Alpha Mind Blog

It’s almost as if some spy went and told Seth Godin and Christopher Penn what I was saying about them when I recorded Episode -2 last week. Each of them seems to have gone out of their way to underscore my point.

Seth talks about the importance of standing for something.

And Chris recommends Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels as a marketing guru.

In Seth’s case… his post aligns with what I said fairly neatly. When he writes about standing for something, he doesn’t talk about being ethically upstanding, merely consistent. But the simple fact is that the kind of consistency he recommends is a hallmark of the ethically mature. And the extreme of inconsistency is the mark of the shyster.

And as I said in the podcast, Seth doesn’t make his point as if from a position atop some “Mr. Ethics” pedestal. But this particular post is perfectly consistent with the theme of respect for the customer, a leitmotif running through all Seth’s work.

Then there’s Chris Penn.

Oy!

My point about Chris in the podcast was that I don’t see in him the sort of broad concern for the human condition that I detect in Godin and see epitomized in Drucker.

And Chris didn’t merely reinforce my point, but almost parodied it, recommending Goebbels as “your go-to guy” for how to do fear marketing.

Here are Chris and John Wall in last week’s Marketing Over Coffee:

Chris: …it’s one of those things in the marketing world people really really really don’t like to talk about, because it’s almost taboo, but if you go and read the works of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, and stuff like that and stuff like that, and go back and read what he did and how he did it and stuff like that, he’s basically the almost the father of fear marketing. In the sense that you know you need to pick, you need to artificially divide people into groups, you need to pit those groups against each other, you need to have a villain and a scapegoat of some kind so that you get these archetypes of drama that work incredibly well for motivating people to do what you want them to do. And if you’ve decided that’s part of your marketing strategy, Goebbels is the go-to guy if you really want to take those tactics on. If you obviously if it comes out that you’ve been using Nazi propaganda books as the—

John: —foundation of your marketing strategy—

Chris: —exactly, you may have some backlash there. But—

John: —that’s the kind of information your competitors will get about you and so—

Chris: Exactly.

John: —as part of their campaign.

Chris: Best to keep those books at home, guys.

John: Or read them at the library when, and don’t check them out. These days I think there’s no security left on that… once it makes your list it’s on the list.

Chris: exactly…

To his credit, Chris has responded to an email he received from someone who had the same concern about all this that I have. But sadly, his response doesn’t convince me he understands the gravity of recommending Goebbels. In particular, both the podcast and Chris’s response suggest that John and Chris fail to see the distinction between marketing segmentation and the “artificially dividing people into groups” that was the linchpin of Goebbels’s work. Distinguishing between cost-conscious and style-conscious consumers is hardly the same as dividing humankind into a master race and a people worthy to be stuffed into ovens.

Somehow four or five days elapsed between recording last week’s episode and uploading it, which happened only a few minutes ago. (The delay was mostly due to a lot of experimentation with post-production techniques, and some Vista hassles.)

In Episode minus 2, I introduce Peter Drucker as a guiding light of the Alpha Mind Podcast. I also introduce the alternating-episodes approach I’ll be taking in the ‘cast, modeled after Drucker’s career-long alternation of management books with ones on broader social issues.

I also compare Seth Godin and Christopher Penn to Drucker, and one of them comes out looking pretty good.

Drucker was passionate about management because he cared deeply about the human family. He had also seen (up close, very close) that perfectionist political systems were deadly. He believed that the organizations that make up a free and pluralist society can do much to further human happiness—if run well. And so he loved teaching us how to run them well.

Seth Godin in an unusually arch rant about an editor’s work on his manuscript:

Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it.

By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical.

It reminds me of Kathy Sierra’s excellent post—one of her classics, I think—called “Keep the sharp edges!” Kathy’s post focuses mostly on how committees are incapable of producing the remarkable, because groupthink is naturally a process by which rough edges and sharp corners are sanded smooth. In product markets, she goes on to say, product become more and more alike through this process.

Seth is writing about a single person’s effect on his work, but he acknowledges it’s a matter of corporate (i.e. shared) responsibility.

I need to be really clear. She’s not at fault. She did exactly what she was supposed to do. The fault lies in the job description, not the job.

When I buy a book by Seth Godin, I want it to sound like Seth Godin, not like Seth strained through several layers of bleached muslin.

It’s a lesson that is hard-won in my own life. I’m a reasonably facile writer, but a long period of my life, my first 30 years in fact, was one great writer’s block. What broke me out of it was to learn that while knowing proper English is a very good thing, when one writes, propriety had better not be the goal, you need to go for effectiveness.

