Archive for the ‘Ten Questions with…’ Category
January 21, 2010
64 Comments
[N.B. The “Ten Questions” archive is here.] [To read other people’s reviews, go to the Linchpin Squidoo page.]
My friend and mentor, Seth Godin has a new book out: “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”.
As has become a regular habit with his last couple of books, to celebrate the launch I asked him ten questions, which he kindly answered below.
LINCHPIN: TEN QUESTIONS FOR SETH GODIN.
1. HUGH: OK, let’s get it over with– What is a “Linchpin”? What is the book about?
SETH: You’re a linchpin, Hugh. So are all those crazy people we can’t live without, people who bring art to work, people who reach out, make a connection, cause change to happen. The linchpin is the person who is indispensable, because they refuse to become an interchangeable part, someone who merely follows the manual. In the hardware store, the linchpin is a lightweight little piece that holds the wheel to the axle. Very difficult to live without.
2. In your book, Purple Cow, your message was “Everyone’s a Marketer, now.” In All Marketers are Liars, the message was, “Everyone’s a Storyteller, now.” In Tribes, it was “Everyone’s a Leader, now.” In Linchpin, the message surprised me: “Everyone’s an Artist, now”. Tell us about your thesis.
Artist doesn’t mean painter or cartoonist or playwright. Artist means someone willing to stand up, stand out and make change. In a stable environment, we worship the efficient factory. Henry Ford or even David Geffen… feed the machine, keep it running smoothly, pay as little as you can, make as much as you can. In our post-industrial world, though, factory worship is a non starter. Cheap cogs are worth what they cost, which is not much. In a changing environment, you want people who can steer, innovate, provoke, lead, connect and make things happen. That’s my thesis. This is a new revolution, and just as Marx and Smith wrote about the industrial revolution, I’m writing about ours.
3. A key term you used throughout the book was “Emotional Labor”. Please explain what that is, and why that matters to anyone wishing to become a Linchpin.
It’s emotional labor to insist that your publisher leave the sexy and dirty bits in your last book, even though it certainly would have been easier to take them out. It’s emotional labor to move to Texas even though it might be easier to just hang out with friends. It’s emotional labor to do the work even when you don’t feel like it. Mostly, I’m talking about doing the difficult work of bringing your very best self to each interaction, because to do otherwise is a mortal sin.
4. Obviously, we’re not all artists, in the strictest sense of the word. I’m a professional artist myself, and even I don’t much like using that term. But here’s Seth, trying to bust the definition of “Artist” wide open. I get the feeling this was not you trying to redefine the term in order to create controversy for the sake of being clever, but you are trying to challenge people to think about their work differently, to make them think about WHAT EXACTLY has to happen, for them to become a Linchpin. Yes?
Well, what should we call these people, these linchpins? I mean, we have a word for a painter who merely does derivative work: a hack. But what do we call a customer service rep or an insurance adjuster or landscape architect that changes the game, that elevates each interaction and that takes enormous emotional and professional risk with their work? I think they need a name, so I stole one. I call them artists.
5. One thing I find interesting about the book (and all your other ones, as well) is that you don’t offer any easy answers. You never say, “This is where the world is headed, and this is how WE ARE going to make it work”. Your shtick is more, “This is where the world is headed, and this is what YOU have to think about, if you don’t want to be thoroughly crushed.” And yet I still see people asking you, “Please tell me what to do to incorporate your kind of new, groovy thinking, WITHOUT ME having to change my life or my modus operandi in an way whatsoever. Please show me where the autopilot button and the cruise control are” etc. Do you find that frustrating? Is it happening more as your work gets more well known? Less?
Frustrating isn’t really the right word. I think it was sad at first, because it’s almost like the Wizard of Oz… Dorothy had the power all along, right? But now I view it as an opportunity. It’s so tempting to start drawing maps for people. It makes them happy and it makes me feel smart. But resisting that temptation is the right thing to do, because once someone does it on their own a few times, they become unstoppable. Watching that change occur is one of the highlights of my professional life. And in fact, every great teacher I’ve ever known seeks the same outcome.
6. If I had to describe your typical writing style (of which I am a huge fan, of course), I’d call it “Dryly understated, humorous, streetwise and lucid”. This book somewhat surprised me. It seems to have a more angry and more emotional tone than your previous books. Was that just me? Is your writing style becoming angrier in general, or did the inherent subject matter in the book just get you more riled up than usual?
It’s not angry, Hugh. It’s urgent.
I don’t think most people realize the precarious nature of our current situation, how close we are to the edge, and how little time we have to get our act together.
7. I’ve known you for a little while; we met right around the time that Purple Cow came out in 2003. Back then to me you were this articulate, entertaining and successful entrepreneur, who had just written this cool business bestseller. Then more books came out and I started seeing this more “author” sensibility emerging. You obviously enjoyed writing the books, and you obviously liked seeing people reading them and liked helping make change happen. But in this last year or so, I’ve seen your shtick become more “rabbinical” i.e. it seems you’ve gotten more interested in teaching people– younger people especially. Like you no longer care so much about your own success and “affecting change” yourself, but are more interested in teaching people how to become successful and affect change themselves. Am I close? Are you evolving?
I hope we’re all evolving. I think my mission is the same as it has been since that day on the canoe dock in 1978 when I decided it would be very cool indeed to help people achieve more than they thought they could. What has changed is my awareness of how the system pushes people like me to be manual writers. Publishers and others really want to give the market what it wants, and what it wants are Dummies books and fast easy change (Hey! It’s been a year… let’s elect a new senator!). Even now, the single best way to get a lot of blog traffic is to post a list of Ten Ways to… and make sure you mention Ron Paul, Apple Computer and the inherent difference between men and women. Try it, it works.
So I’ve experienced the feedback you get when you draw a map, and it’s nice, but the real win is helping people draw their own. To see the world as it is. That’s a lot more difficult. People need glasses, not a map.
8. I saw this in your last book, Tribes, and I see again it Linchpin. Though I’m sure there are tons of people who would prefer it if they were, your books are not instruction manuals. You’re not telling people what to “Do”. You’re telling people to “Decide”. A subtle difference, but it’s an important one. Please tell us more.
Oh, I don’t think it’s subtle at all. I think it’s a HUGE difference. We hate to decide. We avoid deciding. We hide from it.
Once someone decides, they almost always succeed (unless they want to win an Olympic medal or some other ridiculous prize awarded to just a few). The decision is the hard part, but we spend precious little time on it.
9. We have a mutual friend in New York, Fred, who is a tremendously successful venture capitalist. But as anyone who knows him well will testify, his success has diddly-squat to do with love of money and all its trappings, and everything, EVERYTHING to do with the fact that, quite simply, he utterly loves what he does. He just ADORES waking up every morning and clicking his heels on his way to work. I grew up in a pretty standard, middle class corporate family. Back in my parent’s day, “loving” your job was considered almost a taboo; something inherently detrimental to long-term personal career success, and the success of the company team. But there seems to be an underlying message in Linchpin that THAT THIS HAS ALL CHANGED. That if you don’t love your job, not only will you be a miserable wreck the rest of your life, but hey, you’re less likely to be successful in business, as well. Care to elaborate?
The amazing thing is that in every job, every one, there are people who hate it and people who love it. There are clock watchers on Sand Hill Road. There are people bussing tables at a coffee shop who race to work each day. The job is irrelevant, pretty much. It’s the decision.
Fred does great work as a VC because his motives are transparent, his judgment is excellent and he keeps his promises. All three are essential for him to love his job, and he does. Since he’s not willing to trade that joy for a few bucks, he sticks to his principles. And, here’s the cool irony, the more he does that, the more money he makes!
10. Of all the books you’ve written (and I love them all), this seems to be your most challenging. Your previous messages– Everyone’s a Marketer, Everyone’s a Storyteller, Everyone’s a Leader etc– though compelling enough, somehow seem far easier to digest compared the simple message in Linchpin: “Love what you do, or fail.” Why do you think that idea is STILL so difficult for so many people? Do you expect this book to be as well received as your previous ones? Does it matter?
If you had asked me four weeks ago, I would have been a happy pessimist. Happy because I wrote precisely the book I wanted to write, regardless of the consequences. I was literally ready for almost every one to hate it. And a pessimist because I’m pushing people awfully hard with this one.
But you didn’t ask me four weeks ago, you asked me today. And today is a few weeks after 2000+ of my readers made a donation and got a review copy and WOW. They get it. It’s working. It’s resonating.
My work is done here, as the saying goes. To unleash something like this on the world, to go out this far on a limb and have people support you and embrace you and run with it… it’s the most amazing feeling.
Thanks, Hugh, for giving me something to write about and for showing us all a way to live. We can’t do it without you.
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August 30, 2009
2 Comments
Shel Israel and I have known each other since 2005, when he interviewed me for his seminal book on blogging, “Naked Conversations”, that he co-authored with Robert Scoble. Since then he’s been running around, writing books and consulting with large companies on all things to do with social media. His second book, “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods” is launching September 3rd. As he and I have the same publisher, they sent me an advance copy to read, which I was really impressed with. I asked him ten questions, and he kindly agreed to answer them below.
TEN QUESTIONS FOR SHEL ISRAEL
1. Congrats on Twitterville coming out. Please tell us all about it.
In many ways, Twitterville is the de facto sequel to Naked Conversations. The older book gave the argument of why businesses should blog. Twitterville does the same thing, except it goes beyond business to include government, nonprofits and media.
Essentially, I tell the stories of people who use Twitter in interesting and useful ways. The hope is people will read the book and get ideas for using Twitter to help them in whatever it is they wish to do.
2. This book was actually a long time coming. After Naked Conversations, you had a wee bit of trouble getting your second book up and running. A symptom, I believe, not so much of your talents as an author, but of the inherent subject matter itself. A book takes about a good year and a half to write and produce, often far longer. Social Media changes overnight on a regular basis. Please elaborate.
There are two pieces of conventional wisdom for business books: A. Take one bone-dead simple idea and repeat it with some variations for 16 – 20 chapters such as The World is Flat. B. Write about a subject that will not change while you are writing it such as Thomas Edison and the marketing of electricity.
Obviously, I’m bad at following conventional wisdom. I take a different approach in that I like for something that is just taking off which can be enduring. I interview a ton of people and I look for stories that may maintain value for a few years even as they age.
Social media does change overnight, but people don’t and business rarely does. So I look for stories that deal with enduing issues such as profitability, the long slow death of traditional marketing ethics, access to information, making government more accountable and so on.
