Archive for July, 2009

I connect things. I’m wired to. Sometimes it’s powerful, and sometimes it unnecessarily complicates. It can make for good integrated plans, but it can also result in tangled communications.

The past few weeks have been powerful. I’ve reconnected with two long-lost friends. One’s a guitarist I met while attending Berklee College of Music, the other a magazine editor I worked with for a short stint in my career.

The guitarist moved back to Israel, the editor moved a few blocks away from me. The guitarist I found on Facebook, the editor I found at the neighborhood frozen custard shop.

International, hyperlocal. The reach of social media, the power of sugar and cream.

Two very different people with whom I shared important times during transitional periods in my life. I learned important lessons from both of them. And the lessons connect.

continue

North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith said Michael Jordan wasn’t the greatest natural athlete he’d ever coached. He said he was among the hardest working. Miles Davis regularly skipped classes at Julliard to practice his horn, eventually dropping out to play every day in the New York bebop scene. Musicians and artists spend almost all of their time practicing to get ready for small windows of execution.

It’s a simple concept: repeat as many skills within as many contexts as often as possible so when it comes time to execute, you aren’t thinking. You’re fully in service to the prime function of the enterprise and its mission.

It’s precisely the opposite in business. We’re executing all the time with hardly any practice. The results are obvious. Time and again we see gaffs far more destructive than an MJ missed dunk. And we blog about it and pass it around the social media sphere, fingers pointed.

continue

NPR Guy interviewing Health Insurance Guy. Insurance guy* opining about why government run, public health insurance is a bad idea. How it’ll take us all down like some kind of a Mugabe economic initiative.

Insurance Guy is lobbying congress hard on our behalf because the government is inefficient, and the private sector isn’t.

NPR Guy**: Then why worry about it? If you and your company*** are so efficient, shouldn’t the market take care of that? Won’t an inefficient government-run program simply fail?

Great question. A question that cuts to heart of the argument, that exposes the straw man.

Cliff Kuang recently posted on FastCompany and he cuts right to this chase. You don’t bring your Huffy to challenge Lance Armstrong. If you want to beat Lance, you change the game.

The insurance industry should be afraid. They should be lobbying. The competition landscape is changing because a well-funded competitor is entering their space to solve a fundamental problem within it. A solid entrepreneur approach: recognize what’s broken and bring to bear something new to solve it.

The government isn’t interested in competing on the incumbent’s terms. They want to change the game and they have the resources (if not the competency) to do it.

Are you afraid of the competitive landscape defined by the Great Reset or inspired by it?

————

* Can you find this guy on Twitter or the blogosphere? I couldn’t.

** Steve Inskeep seems to be the only NPR person without a Twitter handle. He isn’t even on LinkedIn. Am I wrong?

*** Couldn’t find a blog for this company. Twitter accounts seem to be squatters. Can they compete in a world that they aren’t even communicating with?

If I owned an ad agency I think I’d drop the word advertising. And the word agency.

If I owned an ad agency I’d recognize that the talent I have at my disposal is an asset that isn’t disposable.

I’d consider today an opportunity to throw out the model. Not the staff.

continue

Back in the late 80’s a drummer named Dave Weckl hit the fusion scene with the Chick Corea Elektric Band. If fusion was your thing Weckl was unquestionably your guy. He played impossible polyrhythm stuff and had technique so sound that many thought he sounded like a drum machine. Impossibly perfect.

With Chick’s band, Weckl put all kinds of electronic triggers on his drums and got drummers everywhere thinking about how to use the machines to their advantage instead of worrying about them signaling a pending drummer irrelevance (in a way, the 80’s were to drummers what today is to ad agencies).

Like him or not Weckl was a game changer writ large. Everyone started triggering their sets. Buying Octopads. Trying to figure out his impossible polyrhythms. Calling themselves Weckl Heads. Growing mullets.

It took Weckl several years of fame before releasing his first instructional video. Drummers buzzed about it for years. Couldn’t wait. Give us an Elektric Weckl magik pil. Unlock some secrets. Take us into the future. Teach us the impossible.

In 1988 he finally released it: Back to Basics. My music career (such as it was) took me away from fusion but I never forgot the statement Weckl made with that video. Wanna change the game? Understand the game first.

continue

There are plenty of indicators that the traditional ad agency model is ripe for disruption. Are they relevant? Are their margins appropriate, and in service to their or their client’s needs? Are their efforts focused in the right places? Are their models flexible enough to adapt?

I come from the client side of this relationship. I’ve hired and managed agencies and have only run a small in-house shop. I won’t pretend to be an expert in their business, and can’t offer any fresh insights to what’s ahead for them.

I also have extremely valuable relationships with agencies and their talent. Mine is a creative background, and I see tremendous value in the contributions agency talent will continue to offer the world.

But clearly there’s a long-running virus in agencies that should be mitigated if they want to stay relevant. The virus has been around as long as I’ve been involved with them, and probably much longer. A virus you can’t find in any meaningful degree within other industries like law, consulting, or financial institutions.

The virus attacking their relevance is an open and blatant disdain for clients.  continue