Data As Fear

The National Security Agency’s Prism revelations have contributed to America’s growing ambivalence and fear around privacy and personal data. Who knows what legislation may result from it all? I know that, like many fellow citizens, I was not alarmed by our government’s data-gathering practices. I am more alarmed by what private enterprise can and may do with my data. But, for me, that’s an old saw.

Author Mitch Joel released a book, Ctrl, Alt, Delete, that attempts to establish a certain level of fear and foreboding in us by offering up some staggering statistics indicating how our world has changed, transformed by the digital revolution. It’s yet another police siren the digerati persists in blowing and I’m not sure why. We know the world is changing, for God’s sake. Rather than dish facts, how about demonstrating some traction and results?

Mr. Joel includes a long list of really compelling and surprising stats, but he leads with classic digi-style Chicken Little hyperbole:

“The World Is Changing”—except, “Is Changing” is crossed out in red, fire-engine type (naturally) and is replaced by the more severe “Has Changed.” Then comes the sucker punch . . . “There’s only one question: Do you want to be employable in the next five years?” Somehow it makes me feel like mom just threatened with, “You’d better clean up your room, buster, or you’re going to bed hungry.”

The facts that follow are indeed staggering and do indicate that our world has changed, but then our world is nothing but a morphing, twisting, grinding mass of change. The very land we stand on changes constantly. Our weather, our biological ecosystems, our brains, and our cellular structures are in a rapid state of change. Change doesn’t scare us—it’s expected. And the chaos that ensues isn’t paralyzing; it’s energizing. Change isn’t about fear; it’s about regeneration, rebirth, and transformation.

Mr. Joel might have taken a cue from the gold standard of service journalism and posited, “The World Has Changed: 10 Ways to Assure You’ll Be Employable for the Digital Epoch.” Regardless, the facts are wondrous, ridiculous, without context, and bold—and here are just a few:

1. Google’s revenue is bigger than that of the entire U.S. print industry.
2. Sixty-six percent of Apple’s revenues derive from products released within the past six years.
3. Amazon’s annual revenue is larger than the GDPs generated by half of the countries in the world.
4. In 1999, 38 million people had broadband. Today, 1.2 billion have it on their mobile phones.
5. Half of Facebook’s 150 million daily visits are done on mobile.
6. More people have mobile subscription services than have access to safe water and electricity.
7. Kickstarter raised more money for nonprofits than the National Endowment for the Arts.
8. The average tenure of a chief marketing officer is 48 months.
9. The average Facebook post on a brand page only reaches 16 percent of fans.
10. At least 200 million tablets will be sold in 2013.
11. Seventy-seven percent of smartphone users accessed local content in 2012.
12. Eighty-one percent of users trust information on Pinterest.
13. Reddit has 62 million unique visitors each month, serves 4.4 billion pageviews, and has 22 employees.
14. Only 12 percent of employees believe their companies are keeping up with the changing landscape of business.

And there you have it. So either get out the bottle of Xanax or hoist a glass to the opportunity and fun ahead!

Don’t Eff The Help

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a person entirely . . . all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky

My father-in-law owned restaurants. Like retail, it was a rough, tough business. His loudest and most common gripe was not being able to find good help. Competent, trusted waitresses, dish bussers, bartenders, even managers were hard to find. And the good ones were even harder to keep, many jobs back then being thankless tasks for pennies and nickels.

Sixty years later, good help is still hard to find. But work has changed dramatically. My father-in-law was looking for hard-working people. Today, employers and employees are looking for much more. Philosopher Roman Krznaric says in a recent book, “The desire for fulfilling work—a job that provides a deep sense of purpose and reflects our values, passions, and personality—is a modern invention. . . . the spread of material prosperity has freed our minds to expect much more from the adventure of life.”

Indeed, contemporary employers seek people with characteristics that go well beyond baselines like solid work ethic, and they’re willing (somewhat) to pay for attitudinal traits like motivation, passion, loyalty, innovation, and creativity. When they find them, they hold on tight. Or do they? As Krznaric points out: “Never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles and been so unsure about what to do about it.”

We’ve been lucky. Our attrition rate is very low relative to other small businesses, and retention rates for staff extending beyond 10 years is very high. A recent study conducted for Monster.com indicated that one of every two workers reported dissatisfaction or indifference to their current job. Eighty percent updated their resumés in the past six months, and almost two-thirds of workers reported that they look for new jobs either “all the time” or “frequently.” U.S Labor Department statistics indicate that 3.1 percent of employees leave their jobs in any given month.

