Two weekends ago, when I was working on client things and trying to unravel the mystery of addiction vis-a-vis Civilization V, there were some ladies getting righteous in my twitter feed.  Responses to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s post to TechCrunch, “Who Will Be the Next Talisman of the Tech World?” had lit up my feed and set my alerts to pinging – mostly because people were DMing or cc’ing me in outrage.

Perhaps because it came on the heels of two other lists that conspicuously omitted female names, this one seemed at first glance like ‘yet another list where great women in tech are ignored.’  I’ll confess that my first response was to feel exhausted, and my second was to invade Edinburgh.

But I did eventually get around to reading Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s post.  I thought it was an interesting list, this guess at who could be the ‘next Steve Jobs’.

After all, it makes for excellent link bait to write about Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs.  It supports the folklore of Silicon Valley to speculate on his heirs, intellectual, aesthetic and otherwise. Search for “who will be the next steve jobs” on google and you get 846 million results. Everybody’s doing it. I’m thinking of going as that question for Halloween, in fact.

So, who’s on the list?  Scott Forstall, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Evan Williams, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Janus Friis and Nicklas Zennstrom, Mark Andreesen, and Jack Dorsey.  The list is very journo- and reader-friendly – we’ve heard of these guys.

It’s my opinion that Mr. Karbasfrooshan didn’t even consider the matter of gender when he typed up this availability-heuristic-based, link-baiting listicle of guys in tech.  But it’s the ‘guys’ part that pissed people off. Where were the women? Did Karbasfrooshan mean to suggest there were no worthy women in tech?  Or worse, that there was no place for women in tech?

How did Karbasfrooshan respond?  In the immortal words of my best friend’s ex-husband, he found himself in a hole and kept digging.  Mr. Karbasfrooshan defended his post by saying, “That’s because the media remains biased against woman (fairly or unfairly). This list is largely about whom the media will turn to, most women are IMHO both put on a pedestal when it’s convenient and then viciously and unfairly attacked otherwise.”  In the comments on the post, the twitter exchanges that followed, and in a follow-up post , he suggests that if Charlie Rose wouldn’t book the talent they weren’t worth putting on the list (in what I shall now and forever call the Charlie Rose Booking rule).

Because data is helpful as evidence in an argument, I did a quick search of charlierose.com. Only half of the list have ever been on the show.  Jeff Bezos has been on 6 times, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell 3 times each, while Evan Williams, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and yes, Steve Jobs were on only once.

The others on the list don’t seem to have passed the Charlie Rose Booking rule; Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, practically has his own chair.  So the rule seems to hold.  In fact, in his follow-up blog post, Mr. Karbasfrooshan mentions a few women – “Catherine [sic] Fake, Sheryl Sandberg and Marisa Mayer.”  First of all, Ms. Fake’s first name is Caterina. Second, Ms. Mayer’s first name is spelled Marissa. Third, Ms. Mayer is the only one to have been on Charlie Rose – and she’s been on three times. (So why not include her in the  list if it’s really all about ‘the media’?)

It isn’t worth it to engage the kitchen sink arguments that Mr. Karbasfrooshan employs to defend his position: there aren’t enough women with enough experience, men in the media will overlook them, women in the media will overcompensate for potential perceived favoritism by excluding them, if they made it into the media we’d probably ogle their breasts, what successes they’ve had will either be criticized or minimized, oh, and tokens & Uncle Toms are bad.  Seriously, he covers all that in one post. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so bizarre.

In short, the lady (here, played by Mr. Karbasfrooshan) protests too much.  But he quotes Gloria Steinem several times, perhaps as some sort of innoculation from outraged women.

I leave it to any intrepid reader to find his self-defense plea tiresome, outrageous or both.  Because despite the author’s apparent lack of a criteria for assembling his list (other than the Charlie Rose Booking rule), there was a common thread among those who made the list – and it wasn’t just that they are all men.

What struck me as the true criteria was that the men on this list (with a few exceptions) are inventors.  Take a look at the list this way:

OS & SOFTWARE INVENTORS

• Bill Gates is a software developer who invented MS DOS and Windows.
• Larry Ellison is a database developer who invented Oracle.
• Scott Forstall is a software engineer at Apple who helped develop OSX and iOS.

INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE INVENTORS

• Marc Andreesen invented the first web browser, Mozilla.
• Sergey Brin is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Larry Page is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Elon Musk is an inventor with an interest in physics & engineering who co-invented PayPal.
• Max Levchin is a computer scientist who co-invented PayPal.
• Niklas Zennstrom is a business development guy with a tech background who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.
• Janus Friis is a network developer who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.

SOCIAL WEB INVENTORS

• Mark Zuckerberg is a coder who invented Facebook.
• Sean Parker is a hacker who invented Napster.
• Evan Williams is a programmer who invented Blogger.
• Jack Dorsey is a programmer and software designer who invented Twitter.

