Shape of Things

When I was in college, a good friend nervously opened a major presentation in a poetry course this way: “I feel like I should start with a joke.  My hometown is so small it legalized incest.”  Except for my snickering, utter silence.

A few years before as a particularly unworldly freshman, I was confronted with a tribunal of girls who wanted to screen my worthiness to court their girlfriend.  I began my case and sealed it with this intro: “Well, I’ve been with a lot of girls…”

A leading technology analyst and editor once opened his conference keynote speech on an optimistic note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”

After college, I did a combined slide/audio presentation on reggae and debuted it at a party.  A friend’s wife came up to me afterwards and said: “I really didn’t think you were smart enough to do something like that.”

Me to future wife at beginning of a date early in our relationship: “Whew, your breath is bad…”

Guy to me after introducing myself at a business meeting: “You must get a lot of jokes about that name.” Me: “Ugh, not really…”

Some lines don’t leave us no matter how hard we try to forget them.  What regrettable lines have stuck with you?

In January 1969 the Beatles went into the studio to prepare for a live concert and a new album.  Recording sessions were filmed and almost everything – from musical noodling to offhand comments to deep discussions – was captured on audio tapes.  The resulting film and record were named after the song “Let It Be.”

A blow-by-blow account in the book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster, documents the painful end of a decade-long relationship.  It also offers lessons to business managers about paying attention to the changes their organizations are going through.

By “Let it Be,” George had become a major songwriting talent, but John and Paul refused to acknowledge his remarkable ascent.  In many ways, he was still seen as the adolescent kid of the group.  George reacted according to casting: bitter, sarcastic and uncooperative.

John, who formed the band and was its leader for most of its history, had become withdrawn and uncommunicative. His new obsessions: Yoko and hard drugs.  He was barely an active participant in the sessions.

With John’s abdication as a leader and George’s recalcitrance, Paul had to take on too much responsibility.  He pulled out every trick – cajoling, pleading, joking, challenging – but to no avail.  He ended up coming off shrill and egotistical.

Ringo, well, was Ringo.

“Let it Be” was a train wreck.  But, could it have been avoided?

Maybe — if someone had filled the leadership void left by Brian Epstein’s death.

Maybe — if someone could have figured out the now-conventional approach of letting individual members of a band record solo albums to give them a creative outlet for passions not shared by the rest of the group.

Maybe — if The Beatles could have taken a step back from their commitments and tried to define a common goal and sensible timetables.

What they did instead was to ignore much of what was happening around them and try to conduct business as usual.

The events leading up to The Beatles breakup are eerily familiar to anyone who has managed a business: Employees growing on divergent paths, at different rates, or not at all.  Wasteful spending. Scattered priorities. The perceived need to do more, more, more. An organizational structure riddled with cracks.  Without continuous monitoring, discussion and adjustments, companies can find themselves in the same situation as The Beatles in January 1969.

Let it be at your own risk.

The jury has reached its verdict on Simon Galbraith’s bold experiment to prove the superiority of professional photography for marketing.

Who’s hot and who’s not? See the results in Simon’s second guest spot on the Business of Software blog.

My attitude about PR has often been like Groucho’s about clubs: ” I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”  More to the point, who’d want to be a member of the PR club, especially the way its members have handled their duties?

I answer to PR like I do a childhood nickname I don’t want to carry into adulthood.  Although I still do a good bit of traditional PR and more than my share of press releases, I’m always aware of the audience and what I’m saying to them. That’s telling a story, and it’s the real business I’m in.

I’m writing about it today as a shameless piggyback to an excellent posting by Seth Godin.  There’s also a much longer (probably too long) posting I did for the Business of Software blog.

Most of the great leaders I know are self-effacing.  They’ll open themselves to ridicule if it makes a point.

A good example: Simon Galbraith, joint CEO of Red Gate. In this post on the Business of Software blog, he literally puts his face on the line to prove his theory of professional vs. amateur photography in marketing.

You decide. Is Simon is hot or not?

Everyone should have a manifesto.  Here’s mine, directly from my myspace page:

I’m a writer and marketing/communications consultant for high-tech companies. My current quest is to change the way companies conduct public relations, evolving it from a predominately outgoing, frequently self-aggrandizing activity to one that emphasizes ongoing dialogue with customers and a relationship that goes beyond products and services.

The best companies don’t need to proselytize; their messaging comes from their customers and the way their stories are told. PR needs to shift from a hype machine to a means of building community and keeping the lines of communication open. We should be helping people, not trying to coerce them.

I’m also working to bring some literacy to the pedestrian “success story” or “case study,” turning it into the kind of feature story that people actually want to read. Finally, I’d like to eradicate all the robust, intuitive, user-friendly, world-leading new paradigms that plague technology communication.

A few decades ago, I worked at a very large electronics company.  A good company, with good benefits and pay. My parents and relatives were proud. I was almost immediately distraught — stuck in a job with little chance of advancement, working for a  boss who was miserable and wanted to share his plight with others.

In those times, you didn’t leave a company like this one.  But, my mental survival almost depended on it. I got out and went to work for a little-known association, where I was given a huge amount of responsibility. I learned more than I ever had in my life.  I was happy.

One of the things that is happening as a result of the recession is that people are realizing that multinational conglomerates are not the future.  We’ve sacrificed too much to accommodate them.  The future lies in small- to medium-sized companies with a big distribution arm enabled by digital technologies.   Ping Fu of Geomagic calls this digitally enabled cottage industry.

One of the hopes we can cling to as we emerge from this recession is that the big dinosaurs will be replaced by small, agile companies that are driven by passion. Companies that make their employees their first priority, followed by their customers.  Profits will be critical, but they will not be obscene. There will be a proliferation of what Bo Burlingham calls Small Giants.

Peggy Noonan, who has gone through some pretty big changes herself, says it well in her February 20 column from the Wall Street Journal:  

I end with a hunch that is not an unhappy one. Dynamism has been leached from our system for now, but not from the human brain or heart. Just as our political regeneration will happen locally, in counties and states that learn how to control themselves and demonstrate how to govern effectively in a time of limits, so will our economic regeneration. That will begin in someone’s garage, somebody’s kitchen, as it did in the case of Messrs. Jobs and Wozniak. The comeback will be from the ground up and will start with innovation. No one trusts big anymore. In the future everything will be local. That’s where the magic will be. And no amount of pessimism will stop it once it starts.