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“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.”

—

Terry Pratchett

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Teddy Roosevelt, in 1904:

“… we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man.”

Freedom has to be earned by the exercise of restraint, and its bounty could only be harvested by diligent labor.”

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Labor, as in ‘work’, is one of those topics of which it is almost getting absurd to think about. Between work-from-home, quiet quitting, trophy generation, Purpose, and, well, at least a dozen other things I could argue we are losing sight of what work is all about – diligent labor.

And by diligent, I mean a combination of invested energy and invested ‘what to care about’ focus <maybe craftmanship in some form or fashion>. But we seem to be having an existential crisis over competing extremisms. This is where I toss in Kierkegaard who suggested “the crowd is untruth.” I find the ‘crowd’ tends to institutionalize good ideas so they lose any valuable nuance in combination with the ‘crowd’ has an unhealthy relationship with binaries and extreme.  It almost seems like with everyone engaged everywhere in suggesting how to make things easier, an alternative group has stepped in only to make them difficult again.

Which leads me to fluidity and flow.

The reality of meaningful diligent labor is a bit simpler than we tend to make it. I will suggest two primary aspects of meaningful labor is fluidity and flow. Simplistically, they represent direction of energy for diligence.

• Fluidity

Fluidity is an inherent attribute of progress and, in particular, to the connectivity necessary for collective impact. Diligence becomes an important concept because it captures the attention necessary for the temporary situations of a unique combination of circumstances which present a unique set of problems/opportunities which requires an original solution that represents work/labor ‘applied effectively’. Nevertheless, no temporary situation can be viewed in isolation, but rather each temporary situation merges with those that precede and those that follow all simultaneously, but maybe not equally, shaped by the former and shaping the conditions of the latter. I belabor that point because labor is then a continuous, fluidity of activity replete with fleeting opportunities and unforeseen events. Since labor is a fluid phenomenon, it requires flexibility of thought and adaptability in behaviors/actions. Circling back to the opening, this may include creating new rules. I state that because many rules are constraints and fluidity often demands new rules. Anyway. Successful labor depends in large part on diligence and the ability to adapt — to proactively shape changing events to our advantage as well as to react quickly to constantly changing conditions. This can sound exhausting, but the cadence of labor in fluidity fluctuates from periods of intense activity to periods of information gathering and reflection. This actually means diligent labor is found in the competitive rhythm, i.e., conflict, between entropy (or desire to replicate and standardize) and emergent fluid organizing intent to optimize events to suit the purpose of the business (and the individuals). In addition, this is fluidity between self-interest (impact) and collective interest (impact) and generated value. This fluidity feeds diligent labor at an individual level. That is, well, work.

• Flow

Flow is fluidity working in sync. Flow has a number of states, but let’s say that the desired business objective (which diligent labor makes possible) is, the continuous, smooth flow of value from the business (collective labor) to the market. Oddly many people think of this as ‘labor at scale’ when it really is simply ‘a system in flow state’. Economics, and individual meaning, almost always arises from flow. Simplistically:

• The whole is the part. The part is the whole. Flow is all.

• People are imperfect. Business is made up of people. The imperfections are what makes flow in business perfect.

• The system, the whole, is made up of layers and nested systems with their own pacing and flow accommodates all paces.

The last point above is very important. Flow can be asymmetrical and it can also contain a variety of speeds. I often refer to organizational flow as ‘cadence.’ What I mean by that is a business tends to have a rhythm when it is in flow which is a reflection of the combined individual ‘diligent laborer’ pacing. Flow is actually when all layers of the organization find synchronicity – not same speed or pace. Flow at an individual level is almost irrelevant if it isn’t multiplicative to the energy of the system as a whole. In fact, I could argue individual flow can hamper organizational collective ‘flow’ if the individual self-interest is not in the greater system interest. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that often existing business ‘rules’, including incentives & performance metrics, encourage a belief in individual flow over collective flow. My point here is that organizational flow is diligent labor at a collective level. Obviously, this is an even higher level of diligence – above that of simple self interest and what is right for me.

Which leads me to a thought from Samuel Brealey: “There are still idiots out there who know so little so confidently. Which is bad for all of us.” This is exponentially true surrounding any discussion of diligent labor and “the future of work”. Its almost like we do not want to speak of work AS labor as well as  go out of our way to discuss ‘diligent’ as “success is always a reflection of hard work”. What I mean by that is we seem to dislike admitting work is work and that just working hard, alone, is often not the ‘secret’ to success.

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“Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.”

Martin Shaw

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The truth is, in my opinion, found in Carse’s finite versus infinite games. Far too many people conflate finite and infinite while attempting to discuss labor/work, diligence and outcomes/achievements. What Carse neglected to share with us is there are vapid bottomless pit infinite games and then there are enlightening infinite games, i.e., not all infinite games are created equal. The sooner you can recognize what is finite and what is infinite in labor, the sooner you can be more diligent in how you apply your labor and the sooner both fluidity and flow can be optimized (or functionally applied). And, yes, diligent labor is not just about ‘work applied’, but also functionally attaining some progress or meaning. Not that I need to remind you, but it was Victor Frankl who said “The ultimate meaning in life is ‘to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment’.” Regardless. Much of the discussion about work and labor these days, if you are not careful, is an infinite suckhole of mental masturbation. We must be, well, diligent in our discussions of what is meaningful labor. This is important. Its important because freeing business potential, freedom to be the best it can be, is a bounty which could only be harvested by diligent labor. I end with that thought because I would bet you will not hear one ‘future of work pundit’ say anything like that. And maybe that is why you should think about what I just wrote.

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“A poverty of concepts.”

Bernard Williams

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“The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized.”

Philip Rieff

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Google ‘poverty of concepts’ and you will get ‘about 292,000,000 results (0.21 seconds).’  The problem is almost all 292mm results are discussing, well, poverty. My poverty, today, has to do with thinking and concepts; and ethics I imagine. I added ethics because they are important when it comes to concepts because they offer the guardrails as a concept races down time’s highway. It was Bernard Williams who said ‘our ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory.’ Well. How about that? Too untidy. That’s an important thought as I share the difference between a poverty of ideas and poverty of concepts. Let’s just say, in my opinion, we have an abundance of ideas and a scarcity of concepts in today’s world; not just on ethics but in business, politics, and, well, everything. Ideas are a dime a dozen. So let me spend a minute discussing the difference between ideas and concepts. Ideas have characteristics of a moment of stillness; of nonmovement. An idea is usually bounded by time and space. On the other hand, a concept is resilient in motion. What I mean by that is that while a concept may have fixed principles, they are fluid not only during their development but within time and space. The concept will always have something that will hold them fast – an idea or some facts at the beginning – but none of those things that hold them fast will impede its successful motion and evolution throughout time and space. Maybe what I’m suggesting is that concepts are ideas that successfully mature. All I really know is that movement is the only constant and ideas always run the risk of not being able to keep up; while concepts thrive in keeping up.

Which leads me to the glut of ideas.

I don’t think I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer and I have dozens of ideas scribbled everywhere. Some business, some random, some debunking existing ideas, just lots of ideas. I bet I have even forgotten more than I’ve written down.  I give away ideas all the time mostly because I know ideas are a dime a dozen and maybe someone can make a buck from my dime. I also share them because I will think of far more ideas than I will ever be able to do. That’s true of the world in general. That’s good and bad. I have worked with startup incubators, large organizations, innovations groups, brand consulting firms, smaller organizations, in almost any industry imaginable and I can promise anyone asking, you don’t really have to work that hard for ideas. Most times the best ideas lie within easy reach if you only look close enough. Uhm. But you also have to understand that most so-called ideas are horrible. Just as ideas come in tall, grande & venti sizes, they also come in horrible, useless or extremely useful categories. Sometimes I refer to them as shallow, dimensionally intriguing or deep. Deep <capturing culture, need versus want & behaviorally insightful – linking people with purpose> is a mandatory for a great idea. Even then you can still end up with a dysfunctional useful idea. Suffice it to say not many people are deep, let alone can GO deep in the thinking. The truth is most of the people excited about their ideas are the people least capable to evaluate those ideas. Why? Well. A poverty of concepts. I have said in the past there is absolutely no excuse for not having ideas for your business. None. Zero. Zilch. I would also suggest there is no excuse for not having concepts.