3. You wrote in your book about South By South West 2007, which has now become legend in social media circles. It was there and then that Twitter launched their website to the public, and everybody went crazy for it. I remember– I was there. The first thing that struck me about SXSW ’07 was that suddenly, unlike a lot of the Web 2.0 conferences I had been to before, the star of the show wasn’t some personality, web celeb, “A-Lister” etc… but an actual, non-living, non-breathing, digital website. At the time, I felt like a real shift in Web 2.0 was taking place. From hierarchical, personality-driven, to something else. You?
I think SXSW 07 is the classic story of a star is born overnight, except in this case the star was a flawed little social media platform originally designed to solve an internal problem.
I have always felt A-List focus was vastly over rated. When you look at luminary numbers and put them against the growth rate of Twitter every day, those who are prominent reach a smaller percentage of the entire Twitter universe every day. Each of them is in fact becoming influential to a smaller – not larger– share of the mainstream.
Twitter is decentralizing by its very nature. Of course there are dramatic stories from Twitterville– @JamesBuck arrested in Egypt; @jkrums taking a photo on the Hudson. But just the drama and luminary angle is much smaller than how Twitter serves everyday people, who just have a few followers, who just post a few times every day. Yet Twitter is changing their lives and their business, all the time.
4. Like yourself, I can totally see the value of Twitter (Very cheap, very fast and very easy– even compared to blogs or Facebook etc). Yet, like blogs before it, mainstream adaptation seems to be taking its own sweet time, yet again. As Ben Hammersley said about new media in general back at Reboot 2005, it’s not because the technology is hard to use (it isn’t), or that it’s intellectually hard to get one’s head around (it isn’t), but that to use it properly requires learning A NEW SET OF MANNERS, a new set of social codes. And getting people to do that is really, really hard. As a Web 2.0 consultant with corporate clients , getting these folks to “learn some new manners” must be the hardest part of your job, I’m guessing. Yes?
Ben has a point, but I would take issue with both of you on just how fast Twitter –and social media in general– is changing the world. If you sit on the equator, sipping a beverage with an umbrella in it, watching a coconut tree sway in a soft breeze, it feels motionless; like nothing is happening.
But as you sit there, you are spinning around the world at something like 2400 mph. You are orbiting the Sun at a speed much faster than that and you are hurtling through the universe at a speed humans cannot yet calculate.
Yet, sitting on that porch it may feel like not much is happening.
Those of us who are passionate about social media; who stand in front of rooms where some of the senior people have there arms crossed and there heads going from side to side, often vastly underrate the speed of change.
To understand that, I advise people to go speak to some young people. Watch their habits; watch how they get influenced on what to buy, watch, listen to; where to work. Watch young people going to the workplace and how they use social media as communications and information and productivity tools.
I maintain that we are at the very beginning of a fundamental global social revolution. And it is moving at a blindingly rapid speed.
5. Like Naked Conversations before it, Twitterville is rich in case studies. You talked to a LOT of people. As a fellow author, allow me to pick your brains. When an interesting story was breaking in the “Twittersphere”, one that might have made an interesting case study at some point, did you make a note, put it on file and save it for later? Or did you just rely on memory (and Google) when it came time to write the book?
Organizing for Twitterville was like taking a speed tour through Dante’s Inferno. I am a poor organizer to begin with. I created 17 Word documents on topic and kept dropping links into it. I had post its on my wall and in my reporter’s notebooks. Then something would break like Mumbai and that wouldn’t fit into any of my proposed chapters, but how could I not cover it. While pondering that, Gaza – Israel broke, so then I had to rewrite Tables of Contents.
The other thing that is a challenge is that I try to be more of a story teller, and most business books are not written that way. In the end, I followed the stories and built chapters around them and then restructured– and restructured the flow of the book to respect the people whose stories I told.
6. It’s the worst-kept secret in publishing: Books RARELY make a lot of money for their authors. That being said, since my book came out in June, the number of emails I get, asking about art commissions or other paid gigs has risen NOTICEABLY. I’m utterly swamped. As I’ve been saying forever, “Blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly”. It turns out, the same is true with books. It’s all about “Leverage”. What’s been your experience?
You and I have discussed this before, but on the fame-fortune continuum, we are both much stronger so far on the fame side. I made much more money last time by advising companies and through speaking engagements.
With less than a week to go before Twitterville is available, I of course have dreams of being a #1 Best seller. It is far more likely that once again I’ll do better with speaking and business advising than from actual book sales.
When I first started, someone advised me that you write a book to get the speaking engagements. You use speaking engagements to set the stage for your next book. That’s what my strategy will be.
7. Your background is in Silicon Valley PR. With Naked Conversations, your focus morphed towards Social Media. What drove this personal evolution, do you think?
I am very curious by nature. For a long time I was simply amazed at the disruption and innovation that exploded from Silicon Valley. Now, the technology of the last 30 years has become part of everyday lives in the developed world.
My curiosity is very much focused on how this technology is changing the lives of the world’s people. If given the choice of following social media’s role in Iran’s election larceny, or the beta glitches in the iPhone battery, I’ll spend my time following Iran.
8. When Naked Conversations came out, blogging was new. Web 2.0 was new. Now it’s mainstream. I often get nostalgic for those early days, when the blogosphere was tiny, everybody knew each other, and a brave new world seemed to lie just a few pixels beyond the horizon. Now I find myself caring much less about “the future of media” or whatever, and finding I care a lot more about what I can do TODAY with social media, to help MY business. Has social media grown up? Has it become “like our parents”?
Every enduring technology has been introduced with an associated mania. The inventors are brilliant, the early adopters are passionate, and the media is excited because it’s all so new.
This was true probably of every innovation going back to the wheel. But then comes the longer, slower, steadier period of mass adoption, when people adopt these revolutionary concepts just to get their job done. There was a time when hearing a human voice on a telephone must have been mind-boggling. But, over time, the phone just became an everyday tool to let you use in your life and work.
Social Media, dramatic, explosive, disruptive period is now coming to an end, if you ask me. It is normalizing. It is changing more of the world, but is doing it in less dramatic ways.
We are probably starting to get to the stage of development that interests you and I the least. That’s where best practices get established, measurement systems become reliable, bean counters can estimate cost and value. Social media champions are no longer rebels ratting on the gates of large institutions. We have gotten past the barriers. We will soon start taking our rightful places on the org chart, with our own budget allocations.
This is good for business and the world. It’s just a little boring for disruptors like you and me.
9. As a former PR flack, you’ll obviously have more than your fair share of opinions about PR and how that world is changing, fueled on by social media. Anything you feel more strongly than most?
I think when I practiced PR I thought about ten percent of my peers were true professionals who understood that communications is not buzz; that listening is valuable; that customers need to be respected and that those who cover news need to not be on your side if they are to maintain credibility.
I think all of that is true today and the percentage as pretty much remained constant.
But those who practice PR and are skilled at social media – people like Shel Holtz, Brian Solis, Steve Rubel, Kami Huyse, Richard Binhammer, Scott Monty, Todd Defren [the list is long] have discovered that Conversational tools are far more valuable to communications professionals than the aging and inefficiency broadcast tools that I had to use when I was a PR practitioner.
I think this is a great time to be a Communications pro. You no longer need to be the nicely dressed nobody schlepping press kits and whispering into the ear of the official spokesperson. Now you can be the credible spokesperson yourself.
All you have to do is watch closely what the people I just named are doing, and learn from it. It sounds so easy, but I doubt more than 10 % of the communications profession will end up doing that.
10. So now you’ve got a nice little side-career there as a book author. I’m guessing a lot of bloggers reading this wouldn’t mind having the same, one day. What advice would you give to a blogger who one day hopes to get into the book publishing game?
All of it to me centers on the same issue: he ability to find a story and tell it simply and credibly. You do that with cartoons on the back of business cards, for example.
One other tip: writing a book is hard work. If you price it out in dollars per hour, you might do better in the restaurant service industry. I strongly advise you to love writing before you start.
[Twitterville comes out September 3rd, 2009.]
[The “Ten Questions” archive is here.]
[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. EVIL PLANS. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.]
August 6, 2009
4 Comments
Ten Questions For Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, the great tech & culture publication from Conde Nast. He first came to my attention when he published the book, The Long Tail, which talks about Power Laws and the Internet, especially marketing and the possibilities that the Web opens up for everybody. His latest book, “Free”, talks about the new economies of the Internet, where the default price of everything, as he reminds us, is “set at zero”. He kindly allowed me to interview him.
1. First off, let’s plug your latest book, “Free”. Tell us what it’s all about?
It’s about how technology has turned “free” from a marketing trick to
a new economic model. The digital economy is full of paradoxes,
including the big one: it seems that practically everything online is
free and yet we’re told that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Even more mystifying, jokes like “we lose money on every sale and make
it up on volume” actually describe the business models of such
massively profitable companies as Google.
The book explains the underlying cost economics that allow so much to
be free online, and the business models built around that. It
contrasts 20th Century Free (simple cross-subsidies – you’re paying,
sooner or later) with 21st Century Free (wildly indirect
cross-subsidies – somebody’s paying, but it’s probably not you). And it
focuses on “Freemium” (free+premium), which I think is the first
really new business model of the web and the future of Free online.
2. I think a lot of people have seemed to miss the point of your book, especially people in your business. To me, the point of your book is not about “Free VERSUS Paid”, but a concorde between “Free AND Paid”. As a cartoonist who swings between “Free” and “Paid” quite happily, I don’t see a conflict between the two. Like I said before,
Any profession is in constant, ever-changing negotiation with “Free vs Paid”. When does your lawyer friend offer you free legal advice, and when does he start charging? Ditto with your heart-surgeon pal you play tennis on Tuesdays with. Musicians give their music away for free on MySpace, but charge for the CDs, live gigs and the t-shirts. Petroleum Industry consultants might give 5% of their stuff away for free, just to drum up some new business, but then charge top dollar 95% the rest of the time. In Internet circles, the 95 – 5% converse is often true. Everyone has their sweet spot. Cartoonists are no different.
In other words, “Free” has always been with us, “Free” is nothing new. So why do you think it’s so hard for people to get their heads around it? Why all the controversy? What are they afraid of?
Well put. I think there are two classes of people who are afraid or
skeptical of Free: those who grew up before the web (ie, olds like me)
and people whose industries are threatened by the web (ie, media
people like me). Many in my generation or profession (mostly, I hope,
those who haven’t read the book) assume that Free is something of a
Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, my kids are also appalled that I wrote a book
called FREE, but not because it’s wrong/scary, but because it’s so
freaking obvious.
Needless to say, they’re both wrong. Free is neither a mirage nor is
it self-evident. Instead, it’s an essential, but complicated,
component of a 21st century business model – not the only price, but
often the best one.