E-BUSINESS MODEL INVENTORS

• Michael Dell turned a side business upgrading computers into a vendor license into a business model – the no-overhead PC manufacturer, selling direct to their customers.
• Jeff Bezos is a network engineer who invented Amazon.com, transforming the way you buy books, music and video content.
• Marc Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in sales, marketing and product development before creating his own SaaS, cloud-based business, salesforce.com.

VISIONARY ENABLERS

• Peter Thiel was a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist who saw the potential of PayPal and other start-ups.
• Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer who redesigned Apple.
• Tim Cook is an operations expert who reinvented the way Apple makes and sells its products.

All but 3 are inventors of the products their businesses sell.

And this is the real problem for women in tech.  It’s not (just) that the media don’t like us or sex sells or that bias and sexism exist.  It’s that we don’t have enough women who are true inventors in our midst who take their inventions and turn them into multi-billion dollar businesses… And either stay on to be CEOs or sell the business to a bigger fish.

The sad truth is we don’t have enough inventors right now, especially in the US, where enrollment in STEM degree college programs (which would at least give you the basic skills and knowledge for inventing physical things – or say, getting a job even in this economy) is down across the board.

Even those with an interest in engineering don’t get degrees – 1/3 of the list Karbasfrooshan assembles didn’t finish college, much less get a computer science degree.  So it’s not required to have a STEM degree to invent something, but in terms of skills acquisition, women are poorly represented in the shrinking population of those who do study science, technology, engineering or math.

Perhaps more telling however is how few engineers rise through the ranks of existing companies to be CEOs.  In most of the biggest companies in the world, STEM degrees are not tickets to the boardroom.

If you look at the Fortune 500 for 2011, 18 companies are helmed by women: a media company (Gannett), food and food production companies (Campbell Soup, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland), a cosmetics company (Avon), a pharmaceutical company (Mylan), retail & wholesale companies (TJX Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club  finance and insurance companies (Guardian Life Insurance, KeyCorp, WellPoint), energy and fuel companies (Sempra Energy, Sunoco), and yes, tech companies (Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM).

These CEOs are distinguished women, many graduating with honors.  Most of these women went to prestigious schools. 10 have at least one post-graduate degree.  The vast majority have been with their current company at least 5 years, some as many as 30.  They have worked hard, risen through the ranks, worked for increasingly prestigious brands, working their way up their industry food chain.  But while 6 do in fact have STEM degrees, of those, only one seems to have held a related post, the newly named CEO of IBM, Ginny Rometty. Others, despite their mechanical, civil or electrical engineering degrees, came up through operations, finance and marketing roles.  Even Ms. Rometty went from systems engineer to the consulting arm of IBM, and from there worked her way up. Meg Whitman says she abandoned a math & science degree in favor of the more lucrative and employable economics degree.

While these women have much to be proud of, not one invented the product their company sells or have revolutionized the businesses they helm.  They have made them profitable, made interesting acquisitions, improved productivity or efficiency or morale.  But they haven’t utterly transformed the way people think about packaged food or cosmetics or pumping gas.

But here’s the thing.  Most Fortune 500 CEOs are not the inventors of their products, not the visionaries, not the game-changers.  So this is not a female problem.  It’s a CEO problem.

Some of the tech brands on Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s list are on the Fortune 500: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Google. And you’ll find companies from tech booms past: H-P, Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Yahoo, alongside those old stalwarts Xerox and IBM.  But those companies are now starting to look more like their colleagues in consumer packaged goods, finance/insurance/real estate, media & marketing, and so on.  They hire CEOs, they acquire new technology, they maximize for productivity and cut for efficiency.  They answer to shareholders and the Street.

If his logic holds true, we won’t count the women OR THE MEN of the start-up scene until they have invented and grown their businesses to the size that makes lists like these – household names even Charlie Rose would book.

The companies not on the Fortune 500 created by his tech talismen are an interesting mix: Meg Whitman acquired both PayPal and Skype (Skype is now owned by Microsoft). Google bought Blogger. Best Buy bought Napster. Comcast bought Plaxo. Netscape belongs to AOL. Facebook could IPO any day, they keep saying, while Twitter continues to seek a business model. So perhaps the other future for a product inventor is to exit well and become an investor or serial-entrepreneur.

In other words, it’s about that vision thing.  Karbasfrooshan didn’t omit women because of sexism and bias and discrimination – at least not directly.  He omitted women because there just aren’t any playing at the level these very few guys play at who are visionaries about new products and services built out of technology.  There aren’t enough women who are inventors and cultural visionaries or industry game-changers… because there aren’t enough of those kinds of people, full stop.  They are, almost by definition, rare.

