Event: NACE

Tom's in Anaheim, CA, today talking to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. He made three PowerPoint presentations for the event. You can download the slides here:
NACE Final
NACE Long
NACE Talent

Hooray! (Finally!)

Hats off to: Pres Bush for a great, non-crony choice for Treasury! Hats off to new Chief of Staff Josh Bolton, a Goldman alum, for convincing Mr B of the choice and the need to beef up the job significantly. And, most important, hats off to Hank Paulson for accepting the job in D.C.

(And "no comment" on the two prior office holders.)

No Apologia, But ...

The tawdry behavior of Skilling and Lay, and Fannie Mae execs (revealed in gory detail last week), is inexcusable.

But ...

Legal—as well as illegal—forms of such behaviors are likely to persist, and perhaps increase, as we experience the full-bore arrival of an economy whose basis is almost entirely intangibles. Just as the intellectual property lawyers will be driving Maseratis for the foreseeable future, all of us in enterprise will be wrestling with value-valuations in a world where the great economies have banked their coke ovens, scrapped their material goods—and come to depend on biotech scientists, programmers, experience providers (think Nike, Starbucks—yes Nike, which several years ago Fortune declared a service company, not a manufacturer), and the like.

New rules are needed for new games—and the shakedown cruise will be long and at times painful. (Think about Microsoft's continuing tribulations, now centered on the European Union, and the RIM-Blackberry patent dispute.)

Read It!

Paul Arden is former Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi, and he's authored a no-bull "must read": WHATEVER YOU THINK THINK THE OPPOSITE. It's very short and very sweet—and graphically compelling.

Consider one pithy piece of his advice: "TRAPPED. It's not because you are making the wrong decisions. It's because you are making the right ones. We try to make sensible decisions based on the facts in front of us. The problem with making sensible decisions is that so is everybody else."

I've packaged a few of my favorite "Ardenisms" in the attached PowerPoint.

Read It (II)!

Mary Pipher, Writing to Change the World. Epigraph, courtesy James Baldwin: "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. ... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it."

Call me hopelessly naive, but I believe there is no excuse for any variety of "business writing" that should be crafted any less carefully or aim any less high than a great novel or great inaugural address. After all, we do aim—day in and day out—to change the world via our human collectivities called enterprises. Right?

The Right Stuff!

My Subaru on the Farm in VT.

Irony

I haven't seen this reported, but it strikes me as ironic that the Skilling-Lay convictions came one day before the 72nd birthday of the SEC. The agency was born on 26 May 1934, with this declaration by Senate staffer Ferdinand Pecora: "I think that the stock market bill will purge the securities market of the evil practices shown to have existed in the past. The bill spells the end of the manipulator, jiggler and pool operator."—Well, not quite the end.

Pay For Performance?

Home Depot Chairman & CEO Bob Nardelli is a pal. Period. An amazing guy. Perhaps more energy and determination than I've ever seen in one package. (I met him at GE.) And he has indeed mounted a largely successful REVOLUTION at Home Depot. Which is why I am simply dumbfounded by his Annual Meeting behavior last week. (Among many other things ... the Board were no-shows!!) I talked at a dinner on Sunday with a couple of gen-u-ine "captains of industry" ... with dozens of high-visibility annual meetings under their belts. They, too, are incredulous.

I confidently declare, alas, that Bob N will never recover from this one. FYI, for excellent commentary on the meeting, see Joe Nocera's article, "The Board Wore Chicken Suits," in the New York Times (0527); Joe is an old friend and superb reporter.

(If I don't understand, I sure as hell do offer the "shitty timing" prize for this sicko performance occurring the day after Skilling & Lay went down for, in effect, extreme executive arrogance and disdain of shareholders.)

