No, I'm Not Shampoo

Lot of talk these days about "personal branding." Tom Peters is one of the better known business gurus doing the talking, and at Amazon.com there are pages of books by other experts on the topic.

Brenda Bence, MBA, is one of them: an "internationally-recognized branding expert" who has worked for Procter & Gamble and Bristol-Myers Squibb and as a motivational speaker and executive coach. She has created an industry around the personal branding fad that includes several books all titled with variations on "How YOU Are Like Shampoo."

In the first of these, she says, "I firmly believe that people—just like shampoo and other products—are brands, too." Ms. Bence goes on to remind us that Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, and Britney Spears are individuals with very specific personal brands, with the implication that the rest of us surely want to be just like them.

I doubt that. In fact, I doubt any of them are entirely happy being "just like them." Their celebrity brand serves a publicity purpose but, probably to their own dismay, it is not a reflection of themselves as three-dimensional human beings. And it is not the secret to their success in show business. Don't be fooled: there's a lot more behind Brad Pitt's success than the gloss of his celebrity. Gibson is hired for his whole self, not merely his public brand.

Celebrity is a facade that some wear with grace, others not so much. But what they bring to those who hire them is not their personal brand—it's their talent and their work ethic and their humanity, with all its strengths and quirks.

But back to our shampoo marketer/executive coach...

Bence goes on to dismisses the reasonable objection that the rest of us can't be like those people—Pitt, Gibson, Spears and the rest—because, unlike us, they are celebrities. She suggests that the only thing that makes them "different" from the rest of us is that they all employ image specialists to manage their brands.

But there's hope, says Bence: We don't need expensive help to manage our personal brand's perception, we just need to read her book and take her advice.

The first bit of that advice is that "perception is reality in marketing ... it doesn't matter who you think you are. What matters is how others perceive you."

So to Ms. Bence, personal branding is all about managing perception, not about substance: about perceived value, not real value; image, not integrity.

And that's why I don't believe one does, or should, create and market a personal brand. The term is meaningless and the very idea dehumanizing, inappropriate, and dishonest.

"Personal branding" is a two-dollar name we give to the age old act of posing-to-impress. We use such high-falutin' phrases to make ourselves seem (or feel), more knowledgeable, sophisticated, and fashionable. (We don't look for jobs anymore, we "network." We don't act ourselves our improve ourselves, we "develop our personal brand.")

"Personal branding" is the most currently hip in a long string of self-help management techniques, except that it is not about self-improvement, but conveys something less genuine: self-packaging.

The only value of the phrase is that it gives us a slightly different way to think and talk about our ambitions and how to achieve them—modeling the process on tricks pioneered by the "hidden persuaders" of yore. I'll grant that. But it's an inherently dangerous model that can make us less than what we are—not more.

The phrase has the ring of scientism and enlightened, dispassionate management—but also the accompanying smell of fraud, exploitation, and fakery. It reeks of the rudest ambition and the most unseemly self-absorption. It sounds dishonest and beneath the dignity of human beings.

Branding is for corporations, not people. It is the creation of meaning around a business or product that is otherwise devoid of meaning and differentiation. In practice, branding is more the manipulation of image, less the creation of substance. It's something we do to cattle, potato chips, the aforementioned celebrities, and cosmetics. It's what Ms. Bence did for shampoo at Procter & Gamble.

What real people do is engage with other people and build their reputations—through good works and value, through their contributions to the success of others, through their humanity, and by their demonstrated integrity.

Branding is too restrictive for anything as versatile and deliciously unpredictable as a human being. Despite what all the gurus proclaim, I am most decidedly not a brand; I am me, take it or leave it. Today and in this place with these people I am one me; tomorrow, elsewhere, or with others I will be another. My generation fought against the grey flannel suit, the organization man, the pigeonhole, the stereotype, the glass ceiling—and won. We won the right to not be pigeonholed or defined by others, and it would be hypocritical and foolish to do that to ourselves.

We should not think of ourselves as brands—and should not want to—any more than we should think of our faces as logos, our beliefs as positioning, our character as our "unique selling proposition," or our friends, colleagues and associates as a network or the "value chain" we bring to the market. I am not a definable collection of features and benefits, not a platform or an ecosystem, but an ocean of possibility. My name may be my word, but I refuse to call it a brand promise. My sizzle is not for sale.

Personal success does not come from packaging, but from performance; not from buzz, but respect, not from a marketing strategy, but from a consistent habit of goodwill, kindness and humor.

