Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

How Much Are They Holding You Back?The pervasive fantasy in business today is that you can tweak your way to success. Tweakers believe you need only “monitor your metrics” to ratchet your way to the top of the mountain. “Hold your position, then make a tiny change and click up to the next level.” Tweakers find comfort in numbers, decimal points, percentages and line graphs.Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in monitoring. You cannot improve what you do not measure. But you won’t see big differences in that line graph until you make some meaningful changes.Incremental change is the path to quiet evolution.Significant change unleashes noisy revolution.There are no quiet revolutions.AIn 1979, Sony put lightweight headphones on a tightly-compacted cassette tape player to create the ‘Walkman,’ a worldwide hit that allowed you to take your music with you when you went walking, shopping or jogging. Sony retained a 50% market share in the U.S. for more than a decade even though their Walkman cost at least $20 more than its numerous rivals.Sony in 1990 was like Apple today; seemingly invincible.So why didn’t Sony invent the iPod?Sony fell into the trap of scientific, incremental change; an eternal series of tiny improvements in the hope of making an increasingly better Walkman; a process known in Japan as “kaizen.” 30-SECOND HISTORY LESSON: To help restore Japan in the aftermath of WWII, America provided experts to assist the rebuilding of Japanese industry. A Management Training Program was developed and taught by Homer Sarasohn and Charles Protzman in 1949-50. Sarasohn later recommended W. Edwards Deming to provide further training in Statistical Methods. And thus, Japanese “kaizen” was born. Sony introduced a courageous product and it made them hugely successful.And then Sony began playing it safe.Your friends, family, staff, and customers – all the people who care about you – want you to be safe. And the safest thing you can do, they believe, is to conform to the accepted norm. This is why they will always “express their concern” when they see you stray from the straight and narrow path.But isn’t “playing it safe” in business the least safe thing you can do? Sony methodically kept improving the Walkman long after they should have replaced it with an entirely new concept. Big Success is rare because it requires audacity and courage.Or maybe I’m wrong.What do you think?Roy H. Williams

Travel agencies were eliminated as a business category when the Digital Age arrived. Likewise, encyclopedias found they were no longer needed. Soon we were opening the newspaper each morning to read headlines we already knew about. Newspaper doubled over in pain and fell to its knees. The Yellow Pages got dusty and catalogues quit arriving in the mail.“Why print on paper when we can put our stuff on a computer screen that’s already in the customer’s home?” A single, online catalogue company – Amazon.com – now facilitates 25 percent of all the online purchases in the United States.* And isn’t a blog just an electronic diary, a journal open to public view?Electronic media has been damaged far less than print media by the arrival of the Digital Age. In short, TV and radio are doing just fine.Right now you’re thinking, “But what about iPods and Pandora and smart phones and online listening and satellite radio? Does anyone listen to regular radio anymore?”Research Director tells us the average American spends only 15.4 hours a week listening to the radio these days, a decline of 11 percent since 1970. Media Audit says the decline is 13 percent, down to just 17 hours per week. And a 2010 Bridge Ratings study puts the decline at 18 percent, bringing the average down to about 18 hours per week in radio listening. Obviously, these research firms don’t agree on the details, but they do agree on this: Radio alarm clocks wake America in the morning and radio remains our companion in the car. People who work alone at night – about 14 percent of our nation – think of the radio as a friend.Roughly 3 years after online radio becomes standard equipment in the dash of new cars, geographically targeted online radio advertising will become a powerful tool. Trust me. I’m keeping a very close eye on this.But what about right now, today?My clients across America currently air 52-week radio schedules on more than 700 radio stations, so it can reasonably be said that I’ve spent a few hundred million dollars buying airtime over the past 25 years.Radio is considered “mass media” for a reason: It reaches the unwashed, unfiltered masses. Rich and poor alike. Homeowners, apartment dwellers, and children still bumming a room from their parents. Generally speaking, radio is not good at targeting specific types of persons, but it’s great for building a reputation. If you want the public to think of you when they need what you sell, a nonstop radio schedule will work wonders.But don’t fall into the trap of overpaying to be on the “right” station. Radio goes fishing with a net, pulling up thousands of fish with each pass through the waters. If you want to sit on the riverbank with a pole and a hook and target a specific type of customer, use magazines or a list or invest in Google Adwords. But know this: the success of your ad campaign won’t be determined by your choice of media. The success of your ad campaign will be determined by your choice of message.Weak ads fail, regardless of which media delivers them.Strong ads succeed, regardless of which media delivers them.How strong are your ads?Want to make them stronger?Roy H. Williams