Of course, pay for performance, a key Home Depot issue, is a very hot-contentious topic. A recent study (source??) I saw observed that CEO pay is closely (statistically) related to company size—and essentially unrelated to performance. So consider this from Advertising Age (0521.06) on top-mgt comp. Barebones: Over the last five years, INTERPUBLIC GROUP lost about $2 BILLION—and the top five execs were collectively paid $107 million. During the same five years OMNICOM's top five pocketed $111 million—on a profit of $3.2 BILLION. (Hmmmm?? Wow!! And: Not unusual.)

Yes!!!!

As a Marylander, I played, as birthright, lacrosse starting at about age 5 and effectively ending at Cornell almost two decades later. (FYI, goalie.) I guess the crowds watching me (& my team) maxed out at a thousand or so for a Princeton game at Princeton. Moreover, the reach of the sport at the time was little more than the mid-Atlantic states, and New England.

Not only has the playing of the sport grown like Topsy (my 20-year-old informs me there's a club team in Durango CO), but so have the interested parties. I must admit I was almost driven to tears when I read yesterday that this weekend's NCAA final, in which Virginia beat Massachusetts 15-7, was witnessed by the largest LAX crowd ever—47,062. (In Philadelphia.)

Tom & Trevor

Trevor came to the London event the week before last—finally, a face to go with the name of one of our most frequent contributors to the Blog. (Other London pics at "Tom's Photos"/Flickr.)

Generosity?!

From the Wall Street Journal, May 13. It's sometimes said Americans are stingy when it comes to foreign aid. Perhaps, but a recent study reports that our $19.7 billion in gov't aid in 2004 topped the charts and was more than #2 and #3 combined—Japan and France. Far more important, private contributions (schools, religious groups, foundations, companies, families and individuals) chipped in, conservatively, $71 billion. As usual in the U.S., it's the private sector and citizenry that lead the way. Incidentally (not so incidentally) $47 billion of the $71 billion came from individuals, not institutions.

The Bigger Story

An article-editorial in U.S. News & World Report (05.29) is titled "The Danger of Drift." It suggests that if Mr Bush's ratings remain in the tank, we will drift for the next three years—regardless of the outcome of mid-term elections. And we'll be in deep doggy doo-doo as a result. Reasonable enough argument. And important when one considers Iran and the like.

But ...

U.S. News & World Report resides in Washington D.C. And, like so many other media outlets, it seems as if it can't see beyond the Beltway—or imagine that any of us "out there" make much of a difference. It's as if we Vermonters wake up every morning, breathless to find out what they did in D.C. yesterday.

Let me be crystal clear: There is not a dollop of "red state, blue state" in this. There is a "them" vs "us"—the Congressmen and lobbyists and White House staffers and even D.C. hoteliers versus the "unsung" "other" approximately 299 million of us.

I lived for 30 years in Northern California, and I was back in glorious SF a week or so ago to do a seminar. Yup, immigration policy was on many lips—as you'd expect. Nonetheless, when one read the Chronicle and the San Jose Merc, one was but vaguely aware that D.C. existed.

Of course there were international news stories—Iraq, Iran, etc. But the gist was how "we" (that's the way I feel, Vermonter or no these days) are gettin' on with gettin' on.

The essential point: How we (CA-ians et al. al. al.) do at gettin' on is the primary determinant in whether we can afford guns & butter 20 years from now—when my stepkids are in their early 40s.

At Haaavaaaad I recently heard a "luminary" talk about the issues that confront us Americans. He listed perhaps 10—the last of which, a throwaway line from his tone of voice, was "preparing for a global economy."

Yes. I damn well pray that nutter in North Korea doesn't loose his weapons. Likewise, the terror of Tehran. But the safety of our mid-term and beyond future—security and economic might that underpins said security—depends a helluva lot more on what's transpiring in Cambridge MA's biotech labs* (and in business establishments in VT and CA and NY and KS and IA and GA) than at the Kennedy School or in the halls of Congress.

Believe it.