We are hired for the value we provide others, for our honor, honesty and reliability—not because we have succeeded in creating an appealing "personal brand." Branding may get us in the door as objects to be oggled, but we will be judged for something else: our true selves; our unadorned substance; our un-spun character; our raw, naked unpackaged and unpretentious humanity.

I have nothing against genuine and sincere self-improvement, no quibble with the value of learning and skills development, and certainly no problem with ambition nor argument against the self-promotion necessary to get what one wants. But let's leave the branding to objects that cannot engage with others on their own behalf. We're better than that.

The Message of Silence

President Obama was the adult in the room last night as he delivered his first State of the Union Address. The speech was, if nothing else, presidential. He accepted responsibility for some of his Administration's failures and chastised Congress for its recent dysfunction. He was the grown up, and there were no immature outbursts from the audience as we saw the last time he appeared before a joint session.

As is tradition, the audience punctuated the speech with repeated standing ovations, for about 17 of which Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues. The State of the Union message is one of very few presidential responsibilities that are specified in the Constitution. That the members of his party frequently stand and applaud the President's words—especially the fighting ones—is an unwritten rule. When those words are about the Country's greatness or the valor of American heroes, the rule applies to Members on both sides of the aisle. Regardless how enthusiastic or how bipartisan the ritual standing and clapping is, it tells us nothing we don't already know.

Any impact of those ovations paled in comparison to the unanimous silence that met the long conclusion of the President's speech. For a full five minutes and fifty seconds Mr. Obama called for government, business, and the press to act with the dignity and demonstrate the values of the American people. And for all that time, the audience was hushed, still, attentive, and perhaps even contemplative. The Members of Congress responded as would a chastised child, listening to a parent's quiet, wise, and reasoned counsel.

It was, for me, an emotional and rhetorically effective few minutes. Several times, Obama paused for four or five poignant seconds to let his words sink in.

Whether his message and plea will have any practical effect on the tone of debate or the progress of legislation in Washington, whether it will turn the opposition from obstructionism to governance, is yet to be seen. I am hopeful, but not optimistic.

But those riveting few minutes of respectful silence spoke very clearly about the nature of leadership, the stature of the President, and the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves.

(Listen to the last 5:50 here.)

To Be, Or To Do?

It used to be that word processors were machines that people used for the single purpose of preparing documents. Then personal computers came along, absorbed the functionality of those dedicated devices, did the job better, and did other things, too.

Appliances like word processors, telephones, fax machines, GPS navigators, scanners, calculators, games, televisions, radios—and even computers—aren't just discrete gadgets anymore. Not necessarily.

They are functionalities that are built into myriad devices. They are capabilities, not contraptions. They are things that are done, not gizmos that do a thing. Their physical forms have dissolved away into the digital soup of possibilities; their potential floats freely, to be sucked up into other, more complex forms.

Making voice calls is only one functionality of the smart phone, and it's a function that's available as well in computers and automobiles—and will be in your television, too, if it isn't already. Television isn't just a box in your living room; it's a function that's available in your computer, your phone, and your game console.

It isn't just computers that can connect to the Internet. So can a cell phone, a refrigerator, a home irrigation system—anything that's equipped with digital communications functionality and the necessary software.

A doorknob can be connected to the Internet. But there's no reason to do that, unless connecting to the Internet makes it in some way a better doorknob—or provides some valuable benefit: increased security, or useful information. In many buildings, doorknobs connect to security systems, and some of those use the Internet to send information about who's entering, when.

So this raises questions: If your computer can be a telephone and your telephone can browse the Internet, what is a telephone? What is a computer? What is a calculator? A game? A radio? A television? Or a doorknob?

What they are not (or no longer need to be) is single-purpose, stand-alone gadgets. They are functionalities that are absorbed into other things; they are things that can absorb other functionalities. That's the result of information of all kinds in digital form, of the ubiquity and power of microprocessors to deal with that information, of software to tell those microprocessors what to do, and of communication networks that connect discrete systems to others.

I doubt there's any reason to connect my toaster to the Internet, any benefit that's worth the effort or expense. I don't need a hammer that can find a hardware store through Google when it knows I'm running short of nails. Some tools will continue to be single-purpose and rather dumb gadgets that don't connect to anything—or need to.

But devices that communicate and deal with information are dissolving and becoming functionalities of other things. It wasn't so long ago that people wondered what computers could possibly be used for. Many of us struggled to justify buying the things. Now that they have sucked up so many capabilities from the digital soup, we wonder how we ever lived without them.

