Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

“Bitter arguments often result from a lack of definition of terms.” This is one of the first lessons the Cognoscenti are taught in the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.Cognoscenti Skip Moen – an Oxford scholar – gave me a tragic example of this during his most recent visit to Wizard Academy.“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” – God, speaking to Himself in the second chapter of Genesis according to the English translators of the good King James in 1611This is bad enough, but in later years “help meet for him” [help appropriate for him] became further mistranslated as “helpmate.”Stay with me. This is about to get very interesting. You will laugh, cry or get angry. You will not be unmoved.Ezer kenegdo are the Hebrew words translated as “help meet” in 1611.Ezer is used 20 more times in the Old Testament and in each instance it refers to God’s own effort to rescue and sustain his people. Ezer (pronounced ay’-zer) can be translated as “power” or “strength” or “rescue.”‘Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD? He is your shield and ezer and your glorious sword.’ – Deut. 33:26‘I lift up my eyes to the hills-where does my ezer come from? My ezer comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.’ – Ps. 121:1-2‘May the LORD answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. May he send you ezer.’ – Ps. 20:1-2Kenegdo means “facing.” It can also mean “opposite.”Thus, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a power facing him.”“I will make him a strength opposite him.”“I will make him a rescue that looks him in the face.”Each of these translations of ezer kenegdo is imminently more accurate than “helpmate, helper or assistant.”Like I said; you will laugh, cry or get angry.Google tells me of the following passage by John & Stasi Eldredge in their book, Captivating.Remember when Arwen saves Frodo in The Lord of the Rings? Arwen is a princess, a beautiful elf maiden. She comes into the story in the nick of time to rescue Frodo just as the poisoned knife wound is about to claim him.ARWEN: He’s fading. He’s not going to last. We must get him to my father. I’ve been looking for you for two days. There are five wraiths behind you. Where the other four are, I do not know.ARAGORN: Stay with the hobbits. I’ll send horses for you.ARWEN: I’m the faster rider. I’ll take him.ARAGORN: The road is too dangerous.ARWEN: I do not fear them.ARAGORN: (relinquishing to her, he takes her hand.) Arwen, ride hard. Don’t look back.It is she, not the warrior Aragorn, who rides with glory and speed. She is Frodo’s only hope. She is the one entrusted with his life and with him, the future of all Middle Earth. She is his ezer kenegdo.If you dig deeper into the history of Ezer, you’ll find that it comes from an even more ancient word, Azar, meaning “to surround.” Azar can also mean “protect, aid, succor and give material and/or nonmaterial encouragement.” Azar often refers to aid in the form of military assistance.“Helper” and “assistant” are sounding more tragic with each passing paragraph, don’t you think? Pennie says that you and I often live up to the things we hear said about us. This is why she’s deeply frustrated by what she hears mothers say in front of their children. “He’s such a picky eater.”“She does exactly the opposite of what I say.”“He always throws a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.”“She doesn’t like to take naps.”More to the point: did we make women “the weaker sex” the moment we gave them the name?Words are powerful things.We speak worlds into existence.  Roy H. Williams

"The winner is determined when..."A couple of weeks ago Sean Taylor attended a high-class function to receive the Melvin Jones Award on my behalf. Melvin Jones founded the Lions Club International and his award is the highest honor the club can bestow. You can’t win the MJ Award unless you’re a Lion – which I’m not – so the board of directors voted to make an exception for me.Yes, yes, it sounds like I’m boasting but I’m not. I’m making a full confession.The wiener dog races we sponsor each year in Buda, Texas (population: 2,404) made $120,000 for the Buda Lions club this year. More than 600 wiener dogs arrived from all over America to compete for our 6-foot tall, first-place trophy. Each year’s race has been bigger than the last for 12 consecutive years.My company, Wizard of Ads, Inc. comes up with a theme each year, designs the posters and T-shirts, writes and records a silly radio ad and pays for the oversized trophies. The Lions International website says, “Lions meet the needs of local communities and the world. Our more than 1.35 million members in 206 countries and geographic areas are different in many ways, but we share a core belief – community is what we make it.”Sounds good to me but I fear there’s been a horrible misunderstanding: You see, I cheated.Have you ever seen kids playing football, baseball or soccer on a playground? The winner is determined the moment the captains choose sides. Pick the right players and you win. Pick wrong and you lose.I won 12 years ago when I refused to sponsor anything but the wiener dog races.