Which leads me to thick and thin concepts.

In philosophy there are things called “thick concepts” and “thin concepts” (or philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s ‘thick descriptions’ and ‘thin descriptions’). Thick concepts are like: ‘cowardly or generous, has a lot of content and depth; i.e., to say that someone is cowardly is to say something specific, which requires similarly specific backing-up in terms of the person’s actions, reasons and (expressed) thoughts.’ Thin concepts have little or no depth; simply saying that an action is right or good, or that you ought to do it/not do it. The contrast is not just deep versus shallow depth. Thick concepts are those which ‘seem to express a union of fact and value and virtue (or vice).’ A thick concept not only provides description of how the world is, but also motivation to act on the world. It is evaluative and actionable. Thin concepts may be evaluative, but with little depth. If we are told something is the right thing to do, or that we ought to do it, we understand there is something meaningful in play, but thin-ness offers no direction on what it is that is the right thing to do, or what it is that I ought to do. Yeah. This means ethical behavior is found within a thick concept. Anyway. Thin concepts are defined by their poverty of depth. What that means is you can throw out ‘goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness’ as a concept, but, again, they remain thin in that just as you are told nothing when you are told that an action is the right thing to do. In other words, thin concepts are lazy arguments.

Which leads me to shapelessness.

I may have been a bit lazy when I referred to thin concepts as lazy arguments. Thin concepts are actually characterized by shapelessness. The shapelessness hypothesis is the claim that evaluative concepts are ‘shapeless’ with respect to the descriptive, i.e., the descriptions are thin in that good is just good, bad is just bad, and you know it when you see it. In other words, there is no frame for reflective definition. Thick concepts have shape. Or maybe said differently, they offer depth of description to offer a frame so they can receive the appropriate evaluation. And here is where virtue, or ethics, comes in. a thick concept of virtue extends to unfamiliar contexts, not just defined by what came before. It is an understanding a dealing with situations and not a common action implemented. Therein also lies my earlier point. An idea is stagnant to time and space while concepts shift into time and space. This also leads to ethically dealing with different situations, not the situations themselves, is how we distinguish between the characteristics of good versus bad. And that is what makes ethical/virtuous essential to thick concepts because they gains shape through actions. To summarize, it is not learning how to act throughout different situations in a similar way, but rather learning the point of acting in the ways you have been taught to act and continuing to discover what is involved in doing what is right in that time and space.

Which leads me back to poverty of concepts.

A poverty of concepts is exactly the same as poverty itself – it comes with interest charges. What I mean by that is a lack of concept today has a cascading cost. Mostly because I assume you decide, because a lack of a concept, to simply craft a flimsy hanging bridge with seemingly strong planks made of ideas. You cobble together a bridge and the ideas slowly rot away.

The reality is we can never forecast the future. The best we can do is to position ourselves in the best possible way for whatever happens. As Taleb said: ‘preparedness over prediction.’ Therein lies the power of concepts over ideas. Concepts navigate current constraints and future possibilities, always shifting, learning, as it encounters the unforeseeable and unfamiliar situations. Therefore, a poverty of concepts deprives us of the ability to navigate the present as well as the future. Ponder.

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“We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Charles Bukowski

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“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

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We make about 30,000 decisions a day. Every single one of us. That said. The weight of those 30000 decisions varies from person to person. This isn’t to suggest 30000 decisions is EVER weightless, just that the weight will vary by person and by situation and by role.  For example. If you are a single mother with a minimum wage job or a president of a company with 400 employees almost every single decision, all 30000, tend to be scrutinized and weighed daily. And, yes, I just put those two side by side to make a point. That said. While I do believe far too many of us get chewed up by trivialities, it is also true that context, your situation, can make the trivial seem overly, well, not trivial. And, in fact, a context can make the trivial actually quite non-trivial. Deciding between a brand bread and a generic bread to save 10 cents, do you approve a trip or do you not approve a trip, all seem trivial amongst the 30000 decisions in the day and, yet, they demand some attention and demand some energy and they certainly demand inevitable consequences.
Which leads me to business and the burden of 30,000.

The reality is the majority of us suck in establishing a vision for the future and, yet, businesses will constantly point to something on the horizon – whether it is real or not. And regardless of whether they are being truthful or not, it is actually helpful. Helpful because we make 30,000 decisions on a daily basis and even a shitty vision of the future is better than nuthin’. This is where I do believe there is a difference between people who are in a leadership position and people who are not. While I’ve always argued that anybody in any given situation can lead, the reality is throughout a day some people do make more leadership type decisions than others. Therein lies the thought behind my first X and Y Axis. Some people feel the decisions more than others.

What I mean by that is that if you are in a nontraditional leadership position many of the decisions that you make are just simply by rote. You have some specific responsibilities, you have some specific skills, and there are some specific rules or guidelines within which you take action. At the end of the day, despite the fact that you have made 30,000 decisions, for the most part there is a weight limit. You may be tired, you may question some of the decisions, you may stress out over some of the decisions, but for the most part you made 30,000 decisions that did not look significantly different than the 30000,decisions you made the day before and the 30,000 decisions you will make in the future. And then there are people in leadership positions. They will feel their 30,000 decisions differently. Some if not many of those decisions just simply carry more weight and by weight, I mean consequences. At the end of their day the weight of their 30,000 decisions is heavy. But more consequentially on any given day the weight of those 30,000 decisions does not really have a ceiling. On any given day the weight of any,one individual decision or even a group of decisions within the 30,000 will weigh so heavily upon a person, or maybe even a small group of persons, that it almost becomes suffocating if not too much of a burden to carry. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, seeing as I began with a single mother with a minimum wage job, on any given day a person, in some context, will feel a similar burden and weight. But this is about business today. My only point here is that while we all may make 30,000 decisions a day, the weight of those 30,000 decisions on a daily basis can vary significantly.

A respected business friend sent me a message after I had posted a podcast that I had been on and he said “I wake up on Monday morning feeling like Rembrandt, usually by Friday evening I’m more of a Jackson Pollack.”

This is where I will point out that sometimes there is a reverse relationship in weight. Possibilities simply weigh less than pragmatism. I believe hope always weighs less than reality. But the point he was making is valid. Every day you begin with a Rembrandt, a beautifully constructed piece of art where the layers of the paint shape the narrative pleasant to the eye, and by the end of each day 30,000 decisions later and 30,000 decisions times 400 (if you have that many employees) that Rembrandt has become a Jackson Pollock. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out both are extremely valuable and have value, they just look very different. I won’t argue whether a Rembrandt is more beautiful or more valuable than a Jackson Pollock, but one certainly has a different design than the other. I would suggest in that metaphor that the weight of 30,000 decisions is often like gravity. Rarely did the 30,000 decisions drive you higher than the possibilities you begin with on a daily basis. All they really can do is either maintain or bring your Rembrandt somewhat closer to a Jackson Pollock.

In the end. We all make decisions,. We all make lots of decisions. We all carry a different weight from those decisions. Ponder.

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“My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.”