Really pretty staggering when you consider that the unemployment rate and the constriction of businesses in the past five years have created high barriers to entry for better options. Yet the numbers persist, belying a high degree of failure among companies to seriously engage their staff with cultural compatibility, variety, purpose, or creative and challenging work.

As one who runs a company, I’d hate to think that 60 percent of the people I greet by name each day are actually looking for another job. On the other hand, it’s unreasonable to expect that colleagues don’t have the right and responsibility to their careers and their families to seek the best possible opportunity—not just financially, but those that offer purposeful and self-actualizing environments for what they do eight to 10 hours a day, five or six days a week.

Like most companies, we don’t possess the financial wherewithal to compensate people at levels exceeding industry standards, but we do try to maintain effective enough communication between managers and their staffs to remain aware and sensitive to situations or workloads that might require a reconsideration of compensation, budget notwithstanding. We will readily increase salaries if we believe they’re warranted and will offer unsolicited increases when performance dictates. But according to nearly every bit of research I read about employee satisfaction, it’s not the comp that floats their boat. It’s more about, as Krznaric suggests, “finding work that is life-enhancing, that broadens our horizons and makes us feel more human.”

We don’t always succeed at delivering the goods. Nor do we succeed in retaining our best employees. We lose good people. But short of losing a superstar, the silver lining is there’s usually opportunity in turnover. And, there are times when even the best people simply tire of their role and need a new challenge. There’s little a company can do to beat that dead horse.

Peter Drucker proposed a measure for how employees judged their job satisfaction, called the Equity Theory. Put simply, it asks: Do I get back what I put in? I have a feeling that the majority of people looking for alternative work would unanimously agree that they are not fairly compensated or appreciated for the work they put in. Some may be correct. As managers, we know some are not. Regardless, it’s a great question for every manager to ask, in reverse: Do we give back to each of our employees what they put in?

Companies that choose not to ask the question—or that resist focusing on offering a modicum of respect and dignity, an engaging, embracing culture, or the chance to flex creative, ideative, and intellectual muscles—risk having their staffs wandering the hallways wondering if the grass is greener, or worse, harvesting their updated resumés from the company photocopier.

Stupid 101

I HATE junk mail, paper or electronic. I’m not referring to the concentrated evil that is spam. This is about the faceless jerks who send out millions upon millions of unsolicited offers every day. To them, modern America is one big, juicy turkey leg—a great unwashed willing to buy just about anything, sight unseen. They harangue us daily with the trustworthiness of a carnival barker, the desperation of a drowning rat, and the pure hubris that comes from decades of selling flip flops to Eskimos.

Case in point, I received a form letter the other day from a company called the Neptune Society. Sounds aquatic! Release the Krakon! Sadly, it turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Roman god of the sea. The Neptune Society is all about the science of thrusting bodies, unburdened of life, into ovens so hot they’ll turn Uncle Louie, Conchita the hairdresser, or Mel the butcher into piles of indistinguishable carbon flakes—the equivalent of being flicked off the end of an overly long cigarette ash.

As I perused the letterhead, a line in the lower left corner caught my eye: “Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details Inside.” Details? Are they checking my temperature on bodily disposal or do they have an inside track on arrivals and departures?

How was I selected to receive this incredible offer? At a time when personal privacy data is being handed out like cereal boxes on street corners, is it possible that one of my medical vendors sold a list of high-risk heart patients to this direct marketer? Actuarially my age makes me a candidate for the Grim Reaper Sweepstakes, I suppose. Or, perhaps something about dying or serious illness showed up on Facebook and a Zuckerberg algorithm spit me out on a list of people doing morbid posts. Zuckerberg does that, you know.

In general, marketers are oblivious to how sensitive our bullshit meters have become. They presume we desire a conversation with them. That we have an interest in becoming their friend, liking them, following them, pinning them, or worse, developing a crush and falling in brand-love. They tease us with one-night stands like coupons, sweepstakes, and free offers. They play Where’s Waldo with us, cleverly hiding their products on the sets of TV shows or jamming James Bond behind the wheel of an Audi thinking it’ll sucker us into buying one. They cajole us with wink-wink slogans and funny but irrelevant videos. They use sick kids and tender scenes to convince us they’re people too. They sneak messages into digital content that we are led to believe is unbiased, useful information. They mostly think like people running booths on a carnival midway, not multimillion-dollar enterprises.

