National comparative advantage standpoint many of the arguments of Richard Florida's "Creative Class" as relates to regional and local competitiveness. Gee, when I scribbled on it last March, I think I called it "Whither Comparative Advantage?" Bottom line: this shit ain't hard to get your ghead around, if you can lose the blinkers that "credentialing" and the self-talk that our homogenous groups and their agendas can impose on the quality of our assessments and understanding. Occam was right. And Friedman and friends are talking themselves into believing the smooth sustainability of their new paradigm, all evidence of human history and desire to the contrary. As Mike Dewitt of Spooky Action can tell you, those basics we should always remebember to get to real truth and its drivers are the verities of R-Complex:

The Meta of business

WIIFM
MMFI

What's in it for me? Make me feel important. Those are not about greed or narcissim, not really. Not hardly. If business and business schools spent one third of their time asking and answering those questions meaningfully within the tripartite markets of their shareholders, consumers and employees things might hang together a bit more coherently and resonantly. Especially in the rough times. I know that when I have the chance to present such questions in my work, the answers seem to satisfy without us having to resort to bonus, a fleet of Benzes for managers, or couponing and slotting-fee-ing ourselves to chapter 11.

Force or flow. Artificial or natural order. The meta of business is really, right now, the denial of the pattern language of people. We are the molecules of business matter. And often unobserved, unsanctioned in our real motives and desires. Ignored. I can see what makes the molecules hang together and hold me up on this Aeron chair I sit on only if I look really closely. And not with everyday eyes. And even then, I can only measure the hyperphysical: the electric charge or the paths they leave. I can't actually see them: energy is invisible. And, in many ways, it is meta.

The characteristics between atoms are invisible when we look from a distance, and when we insist on observing that way. People, the soft molecules of business are no different. They have patterns that aren't scientific, aren't on some chart in some business school. But they are somewhat knowable. If we know what to look for. And where. And why.

Once we do that, the "how" always comes. Like an epiphany.

Oy Gevalt!

Wired News

The New Market Bubble Theory

So here's the good news: The next five years will bring us the biggest stock-market boom in history. The bad news? The party will end in late 2010, after which we'll face the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the world of Harry S. Dent, an economist and demographic researcher whose 1992 book, The Great Boom Ahead, called the stock-market bubble of the late '90s when few saw it coming. In his 2004 book, The Next Great Bubble Boom, Dent predicts an even bigger bubble forming over the next few years. That is, before everything crashes down around us.

We caught up recently with Dent to talk about where the markets are heading, and where to park our spare cash...

A snip

WN: You predict this new stock-market bubble will burst in late 2010, followed by a long decline. Are we talking about something like the 1970s or more of a cataclysmic downturn like the Great Depression?

Dent: I'd say it's going to be in between. It won't be as extreme as the Great Depression. But it will be worse than the '70s downturn, and I think it will be worse than what Japan saw from 1990 to 2003. Maybe we'll see unemployment at 15 percent, give or take. The worst part of it is you're going to see deflationary trends in prices from a shrinking work force. Deflation is the enemy of asset prices. You've got to remember that in the '70s, while the Bob Hope generation was declining in their spending, you had a bigger generation coming behind them entering the work force and picking up some of the slack. Now you've got a smaller generation following the largest generation in history. So it makes the downward trend even more pronounced...

WN: Is there always a bubble somewhere?

Dent: Yes and no. We're in a whole bubble era. It started in the '70s with oil and gold and real estate, and then it spread to the stock market. And now it's back to oil and real estate. You have to go back to the early 1900s to see a similar bubble economy because that's when a lot of these economies were racing with much-higher-than-average productivity, all of these growth industries and all of this change. That's when you get bubbles. We didn't see bubbles in the (19)40s, '50s and '60s. This bubble boom will finally end around 2010 with the massive baby boom and the new technology trends.... I mean, by the end of this decade new technologies -- broadband, internet, wireless, home computing, all this stuff -- will have penetrated 90 percent of households in this country. The boom's over for a while. I mean, who are you going to sell this stuff to? You're down to West Virginia at that point.