3. A lot of blog pundits out there spend a lot of time pontificating about “What is the future of media?” You, who probably knows more than most about this, seemed to almost offend this journalist from Germany when you answered, “I don’t know”. Reminds me of a jazz musician from the 1950s (his name escapes me) who was asked by a journalist, “Where do you think jazz is going?” To which the musician replied, “If I knew where it was going, I’d already be there.” Seems to me that the more you talk about the “uncertainty” of it all, the more peoples start demanding “certainty” from you. Odd, no?
The main problem with professional media is that we’ve lost our
quasi-monopoly on consumer attention. What’s worse, we’ve lost it to
an indistinct cloud of mostly non-media voices, from blogs to Facebook
to Twitter to YouTube. These amateurs, mostly producing without any
interest in a business model at all, are narrow where we are mass,
many where we are few and free where we are paid. They are not “media“
but they compete with media. That’s why strict adherence to terms
doesn’t help – it’s fifth column vs fourth estate!
I think that this is a moment where the sacred vocabulary of
professional media (“journalism”, “news”, etc), which we use as
incantations to differentiate ourselves from the unwashed horde, now
obscure the path forward more than illuminate it. Some of what we do
still has great value and perhaps always will: original information,
accuracy, analysis, great writing, edtiting, etc. But it is arrogant
to assume that only we can do that stuff, or that we know best what’s
“fit to print”.
I don’t know what the future of professional media is, but I am sure
there is one and am excited to participate in the many experiments
that will reveal what it is (obviously there is no one model or a
silver bullet solution – instead the future is going to messy and
multivariate, which is why it’s so scary for many). One thing that is
sure is that it’s not hoping change will stop or wishing to reverse
the tides of history.
4. You’ve become one of the great advocates of “Free”. Yet the people who sign your paychecks, well, they’re not in that business. They’re trying to sell magazines and advertising space. Similar deal with the people who publish your books. Does this create a lot of tension behind the scenes? Or do you try to educate them? How do these two different worldviews work together?
Actually, they *are* in that business. Most companies understand that
Free is the best marketing, which is why the magazine company I work
for makes its websites free and my book publisher gives out thousands
of free books each year to influentials. Of course they’re in the Paid
business, too. But that’s the point of the book: it’s getting easier
and easier (thanks to near-zero marginal cost of digital
distribiution) to use Free to promote Paid. In the magazine world, we
charge some customer groups nothing (web) or very little (print
subscribers) and other customer groups (advertisers) a lot.
Books are more conventionally priced, but when Hyperion agree to
publish a book called FREE by me, they knew what they were getting
into. It was a negotiation, to be sure, about how far we would go, but
using Free in one way or another was always part of the plan.
5. You’ve got your Editor job, you’ve got your book deals, you’ve got your blog, you do a lot of speaking gigs… As your name gets more and more known, are you having trouble keeping up with everything? What’s your coping mechanism? How do you find the balance?
Plus the five little kids, the two startup companies on the side, etc.
Obviously, balance is a distant goal. In the meantime, I delegate,
work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore politics, sports and
pop culture, neglect my family too much and probably don’t do any of
my jobs as well as I could. But these are exciting days, and if ever
these was a time to be overextended this is it.
6. Everybody knows you now as “Editor In Chief of Wired”. That’s a pretty big deal. I’m curious how you got there. Did you start off in journalism, with a career path all planned out, or was it a “random act of traction”? Tell us about your background.
Trained as a physicist (Los Alamos, etc). As I was heading to grad
school, realized that I wasn’t a very good physicist and that the
high-energy experiments that I was working on were running headlong
into a financial crisis (cost of accelerators rises with the square of
the energy of the accelerator – many $ billions). Bailed and went to
the science journals instead (Nature, Science). Then recruited to
start Internet coverage at The Economist in 1993 (remember the Web
started in a physics facility, CERN, so I was an early user). Three
years in London covering tech for the Econ, then three years in China
covering Asia, then to NYC as US Business Editor. Then recruited in
2001 (darkest days of the post dot.com crash) by Conde Nast to run
Wired.
So from physics geek to the Devil Wore Prada. “Random acts of traction” indeed.
7. Wired makes the lion’s share of its money via advertising, of course. The more I think about advertising-funded media, the less I think it’s just about offering “space” and “eyeballs”. At some level, the magazine’s job is to provide a context, a situation, an arena, that makes brands appear more “interesting”, than if they went somewhere else. The goods news is, this is a great opportunity for magazines. The bad news is, it’s really, really hard. What’s Wired’s attitude on this? Are you trying to push out the limits of advertising, with the same verve you try to push out the limits of tech and culture?
We should, and if we are to thrive, we must. We invented the banner ad
in 1995 (sorry!) and I hope we’ll help invent some of the ad units
that work best in the next era, too. Much of the innovation will be
online, but not all of it. And once devices emerge that allow a
magazine-like experience with digital delivery (Apple tablet?), the
distinctions between the two will blur.
8. As anyone who reads your stuff will know, human civilization in the middle of great changes, with media at the vanguard. And when great change happens, some things get harder, some things get easier. What’s getting easier about your job? Harder?
Easier: experimenting. Harder: predicting.
9. We all know what Wired is, and it’s great. But what do you want Wired to be, that it isn’t already? Just curious.
We’re known for being innovative in magazine making. I’d like to be
equally know for innovations in business models.
10. A lot of bright kids out there, just leaving school, would love to have your job one day. Hell, a lot of them would love to just have a job on your team. What advice would you give them, in order to make that happen?
Don’t wait to be given a job to do something cool. Follow your
passions, create something every day, take chances and try to be the
best in the world at something, no matter how tiny and trivial.
Nothing impresses me more than initiative. And there has never been a
better time to take it.
On a more prosaic note, I think that leading people is perhaps the
most important skill these days. My business card says “Editor in
Chief”. I suspect that if any of my children follow in my footsteps,
their card will say “Community Manager”. Helping (and inspiring) other
people to do cool stuff is what an editor does, and when you take it
out of a purely professional media context that looks more and more
like effective community management. It’s a great skill and I admire
those who do it well.
[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.]
July 18, 2009
18 Comments
[Hazel Dooney. Study For Dangerous Career Babe: The Race Car Driver (Homage To Hellé Nice). 2009 Acrylic on paper, 40cm x 52cm.]
Hazel Dooney is a young and VERY successful Australian Artist. From the blurb on her website:
In December, 2007, Hazel Dooney was the only female artist under 30 with works included in the prestigious auction, Modern and Contemporary Australian Art, held at Christie’s in London. In what was a record-setting sale, with major works by Brett Whitely, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and Tracey Moffat, two modest early works by Dooney fetched over $AU23,000 each.
You get the idea. We follow each other on Twitter, we exchange the occasional email. I’m a big fan. There are A LOT of artists online, but very few as smart, interesting, talented, successful or as driven as Hazel, so I thought a “Ten Questions” session would be in order. She kindly agreed to answer.
TEN QUESTIONS FOR HAZEL DOONEY
1. I’ve described your work to the non-initiated before as “Hard-Edge, Erotic Pop meets Tank Girl”. That’s a MASSIVE oversimplification, of course. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers, could you tell us more about your work?
I love your description of it – I think I’ll use it in the future. It certainly describes the attitude that suffuses it. In Japan, artists like Takashi Murakami have been labelled Shock Pop and some critics have included me in that. At its core, my art’s about the way contemporary women’s identities and sexuality are defined by advertising, entertainment, even commercial pornography. I’m no different – which is why versions of me turn up in nearly all my work. Moreover, I try to replicate the physical experience of modern advertising and entertainment media which is why my large enamel paintings are produced in series (just like TV shows and ad campaigns).
In some ways, I want to make it harder to tell art (or artist) from product. My works are, fundamentally, conceptual – even if most, so far, have been paintings. But this’ll change over the next few years as I experiment with other media.
2. You found success at a very early age. Was it skill? Luck? Talent? Bad Craziness? How did it all come about?
Desperation, probably. I had a fairly lonely, introspective childhood and an often crazy, drug– and boy-dependent youth so when I finally recognised that I had a modicum of talent, I seized upon it. And I was determined not to waste an ounce of it. I worked bloody hard to put together a solid body of work – mostly large and in enamel (I was nothing if not ambitious). And when I felt ready to show it, I refused to let anything or anybody get in my way. I paid for and promoted my first shows myself and I learnt very quickly how to respond professionally to collectors and the press. I realised that art was the key not to having some kind of success – although I wanted success very much – but to survival. That drove me hard for ten years.
3. The reason you got my attention initially, was hearing about your decision to bag the traditional gallery route, instead electing to sell your work to collectors via online. Tell us a little bit about your business model. Tell us why you decided to circumvent the gallery system. Tell us about what’s working. Tell us about the hard parts. Tell us your thoughts on how social media plays a part in this.
Four years ago, I decided to quit the two highly regarded galleries in Sydney and Melbourne that were then representing my work. We had a dispute over how they wanted to position me and (believe it or not) constrain my prices. I found some very smart people in technology and business who were prepared to help me figure out a way to manage myself – not just marketing and selling my work but creating an infrastructure to manage every aspect of the business of it, from identifying and communicating with individual collectors and producing my own shows to expanding my online presence and exploiting tools such as social networks and email to develop a wider interest in my work and me. Since then, the value of my work has increased to five, maybe ten, times what it was five years ago, and 15 times what it was a decade ago and my career has radically expanded – as has my collector base.
Traditional galleries and art institutions – and the art publications that depend on both for their advertising – have had fuck-all to do with it. Neither did a traditional, ‘high minded’ artist approach. I regarded myself early on as a post-punk performer, a ‘garage band’ version of a modern artist who ends up owning her own label and promoting her own tours. I don’t deal through intermediaries and I try to maintain a direct connection with everyone who has an interest in my work. Which is maybe why my work has done so well at auction recently.
4. You’ve been called “One of the Pacific Rim’s most controversial artists”. That may be true, but I don’t find your work offensive in the slightest– I find it delightful. Sure, Sexuality– Female Sexuality in particular– features heavily in the work, but what’s controversial about that? Everyone’s got a libido, after all. It seems to me that to from your perspective, Sexuality and the Social Conventions that surround it are two things that are there to be played with, like a toy. Like you’re trying to make a serious statement by having fun with it. Am I close?
I think the controversial part reflects my outspoken attitude towards the gallery system – and my rejection of it. I don’t see my work as erotic, really. It just reflects an aspect of how young women in the developed world see themselves. For better or worse, sexuality is always a powerful element of this. Besides, there’s always been both sexuality and sensuality in art. It’s as visible in the works of Michaelangelo as it is in those of Picasso or Modigliani. However, these days, we don’t have the same social, religious or gender constraints. We’re able to delve more deeply and frankly, creating art that is more explicit, darker and in my case, confessional and/or critical.