Martha Beck

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It just seems nutty to me talking about a recession. Nutty because we have a healthy labor participation rate, unemployment is less than 6% (which historically we would be applauding), the overall growth is well over 2% and estimated to remain at 2% or above. It’s nutty to me because inflation continues to ease while corporate profits remain at an astounding high. The implication to that would be is there some room, if corporations had it in their good hearts, to actually lower some prices and still maintain some healthy profits. That eases some price point pain for people (and they spend more and the economy grows and, well, …   yeah …). It’s a bit nutty to me because while people will point to sell offs in the stock markets the reality would be is the majority of the businesses seeing a sell off just reported positive earnings and positive growth. It’s just that their earnings and growth weren’t ‘enough’ for an insatiable market (and , yeah, the share valuation was a bit nutty in the first place). It’s nutty to me because I envision what it would be like facing this when we had free (money when interest rates were at zero). That would have been bad. The reality would be is that we actually have some flexibility to be able to address some of the market concerns. It’s nutty to me because the fundamentals of the US economy are about as solid as they have been in almost two decades. And generally speaking it’s nutty to me because it’s almost like we are asking to be in a recession. What I mean by that is while we talked about the nuttiness of the ‘vibecession’ and how a healthy economy was being portrayed as imminently going to become bad, we now appear to be seizing upon individual data points to give us the reason to believe we deserve to be in a recession. That is nuts.

That said.

America has a nutty view in that it is always on the lookout for not only something better, but for the worse to happen. And while we always talk about our thirst for hope what we really want is to hurt people we hate. So while we drone on and on about unemployment and not enough growth what we want is an enemy and something (or someone) to lead us to victory against that enemy. It is a nutty version of purpose. Instead of finding ways to help people the general narrative is to attempt to inflict damage. This nutty malleability of truth disorients not only the general narrative, but people. It’s crept into the world TikTok video by TikTok video, Instagram by Instagram, and YouTube video by YouTube video. There can be hours and hours of memes and videos demonstrating the arc of good things and truth, but it won’t matter because all someone has to do is go on TV and deny it and point to some nebulous bad thing somewhere over the horizon. A history of proof can be erased in a moment. But the truly nutty thing is all of these things simply paralyze us. We not only don’t know what to believe, but we’re not really sure which ideas we should align ourselves with. We aren’t really sure what positions we should take and we, well, don’t do anything (or the natural things which would enhance the probability of good things happening). And into this vacuum steps people who want power. Which forces me to circle back to the concept of inflicting damage. If you pursue power in today’s environment, your pathway to power isn’t to offer hope, but rather to inflict damage on the enemy.

Yeah. The nuts bringing up the recession aren’t bringing up recession to solve it, but rather to blame someone and inflict damage on them. That’s nuts.

I find the recession discussion a bit nutty with stable household income, high(ish) consumer spending, and good business investment data. This isn’t to suggest if you have a 401k you may not want to look at it for a bit, but I think the recession talk is a bit nuts. But maybe I’m nuts. Ponder.

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“If you can’t say something nice, say something mean.”

 

“Being mean is a talent, not a flaw.”

 

“Being kind is easy. Being mean is an art.”

Its not easy being mean

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Business is infamous for normalizing horrible. Business has always had guys (yes, they are mostly men) who have treated people horribly, acted horribly, did things morally and ethically horrible, and, yet, have been given a ‘pass’ because of, well, uhm, results. Business associated their horribleness with their ‘style to generate the results business desires/needs.” Their horribleness is normalized as “what needs to be done to get good shit done.” What is truly horrible about all this is that it destroys any respect for the institution of business and the institutions, principles, that underly good business.

Which leads me to Trump.

Trump is not only consistently horrible; he has normalized being horrible. While being horrible used to be in the purview of the hallways of business, it has now gone mainstream with Trump. With trump we are trapped between our respect for the institution of the presidency and a man who has no respect for the institution. I’ve competed against asshats like him my entire career. He elevates tertiary benefits implying they are more important than a primary benefit. He attempts to make everything liquid so a pebble seems solid as iron. He relentlessly diminishes and destroys everything around him so that even as a mental midget he stands taller than anything else. He thrives on being mentioned in the same breath as you because it somehow legitimizes his illegitimacy. He is so consistently horrible in his rhetoric it has become a feature of who and what he is.

Which leads me to Trump’s consistency.

Everything is horribly consistent about him. He built a career by making small look big, the minority sound like the majority and show a thread but talk a tapestry. He uses scraps to make a dinner. Truth doesn’t exist in his universe just scraps of information to be wielded like chaff to avoid a missile. I could have just written “zero evidence that any thought was given,” but I will just say T\this is the most vapid, hollow, intellectually empty, business person I believe I have ever encountered. He has no motto, ideology, morals or ethics other than zero-sum and winner takes all. He skates, & always has, on the thin ice of superficial irrelevance & ignorance. He is a horrible person who is horribly consistent.

Which leads me to Trump as a president.

I am a business guy & I think this whole Trump presidency thing is batshit crazy. All of it. The way he views America is not the America I know. With all due respect to anyone who voted for Trump, the whole Trump schtick is batshit crazy. His presidency was one batshit crazy week after another filled with batshit crazy day after batshit crazy day. In fact, its not crazy to think he is batshit crazy. That said. With the sheer amount of shit Trump throws up against the wall it becomes difficult to see anything but, well, shit. That said. There ais no lack of people trying to convince us it isn’t really shit. In other words, he is horrible and they are trying to convince us he is not horrible. That’s batshit crazy.

“This is stone cold crazy. After a week of crazy.”

Susan Rice

But. As a business guy I will point out two things to show how batshit crazy this whole situation is:

• If he were running a business like this, he would be fired

This is not how businesses are run. No. He is not running the country like a high speed business. He is running it like a transactional manager with poorly thought out plans who just wants to do shit to show he is doing something … and, on top of that, has no clue how to adapt the shit if it goes to shit. Faster paced businesses only run faster because they are willing to plan, go and quickly adapt. Faster paced businesses understand the name of the game is “adapt or die” if they want to go with some speed. But, for the most part, they are not making shit up on the fly and the really big shit has been planned for.

Oh. One other thing about fast paced businesses. Alignment. Unity in vision.

Speed, in business, has a lot to do with gravity and mass. If you want your organization to be successful AND move at a good pace, you remove barnacles and you make sure everyone on the crew knows where you are going and have talked through the intent before you say “let’s go.” And you maybe even show everyone, on some map, where you are trying to get to <this helps everyone adapt because you don’t screw them up stopping them from doing something while adapting if you know they have the same end objective everyone else has>. Trump sees people as barnacles to be scarped off, experts as barnacles to be scraped off, effective policy implementers as barnacles to be scraped off, basically he wants to scrape off everything that ensures value creation. Needless to say, that is a horrible vision.

Anyway. Our larger batshit crazy concern really has nothing to do with the pace.

• Cabal decision making

Yeah. He works in a cabal fashion. It feels like it is a couple of people who have a very dark vision of who and what America should be, maybe a couple of flunkies who want to suck up to the Trumpster because they want something and the circus ringleader himself — the Trumpster. Uhm. How would you feel if you were a senior manager in a company and he pulled shit like this? How would you feel if you were one of his chosen cabinet members? His eventual cabinet was a horrible joke. They were mostly people with no experience and actually didn’t support the mission of their particular purview. But it didn’t really matter how horrible they were, they just did whatever the horrible flunkies encouraging horrible Trump decision-making to do.

“why does he need me … he seems to want to do it all on his own.”

It appears a small band of slightly off-kilter individuals are making decisions for all of us. They are not involving even their senior management let alone the congress — who represent, us, the people — and shooting off orders on what should be done <which inevitably, in this universe, is supposed to reflect what we are supposed to think>.

That is a dictator/cabal and not a “business leader.”

Okay. Let’s be generous and say that this is classic ‘top/down’ management. If it is, top/down works if you are leading a cult or you have a one-person company. If you have an organization of any significant size, let’s say … uhm … 330 million or so … you need some buy in at a number of levels and, even better, some of the lower management levels even contribute to the tactics. That said, if it is ‘top/down’ management, it is just horribly incompetent leadership. If it is a cabal, it is not a democracy.