Illicit Coke Dealers

Reveries dot com

“Coke is sending lawyers to harass people instead of catering to customer demand,” says Danny Ginsberg of Real Soda in Real Bottles, bashing Coca-Cola’s attempts to stop the flow of the Real Thing from Mexico to the United States, as reported by Chad Terhune in The Wall Street Journal (1/11/06). The story is that in Mexico, “which has the world’s highest per-capita consumption of Coca-Cola,” the locals like their Coke made with real cane sugar and bottled in thick, glass contoured bottles (no American-style plastic bottles or high-fructose corn syrup for them). That’s the way it’s been since Coke arrived in Mexico in 1916 and Mexicans wouldn’t have it any other way — even those Mexicans who have since moved to the U.S. And so, predictably, Mexican Coke is being bootlegged via “independent truckers” and warehouse stores. Just as predictably, that “is costing Coke’s 75 U.S. bottlers millions of dollars a year in sales.” [more]

Zingerman's

From Reveries dot com...

The food industry wisdom is that people can't taste the difference, don't care, and won't pay more. We don't think that's true, says Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of Zingerman's Deli.

"We believe," says Ari, "that people can taste the difference, that if they can afford it, they happily will pay more if they know why they're paying more and can taste it."

Though it claims but one location, housed in an old-and-quirky, two-story, 1902 orange-brick building, on the corner of Detroit and Kingsley in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zingerman's has been called the most famous deli in America.

In part that's because its founders - Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw - have stuck to a vision of serving highest quality, traditional foods and doing all they can to make sure that no customer ever turns into a former customer.

It is also because the two men resolutely refuse to franchise their business from coast to coast. They believe that leaving Ann Arbor would forfeit what makes Zingerman's great.

So, instead, in 1994, Ari and Paul wrote a 15-year business plan that keeps Zingerman's local, in Ann Arbor, and "line-extends" into a range of ancillary businesses - each of which supports the flagship, the deli. So far, in addition to the deli, there are six such businesses (bakery, mail-order, training, catering, creamery, restaurant).

Oh, and Ari has also just published a book, Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, a breezy and fun read that's loaded with fascinating details and laced with quick-and-easy recipes.

The grand plan, though, is to launch a total of 12-15 Zingerman's businesses by the year 2009. That highly unusual, and impressive, business model has earned Zingerman's lots of attention in the business press. Still, underneath it all is the same, basic idea that got Ari and Paul started in the first place.


"Everything we do starts with substance, because it's all about the food," says Ari. "We don't sit there and think - there's a hole in this market, what do we do? We look for the food that we believe in, to either make or buy, and then we figure out how to get people interested in buying it, which has to be based on how it tastes."

He continues: "It's not a value judgment about what people should eat. It's up to each person to decide. I could tell you what I like and why, but at the end of the day, it's up to the customer to make the decision."

It's a point of view at which Ari arrived while working as a dishwasher at an Ann Arbor restaurant, a job he took after graduating from the University of Michigan, where he had studied Russian history. Paul was the general manager at this restaurant, and the two became friends.

Paul eventually left to open his own fish market, and, after a while, it reached a point where Ari's philosophy of food and business was taking on a life of its own, and so he, too, left the restaurant. He says he really had no idea exactly what he was going to do next.

Incredibly, it all clicked, and very quickly. Paul rang up Ari and told him about some retail space that was coming open, near his fish market. The thought was that maybe they would do something together.

And they did.


What were you thinking when you and Paul started Zingerman's back in 1982?

We wanted to bring great-tasting, traditional foods, especially a lot of the traditional Jewish foods that we had grown up with, into the neighborhood here. I grew up in Chicago and Paul grew up in Detroit, and a lot of those foods weren't available here, in Ann Arbor.