(*Hats off to Mike Bloomberg for his graduation address to Johns Hopkins medical school grads—he eschewed White House doctrine and begged us not to denigrate three hundred or so years of traditional scientific progress, citing everything from "intelligent design" to stem-cell research to Terry Schiavo. If my Bloomberg remark counts as "red state"-"blue state" ... my apologies. But as I said, in case you didn't "hear" me the first time—hats off to Republican Mayor Mike. FYI, if you wonder why he was down there declaiming, it's because he is a grad and has given hundreds of millions of $$$$ to Hopkins med. Exerpt: "It boggles the mind that two centuries after Darwin, and 80 years after John Scopes was put on trial, this country is still debating the validity of evolution. ... This not only devalues science, it cheapens theology. As well as condemning these students to an inferior education, it ultimately hurts their opportunities.")

On the Right Track

Our medically uninsured are a big problem—and, at least to me, a global embarrassment. But what if the care, once you do get in the system, is questionable? As readers of this Blog know, I've been on a tear about quality of care in acute-care facilities, emphasis on prevention & wellness & chronic care, erratic application of medical "knowledge," obesity, H5N1 preparedness, and the like. (See my recent healthcare "report card" PPT attached.)

Nonetheless I am delighted to report that my "right stuff" healthcare FILE is bulging from recent reportage. E.g.: "Medical Guesswork: From Heart Surgery to Prostate Care, the Medical Industry Knows Little about Which Common Treatments Really Work" (cover, BusinessWeek, 0529). "What Doctors Hate about Hospitals: An Insider's View of What Can Go Wrong—and How You Can Improve Your Odds of Getting the Right Treatment" (cover, Time, 0501). "Pushing Pills: How Big Pharma Got Addicted to Marketing" (cover, Forbes, 0508). "Hey, You Don't Look So Good: As Diagnoses of Once-rare Illnesses Soar, Doctors Say Drugmakers Are 'Disease-mongering' to Boost Sales" (BusinessWeek, 0508). "Teaching Doctors to Care: The Problem With Most Medical Students Is That They've Never Been Really Sick. Now Some Are Learning What It's Like to Be Chronically Ill." (Headline, Time, 0529). "The Politics of Fat" (Time, 0327). "Obesity Tests: Every Four-year-old in the Country to Be Officially Screened" (The Independent on Sunday, UK, 0521*). (Later in the same paper there was a story about McDonald's new XL burger.) "Call for Switch to Preventive Measures as 29 Billion Pound Cost of Heart Disease Is Revealed" (The Independent, UK, 0515).

Great, more or less! At least these issues are beginning to work their way into the consciousness of our citizenry. And hacking at Big Pharma is way overdue, as I see it; the recently retired CEO of a giant med devices company told me last week that for last year's roughly $15 billion in pharmaceutical research among the U.S. Giants, we got exactly ZERO approved drugs. I haven't checked the accuracy of that statement, but given the source I'm assuming it's right on or damn (damningly?) close.

Innovation

I love New York: Barney's window above.

Last week I spoke at the modestly titled World Innovation Forum in New York. My speech was pessimistic when it comes to hyper-planned innovation; you'll see that from the presentation slides or the immediately attached 2 summary presentations. But I did in the end offer some suggestions—which you'll also find; some are pretty obscure ("you had to be there"), but it is my near-term plan to write up-flesh out this List in some detail. [Innovation Summary PPT and Innovation List Only PPT.]

Thanks, Wikipedia!

Robert Morris. (See yesterday's post.)

Almost All You Need To Know About Leadership

This, from Enron juror Freddy Delgado, an elementary school principal: "I can't say that I don't know what my teachers were doing in the classroom. I am still responsible if a child gets lost."

Sounds like the jury-of-one's-peers system, even in a complex corporate trial, is alive and well. Thanks, Principal Delgado, for your service to our country—I envy the parents and students in your school!

(See attached 2-slide presentation.)