As ever, I come back to the wise words oft-repeated by Cindy Gallop: you can’t be what you don’t see.
Clearly there were women in the 70s and 80s who had engineering degrees but who either could not, or would not, or didn’t know how to put those degrees to use in a way that would serve their considerable talents and ambition.  But it wasn’t just the women who struggled.  If we’re seeing enrollment in STEM programs decline it’s because the business culture makes the case that a strategist at McKinsey, or a trader at Goldman, or a lawyer at White & Case will make the big bucks; the media culture makes the case that a pro-ball player, or a rock star, or an actress, or a reality show contestant will be famous; and both still seem to believe that nerds who invent stuff lack the necessary skills to be either rich or famous, all evidence provided by the dudes on Karbasfrooshan’s list to the contrary.

There aren’t enough of them to really break the mold – so far, these 20 guys just have cracked it slightly, proffering the exception that proves the rule (think of all the nasty comments and characterizations of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg as unattractive or socially awkward, or of Steve Jobs as a cruel egomaniac). It’s upsetting, yes, that we don’t have more female role models in tech.  But what’s more upsetting is that we have so few role models in tech altogether.

Still, Mr. Karbasfrooshan should have accepted responsibility for his words instead of playing the ‘blame the media’ card.  He should have simply said, “I was talking about inventors and visionaries who are inventing what’s next, and can helm businesses and stay relevant.  I was talking about Steve Jobs, not Steve Wozniak.” That criteria makes it hard to think of anyone you’d add to the list, male or female. He could have simply played it as it lay.  But he took the bait he no doubt unwittingly set, and now looks like a fool or a jerk or both.

So, who are the women (or the men we haven’t heard of, for that matter) who are inventing new OSes, software that changes the way you interact with the world, social platforms that alter the infrastructure of the internet, technologies that enable new kinds of transactions and business models, boxes of wires and silicon that transmit and calculate data in new ways?

If you know who they are, please say so in the comments here, and I’ll follow up with that list.

Here’s the problem:

There is a massive drought in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. People are starving. The crisis is so bad, people are fleeing their home countries to seek refuge in neighboring nations where conditions are not much better. Corruption prevents some aid from reaching the people who need it most. Bottom line: they need water, and they need food.

Put more simply, here’s the problem:

It’s easy to feel defeated by this. After all, we’re talking about the weather, and governments in lands far from our own, and people we’ve never met – tens of thousands of them. The level of abstraction for those of us in the West is almost insurmountable.

But there are people who have decided to set the abstraction aside and do something concrete. London digital service design agency Made by Many have partnered with social innovation lab Good for Nothing to develop a platform for raising money and aid for those affected by the crisis in East Africa. But they went much farther than just marketing for a fundraising initiative.

The result is the 50/50 Project: a platform to develop and deploy 50 fundraising projects in 50 days, starting August 27 with 5-10 projects and culminating on World Food Day, October 16, with 50 working fundraising projects, and be well on the way to reaching the goal of raising at least £1 million. Ideas for projects are being anonymously submitted to http://good.byideas.co.uk, and a public beta of the 50/50 platform should go live sometime this week with all the basic pages up for creating, selecting or starting a project.

Digital agencies and startups in London are giving their free time to this. Members of the NYC start-up and Lean Startup movement have offered support. The BBC have given it modest coverage. And while the project is heating up in support from many quarters, more help is needed.

The UK donations will go to the Disasters Emergency Committee. The US donations will go to the International Rescue Committee.

Here’s what you can do:

• If you would like to participate in the Hackathon, please vote for your preferred days (these will be Friday night to Sunday evening hackathons, just like a Startup Weekend or others you may have heard about). The poll for selecting a day is here: http://doodle.com/ikpm6dqdi4s6bgkg.
• Sign up for the role you’d like to participate in here: http://www.doodle.com/3zcrtsvu2fez6biq This will help us to figure out how to staff to have enough devs – because there are never enough devs. If none of these roles fit you, but you’d still like to participate, email me and we’ll make it happen.
• Want to sponsor the hackathon? We’d rather have stuff than money for the Hackathon. Offer us space, or pay for our sandwiches and sodas. Donate post-its or sharpies. Email me
• Want to write about The 50/50 Project, email me and I’ll put you in touch with the people at Made by Many.

So please – tweet about this! Facebook it! Post it to your circles on Google+. Email everyone you know.

And thanks.

It’s not the first time we’ve read this story, but the Wall Street Journal decided to round it up for us again:

[T]o lie you also have to keep the truth in mind, which involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating several sources of information and manipulating that information, according to Shawn Christ, a neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The ability to lie—and lie successfully—is thought to be related to development of brain regions that allow so-called “executive functioning,” or higher order thinking and reasoning abilities. Kids who perform better on tests that involve executive functioning also lie more.

The upshot of these stories is simple: leadership = lying. And I suspect that it is this narrative, increasingly popular, that informed many of the responses to Clay Shirky’s rant about women. He suggested that women needed to figure out ways to “behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks”. He outlined a few calculated risks he took for himself, and the twitscape went a little apoplectic, deciding on one hand that what he meant was we should all behave like lying dicks, and that on the other hand all a woman has to do to be seen as dishonest is open her mouth.