At one time, we thought that "digital convergence" meant that you could handle just about any kind of information on a computer. We thought it was a threat to industries that delivered information through other means: publishing, broadcasting, telephone and cable companies.

I made a movie for Bill Gates (see "Digital Convergence") to explain this perception in humorous ways and describe how the media and communications industries were reacting to the menace.

Now we know better: that convergence is not so much a threat to these industries, as to their old business models and product lines. It is an opportunity to transform both and add value to their offerings.

Television can get out of the box in the living room, and has done so. Telephones run applications and games; know where they are in the world; retrieve, store, and present information and entertainment. They have become re-defined, and much more useful and valuable. Books and magazines, even in their present ink-on-paper form, can be interactive communication systems of greater value and relevance—if publishers embrace and promote technologies that are already available and ask the question: What is a book? What is a magazine?

The only threat is to those who persist in the old definitions of what things are, and who think that things are and will always be just things—objects instead of functions, nouns, rather than verbs.

Ulysses S. Grant and Buckminster Fuller both said, "I am a verb." The objects around you are saying the same thing. Are you listening?

Pain English

I suspect the reason business people so often resort to gobbledygook in their writings is not just laziness or habit, but that they're afraid specific language is too confining and restrictive. Ambiguity seems more inclusive. It relies on the reader to fill in the blanks of meaning. These would-be communicators fear that explicit, precise, and detailed writing might not tweak every reader's interest or encompass every possible interpretation.

Problem is, it doesn't say anything either.

You don't have to look hard for examples. As I started to write this, IBM spammed me with an email they hope will draw my attention to an article in their newsletter. They say the piece is about how that company helps "organizations make strategic decisions that enhance competitive advantages, create new sources of value, improve revenue growth and develop the change programs necessary to meet business or mission objectives."

Well, who wouldn't be interested in all—or at least some part of—that? Aren't those things that all businesses want to do? But the email doesn't give me a clue what IBM's consultants really offer, or how they deliver it, or what they've done for somebody else.

On the contrary, the message I get—loud and clear—from their spamMail is that IBM doesn't know a thing about my business or me. They think of Bob Kalsey and Bravura Films as just another organization with problems and issues no different from those faced by any other. By trying to offer everything, they offer nothing at all. That's the ROI for ambiguity: nothing.

These thoughts are inspired by a question today on LinkedIn, where I occasionally try to contribute to the conversation. Loren Hicks referred there to a help-wanted ad that includes the phrases “The role will leverage all aspects of the offer matrix” and “ … will include presenting and evangelizing xxx’s offering …”

Loren asks how people respond to such a thing and whether they'd apply for the job—whatever it is.

My response was:

I would be pleased to apply for a role that leverages all aspects of the offer matrix and proud to present and evangelize the company's offerings, especially if the aspects are of the unique, cost-effective and robust next-generation aspect type.

At the end of the day, though, the matrix would have to be flexible, scalable and optimized in terms of metrics that deliver value added outcomes, and the offerings would, hopefully, be easy to use, world-class and unique—as well as focused on high performance innovations from a leading provider of new and improved feature sets. Heck, the bottom line is, I'd give 110 percent commitment—or more—to such a win-win partnership of all stakeholders. Wouldn't you?

I have to give credit for many of the buzzwords I used to David Meerman Scott and Dow Jones, who created and provide (under Creative Commons) a list of the things. Just in case you've forgotten some of them and don't want to leave any out of your next spam.

Scott is as ferocious about blather and baloney as I am, and you might want to read his Gobbledygook Manifesto, in which he points out another reason business writers default to those words: they don't really understand their products, or how customers use them.

Shame on them.

The Business of Music

The music industry is in crisis. The fundamental cause is the unbundling of creative content from physical media: the same phenomenon that is behind the troubles of the newspaper publishing business.

At one time, music was not bound to physical media at all but was part of the oral/performance tradition. Artists supported themselves through patronage and direct payments by their listeners.

Musical notation was the first technology to change the music business. It arose not as a means of publication and distribution, but for the preservation of music and the convenience of its performers—and music became fixable, in some respects, to a physical medium. Various musicologists improved and standardized notational methods through the 16th century, concurrent with the printing press boom, and music publishing became a viable business.

Music flourished as an industry due to the entrepreneur's ability to produce and sell copies of sheet music and collections—to fasten creative content to salable, durable physical products. "Pirating," though, was a commonly accepted business practice in the United States, until Congress extended copyright protection to music in 1831.