A New Book is in the Making. Want to Be Part of It?More than 1,000 businesses will be featured in this book. Each will have fewer than 100 employees. On average, they’ll have been operating for at least 20 years. We’re going to ask them about their advertising.Research tells you what ought to work.We’re going to ask these businesses what actually worked.Actual experience is the highest form of research.Each of these businesses will be part of a new book to be published in 2013, the halfway point in the upswing of our current “We” generation:20,000 Years of AdvertisingLessons Learned. Fortunes Made.Pendulum was released last week. This week we’re making a run at the bestsellers list. Wish us luck.Two weeks ago, the Wizard of Ads partners held their semi-annual partner meeting in the Veranda Room of the Enchanted Emporium at the entrance to Wizard Academy.Be patient. All these things are connected. You’ll see.Each of the partners was given an advance copy of Pendulum. Here’s part of what it says on the back flap:Roy H. Williams dropped out of college on the second day, choosing instead to “figure it out” for himself. At age 19, he began asking local business owners, “Have you ever done any advertising that you felt really worked? Tell me about it.” After cataloguing their answers, he asked, “Have you ever done any advertising that you thought was brilliant—something you were really excited about— that failed miserably?”“You only have to ask a few hundred business owners,” says Williams, “before it all becomes crystal clear . . . everyone makes the same mistakes for the same reasons. And the things that work brilliantly have common denominators as well. All the answers, of course, are initially counterintuitive. That’s why everyone makes the same mistakes. I was given thousands of years of collective experience and the results of more than one hundred million dollars in advertising expenditures . . . for free. All I had to do was see the patterns. What a country!”At 20, Williams began consulting small business owners across America, guiding dozens of them to unprecedented success. Twenty years later, his Wizard of Ads trilogy of business books rose to the top of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.Princess Pennie, the love of my life, said to the partners, “Not long after we were married, Roy spent all day, every day, asking business owners about their experiences in advertising. I think we should do it again. Who is willing to interveiw 50 business owners about their best and worst experiences in advertising?”The room was a sea of raised hands. I’ve got the greatest partners on earth. 20,000 Years of Advertising Lessons Learned, Fortunes Made, will clearly identify the common denominators of successful small business advertising as well as those costly, seductive mistakes we all seem to make. We’ll quote many of the businesses who participate and we’ll identify our stringers as well. The reader will gain the benefit of 20,000 years of recent, real-world experience on the battlefield of marketing. And this won’t be patty-cake business school theory, either. AThese battles will have been fought with live ammunition: hard dollars spent by small business owners performing the kinds of marketing experiments entrepreneurs do every day.What’s a stringer, you ask? A stringer is an independant reporter who is not on the payroll of a major news network but who contributes from the sidelines in exchange for national recognition. The stringer brings a story to the attention of the network and then benefits from the recognition of that association. The first step in getting hired by a major network is to become a valuable stringer.If you own a small business and would be willing to be interviewed by telephone, please email your name, business name and phone number to Devin@WizardOfAds.com.If you know at least 20 business owners and would be willing to suggest to them that they volunteer to be interviewed by us, just have them email their name, business name and telephone number to Devin@WizardOfAds.com and be sure they tell us that it was you that asked them to do it. Participants and stringers will be recognized in the book for their contributions and each will receive an advance copy of the hardback when it’s published next year.Stringers whose names are mentioned in more than 20 emails from business owners will be invited to a special Wizard of Ads training event and given free access to the Wizard of Ads LIVE monthly webcast for a full year, (usually $1,440.)20,000 Years of Advertising is going to increase the success and prosperity of every small business owner who reads it. And make no mistake; the success of a nation’s small business owners is what drives the economy of that nation. A “We” generation is about working together for the common good.Let’s get to work.Roy H. Williams 