I can be more concrete. I used to fuss over poetry manuscripts, because I couldn’t find a way to say what I wanted to say in a way that was both stylistically powerful and grammatically perfect. The revelation for me was when I was listening for the zillionth time to “Fun Fun Fun” by the beach boys. And I suddenly realized that the first two lines are both abominable English and a work of rare genius.

Let me remind you.

Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised to the hamburger stand now.

See she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.

That second line is purt-near unparseable. It’s also perfect, absolutely perfect. A gem, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It captures the late 50s in a drop of clearest amber.

A dear friend of mine in Berkeley recently pointed out that I’m the only person she’s heard use the word “bodacious” since 1982 or so. I think she might have meant it as a criticism. I can only smile. I don’t use the word often, but when I think about excising it from my vocabulary, the prospect strikes me much the same as if somebody at Coke pointed out they could use a tiny bit less syrup in the drink and nobody would notice. Brand dilution.

Dowsing for clients: Seth, B. L. Ochman, and my business card

Seth Godin has everything to do with why I spent almost 50 hours creating my latest business card.

In case you went and looked at that post but didn’t read B.L. Ochman’s comment, I’ll repeat it here:

…when I had my own PR firm, in another life, I used to do something very similar to your new card. But frankly, i think there are more simple ways to make the point.

B. L. misses something important: My card is not just a way for me to tell something, but, and just as importantly, to learn.

When somebody phones me on the basis of that card, I know they’re already, in a very important way, a qualified prospect. They’re somebody I’ll be able to work with.

That card puts me on probation before I ever even talk to the prospect. And if I’ve passed that probation, the prospect has as well. Lots of people will toss that card, seeing me as a weirdo. The ones who call will be see me as their kind of weirdo. And in working together, that will make all the difference.

I’m dowsing not for clients but for the kind of clients I want to work for. If I don’t find them, I’ll just keep writing what I want to write, record some podcasts and preach the gospel, and earn the right to do those things by digging ditches if that’s what it takes.

Seth’s Blog asks: Would you do me a favor? What he wants is for me to lend out my copy of his wonderful book, The Dip.

Oh, Seth, my friend, I’ll happily recommend your book, but I just don’t seem to get the books I lend out returned to me. I’ve already bought at least 3 copies of Gerald Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting, and I still can’t seem to find one on my own shelves. Why? Because I’m so enthusiastic about the book that I keep lending it to people.

Seth, I’ll lend out the book if you’ll make me a promise: If it isn’t back in 6 months, you’ll sell me a new, autographed copy.

Deal?

Technorati Tags: Gerald Weinberg,Seth Godin,The Dip,Secrets of Consulting,consulting,books,lending

If there’s something annoying about Seth Godin, it’s that he’s so truthful. Even when he wears that nose.

But before I go on to discuss Seth, let’s get our bearings.

Kathy Sierra Week

It’s Kathy Sierra Week here at the Alpha Mind Blog. The idea is that, while Kathy isn’t blogging (a situation I hope is temporary), the rest of us can express our appreciation for what she’s done for us so far. I’ve identified a number of ways Kathy’s Blog has improved my thinking, my blogging, even my attitude, and I’m writing a post a day about it. Today’s post is about Seth.

Can Everybody Rule?

How many people can be the best in the world? Sounds kinda silly, but the answer is not “one, dummy.” And this fact is at the heart of what Kathy helped me understand about Seth.

I don’t want to overdramatize. I don’t want to let on that Kathy turned me into a Seth Godin fan (I already was), or even caused a very radical shift in my attitude toward Seth. But while the shift wasn’t radical, it was important.

To begin with, my problem with Seth happens to be pretty well laid out in this exchange between Seth and me here on TAM. (An exchange in which I was perhaps a bit snarkier than I wanted to be.)

For the point I’ll be making today, the key words in my reply to Seth’s comment are:

Life’s choices do not consist only of supremacy and mediocrity. The distance between good and best is greater than that between mediocre and good, and yet good is good.

What Seth’s Been Up To

What was I responding to? For those of you who aren’t Godin fans, you’ll need to follow the link from my above-quoted post to the one of Seth’s that I was writing about. And if you still don’t get it, you need to read more of the recent stuff on Seth’s blog. But in case you haven’t time, I’ll just give a quick summary of Seth’s latest currents of thought.