“But Truck City is sponsoring the wiener dogs.”“Sorry, it’s the wiener dogs or nothing.”“Won’t you reconsider?”“No.”“You’ll be helping a really good cause…”“Get Truck City to sponsor the precision lawn chair drill teams or the riding lawnmower races.”“Trust me, Mr. Williams, you want the riding lawnmower races. Do you remember the episode of Home Improvement when Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor was going to race riding lawnmowers with Bob Vila and Tim put a jet engine from a Chinook helicopter on his lawn mower?”“Sure.”“We’re going to have that lawnmower – the actual one from the TV show – in this year’s race. And it’s got a real jet engine.”“Sorry, but it’s the wiener dogs or nothing. Convince Truck City to sponsor the lawnmowers.”Truck City was magnanimous and changed their sponsorship to the riding lawnmowers. I wasn’t willing to risk my reputation as an ad consultant on anything but a sure bet.The lawnmower races and the lawn chair drill teams were abandoned when the wiener dogs began to gain serious national momentum.The source of the misunderstanding – and the root of my confession – is that everyone assumes we could have aimed our mighty firepower at the lawnmowers or the lawn chairs and made them just as successful. But I know it isn’t true.We won the game when we picked the wiener dogs.This is the dirty little secret of advertising: you determine the success of the campaign when you pick what you’re going to promote.Have you been settling for precision lawn chairs and lawnmowers? Repent of your sin. Demand the wiener dogs.You’ll be amazed how much better your ads work.Roy H. Williams

I was explaining to my apprentices the difference between cost-based accounting and customer-based accounting. “Cars in 1908 sold for about $2,500 apiece. Nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs became car builders between 1886 and 1908 and each of them began with the question, ‘How can I build a stronger, faster, more desirable car?’” But none of them could build and sell a car for less than $2,500. Consequently, cars sold in small numbers and only to the very rich.But Henry Ford wasn’t product-focused, he was customer-focused. Henry asked, “At what price could I sell a lot of cars… a whole lot of cars?” Henry decided upon the price of $849 and it became his non-negotiable, his North Star.Designs A through S were impossible to build and sell for $849 so those designs were scrapped. But the Model T at $849 swept America like a prairie fire on a windy day and left 15 million Americans smiling happily in the smoke of identical, black cars. (The bestselling car in the world today sells about 400,000 units per year worldwide, so 15 million is a lot of cars… a whole lot of cars.)Henry Ford developed the assembly line using the same sort of reverse logic. While visiting a large meat-packing house in Chicago, Henry was impressed with the efficiency of their disassembly line: a pig carcass hung from a hook that rolled along an overhead rail in front of a line of workers, each of whom cut off a piece of pork with a specialized knife. Whoosh. The pig was skeletonized in less than 2 minutes.“Instead of a rail overhead, I’ll have a conveyor belt underneath. And instead of taking off a piece, my workers will add a piece. Instead of ending with a skeleton, we’ll begin with a skeleton.” Whoosh. By 1920 a new Model T rolled out of the factory every 60 seconds and 1 of every 2 cars on earth was a Ford Model T.Sam Walton was Henry Ford with a different haircut. Sam taught his buyers to look at an item and ask, “At what price could I sell a lot of these… a whole lot of these?” Then if the item could be bought for less than that amount, the buyer was told to buy a trainload of them.“Roy, I can corroborate that story.” All eyes turned toward Norm, one of my apprentices. “I was with Fred Meyer in 1980 and Wal-Mart was part of our buying group. A man at the front of the room held up a rug and began explaining its features. The Wal-Mart buyer on my right leaned across to ask the Fred Meyer buyer on my left, ‘How much do you think we could sell those for?’ My buyer whispered back, ‘We don’t yet know what they cost.’ The Wal-Mart buyer cocked his head and responded, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’”Fred Meyer and Sam Walton simultaneously broke the 1 billion-dollar mark in 1980. Fred Meyer now sells 7 billion dollars a year.Wal-Mart sells that much every week.Henry Ford and Sam Walton became ecstatically wealthy because they had an instinctive understanding of Genrich Altshuller’s Answer 13: Do it backwards.Bad marketing is focused on the product. Good marketing is focused on the customer. It’s a subtle shift in perspective, but a vital one.Wizard Academy graduate Kary Mullis understands Answer 13, just like Henry and Sam. “Geneticists were looking for a needle in a haystack, so I said, ‘Why not turn the haystack into needles?’” The year was 2004. Kary was telling me how he invented Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR,) the scientific breakthrough that won him the Nobel Prize and opened the door to genetic research.Kary then showed me a scale model of a new, organic molecule and said he was using that same inverted perspective – Answer 