Endeavorance
The point of our blog isn’t to show you how up to date we are with buzzwords and jargon. It isn’t to instruct you with how-to guides, tips, tricks, and hacks. It isn’t to encourage, endorse, or engage in conformity. The point of our blog is to provoke, to counter popular notions, to question the status quo, to prompt your imagination, and to challenge you to think and achieve more than you might otherwise. Whatever happens, it’s worth the endeavor.
Endeavorance
The point of our blog isn’t to show you how up to date we are with buzzwords and jargon. It isn’t to instruct you with how-to guides, tips, tricks, and hacks. It isn’t to encourage, endorse, or engage in conformity. The point of our blog is to provoke, to counter popular notions, to question the status quo, to prompt your imagination, and to challenge you to think and achieve more than you might otherwise. Whatever happens, it’s worth the endeavor.
Innovation is the New Imagination
Another wonderful word has bitten the generational dust, kids: imagination. "Yeah," I hear you thinking. "This arbitrary substitution of terminology happens all the time. It's the way of a world committed to creating the illusion of thoughtful, creative intelligence...
Surround-Sound Scuba
Given the accelerating pace of change, especially technological change, we should have expected this. Even if we'd noticed nothing but the changes in contact-lens technology, we'd have had to recognize that anything was possible; that the limitations earth, wind,...
Nobody Loves Me But My Mother … and Big Data
It's official, kids: Big Data is around the bend, out of control, and off the charts. To prove the point, Harvard Business Review published an article called, "Data-Driven Management Can Also Be Compassionate". Featuring a photograph of Amazon's CEO -- appearing to...
Marketing and Engineering
The Hartford Business Journal, published right here in my very own Nutmeg State, ran a piece the other day that constituted another timely reminder of Immutable Communication Rules 1 through 6. The piece was called, "Seven Secrets to Project Management Success". And...
Marketing: From Revolution to Convolution
We need to resurrect insult, kids. I don't mean we should insult each other any more than we already do. I mean it's time to be more cognizant of being insulted when we are. Exhibit A: "A Contrarian View on Innovation in Advertising & PR": I actually take a...
Blowing My Marketing Stack
I don't know that it was officially declared. But this may have been Marketing Week. After I wrote this post on Wednesday — "Marketing Should Be Simple: Part Deux" — this one popped into my queue: "What's in Your Marketing Stack?" The question in the title prompts...
Big Data: Cynicism vs. Reality
At the rate at which Goliaths seem to be taking hits, I'm starting to wonder if David may have invested in a machine-gun version of his trusty slingshot. First it was inbound marketing. Then it was performance appraisals. Now it's Big Data. The most recent salvo was...
Marketing Should Be Simple: Part Deux
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. (Carlos Fuentes) If I weren't the epitome of the Eternal Optimist — and if I didn't believe utterly in the cyclical nature of all things (yes, sanity WILL return) — I'd be despondent right about now. I'd feel as if my...
Catch the Buzz
I was talking to my Zen master, Buzz Siddhartha, the other day. We actually don't talk much. We usually just sort of stare at each other in ostensible attempts to achieve various states of being and nothingness. (Buzz is French on his mother's side.) But after gawking...
Pathways
Bearing in mind that I write from the relatively affluent western part of the world -- from the United States of America, in particular -- I recognize the generalizations I express herein are limited to the socio-economic realities of geography. And I concede that...
Pre-Crisis Public Relations
Kevin Donnellon, president of Macali Communications, published a list of seven tips for managing prospective public-relations disasters under this headline: "Preparing For Your Jared Fogle or Spokesperson Crisis". Mr. Donnellon's syntactical and grammatical challenges...
In the Soup
Thou shalt not dilute thy brand.1 Thou shalt not create brand confusion.2 Apparently, the folks at Google neglected to read The Branding Bible (or at least my book therein) before getting themselves in the soup with their recent (re)branding debacle. As result,...
The Promise of Promise
promise (noun): a declaration that something will or will not be done, given, etc.; e.g., unkept political promises Just when you thought it was safe to hypothesize that human nature might have evolved emotionally and psychologically to a point at which the...