That said, yeah, I do like to have fun with it. My Dangerous Career Babes series is a case in point. A lot of women like to dress up to pretend roles as adults. This is different to actually being something. It’s a form of play-acting. So in this series, each figure has exactly the same pose, like an action figure or a Barbie doll, with one hand designed so props can be slid into it, the other formed for gestures or actions. Just as in real life, the costumes are the key. The figure is a dress-up doll. The career that the figure assumes in each painting is identifiable because of the clothes.
Needless to say, the glibness of this concept pisses some critics off. Me, I think it’s a hoot.
5. As a well-known and charismatic artist, suddenly you find yourself with a “Public Persona”. This “Meta-Hazel”, as it were, running around, going to all the right parties etc. You seem quite happy with your relationship with MetaHazel. Was this always the case, or did it grow on you?
In many ways, it was part of my early survival mechanism. I was immersed within her the moment I recognised my future as an artist. Now we’re so thoroughly interconnected, there’s no other Hazel but the Meta-Hazel, as you put it.
Actually, she’s still quite reclusive and rarely goes to a lot of parties. She’s way too busy. But she has a damn fine lifestyle and her sex life is… arcane, involving a very cool, hugely talented man and a bevy of young Asian camp-followers.
6. Everybody has a “Fantasy Version of Themselves”. You know, that fantasy person who manages to get all their work done, while still having enough room left over to do everything else– like getting a life, for example. What does “Fantasy Hazel” do with herself these days?
’Fraid not, in my case. See above. I live every aspect of my dreams to the hilt, even if most of them are still driven by a need to make art and succeed (within a wide frame of definitions) as an artist.
7. No matter how big your “Personal Brand” becomes, at the end of the day, you still have to do the work. As I’m fond of saying, “Success is more complex than Failure.” As your work gets more and more known, beyond Australia and Asia, are you having any trouble keeping up? How do you negotiate the ever-increasing demands placed on you, by your fans, collectors, the media and business interests? This increased complexity is something I always struggle with, so yeah, please do tell.
Some days, the work is tedious, labour-intensive and as repetitive as a production line in a factory. This is particularly the case when I am working with assistants on a handful of large pieces at the same time – and yes, it would be impossible to work on the very large enamels without them, as I’ve become increasing allergic to the medium. On other days, it can be almost languid. I draw or paint alone, in a room overlooking the ocean, and an assistant looks after phone calls, prepares snacks for me, and ensures I’m left in peace.
The most frenetic times are just before my exhibitions – ‘show time’ as my assistants call it. My openings are usually pretty extravagant so the logistics are complicated and usually bloody expensive, mainly because I produce my own shows these days.
The key is having a good infrastructure. Apart from my assistants, I have an excellent business manager and accountant who ensure that the right financial and logistical decisions are made for me. I always listen closely to them and follow their advice. And I have the wonderful Jim, a wise, older man who oversees the work-flow on my commissions and the mundane details of production, like ensuring we have enough frames built or the right colour paints to hand.
But none of it works without discipline. Early on in my career, I was told that success demanded one thing above all others: turning up. Turning up every bloody day, regardless of everything.
8. I’ve noticed a lot of well-known artists, like yourself, like Damien Hirst, are now selling their work via auction houses like Christie’s or Sotheby’s, rather than Blue-Chip galleries. What do you think brought this about? Pros? Cons?
It’s cleaner and a lot less effort than dealing with commercial galleries. Despite what they pretend, very few galleries or gallerists have what is required to develop and manage even a moderately successful career, let alone a stellar one – nor do they even want to. So I manage my own career and encourage my collectors to use auction houses for acquisitions and sales. I don’t yet sell on my own account through them but after Hirst and Sotheby’s… maybe.
I have great relationships with the best of them in Australia and collaborate in their marketing efforts for my works ahead of a major sale. They’re polite, helpful, good to deal with. I haven’t met an art dealer about whom I can say the same. Not yet anyway.
9. You have strong opinions about the art world, especially the big art institutions. What are your pet peeves? What do you think needs to change? What would you change if you could?
Oh, I’d tear down nearly everything and replace it. Or not replace it at all. The dark creed underpinning my attacks on the traditional commercial and institutional gallery system is that the system deliberately attempts to determine, control and sometimes destroy the destiny of individual artists – promoting some at the expense of others, making arbitrary judgements influenced by fad, self-interest, even government funding – for its own interests, none of which are to do with art.
Nowadays, too many galleries, public and private, see their role as somehow superior to that of the artists they represent. Hell, recently I read an interview with a noted curator in New York who tried to argue that curators were more important than artists. Is that really what it’s all come to?
Worse, more for reasons of social status than anything else, galleries like to think of art as something that should not be too ubiquitous or egalitarian in terms of access to it. They have no understanding of new systems of value that have gathered momentum because of the web: for example, the idea that ubiquity not scarcity is likely to drive value higher or that the repository of real value is no longer the artwork, the product, but the artist, the producer. This reflects what has changed even in mainstream business, where it isn’t the individual product that’s important but the brand.
As far as I’m concerned, the traditional art apparatchik deserves to die. It’s an anachronism that’s outlived it’s usefulness. I think there is still a role for individual curators or even ‘show producers’ but they need to work in a more individualised, specialist way within a networked ‘virtual’ paradigm – not old-fashioned bricks and mortar.
10. You’ve got your schtick, you’ve got your modus operandi, and obviously, it’s a good one and it’s working well for you. How do you see it evolving in the next few years?
It’s not schtick at all. Schtick is what Perez Hilton or worse, Paris Hilton live on. Rather, it’s a commitment to a different way of working, both personally and professionally. And it’ll evolve with the ideas within the work. In the end, that’s all it’s about.
[The gapingvoid “Ten Questions” archive is here.]
June 16, 2009
3 Comments
A few months ago I posed ten questions to David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe, which he kindly answered. To mark the launch of my book, IGNORE EVERYBODY, he asked me ten questions back. Here they are:
1. In a nutshell, why should someone read the book?
Like it says in the very beginning of the book, “So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.” I don’t claim to have any special insight in the nature of creativity. However, it’s something I put a lot of thought and effort into over the last few decades, so I have my opinions. I’m just sharing what I know, for what it’s worth.
2. You say, “The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you”. How do people who work for organisations and companies deal with this?
The same way any one else does. Patience, tenacity and good timing.
3. Does the “ignoring everybody” lead to loneliness?
Yes. It’s the price you WILL pay. Only you can decide if it’s worth it.
4. Is the book your social object?
I consider my cartoons my social object. The book, however, allowed me to present them to the world in way I found compelling.
5. By coincidence, I am reading David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, and your style is somewhat reminiscent of that book which became a kind of handbook to running an ad agency. Is Ignore Everybody a handbook and if so, for who?
I love that book. The introduction where he wrote about working in that high-end restaurant in Paris in the 1930s is probably one of my favorite pieces of writing, ever.
I didn’t have a demographic or a “function” in mind when I wrote the book. But I did think that there were a lot of people out there who, like me, aspired to do something more “creative” with their lives, than what was expected of them. And I thought there’d be no harm in sharing with them what I had learned the hard way, over the years. The premise was really no more complicated than that.
6. What was the motive behind writing the book? I mean I know how little money these things make, but do you want it to help other people better their lives or is it just another evil plan?
I certainly didn’t expect to make any real money from it, and how much it would “help” other people is pretty debatable. But sometimes in your life you have these defining moments, where you draw a line in the sand and declare to the world, “This is who I am, this is what I believe, this is what’s important to me.” I think we all need these moments at some point, to make us better understand who we really are. Writing a book is a good way to force these moments to the surface. That was really the key driver, here.
7. You name some obviously creative people in the book like Picasso and Bob Dylan but in the hard commercial world where you spend part of your life, who are the people who have managed to stay creative that have most impressed you?
I’ve always been most inspired by small businesses that could have been a lot bigger, but the owners decided to say small, because they didn’t want to commodify something that was very dear and special to them. Thomas Mahon over at English Cut, or Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin. But that’s certainly not my only criteria. Doing what you love AND getting paid for it at the same time is actually a really, really hard trick to pull off. Most people can’t do it, but if you can, yeah, you will have earned my respect.
8. You seem to have a love/hate relationship with advertising and advertising thinking (as do I). What’s with that?
The trouble with working in advertising is that you’re basically paid to perform miracles, by people who actually don’t believe in miracles. And the fact that most of the stuff being produced is boring, noisy and obnoxious doesn’t help, either. That being said, when it works, it works REALLY well, and creates a lot of value in a very short period of time. Like all advertising and marketing folk, I just wish the latter happened more often.
9. Creativity and technology have in the past been seen as different worlds but you seem in this and in other work to really enjoy the combination? Why?
It’s not really about the tech per se, it’s about the people. Like yourself, I like smart, driven, passionate people. The tech industry seems to be a place where these people often congregate. So it’s an relatively easy place to hang out in, an easy place to meet interesting folk with interesting ideas.
10. So what are your plans for the book and what next?
I’m toying with the idea of writing a second book, albeit with some trepidation. When asked why she never wrote a second book after “To Kill A Mockingbird”, Harper Lee answered, “Because after that, there was nowhere to go but down”. I can certainly relate!
Being a book author is not important to me. Neither is being a blogger or a marketing guy. Drawing cartoons is important to me. I know that if I keep on drawing the cartoons, interesting things will come out of it eventually, so my plan is to to just keep focusing on that.
[P.S. This was cross-posted on David’s blog here.]
January 31, 2009
2 Comments
[“Mistakenly”, one of my all-time favorite cartoons, is appearing in my upcoming book etc.]
A few days ago, during my “Ten Questions With Mark O’Donnell”, we mentioned briefly his stint back at college, working at the great college humor paper, The Harvard Lampoon.
Soon after, my mother sent me the following email:
Don’t forget that your grandfather was also a member of the Harvard Lampoon in the ‘30s.
Their humor was probably a little different– it was an innocent time.
One project which Grampa and his friends carried off with aplomb — in order to write about it later in the Lampoon — was to ‘kidnap’ the Sacred Cod of Massachusetts- still there, by the way. They smuggled it out of the Mass. State House in a coffin, well-covered in lilies. In the days of Mayor Curley, no policeman would have done anything but bow his head with a reverential murmur. It also tells you something about the reign of Mayor Curley, that he set a ransom of a pint of beer and paid up to get the fish back.
As I said, it still hangs there today.