How much do your name, logo and color scheme really matter?A schmuck falls off the balcony on the 30th floor.A putz is the guy he lands on.A putz is passively stupid; ridiculously unlucky.Could a company succeed with a name like Putzmeister?Could a company win if its logo was indistinctive and boring and literally gray?Putzmeister was founded by Karl Schlecht in 1958. Today it employs 3,900 people that produce more than $ 1.5 billion in annual sales in 154 countries on 5 continents, name and logo and color be damned.$1.5 billion, by the way,is fifteen hundredtimes a thousand,times a thousand.Fifteen hundred million. Just sayin’.Wal-Mart may have the dumbest name in the history of the world. “My name is Walton, so I’ll call the store Wal-Mart.” Really? And yet he became so rich that just six of his descendants are worth more today than the combined net worth of 30 percent of our nation. That’s right, a tiny company begun in 1962 with an idiotic name and a drab logo and an unimaginative color scheme became the most successful retail empire in the history of the world in less than 30 years.And they never bothered to change the name or the logo.I meet Chicken Little advertising people every day who squeal, “the sky is falling” over names and colors and logos.Color is a language. It definitely matters. A little.Shape is a language. It can contradict or reinforce your choice of colors. Shape matters. A little.Product and company names are words that carry conscious and unconscious associations. They absolutely matter. But what matters most of all is what matters to the customer.Customers who buy from your competitors aren’t choosing your competitors because they have better logos. Your problem is something else entirely.Customers care about things like products and procedures and policies that might affect them. They care about your offers and assurances. They care about the experience you create for them.Will your prospective customer be glad they chose you? Yes? How are communicating this? What do you offer as evidence? Testimonials are suspect. Bold promises sound like Ad-speak. What are you doing to give your prospective customer real confidence that choosing you is the right thing to do?You need a consultant because you have a blind spot.(If you knew what it was, they wouldn’t call it a blind spot.)You’re on the inside, looking out. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. Your consultant is on the outside, looking in.If your marketing people talk a lot about colors and logos and layouts, you’re dealing with graphics artists posing as marketing consultants.If you’d like to talk about how to take your company to the next level for real, my partners and I are ready. Are you?If you’re a person who is interested in marketing and would like to expand your skill set, Wizard Academy was built for you, for today, and for the challenges you’re about to face.Come. It’s time for you to rise up to your full height. You, we, have work to do.Roy H. Williams

I am, by profession, a communications consultant. I craft strategies, write ads and buy media. My clients ask for my advice. They even pay me for it.Advice is dangerous to give.If you are thinking, “Yes, it’s dangerous to give advice because your advice might be wrong,” you probably haven’t worked full-time in a focused specialty for 30 years. Yes, there is a chance my advice might be wrong, but that’s not the principal danger.Advice is always dangerous because a person only needs it when:1. they’re making decisions based on incorrect assumptions.2. they made a mistake that triggered unhappy repercussions.3. they’re looking at a situation from an unproductive angle.Jeffrey’s experiences in life have been different from my own. Jeff has traveled more extensively, speaks multiple languages, has a different religious background, a different political bent and his education has been completely unlike anything I have experienced.Weirdly, we get along extremely well. This is possible only because I know Jeff likes me and respects me and he knows I feel the same about him.Jeffrey taught me three new terms: educational bias, cultural bias and religious bias.Educational bias is what happens when native intellect encounters new information. How smart are you? How extensive and reliable is the information to which you’ve been exposed? How well do you assimilate knowledge into your actions? These things form the basis of your educational bias. There are things you know a lot about and other things you know very little about.Cultural bias is formed by the persons with whom you interact. Your inherent beliefs are shaped – to some degree – by the nations, the communities and the families in which you have lived.Religious bias originates with your beliefs about God. Is there a supreme being or is there not? And if such a being exists, what is his attitude toward us? Your religious bias is the foundation of your beliefs about how the world works. Do we live in an organized Newtonian universe of cause-and-effect or do we live in a mystery-and-awe universe of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? When a person says, “That’s the way things are because, well, that’s just how they are,” their religious bias is talking.Now let’s look at those three, highly volatile moments when a person needs advice:1. When your friend or client is making a decision based onincorrect assumptions, such assumptions are usually based on:(A.) a popular myth, such as, “People remember more of what they see than what they hear,” or(B.) outright misinformation, such as, “Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.”When you challenge the reliability of a false assumption, you are:(A.) telling your friend that he or she has been misled. You are exposing their educational bias, questioning their intellect and gently calling them naïve. How do you suppose this will make them feel?