Welcome to the Bandwagon, Twitter
The bandwagon is about to get a little more crowded, kids. According to Neil Hughes, Twitter might be on the verge of ditching its differentiation: "Has Twitter Ditched 140 Character Limit to Crack Dark Social?" Why would they do such a thing? For two reasons: First,...
Death by Bureaucracy
We seem to have another fledgling theme on our hands, kids. Less than three weeks after Ron Baker and I sounded the death knell for performance appraisals, Richard Moran offers a variation on the tune with this post: "Death to Performance Reviews!" Mr. Moran starts...
The Importance of Brand
In the first college course I ever took, Introduction to Literature, the professor said something that remains with me always: "John Donne's poetry rewards study." And so it is with this article in Entrepreneur: "Why Building Your Business Comes Before Building Your...
A Screw Loose
I was intrigued by a headline I read the other day: "The 3 Business Models That Matter for Connected Hardware Startups". True to the headline, the article under the headline went on to list ... well ... you know. I recognize the likelihood that I may have missed...
Who Cares For Our Health Care?
After I wrote about Big Brother in less than glowing terms the other day, I found a post called, "The health plan of the future is easy to see". The post is one in a series published by Deloitte. Notice it doesn't say, "The health insurance policy of the future is...
Stop the Presses
Sound the alarm! Call out the hysterics! Summon the Special Interest Police! Mobilize the Social Equalizers! Put out an APB (absolutely peremptory blame)! Money just published the results of an incriminating study — "Getting Mad at Work Can Cost Women $15,000 in...
The Market Doesn’t Emote
We need to get a grip of our knickers, kids. We've become accustomed to being taken care of. We're conditioned to thinking of government as a benign parent, guiding us along our painless paths with a gentle, altruistic hand. And we're inured to imagining Big Brother...
Beware Free Advice
I saw an announcement on LinkedIn the other day that, on clicking through, brought me to the announcement that Prophet and Altimeter Group are joining forces. (I don't know anything about either company, nor am I affiliated with either company in any way. Both...
Writers, Rejoice!
Well, well. well. Look what I found. An exoneration. An affirmation. A contradiction of the ever-absurd notion that the only things people will read are bullet points, tweets, or series of acronyms: "Your Customers Like Long-Form Content Much More Than You Think They...
Laurence Peter Got it Right
Disruption is back. Actually, it never really went anywhere — not, at least, since it became a buzzword. It reappeared last month in a post called, "Think outside the box: Adaptation (not disruption) is the game". The post states concisely in 485 words what...
Go Ahead, Back Up
Since I don't believe in accidents, I wasn't surprised when a recent spate of vendor acquisitions in the insurance industry coincided with my finding a related, 10-year-old article while rummaging through the bowels of The Chautauqua Center for Synchronous...
Technology in Retreat?
Wow. This stuff is starting to come fast and furious now. Soon after I cited Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) in this post about the pitfalls (if not shortfalls) of data-driven content marketing (aka inbound marketing and marketing automation, two contradictions in...
Forever Young
I don't know whence our inclination to treat symptoms, rather than diseases, derives. I suspect it's a combination of fear, laziness, political correctness, and a kind of willful ignorance born of the relative luxury in which we've become accustomed to living. ("I...
Subjective Objectivity
One of my older sister's favorite expressions is this: "No guts, no air medals." While it does seem harder and harder to find people with guts these days — people with the courage to stand up, stand out, and tell difficult truths — there are still some around. Ron...
Deep(ak) Thoughts
Dear Deep, I read your recent LinkedIn post, "How to Get a Clear Mind", with keen interest. Given the morbid fear of marionettes I developed after an unfortunate childhood incident with Howdy Doody (thank God Buffalo Bob was there), this passage, especially, struck a...
Water Isn’t the Only Thing That Flows Downhill
In the course of our research for a book we once created as a specialty publishing project — Origin/Destination: 75 Years of the New England Water Environment Association — we learned that it took the residents of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, 50 years to figure out the...
Serendipity
Wow! Sometimes I just can't believe how coincident (but not coincidental) life can be and, in my case (forgive me for personalizing), how charmed my life can be. Just as I was thinking I was on the verge of a mid-life crisis or some kind of long-term malaise, along...
