Rothacker Reviews

Authenticity

"Hey!  You got Seth Godin in my peanut butter!"

"Well, you've got Virginia Postrel in my chocolate!"

I had read about thirty pages in Virginia's book The Substance of Style this morning, put it down and picked up Seth's book All Marketers Are Liars.  I got twenty or so pages into Seth's book, ran into a common topic between the two books and instantly thought about PR guys.

The common topic is authenticity.  Virginia, in the realm of aesthetic meaning, contrasts an objective ideal of authenticity against a subjective one.  The objective view uses standards to judge, an outside in approach.  The subjective view begins from within the self, an inside out look.  Seth talks about the need for marketers to have authenticity.  He says, "...no marketing succeeds if it can't find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told."

My Reese's moment came when I thought about how people try to pitch us bloggers, especially those of us who write product or service reviews.  For perspective, I only receive a handful of solicitations per year.   I can't begin to fathom how many an insanely popular chap like Merlin Mann lands per year.   Enough to say that he must have an interesting opinion on authenticity as well.

"Hey, I really love your blog.  Will you please consider reviewing my client's new book, The Mindset of The Blogging Millionaire?"

"Thought you might like to review Bobbing For Bloggers before we appear on the Oprah show."

I think most of us who write online have the propensity to spot a visitor with inauthentic intentions faster than a candy bar going to goo inside a car parked in the Florida sun.  Ben McConnell writes a great post instructing folks who wish to contact us and how to do it properly. 

To be authentic, to be worthy of trust and belief, people must be real and human.  Even corporations can be authentic.  Afterall, machines do not author press releases and corporate communications, people do.  Lose the nauseating corporate rhetoric and speak the language of humans.  Let the verbiage melt in your mouth and not on your keyboard.

Independence

Is your soul suffocating?  Is it stifled by work place bureaucracy?  Is it sickened by micro managers?  Does it crave a whisper of fresh air...a whisper of freedom?

I have endured complete soul suffocation at work.  It was so deplete of oxygen that the environment was in a vacuum.  To cope I turned to the self-help authors.  I've got all the books.  But in the end it was two gentlemen not known to be self-help authors who came through for me.  Both were POW's.  Viktor in Germany and Jim in Vietnam.  Between the two, it is Jim's advice that sticks with me:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end which you can never      afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

My main problem through those turbulent years was in realizing that I was not a prisoner.  The only walls that imprisoned me at the time were in my mind.  I should have left that company.  If you find yourself in such a situation, take a hard look at management.  If you see no hope of change, leave. 

If you like to journal, if you value design, if you love the unique smell of an intoxicating book, if you delight in the tactility of smooth and rich paper, if you appreciate creativity and if you'd like to track your journey towards independence, then please allow me to turn you on to something that is beyond cool.

   

   

The Book of Independence  I discovered this packaged book of sensory overload in the magazine HOW.  It took first place in HOW's 2007 International Design Awards.

Encased in a bright red cover, this piece of art is a book, a journal, a design-your-own-calendar, a sticker-holder and a way to communicate with yourself on your own journey to Independence.
 

The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

I wrote a short overview on this book over at Joyful Jubilant Learning last month.  I thought I'd explore a little more today.  What tickles my imagination more than anything else in The Starfish and the Spider is the explanation that there is no hierarchy or structure in a starfish organization.  When taking notes in this book, I can't tell you how many times I wrote Starship instead of Starfish.  In my sub-c they must be one in the same.

Ori and Rod explain that a decentralized organization is built on a foundation of five legs:

• Circles
• The Catalyst
• Ideology
• The Preexisting Network
• The Champion

Circles consist of folks who buy into the organizations ideology.  Norms are a circles backbone.  Whereas rules are someone else's idea of what you should do.  Norms are the ideology that you joined the organization for in the first place.  As the norms of a circle mature, trust develops.

My concept of a circle is that everyone involved knows what they gotta do.  If a person doesn't buy in they are collectively eased out.  This type of environment is wildly liberating. 

The Catalyst is someone who forms a circle then quietly fades into the background.  The lads say the catalyst lets go of the leadership role and transfers leadership to the circle.   Ori and Rod say that a catalyst has the following tools.

• Genuine interest in others
• Loose connections
• Mapping
• Desire to help
• Passion
• Meet people where they are
• Emotional intelligence
• Trust
• Inspiration
• Tolerance for ambiguity
• Hands off approach
• Receding

You'll notice in the comment section of my post at Joyful Jubilant Learning, Rosa Say, the ultimate and consummate manager raises an eyebrow to all this decentralized, non-hierarchy type of talk.   As someone who has logged twenty eight or nine years as a manager, I need to articulate to Rosa and myself why I am enamored with the Starfish gig.