The Neptune Society says it will allow family members to conduct “simple services” (read: not pricey) at “their convenience” (read: immolate Auntie Carol before she starts stinking up the living room). They say it’s “less expensive” (gas ’n a match, fingersnap!). They say it allows families a “dignified resting place” (me displayed in a lovely urn on the mantle to freak the s**t out of the grandkids). And, as if those aren’t reasons enough to sign up, they pull out all the stops on a forehead-scruncher of a close with a quote from that famous cremation advocate, Eleanor Roosevelt:“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.”

Hmmm, a “present” from the Neptune Society. Like birthday or Christmas, yah?! The quid pro quo is I send them a fistful of dollars. Then, on that fateful day my heart slams on the brakes and I head butt my bowl of oatmeal across the kitchen like a tiddly wink, I am literally toast, pre-paid. Sweeeeet!

Makes one want to jack the cane, crank up the oxygen, unload the catheter bag, and scurry to the land line to dial up King Neptune and get those waiting furnaces a cracklin’. Plus, in their best Bob Barker voice, they tell me I can register for a FREE Pre-Paid Cremation and, if I hit the jackpot, I can get microwaved to a crisp for nothing—nada—just like last month’s sweepstakes winner, Johnny Thompson. Poor old Johnny, you could hardly recognize him after the procedure.

All I need do is enter my name: Mr. Gary M. Johnson!

Sounds good, but that’s not my name. But then, for direct marketers, it’s not about getting the names right. Just make the sale, baby. Somewhere out there in the lonely and sad-yet-pragmatic “body disposal” marketplace, there’s a Gary M. Johnson chewing on a towel waiting to hear from these guys. Certainly he’ll take the bait and enter his name in their Bake-Off.

For now, I’m off the hook. Think I’ll go crack a cold one.

Trends That Bite

1. Procter & Gamble has announced that it will begin paying its advertising agency and other vendor invoices 120 days out from invoice date. You may say, “So what?” I say: De.spic.a.ble. Increasingly, service companies working with major corporations are being bent and twisted by reduced fees and transmogrified arrangements. Ad agencies, which have long enjoyed remarkably hefty fees for creating clever messaging, are being slammed to the mat of late, as ROI has become every CMO’s Holy Grail. But there are right and wrong ways to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip, and late payment isn’t one of them. P&G justifies its new policy by insisting that it can’t measure ROI on campaigns until an adequate amount of time has passed, which may be true. So calculate payments on fees (now) plus achievement of goals (later) and pay on time, net 30. The only time 120-day payments could possibly be justified is when declining profits and thin cash flows require it. Vendors get that and are always willing to accommodate. P&G’s first-quarter profits this year were up $160 million to $2.7 billion. Not exactly a cash-flow crunch. This is simply a ball squeeze by folks holding the money and power. And it’s wrong.

2. Speaking of advertising, I saw a television ad the other night, not at all sure who it was for. It was a product-placement parade, including, among others, Pandora. Makes one wonder if a new genre in advertising is on the horizon, turning ads into Seinfeld episodes, i.e., about nothing. Imagine watching a 60-second spot with products appearing in moments of pure happenstance. Could be the next wave of ambient marketing. In a way, it smacks of the latest trend in digital advertising, native ads, i.e., embedded commercial messaging among what my former partner and editor Brian Anderson used to refer to as “real edit.” Should it really be the responsibility of consumers to use every discernment mechanism at their disposal to separate the wheat from the chaff in the fields of content they’re wandering through? Marketers seem lost, or at the very least obsessed, with expectations from distracted consumers that are unrealistic and unattainable.

3. A recent court case in New York brings to light an interesting trend in the world of words. When does a colloquialism become an officially recognized word? It used to be easy to identify slang from proper English. Noah Webster had all the answers. This particular court case revolved around the verbiage of an accused criminal where the term “jack” was used to describe the offense. The courts sourced the widely-used (110 million visits per month) Urban Dictionary to properly define the slang term, jack: to steal or take from an unsuspecting person or store. Nowhere in Webster’s or Oxford will one find that definition. Webster’s goes so far as to provide several definitions: a familiar term of address to a social inferior, a device for turning a spit, a portable mechanism for lifting a heavy object, a female fitting in an electrical circuit, money, etc. Everything but thievery. The Urban Dictionary is just one of many examples where our formal world is being blown to bits and once-sacred norms are crumbling before our eyes.