2nd after dinner story: To sell papers — it was the depression, remember — they kidnapped (the “K” word again?) — the Yale Bulldog — yes — a live dog — and took it home to Cambridge where they kept it (him) happy on a diet of hamburger and French fries. Before they gave it back in time for the 1933 Harvard-Yale game, they put his dinner on the foot of John Harvard’s statue– still there, in Harvard Yard — and photographed the good dog licking the foot of John Harvard. Needless to say, the pictures of the dog’s dinner greeted the Yalies when they arrived for the game. Sold a fair few Lampoons, too.
Love from your mother
Heh. I remember hearing those stories about Grandpa, growing up. I’d forgotten he was was with The Lampoon when he did it, though… Thanks, Mom! Rock on.
January 26, 2009
1 Comment
If you’ve spent a lot of time around the New York literary party circuit in the last couple of decades, chances are you would’ve run into a very old friend of mine, the author and playwrite, Mark O’Donnell.
I met Mark at summer camp back when I was a kid. He was a camp councilor. Back then he was attending Harvard, where he and his twin brother, Steve, were heavily involved in the Harvard Lampoon, the great, old college humor magazine that spawned offshoots like National Lampoon, Spy Magazine and The Onion.
Mark’s specialty at camp was writing skits, which he’d get the kids to perform around th campfire. And damn, they were good. Funny and smart as hell. I still remember how much fun they were to put on. I still remember how much people loved them, both old and young.
Fast forward ten years. I’m in college at UT Austin, though now I’m now back up East in Boston for a week, visiting family. I’m in the offices of the Harvard Lampoon, just hanging around the campus. The Lampoon was HQ’d in this really curious little building, that was donated to the college by William Randolph Hearst. Talking to the young president of the Lampoon and some other student staffers, I ask if they knew of Mark and Steve. Very much so, it turns out. Though they graduated a decade before, their names were still very much revered by folks there. I was told that Mark was off writing novels and plays, and Steve was now working as head writer for David Letterman. Both were living in New York.
So a few days later I phoned up the NBC Letterman office, asked for Steve, got put through, introduced myself, told him who I was and that I was looking for Mark etc. We talked for a bit, Steve gave me Mark’s number, I called him up, we talked for a whie, the next time I was in New York we hooked up and hung out; we’ve been friends ever since.
Ten Questions For Mark O’Donnell
1. After years of struggling as a classic New York humorist, you finally landed your first really big hit: Co-writer of “Hairspray, The Musical”, based on the John Waters film. The play won you a Tony Award, it now tours the world and has been made into a movie with John Travolta. I remember writing to congratulating you, and you wrote back, “And Hairspray is like only one per cent of what I’m proud of.” Perhaps, but it’s still pretty impressive stuff nonetheless. I also know you are still living in the same apartment you had when you first moved to New York in the late 1970s. Has your life really changed that much since Hairspray conquered the world?
It hasn’t changed at all, except I now have some security for my free-lancer old age. I’m certainly not famous, except to my friends. When I walked the red carpet at the Tony Awards, photographers kept asking me to get out of the way. Except one Japanese paparazzo, who said, “Over here, Mr. Dennehy!” He thought I was Brian Dennehy.
2. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers, let’s talk about the remaining 99% percent of your work. What else have you done that you’re proud of?
I joke that I’m obscure in many fields, but I am proud that I’ve published poetry, cartoons, plays, novels, essays and songs, even if I’m not well known as any one of those things. The diversity has been fulfilling. That Knopf and The New Yorker and Playwrights Horizons, the best in their respective arenas, have sponsored me — It makes me feel good, even if it’s our little secret.
3. I remember when your book, Vertigo Park came out. Basically, it was a collection of short humor pieces. One piece I remember in particular, “Marred Bliss”, actually got me to laugh out loud, something that rarely happens when I’m reading. It’s perhaps one of the top ten funniest things I have ever read in my life. Once you told me “Marred Bliss” was your “Party Trick”. Care to elaborate?
Basically, it’s characters talking in revealing Freudian slips: “I heard you were engorged, and I just slopped by to pave my regrets.” “Where is the strong, stabled man I’m taking to be altered?” It’s very funny, but only for ten minutes. It would get wearying after that.That’s why I call it a parlor trick. Also, it’s probably my most produced play, brief as it is.
4. You were also one of the first contributors to SPY, the famous satirical magazine. What was that like to work for, back in the early days?
It was wonderful, because my old Lampoon friend, Kurt Andersen, was the editor, so there was no “fear of teacher.” It was like a secret treehouse. He generously published a lot of my cartoons when other places weren’t biting, and when SPY became the capital of Hip, it was fun to go to its black-tie parties.
5. About a decade ago, I was living in New York when your novel, “Let Nothing You Dismay” came out. I remember hearing you being interviewed on New York Public Radio about it. One of those “Hey, I know that guy” moments. I really enjoyed the book. Though I’m straight, I remember really identifying with the main character, a gay, thirtysomething Manhattan guy whose life, shall we say, is going nowhere fast. The book chronicles his adventures during New York Christmas Holidays Party Season. He’s a guy who wants the same warm-and-fuzzy stuff we all do, but all he seems to have to show for his years living in “The Greatest City In The World” is underemployment, loneliness and alienation. You’re gay yourself, and as I’ve known you for a while, I did see some autobiography embedded in the story, however I didn’t see this book as “gay fiction”. There was something to it that captured the quintessential New York experience that transcends sex or sexuality– the high emotional price you pay for living there. You’ve lived in New York for over three decades, and I’m guessing, like all New Yorkers, you will have had plenty of painful, personal experiences similar to the main character. Was writing this book your way of working through those experiences?
GETTING OVER HOMER was my personal working-through-heartbreak novel. LET NOTHING YOU DISMAY is sheer imaginative speculation: the hero is five two, and I’m six two in height. I got the idea one Christmas season, when I went to two radically different parties in one day — an off-Broadway theatre’s, which had potato chips and wine in a box, and FORBES Magazine’s party, which had a live orchestra, tuxedoed waiters with hot hors d’oeuvres, and a glittering buffet. I thought you could paint a picture of all mankind in just a few strokes if you did it right. Also, the main character, because he’s short, aspires to higher things.
6. I remember meeting your twin brother, Steve, when he came up to the summer camp in New Hampshire to visit you for a few days. I remember seeing him wearing a tweed jacket, tie and slacks, and thinking, “Why is Mark all dressed up?” You guys were extremely identical in the twin department. And then yes, soon after you both graduated from Harvard and got jobs writing funny stuff for a living. Steve had his first big break writing for David Letterman [before that he wrote funny lines for a greeting card company]. Though you both have had nothing but love and mutual respect for each other over the years, your career took longer than Steve’s to reach the big time. Was that difficult for you, or did it not really matter?
We’ve never been competitors, we’re colleagues. His success is mine and vice versa. Does one doctor resent it when another doctor saves a life? Actually, it’s been up and down for us both, so no one’s ever “ahead.” We each believe in the other’s funniness, so the outside world’s response is beside the point.
7. Your humor, cartoons, and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Spy, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, you’ve published books, and your plays have been produced both on and off Broadway. I know you had a brief stint writing TV for Saturday Night Live, but if I were to sum up your oeuvre in three words, it would be “The Printed Page”. Your bother, however, opted for television, not just with Letterman, but also folk like Chris Rock and Seinfeld. I’m guessing you’re talented enough to have also gone down that road, had it appealed to you. But I’m guessing it didn’t. Thoughts?
I did write for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and wrote assorted scripts that never got made. I’m a bit more bookish, I guess. Steve has thrived in TV, whereas I preferred books and plays. I joke that he’s the world’s most artistic comic and I’m the world’s most comic artist.
8. Wen you first started getting your name around New York, the world wide web didn’t exist. And now it does, very much so. Has the web affected your career? Has it made it harder? Easier? How has the world changed, from the perspective of the industry you’re in?
I’m techno-tarded, so the Web or whatever hardly affects me. The HAIRSPRAY screenplay had to be filed as an online attached document, that was, to me, a challenge. I expect I’ll have to handle it eventually.
9. This story really tickled me: After the success of Hairspray, you’re were working on a new John Waters musical, “CryBaby”, based on his film. A few months ago I sent you a note, telling you about how my “How To Be Creative” manifesto was going to be published as a book. I had no idea if you had yet come across it, at that point. And you wrote back, “One of our actors was browsing your website as we rehearsed CRYBABY, and was impressed I knew you. Qui peut savoir?” It seems to me, that when something you make gets successful [My most conservative estimate of how many people have read HTBC so far: Two million], it really takes on a life of its own. The author pretty much ceases to matter. You’ve got the author, you’ve got the piece of work, and suddenly you’ve got his THIRD THING that the work becomes, after it’s been seen and digested by enough people. Since Hairspray’s success, have you noticed this phenomenon?
Well, there’s a lot of HAIRSPRAY merchandise — Bloomingdale’s even did a fashion line — and high school kids everywhhere sing the score, but it was a collaboration between six people, and John Waters is the ultimate progenitor. I don’t take it personally, as you can with your strip. It’s how people introduce me now, though.
10. As your long-time fanboy, it’s really gratifying for me to see your work FINALLY getting the recognition it deserves. But as we both learned the hard way, “It don’t come easy”. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you have given yourself, years ago, when you first moved to New York as a young, aspiring writer just out of college?
Basically, don’t look down. I didn’t realize that the odds are against the struggling artist, but I assume talent, patience and work will vindicate those meant for whatever the dream may be.
And, as Yeats suggests, “Be secret and exult.” Take joy in what you do, even if as yet it goes unseen.
[The “Ten Questions” series archive is here.]
November 3, 2008
9 Comments
When I lived in London last year, one of my best pals was David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe [The largest private, global PR firm in the world]. Our schtick was to meet for breakfast about twice a month, and just talk about the crazy world happening around us. Sometimes we’d invite other friends along, like Steve Clayton or Lee Thomas. Other times we’d meet at The Groucho Club after work, drink some beers, and hatch new secret evil plans. It was fun times all round.
“Crowd Surfing”: 10 Questions for Edelman’s David Brain
1. Let’s cut to the chase. You just co-authored a book with Martin Thomas, “Crowd Surfing”. Please give us the schpiel.
Martin and I were interested in how companies and organisations were managing to deal with the new empowered consumer. There’s been a lot written about the crowd, but less about how the people inside big companies deal with it. As you know we have some experience of this with Edelman clients, so at the heart of the book is a series of interviews with some interesting people who have to juggle the often conflicting demands of the crowd and the company.
2. What made you want to write this particular book? You’re already busy enough, you’re already doing well enough professionally, so what was the motive? What was the conversation you wanted to start with people, that wasn’t happening already?