(B.) suggesting that their teacher was either a liar or a fool. In this case, your advice will be dangerous to precisely the degree they loved and respected that teacher.2. When your friend or client has made a mistake that triggered unhappy repercussions, you can be certain they are feeling some pain. Their educational bias is on display for the world to see and surmise, “They didn’t know what they were doing.” Your friend will either be embarrassed and sensitive or angry and defiant, “I wasn’t wrong. Everyone else was wrong.” Either way, you must choose your words carefully.3. When your friend or client is looking at a situation from an unproductive angle, your advice is going to challenge their worldview, their belief system, their interpretation of their own past experiences. Be careful or your advice will make them feel like you’re saying their whole life was built upon a mistake up until now. An unproductive angle of view is usually the result of a cultural bias or a religious bias and both go all the way to the bone.My advice to you is this: never, under any circumstances, offer unsolicited advice. Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.Even when you are asked for advice, be very careful. Your relationship with this person will be significantly altered by what you are about to say.And yes, I realize I’ve been giving you unsolicited advice for about 5 minutes now. I took this chance because advice that’s distributed widely doesn’t carry the same accusatory impact as advice that’s delivered one-on-one.And I took the chance because I like you and I respect you and I think you know this.Roy H. Williams

Every “Me” cycle in society begins with:1. a beautiful dream of freedom from restraint2. a hunger for self-expression3. a search for individualityOur last “Me” cycle began in 1963 and reached its zenith in 1983 when freedom from restraint had evolved into conspicuous consumption and individuality was being “self-expressed” through costumes, big hair, disco and phony poses.The upside of a “Me” zenith is optimistic entrepreneurialism and national pride. Of course Peter Ueberroth was able to raise 215 million dollars more than was needed to host the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Of course it was the grandest spectacle the world had ever seen. Of course it was. And our movie-star handsome, wavy-haired President is about to stand at the Brandenburg Gate on worldwide television and command the leader of the world’s other superpower to “Tear down this wall!” as though he’s telling a naughty child to clean his room.We tend to overdose on everything, don’t we? “If a little ‘Me’ pride is good, a lot is better.” The slow deflation of the over-pumped “Me” was known as Gen-X (1983-2003,) but Generation-X was never about birth cohorts. A generation is about life cohorts. Emergent values will be embraced first by the youth and this causes people to mistakenly believe those birth-cohort myths about “Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials.” But our attitudes aren’t a reflection of when we were born; they’re a reflection of the times in which we live.Ultimately, we’re all in this generation together, regardless of when we were born or how soon after the tipping point we embrace the new values, outlook, and perspective.A “Me” is about vertical hierarchy, “Who is on top?”A “We” is about horizontal connectedness, “To what am I committed?”And we move as a group between these perspectives in a predictable swing of society’s pendulum that takes precisely 40 years to travel between zeniths.The bottom of the pendulum’s arc is the tipping point. 1963 began the “Me” that reached it’s zenith in 1983 and then declined back to a new tipping point twenty years later.Our current “We” cycle began in 2003 with:1. a beautiful dream of working together for the common good2. a hunger for acceptance as a member of a team3. a search for significanceWe’re approaching the halfway point (2013) in the 20-year upswing of a “We” that will zenith in 2023. If the recurrent and undeniable patterns of the past 3,000 years can be trusted, we’re about to enter a very dangerous time.The upside of a “We” zenith is that the prevailing attitude is “I’m OK – You’re Not OK.” This can manifest itself as genuine concern for others, “Things are good for me right now, but not so good for you. How can I help?” Volunteerism zeniths in a “We” as teamwork and significance are celebrated as supreme virtues.The downside of a “We” zenith is that “working together for the common good” often escalates into a self-righteous gang mentality. “I’m OK – You’re Not OK” can also be translated as, “I am correct and good. You are incorrect and evil.”Yes, we’re entering a dangerous time indeed.What can be done?Tune in tomorrow (Sept. 18) for a live, 1-hour webcast hosted by yours truly. No money. Just an hour of your time. We’ll look at some real-world, right-now examples of the upswing of the “We.”The book will be released October 2nd.Roy H. WilliamsA