Jeff & Kenny-boy Get Theirs

Several of you have urged me to comment on yesterday's verdicts ... so I will. Fact is I knew Jeff Skilling in his early McKinsey days (he once worked for me), and guilty or not—and doubtless guilty—one shudders when a colleague faces the prospect of years and years in the Big House.

Jeff was indeed the "smartest guy in the room" and a micro-manager to boot—which certainly made it clear to me that the idea that he was unaware of details of his subordinates' affairs was utterly absurd. Likewise the idea that he was ignorant of the shades of gray and then black concerning the border between legal and illegal market manipulation insults his intelligence. So I guess I conclude "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the prosecutors and the jury got it right.

And, alas, I don't particularly wonder why. One starts as a consultant-turned-senior-manager at a modest pipeline company, and a couple of years later one is the Toast of World Business for having created a uniquely important new variety of enterprise; i.e., "smartest guy in the world—ever." (That's an exaggeration, but not too far from the level of Enron hype—after all, it was the 90s.) Moreover, the "guru set" (e.g., Gary Hamel) was at the head of the cheerleader-sycophant parade. (I was mercifully mostly absent—but only because I hadn't gotten around to penning my own "hurrahs.") Hence even the most casual student of human nature can hardly be surprised that no stone, legal or illegal, was left unturned to keep the image of omnipotence alive. In this case that boils down to managing the earnings' stream to Wall Street's liking—and, no matter how smart, coming to believe one's press clippings.

Silicon Valley, my home for 30 years, is a macho place. (Understatement.) (Gross understatement.) Competing with other very smart macho guys for bragging rights is rampant in Santa Clara County CA. In fact, such competition has been rampant wherever boys doused with testosterone have gathered—since we slithered out of the brine. (Sorry, Kansas.) And Enron was a swashbuckling, macho place—for a while the "macho place extraordinaire." Enron, with me applauding, was a band of self-acclaimed "pirates" trashing enterprise stodginess and building a spanking New World Economic Order. I was subsequently appalled at the "screw grandmother" flavor of quotes Enron-ies used as they savagely messed with the California energy market—but not in the least bit surprised. Frankly, that's the way us boys have always talked when nobody was around to hear. (In this case the biz version of the NSA was indeed listening.)

All of which is to say that while the contours of the Enron-Skilling-Lay case are unique, I'm sure it fits neatly into one of the "only seven basic plots" categories.

So, my more or less pal probably goes to jail—doubtless following the best appeals that money can buy. Incidentally "it" has already taken its toll in part. Jeff was a great-looking, buoyant guy—and now it's a pudgy, forlorn visage that emerges on our TV screens. (For what that's worth.)

Some of my closest friends have reddened their hands applauding the string of successful prosecutions at Enron. As I ponder the financial fate of the thousands upon thousands who lost every penny of their pensions, I applaud the verdict, too—though many of those folks did not object at the time to being even bit players at "the coolest place on earth."

I'm glad when the crooks get caught. I even applaud the blunt weapons such as Sarbanes-Oxley which must be occasionally concocted to right the cumulative imbalances of cowboy capitalism run amok. On the other hand I also acknowledge that "cowboy capitalism" is near the heart—and even the soul—of America's 2-century rise to unprecedented global might. (Which I, on balance, consider to be a "very good thing.") Jeff Skilling had nothing on Leland Stanford, for whom my beloved University was named. (Actually it's Leland Stanford JUNIOR University—named after his son.) Mr Stanford was a Member in Excellent Standing of the Robber Barron's Club of America, which stole us blind—and among other things gave us the Transcontinental Railroad. Needless to say, said railroad was one of the Top 5 stimuli to the creation of America's amazing continent-spanning economy that spawned America's amazing global economic enterprise. As I recall (and I shan't Google it), about 10 decades earlier Charles Morris nearly went to the Big House; he was a greedy crook who lined his pockets in grand style—but simultaneously raised a huge share of the money that allowed our forebears to fund the nascent American Revolution. Curb Mr. Morris' "wretched excess"—and we might have sung "Rule Britannia" at the start of the 40th Super Bowl. (Nothing against the Brits mind you—it's that as a Baltimorean* I like our song better.) (*Francis Scott Key, Ft McHenry, etc.)