[To be fair, most of the work done on how lying is attractive and a successful strategy only applies to men; in fact, most studies show that women who adopt similar strategies suffer both in the boardroom and the bedroom. And yeah, I just said "boardroom & bedroom". Put me on the Today Show.]

For all the sturm und drang over liars and lying – that it doesn’t contribute anything to culture, to ideas, to products; that it is inherently evil; that we shouldn’t do it – it seems to me that liars succeed because, quite simply, they get better press. We like liars – we promote and pay them more, we go to their movies, we listen to their music, we want to sleep with them, we hope to be invited to their parties. Liars lead an exciting, powerful life because they dare to do what we won’t. And besides, our culture rewards – dare I say, expects – these behaviors even as it derides them.

Way too long ago to discuss, I read this article in Psychology Today:

“Everyday lies are really part of the fabric of social life,” says DePaulo, a professor at the University of Virginia. While some lies damage relationships and destroy trust, other fibs fulfill important interpersonal functions, like smoothing over awkward situations or protecting fragile egos.

The developmental purpose argument has its limits, of course. As it turns out lying is a physically, psychologically and emotionally draining activity. But you know who is able to ward off these negative physiological effects? People in power.

‘Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.’

Let’s face it, a lot of the time, liars are telling you what you want to hear: you’re a valuable member of the team, you can make your own way here, you’re pretty and smart, you can’t lose. Liars seem capable of doing anything, even if in the doing they’re really just delegating the responsibility to others (also known as leadership). Liars are often charismatic and undeniably creative – holding the truth in their heads even as they create an alternate reality. The truth is, we love liars.

What we don’t like is having the illusion shattered. And what we resent is not having enough power in our own lives or careers or cultures to be able to ward off the stress of lying.

For me? I love to play with a little fakery. It’s fun. You just have to know when honesty is more effective (because it’s such a surprise!), and less stressful.

[Note: I posted this elsewhere awhile ago. Since then I've thought a little more about it...]

Much has been made of the specialness of brands that are adored, desired, and truly loved by consumers since Lovemarks was published. Only a few consistently come to mind, and you can see how they play out in the brand battles at brandtags.net. Sometimes it seems like there are so few true ‘brands’ that you can count them on both hands: Adidas, Apple, BMW, Coke, Ferrari, Google, Lego, Nike, Pixar, YouTube. They stand for something, they have meaning, they evoke imagery and feeling and spirit. They are, in other words, lovable.

But for many years now we’ve been convinced that anything with a trademark or a .com or a business card can be a brand. It isn’t true. Not everything – or everyone – is a brand. Sometimes they are just people, companies, products, services.

A friend and former colleague told me about a client who wanted to make a button on one of their remote controls a brand. A component piece of a component piece of a utility service – made into a brand. I’ve had clients who want the silhouette Apple iconography – now. I’ve had others muse that if they just had the Intel chimes, they’d stick in people’s heads longer. They’d completely forgotten about the work those companies had to do to earn the right – and the privilege – of being so recognizable. We had to have “1000 songs in your pocket” and “Rip. Mix. Burn.” in order to get to the iconic iPod earbud cords. We had to to see stickers on every PC tower and see the dancing technicolor ‘bunnysuits’ and get excited about the Pentium (remember that?) to give Intel credit for that sound.

And as we know, love fades. Brands that once deserved, even demanded our love, have grown distant, tiresome, old. Some brands have deserted us for younger consumers. Others stopped bringing us flowers, thinking we’d settle for something a little less. Many make us work harder to get their attention and their affection. You see, the problem for years was that marketing managers, companies believed it was their right to demand our love. They believed if they were loud enough, repetitive enough, big enough, we’d all adore them.

Over the last decade – the one just ended – many marketing managers concluded that the brave new world was upon us; that the monologue had been supplanted by a dialogue. That was the nice way of putting it – what many really thought was that they’d opened up the doors to all the riff-raff and found themselves deafened by the cacophony of consumer voices. Control of the brand was threatened by this transparency, by all this commenting and linking and reviewing and forwarding and tweeting.

But a new age is upon us – everyone’s going digital, everyone is, in the parlance of The ARF, “listening” – or in the framework of Henry Jenkins, fostering participatory culture. Yet even this winds up as a one way street. Many agencies are interpreting digital solely as online direct response marketing – and leaving creativity, demand creation, brand building in the dust. Many researchers and brand managers interpret listening as eavesdropping, getting consumers to do the work for you. It reminds me of how Tom Sawyer pulled a con – I’ll let you paint my fence if you’ll give me your apple. Who’s getting the better deal? As it turns out, no one.

Positioning and brand strategy have become empty vessels for a lot of companies. Getting people to love you is the result, not the strategy. What I’m interested in and passionate about is figuring out: what do you have to offer that makes you lovable? What can you offer people that shows them you care?  And how do you prove it?  When I talk to clients, we’ll talk about your brand, and your consumer – but we’ll have to talk about it in a slightly different way. We’ll need to reckon with your present and your past, but we must face the future.