It's food that is very down to earth. It's the kind of food you can eat every day. It's accessible to everybody. What we don't want is the kind of food that you only go out for once a year. We like food that you can eat and enjoy all the time.

How does the deli compare today to the way it was when you first opened it?

Well, it's bigger, but it's still relatively small. Ultimately, we're still trying to do the same thing we started with. We want to have world-class food in a casual setting.

We want to have a great place for people to work. We want a unique experience for people - one that is true to who we are and what the business is. We want to be true to the community, and not a replica of some other place, somewhere else.

We want to have great service and make being at Zingerman's a really fun and enjoyable experience for everybody involved. Ultimately, it's really not any different now than it was before.

What is it like inside Zingerman's Deli?

It's probably overwhelming and extremely confusing the first time you come in. Our job is to try to help manage that confusion and turn it into a positive experience. It's not really like what most people are used to. Most people who've heard a lot about it are surprised that it's smaller than they expected it to be.

Frequently, the line is out the door. There might be a greeter at the door, giving out menus and samples and helping to direct traffic. We have an interesting mix of people who have been here three times a week for 15 years and people who've never been here before.

When you first walk in, you're looking at a whole wall of bread from our Bakehouse … a whole counter with breads and pastries on it. If you look to the left, there's smoked fish. There's a whole cheese counter. If you walk straight ahead, about 20 yards, you'll find a counter where people are taking orders for sandwiches and prepared foods.

If you walk to the right of the bread area, you wander into a relatively small space that's got all sorts of olive oils and vinegars and honeys and mustards and pastas and other interesting, un-refrigerated foods. All of them are open for tasting, for samples.

What is your merchandising philosophy?

We do a lot of talking. The dry goods you could simply pick up and walk out with, but all the cheese is cut to order, as are the cured meats and smoked fish. We have a lot of signage. We do our own posters and graphic design in our own particular style, which evolved over time.

We teach courses on our approach to design. We have a lot of it documented in terms of the look and feel of it, and how we use it. It's pretty interactive and lively. It's bold. It should be fun. It's pretty colorful, and very personalized.

Do you advertise?

We do very little advertising. We do one ad a month in the Ann Arbor Observer, which is a community guide. That’s probably 80 percent of our advertising for the whole organization. We're very much oriented towards guerilla marketing.


What kind of guerilla marketing?

We create a lot of written materials that we give out in-house, in the belief that the more we share information and education with our existing customers the more they'll be up for buying good food and learning about what we do.

We create a lot of hand-made, colorful, illustrated posters that share information about the food. We work with the press to share stories of what we're doing to keep them up to speed.

It's a lot of simple stuff - handouts, stuffed bags, talking to customers, T-shirts, emails. It's just realizing that it takes years and years to build up a market for a product. You can't just put out one little promotional piece or one ad and expect that it's going to make much headway.

We don't have big budgets, so we just keep working with inexpensive tools, word of mouth. We try to make substantial things happen so that people are interested in them.

In your employee manual it says that one out of every 300,000 customers can't be satisfied no matter what. How do you satisfy that customer?

In most businesses, the average service provider would tell you that it's one out of every two or three customers who can't be satisfied. We need people to understand that, as we see it, a customer who can't be satisfied is a totally rare exception. It is not the norm.

You just keep working with them. I'm having lunch with a guy next week who wrote two long emails about all the things that were wrong with Zingerman's. But you just keep inviting them back in until you figure it out.

Have you noticed any significant ways in which your customers' tastes have changed?

Oh, sure. Fifteen years ago it was a big deal just to have an extra virgin olive oil - now it's in every grocery store. But that's the nature of the marketplace, so we always have to be improving in order to get to where we want to be.

You wrote a whole article about cream cheese, explaining how and why Zingerman's cream cheese is not like the brands most of us buy at the supermarket.