Without extending this commentary forever, I'd add that Jeff ("smartest guy in the room") Skilling & Kenny-boy were not alone among Renowned CEOs (hint hint) at sailing close to the wind when it came to fixing up earnings on a regular basis in the wild & woolly 90s.

Skilling and Lay had their metaphorical hand in the till. Big time. They got caught. It appears they'll get punished. The system of checks and balances by and large works. And Cowboy Capitalism that underpins the Land of the Free remains a messy business. And thus it shall always be.

God bless America. God bless Cowboy Capitalism. God bless the U.S. Attorney. Life goes on.

(And: Happy Memorial Day. And blessings to the active duty forces and vets and their families everywhere.)

Yesterday's Bright Ideas

Across the Board magazine has an article in its May/June 2006 issue titled "Whatever Happened to Yesterday's Bright Ideas?" They include In Search of Excellence as one of the original influences on a new outlook on business heralded 20+ years ago. They go on to ask—and give their opinions on answers to—these questions:

What impact did this first generation of mass-appeal business ideas actually have? Did these early thinkers change the business world? Two decades on, do their ideas resonate with today's executives and thinkers? And if so, has their effect been positive or negative?

Worth a look.

Cool Friend: Pfeffer

Jeffrey Pfeffer joins the Cool Friends today. His book is Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, and his coauthor is Robert Sutton, who was the subject of one of our interviews in 2002. You may remember that they had a previous book together, The Knowing-Doing Gap. Mr. Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and a well-known speaker. You can read his Cool Friend interview here.

Event: World Innovation Forum

The World Innovation Forum is being presented by HSM in New York with speakers such as Clayton Christensen, Seth Godin, Tom Kelley, and Bran Ferren. Tom is among them, and his slides are here for downloading:
World Innovation Forum
Longer Web-only Version

Room to Read

You know that feeling you get when you do the right thing? Well, we've got it in spades over here. A while back we told you about Tom's participation in The Big Moo. It's a book about being remarkable that was written by 33 authors and edited by our Cool Friend Seth Godin. All the author royalties are being donated to three charities. One of those charities is Room to Read. They've shared with us the very concrete results that the donations are making possible (a school for 4 communities!!). Check out the detailed report or a brief synopsis.

More Brand You

Just in case you all hadn't had enough of brand you...our Cool Friend Raj Setty, author of Life Beyond Code, has created an ebook available as a free download at his site. I think this book began as a pdf but now it is available in NXTbook format. Looks like a pretty cool technology. Check out Raj's site for more details. When you get there, just click on the image of the flipping pages.

Event: London

Finding Inspiration in London: Tom presents a master class in corporate excellence sponsored by tompeterscompany!UK and Benchmark for Business. This is the link to the slides. We apologize for any confusion regarding how to find them.

On the Cover ...

The 1000th issue of Rolling Stone magazine is out, with a laminated 3-D cover featuring pictures of the biggest pop icons of the rock & roll era—reminiscent of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's album cover. [See it here.] The only problem: Where are the Beatles? It took me several minutes to locate them, buried behind the front line of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, and Jimi Hendrix. The latter artists (of whom I'm a huge admirer) deserve their eternal props, but not at the expense of the former. The Liverpool Lads single-handedly resurrected and reinvented rock & roll in 1964 after its demise five years earlier. Simply put, no Beatles = no rock revolution = no Rolling Stone magazine. (Also no Joplin or Hendrix.) As Newsweek once put it: "What the Beatles did in the 60s remains the most thrilling surge of creativity in the history of pop culture." Shouldn't game-changing innovation get a LITTLE more respect?