If we don’t talk about who you really are as defined by what you do, what you make, how you present yourself – in other words, your products, services, employees, distribution methods, design, pricing and service – we’re only ever talking about window dressing. If we don’t align who you are with how you want people to feel about you – we’re likely to make products and messages that don’t break through and don’t stick.

And if we don’t keep our eyes open to the possibilities – to the people who do, could, and should love you – then we risk your business. To get love, you have to give it – all the relationship advice in the world can be boiled down to that truth. The way companies give love is simple: respect the people you want to sell things to, and make things they would want to buy. The hard part (read: the really fun part) is figuring out how to get there.

[gratuitous use of a puppy is within my rights]

i’ve been working in and around advertising for 12 or 13 years.  i’ve been a copywriter and a web designer and a planner and a strategic consultant and a qualitative researcher and an innovations lead and a ‘corporate intellectual’.  yesterday i was described on a phone call as an ‘expert on brands, strategy, research methodologies and implementation. and she’s a wild blogger.’  practically feral, i’d say.

but wait – “implementation.”

now that takes me back to the beginning, when i was making websites and ads and games.  and it reminds me of a really early conversation i had with a client who wanted to get into the e-commerce world.  this had to have been 1999, it was Ron Herman, who owns the Fred Segal store on Melrose.  he was turned on by Helmut Lang‘s website, but also by the Gap. but he didn’t have the fulfillment capabilities to ship everything anyone wanted, and he didn’t have the inventory system to know what he had and link it to his stores in both a virtual world and a brick-and-mortar one (remember how we all used to say that? i’m so glad it’s gone).

what he did have was a line called RH Vintage – which still exists, though at the time it was basically bedazzled vintage bought out of poundage.  the line was comprised of jeans or cords, t-shirts, and belts.  no two of anything was alike.  the prices were comparatively reasonable for a Fred Segal shopping trip.  we thought – let’s experiment:  let’s put up your jeans, your cords, your tees and your belts.  you have three choices to make as a customer: which of these 4 categories do you want to shop from, are you a guy or a girl, and what’s your size.  tick those boxes, and the good people at RH Vintage will pick out your clothes and send it to you.  it’ll probably fit.  it’ll probably be what you want.  it’ll definitely come in a branded bag, with a branded receipt.  it’ll make you think that you actually got in your car and went to Fred Segal.  you can pretend to your friends at Brown and Wesleyan and Amherst that you shopped there (and you sorta did), and you’ve got the threads to prove it.

Ron loved the idea – i’m not sure what happened next, but here was an answer that wasn’t an ad.  it was a micro-model for doing business.  it was a branded product line with a branded distribution system and a branded user/shopping experience.  yes, it would have a website.  probably taglines would need to be written and designs made &c.  but it wasn’t an advertising idea – it was a business idea.

the best stuff i’ve ever done in anything related to advertising has always been ‘this is what you should do‘ not ‘this is what you should say‘.

i was talking to Seth Wolk the other day at Saatchi about who in the business is making things.  (he’s so great – really smart and candid and clear and open.  frankly, a rarity.)  but he did cut to the quick: maybe i’m barking up the wrong tree.  maybe i’m expecting places who don’t, as a matter of course, do what i do, to want to do what i do – and to know how to package it, sell it, and implement it.  maybe people like me need to find a new roof. or build our own house.

it’s really important to not only think about what you do as the definition of who you are, but to make sure you’re in the right place, the place that will not only let you be you, but wants you to be more of you, is hungry for you, is receptive to you.  people like me should be in places where people say ‘this is what you should do’ – and then adds, ‘we’ll build it for you.’

and here, then, is my question:  where are those places, really? lots of places claim to be doing that, but are at heart still ad agencies or branding companies.  is it, as Seth suggested, media properties and platforms?  is it tech startups?  who are the companies that are looking at brands on a holistic level and then suggesting – and implementing - action instead of talk?

You’re definitely going to see this as a key theme to what I hope to explore here – that in the quest to get ahead, most companies and brands find themselves mired in cultures and processes that actually can only truly accomplish keeping up.  And keeping up is what they can do when the engine is firing on all cylinders.

As part of their quest to keep up, most companies and brands spend significant resources on ‘keeping their finger on the pulse’ of their consumer.  This is usually done with only the best of intentions, and with a goal of responsiveness.  But responsiveness is taxing and time-consuming.  What trends do you watch?  Which consumers do you track?  How do you know what’s important to respond to and what is not?  It’s classic Stephen J. Covey stuff – what is important, and what is urgent?

For many brands this results in what I think of as chasing consumers, following them around.  A lot of fads in strategy, planning, research and brand management are reinterpretations of ‘responsiveness.’  The strongest brands – and we all know who they are – live and breathe the worlds their best, most influential, most discerning customers experience, they interpret the signs and signifiers of that world, and they think deeply about how that leads their product development and how it leads the consumer to the brand or product.