First and foremost we all buy into the same ideology, the same mission.  Perhaps just as important, there is no bureaucracy to weigh you down.  I perfected the craft of protecting my staff from bureaucratic meddlers - my bosses.  I hated doing it and it wore me down.  But I love the concept of channeling strengths and letting folks do what they do best. 

In my vision of a circle within a decentralized organization, there is no dilution.  One part water to a straight up whiskey is dilution.  One part slacker to a circle dilutes the circle.   I do not like dilution.

The Starfish and the Spider is a most excellent book!  It gently guides one to the fringe, to think outside of their norm and this is the environment where great things always happen.

In true Starfish form, Ori and Rod open up information for us in the form of a wiki.

Bruce Nussbaum: A Modern Day Hero

In the last couple hundred years we discovered electricity, automobiles, telephones, airplanes, the Internet and we even had people walking on the moon.  The magnitude of each here cannot be understated.  I felt the need to lay the groundwork here for this next discovery.  In my eyes it's just as important.

Roger von Oech visits and talks with Bruce Nussbaum.  At Creative Think, Roger tells us about this chat.  Roger comments to Bruce about David Armano's observation that the tone of Nussbaum On Design appears to have changed over the past few months from being reporting-oriented to being more conversational and audience-engaging.  Bruce replies, "I've gotten to a certain age where I feel I can just say what's on my mind."

Now, if Bruce were your typical blogger this statement blends into traffic and maintains the speed limit.  But Bruce isn't your typical blogger.  Bruce is a journalist for the McGraw-Hill company Business Week online.  While Bruce is a blogger, he does not enjoy the freedom of speech that you and I* do.  Why?  Because he works for the Man.  Even though Bruce says he can say what's on his mind, I am relatively sure if he believed so, he couldn't say, "Land Rovers project the aesthetic brilliance of a steaming heap of cow dung."  I think it has something to do with companies that pay his company money.

I wish he could express this feeling if it were his feeling.  If that ever happens then all bets are off.  History changes and our culture evolves.  How's that you ask.  Because as a reader or consumer our intelligence is not insulted.  That might be Bruce's opinion and while I value it and can weigh the plusses and minuses of it, I form my own opinion on Land Rovers.  Of course Oprah Winfrey and the hypnotic-like trance she holds over her followers might blow this theory to smithereens.  Darn it!  I thought I had a good case here until I thought about Oprah and Kool-Aid.

Maybe I've had too much coffee and over exaggerated my position in the first paragraph.  But here's the deal.  As the tone of a writer's discourse becomes conversational, becomes more human-like, I am better able to relate to his point of view.  His stuff begins to click.  As his voice takes a front seat to reporting, I find myself wanting to return more often.   Visiting some of Bruce's earlier online work at Business Week, his voice is clearly there.  The conversational aspect of his writing is becoming more evident as David A., notes.

Bruce, I mean no disrespect here, but if you lost the tie, would your bosses eyeballs pop out from the force of their starched underwear?

*Ten years ago, when I first began to write online, I encountered violent opposition from the company that I worked for...to the point that they forbade me from talking about my Web site while attending a trade show.  Our site's mission was to gather folks from all corners of the industry to exchange knowledge, information and ideas.  It wasn't until years later did we even mention the company's name that we worked for, speaking of it on our site's last day of existence. 

I still work for the Man, albeit a different one.  And while it is the best Man that I've ever worked for I will neither mention its name here or talk about my profession.  So, from a work-related aspect, I do not enjoy freedom of speech either.

People Are the Message

"It's a real-time feedback system on one's ability to strike a chord within culture."

Do you know the effect of smelling salts?  Smelling salts arouse consciousness.  I felt as if I had snorted a barrel full of smelling salts after reading the above sentence.   Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba give order to these words in their book, Citizen Marketers, referring to blogs as the feedback system.

I have a few books in cue to review and will get to Ben and Jackie's work as soon as I can, but this sentence simply overpowered me to the point of needing to write about it.  More specifically it's the one's ability to strike a chord within culture part that has my head in a hammerlock.

I sit down at my keyboard with the intent of connecting a reader to either someone else, a book, Web site, company, a thought, an idea, etc.  I hadn't consciously thought about it, but I do have the potential to strike a chord within culture.  You do too.  This blows my mind!  It's one of those things that make living in this era so exciting.  The Internet allows us to reach out and make a difference.  Whether we do it with intent or it evolves out of our stuff, the ability to strike a chord within culture is most liberating!

Pick up a copy of Citizen Marketers today and dwell for a moment on the book's byline, People Are the Message and the ability to strike a chord within nature.  Might my grandchildren be reading your name in a history book?  How cool is that?