4. David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, “What Our Words Tell Us,” referenced a recent book and study that identified a fascinating data set derived from Google’s cataloguing of all books written since 1500. The data exposes a trend over the past 50 years indicating a tectonic shift in our cultural and moral priorities based upon the frequency of words appearing in published texts. It’s an unscientific but telling prism into how varying concentrations in our language are directly related to changes in our moral frames and cultural values. As an example, one aspect of the study found that words and phrases referring to individual traits, e.g., self, standout, personalized, come first, unique, etc., were far more common in recent years than those referencing community, e.g., collectives, united, common good, or share—a trend that only began to appear since 1930. It’s yet another new and innovative means of understanding ourselves, this time by chronicling history in data points versus the written word.

Making Life More Bearable

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem, even a lousy poem. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”—Kurt Vonnegut

In a recent Los Angeles Times Q&A, theater director, playwright, and professor Peter Sellars was asked why art over the past 25 years has failed to humanize the country.

Sellars’ poignant answer . . .

“The humanities were systematically removed from the menu of most Americans. The result is you get a less humane civilization. We’re surrounded by every kind of petty and large-scale injustice and we’ve learned not to comment on it, not to make an issue of it, just to keep our heads down and keep moving. That’s so not American and so not looking out for anyone else. It’s deliberately neutering your own personal justice sensors.

“And of course the humanities are all about activating your justice sensors and also about the empowerment of not just sitting there but actually realizing we’re all on Earth to be creative, to change things, to make powerful transformations in our lives and the world around us. We are in such deep, deep, deep waters, the only solutions are going to be creative ones. And creativity is the very thing that has been removed from the school system.”

Sellars is correct that the humanities are a direct channel to having an open mind and heart. The awesome spark of creativity is a mostly-missing curriculum in many of our children’s early lives, largely the result of reduced school budgets, less aware and awake parents, school boards, and politicians. Children are the most naturally creative beings on the planet, yet we starve them of the inspiration and stimulation to keep their creative lights flickering when we deny them a steady and robust diet of arts and literature.

The humanities challenge the cultural jails built around tribalism and narrow mindedness. They counter the effects of anomie, the sense of being lost, adrift, without roots, of not counting. Studs Terkel said, “When you become part of something, in some way you count. To count is very important.” Unfortunately, there are more opportunities in our society not to count than ever before. I’m not referring to Little League baseball trophies or blue ribbons for just showing up. This is more about understanding and feeling akin to the world we live in.

Technology separates us. Many would insist otherwise, but technology, even when connecting, is done from a distance. Though Mark Zuckerberg insists Facebook’s claim to fame is community, one could argue that it is not community at all, only a tool not unlike the Pony Express, locomotives, telegraphs, land-line phones, and home-delivered mail—delivery systems that did little to create interconnectedness, the belief and practice that we are all connected, intimately so, inside this eco-space we all share.

Ideologies separate us. Though some might insist they unite us, ideologies are, by nature, views confined. Not that I’m a big fan of the Theater of the Absurd, but playwright Eugene Ionesco said, “The absence of ideology in a work does not mean the absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.” A broader view might suggest that exposure to the humanities and creative thinking serves to counter the ritualism and stasis so inherent in ideology, opening minds to ideas and enlightenment.

Creativity, derived through exposure to and practice of the arts, i.e., music, literature, image and design, theater and performance, etc., is a source of spiritual and intellectual nutrition kids should never be deprived of—at school or at home. It envelops them in the stardust of history, imagination, culture, and meaning. Einstein said: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of coming attractions.” By extension, creative thinking can solve all manner of existing problems, forcing us out of our boxes and our comfort zones, allowing us to flex our psychic muscles in ways that anticipate future need, provide alternative solutions, stretch perspectives, and most certainly enjoin and engage.

I have seen it in action at schools like Cretin-Derham Hall where Katie Kreitzer’s theater productions are inspiring showcases of the halo effect creativity and focus can have on high school students. I’ve seen it in my own business where people rank a work environment in which they can be creative far above job benefits like wages and personal recognition. I’ve seen it profoundly affect audiences, like the April 21 heart-and-soul-fest for Gwen Matthews at the Dakota Jazz Club. And, I’ve seen it countless times observing people comfortably embryonic in a chair, rapt in a sticky story.

Creativity. It is releasing, magical, and transformative. And the humanities are the superhighway to getting there. Yeah, we need to force more math and science down our kids’ throats and yes, they need to learn discipline and respect for others. But creativity is the lynchpin for “connecting things,” as Steve Jobs pointed out. And without the arts, we can’t begin to “let go of the certainties,” as noted psychologist Erich Fromm suggested we do, thereby creating epiphanies that piece Humpty back together again, in new and perhaps game-changing ways.