The Lady Doth Protest Too Much
I don't know that LeAnne Brinkies is familiar with Hamlet, let alone Queen Gertrude. As the Bard might say, 'tis a pity. Had she been so familiar, she might have gone about "Native advertising – the editorial vs advertorial debate" in a different way. And she almost...
Sharing: What a Concept
On Tuesday night, I was the featured speaker at the annual meeting of Literacy Volunteers Valley Shore (LVVS, about which I wrote here). This may suggest two things about LVVS: Their character judgment is deeply suspect and their speaker pool is perilously shallow if...
Ice Breakers for Agorophobes
Every once in a while, you happen onto something that makes you appreciate just how hard life can be. On those occasions, you realize how much more sympathetic you can be, how much more helpful you can be, and how much better you can make other people feel as they...
Go With the Flow
I came across a book review in The Financial Times over the past weekend in which the author, Julian Baggini, finding a common thread running through the three books he reviewed, wrote something arresting — something that directly contradicts the popular and...
Self-Help Insurance
On the day I searched Amazon for books on work/life balance, there were 1,702 results returned. I'll bet if I'd conducted the same search the next day, there would have been more. That made me wonder: If all of the employees who read these books practice what the...
The Whole Entire Enchilada
The other day, as I was giving my cat, Sammy, his usual evening repast, which consists of a half-can of wet food (he snacks on dry food all day), he said, "Just give me the whole shebang." The next day, as I was repeating the process, he said, "Just give me the whole...
Pencil Pusher
In an effort to keep my horizons as broad as possible, I've been taking correspondence courses in Women's Fashion from the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM). To say it's been fascinating would be understatement bordering on the obscene. Among other positively...
DeFacing LinkedIn
There are times at which you have no choice but to accept the fact that you’re going to be judged as being callous. At those times, you simply have to be okay with it. That's why I'm okay if I'm judged as being callous for vehemently expressing this truth: LinkedIn is...
From the Mailbag: Volume Three
Having just published our 200th post, this month saw an unusually vigorous influx of billets-doux from our ever-growing legions of loyal readers. In fact, the volume of inbound correspondence was so high, our regular postman contracted a quadruple hernia schlepping...
A Legal Conundrum
I need your help. Amazon is being sued for not saying it doesn't sell something. That actually has nothing to do with us. But here's where you come in: If two wrongs don't make a right, can you help me understand why two negatives make a positive? I'm no physicist....
The Professional Nebbish
I've discovered yet another reminder that I'm going about everything all wrong. I'm the kind of guy who takes seriously the U.S. Army commercials about being the best you can be. I suffer with a chronically stiff neck from setting my sights too high. I get up early,...
My Irish Coffee With Bono
After I got through the promo for his new book — and his seven-minute video — I read a LinkedIn post Tuesday from Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall's famous. If he isn't, he should be. It's also possible he thinks he is — or thinks he should be. I'm not sure. What I am...
A Happier Medium
My recent post, An Unhappy Medium, spawned an exchange of thoughts with a colleague, Brent Robertson. Since that exchange expanded some of the notions presented in the post, I share excerpts from it here for your reading pleasure: Brent: I just had this conversation...
Up Your UFO
I don't mean to appear skeptical or disrespectful. And I certainly don't mean to cast aspersions or to judge (God forbid). But I do have some questions about the claims of alien abductees to have had rectal probes. My curiosity is, of course, purely scientific; that...
An Unhappy Medium
This is going to disappoint a lot of people. I'm sorry. It can't be helped. Sometimes I feel like a professional bearer of bad news. And this news is less popular than most: Marketing people aren't clairvoyant. There. I've said (typed) it. Now that I have, I recognize...
It Couldn’t Hurt
The results of a five-year study on suicide trends were published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology a few years ago, indicating people are more likely to commit suicide on Wednesdays than any other day of the week. As a public service, we offer a...
Are You Kidding?
This Fast Company article — "The Best Time of Day to Do Everything at Work" — is a wonderfully theoretical thing. But as Albert Einstein famously said: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're different. In theory, then, the article proposes...
Do Your Homework
In my line of work, you have to say a lot of things that most folks find distasteful. This one elicits sneers, jeers, fears, and tears every time: Marketing is not a sales-support function. Sales is a marketing-fulfillment function. Salesperson: What do you mean...