A Look at Choices and ConsequencesYou wrestle with lions daily.Lions are powers outside yourself: circumstance and serendipity, fate and phenomenon, bad luck and good. A lion can oppose or assist you. It can be your enemy or friend.A gang of lions is called a pride. Interesting.Unlike lions, tigers are solitary.Your tiger is your own, inner ferocity: Determination. Commitment. Focus. Hence the phrase, “The eye of the tiger.”The tiger will not be denied.Gentle persons don’t like to believe they possess an inner ferocity, but I agree with William Blake, “He that gently made the lamb hath made the tiger also.”The tiger within you calculates the cost of your choices and agrees to pay the price. Make no mistake; every choice has a cost.Here are 3 more things you should know:1. All tigers have a similar marking on their forehead, which resembles the Chinese symbol Wang, meaning King. Likewise, the tiger within you is king, the captain of your soul, choosing what it chooses and paying in whatever coin is required:Coin 1. Time – Time, like money, is spent. But unlike money, time cannot be replaced.Coin 2. Embarrassment – Embarrassment, or the risk of it, accompanies all your important choices.Coin 3. Deprivation – All the things not chosen are the price of every choice you make.Coin 4. Relationship – You make demands on those who care for you and thereby alter the bond that connects. Will your choice make this bond stronger or weaker?Coin 5. Effort – The pain of “trying” is a coin all its own. And in its shadow is embarrassment if you fail.Coin 6. Conscience – When your tiger sides with your conscience, the price is that which your conscience denies you. But when your tiger overrules your conscience, the price is paid in the coin of embarrassment. And the audience that is watching… is you.2. Shave the fur from a tiger and it will still have stripes. Fur is merely an outward thing. The true shape and color of the animal lies beneath. What stripe is tattooed beneath the fur of your outward personality? The skin-stripes of tigers are the source of the proverb, “a tiger cannot change its stripes,” meaning that we do not change our basic nature. We can only hope to overcome it.3. The tiger’s most developed sense is its hearing. Likewise, the tiger within you is informed primarily by what you hear, including those printed words that echo in your mind as you read.What do you read? What have you been feeding your tiger?Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, understands tigers.Calvin’s tiger, Hobbes, lives exclusively in the mind of Calvin. When anyone else is in the picture, Hobbes is just a small, stuffed toy.Likewise, none of us sees the tiger that lives in another. We see only a sketch of a tiger drawn by their choices and actions.Watterson understands the power of silent voice. He famously decided that Calvin and Hobbes would live only on the printed page. No animated cartoons. The only voices of Calvin and Hobbes are those that each of us hears in our minds as we read their words on the printed page.And Brother Watterson understands “paying the price.” In this case, that price is the many millions of dollars he forfeits each year by not licensing Calvin and Hobbes. No toys. No action figures. No paraphernalia. Tens of millions of dollars would appear in his bank account if the man would simply say the word “Yes.”Bill Watterson is either a giant among men or one of the greatest fools that has ever lived. This you must decide for yourself.But one thing is stunningly clear:Watterson’s tiger does not purr.I like him.Roy H. Williams

From Unstructured DataJune 25, 2012, 8:29 PMStep 1: Create a monster by networking 16,000 ultrafast computer processors.Step 2: Feed the monster 10 billion images chosen at random from YouTube videos.Step 3: See what happens.What Happened: The monster taught itself to recognize cats.“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat.’ It basically invented the concept of a cat.” – Jeff Dean, speaking for the scientists at Google’s secretive X-LabsThe frightening part of this report is that modern computers appear to be capable of independent learning through extrapolation.The comforting part of this report is that it takes 16,000 ultrafast processors working together to do something that’s completely effortless for a human toddler.I drive 40 minutes to meet Jeffrey Eisenberg for lunch in a place that looks like it used to be a Denny’s. I hand him an advance copy of Pendulum. “Hold it up next to your face,” I said. He held it up and smiled. [click]Jeff laid the book on the table and thumbed through it, “This really turned out nice.”“So tell me what’s happening in Jeff-world.”Jeff said he was developing applications of big data for some of America’s largest companies.“What’s big data?” I asked.“You’ve been teaching Practical Applications of Chaos Theory in the Magical Worlds course for about 12 years now, right?”“Right.”“Big data is just one more use of that idea.”“How so?”