We just go back to the old way of doing it, before it got all industrialized. It's basically just a very old, simple process. You take the milk, you add the rennet, which is what sets it and creates the curd. You cut the curd, which releases the whey - like Little Miss Muffett. Then you literally hand ladle the curd into cloth bags so that it can drain. After it's drained, you add a little salt and cream, and you're done.

It has texture, it has flavor. It doesn't have any vegetable gum. It's not extruded, which means it's not forced through dies to move it more quickly through the process. The milk is pasteurized at a much lower temperature, which takes longer, but protects the flavor.


Do foods like Zingerman's cream cheese have mass market potential?

Not at the level that we do it, but I'm confident that in three to five years there will be some version of it from some major marketer, just like they copy everything else. It won't be as good, but it'll have a picture of a nice farm on the front of the package.

A slice of Zingerman's bread can cost as much as fifty cents. Why does it cost so much?

Just like with the cream cheese or anything else - it's just a lot of work. You have a lot more steps involved. It's relatively inexpensive to make food if nobody touches it, and if you use really good ingredients they cost more. If you take longer to produce it, it costs more.

How do you make sure it's profitable when it costs so much to make?

Um, you do the math? (laughs)

But you also have to make sure there's sufficient demand to pay the freight.

You do, but you don't know if there's demand until you go out and try to do it. In theory, big companies try to do all of that research first. We're not that big, so we just sort of start with what we believe in and then figure out how to get people to buy it. Even if you do the research, you don't really know whether it will sell, either. You just think you know. But people are wrong all the time.

Does making food so much healthier and attractive help or hurt America's obesity problem?


It helps - totally - because when you eat really good food, you eat less of it. You enjoy it and it's satiating. If you look at our customers and employees, we don't really have a lot of overweight people. If you're a healthy person and you're enjoying life and food, generally you are in pretty good shape.

When you eat a lot of processed foods, you find that they have an unappealing finish to the flavor, and you tend to eat more and more of it to get rid of that finish. Whereas, if you eat a square of really great chocolate, maybe you have two squares, but it's pretty unusual that anybody eats an entire bar of a really great chocolate. Some people do, but it's not like the way most people will put a Hershey bar down in 48 seconds.

When people eat good food, they eat in balance. When we have new employees start, they try to eat everything in the first week. Then they realize the food's not going anywhere and you'll see that everybody who has worked for us for a long time eats a little of this and a little of that. It's actually a much nicer way to eat.

Don't suppose you're a fan of the Atkins Diet.

No, but I'm a fan of everything in moderation. Up until 18 months ago it was all about low fat. We kind of ignored that, too. That's the thing about traditional foods - people have been eating these foods for hundreds and thousands of years. It's not going anywhere because of a new trend. We try to stick with what we believe in, and not flow with the trends.

What about Mad Cow disease?

It's the same thing. We buy only from sources like Niman Ranch, and for 22 years they've been in business they've never allowed animal byproducts into the feed. So, they're doing all the things you should to avoid those problems. We pay a lot more to get their meat, in part because it tastes a lot better, but also because we can feel confident selling it to our customers.


You have a new book out, Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating.

Yes. It has about 15 chapters, each one on a different ingredient and there are about 100 recipes in it, too. Each chapter goes through how the food is made and how to use it and what makes the difference between a good one and a not so good one. It includes stories about the people who make it.

The recipes I tried to focus on are things that people could make after a long day at work - not just things that you look at in a nice cookbook but never produce but once a year. Consequently, those are recipes that require really good ingredients to work because they're simple.

If you had to pick one meal that's your favorite, what would that be?

Probably pasta. I cook every night. Something simple. Good olive oil. Parmesan cheese. If it was in the middle of winter and I was in a hurry and I was at home I might toss some sardines with it, capers maybe.

You like it salty?

No, good sardines aren't salty. Capers shouldn't be salty either. Bad ones are. Most people have experienced not great food. Anchovies are a perfect example.

The anchovies that most people have been served - me included, growing up - aren't very good. But basing your opinion on those anchovies is like eating sliced American singles and deciding you don't like Cheddar cheese.