PowerPoint

Here's someone who likes Tom's approach to PowerPoint: Dave Taylor at the Intuitive Life Business Blog. Thank you, Dave.

Worm In The Apple

I'm using Firefox's new "tabbed browsing" feature, which enables me to have multiple start pages every time I launch the browser. Each page loads, and can be accessed by a tab at the top.

One of my start pages has been—until 5 minutes ago—apple.com. I've had apple.com as one of my start pages so I can access Apple information and, I admit, because I feel affinity for the brand. But I recently started hearing voices every time I fired up Firefox, and I quickly discovered it was because Apple's start page now automatically plays their "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" TV ads.

This is pretty irritating, so I've removed apple.com from my array of start pages. The lesson: It's never a good idea to become so proud of your advertising that you think people will enjoy seeing it when they don't have to. It's like when people make their guests watch boring home videos.

Cool Friend Sighting

Our Cool Friend Bob Sutton has a freshly published book called Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. We've recently interviewed his coauthor, Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer, about the book, and that Cool Friend interview will be posted in the next few weeks. Can't wait that long to hear about the book? Guy Kawasaki interviewed Bob this week. It's an entertaining read. Check it out here. If it makes you nostalgic for Bob's Weird Ideas That Work days, you can re-visit his Cool Friend interview about that book here.

New Cool Friend

Catherine Kaputa is a twenty-year veteran of branding and advertising. The president of SelfBrand, a New York City-based brand strategy and business coaching company, she brings her experience to bear in the book U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success. Tom called it "an excellent and welcome addition to the all too small library on the subject." You can learn more at URaBrand.com, or by reading her Cool Friend interview here.

Cool Friend Announcement

Cool Friend Bo Burlingham is to "appear" in the online Microsoft Leadership Forum. He'll be discussing ideas from his book Small Giants this Thursday, May 11, Noon-1:00 p.m. Eastern time, 9:00-10:00 a.m. Pacific time. If you'd like to sign up for this free online seminar, you can learn more and find a link to registration at smallgiantsbook.com.

Event: ACEO

Tom's talking to the Association of Chief Executive Officers in Athens, Greece. Here are the slides for the event:
ACEO Final
ACEO, Long Version #1
ACEO, Long Version #2

Somebody's Gotta Do It ...

The view from my hotel window. Yup. It's ye olde Acropolis.

Yes, We Really Do Have Covered Bridges!

Coming home on Thursday from my Epsilon/California event, I drove as usual through Brattleboro, VT. About 8 miles North, on VT 30, I came (as usual) to a classic covered bridge—in use no less. Couldn't resist getting the camera out.

First time home in 3 weeks. The new Aussie puppy (Ruby) had doubled in size, or so it seemed; and Spring had sprung. In Vermont, Spring comes like this: gonna come, gonna come, gonna come. Came. Peepers were deafening. Black flies were beginning to appear. (Nasty—Ben's 100 percent DEET for sure. Damn the consequences.) Brambles I'd cleared last year growing an inch a day. Beavers in the pond and clear cutting maples around the pond—hate to admit it, but last year after trying friendly traps, etc. ... we were forced to dynamite their carefully engineered dam. Not able to get the beavers out, the pond was ripe to produce giardia. And our neighbors and our boys and their friends were swimming every day. We'll see how we do this year.

Three full days home—a record in recent times. Now off to Athens for a Tuesday speech to a CEO confab; writing this from MUC, the Munich airport.

Home (Boston) Wednesday for a gala event at the Kennedy School celebrating the life and work of a very much alive Warren Bennis on his 80th. I've got a 15-minute lunchtime speech (Stephen Covey is the other speech-giver), and I'm in a panic I so want to get it right. I dragged about 10 reference books with me to help with prep. Gawd, you'd think it would be easy by now ...