“Dump huge amounts of unstructured data into a computer, then wait to see the patterns it discovers. The bigger the dataset, the more obvious the patterns.”Jeff went on to explain that ‘unstructured data’ included information from climate sensors, digital photos and videos, purchase transaction records, Tweets and other social media posts, GPS signals from cell phones, things like that.YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, traffic and security cameras and the worldwide proliferation of portable digital devices add up to this: If every book, document, spreadsheet, register, newspaper and photograph created prior to July, 2010, were digitized, they would account for only about 10 percent of the world’s data.Ninety percent of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years.According to Ed Dumbill,“Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn’t fit the strictures of your database architectures. To gain value from this data, you must choose an alternative way to process it.”Institutions can use big data to reduce fraud and errors. Hospitals can use it to improve patient care while reducing healthcare costs. According to IBM, one health care organization used big data this year to decrease patient mortality by 20 percent. A telecommunications company reduced processing time by 92 percent and a utility company improved the accuracy of power resource placement by 99 percent.Huge organizations like these have been the first to embrace big data, but Jeff Eisenberg tells me that he and Bryan are working to make its power available to retailers and small businesses, as well.When Jeff said big data was just another practical application of chaos theory, here’s what he meant: Chaos, in science, is not randomness, but precisely the opposite. Chaos is a pattern so vast that it won’t fit into the human mind.Confronted with the product of a chaotic system, the pattern-recognition function of our brain’s right hemisphere senses a pattern that never seems to resolve, never seems to close, never seems to finish and begin again. As a result, we are drawn to a beauty that is too big for us. All the beauties of nature – mountains, canyons, trees, clouds, snowflakes and the movements of fire and water – are products of chaotic systems.Likewise, works of art that pierce public consciousness to become mass-appeal, runaway successes – top-of-the-chart songs, bestselling books, Oscar-winning movies – always contain a third gravitating body* with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence. Third gravitating bodies show up in effective advertising, as well.I didn’t make up that term, “third gravitating body,” by the way. It’s a term that has been used by astrophysicists for more than 100 years to describe a mathematical function of the universe that relates to system evolution and gravity, the ability to attract.Attract…Attraction. That would be a good thing to master, don’t you think?And now you know why it’s called The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy, the most interesting business school on earth.Come. We’ll fill in the blanks.It will all make perfect sense before you leave.Roy H. Williams

Jack became dull when he failed to free the beagle in his brain. You let your beagle romp and play, don’t you?Don’t you?The beagle in your brain connects nonlinear events – think of these events as a collection of dots – to reveal fantastic patterns.Intuition. Humor. Leap of Faith. These are just three of the beagle’s names.The beagle is not limited to paired opposites but lives in a place of infinite possibilities. Fantasy and fiction, poetry and song, symbols, rituals and metaphors beckon us into that realm where anything can happen in the color-stained shadows beneath the beagle’s grand forest canopy. Every stick is a sword, every rabbit is an adventure and every tree becomes home base the moment you begin to run.“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” first appeared in a book of collected proverbs published by James Howell in 1659, but it was generations old, even then.An article by Dr. Peter Gray in Psychology Today proves the potency of this 353 year-old warning. Dr. Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. His findings guide the decisions of comparative, evolutionary, developmental and educational psychologists around the world. He has written important articles on innovative teaching methods and alternative approaches to education. He is the author of Psychology, an important college textbook now in its 6th edition.That’s right. He wrote the college textbook.Dr. Gray has recently been studying “the dullest culture on earth,” a people so painfully boring that previous researchers concluded they could not be studied. There was nothing to see, nothing to ask, nothing to probe or investigate among the Baining, an isolated tribe in Papua, New Guinea. According to Dr. Gray, “They do not tell stories, rarely gossip, and exhibit little curiosity or enthusiasm. Their conversation is obsessively mundane, concerned primarily with food-getting and food-processing.”The Baining, you see, do not believe in play. In fact, Baining children are punished when they do frivolous things. The Baining believe only in productive work and “things that make sense.”Grow crops.Harvest crops.Cook crops.Eat crops.Sit and wait silently for tomorrow.Do it all again.The Baining make no room in their minds for romance, fantasy or adventure. They don’t even allow imitation. There are no Baining religions or heroes or humor, no Baining poetry or legends or music. Sex is an unpleasant chore endured only for the production of children. The single Baining ritual is a firedance that initiates boys into manhood. Women and children are not allowed to watch.I promise I’m not making this up. I’m not even exaggerating.Dr. Gray’s report paints a picture so dreary and sad that he opens it by assuring us that he is not a racist. “This essay is clearly not about race but about culture, and if there is value judgment, it is judgment grounded in my own culturally-produced biases.”Dr. Gray ends his report by saying,“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and it apparently makes the Baining the ‘dullest culture on earth.’ In some ways, I fear, we today are trying to emulate the Baining as we increasingly deprive children of opportunities to play and explore freely and, instead, force them to spend ever more time working in school and participating in adult-directed activities outside of school.”I agree with all that, but I took something different from Dr. Gray’s report, namely this: if we don’t make time for intuition, humor and leaps of faith, if we don’t make room for romance, fantasy and adventure, then we don’t know Jack.But it’s very possible we’re on our way to being him.And Jack is a very dull boy.Free the Beagle.Roy H. Williams

“Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.” – David OgilvyA creative problem-solver consciously or unconsciously realizes the problem at hand has already been solved – many times – but the answers have not yet been applied to the immediate situation.Creative problem solving is merely the leveraging of trustworthy patterns – those relationships between elements in a system – to achieve an advantage previously undiscovered in the immediate application.The critical first step in creative problem solving is to identify the defining characteristics of the problem. This is usually achieved, according to David Ogilvy, by “stuffing your conscious mind with information.” That’s the easy part. Our society swims in information. The second part, to “unhook your rational thought process,” is where it gets tricky.I believe there are 5 ways to unhook deductive reasoning. A1. The Arts. Music speaks to us through rhythm, interval, contour, pitch, key and tempo. Theater and Dance speak through foreshadow, symbol and movement. Painting and Sculpture through shape, proximity and color. Poetry and Literature speak to depths beyond our understanding. Connect to the arts and watch the marlin rise from deep water to tail-dance across the ocean in the moonlight.  2. Humor. A statement that belongs and fits is predictable, not funny. A statement that doesn’t belong and doesn’t fit makes no sense: not funny. A statement is funny only when it “doesn’t belong, but fits.” Brilliant ideas often enter the world as jokes. An outrageous suggestion that could theoretically work is always hilarious. Humor is a slippery key that unlocks the intuitive mind as we become aware of obscure but possible connections. Laughter is a portal that takes us beyond the realms of fear and doubt. Look though that window and consider what you see. b3. Time Pressure. I once watched Keith Miller trick a roomful of people into brilliance by giving them too little time to complete a series of detailed lists. “Pick a subject that interests you. I’ll give you sixty seconds.” Keith counted down, “45 seconds… thirty seconds… fifteen seconds…” Each person was then required to stand and name the subject they’d chosen. Keith said, “Write down 16 things you’d want to include if you wrote a book about this subject. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or putting them into any kind of order. I’ll give you 4 minutes. Sixteen things. Go.” Mild panic causes the logical mind to quit “second guessing” as the floodgates of intuition open and spray far more knowledge than you ever knew was there. r4. Play! Without keeping score. Playing to win is just another name for work. Play must be freely chosen, actively engaging and fun. Hide-and-seek. Throw a disc. Sing hit songs with a group of new friends. Play requires the relaxation of the uptight mind. We are rejuvenated and revitalized by it. Children are happy because they play. Adults are unhappy because they do not. i5. Recovery. Humans are like neon; we glow when we release the energy of overstimulation. I once mentioned to Dr. Grant that I often have my best ideas in airplanes on the way home from speaking engagements. Knowing my strong preference for introverted thinking, he said, “Well of course. Working to connect to an audience is extraverted feeling, your least preferred function.” When he saw I was confused he continued, “Psychologists have known for years that a person’s fourth function – the one least preferred – is the trap door to the unconscious mind.” Ten minutes later we created Escape the Box, one of Wizard Academy’s most heralded workshops. (We don’t have one scheduled but we could easily do so if enough of you are interested. Just call Della at 512-295-5700 or email Michele@WizardAcademy.org) Look Inward. Laugh. Panic. Play. Sleep.Welcome to Wizard Academy. Are you beginning to understand why the world’s most interesting business school has an art gallery, a concert hall, a star deck, a wine cellar and a student mansion?Come.Roy H. Williams