I'm a city kid. It took me a long time to get used to going out into nature. It's not good or bad; it's just different. It's all what you're used to. Just because I'm uncomfortable in the woods doesn't mean the woods are bad.

Has any one of the seven Zingerman's businesses proved to be the most challenging to make work?

They're all challenging. There are no easy ones. You just have different problems with each one. It's always hard - no matter how much people think you're raking in the money. I don't mean that we're not profitable, but even if you're profitable, you're always reinvesting it in the business. It's never a piece of cake - no pun intended from the Bakehouse perspective.

How do you ensure the same quality in the mail order business?

I would never tell you that it's the same to eat a piece of bread that we ship as it would be have a piece that came directly from the Bakehouse that day. The reality is that most people don't have access to great bread or baked goods so it's not a choice of should I walk down the block to my really wonderful Artisan bakery or should I order it by mail?

Are there any circumstances under which you would replicate some of these businesses - the Roadhouse for example?

No. It's in our vision. It's all documented. In 2006, we're going to start revisiting our vision, which runs through 2009, but I can't tell you what we'll come up with. No, no circumstances. The only circumstance would be that if it became strategically unachievable, or wasn't inspiring. But it is inspiring, and I think it's strategically achievable.

So, no - the practical answer is no, we're not changing our vision. We have a documented vision that says this is what we're doing, and we teach it to everybody who works here. You can't just go back on it. Well, you could, but it wouldn't be a very smart move.

This isn't a short-term decision. We sat down ten years ago and we wrote a 15-year vision and that's what we will do.

By the way, who is Zingerman?

We made it up. There are people, we've since learned, who have that name. But we made it up. We were going to call it Greenberg's, and name it after a woman who was a regular customer at the fish market.

But a week or ten days before we were going to open we got a call from somebody who had already registered the name and wouldn't let us use it. So I went to Paul's house, we drank a few beers and sat on the floor of his living room and brainstormed until we came up with something we liked.

It worked out for the best.

Wal-Mart & Stockholm Syndrome

Wal-Mart is being sued in PA for 'encouraging' hourly employees to skip breaks and keep on working. A court is considering whether to elevate said ingrate employees to the status of an agrieved group for purposes of "Class Action." Ooops, that's a big noisy battleship with lots of deck chairs. Wal-Mart's attorneys are arguing, unsuccesfully, that because a few employees have been deposed on videotape saying "no problem here, we voluntarily work for free" there is no consistent claim to "Class" status. Judge Mark Bernstein’s decision noted that WMT's own internal management analysis of labor costs show a weird drop in breaks taken and no indication of compensation for break-time lost.

So, are they throwing their shoulder to the wheel, breaks be damned, for the greater good of old WMT? Or, is Raymond Shaw the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life?

The judge thinks he knows... law.com:

"Although this court was offered a few carefully selected snippets of videotaped deposition testimony, it is certainly improper to decide credibility on this basis...

"One need only recall the symbolic placement of the middle finger of the captured crew members of the USS Pueblo in photographs displayed by their North Korean captors along with their 'confessions' to recognize the need to observe all the testimony of current employees testifying under their employer's watchful eye that they voluntarily worked off-the-clock without pay because of their devotion to the ideal of corporate profitability through customer satisfaction."

Hah! Welcome to the Glorious Period of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, comrades of Sam. Now get back to work.

"Recarreering" Boomers

Some snips from an article at Workforce Management dot com. Seems we're missing opportunities at talent by assessing hires by Job Title and dismissing valuable skills in the process. Moral: Don't judge a book by it's cover. And stop going the same damn shelf every time....

By 2012, the group of workers ages 55 and older will grow to 19.1 percent of the total workforce, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In some cases, the assumption has been that this group will retire, causing both a "brain drain" and a labor shortage for business.
In fact, there are few formal surveys of this group that reveal what their intentions actually are. However, two separate surveys of business executives in various age groups, conducted earlier this year by Korn Ferry, suggest that half will work past age 64. And three out of five anticipate making a major career change before retirement.