A Writer's Voice

Did you ever go searching for silver in a silver mine...and walk out with a barrel full of gold?  I bet if you go over to Penelope Trunk's mine and read this post, you will.  I did.  Penelope chips away silver nuggets from her writing career and tells us how to be a freelance writer and not go hungry doing it.   I was pretty happy with the silver as I started to leave but decided to read the comment section...and that's where I found the gold.

Rachel, a first time commenter, calls Penelope on the carpet for her incorrect use of grammar and punctuation.  I get where Rachel is coming from.  When was the last time you heard someone who wrote an article on how to get published, tell you to not worry about grammar, punctuation and spelling?  Penelope differs from this point of view.  Here is part of what she has to say:

I do not believe you need to be good at spelling to be a good writer. I don't think you get hired for good attention to spelling. You get hired for voice, ideas, clever ways of saying things. Perfect grammar doesn't get you hired as a writer, it gets you hired as a copyeditor. They are different skill sets. I get final edits back from high-level editors all the time that have spelling errors in them, and that's becasue there is someone else to catch those errors.

"You get hired for voice..."  Pure gold!  I read Penelop's post here and not once did I notice the grammatical flaws that Rachel points out.  When it comes to grammar and such I am in t-ball compared to some of the other commenters on this post. Usually however, I do pick up on written irregularities.  I didn' t this time.  Wanna know why?  Penelope's voice drowned them out.  Her message didn't just travel from her brain to her fingertips, it took a detour.

Newspapers present the perfect example of brains to fingertip writing.  You can take one-hundred newspaper articles written by one-hundred different writers and hardly notice more than one person wrote them.  There is no voice in brains to fingertip writing.  Here is where I think voice comes from...

Voice starts as a solo artist in your brain.  It is the collective sum of your knowledge, wisdom and experiences.  To get to the concert, voice needs two other partners.  Think Neil Peart trying to do a Rush concert by himself, without Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.  So Neil makes a pitstop and picks up heart and soul.  You immerse your knowledge, wisdom and experiences into your heart and soul.  Let this concoction flow threw your fingertips and now you've got Working Man,* errrr, Voice.

*Speaking of Penelope Trunk, I just smoked-n-signed her latest book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules For Success.  Brazen Careerist is the antithesis of Geddy and Alex's Working Man...sigh. I need to devote an entire post to Penelope's work, but I can tell you right now, it is a must read! 

   

Accept Positive Feedback

A kernel of truth that evolved from yesterday's post about the Harvard Business School Press's insert that came in the April edition of the Harvard Business Review is have the mindset to accept positive feedback.

I once tracked down an electrical contractor's manager to praise one of his technicians. This guy looked at me like I was going to perform a tooth extraction on him without novocain.  His shell was so thick and he was so on pins and needles waiting for me to complain about his worker that it took about three or four minutes to register - I was there to complement his technician.

I really hate to keep picking on Harvard Business, but, in my quest to find someone to praise the work of their Harvard Business School Press, I encountered this  Customer Service Page .  Scrolling through Select a Subject, one feels a rather cold receptionist...the woman looks up, obviously annoyed at the customer's presence.  With hair pulled back so tight it pulls her eyebrows toward her ears, she barks, "How can I help you?" 

In today's environment of Web 2.0 that is three quarters around the track to Web 3.0, I find this Web page mired in Web 1.0.  Sorry HBR.  I love Tom Stewart and I love your magazine man, but I think you guys gotta look up-n-lighten up.

I haven't found accepting positive feedback around the blogosphere a problem at all.  I have yet to not receive an acknowledgment from a blog author when I contact them to offer praise - and that includes cats like Dan Pink and Seth Godin.

Maybe we ought to incorporate our blogging behavior a tad more into our business behavior...

Juicing The Orange

Juicing The Orange by Pat Fallon & Fred Penn

Andrea Learned turned me onto this book in her 9 Minds on Marketing book...which by the way I originally paid for but you can download it free via this link.  When I read a book I try to get my mind around one or two general themes.  I try to establish my own opinion in regard to a book's meaning.  This is a challenge sometimes as I usually have the person's opinion who referred the book dancing about my brain.  I tried to wall out Andrea's review but in the end came to the same conclusion as her.

Fallon and Penn along with a couple other folks founded what is now Fallon Worldwide in 1981.  They built their agency on these principles:

• The single-minded devotion to, and the belief in, the power of creativity
• The belief in family as a business model
• Seeing risk taking as a friend
• Success as a business imperative
• The importance of remaining humble
• The necessity of having fun

From the authors...

Our goal was to help our clients outsmart rather than outspend their competitors, to leverage brains over budgets, to juice the orange rather than drain our client's wallets.  We labeled this fledgling idea creative leverage, the daily practice of making creativity actionable and accountable for changing consumer behavior.