13 again – to eliminate bioterrorism. “We know all about this powerful immuno-reaction because we’ve been suppressing it during heart-valve transplants for decades. So I said, ‘Suppress it hell, why not aim it?’”Kary is holding the molecule he showed me in 2004 in the 2009 TED video in which he announces the success of his experiment to make a vaccine for anthrax. Take a look.Answer 13: Do it backwards. Reverse it. Turn it upside down. Backwards thinking is what made Henry Ford and Sam Walton rich and won Kary Mullis the Nobel Prize.Think of a limiting factor, something that’s holding you back. Now sling a little Answer 13 on the problem. What does it look like now?After Norm finished his Fred Meyer/Wal-Mart story, each of my apprentices was tasked with studying a specific client through the lens of customer-based accounting. A second apprentice spoke up: “My client sells lighting fixtures and wants to target 30 to 50 year-old women who are in the process of building a new custom home. But why not target women who already own a home? And instead of these women having to find an installer, why don’t we send an installer home with them to install the light fixture immediately? All the lights in the showroom could have price tags showing the price of the light Installed Today.”Anyone with half a brain can think of several reasons why this is an unworkable idea. But what do you think will happen when a person with a whole brain works out how to do it? “You Buy It Today, We Install It Today.”The trendy thing among furniture stores right now is to let customers choose the stain for the wood and the fabric for the cushions and then deliver this quasi-custom furniture to their homes in about 10 weeks.But my friend Jim McIngvale takes the opposite approach. Jim doesn’t do specialorders. “You see it? We got it. Buy it today and it’s in your home tonight. My guys are ready to load the delivery truck and follow you home right now. No, you can’t order it in another color. That’s the color we got, right there. Do you like it?”Henry Ford offered a similar choice on his Model T. “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.”Jim McIngvale is a furniture-selling legend. “Mattress Mack” sells $200 million per year in a single location, the highest volume per square foot of any furniture store in the world. His Gallery Furniture store is in Houston, his city of choice.Like Henry and Sam and Kary, Jim McIngvale understands the power of Answer 13.Forwards is fine but backwards is better.What might you do better backwards?Roy H. Williams 

Discover the Buried TreasureLast week I spent long hours preparing nine ad-writing apprentices for what lies ahead. Strangely, each of them signed up for this excruciating 7-week adventure for the same reason; they wanted to escape the handcuffs of specialization. None of them are new to marketing.The first 4 are full-time advertising professionals with deep experience in:1. financial services,2. clothing,3. garden centers,4. cameras and video equipment.The others are:5. The owner of a newspaper.6. The chief marketing officer of a technology firm that created several of the wonders at Walt Disney World.7. A seasoned, high profile marketing guru that took an obscure, regional retailer (Fred Meyer) to 7 billion dollars a year.And then we added an extra seat for8. The head of a major department at the Mayo Clinic, a lifelong turnaround specialist who takes medical practices from loss to profit.And9. A new employee I recently hired from a field of 214 applicants.These apprentices will not be assigned clients in their categories of specialization. The goal of this adventure is for (1.) the apprentice and (2.) you, the business owner, to escape the handcuffs of your comfort zones.Do you remember what I said in the Monday Morning Memo of June 7, 2010? “Ignorant people aren’t stupid but merely uninformed; a marvelous advantage when you need a perspective from ‘outside the box.’ When you consult specialists within your industry, you’re talking to the builders of the box, the guardians of the box, the faithful defenders of THE BOX. So when specialists fail to provide the innovative thinking you need, ask the opinions of intelligent people who have no experience in your industry.”Are you beginning to understand why these nine specialists will not be allowed to write ads for businesses within their areas of specialization?I told the 9 specialists what lies ahead. “You will feel trapped in a tiny room whose walls are closing in on you.” “The first wall will be the delusion of the client regarding what really matters to the customer. They’ll want you to say the all things they’ve been saying that haven’t been working. They’re hoping you can say them differently and get a different result. Writing great ads is easy when the message is relevant, credible, new, surprising and different. Extracting a message from your client that will be new and surprising to the customer and genuinely different from the claims of the competitor is the hardest thing you will ever do.”“The second wall will be made of brick, a non-negotiable; your client’s financial or managerial inability to implement the plan in which you have the deepest confidence. Most of the time you’ll have to settle for Plan B, C or D.”