This is batshit crazy for America and we should never normalize this type of horrible.

Which leads me to the so called “Trump economy.”

What a bunch of horseshit is being thrown around with regard to how ‘good’ the Trump years economy was. Horseshit.

I said this back in 2018 during the Trump presidency:

• Trump’s tariffs will destroy more manufacturing jobs than it creates;
• Kim’s successful nuke tests made him happy to talk and Trump agreeing to a summit is a US concession;
• Pace of job growth has slowed since Obama era;
• The budget deficit is exploding.

They did.

It was.

And it remained so.

It did.

I bring this up circling back to my opening point. Business normalizes horribleness with “results.” The whole Trump/MAGA narrative revolves around “orange man bad ignores great results.”

The more difficult thing is to create a menu of objectives, balance them all out as important, and set about a plan of action to attain them in which you remained positive on almost all fronts and accept the fact you will sacrifice some ‘higher highs’ on some items on the menu for positives on all fronts.

This business management choice is more difficult because anyone with half a brain could pull out one thing on the menu and point out how it could be done better and be doing better. While this isn’t about administration comparisons, I will say this is one topic which the Obama administration didn’t get enough credit for.

“I believe that it is just a matter of time before our party pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy and his disregard for environmental concerns.”

McKean

Just to wrap this last thought up. Reality suggests the United States economy, driven by the current administration, is not only healthy now, but embedding some healthy aspects for the future. This reality is not reflective of the Trump administration reality (either as judged within the administrative years or as a judgement of how and what they did as an impact on the present). The Trump economy was wobbly, at best, and girded by subsidies and government support. In this one case I would suggest the Trump economy wasn’t horrible, but there were going to eventually be horrible consequences for how they maintained that not-horrible economy.

In the end, we can’t let Trump normalize horrible any more than it had already been normalized. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, person in order to get good shit done. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, amoral, person to ‘beat the system.’ We deserve a non-horrible person leading a country let alone a business. Ponder.

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The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Vladimir Lenin

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“No one is walking in saying, ‘Great, I’d love to pay full price’.”

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One of the things that drives me nuts is when people say how much better the economy was during the Trump Administration. It’s not really true, it was good, not quite as good as under Obama administration, certainly not bad, not really comparably as good as current economy, but that’s a post for a different day (and I encourage everyone to research economists like Noah Smith, Tyler Cowen or Justin Wolfers to read their thoughts).

Today I’m addressing the comparison elephant in the room: inflation.

Inflation is not the economy. It seems like the majority of people are judging the economy solely on what they perceive is inflation. Inflation perception may seem like an odd term. Heck. Inflation itself is an oddish thing. Economists define it in a nuanced way, people define it in a simplistic way, news defines it whatever way its own political winds blow way, and reality is somewhere in between. But where people think of inflation the most is with prices they pay (not causes).

So let me speak a little bit about pricing during the Trump administration years. Similar to the Obama administration years, in the Trump years corporate America scanned about their competition and tried to figure out how to be able to charge the highest possible competitive price and generate the highest profits. It’s kind of standard operating pricing procedure weighing “how much can I charge and still create significant demand.” That doesn’t mean that many of these same companies were year in year out doing things like conjoint testing (testing variables that affect the price that could be charged versus the demand increase or decrease, i.e., price sensitivity). Businesses are always trying to figure out how to have higher prices. That said, generally speaking, changing prices sends a shiver down the spine of every business as they worry about the demand effect. So, the natural arc of pricing is to establish your price within a competitive environment, watch your competition pricing, and establish a demand for your product or service based on that price. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that I’ve sat in endless meetings where business people wistfully spoke of charging significantly more than they currently were charging.

Which leads me to the Trump Administration years.

Business institutions had less and less wistful conversations. Not because they actually raised their prices, but because the Trump Administration went out of their way to cut corporate taxes, offer incentivized subsidies to keep cost of goods affordable, and did a variety of things which enabled businesses to increase their profits, not their sales, without ever having to raise their price one penny. Let me reiterate that the Trump Administration also did everything they could possibly do to subsidize everything (things that effected cost of goods) to keep inflationary pricing down. The consequence of this was soaring federal level deficits, but for the most part the everyday schmuck like you and I didn’t really care because prices remained fairly stable and the headlines didn’t look any different than they had always looked in the past – pointing out day after day the soaring corporate profits. We all felt like the system was rigged, the corporations were gouging us, but we didn’t really see it at the shelf or in our pocketbooks. So, we just hated business, but didn’t hate the economy.

Which leads me to the pandemic.

Instead of theoretical, conjoint-like, testing, every business was faced with market reality and a real market test. Supply chains were disrupted, commodities – costs of goods – that were essential to their production and resources needed for services became limited or asymmetrically supplied and more costly, and consequently prices changed – most typically upwards. Oh. And everything was passed along to the buyers. What this meant in practical terms, to a business, was the sellers were able to test the market pricing (elasticity) without being blamed. They could see in real time how demand was affected by disruptions and price changes. Rightfully so everybody pointed their fingers at the pandemic, but businesses didn’t really lose a lot of sleep because they maintained their profits, for the most part adapted to the changing demand, and tried to keep their profit heads above the water. Then the pandemic ended. And businesses sat around conference rooms failing moral gut check after moral gut check. And what was that moral gut check? What to do with my pricing now that my cost of goods has decreased. This isn’t to suggest that some industries and businesses were still affected by some of the ripple effect consequences of the pandemic with regard to the cost of the goods they needed to be able to craft the products they offered to the market. But for the most part the pandemic encouraged businesses to create a more resilient production model to make their cost of the goods more stable. In addition, the corporate tax cuts stayed in place … despite the current administration wanting to increase them (government is government and nothing changed there). Many of the tariffs were removed which should have eased pricing to the buyers, but many of the businesses failed to pass along the cost savings. In addition to that the pandemic market had shown many of the businesses the price elasticity and inelasticity of their products and services. For example. My geographic market prior to the pandemic. It would not be rare to see that you could buy a two-liter bottle of Coke or Pepsi on promotion for $1 (actually 99cents) and the everyday price was always below $2 (maybe $1.99, maybe $1.89.) During the pandemic of course all prices went crazy. Coke and Pepsi’s two-liter bottle prices soared above $2 every day (usually $2.99 everyday). Uhm. Post pandemic the everyday price for a two-liter bottle is now $2.50, or above, and promotions never drop below $1.25 per 2 liter. The demand has remained exactly the same and Coke and Pepsi are getting, at minimum, $0.25 gravy, at maximum, $1.00 gouging, on every single two-liter bottle purchased. Just to complete the math on this. If they sell 1 million 2-liter bottles, they make anywhere from $250,000-$1,000,000 additional profit. Uhm. And they sell billions. Anyway. This isn’t to just pick on Coke and Pepsi, Coke and Pepsi are indicative of business. The problem is most people aren’t thinking about this the way I just finished describing it. All they see is what groceries are costing them every single day, without promotion, a dollar more per 2-liter bottle. And as they wander the supermarkets, they see the same thing. In some industries the prices have certainly decreased and, generally speaking, the majority of the pandemic pricing has decreased aligned with the realities of whatever their cost of goods increased or decreased. But when you go to the supermarket you don’t focus on the prices that lowered closer to prepandemic, you focus in on the prices of the goods that you want that you’re tired of paying pandemic pricing for. And I word it that way because that’s not inflation. That’s pandemic pricing in non-pandemic time.

“The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.”

Mark Skousen

And that’s the economic gut check on the moral gut check businesses failed. I am certainly not suggesting that the Trump Administration is to be blamed for the current pricing. They didn’t plan the pandemic and the pandemic certainly affected all businesses in terms of their supply chains and cost of goods. And just as well I can’t blame the Biden administration for not doing anything about what I’m calling pandemic pricing, which is confused with inflation, because governments are not in the business of dictating pricing that people pay. Suffice it to say, no administration would ever change the prices people pay.