Fallon & Penn weave and describe the creative leverage concept in and out of ten client stories.    While the stories depict the challenges, opportunities and success of the agency, I kept being pulled toward how Fallon Worldwide treats its employees.  That and the company's ability to follow a moral and ethical compass throughout its history. 

Taking into account the on board talent at Fallon, if I were a decision maker in a large company looking for an ad agency, I would choose Fallon simply for this reason...(and for me, this is the book's WOW factor)

Fallon had secured a gig with Domino's Pizza.  It would be their largest account.  The only thing that Fallon had to do was drop their pro bono work for the Children's Defense Fund to seal the deal.  Apparently Domino's owner Tom Monaghan did not approve of this association and their mission to protect the rights of children.  Fallon dropped Domino's.  To be honest, I think I'd vomit if I ever tasted pizza from this company again.

As with Andrea, I am impressed with how Fallon cultivates its work environment and culture.

By the way, did you know it was Fallon Worldwide that came up with the Holiday Inn Express commercials..."No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."  These commercials came out eight years ago.  Man, where has the time gone?

 

Harvard Business School Press

The prize inside.  I received my April edition of Harvard Business Review last week and inside was one of the coolest inserts I've ever seen in a magazine.  The Harvard Business School Press Spring 2007 Collection. 

Now, please try and understand Dave here.  To equate my joy is to equate a woman with disposable income receiving the latest Coach catalog.  The insert's content speaks to the business book lover in me...a wide array of mental mind candy for an insatiable sweet tooth!  But that is not why I am writing about the Harvard Business School Press today.

It's about the insert's design.  It pickles my brain and jellies my backbone.  It's sooooooooo open and clean!  Books are grouped and presented according to their main theme.  For instance, books on global economy are listed on two pages.  And in a neat little graphic at the top of the page, HBP writes, Business Without Borders.  Plenty of white space ordered about by thin lines of distinction surround pictures of the books, flanked by succinct descriptions and crisp testimony.  To round out my delight, HBP infuses a subtle message from start to finish, a call to action if you will.

Now, please try and understand Dave here.  If business books strain to satisfy an insatiable appetite for knowledge and ideas, then reviewing marketing pieces is a full blown addiction.  I mean, throwing away junk mail before reviewing it, is akin to throwing a dollar bill into the trash container.  It seems as if I'm on a perpetual journey to discover messages that are presented in a clean, appealing and meaningful manner.  These pieces are few and far between.  A couple of years ago I received a small course catalog from the Corporate College of Cuyahoga Community College.  It registered off the charts on my difference from status-quo meter.  I got so excited that I found out who the editor was and wrote her a glowing e-mail review.  I believe she found that very odd and unusual, but I felt a powerful need to get it off of my chest, as I do today with the Harvard Business School Press.  And that has presented a problem!

Unlike the Corporate College piece, there is no contact information in the HBP's insert.  For that matter, there isn't even a Web site listed.  What a shame!  I've recently become enamored with HOW, Print and Communication Arts.  Okay, enamored is weak.  Let's try obsessed and addicted.  Articles list the writer, designer, illustrator, photographer and the editor's grandmother.  And that's just for an article!  Very cool. 

Of course, I'll go some place online and hunt someone down and tell them how awesome I think The Spring 2007 Collection is.  But aside from making it easier on me, don't you think the folks who participated in putting together such an inspiring piece of communication deserve a little credit?  I do!

On Writing

Syntax & Soul - personal growth for people who write by Dick Richards.  I had a thought about writing this morning and ironically corresponded with Dick a bit later about his new site...which is about writing.  The perfect storm.  An opportunity to shed light on Syntax & Soul and one to explore my thought.

Why do I write?

I write because I have to.  My internal compass goes haywire if I do not.  I have four journals in progress.  If I am not writing there I'm writing at Rothacker Reviews or Joyful Jubilant Learning.  I have, in the past, written a monthly column for a trade newspaper, a leadership column for a trade association and book reviews for a business group.  Even though I have earned money for writing, my greatest satisfaction has come when something I've written has helped someone else. 

There is nothing more precious than touching someone's soul through writing.  Some folks complement you on your writing.  When this complement is fueled by emotion however, you've cracked the code to their soul.  For me, there is no correlation between this response and money.  In Spock-like vernacular, it does not compute.  (Or was that from the Lost in Space robot?).  No worries.

Writing for me is like panning for gold.  You've got to keep dipping the pan, you've got to keep on writing.  One golden nugget, one emotion-filled response, and the search is fueled into the future.

I would be interested to hear why you write.  Why not address this question at your website and tell me about it?