“The third wall will be the product purchase cycle: how often is the customer in the market for this product or service? Food is easy to sell. Entertainment is easy to sell. We crave these things every day so they have a very short product purchase cycle and ads for these categories pay off very quickly. But what about life insurance, tires, refrigerators and chandeliers? How often do we buy these things? Product purchase cycles are carved in stone. No amount of wishing or hoping or cajoling or debate will put customers in the market to buy your client’s product before they’re ready to buy it.”“The fourth wall will be your own prejudice. You will be strongly tempted to evaluate product offerings based on whether or not they would appeal to you, personally. You cannot allow yourself to judge subjectively. The key isn’t whether or not you and all your friends would be attracted to the offer. The key is find similar offers that have worked well in the recent past. But if you use an idea that is already common within your client’s industry, it won’t be new, surprising or different to the customer. You must use Business Problem Topology* to find a tested, reliable innovation that has been developed and refined in an unrelated business category. The old, reliable concept in one category may be new, surprising and different in your client’s category. Find a BPT solution for your client and the resulting ad will be powerful, effective, and easy to write.”“The ceiling of this tiny room in which you are trapped will be the limitations of the marketplace. You’ll have to calculate the market potential: how much does the public currently spend in your client’s category? The monster king of a category usually controls between 25 percent and 33 percent of that potential. It’s almost impossible to grow beyond those numbers. How close is your client to that ceiling already? How much headroom do they have? Next you’ll have to evaluate your client’s competitive environment: when the customer doesn’t buy from your client, where do they buy? Why do they buy there? The marketplace is what it is. You cannot materially change it. You must learn to be for what is.”That is what I told my apprentices.A few dozen business owners have donated $500 each to help finish the tower at Wizard Academy. In return, each of them is being interviewed by one of nine apprentices who will then write an ad for them that I will edit. Are you open-minded enough to be led outside your comfort zone? Are you big enough to swing a $500 hammer? We need just a few more business owners willing to take a walk on the wild side. Each of my 9 apprentices will need a different business each week for 7 weeks; 63 businesses altogether.Might you be one of them?Let us know.Roy H. Williams

From Things You Carry in Your Mind A Chinese proverb extols the strength of the written word: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” “Ah, yes, Xiao,” (Shee Ow, ‘Little One,’) “but the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents.”The second chapter of the book of Genesis tells us God created all the animals and then, “brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” The gift of God to you and me – the thing that facilitates our ability to transfer knowledge across time and space – is our capacity for attaching complex meanings to sounds. The deepest meanings are attached to special types of sounds called “words.”We, the People, invented the written word only to make the spoken word more durable. When the spoken word becomes permanent, it is a powerful thing. Ink on paper creates a plastic explosive. The eyes of the reader ignite the page and BOOM! images fill the mind. “The soft blanket of Summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace. Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness. Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.” – Destinae, book 2, chap. 4 Just behind your left ear is Wernicke’s area of the brain. This is where certain sounds called “nouns” are attached to the mental images they represent. Slightly forward of that ear is Broca’s area, where verbs become actions on the projection screen of imagination, the mind’s eye, called the “visuospatial sketchpad” by cognitive neuroscientists. The movie projector we call consciousness, they call “working memory.” The high-bandwidth neural pipeline that connects the two is called the “arcuate fasciculus.” Toss these words into the mix at dinner parties and everyone will think you’re smart. Painfully dull, but smart. A second function of Broca’s area is to coordinate the diaphragm, larynx, lips and tongue to create a whole range of vocal phonemes: vowels, diphthongs, closures, plosives, nasals, flaps, fricatives, affricates, liquids, dentals, glides, velars, palatals and labials; the sounds you make in rapid succession every time you speak. The rest of us interpret these sounds to see exactly what you want us to see in our minds. I remember the day my friend Michael Zaplitny, an excellent writer, told me about a particular bar in 1970’s Saskatoon:“It was where loose women in beehive hairdos met guys in two-tone shoes.”Michael’s words make you see and feel.Made in God’s