In other words, they anticipate problems and solve them; they anticipate changes and adapt to them; they, simply, make good things and treat people with respect.

My friend and former colleague Susan Coghill (now of The Campaign Palace in Sydney) noted this WARC article about Coca-Cola’s quest to get ahead of the curve and to ‘shape change.’

“It’s not about following the change as quickly as possible – that’s being reactive. It is about helping your company to shape change.”

In order to achieve this goal, consumer insights specialists will need to radically rethink their traditional techniques, which typically emphasise understanding previous or present behaviour.

“We spend 80% of time on ‘rear-view’ research – brand-health tracking, validation, and risk-avoidance research,” Sthanunathan stated.

“On top of that, we spend 80% of our remaining time debating report cards. And, whether it’s good data or not, it’s all about explaining the past.”

“No company has become great by using the past to predict the future. Companies become great by dreaming of the future and then taking the company there.”

Definitely worth a read-through – but more importantly, worth a meaningful debate about what it will mean, day-to-day for brands and companies.  Time to get beyond whether to do things differently and start figuring out how.  And then of course, you have to commit to it.  But that’s a post for another day.

About a month ago I posted the piece that follows on another blog.  Yesterday, a BBC Radio producer posted a comment inviting me to come on World Have Your Say yesterday with Clay Shirky.  I haven’t been on the radio since college, so this was definitely a little nerve-wracking, but also a load of fun.  I want to  pick up the thread of my article here because collaboration is an important part of innovation and entrepreneurialism – and because I think people should get credit for their ideas and achievements.  It’s only fair.

Another theme that emerged on the radio program, which you can listen to here, is the use of social networking tools to do a better job of self-promotion, mutual promotion, and collaboration.  I recently experienced this with a post on, coincidentally, ‘self-promotion’ in which I referenced the people I had appeared on panels or presented papers with.  They were aware via Google Alerts that their names appeared on this blog, and reached out to talk, meet or just say hi.  Calling people out by name and giving them credit simply works – and not just by giving them credit, but almost as an invitation to reciprocate.  Anyway, I’m hoping to talk more about this here.  In the meantime, herewith, something of a reprint. – flb

For those who have not seen the post that this article references, please go to this page.

Several weeks ago Clay Shirky ranted about women.  The premise was a simple one – as a faculty member at NYU, Shirky gets a lot of requests for recommendations, but the men are more forceful about self-promotion, and he is worried, he says, that:

not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

For the record, I think he’s right.  I have personally been guilty of not behaving like an arrogant self-aggrandizing jerk, and I have witnessed my fellow female colleagues fail on the same count.

But let’s unpack this sentence.  First off, the statistical caveat, “not enough”.  Some women do this and do it well.  Second, “have what it takes” – one supposes this assumes a set of personality or character traits, but also a set of skills, and perhaps most importantly, the will to do this and do it well.  Some women, and perhaps many of the women Shirky encounters, do not have the self-esteem or confidence or what-have-you to put themselves forward, to be zealous advocates for themselves.  But even if women have the self-esteem and confidence, they may lack the skill-set that makes an effective advocate.  Now let’s also assume that some women have the confidence, and have even been taught the skills, but for some reason hold themselves back from advocating for themselves.

The argument has been made that women are socialized to advocate for themselves last – that it is easier for us to promote or defend our friends, loved-ones and colleagues before we will promote or defend ourselves.  It has also been written that in business women promote each other in the belief that they will carry each other forward and up – and also provide a bit of cover when women at the top want or need or must take on the roles and responsibilities they face outside the workplace.  For example, this article in the New York Times a few years ago described this behavior in the Hollywood studio system.

From there, the women fanned out to different studios, often employing one another. “There’s a little bit of an old girls club at this point,” Ms. Pascal said. By the late 1990′s, female executives, particularly Ms. Fisher, who cut her work week to as little as three days when she had young children, had smoothed some of the edges off the industry’s go-go, late-night culture. “We needed each other for cover, so we could cut out for that concert our kid was in and not seem like slackers,” said Ms. Jacobson, who has a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. (Such habits spread: even Steven Spielberg has joked publicly about the joy of taking “a Lucy Fisher day” with his children.)

That seems encouraging, on its face, and I personally have benefited from having great female role models in my industry – women who were definitely themselves and definitely women, who were able to make decisions and build businesses and influence the influential, and who were even able to marry and have children in the process.  Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t shut the door behind them – they actively mentored, rewarded and promoted younger women like me.  They have, over time, evolved in their roles, from my boss and mentor, to my friend and colleague.  Without them, I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do what I’m doing now – or the vision.

Shirky doesn’t address this part – most people don’t.  What they talk about instead are questions of supply, demand, and intrinsic gender-based qualities (that are assumed to exist).  For example, in the same Times article as above, they discuss other options, ranging from pipeline, to socialization, to drive and support, to personality traits.