“I believe that it is just a matter of time before our party pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy and his disregard for environmental concerns.”

McKean

But, in the end, I opened discussing what drove me nuts (the Trump administration wasn’t as great as many people think it was). Inflation in Trump times was no better than prior administrations and unless you have a crystal ball there is no way to know whether inflation would be the same, lower, or higher if the Trump administration were in place now. That said, I will suggest that the likelihood a new Trump administration would lower inflation is next to nil. Any objective observer would struggle to imagine what policies the Trump administration would have in place that would lower inflation now or even what policies would be in place that would make the economy any better now.

At this time, I tend to believe the biggest culprit is institutional pricing, not real inflation. But that’s me. Ponder.

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“But the brain does much more than just recollect it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought like the concept of the number one has an elaborate logical underpinning. “

Carl Sagan

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“We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.”

Antonio Gramsci

Velvet curtain of culture.

Iron curtain of ideology.

Samuel Huntington

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This is a slightly different discussion about speed and speedy stuff. Farnam Street did a topnotch job outlining speed versus velocity, and I wrote an entire series on velocity, but today I am focused on speedy looking less-than-important stuff and more important slower-speed human nature, in other words, meaningful cultural movement versus superficial culture movements.

Which leads me to most culture is inertia disguised in speedy clothing.

Most culture is misidentified by 24/7 culture scam artists posing as futurists, trend spotters, and social influencers, i.e., people who monetarily benefit from hype and, most specifically, ‘speed hype’

• ·       ** speed hype is typically captured in the ubiquitous phrase “the world is moving faster than ever.” It’s not.

Most businesses, with good intentions, get caught up in the speedy inertia wheel of doom. So, let’s talk culture in two ways:

1.       culture of human whims.

2.       culture of human nature.

The former is about cultural shifts, or shifting, (some big, some small) and the latter is about foundational movement (the inevitable cadence that always exists). Ultimately, this becomes a battle between whims and nature. Sure. Sometimes a whim is a reflection of some deeper human truth and has some enduring nature, but for the most part whims are whims, fads are fads, and things that look good in the ‘shift phase’ look pretty stupid in a rearview mirror. But within the battle of whims and nature the word ‘culture’ is wielded like a dull axe. To be clear, as Dick Hebdige, author of The Meaning of Style, said “culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept.” Personally, I believe we shouldn’t be landing on one definition but rather, well, “the best thing about definitions, like $100 bills, is to have plenty of them” (Robert Ardrey). That said. Simplistically, culture is the elements of human nature that make up the experiences of a group. Yeah. Culture is the work of whole peoples and their interactions. It moves at the pace of language, experiences, and stories. To be clear. Events, religion, ideologies feed into language, experiences and stories, but those things are not culture, but rather stimulus of culture.  Regardless, all this means cultural truths are tied to the rhythms of human nature/biology and connectivity between peoples – the cadence of humanity. I know businesses prefer talking about profitability, objectives, and KPIs, or even what culture they may ‘have,’ but the more a business can tap into the cadence of nature and humanity, its cultural truths, the more enduring the business idea will be. I would suggest that it is through culture that we make sense of our lives so when a business taps into the movement of culture, people’s lives tend to move with it.

Which leads me to inertia or, in other words, irrelevance.

Forever is a long, long time.

And has a way of changing things.

The Fox and the Hound

We accept inertia, irrelevance, far too easily/comfortably. Why do I think irrelevance is accepted? To be fair it’s easy to confuse the irrelevant as being relevant in today’s speedy FOMO world. First. Let me point out that speed can look an awful lot like inertia. So, if you think running in the hamster wheel of hype is doing a lot of ‘important things’, you are wrong, but ‘feels’ like good shit is happening. You are more likely just doing a lot of things and the business is never really moving or gaining value. Second. A misguided understanding of value. This misunderstanding is most often discovered in opportunities missed. If you emphasize the speedy stuff, or just speed alone, as offering the highest value, you will inevitably miss out the slower moving opportunities which offer foundational, and sustainable, value. Mistaking all that speedy stuff for culture is transactional value versus enduring value and, in most cases, I would argue a business is leaving dollars on the table.

Which leads me to how to navigate offering relevant value.

First. Slow down (the world is not moving so fast you will miss anything significant). Second. I would suggest find the relevant cultural movement. To be fair, it is tricky to find the natural, biological, cadence tucked in human nature. The problem is we have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” but in order to maintain a thriving business you need short term results without being shortsighted and you need a long-term view while ‘being’ in the short term. I have found Stewart Brand’s pace layering an invaluable tool for thinking about how brands can ‘navigate the long now.’ In other words, ground a business in culture in terms of human insights, not popular relevant(?) culture.

Let me explain. Remember. Cultural insights are grounded in human nature. These things have a bit of timelessness to them. In pace layering terms they are the slow moving truths that people gather around, or, as James Carse said: “a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other.”

These things are easy to overlook because they are the things that hold us all together when it seems like the world is moving too fast for us (while technology is shouting at us to go faster). If a business leans into these cultural truths, human psychological truths, they construct a strong but flexible structure built to absorb shocks and, in most cases, incorporate them. Instead of breaking under stress, like something brittle, the business accommodates what the world throws at us and yet its cultural truths move so slowly, they seem like they are unchanging.

Fast learns, slow remembers.

Fast proposes, slow disposes.

Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.

Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.

Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

Stewart Brand

Business walks a variety of paths every day. But today rather than looking at as terrain and paths let’s think of these paths in concentric layers. I, personally, believe everyone should think about Stewart Brand’s pace layering and from a larger perspective, societally, I believe we could all use a good lesson in navigating the long now rather than focus solely on the now (and the short term). Societally we certainly have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” which I would argue isn’t particularly good for any of us. But for a business that is the kiss of death. An enduring, thriving, business demands a long view and I believe that long view is found within a cultural insight. Here is the harsh truth. Most businesses skate on the superficial surface of irrelevance because they ignore cultural truths. For the most part brands are ignoring these truths for temporary happiness. Far too many brands view fads, fashion, much of social media as cultural truths and, for the most part, they are not. Cultural truths are grounded in human insights – psychological, behavioral – which power our hopes and dreams and anger and happiness and, most importantly, connection with other humans. Today’s brands see ‘culture’ in the fleeting outside world of fads and fashion and style and useless gadgets-of-the-moment which are just the momentary mindless, the irrelevant, clothed in a veneer of connectivity.

Remember. Culture is not static, its transitory. Culture is a process (that which is acquired) as well as a product (that which has been acquired). Culture is both backward looking as well as future looking (nostalgic or memory grounded as well as utopian or dream looking). Culture is a refraction, not a reflection. Culture is a macro narrative made up of micro-narratives (sub cultures).

Which leads me to infinite movement.

Business is addicted to finite stuff. Projects, initiatives, weekly goals, all rolled up n KPIs. Business loves to isolate things and ‘make them perfect’ while espousing infinite value. Look. Forever, infinite, is about time and it isn’t. What I mean is we associate forever with time and, yet, it is timeless so time is almost irrelevant to ‘infinite.’ What is relevant to forever (or let’s call it ‘the long now’’) is constancy and adaptation. Please note I never said “control.”

“We control nothing, but we influence everything.”

Brian Klass

Ah. Control. Now, being the type of outcome-oriented people we are; we actually try and apply some measurement to infinite progress (yes, measuring that sounds like an oxymoron) and all it does is increase the perception of speed and encourage inertia. We look like we’re filling up time with important things, we feel like we are filling up time with important things, we even sit around conference room tables pointing at numbers that look important, but for the most part none of those things are contributing, in any significant way, to the constancy and adaptation which is the key to navigating the layers of pace every culture and business exists upon. In fact, all of those things are just attempts to take snapshots of all the blurry unimportant things speeding by. Yeah. The numbers are an attempt to convince you that the unimportant is important.