image, Michael and me and you speak worlds into existence. And Michael said, “Where loose women in beehive hairdos met guys in two-tone shoes.” And Roy said, “Bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness.”And You said, “Finish the tower.” Yes, language is an amazing thing. I’m taking off work the next 2 months to write a couple of books and groom half a dozen apprentices. They’re going to need real businesses for whom they can write real ads. Would you like us to isolate your core message and turn it into advertising copy for you? I’m going to edit all the ads written by each of these apprentices but there’s nothing I can do to bring sparkle to a boring message. That’s why you’re going to need to allow my apprentices to extract from you the very best message that’s in you when they call to interview you about your business.We can definitely give you better words than the ones you’ve been using. Donate $500 to help finish the tower at Wizard Academy and leave the rest to me and my apprentices. They’ll call you, interview you, craft the message and give it to me, I’ll edit it and give it back, they’ll send it to you, you’ll use it to grow your business.Each of these apprentices paid $6,000 for 7 weeks of detailed training. You can bet they’re taking it very seriously.Want to read the details of this opportunity?Aroo and aroo.Roy H. Williams

Marty Markowitz. Know the name?I thought not.Marty is the borough president of Brooklyn, one of New York City’s five municipal corporations. His domain stretches nine miles by eight. Marty’s not even a mayor, yet more people live under his authority than lived in the whole of America in 1776.*Mathematics would argue that Marty is therefore more important than George Washington.There’s a limit to the accuracy of math and we exceed this limit when we attempt to correlate numbers that have no correlation. Like we do every day when we try to justify our marketing decisions.Qualitative data, quantitative data and metrics prove the superiority of Marty Markowitz over George Washington:1. Marty’s citizens are better educated, enjoy a higher standard of living and a longer life expectancy than citizensunder George Washington.2. Marty’s citizens are happier than George Washington’s, evidenced by the fact that they are less prone to armed insurrection.3. Marty’s domain is networked with efficient bridges, streets and roads. George Washington’s domain was undeveloped, inefficient and underutilized.4. Marty’s domain generates a profoundly higher Gross Domestic Product than the domain managed by George, even after adjusting for inflation. Marty is able to do this even though George governed a landmass 11,528 times larger than the landmass governed by Marty: 72 sq. miles vs. the 13 colonies – 830,000 sq. miles ceded by Britian at the conclusion of the armed insurrection instigated by Washington.5. Divide the Gross Domestic Product of Brooklyn by the 72 square miles of Brooklyn and any reasonable person will be forced to acknowledge that Marty Markowitz is not only a better leader than George Washington, he is in fact the greatest leader the world has ever known.Welcome to the world of Marketing Research, where tangentially relevant data is conjoined to logically support a fallacious premise chosen in advance.TRANSLATION: “Welcome to the world of Marketing Research, where figures lie and liars figure.”Is it possible to gather relevant, reliable data and use it to help us make profitable marketing decisions? Absolutely. In fact, Wizard Academy is gathering the most highly paid marketing research professionals on earth to teach you how to accurately measure what really matters and then use that information to take your business to the next level.If you’re a marketing professional who believes you’re far too savvy to be fooled by data, we beg you NOT to bring a client with you to this class. Our goal is to lift your understanding to a higher level. This will happen. You will learn astounding new things. Valuable new things. Revolutionary new things. We don’t want to create a situation where you feel a need to defend your old ideas. If you bring a client, it’s going to be awkward when some of your old beliefs are disproven. Here’s who we’re hoping to bring together: 1. John Davis conducted the research that led to a number of the most successful ad campaigns in the history of marketing. Hear the backstories of these campaigns from John, himself. Learn from this master of masters how to avoid the seductive mistakes commonly made by researchers and numbers crunchers. (We have video of John Davis in the rabbit hole. Click the Marty Markowitz photo at the top of this memo to enter. Say Hi to Alice for me.)2. Mark Huffman is Integrated Production Manager (of advertising) at Procter & Gamble, the largest advertiser on earth*. When Mark first came to the academy nine years ago, he told me about the research culture at P & G: “In God we trust. All others bring data.” With 26 years of P & G experience – whose ad budget is nearly 5 billion dollars a year – Mark isn’t guessing or simply repeating what he’s been told. Mark is a BIG boy among BIG boys.3. Jeffrey Eisenberg – “Did you know that 1 of every 5 Google search results is individualized