Before the publishing revolution, music was not so much a business as an art, and musicians were independent of commercial specialists: lawyers, agents, publishers, printers and resellers. They were beholden only to the makers of instruments, their fellow artists, and the gratitude and generosity of their admirers. That changed when composers made a Faustian bargain with publishers. It seemed like a good idea at the time and, for centuries, it was.

After 1878, with the perfection of the first practical sound recording and reproduction systems, recorded music followed the same strategy as music publishing. Not just notations, but actual musical performances could be fixed to mass-reproducible physical media. The advent of the phonograph brought a crisis to the music publishing industry's reliance on sheet music sales, but publishers (and the composers they represented) adapted their revenue model to draw income in the form of royalties, on the strength of copyright protection.

Radio broadcasting was initially seen as a threat to the recording industry because it made music "free" to the consumer—first with the support of the radio set manufacturing industry and, eventually, of advertisers. The music industry demanded—and received—compensation through broadcast performance licensing, but its income from that source paled in comparison to that from record sales. Eventually it became clear that radio broadcasting was an effective music-marketing tool because of its reach and influence. Radio was not an on-demand medium, so consumers who wished to hear a particular performance at a particular time still needed to purchase it in its physical form.

Digital technology changed everything, and that is where we are today. Music and its performance are no longer bound to salable physical media. Individual consumers are able to cheaply copy, store, and distribute music. Whether those practices are legal or not is almost irrelevant, because in practical terms the laws and patents that protect the rights of creators, performers, and their licensees are unenforceable.

The business models are broken. The industry faces the prospect of a return to its roots: the support of musicians through patronage and the gratitude and generosity of their admirers.

The good news is that digital technologies are available to musicians, as well as to their audiences. Composers, arrangers, and musicians can create, perform, distribute, and monetize their products with as much independence from the traditional middlemen and facilitators as they are willing and able to claim. If one wants to go that way, one can. But the upside potential for the independent artist is limited; the rewards are different, and of a smaller scale, than those possible for musicians who choose the traditional route to success.

The music industry has long offered the alluring potential of quick and possibly obscene profit. That is not and has never been the principal motivation for every musician or music business person, to be sure, but it has always lurked in the wings behind the dream of artistic acceptance: the hot score, the hit single, the platinum album, the world tour, the merchandise, and the star on the walk of fame. If not the goal, that elusive dream has always been the ultimate verification of one's value. But to be honest, achieving that dream was never the pay-off for talent alone, or talent and hard work. It was the product of a machine, and artists never ran that machine.

Those at its controls are struggling today with the new digital reality. They are re-jiggering the machine, changing its components, re-tooling to maximize and maintain the profitability that fuels it. Music served on a platter is no longer the product, but the music and those who make it are—once again.

In a way, the machine too is returning to music's roots—to the song, the personalities, and the performance, rather than the page, the disk, or the cassette. It returns with the benefits of the contraption it has evolved to become: its profit motive, its managerial skills, its media reach and influence, its marketing power, its packaging abilities, its synergistic properties and its business relationships. Of course, it also arrives with the burdens of its artistic timidity, its pandering to public preferences, and its reputation for greed intact. You can learn everything you need to know about the machine from "American Idol."

Musicians, since their Faustian bargain with the Mephistophelean machine, have always been only a part of the system, and they are finding that their relationships—and their place in the revenue stream—are changing. Ironically, as the performers and their performances are increasingly the salable product, their share of the revenue will decline. There is no other way to feed the beast.

Musicians have two choices, and every imaginable opportunity in between: to go it alone, or to ride with the machine. Either way, the future is uncertain. But the future always is.

That Nobel Prize

Peace is more than a state of warlessness—a state, it should be noted, the world has never known. It is, as importantly, a process and an attitude.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has conferred the Peace Prize on 97 individuals and 20 organizations. In only three instances was it awarded to individuals who were actually involved in the direct brokering of peace accords between nations.

Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for his successful mediation of an end to the Russo-Japanese war and other contributions. Henry Kissinger was honored in 1973 for his work on the Paris agreement that led to the final cease-fire in Vietnam and the withdrawal of American forces. And Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shared the prize in 1978 for the Camp David Agreement, which led to a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel. (Despite the persistence of animosity, hostility, and bloodshed between Israel and its neighbors, that country and Egypt remain—after a fashion—at peace with one another.)

Some winners have helped to reduce tensions and bloodshed within their nations. The Committee honored Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Clerk in 1993 for terminating the apartheid regime in South Africa, and John Hume and David Trimble for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

But, mostly, the prize has historically been awarded to people and institutions who have worked toward the process of conflict resolution and aided or inspired humanitarian efforts. The International Committee of the Red Cross has won three times, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, twice.