Ms. Daley said the pipeline is indeed part of the explanation – only about a third of the women who come to the U.S.C. program are interested in directing – but not all of it. “There are talented girls who want to do this, but so far they haven’t done what the boys do – band together and sacrifice everything to make a small film,” she said. It’s those films that eventually find their way into the hands of studio executives looking for the next hot young thing.

Young women are less likely to get support, both financial and emotional, from their parents, Ms. Daley added. “In my experience, parents of girls aren’t as eager to give them their life savings to make a movie,” she said.

But some executives, male and female, suggested that directing might require personal characteristics that few women possess. “The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless,” said a woman who has been both a studio chief and a producer, but didn’t want her name used for fear of alienating temperamental directors. “They have a cold streak that most women I know don’t have and don’t want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film.”

It’s almost impossible to unpack everything that’s going on in these paragraphs, but let’s just do this as simply as possible:

• There aren’t enough women putting themselves into the system for development in fields, especially creative ones, that have been traditionally dominated by men.  The film, design, advertising, and music businesses are key areas where this has been a notable struggle; I’m sure there are many others.  The struggle is defined less by employment stats (number of women in field) and more by power structures (number of women breaking the title/pay/success metric barriers).
• So why not?  One reason: they don’t have the family support that ‘self-made men’ have.  Their parents don’t encourage them to take these risks, nor do they bankroll their endeavors. I’ve known a lot of women whose mothers still encouraged them to get a degree in teaching so they could work on their writing while having something sensible to fall back on; my own parents counseled me to double-major in something esoteric and something practical (though in fairness, my father always wanted me to take 6 months off to write a book and said he would do anything to help me do that).
• Reason #2: they don’t have the support of their peers.  Whether male or female, they do not have the support structure of colleagues and friends.  When I was thinking of leaving my last company, my friends were gingerly supportive, worried that making a move in a volatile economy would be a bad idea.  But another swath of my friends, interestingly my male friends, have always told me that they would work for me any day, that they would let me sleep on their couches while I looked for a new job, that I could be a literal rock star if that’s what I chose to do.  These friends have helped me talk myself into my going solo project; a lot of women don’t have these support structures. I’m incredibly lucky, and I’ve cultivated this kind of reckless belief in my abilities by recklessly believing in the abilities of my friends.  Who are, it must be said, awesome.
• Reason #3 is the one that people seem to respond to in Shirky’s post: that women don’t have what it takes.  Apparently what it takes is a maniacal personality, compulsiveness, obsessiveness, 24-hour work days, etc.  I think this one is bunk.  That’s not about gender, that’s about personality, and I wonder whether that is truly the personality make-up of all successful directors.  Any artist or creator is obsessed with their creation during its incubation period – have you met mothers?

Okay so let’s go back to Shirky’s sentence and the phrase I think actually matters here. That phrase is “behave like.”  He’s not advocating that women become ruthless bastards, he’s just suggesting we borrow some of the behaviors.  We certainly can find ourselves defined by our deeds, but the point is that we have to be our own best advocates, or as my dad said, “look out for number 1.”

Right, so what’s the answer?  The thing I find most fascinating is that when you look at Shirky’s post, taking what he posted and all the comments below, the word ‘mentor’ is used exactly once, by Shirky himself.  In my view, that is the answer – good mentors, people who completely, unreasonably believe in someone’s talent and wherewithal.  I have been accused of possessing this trait.  It came from a friend who D’d me this a few months ago:

random realization: u are very good at exciting people toward their potential. i wouldn’t mind it if you told me what to do someday.
(That D came from a guy, by the way.)

This is the role of the mentor.  And in my opinion is a role that is sorely missing from professional programs, creative fields and the workplace.  So, Mr. Shirky, here is what I would propose for your program, for any field, and I’ll say this – on the off chance you see it: I would be very interested in building a network founded on these ideas:

1. Move beyond advisor and recommender to cultivator.  You are growing new talent, not just reviewing it and passing it along.  See your job as training people, drilling the basics into their heads, while also forcing your students to use all those basics to put together something bigger.  It’s like teaching someone to read using a combination of whole word and phonetics: sound it out, okay now you hear the word that you are seeing, what does it mean?  okay now you know the words, how do you put them together into a sentence?  okay now you know how to put together a sentence, how do you make a paragraph? and so on.
2. Take gender out of it – give men mentors who are female, and vice versa.  In fact, I think this is incredibly important – we need to train bosses to see the opposite gender employee in a constructive light, as much as we need prospective employees to model successful behavior.  Show women and men what it’s like to have a professional relationship with an advocate of the opposite sex, and we can begin to deal with people based on categories other than the simplistic gender divide.
3. Teach: Break it down into digestible, action-oriented pieces.  When I was starting out, the people I did informational interviews with (an excellent tactic! I have been hired through that approach, and I hired someone last fall who took that approach with me), often told me that they ‘backed into’ their field.  This revealed two things: they wanted to believe it was a mystical event; and they hadn’t been thoughtful or reflective about the path they’d taken to get into their field and achieve any success in it.  They were fumbling towards their own futures, with no perspective on their pasts.  I know most of the steps I took to get to where I am now, and will happily tell you how that worked and give you insights and actionable suggestions that are behaviors not philosophies – in other words, ‘news you can use.’  Mentors need to take down the veil of mystery – it’s a lot simpler than that.
4. Practice: Drills, drills, and more drills.  Any sport requires the breaking down of a move, a play, a technique into its component parts and then reassembling them into the game, the routine, the stroke.  On Saturdays I take a writing class – we do free writing drills based on simple concepts: write this in the 1st person, now the 3rd person, now the omniscient, etc.  Then I go to the gym and lap swim – I don’t just freestyle, I do lengths of kicks, lengths of strokes, practice my kick turn, count strokes past the flags.  Our junior employees and our students need to do the same thing: on this project, only do the desk research and write a summary.  On the next project, do that but now tell me what you think that information means.  On the next project, do all that but now tell me what you think our client shoulddo about it.  It’s the teaching hospital principle of “watch one, do one, teach one.”  Theory is great, but we have to teach people to apply it.

And that is where the last bit of advice that is always put forward really falls short for me: it’s about hard work.  Yes, it is, but what kind of work?  There is hard work and there is smart work.  Smart work is drills and plays.  Smart work is trial and error.  Smart work is raising your hand and going first.  Smart work is believing there will always be a next time.  Smart work is failing harder.

And that has to be taught.  So, Mr. Shirky – how are you, as an educator, a mentor, a leader in your field, going to teach your students how to achieve their own success?  And how can I help?

The central question of this post is this:  are realism and vision mutually exclusive worldviews for ‘CEOs’?

For the purposes of this post, when I say “CEO” I mean “person in charge/owner”.

This is something I said to a friend of mine after listening to her talk about her work environment:

You should write a book targeted at CEOs but written from the middle.

Fairly tortured, woefully incomplete articulation, so let me try again:

• CEOs are ultimately responsible for a lot – the life of the organization, including its people, its customers, its creditors, its products, its distributors, its retailers, its advertising agency, its … everything.
• CEOs can not possibly know what is happening at every stop along the chain.  They can’t know all their employees (in organizations past a certain size), and they can’t meet every customer.  They just can’t.
• CEOs sometimes have a disconnect between their vision for a company and what it actually is, the day-to-day running of the organization.
• Often, middle-management is charged with enacting this vision, and frankly, with bringing the vision back down to proportion – to what’s ‘doable’.
• Middle-management sometimes suffers from lack of vision, inability to share the vision, lack of commitment to the vision, or a genuine belief that the vision is not realistic.
• Some CEOs, and not always just CEOs, but presidents of divisions, heads of departments – in other words leaders – find solace and respite from the highwire in mucking about in day-to-day details.
• And some CEOs simply fail to imagine what the world looks like through the eyes of the people who work for them.

So then.  There are people in your organization who are senior but not in charge.  They are working both angles as hard as they can – trying to foster the CEO’s vision and trying to enact it.  They are trying to keep the vision alive while dealing with the realities on the ground.  They know people’s names and meet the clients and deal with venders.

They have something to teach CEOs who have become very busy doing very important work, but work that has elevated them out of the day-to-day.

I would like to see a book written by someone in middle management about what vision looks like from the middle.  Maybe this is the purpose of that TV show Undercover Boss.

I’m still thinking about this – and what that book would be like, and why I even think it’s a good idea.  But I did see this on Seth’s blog:

Product launches, innovations and initiatives by any organization work better when the key people agree on the goal, believe that they can achieve it and that the plan will work.

Do we have a cynicism shortage? Unlikely.

Successful people rarely confuse a can-do attitude with a smart plan. But they realize that one without the other is unlikely to get you very far.

I added the emphasis on “the key people.” I think this is sometimes where things fall down. Who are the key people? Sometimes CEOs think it’s themselves and other people in, for want of a better turn of phrase, their ‘class of service.’ Sometimes they leave out the people who have to make it happen, and the people who have to live with the consequences of the decision. Sometimes this is even the right thing to do – I am not particularly in favor of democratically run commercial enterprises. But when you have internal expertise and you do not assemble these experts, it’s hard to expect people to be enthusiastic and supportive when you forge ahead.

So what would be interesting to me is a little handbook from a smart, committed, insightful middle manager (my friend from the start of this post) for the conscientious CEO who really does want to move forward, together, with his or her people.  Of course this middle manager would need to not be an Iago. Maybe it’s a tall order, and maybe it’s not very inspiring sounding, but it feels like a way to keep a CEO grounded in what needs doing, and not what seemed like a good idea at the time.