The article makes note of lots of issues. The "old dog/new tricks" cliche doens't really hold any more when it's difficult to get "new dogs" to hang around long enough to build their own professional "gut" or experience. Stubborn old farts are the least of your worries if the alternative is younger workers who just don't dig the "dues paying" thing. Retention and churn and satisfaction come up too...

Two organizations that are in the early lead
A CIO who was a gynecologist. A nurse who now leads patient-care projects in IT. Both of those sound like unusual career-changing success stories, but they’re not so rare at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The health care institution has grown by hiring and retaining a large number of knowledge workers who made just such shifts.

M.D. Anderson is a research-driven organization and has been increasing staff by 20 percent annually in a field that competes heavily for talent. Jim Dorn, chief HR officer, estimates that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 1,100 faculty researchers on the M.D. Anderson staff have expressed an interest in changing their careers. They’re an elite group of employees--Ph.D.s and M.D.s.

"In most cases they still like what they do, but they express a need to take on new challenges," Dorn says. Dorn’s team supports the process with career counseling and a plan that he customizes to the needs of each employee.

Recareering is recalibrationof personal and professional goals? Fair enough.

"Sometimes boomers are overqualified and could be a good match for an area where they have no experience but are well suited" based on their skills, Barton says. The best practice for evaluating job-switching candidates includes the use of assessments that measure a person’s attitude and aptitude for the position, rather than relying on experience as a differentiator, she says.

"Most companies need assessments and technology to make great job placements and to encourage employee retention by offering recareering opportunities," Barton says.

Boomers drive the trend; companies benefit
As companies have become leaner and put their focus on what’s happening in the business in the short term, the concept of retaining employees by offering career changes is not often at the top of the agenda. More experienced employees can offer greater productivity and reduced learning curves through their ability to transfer the knowledge they already have to the new concepts they’re learning.

"Boomers can do more in less time; they have already made mistakes before and now they will avoid them," CareerXroads’ Crispin says. "Businesses have institutionally and unintentionally discriminated against people aged 40 and above. The boomers need to be ready to articulate why they bring value with their extra experience."

The boomers themselves have the ability and the responsibility to drive the change that they want, Crispin says. At more than 70 million strong, they have reputation for pushing change. If they want new careers, history says that they will probably get them.

If knowledge is the New Labor, guess boomers are the New Bricoleurs.

Chief Marketing Officer mag suspends publication

January 12, 2006.

A Message to Our Readers

As we have chronicled in our print magazine and on our website, one of the CMO’s greatest challenges is balancing a plan for long-term growth with the pressures to produce short-term results. An inability to strike the proper balance is a key contributor to the CMO’s startling 24-month average tenure.

At CMO magazine, we share your struggles – and your short shelf life. Current business realities require us to suspend publication of our 16-month-old magazine as of the January 2006 issue. The extraordinary feedback and support from the CMO community has not been enough to sustain and grow our advertising-supported business in what has become a severely challenged publishing environment.

As a result, we have decided to hit the pause button, take a step back, and consider alternative business plans. It is my sincere hope that we will be able to return with an exciting strategy to invigorate the business and once again begin serving what has quickly become a faithful community of senior marketing executives and other marketing practitioners.

In the meantime, I would like to thank you, our loyal readers, for your patronage, your thoughtful feedback, and your commitment to helping us build this new brand. I would like to thank our advertisers and sponsors for their staunch support. I would like to thank our publisher, Steve Twombly, along with the rest of the sales, marketing, operations and events staff at CXO Media for their tireless efforts in launching CMO in 2004 and driving it forward over the past year and a half.

Most of all, I would like to thank CMO’s talented team of writers, editors and designers for producing a consistently high-quality magazine that surpassed everyone’s expectations. The flame burns brightest, the saying goes, just before it flickers out. CMO has never burned more brightly.