to the user?” My staff could hardly believe what they were hearing so Jeffrey proved it to us. As the author of 2 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and BusinessWeek bestselling books on internet marketing, Jeffrey will open your eyes to a whole series of urban legends about internet metrics. Then he’ll focus your attention on the things that really make a difference. You’re going to be surprised.4. Dr. Richard Grant takes time away from his practice as a clinical psychologist to teach Consumer Behavior in the MBA program at the University of Texas. The cognoscenti will remember Dr. Grant from the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. After spending an hour with Dr. Grant, no one ever sees the world as they did before.Several dozen people will attend this course but only 1 dozen rooms will be available in Engelbrecht House. These FREE, on-campus rooms will be given, of course, to the first dozen people who register. Want to be notified by email when we’ve firmed up the dates for this 2-day class? Send a quick email to Kristin@WizardAcademy.org right now. This is going to be an awesome class.Roy H. Williams

How to Become a Wise Man (Wise-ard)Ignorant people aren’t stupid but merely uninformed; a marvelous advantage when you need a perspective from “outside the box.”The truly naïve are so thoroughly “outside” they’re not even sure what you mean by “the box.”When you consult specialists within your industry, you’re talking to the builders of the box, the guardians of the box, the faithful defenders of THE BOX.So when specialists fail to provide the innovative thinking you need, ask the opinions of intelligent people who have no experience in your industry. This is the second quickest shortcut to successful innovation. (I’ll tell you the quickest shortcut later.)Each suggestion you hear will tempt you to say, “But you don’t understand…”Bite your tongue. Don’t say it. The goal of this exercise isn’t to drag people into your box but to get a fresh perspective from outside it, remember? So just listen and ponder all that would have to change if you were to implement the suggestion made by your naïve friend.The naïve suggestion won’t be workable. What you make from it will be.Frank Kern is senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services. On May 19, 2010, he released a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. Are you ready for this? According to that survey, today’s CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.“That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shiftin attitude.”– Frank Kern, IBM Global Business ServicesBUT we’re not getting more creative. As our society moves deeper into this Civic cycle (2003-2023) we’re becoming more deeply committed to following the rules. We’re becoming more regulatory, less tolerant of divergent thought. Under the guise of “working together for the common good,” our young men and women are choosing to become guardians of the status quo, especially when it comes to problem solving. In short, we’re “playing it safe.”When it comes to advertising and marketing, “playing it safe” is the least safe thing you can do.A report just released from M.I.T. reveals a surprising connection between progress and “playing it safe.”When bonuses were given for increased performance, the bigger the bonus, the better the performance when only mechanical skills were required. No surprise here, right?But when bonuses were offered for cognitive skills, even rudimentary ones, higher incentives led to poorer performance. I swear I’m not making this up. “These findings have been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists, by sociologists, and by economists.”– Prof. Daniel Pink Watch the video.Daniel Pink speculates that we respond most strongly to offers of 1. autonomy, 2. mastery and 3. purpose. I agree with Pink but I interpret the M.I.T. data with a slightly different twist; it seems to me that the higher the reward, the greater the tendency of respondents to second-guess their creative right-brain impulses.In other words, they over-thunk it and “played it safe.”Fear is a terrible master.It is by attempting the ridiculous that we accomplish the miraculous.“If you will expand your world, you must crawl on your hands and knees, get on your belly and squirm under the fence that surrounds your insulated life.” – Inside the Outside, Wizard Academy PressRita Mae Brown says it more colorfully. “As a woman, I find it very embarrassing to be in a meeting and realize I’m the only one in the room with balls.”Rita Mae would love Wizard Academy.Wizard Academy is a school for brilliant misfits, people who have achieved success in the mainstream but never bought into its values. “It’s like the wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey and we’re the strange people who answered.”– Keith Miller, adjunct faculty and bestselling author of The Taste of New Wine.Wizard Academy: America’s Island of Independent Thought.Come. We’ve got a room for you in the student mansion and we’re not afraid of your creative, crazy ideas. That Fastest Shortcut I Mentioned? Read Mark Fox’s book on the 40 lenses of TRIZ, Da Vinci and the 40 Answers, or take Mark’s class at Wizard Academy June 30 – July 1.Engelbrecht House awaits. Roy H. Williams