In a nutshell, what Seth is telling us these days is that none of us should settle for anything less than being the best in the world. No lesser goal is worthy. And we should drop anything we’re doing that keeps us from pursuing the one righteous goal. This is the thrust of his forthcoming book, The Dip.

My reaction to this idea, when I first heard it… well, I put it most strongly on Lucy Kellaway’s forum at the Financial Times:

….honestly, I’ve begun to think that the most brilliant people in the blogosphere positively enjoy having the rest of us think that if we’re not equally clever, we’ve no reason to live.

This was still pretty much how I felt when I started my systematic reading of “Creating Passionate Users” a couple of weeks back.

Not Everybody Can Rule, But Kathy Says Let Them Anyway

And there, as I read, was Kathy Sierra telling designers of everything and anything, “Help Your Users Rule!” And she told them this over and over. It became one of her most important mantras (although she never put it in just the words I used. In fact she put it in about a hundred slightly different ways.)

And on my umpteenth reading of this mantra, the thought hit me:

How many users can really rule?

How many users of how many software applications can rule?

How many producers of how many software applications can rule by doing what Kathy suggests?

How many producers of how many other kinds of products can rule?

How many kinds of products are there? Not to mention services? Not to mention roles we can all play that aren’t defined by “product” or “service”?

And finally it all came together for me. Seth isn’t an elitist for whom only a very very few are worthy to survive. Because Seth knows (and I’d seen it all through his other writings even if I hadn’t grasped it) that…

There are a gazillion things, a gazillion truly different and differentiated thing, a gazillion things of genuine value, to be the best in the world at.

And that has made all the difference.

If you tried to create a contest to determine the greatest software developer in the world, where would you start? If you got five undoubtedly great developers into a room and asked them to design the contest, betcha they could talk for days and never agree on a set of criteria. Betcha before too long they’d come out and ask, “What kind of developer?”

Because what makes a great game coder won’t make the best coder of real-time satellite controls. And those two things are a lot closer together than other pairs I could name.

For every category of software on Tucows, there’s an opportunity to be best in the world. That’s a lot of categories. And there are subcategories galore inside those.

Seth’s many riffs on being remarkable set this up perfectly. Because when you set out to be remarkable, you’re creating a whole new category to be the best at. And there are nearly limitless possible ways of being remarkable and creating the category that won’t be categorized.

Why I Had a Problem

In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth makes a lot of us squirm by how he talks about lies and truth. But, on a close reading, it sure isn’t because Seth is lying. Quite the contrary.

He makes me squirm by saying, in essence, that one and the same story is a truth and is a lie, and doing this so many times in the book that my head spins and I get a little dizzy.

The awful thing is that he’s telling the truth.

If it gets confusing, it’s because, in reality, our human capacities for discerning truth are lousy. What we’re good at discerning are consistency and authenticity, which is why Seth winds up saying that we need to aim for those while telling good stories.

It’s that same truthfulness about the whole new world we’re living in that made me take a ten-foot pole to Godin’s latest riffs.

I think I’m a little more sensitive than most to just how confusing the post-internet world is. So I’m not always inclined to focus on its brighter facets. Seth is inclined to view both sides, and to speak strongly about both. His focus on permission marketing addresses head-on one of the dark sides of the loud new world. His focus on being remarkable, and his new focus on being the best, address one of the bright sides.

That bright facet is that today’s environment offers opportunity for self-expression like none before. It offers to millions the chance to say and live the truth, “The thing that I am matters, and the thing I choose to do matters, and I will be the best at it!”

Coda: You Can Move In With Seth

Three days into KS Week, I’m noticing that not many of the things I’m appreciating Kathy for are very direct applications of what she’s taught. Rather, they’re mostly wonderful things that happen inside my head while I’m reading CPU, that result from my mind wandering several steps away from what she’s saying. She’s my starting point.

Better, maybe, to say she’s a catalyst. I love what Kathy teaches, but I also like Kathy simply because I’m smarter, cleverer, more creative, when I’m in her virtual presence.

The same is true for Seth. One reason it took Kathy to get me to grapple with an aspect of Seth’s thought is that I don’t read him only for his ideas, but for his thinking process, which serves to start fires in my brain. I’ve only seen him in person once, but it happened then, too.

Having said that, have I interested anyone in this offer from Seth? Not tempting enough for me to leave the coast I love (the left), but a pretty wonderful idea. Move in with Seth Godin and watch the creative sparks fly.