Of all the Nobel prizes, the Peace Prize is generally the most controversial. Were there, in each year, an individual or organization conspicuously responsible for bringing peace to some corner of the world, there would likely be no controversy; the Prize would be a slam-dunk. Sadly, that has seldom happened, but happily there are always folks grinding away at the process, forcing attitudes and postures to change, making contributions. They might work for decades, on their own initiative, with little recognition. Others might just be at the right place when history comes to call. In every case, though, they are—more than anything—an inspiration to others.

Geir Lundestad, the Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, has said that President Barack Obama will receive the honor this year for his creation of a new climate in international politics. The cable tv political bloviators—and the Chairman of the Republican Party—think the prize is pretty much a joke; that Obama is undeserving, the prize diminished by his selection, and the award no more than a slap at former President Bush and evidence of an international socialist conspiracy at work.

President Obama richly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Even before taking office, he revived the world’s long-dormant sense of hope for peace and positive change. People around the globe see him as a transformative figure and are inspired by his message of optimism, his call for mutual respect, and his promise of progress. They wear Obama t-shirts in Udaipur these days, and gave this American visitor high-fives in Delhi last December as they grinned and shouted, “Obama! Obama!”

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama convinced the majority of American voters to choose peace and to reject the previous administration’s policies of hostility and confrontation; to vote for rationality and against rigidity and blind ideology; to support a foreign policy based on respect, rather than arrogance; and to believe, once again, that it’s okay to look after one another--here at home and around the world.

None of the above, none of the genuine feelings of so many citizens of the world, is welcome news to those who reflexively oppose the President no matter what he does or tries to do or what honors or endorsements he receives. Nothing in the revitalized aspirations of many millions around the world will reverse the hostility of those who hope and pray for our President to fail (as though his failures would not be our own), who are irreversibly angry about his election victory, and who still can’t believe that most American voters don’t agree with them.

Those Americans should get over it, and get with the program—or get out of the way.

Rachel Maddow concluded an excellent MSNBC broadcast on the matter saying, “The American president just won the Nobel Peace Prize—by any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud.”

Indeed.

Social Networking

Names are kind of funny. We like to name things, because it gives us the illusion of understanding them and the hope we will ultimately control them. When we name a disease, for example, we begin to think that one cure – if we're lucky or smart enough to find it – will remedy all instances of the malady. Unfortunately we often mistake symptoms for diseases and forget that a symptom may have many causes. Cancer comes to mind. Or the common cold. We forget, too, that the disease might be entirely imaginary – caused by mass hallucination or hysteria.

"Social networking" has a lot in common with diseases in those respects. It isn't a single thing, nor is there a single way to deal with its many instances. Giving it a serious-sounding and techno-babbly kind of name may make us feel as though it's one thing and that we understand it, but those impressions are false. It might even be imaginary, brought on by exposure to the radiation of computer monitors and Blackberry LCD screens.

We like to categorize things, too: also so we can understand and control them. Ever since Linnaeus we've tried to categorize the flora and fauna of the Earth, for instance. But we've embarrassed ourselves many times because the categories we've invented have sometimes turned out to be meaningless and those in which we've chosen to place a thing have not always been the most appropriate.

"Social networking" is a whole jungle of creatures and they don't all belong in the same part of the zoo. Facebook and Flickr, YouTube and Twitter may be cousins, branches on the Internet family tree, but should they be in the same cage and fed the same diet? Maybe they're all in the kingdom "Digital," the phylum "Internet," and the class "Social," but are they all in the order "Advertising Medium?"

Marketers are some of the most dedicated namers of things. One of them came up with a condition known as "halitosis" in order to sell an elixir for bad breath. Many folks who sell advertising and technology consulting services have latched onto "social networking" as a way to foment a profitable combination of greed and fear, dread and avarice in the marketplace for their wares. It helps that nobody really knows what "social networking" is (it can mean anything you want it to mean), but everybody wants to turn it to his own advantage or save himself from its potential ravages.

We sure do like to try to turn everything we encounter to our advantage, and that can bring good results or otherwise. Thankfully some guy long ago saw a spiny lobster crawling around and said "I don't care what it looks like, I'm gonna eat the thing." But it's not a good idea to leave infants unattended around cans of paint thinner.

Many thirsty folks these days are thinking seriously about swallowing the social networking Kool-Aid. I guess we'll find out how that turns out.