The Secret of Self DefinitionCorporate mission statements all sound alike because companies stand for pretty much the same things: “We believe in honesty, quality products, a positive work environment and a fair profit.”Yawn.You and I write mission statements because we want people to like us. Our pattern-recognizing, touchy-feely right brains see a newcomer and ask, “How are we alike? What makes us the same?”But the deductive-reasoning left brain looks for discrepancies and anomalies, “How are we not alike? What makes us different?” Consequently, we cannot set ourselves apart according to what we stand for since we stand for pretty much the same things.We set ourselves apart by what we stand against.I’m not suggesting you become a complainer, a picketer or a self-righteous prig. I’m suggesting only that you make clear to the world what you don’t do.What you exclude – not what you include – is what defines you.1. There’s a nationwide fast-food chain that refuses to be open on Sundays. Can you name it?2. BeautifulPeople.com – a dating site for narcissists – excludes anyone who is overweight. (Gasp!) This January they kicked out 5,000 members whose post-Christmas photos revealed they had gained a few pounds during the holidays.3. A fitness center became the fastest growing franchise in history by excluding half the population. They opened their second location just 15 years ago. Curves – for women only – now has more than 10,000 locations in 70 countries.4. “No drinkin’ – No dancin’ – No smokin’ – No spittin’ and No cussin’. Now if you don’t mind what we Don’t have… I’m sure you’ll like what we DO have…. good, clean, family entertainment, every weekend, year ’round.”– Kentucky Opry5. The Heart Attack Grill excludes from their menu anything that might be good for you. But they’re happy to bring you a Quadruple Bypass Burger with Flatliner Fries and unfiltered cigarettes. “Taste Worth Dying For.”6. Martin – that most highly revered of guitars – won’t make electric instruments. Acoustic only.7. Geppetto’s Workshop is a toy store that excludes anything made of plastic or requiring batteries.I’m not asking whether or not you agree with these companies. I’m not even suggesting that we debate whether their exclusions are ultimately good or bad for business. (I’m fairly certain that Chick Fil-A would make more money if they opened on Sundays.) My point is merely to illustrate that an organization’s exclusions define it far more clearly than its inclusions.Does your company exclude anything?If so, what do you exclude… and why?Take a moment to answer these questions and you will have stepped onto the path that leads to Corporate Differentiation.Let the journey begin. Roy H. Williams

“Well, it’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages.Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention… We’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day 40 years ago to about 5,000 a day today… It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement. It’s an assault on the senses. We have to screen it out because we simply can’t absorb that much information. We can’t process that much data. And so no surprise, consumers are reacting negatively to the kind of marketing blitz; the kind of super saturation of advertising that they’re exposed to on a daily basis.”– Jay Walker-Smith,President of Yankelovich,a consumer behavior research firmPeople are infuriated by ads that get their attention. The public doesn’t want to pay attention. They’re working hard at not paying attention. “Why can’t you just bury your dollars in the Yellow Pages like everyone else? Why won’t you sound like other people on the radio so we can ignore your ads the way we ignore theirs? Give us a break. We really, really, really want to ignore you.”Here’s another wonderful love letter received by one of our clients last week. It’s typical of the genre:Your radio commercials are so annoying, obnoxious and irritating that I immediately turn off the radio. It is amazing that whoever wrote and produced this inane bunch of dribble convinced Ms. Thompson to invest the firm’s money in them. Cutting through the niceties of polite society, the only way to describe the commercials: a bunch of crap. They are not funny. Just because foundation repair requires digging a hole doesn’t mean that the advertising for your services should be dragged down (or up depending on how you look at it) to that level. Perhaps these are the commercials from Hell. Thanks for listening. It’s just one persons opinion, but thought you should know before you tape any more of these spots. I’m sure your company does a fine job for folks and as a result you should represent yourselves accordingly in a more dignified manner.The person who sent this email is a sheepdog, barking and yapping and nipping the heels of anyone who attempts to break away from the herd.The rest of that story: the client in question, a long-established foundation repair company, has grown from barely $4 million to more than $6 million during their 4 years with us, even in the shadow of recession.Traditional wisdom says that a foundation repair company is going to live or die based on their ads in the Yellow Pages. After all, the Yellow Pages is where a homeowner is going to go when they need foundation repair, right?We steadily cut back the Yellow Pages and redirected that money into radio. We’re now spending zero dollars in the Yellow Pages and our client is having her best year ever.Her banker says she deposits her money in a very dignified manner.Roy H. Williams