Rob O’Regan, Editor in Chief

On cutting grass, kicking ass, and Wal-Mart

Fast Company, 1.6.06

The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart

Every year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world's biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.

What struck Jim Wier first, as he entered the Wal-Mart vice president's office, was the seating area for visitors. "It was just some lawn chairs that some other peddler had left behind as samples." The vice president's office was furnished with a folding lawn chair and a chaise lounge.

And so Wier, the CEO of lawn-equipment maker Simplicity, dressed in a suit, took a seat on the chaise lounge. "I sat forward, of course, with my legs off to the side. If you've ever sat in a lawn chair, well, they are lower than regular chairs. And I was on the chaise. It was a bit intimidating. It was uncomfortable, and it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting."

It was a Wal-Mart moment that couldn't be scripted, or perhaps even imagined. A vice president responsible for billions of dollars' worth of business in the largest company in history has his visitors sit in mismatched, cast-off lawn chairs that Wal-Mart quite likely never had to pay for.

The vice president had a bigger surprise for Wier, though. Wal-Mart not only wanted to keep selling his lawn mowers, it wanted to sell lots more of them. Wal-Mart wanted to sell mowers nose-to-nose against Home Depot and Lowe's.

"Usually," says Wier, "I don't perspire easily." But perched on the edge of his chaise, "I felt my arms getting drippy."

Wier took a breath and said, "Let me tell you why it doesn't work."

I'll let you click the link to read the whole story. It's one of courage, simple self-awareness and medieaval purchasing agency. And it shows a fine grasp of Sam's 1st Law of Compound Dis-interest. What's Sam's 1st law? Why, that's the abject dismissal of the visceral built-up long-term value of brand, and its margin-enhancing mythology, which companies like Vlassic and Rubbermaid and others ignored at their peril. Another snippet on the Reverse Ponzi Scheme...

You can buy a lawn mower at Wal-Mart for $99.96, and depending on the size and location of the store, there are slightly better models for every additional $20 bill you're willing to put down--priced at $122, $138, $154, $163, and $188. That's six models of lawn mowers below $200. Mind you, in some Wal-Marts you literally cannot see what you are buying; there are no display models, just lawn mowers in huge cardboard boxes.

The least expensive Snapper lawn mower--a 19-inch push mower with a 5.5-horsepower engine--sells for $349.99 at full list price. Even finding it discounted to $299, you can buy two or three lawn mowers at Wal-Mart for the cost of a single Snapper.

If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At even $138, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, and if you can't start it the next spring (Wal-Mart won't help you out with that), put it at the curb and buy another one. That kind of pricing changes not just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market. Why would you buy a walk-behind mower from Snapper that costs $519? What could it possibly have to justify spending $300 or $400 more?

That's the question that motivated Jim Wier to stop doing business with Wal-Mart. Wier is too judicious to describe it this way, but he looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral.

Wier had two things going for him: First, he had another way to get his lawn mowers to customers--a well-established network of independent lawn-equipment dealers that accounted for 80% of Snapper's sales. And Wier had the courage, the foresight, to take an unblinking view of where his Wal-Mart business was heading--not in year 3, or year 4, but year 10.

Wier traveled to Bentonville with a firm grasp of the values of Snapper, the dynamics of the lawn-mower business, the needs of the dealers, the needs of the Snapper customer, and the needs of the Wal-Mart customer. He was not dazzled by the tens of millions of dollars' worth of lawn mowers Wal-Mart was already selling for Snapper; he was not deluded about his ability to beat Wal-Mart at its own game, to somehow resist the price pressure. He was not imagining that he could take the sales now and figure out the profits later.

Jim Wier believed that Snapper's health--indeed, its very long-term survival--required that it not do business with Wal-Mart...

Ooo-rah. And Semper Fescue! A fine read, and lots more than clumsily snipped here. Go there now, whilst I return to writing some old-style, business-type, heretic-like ramblings to launch off our 3rd year properly.