So we measure meaningless stuff and hold on to old things, including thinking, for too long. Businesses get caught in the wretched hollow in between shiny fast moving meaningless shit and the old thinking which only increases burden on a daily basis and the people gravitating to either side of FOMO or stability. Therein lies inertia. Therein lies path dependence.

Here is the crazy thing. The whole idea of infinite far too often tethers us to our past or inertia which is not very productive. Maybe worse is as we grow away from infiniteness, we grow closer to the understanding of finiteness, measurement by measurement, fad by fad, widget by widget. Paradoxically as we focus on all the shit speeding around, all the whims and fads, we reduce nature to silly things we convince ourselves are important.

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“Let me tell you a truth … no matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you.

Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there’s ever a choice you’ve made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.”

Jonathan Maberry

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Which leads me to paced learning.

Rather than discussing fast or slow, let’s discuss pacing – and learning. The reality is that organizations learn. That may sound a little odd because organizations are made up of people and we typically talk about learning in individualistic ways. However, organizations and the systems are implemented by people and in turn influence people’s mindsets, attitudes, and actual behaviors. So, when I say that organizations learn what I mean by that is that they encase their learning in programs and standard operating procedures that the people within the organization routinely execute. That is the system. The problem with this is that all of these programs and procedures typically generate inertia. And this inertia inevitably increases as the organization brings in new people and reward conformity to the system and its ‘learned implementation.’  This is done over and over and over again embedding past learning in the present (and future). As the successes accumulate the organization doubles down on the existing system emphasizing efficiency. The consequences of this are inevitable – the system itself becomes complacent, people learning slows, and inertia sets in. To be clear. Inertia and complacency is a double whammy to a business. It slows culture down and human nature (natural adaptation) down. So how should organizations learn? Well. As William Starbuck said “organizations must unlearn.” Unlearn is an awkward way of saying that systems must be systemically dismantled piece by piece and iteratively rebuilt. And what that means is that the people within the organization need to be self-aware enough in order to be able to influence not only organizational systems, but organizational learning. This is where hierarchy comes in. In most businesses organizations are constructed in a hierarchy. What this means is that the higher up the manager is the more likely they are to dominate organizational learning as well as organizational implementation. This means that most managers invest the majority of their energy in terms of learning the existing system and not unlearning aspects of the system, i.e., trying different things and innovation. It may sound odd, but past learning inhibits new learning. The only way to create space for new learning is to be able to discard some old learning, i.e., unlearn.

Which leads me to human nature (human movement).

Nature is never still. Nothing, in nature, is ever infinite other than possibly adaptability. This truth includes humans and human nature. Adaptability is a complex coherence of faster and slower moving aspects (static and dynamic). Typically, the aspects seek an optimal equilibrium situation through reactions and interactions (connectivity) where all become stable in a coherent sense enabling movement. In fact, maybe that defines infinite and progress. What I mean by that is optimal is only attainable in a temporary state (finite) therefore the pursuit is always infinite. This means true ‘achievement’ is not possible therefore progress is the only reality-based construct. Anyway. I would suggest the most interesting systems are dynamic in that they are non equilibrium systems that form order from actively dissipating entropy. Ah. Entropy (and its relationship to paces and pace layering). I would argue that entropy increases as the total surface of what is exposed to external stimuli is decreased. This decrease surface connectivity creates an overall increase of entropy. To be clear. “Surface” is a complex weave of whims and human nature at speed. Discerning between the two is important because if the ‘external stimuli’ you elect to expose yourself to are ‘whims’ that will only increase entropy (that is the paradox of speed). This doesn’t mean that there can’t be constant re-formation of order; just that there is an increased likelihood of entropy. I believe it was physical chemist Ilya Prigogine who viewed the paradox of evolution as one of an engine running down and the other of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity. In his theory, the second law of thermodynamics – which is the law of ever-increasing entropy or disorder – is still valid, but the relationship between entropy and disorder is different. At bifurcation points states of greater order may emerge spontaneously without contradicting the second law of thermodynamics. The total entropy of the system keeps increasing, but this increase in entropy is not uniform or symmetrical. In the living world order and disorder are always created simultaneously. What this means is that there are always islands of order in all seas of disorder and their role is to maintain and increase their order. And therein lies another thought, one in which that speed, inertia, and cultural movement will always have aspects of order and disorder. Well. That thought will make every business uncomfortable.

“Strategy’s endgame is to spark movement. But as an intermediary measure, feeling moved by the process is an indicator you’re doing it right. Because if you’re doing it right, you do embody new people. New messages. New audiences. A new tone of voice. Strong vicarious vibes. And by doing so, things get raw. Raw precedes real. And real is something that provokes a response.”

Rob Estreinho

Which leads me to cultural movement.

Let’s say this is about experience versus experiencing. I tend to believe most people are misguided when they focus on experiences, and selling experiences, rather than focusing on experiencing (which is more about human nature). Here’s what I mean. Experiences are an outcome of experiencing, and experiencing is a complex culmination of connections:

1.       Connection to human nature.

In other words, the biology which creates the comfortable or the purposefully uncomfortable cadence that seems natural to us (note: this is actually embodied in a number of cultural cues)

2.       Connection to context and environment.

This Is the environment which expands or reduces potential.

3.       Connection to other humans.

In fact, human nature experiencing is autopoiesis. Autopoiesis means self-making. It is the main characteristic of life in that it is self-maintenance due to the natural internal networking of the system itself. It constantly maintains itself within the boundary of its own making. But it also implies that a living system is the totality of all of its mutual interactions, i.e., connections (as listed above). Through connections multiple mini transformations continuously take place and, yet, at its core the system/human/human nature maintains its individuality. Is this apparent contradiction between adaptation and constancy which actually explains a healthy system. I say all of that to suggest all living systems need some constancy and yet still need some change through adaptation. I say that to suggest human nature, culture, is constancy constantly, slowly, adapting.

Which leads me to end with the fact most people discuss culture incorrectly.

Human nature is at the core of culture. Whims and fads are simply temporary features of human nature’s more systemic rhythms. The reality of culture is that it is not a particular speedy thing. With that in mind, rather than giving so much attention to speedy stuff, maybe we should invest just a bit more energy focusing on the less speedy stuff. I seriously doubt we will miss out on anything truly meaningful in the process. Ponder.

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“It is misleading to argue that cultural circulation has been democratized. The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to democratic accountability or control. Hyperconnectivity has in fact further concentrated power over the means of circulation in the hands of the giant platforms that design and control the architectures of visibility.”

I wrote this back in 2010 and have resurrected it with the news that Dan Hurley, currently the coach of defending NCAA basketball champions University of Connecticut, is talking with the Los Angeles Lakers about their open head coaching job. Regardless of how you slice this, life decision, career decision, ambition decision, or money decision, the money involved is a life changing salary. Coach Hurley, similar to Coach K as discussed in 2010, earns a salary the majority of us will never attain. Its a good salary. But he is now going to be offered money 99% of us cannot even imagine earning. As I tuck in later in the below piece – “you have to listen.”That said. My real point is that we often talk about how life is more than money, a career is more than money, and, well, money isn’t everything. All true; until is not. Sometimes the money is so ‘more’ that it suffocates all the other possible ‘mores.’ Ponder.

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According to multiple media sources, the Russian billionaire (and owner of the NBA Nets) Prokhorov wanted to make a big splash by hiring Mike Krzyzewski as coach and GM (he has since turned them down). According to the report, Prokhorov was prepared to offer him $12-15 million (salary without extras) per season. Mike Krzyzewski’s 2009 salary as coach of the Duke Blue Devil’s men’s basketball team is $3.5 million.