Well, someone once told me that a great way to start a conversation was to create a ‘social object’.…and to some degree this is my social object. There is something about publishing a book that allows you to have a different type of conversation with clients, colleagues and prospects, and that has proven to be the case. We are now talking to many clients for whom this stuff was in the ‘too difficult’ basket, and somehow talking about case studies from the book has made that easier. I also felt that the corporate side of the story has been underplayed. The heroes of this book are not bloggers or consumer activists but the people inside firms who have changed their companies (sometimes at significant career risk) to better serve the new consumer. People like Microsoft’s Steve Clayton and Dell’s Richard Binhammer.
3. It seems both the Microsoft Blue Monster and the folks I’m currently working with at Dell [Lionel, Richard, Bruce etc] feature heavily in the book. What was it about these stories that sparked your interest?
Sometimes it is easy for an entrepreneur or small business to be in tune with their customers or stakeholders, because their scale (or lack of it) means everyone is close to the customer (an obvious point I know, but size does sometimes matter). The bigger a firm gets the more difficult that becomes . Big companies need robust processes and structures to organise, to do what it is they do, and that can mean that the people inside can sometimes begin to focus on those processes and structures to the exclusion of the customer or the crowd. Dell and Microsoft have both worked really hard to find ways to bring the crowd inside the firm (at the cost of significant disruption) so that they don’t make that mistake. For me, where the crowd meets the organisation is where the real action is.
4. We’ve had this conversation many times before in private, allow me to take it public: You and I both believe that in this hyper-digital, post-Cluetrain world of ours, the PR industry has a huge opportunity, simply by taking huge chunks of business away from what was traditionally the domain of the large advertising agencies. I’m thinking the work Edelman did for Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty would be a good example of this. Care to elaborate on the business model?
Everything these days is work in progress. Customers and stakeholders know that about the companies and brands that are part of their life, and yet many of those companies still seem to over-use the mass communication vehicles of the industrial age, presenting a perfect ‘image’ or a ‘lifestyle’ and looking for aspiration or approval. So much advertising, direct marketing and promotion (and some PR to be fair) is a one-way street and that just does not fit the world I see around me. PR, or good PR at least, was always about things like relationship, influence and dialogue (in the old days focused more on the elite few maybe, but now with the many as well) and so PR now has an even more central role in helping companies align with stakeholders and customers by properly engaging with them. Thankfully many firms and brands are seeing this and many PR people (in agencies and in-house) are embracing this new mandate and the responsibility that comes with it. Every day the false certainties peddled by the old-school advertising agencies look more and more out of place and time.
5. You weren’t always in PR. You also have backgrounds in advertising and journalism. Like you once told me, “Anybody who’s any good at this business, usually ended up working in it by accident.” What’s your story? How did you end up in it?
You have a good memory. It was indeed a distress purchase. I was briefly in journalism but got turfed out by the recession of the mid 80s, and had to parlay my training into something to pay the bills. I have also been in advertising (in Asia in the 90’s) and client side, but have always come back to PR, which I guess shows a lack of imagination to some extent.
6. You’re not just a PR flack, you actually run a pretty sizable business. What’s the toughest part of your job as CEO?
Finding good people. At Edelman in Europe, Middle East and Africa we now have just under a 1,000 people across wholly owned offices in 14 countries, and we always have vacancies for talent. You have helped us find people in the past as you remember, and one of the best things for us about social media has been the ability to spot talent and people who ‘get it’ by what they say and do online.
7. When we think of PR, we think of the stereotypical smoothie in an Italian suit, schmoozing away at some fancy sponsored event [See “Pickaxe” cartoon above]. But as we both know, Global PR is actually a pretty sophisticated business. Again, back to a conversation we’ve had more than once, the big challenge for PR firms in the next decade is all about becoming more culturally and technically diverse, AWAY from the typical smoothie archetype, towards something more hardcore, valuable and interesting. How does Edelman Europe see the challenge? Do you see a “new breed” of PR practitioner emerging?
I do see a new breed. PR used to be based on the top-down principle of managing a few relationships with senior journalists or stakeholders. These respected authorities would say good things about your business or firm and the world would gratefully receive their view and act accordingly. Well as you know, that world got blown up and the new democratised world of the enfranchised consumer and the occasional angry crowd has forced businesses (and the PR people and firms that advise them) to open up. It used to be in this business that you could trade on who you know, and now it has swung much more to what you know as well. I can’t imagine hiring people these days who are not actively engaged in the conversation or community in some form . You can’t fake this stuff. And so that means we always look for technical skills, people with a wide set of interests and a passion for something (other than work). Richard Edelman calls this ‘Living in Colour.…the idea that if you only live for the office and home you become a little grey. And if you cut off from the world in that way, you are much less use to our clients, who are looking for insight and advice and connection.
8. Of all the global players, it seems to me that Edelman got seriously interested in the implications of Web 2.0 sooner than the other big guys. Hence Richard Edelman hiring Steve Rubel etc. What was it about 2.0 that initially got Edelman all excited, where did you see the opportunity for your business, and what was particularly unique about the company that allowed you to arrive there first?
It really was Richard Edelman. He was banging on about this stuff five years ago when I joined the firm, and I was probably the leading naysayer at the time (I may even have expressed the view that blogging was like CB radio). The Trust Study, the big survey we do each year, had given us some clues when it showed that a ‘person like me’ was becoming a credible source of information on companies and organisations. ‘A person like me’ is now globally the number one credible source of information on companies…the CEO is the seventh most credible! And once we got our heads around that and the seismic changes of which that was just one part, the rest was about putting our money where our mouth was. And Richard hired people who got it, like Steve Rubel, and we invested in research and we bought digital agencies for their technical and creative skills, and we adapted their ways into the mainstream of the firm and invited in people like you who addressed our teams and our clients. And of course training, training, training. But we did make some bloody big mistakes along the way as everybody knows, and boy, did we ever learn from them!
9. Edelman is privately-owned. All your big, main competitors [Weber Shandwick etc] are subsidiaries of the large, publicly-owned advertising conglomerates [Interpublic, WPP etc]. Pros? Cons?
Every shareholder is in the firm, and that means that what’s right for the clients, the people and the business is never diluted by Wall Street or some bully-boy advertising suit. When I worked at some of the advertising-company-dominated, publicly-owned firms you could never point out advertising’s limitations…you were muzzled. We can say precisely what we think is right for the client without worry– and no other PR firm of scale is in that position. On the money front, because we don’t have outside shareholders bleeding cash out of the firm, we can re-invest in intellectual property like research, and in new products and training. I really can’t think of any cons.
10. What advice would you give to a bright young thing wanting to break into the PR business? More specifically, what advice would you give today, that you wouldn’t have given say, a decade ago? In other words, for a young person just entering the trade, how has the world changed in the last ten years?
Be involved and have a voice. When I got into this business in the early Jurassic period those two things were much more difficult to do. But society has changed and it is easy to express opinions and debate and join with like-minded people to pursue your interests. It does not all have to be online, but obviously much of it is now. And we look for that. Someone who is interested and passionate about something and who contributes. I still expect new joiners to be passionate about news, culture and politics in the traditional senses too, but what you read through your aggregator and via your community is as important as what you can buy at the news stand (OK not the most original point, but you would be amazed how many people still come to interviews with no views on news and no understanding or participation in social media). One other thing that has struck me about people joining the business now, especially in the US and the UK, is that they are amazingly conservative about their careers. Many look to progress through the ranks in small linear steps, I guess because the business has become so big and so structured. One of the most difficult things is to find people who will take a risk and go live in the Middle East or Moscow or China and I find that so hard to understand having lived and worked outside my country for seven years … something which broadened my horizons significantly.
November 1, 2008
13 Comments
(Cartoon taken from The Hughtrain etc.)
Like I said in my interview with Mark Earls, The Blue Monster is a “Purpose-Idea”. As Mark, the man who first coined the term explains it:
Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory — it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.
Real drives, passions and beliefs. Exactly.
The Blue Monster line, “Change The World Or Go Home” is not rocket science or literary brilliance. It just articulates a simple belief, a simple passion, a simple drive THAT ALREADY EXISTED, long before The Blue Monster ever came on to the scene. That’s all it was ever meant to do.
[The Microsoft Blue Monster etc.]
Whether you agree or disagree with it doesn’t matter, the important bit is that people within Microsoft believe it. Unlike a conventional ad campaign, it’s not about you. It’s about them.
Why is something like this potentially valuable to a business? Simply put, if you believe something passionately enough, for long enough, articulate it well enough, and your actions are aligned, credible and consistent with your belief for long enough, it’s just a matter of time before other people start believing it, too. And next thing you know, you have an interesting conversation going on, both inside and outside the company. And as Doc Searls famously said, “Markets are conversations”. Ker-Chiing.
Again, none of this is rocket science. Talking to people never is.
When people ask me what exactly is a Blue Monster, I tell them, it’s not necessarily a cartoon. It’s simply a social object that allows one to more easily articulate the Purpose-Idea. No more, no less.
I’ve been asking myself for years, what comes after conventional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising, now that we live in a post-TV, post-advertising, post-message world? “Creating Blue Monsters” is the closest I’ve ever come to finding an actual answer.
Besides drawing the cartoons, helping other companies create Blue Monsters is how I intend to spend the remainder of my career.
Cartoons and Blue Monsters. I really do have the world’s greatest job. Rock on.
[More Blue Monster background reading here.]
October 31, 2008
13 Comments
From my recent ‘Ten Questions’ with Mark Earls:
7. In “Creative Age”, you destroyed a very sacred cow of the agency world, The Brand. With your second book, “Herd”, you successfully went after an equally massive agency sacred cow: The Idea of Consumer as “Heroic Individual” [Embodied by cultural icons like The Marlboro Man, or the existential athlete wearing Nike’s]. Your message seemed to be, actually guys, we’re social animals. We’re social primates; we behave more like chimps and gorillas, more than we behave like lone, cigarette-smoking cowboys. Care to explain the idea further?
[Mark’s Answer:] Again to simplify: Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us).
So if you want to change what I’m doing, don’t try to persuade me– don’t try to make me– do anything. Instead, enlist the help of my friends…
But not crudely (as in “Recommendation”). That’s just persuasion by another name: another “Push” tactic. I’m convinced the answer lies in creating “Pull” (i.e. Social) forces.
When I wrote that question for Mark, I’d been thinking a lot about the “Heroic, Lone Individual” schtick in mass media, particularly with mass marketing.
Most mass-market messages are consumed alone. Most of the ones we see are so unremarkable– think of a late-night TV commercial for a local car dealer, for example– they’re not Social Objects, they don’t warrant us doing the social, they don’t warrant us sharing them with people. Sure, we can gather in groups around the TV and be watching the same commercial, but the commercial is not genuinely addressing us as a group. It’s trying trying to pick us off, one by one.