More Bennis: Ruminations Stirred By

generic viagra canada price

As I thought about Warren I thought about my own battles against the Forces of Convention. Hence the attachment (in shorthand) listing a few of my Causes—and enemies thereto.

On Selling

Yesterday's post from Tom about selling has generated a lot of talk. It was chosen for the marketingprofs blog, and it's the topic of a post titled "Selling Stuff" on Clickz.com today. So, take a look, but if you want to comment, we'd of course prefer you do it on our website, not here, but at the original post: "My Schtick."

Happy Birthday!

My Dad would have been 103 today. He died in June 1981, literally three days before an OpEd piece of mine was published in the Wall Street Journal. That was the first thing I'd ever had published in the national press—he would have been beside himself with pleasure. And I would have been beside myself that he was beside himself—Frank Jacob Ebert Peters was as German as the name suggests, and praise didn't exactly emerge from his mouth with regularity. (He was first generation American—my Granddad Peters, a contractor who among other things built Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, came over in the 1870s.)

Banker's Heart

When I worked for McKinsey & Co (1974-1981), we resided on the 49th floor at 555 California in San Francisco, then world headquarters for the Bank of America (above). Down below in the courtyard was a sculpture. God knows who did it or what it was called. From the picture (below) you'll understand why it was more or less fondly called the "banker's heart."

My Shtick

I'm on a new campaign. (Old campaign, really, but renewed vigor—and I single it out from the noise.) I am trying to put ... SALES ... back on the pedestal it deserves. In the process I suppose I'm down-grading marketing—and that's more than okay per me. Of course I think marketing is incredibly important, but I think it intellectually comes second after sales—and the like of MBA programs have mostly eliminated sales from the picture. Stupid! Hence one of my favorite quotes these days is from Robert Louis Stevenson: "Everyone lives by selling something."

This all came up in a presentation yesterday. I championed my Client's cause—the more intense and focused use of databases and analytics associated therewith in marketing. I said, fine—as long as you'll substitute the word "sales" for "marketing." I claimed—and I'm faithful to it in practice—that my two favorite "businessman's terms" are: Sales. Revenue. (Good stuff.) (Very good stuff.)

I also cautioned about the use of "integrated marketing." I said, "Fine, as long as we fully comprehend that said 'integrated marketing' is in service to 'selling more stuff.'" On a roll, I suggested that the extended use of data did not mean, as some said, that "marketing" was going "left brained" (more analytic). Data and analysis, by the front-end-loader-full? Fine! But ... all sales-marketing is in the end about the "Two Es"—Emotion and Experiences. And this is as true for commercial sales as for consumer transactions. The increasingly sophisticated and intense use of data and analytics is effective only to the extent that it supports emotion, experience, sales, and revenue. Period.

I'd acknowledge that's a little strong—but my point, as usual, is to correct what I see as incorrect biases.

Event: Epsilon

Tom's in Monterey, CA, at Quail Lodge, which he tells us is gorgeous. He's with old friends at Epsilon declaiming on the topic of database marketing. You can see his PPTs here:
Epsilon Final and Epsilon Long.

The Road Never Closes

Two hundred years ago, a man named Mendel of Rymanov reminisced about quieter times:

"As long as there were no roads, you had to interrupt a journey at nightfall. Then, you had all the leisure in the world to recite psalms at the inn, to open a book and to have a good talk with one another. But nowadays you can ride on these roads day and night and there is no peace anymore."

In our age of 24 hour connectivity, the road really never closes. (As I write this at 12:15 A.M. in San Francisco.) Does it interrupt peace of mind? What would Mendel say today?

At Last!

Home on the Farm after 2.5 weeks away. (Siberia, Rome, Oman, Phoenix, Orlando.) Out walking within 3 minutes. Signs of Spring ... finally. For instance, new leaves! (And a Canadian goose is sitting on eggs in a cranny near the main barn.)