When I read about this I started thinking about life changing career decisions. And mostly ones based on money. All I really can say to Coach K is if Mikhail Prokhorov is willing to pay that much, well Coach K, you should probably listen to the Nets’ job offer. Listening doesn’t cost a thing.

Because this is life changing money.

Look. Have I ever been offered 15 million a year? Nope.

But have I ever been offered twice or maybe 3 times as much as I was earning for a new job? Yup.

One sports announcer said “How could you not even at least consider it?  Its life changing”.

Now. To us little people it’s hard for us to fathom 3.5 million to 15 million (plus extras on both) as life changing. But 30k to 150k. Or 100k to 350k. Or 150k to 500k. You get it.

Yes. It is life changing. And it makes you evaluate what is important to you. And some people will argue “I will do it so that it frees me up to do something else later on.” And that kind of logic is as good as any I have heard. But. In the end. It is most often a life changing decision. And not just moneywise.

I did it once. I took the money. And it was wrong for me (that’s a personal decision and I am not suggesting everyone should think of it the same way). I ended up quitting to do what I felt was right for me.

Yes. I sacrificed a lot of money.

Yes. I thought about it afterwards.

Yes. I made the right decision (for me).

But that decision helped clarify some later decisions. And made some following similar decisions a little easier. But. Not easy … just easier.

Why just easier (and not making everything clearer down the road)?

Because Life changing money is just that. Life changing. And no matter how good you felt about the last decision you made if and when the next one rolls around a lot of money is a lot of money.

Should Coach k have listened?  Sure. Listening never hurts. Should he have taken it?  Well. That ain’t for me to say. He is a great college coach. I would envision just like the rest of us he thinks about what’s next when you have existing success. And then all the rest of things get put into the decision blender and you come out with a decision.

I guess my point here is about life changing money decisions. It is easy to say life and career is more than about money. That is until someone offers you double or triple or more what you are currently earning. Then money makes you forget about a lot of other things.

Coach K passed on this one. Does falling back on 3.5 million a year make it easier? Sure. I am sure it does. But 15 million is 15 million.

Making 4 times what you are already earning?

Gosh. Even at the most measly salary level that would make anyone pause and think.

Suffice it to say career choices, and decisions, are life decisions. Do not ever fool yourself into believing anything else. They are so intertwined it is difficult to separate. Especially when money is involved.

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“Because we would be forced to truly reckon with the harm our default approach perpetuates. And that would be an existential threat to our business models.”

Dr Jason Fox

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“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt”

John Green

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Suffice it to say, people do not like pain. Especially self-inflicted pain. So we avoid a shitload of things. One of our main avoidance tactics is ‘default.’ Default is simply a term for ‘not noticing.’

Which leads me to say that noticing things can be painful.

We ignore a lot of shit. Why? Because it’s convenient to do so. Because in order to acknowledge something we would have accept something. And acceptance is a small quiet room. And acceptance can be painful. Not physically painful, just mentally so. Now. Small quiet room sounds like it needs to be small. It doesn’t. It’s often just a space you carve out in an immense system – like a society, a community, a business, or even a business model or system of doing things. It’s a space where you can hide from things you may not want to face. It’s a space where you are not demanded to reckon for the larger system.

Which leads me to say that Life, in & of itself, is demanding of accepting pain.

We are certainly pleasure-seeking beings and despite all our dystopian rhetoric we invest a shitload of energy on ‘finding happiness.’ That said. Suffice it to say that whatever we emphasize has a nasty habit of demanding attention. Good and bad. But, more often than not, in our analyzing of ourselves and what is around us we emphasize the ‘less than’, the ‘imperfections,’ and the pain. They all demand to be felt.

Slowly becoming the person I should’ve been a long time ago.

In other words. Many things in life demand to be felt. And maybe it is because of that we numb ourselves to as many things as possible figuring it is the only way to manage our way thru the onslaught of things demanding and demanding and demanding. Pay enough attention, or give them enough emphasis, and the clamor of their cries for attention seems deafening if you listen too closely.

I say all of that to state an essential part of ‘numbing ourselves’ is to deemphasize how the system, or structural things, affect us. This can go several ways. You can deemphasize the effects of the system because you know you are getting screwed and you feel like there is nothing you can do, and will continue to get screwed, so you deemphasize and get on with getting on. On the flip side if you haven’t been screwed by the system and done well you de-emphasize the effects of the system because acknowledging the system and structure de-emphasizes what you may see as your strengths and the attributes you apply to yourself that you believe got you to where you are today. Regardless. As noted earlier, it depends on what one emphasizes.

“What matters isn’t being applauded when you arrive—for that is common—but being missed when you leave.”

Baltasar Gracián

Which leads me to say that society, in and of itself, has a shitload of invisible things that can create pain.

Society is strewn with systemic things. Many of things lurk, invisibly, in the general ‘doings’ of how things work in society. Racism, hierarchy, inequality, inequities, power, all chug along beneath the surface of everyday life. If I were to have to explain why some things we think we should be done and aren’t being done, I would point to these invisible things (rather than some of the visible ‘common sense’ things the loud mouths point at) as the causes. I suggest that because invisibility, and invisible things, is isolation and I am not sure anything can really be built in isolation. Created? Possibly. Built?  Yikes. I don’t think so. One person, an individual, can rarely build something without help. Help as in tangible <doing help> or intangible <emotional support>. So if you notice the default things in life, make the invisible systemic things visible in your mind, well, its gonna be panful to see. But its also the path to progress.

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  “We ignored truths for temporary happiness.

six word story

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Which leads me to business.

If there is one place in which we ignore invisible pains, it is business. This is because business asks you to focus on some random shit which only encourages you to embrace default shit as often as you can. Even worse, it gets a bit personal. Yeah. The business world makes us think about being visible and not being ignored to an absurd level. Huh? Things like ‘you have to be your own cheerleader!” or ‘you have to promote your accomplishments’; things like that. The implication is that the only way to not be invisible is to make sure you are not ignored. Theoretically this is okay, but in practice what this mean is a lot of noise from people who are doing things just to be visible and the things they are actually doing should be ignored. But here is the truly egregious thing. This ‘be visible’ ideology cloaks the truly corrosive invisible things which create scenarios in which the invisible people of value are not deemed worthy.

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”

Will Shortz

In other words, if all you are doing is holding up the universe you are fucked. Uhm. That’s an existential threat to the universe.

Which leads me to circle back to the opening Jason Fox quote and how noticing is an existential threat to the system.

It was Grace Blakeley who said: “Disobedience to authority is not an indication of selfishness; it’s an assertion of an individual’s autonomy.” Noticing IS disobedience. In fact, I would argue society’s progress has always been driven by this kind of disobedience. Driven by the ones willing to notice the ‘invisible hands’ slapping the shit out of people and saying its ‘abuse of society,’ or, at an individual level, ‘abuse of my autonomy.’ Revolutions always begin with people noticing things and disobeying the defaults within a system if not the system itself.

In the end.

If you think about this, and these issues, well, even if you attempt to ignore it, once thought about, it begins to nudge its way into your thinking. Call it a splinter. A splinter is something you have to notice. And splinters are painful. Ponder.

=================

“You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”

David Ogilvy

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“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

Victor Hugo

==

I know businesses are hesitant to wade into social issues. It is fraught with peril. That said. Look at this Google chart Axios offers us with regard to topics. It was an absolutely crazy time in the world as Trump offered the world an onslaught of crazy shit. I would argue it was impossible to not engage, therefore, the question a business had to answer was “how do I engage.” And if that is so, I would argue it would behoove all business people to think of it as “convergence opportunities charting” where if you engaged in a relevant thoughtful way – what would your business look like in the eyes of people as it spoke out?