“No one is sincere except for me and you.And lately I’ve had my doubts about you.” We’re staring into the face of a trend.I told you in Dec. 2003 that we were moving into an era of “working together for the common good” and that the transition would take 6 years. Thousands of you from Stockholm to Sydney to Las Vegas to South Carolina slipped into the hour-and-a-half multimedia time-tunnel in which I illustrated the arc of society’s 40-year pendulum. Thousands more of you have seen one of my partners make the same presentation.That 6-year transition is ended; we’re now living solidly in the upswing of a Civic cycle.This year’s “Final Four” playoffs in college basketball were conspicuously absent of attention-grabbing superstars. Prior to the games, Tom Davis of NBC Sports wrote, “This is being billed as the ‘No Name’ Final Four for its lack of a star-studded cast of individuals.”In a related story, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said, “The megastar that maybe you normally seem to find in these Final Fours maybe isn’t there. I think it’s refreshing that you’re looking at four teams that ‘team’ is maybe the most important thing.”Working together for the common good is a beautiful dream. But we always take a good thing too far. “Working together for the common good” quickly becomes “I’m not convinced you’re working hard enough and I’m not entirely sure of your motives. What do you have to say for yourself?”People who offer evaluation and advice presume to be superior under the guise of being “helpful.” I find few things in life as irritating as faux purity and faux authenticity: the Faux Real. (The title of today’s memo is an inside joke. Pennie and I have pronounced faux [foe] as “fox” ever since the day an imperious woman in an antique shop condescended to explain to us that a particular antique had a “fox finish.” Sniffing and looking down her nose, she said, “Fox is French for false.” We’ve been laughing about it for 20 years.)Yes, we’re moving into an era of hyper-accountability. Soon Cain will no longer answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” but will take great pride in keeping his brother on the straight and narrow. The Cain of tomorrow will be a pest, a prig* and a self-righteous tattle-tale. The Spanish Inquisition and the holocaust of the Nazis were the result of just such a trend getting out of control.“There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.”– Robert Lynd (1879 – 1949)“Men who believe themselves to be good, who do not search their own souls, often commit the worst atrocities. It is only when we do evil in the belief that we do good that we pursue it wholeheartedly.”– David Farland Just as the Final Four were taking the basketball court, Andrew Potter released a new book, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. David Pitt of BOOKLIST writes, “We live, Potter argues, in a world dominated by the prepackaged and the artificial, the fraudulent and the fake. Growing out of this increasingly bleak cultural landscape is a movement centered on the notion of authenticity: the honest, the natural, the real. That’s all fine and good, Potter says, except for one thing: we don’t have a clue what we mean by authenticity, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know how to find it. That is, the quest for authenticity is a hoax—there is no such thing. Authenticity is an exclusionist notion, defined by what it isn’t, not by what it is, and, for the most part, so-called authentic lifestyles are just as artificial and contrived as the rest of modern culture.”Tess Vigeland, interviewing Andrew Potter, said, “You also talk about the one-upmanship that comes into play here, keeping up with the authentic Joneses, especially when it comes to being authentically environmentally friendly. You say there’s this trend toward competitive anti-consumption.”Potter replied, “The idea is that you have to show that you’re not actually connected to the stuff you’re buying. But I think the way it gets really interesting is in the various ways people are downgrading their houses. You know, you get these amazing stories of people putting no-flush toilets in their condominiums in Manhattan, or mud floors in their house. To prove you’re more authentic than everyone else, you have to live like some third world, poverty-stricken aboriginal. It’s quite remarkable.”We get our weirdest when we compete over who is the most pure.If we are not careful this attitude will spawn a new McCarthyism in our politics.If we are not careful this attitude will lead to witch trials in our religions.If we are not careful this attitude will lead to “litmus tests” in our society.I suggest we be careful.And open-minded.And light-hearted.And forgiving. In all the millennia of human experience, these are the only known antidotes.Roy H. Williams