Ergo, the world of mass marketing is basically a lonely place. Which makes the Marlboro Man- think riding the range with no other people for miles around– or the existential athlete– think Tiger Woods, about to make the amazing putt– the perfect citizen for it.
Then along comes the internet. Along comes interactive. Along comes “sharing”. Along comes media that actually creates real social behavior, as opposed to just trying to create idealized, theatrical versions of it..
Suddenly Mr. Lonesome Heroic seems a bit out of place.
October 18, 2008
13 Comments
If had to pick the two or three business books that have “changed my life” in the last couple of years, Mark Earls’ “Welcome To The Creative Age” would be on the list, without question. Recently he also published his second book, “Herd”, which picks up where “Creative Age” left off.
In order to turn more people onto his work, I prepared for him ten questions, which like Seth Godin before him, he kindly agreed to answer below. Rock on.
Ten Questions For Mark Earls
1. I remember “Creative Age” sending shockwaves through the British advertising establishment when it first came out in the early 2000’s. You basically came out of nowhere and declared that marketing and branding, at least how we generally defined it back then in the advertising world, was dead. That it was intellectually bankrupt. Care to elaborate?
Thinking back now it must seem a bit odd — a bit presumptious, maybe — to make this kind of dramatic declaration. But remember this was a turbulent period — Fukuyama was declaring the end of history, ideology etc etc. And there was a fresh feeling in the air in Britain — the arrival of a New Labour government after more than a decade in the wilderness felt to many of us like the passing of a baton from one generation to the next. I was having the time of my life working in the crazy creative co-operative St Luke’s, where we were pushing the idea of “What it is to be a creative business” to the limit, and then finding that there were no limits (Apart from ourselves, as it turned out).
Part of my thinking was shaped by all of this contextual stuff, but I think the most important thing was the realisation that the cluster of ideas we sold as “marketing” was basically the product of a particular time and place (they bear the cultural and intellectual imprint of mid-Century, Midwest United States) and not some collection of eternal and irreducible truths (like the laws of Maths, say). This — and my day-to-day experience trying to use these old ideas to shape creative communications and behaviours that really work — led me to work out what was wrong AND offer something that better reflected what we’ve learned about humans, business and creativity over the last half-century.
2. You were the first person to make me actually ask the question, “When I say ‘Brand’, or ‘Branding’, what do I actually mean by that? Do brands actually exist as we say they do, or are they just a mental construct to make us advertising types sound more clever in client meetings?“
So here’s Mark Earls, this highly respected British brand guru, getting paid lots of money to better articulate the idea of ‘The Brand’, and suddenly you’re telling your clients, “Hey, you know all that clever ‘Brand’ stuff you’ve been paying my agency lots of money for? It’s actually all a load of crap.“
So I’ll ask you the same question your clients undoubtedly asked you: “Why is it crap?“
Let’s start with the good stuff about “Brand”: it’s clearly a popular idea, it’s spread far and wide into politics and self-help books. It’s useful, in that it allows us to talk about the cluster of stuff that floats around reputation and perception and so on. It looks like we can measure it because it’s something that seems like folk out there in Consumerland can talk about.
So what’s wrong with it: well, first of all “Brand” is a metaphor. It’s not a thing, even though we talk about it as if it were: it’s a way of talking as if.
Second, it’s a fat-metaphor: there is no agreed definition, so we can use it to mean just about anything we want — to pre– or proscribe whatever we want. Most brand conversations need an agreed set of definitions or…
Third, “Brand” is what you get as a result of doing great , not a good guide to what to do — it’s the scoreboard, not the game.
Fourth, “Brand” is a distraction from the main game, which is doing great stuff for customers and staff (“baking it in”, as for example the Zeus Jones go on about). P***ing about in Brandland is a good excuse not to really get to grips with the stuff you need to get to grips with, and it tends to lead you off into “communications” rather than actually doing something.
Fifth, “Brand” perpetuates the myths we like to hold tight to, about the power of marketing and communication — sometimes when you hear brand folk talk, they seem to imagine they are sorcerers and magicians, weaving binding spells and illusions. More often than not, they like to use military metaphors. The truth of course is that mostly were neither of these things and have a marginal effect at best.
3. Then after you convinced your friends and colleagues [some of them, anyway] that all this was ‘crap’, the first thing they would’ve asked you is, “Well, OK, so what else ya got? What comes next?“
And your answer turned out to be a big one. A VERY big one, Indeed: “The Purpose-Idea”. I’ve told a LOT of people about the P-I over the years, since first discovering it in “Creative Age”. This time, I think we’d all rather get it from the horse’s mouth. Please explain the P-I to us mere mortals. Thanks.
Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory — it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.
4. I like The P-I. Explaining it to people pretty much has made paying all my bills a lot easier in the the last few years. The Blue Monster was a P-I. When you see a real P-I working in action, it cuts through the clutter and ignites passion in a way that, for the money, your standard “Here’s why you should buy my product” message simply cannot compete with. In spite of this, I see people in the business resist it. Something about it that scares them. What do you think that might be?
Like I say, I think it embarrasses the grown-ups: a lot of folk think business is some separate rational sphere of activity, in which maths, analytics and rational thinking prevail (whether it’s in customers’ or employees’ minds). P-I makes things personal — makes you put your balls on the line. It cuts through the crap of “strategy” and all that pseudoscience that we hide behind.
5. One thing that makes your work so compelling, I believe, is that you have a lot of conversations with people who are NOT in the advertising world, but instead inside the world of academia. You also seem to devour books on social and behavioral sciences. Did these interests predate your advertising career, or did it develop on the job?
I’ve always been interested in how things (really) work but my job has allowed me to indulge that more and more. Over the years, my curiosity has led me talk to folk who don’t have an axe to grind or a vested interest in marketing’s explanations of how things work. So, for example, recently I’ve been working with a great guy, Alex Bentley, who’s an academic anthropologist who specialises in how ideas and behaviours spread through populations. If it works for stone age pottery styles, 21st popular music, dog breeds, charitable giving and marketing jargon — all things that marketing folks’ models can’t or haven’t bothered to do the math for, I think his explanation of how things spread is a pretty good explanation and should serve as a great place to start. If it is also grounded in the consensus in modern behavioural and cognitive sciences about human beings, well again so much the better.
I’ve been surprised how rarely folk do this — looking broadly across other disciplines. At best we take sliver of some experiment we read about in Scientific American Mind, say and force the new thing to support our old ideas. The snake oil salesmen of the so-called “neuromarketing” are one example; the whole “influentials” word of mouth gig is another. On the one hand, it’s a shame; on the other, it allows me to make a good living!
6. Back in the early days of marketing and advertising blogging, it seems that me and my fellow bloggers were taking great and constant delight in declaring that “Ad agencies are dead”. Five or six years later, and they’re still with us. Have they evolved, or are they just living on borrowed time?
Living on borrowed time. Their economic models are screwed. The one thing you read on the faces of the guys (and it is mostly the guys) who run them is “Not on my watch”: They know that a major discontinuity is coming, they know we’re all going over the cliff, and that it’s all going to be different the other side but they just hope to have paid off the school and college fees before then. They’ve done pretty well to hedge all of this with a bit of digital tinkering but frankly they’re too slow, too fat and not set up to embrace what’s next (Which isn’t about messages btw).
7. In “Creative Age”, you destroyed a very sacred cow of the agency world, The Brand. With your second book, “Herd”, you successfully went after an equally massive agency sacred cow: The Idea of Consumer as “Heroic Individual” [Embodied by cultural icons like The Marlboro Man, or the existential athlete wearing Nike’s]. Your message seemed to be, actually guys, we’re social animals. We’re social primates; we behave more like chimps and gorillas, more than we behave like lone, cigarette-smoking cowboys. Care to explain the idea further?
Again to simplify: Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us).
So if you want to change what I’m doing, don’t try to persuade me– don’t try to make me– do anything. Instead, enlist the help of my friends…
But not crudely (as in “Recommendation”). That’s just persuasion by another name: another “Push” tactic. I’m convinced the answer lies in creating “Pull” (i.e. Social) forces.
8. Getting to know you over the years, it seems a big part of your schpiel is telling people, namely, people who work for companies, that actually, you know, businesses aren’t machines. Homo Economicus doesn’t actually exist. Actually, companies are the same they’ve always been: Human being collected together for a shared purpose. And until you start recognizing your company’s own humanity, you’re just making it a lot harder than it needs to be. That would be an easy sell to me or the average gapingvoid reader. But how hard is it to sell into a large company, one that’s been doing the same old things for years? Do you feel you’re pushing a boulder uphill, or do you find people pretty receptive to your new way of thinking?
It depends. Sometimes — when times are tough — folk will bite your arm off for anything new. At others, it’s no-change-whatever. Other folk do things the reverse i.e Good times = Experiment!
Also, I try to remember that– as I tell them about their own attempts to influence their customers– I can’t make anyone do anything. They do what they do because of their peers.
In this context, it’s worth pointing out how the world has moved since I started talking HERD. I was on the freakier end of things in 2001 – 2; now, I’m mainstream enough that young adfolk are forced by The IPA (the British equivalent of AAAA) to study my work. Weird.
9. You and I have both left the ad agency world, me to become a cartoonist, you to become a consultant. That being said, the agency world still exists, it’s still making money, and we still have some dear friends still in the business, who we’d still like to see do well. From what you’ve learned from the ever-changing world we both seem to be living in, what advice would you give our agency friends? What can agency folk do to create value for their clients, in spite of so many advertising and branding sacred cows already having been turned into hamburger meat?
Start making things (rather than communication — communication is not the answer, in fact it’s an excuse).
AND
Work out — like the dudes at Anomaly and Another Anomaly — how to make money from making things.
Also…
Work out how you can make the kind of places that you or I, or the people who clients really value, want to work.
10. Ok, Mr Purpose-Idea Grand Ninja, if somebody asked you what was YOUR OWN, individual P-I, how would you answer them? Just curious.
Helping us all do better stuff by making sure our thinking is straighter.
You see, I don’t have the answers (and even if I did, it’d be pointless telling the world). But I can make you think a bit harder about stuff — I can help you throw away the useless stuff, the stuff you don’t need anymore.
[You can also follow Mark on Twitter here.]
October 8, 2008
42 Comments
10 Questions For Seth Godin
My friend and mentor, Seth Godin has a new book out, “Tribes”. As has become a regular gapingvoid tradition, to celebrate the launch I e-mailed Seth 10 questions, which he kindly answered below. Rock on.
1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let’s get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is “Tribes” about?
It explains why top-down, buzz-driven media is the past, not the future.
The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.
Barack Obama has one, John McCain tried to co-opt one. Arianna Huffington has built the most popular blog in the world around one. Harley Davidson and Apple are titanic brands for the very same reason. They sell a chance to join a group that matters.