Now. Crazy lightning rod topics or not, businesses kill for convergence moments in which #’s of people coalesce, if but for a moment or two, to say something to them. That’s why businesses do events. That’s why health clubs look at towel dispensers as communication/experience opportunities (while members may all do different workouts 90% stop at the dispenser). Twitter is like the workouts & the convergence moments are the towel dispensers. Scan someone’s thread & it centers on their interest (cats, climate, bad jokes, community, politics, etc.), but when a convergence topic hits everyone pays attention. Even if you hesitate to weigh in on issues it is difficult to not see these as opportunities to not only elevate your business brand socially, but also to expand your business. Personally, I believe all businesses should make their personal stand on society issues as part of their brand. But that’s me.

Yeah. I believe businesses should take a stand on social issues.

I am in the minority, but I believe business should get involved in society issues. Maybe not all, but they should take a stand. To me silence is not an option. I believe if you have a podium and the opportunity to speak you should accept the burden of responsibility and try and ‘lift society to a higher level.’ And if you don’t give a rat’s ass what I think, Peter Drucker also thought business should be involved in society.

So let me take a moment and comment on business responsibility and their choices with regard to what they say in communications. I do so because in today’s heightened sense of politicism and divisive rhetoric a shitload of people are making noise about “advertising should honor the event and not use it to make a political statement.” That’s is nuts to me.

Uhm.

If not then, then when?

Uhm.

If not me, then who?

Yeah.

There are surely consequences for your actions. But far too often this discussion devolves into a simplistic binary choice – an ‘either/or’ choice. You stand for this therefore you hate that. In other words, you cannot be pro-choice and yet respectful or understanding of pro-life, you cannot desire stronger immigration rules and still be accepting of immigrants, you cannot believe in your religion and still accept that how others worship, or not worship, is meaningful. It’s all wrong because Life, in most cases, is not some simplistic binary choice. You can, and should, believe in something and yet still can, and should, be accepting and respectful of others views. To do this not only would we need to embrace respect, but also assume that most people, let’s say maybe 99% of people, do the best they can and make the best decisions they can <no matter how flawed those decisions may look in our eyes>.

That said. I believe communications, in general, should always seek to highlight the opportunity for us to see the better, or best, version of who and what we are. And that is where I believe business marketing and advertising should not fear speaking out. And I would point out that is not political nor is it divisive, but a general point of view on contributing to a better society.

Look. Companies make statements all the time. Maybe they do more vocally internally, but part of any good organization is a sense of what they believe is right, versus wrong, and how they may define integrity & values. Frankly. We need more companies standing up and vocalizing this publicly. This is not about saying “you are wrong for believing this” or “we do not agree with you,” but rather more about normalizing what is right.

I talk with a shitload of business people, not about advertising or marketing per se,, but rather about simply being successful in the marketplace.

I focus on distinction and not differentiation.

I focus on worrying about “me” and what I want to say rather than finding some elusive, and most likely nonexistent, ‘white space’ in some industry.

I focus on saying the right things and doing it the right way and suggesting that if you tell people the right way to think about things that eventually people will see you as ‘right’ rather than ‘wrong.’

This is not about free speech or any political motivation, but it is about how business, and work life, is an important part of the societal fabric of who and what we are and how and what we think.

In my eyes if you really want to discuss how political correctness has gone awry, it would be in the business world. It wasn’t too long ago that business played a significant role in shaping society. Yeah. I said that. As Peter Drucker pointed out back in the early 1990’s in something he called “salvation by society” businesses understood that work made up a significant portion of people’s lives and therefore they had some responsibility to investing in the fabric of society and communities. As time and views have shifted toward ‘making a dollar’ and profits the work place became less and less an extension of society, but rather simply ‘a place to work and get a paycheck’.

What an empty thought that is.

Our work lives, like it or not, represent a significant portion of our lives not just in terms of sheer hours, but also in terms of thinking we are exposed to, accepted behavior and general attitudes on what is right & what is wrong. For a business to avoid that ‘fabric of society’ responsibility is shameful.

Once again, there are absolutely consequences for your actions. But that is what business positioning is really all about. Distinctness and forcing people to think – think about you, think about what you are offering and thinking about how they feel about you, your message and, uhm, themselves. That is what business positioning and marketing and advertising, at its core, is all about. We dumb it down into some ‘selling shit’ soundbite, but that is dumb.

Yes.

I know.

People will debate with me and, to be fair, this whole discussion wanders along the razor thin line of inclusionary versus exclusionary. If your message is effective, concise and clear, it will absolutely be inclusionary for those who see themselves in what you have to say and offer and potentially exclusionary to others at exactly the same time. However, when done well, a business’s communications captures the brands’ distinctness <which is a campfire to those who want to be included> and offers a better version of people <so that people do not dislike you, they simply think ‘they are not for me’>.  

But to do what I am suggesting a business has to set political correctness off to the side, not think about politics at all and simply think about people. The people who they desire to try their products and services and how they would like to showcase those people as the best version of themselves. And then after doing that they have to place the burden of responsibility upon their shoulders, open the door and stride out into the word to share it with people.

Yes.

I am suggesting business, and the people within it, have a responsibility.

Yes.

I am suggesting business is something more than simply selling stuff.

——

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society.

We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”

Bill Bernbach

——-

“We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it.

We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.”

Bill Bernbach

——-

I would suggest to any business person reading this that responsibility is responsibility. All responsibility is only as overwhelming or ‘whelming’ a you make it. And if you do not accept your responsibility to tell the truth as excitingly and convincingly as you possibly can, lies will win. If you choose to vulgarize the society or brutalize it or even ignore it <all under the guise of ‘understanding what the consumer wants’>, society will lose.

To be clear.

I honestly do not despair when I look at business in today’s world, but I do get aggravated.

Ok.

No.

I get angry.

I get angry that we are not accepting the responsibility.

I get angry that we are not strong enough to accept the burden.

I get angry that many do not even presume the responsibility is within their purview.

Business, whether you like it or not, shapes society.

What we do matters.

What we say matters.

Selling stuff may matter to our bottom line and the existence of our business, but we cannot ignore that a thriving business actually contributes to a greater good — the existence of a healthy society.

Far too often by simply focusing on ‘selling stuff’ the byproduct of our ignoring the larger responsibility is that we brutalizing society in some form or fashion.

Am I suggesting that selling stuff or being profitable isn’t important? Of course not.

All I am suggesting is that HOW you sell stuff and be profitable matters. And that you have a responsibility in HOW you do what you do. Because HOW you do things impacts society. It shapes society. It can vulgarize or brutalize … or invigorate or instill good.

HOW you do things has a power way beyond simply you or what you do in that moment.

HOW you do things is a pebble dropping into a pond.

Responsibility assumes you are neither impotent nor harmless.

——-

“Advertising is far from impotent or harmless; it is not a mere mirror image. Its power is real, and on the brink of a great increase. Not the power to brainwash overnight, but the power to create subtle and real change.

The power to prevail.”

Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988

——

Your responsibility in business is sometimes subtle, but always real.

I worry that business people everywhere, but in particular communications, have become so focused on getting shit done and ‘attaining the bottom line’ that they have forgotten the responsibility.

I worry that business people worry so much about politics and ‘political correctness’ they have forgotten that when good people remain silent the only one who wins is bad.

Just think about what thinking I offered today.

This isn’t about causes.

This isn’t about social responsibility <or the welfare of people>.

This is about understanding that what you do impacts people.

This is about whether you, as business people, accept the burden of responsibility to help shape a society which is a reflection of the best versions of who and what we are.

I will say while I’m not trying to ruin the mirage that business is just about business, I’d like everyone to think just a bit harder that with determination and with potentially a little unjustified confidence, you can not only get through the times of uncertainty, but maybe shape a better world. Ponder.