Predictable

Gender differences are all-important to internal enterprise design—as well as to product development and marketing. As you know, that's been a major pet theme of mine for a decade. I still fight with a lot of people, including my wife, over the extent of such differences. As I see it, like global warming, the science is in—the differences are indeed profound.

Anyway, that's all prelude to one more, in this case semi-scientific, anecdote. Got back to my Boston house at 1 a.m. Saturday. Slept in, and didn't go for my Charles River run (power walk) until 10 a.m. It turned out to be official spring-cleaning day, and a ton of volunteers were out cleaning the winter's crap from the river's edge. After about a quarter or half mile, a little bell went off—and I shifted to semi-scientific mode. Here's my report of my next mile (approximately) of power walking.

The volunteer cleaning crew:

91 women, 16 men.
12 of the 16 men were with a woman, each in a pair; the 4 by-themselves males consisted of a pair and 2 solos.
Do your sums, and that means that 79 of the 91 women were in all-female groups.
Only 2 of the women were solo (2 male solos out of 4 by contrast—but a wee sample). Though I wouldn't vouch for the precise accuracy of the next statistic, my rough recording shows that the median size of the groups of women was 3.

One point of these stats is to show how clear-cut such differences are. If I made a comment about the community-mindedness or group-mindedness of women, and the tally were 61 to 46 that would be one thing, though even then a big difference; 91-16 is, simply, a slam-dunk. And if 7 of the 16 guys had been solo or in an all-male group that would have been "interesting"—but not so compelling as the hypothesis that most of the guys (12 of 16) were probably only there because they'd been dragged by a girlfriend or flat-mate.

Bulletin: Men and Women are (very) different.

[Tom's photo at the top is an eight (crew) on the Charles River rowing past MIT.—CM]

A Gem of an Assertion

I had a fantastic time in Orlando addressing the American Gem Society. (I have an open love affair with small businesses and business owners—I like their nerve, among other things.) To my surprise—and delight—the "marketing to women" issue loomed large.

The conventional industry wisdom is that a large fraction of jewelry is bought by men for women; moreover women would prefer their jewelry to be bought for them by men. (My characterization is slightly—ever so slightly—exaggerated.) However, as I probed, expressing some disbelief (I've heard the same sort of story elsewhere—e.g., financial advice, a woman feels better with a male advisor), some intriguing alternate hypotheses emerged—championed by the relatively small share of female jewelry store owners in attendance.

This was my favorite, from a powerful female business owner (I paraphrase, of course): "Yes, Tom, it's doubtless true that a lot of jewelry is bought by men for women. But there's a clear reason: That jewelry is bought for the stores by men. That is, men [male store owners] instinctively buy for their stores the sort of jewelry that other men would buy for women—hence the end result is as reported, male consumers buying jewelry for women. In my store it's a case of a woman—me—buying jewelry that I think other women would buy for themselves! In fact, the large majority of my customers are women making significant purchases for themselves."

Nice! (Made my day.) (And so it goes in a jillion markets, not just jewelry—what I call "the untested 'oh she prefers it that way' hypothesis.")

Healthcare Report Card

Attached as a one-slide PPT you'll find my healthcare Report Card, created for a recent presentation.

Old & New

I made a major revision to the new presentation that's been pre-occupying me since Siberia: Excellence. Always. Also you'll find a new-old presentation I've been fiddling with: The Work Matters: On Self-reliance, Becoming a "Change Insurgent," and the Power of Peculiarities.

Jeff Angus at Inbubblewrap

Our friends at inbubblewrap are featuring our cool friend Jeff Angus' book today. Head on over, and if you're lucky you might score a free copy.

Marketingprofs Blog

Tom has agreed to let the folks at blog.marketingprofs.com use some of his posts. Check it out. You won't find anything new by Tom, but you might find something of interest. They have a good idea—collecting marketing messages from various places and contributors into one location. Among the participants are Seth Godin, who's a Cool Friend, and Andrea Learned, who's the coauthor of Don't Think Pink.