The punchline is that the only way to lead a tribe is to lead it. And that means that marketing is now about leadership, about challenging the status quo and about connecting people who can actually make a difference. If you can’t do that, don’t launch your site, your product, your non-profit or your career.
I’d argue that you understand how to tap into this need, Hugh. Lots of people don’t like your work – screw them, we don’t like them anyway. The people who do like, who find that it resonates… it’s likely that we’ll like each other. You lead us to a place we want to go.
2. Your seminal bestseller from a few years ago, “Purple Cow”, made the assertion that “Everyone is a Marketer”. Though this would now be considered pretty standard doctrine for marketing geeks Everywhere, at the time I remember it seeming a pretty radical, new, challenging thought. In Tribes, it seems to me you’ve upped the ante by asserting that “Everyone is a Leader”. Care to elaborate?
Sure. The idea that everyone is a marketer is still hard for a surprisingly large number of organizations. Non profits (most of them) don’t see the world that way. Neither do traditional factories or many other businesses. But it’s so clearly true, I don’t even have to outline here how the product is the marketing, how the service is the marketing, how every human being who touches something is doing marketing.
Well, if we go a giant step forward and realize that it is for and about the tribe, that tribes – connected, motivated groups of people – are the engines of growth, then it seems clear to me that what marketing means today is leadership. If you’re boring or staid, no one will follow you. Why would they?
3. Anyone who knows you would consider you a leader, in your own unique way. And the same could be said for a lot of the people you personally hang out with. But it seems to me that this book was not written for those type of folk, but for people who have yet to really consider themselves as leadership material. It seems to me that the main thrust of the book is about trying to get them to make the leap from “Follower” to “Leader”. Is there any truth in that?
Everyone isn’t going to be a leader. But everyone isn’t going to be successful, either.
Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.
So the challenge is: your choice.
4. As you well know, I’m fascinated with marketing, both for myself and for my clients. Looking over my work from the last couple of years, I increasingly see marketing [by that I mean, GOOD marketing] as a function of LANGUAGE and NARRATIVE. In other words, the art of marketing is figuring out a way to talk to people in the market in a manner they SIMPLY HAVE NOT been talked to before. And then when I’m reading your book, I keep thinking that, SO MUCH of being a leader is simply providing people with a good narrative to explain their actions. In other words, it’s far easier to lead if [A] You’ve got a great story that’s easy for you to share and [B], more importantly, you have a good story that is EASY for other people to share.
So much traditional marketing is built around the idea of “Merit” i.e. good quality, good prices etc. But the older I get, I keep asking myself, “What’s the story here? What’s the REAL story that people are GENUINELY going to want to tell other people?” Do you see Storytelling as a form of Leadership? How about vice versa?
In All Marketers Are Liars, my point was that people buy stories, not stuff, and it’s stories that spread, not stuff. An iPod made by Garmin wouldn’t be an iPod, would it? It’s the story and the affect and the whole aura that makes it worth $200.
I think you’ve hit the issue on the head. Leaders tell stories. Gandhi or King or Che or yes, Rush Limbaugh. They tell stories. The stories matter and the words matter. Of course OF COURSE the product has to live up to the story, the service has to be there, the story has to be true. But no story, not idea, no marketing.
5. We all have different things that motivate us, that gets us out of bed in the morning. Some people want money, some people want power, some people want fame and applause. You seem very driven “To Affect Change”, both on an individual level, and collectively within companies. Where does that drive come from? Were you born with it, or has it just grown with you over the years? Is it something that is still constantly evolving? If so, how?
It used to be a curse, but now I’m getting used to it.
I’m pretty impatient with things that are as they are instead of as they could be. I’m impatient with people who grumble and settle and then get old and die. I’m energized by people who see things differently and make changes happen. We’re all so lucky, what a sin to waste it.
6. When I finished reading “Tribes” I was both stunned and delighted in equal measure to see my name cited in the Acknowledgements section as an influence in the creation of the book [Thanks!]:
“Years ago, Hugh MacLeod, the world’s most popular inspirational business cartoonist (who knew you could do that for a living?), drew a cartoon (his most popular one ever) with the caption, ‘The market for something to believe in is infinite’- as soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to write a book about that idea.”
Well, I certainly have some ideas about what that cartoon means to me, though I’d be curious to hear your individual take on it. What it says to you, personally. Thoughts?
That was the second title I had in mind for the book. And I was going to include the image itself, but then it showed up all over the web and so…
The point imho is this: You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two massages at once…
So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales?
I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this.
7. Your books and blog posts seem to have one thing in common, they seem to be getting shorter and shorter with every passing year. I have no problem with that; I think people genuinely prefer short reads, over long ones. For people aspiring to publish their own books one day, what advice would you give them re. deciding on a book’s length?
Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.
8. I think aspiring writers have a lot of romantic illusions about “The life of an author”, which have little to do with the actual hard-nose reality of the publishing business. What do you think are the hardest lessons for a first-time author to learn?
Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail.
Book publishers don’t make authors successful (clarification: 175,000 new authors a year, 300 become successful because of publishers). Authors make themselves successful by earning the privilege of having a platform, by creating ideas that spread, and yes, by building a tribe. (Harry Potter anyone?)
9. You’re a busy guy. Besides writing books, you have paid speaking gigs, your blog to keep up, and your various start-ups and businesses to manage. When do you find time to write the actual books? Do you have a regular set time for working on it [first thing in the morning, say], or do you just somehow find the time whenever?
I don’t set out to write books. I don’t make time for them. They just force themselves on me. If I resist, the idea makes me miserable until I write it down.
I can go three or six months or longer with nothing, and then an entire book just sort of appears. If I have to grind it out, I’m not going to write it. That’s not true for everyone, but that’s what works for me.
10. You’ve been publishing your books for about a decade now. Obviously, in that time period there’s been a lot of changes in the world. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s narrow the field down a bit, to the “Purple Cow”, new-marketing world you’ve been happily residing in. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in this brave new world, since Purple Cow and IdeaVirus first hit the bookstores?
There’s no doubt that the biggest change is that most smart people now realize that the world has changed.
When I started, I was working in a status quo, static world, where the future was expected to be just like the past, but a little sleeker.
Now, chaos is the new normal. That makes it easier to sell an idea but a lot harder to sound like a crackpot.
March 20, 2005
6 Comments
I recently e-mailed Seth Godin some questions regarding his terrific new book, “All Marketers are Liars”, and he kindly wrote back with some answers.
HUGH [italics]: 1. You’re most famous for “The Purple Cow”. Purple cows are cute. Then you had “The Free Prize”. Free prizes are cute. Before those two you had “The Idea Virus”. Maybe not quite so cute, but still, pretty nifty sounding. But in your latest book, you have “The Lie”. Lies are neither cute or nifty. Did your editors have a problem with this?
SETH [no italics]: They did! So did the salesforce at the publisher. But I persisted.
There’s HUGE inertia at most every company to do the safe thing, not the remarkable thing.
So far, it appears that I’m right. My readers “get it.” They’re quite intelligent folks, actually.
2. The word I associate with you the most is “Remarkable”. In “Lies”, you seem to be telling people, “Look, if your product cannot generate a remarkable story, then Q.E.D., quod erat demonstrandum, the product is not, by definition, remarkable”.
Actually, the most common word is “bald” followed by “slightly annoying” (which is two words, but who’s counting.)
Yes, you got my point re. ‘Remarkable’ spot on.
I can see a possible cause of contention where people who buy your books or attend your seminars erroneously thinking, “Gee, maybe if I give Seth some money, my product will somehow end up less unremarkable than it currently is.“
Except I rarely do seminars, which aren’t particularly profitable anyway. I want them (the reader) to figure out how to be remarkable, not for me to do it for them.
And I can see you answering back, “This has nothing to do with me; make your product more remarkable and more people will remark on it more often. Deal with it.“
That sounds like me.
Do you ever get asked to wave a magic wand, even though you have never made any claims to be a magician? And when you tell your potential clients/readers that you possess no magic, do they ever get upset/disappointed?
More like the heartbreak of psoriasis than upset. I’m pretty upfront about this, so so far, no real meltdowns.
3. A friend of mine, Jamie Fleming writes fiction [His uncle, Ian also wrote some fiction, about a British spy or whatever]. Jamie’s great line that I always remember is “Nonfiction doesn’t exist”.
Or, as my tenth grade art teacher once told me, “All art is a lie”. (“Ceci n’est pas un pipe” etc, “The map is not the terrain” etc)… The story about the product is not the actual product. But if you can believe “The Lie”, then oh yes it is.
YES!
This is roughly how I interpreted your definition of “The Lie”. And this allows you to contentiously name your book “All Marketers Are Liars”, which probably means more sales than if you’d named your book “All Marketers Are Storytellers”. And since you’re in the business of telling people how to sell and being remarkable, to not do something remarkable to increase sales would not be good for “Brand Seth”.
“Purple Cow” is a great metaphor “Free Prize” is a great metaphor. “Idea Virus” is a great metaphor. I think “The Lie” is also a great metaphor, the observation it makes is brilliant, but equally I can see your average marketing professional getting all snitty about it.
I hope so.
“That man just called me a liar! How dare he think that when I tell the world that my value mouthwash has all the great, fresh, minty taste they crave at only half the price of the leading brand, I am somehow lying! I am not pleased! I am angry and I demand justice!” etc etc etc.
Where do you think your ideas are aligned with mainstream, corporate, MBA-inspired marketing, and where do you see yourself parting company?
Oh, I parted company with these guys on September 12th, 1982 when they almost threw me out of my first class at the Stanford Business School. Every word you just said was true (if anything can be true). By the way, I think I once saw a movie about a book from your friend’s uncle.
What a cool thing to have an uncle like that. My uncle is a lawyer.
I part company with marketers at the selfish part. Marketers are selfish, because they think they can get people to pay attention just by buying media or shelf space.
5. How has “Brand Seth” evolved/changed/mutated over the last 5 – 10 years? What are you happiest about? Unhappiest about? What concerns you/excites you the most about “Brand Seth” and its future path?
I think the brand has evolved a great deal. I’m a lot more mature and a little bit more confident and less manic. I also see a bit more of the bigger picture.
My big concern is that I have no ideas left at all, and I’m just retreading the most recent book until something comes to me. Which it usually does, but still… That, and I wish I could get the people playing at safe at the big brands and in some of the political parties to take a deep breath and do something while there’s still time.
I also believe wholeheartedly that it’s all marketing (politics, jobs, etc.) but sometimes my readers hesitate to go there.
6. Who’s your tailor?
I had this Italian guy named Giorgio, but I’m scouting for a new one. Suggestions?
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