Last week when I promised to start posting bits of
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices ["87 used & new from $0.47"], I thought it would be a piece of cake. Not really. And not least because it's sometimes hard to read one's own stuff. If one is me, that is. There's a lot of personal history tied up in this one, which, except for this sentence (and that
grafik), I will pass over in silence.
However, silence not being my natural mode, I'll throw in some comments and additional references along the way. And by the way, feel more than free to imagine me gritting my teeth along with you at the terrible puns and bad jokes with which this thing is littered. What can I tell you? As the Zombie's once said, it's too late to say you're sorry...
Ahem, yes. And so, without further ado, here's the beginning...
Introduction
Participating in the Scene
Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.
Sir Max Beerbohm[1]
This is a serious book. No fooling.
Now right off the bat that has to make you wonder, right? Because most books, especially business books, pretty much take it for granted that you believe that going in. Of course the book is serious. That's why you bought it. Either that, or you needed an over-the-counter alternative to your regular insomnia medication. Don't laugh. Recent studies show that seven out of ten business book buyers are really looking for semantic Sominex. And, as Harley Manning of Forrester Research points out in his insightful report -- "The Snooze Factor: Sleepy Time in the Management Aisle" -- these consumers find what they're looking for in 82% of all online book transactions.[2]
But seriously. In his seminal work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga riffs on the perennial theme of wisdom, from the Latin sapientia. "A happier age than ours," he wrote, "once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens." However, he wonders how appropriate this label remains today. "In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, thought us." So someone came up with Homo Faber: Man the Maker. Better, Huizinga says, but still no cigar. Homo Ludens, he then proposes: Man the Player.[3]
While some will find the notion ludicrous, play is no less an important aspect of business than it is of life. This is probably because, contrary to widespread popular belief, commerce is a subset of life and not the other way around. Therefore, as Huizinga goes to great lengths to point out, play is serious business. Or something like that. I only read the foreword.
In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote a book called The Savage Mind, in which he says "Language is a form of human reason and has its reasons which are unknown to man." Man, I don't even know why I quoted that, except that it sounds pretty cool.[4] More to the point, he talks about a concept for which English has no equivalent: bricolage.[5] In essence, bricolage is what tinkers do -- collecting odd bits of stuff they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon. While the Internet may have convinced some businesses to think "out of the box," most are still not even sure what box they're in, much less which way to turn for emergency egress. If some unprincipled individual were to yell "fire!" right about now, the entire edifice of global commerce might suddenly collapse.
Fire! Fire!
What the hell. Because, while few corporations seem to realize it, the entire edifice of global commerce is collapsing already -- under its own top-heavy weight. And this is happening at the very moment business is crowing loudest about its own gross tonnage: the biggest media mergers, biggest advertising budgets, biggest aggregation of eyeballs. Yuck, what an image. In short, the messiest, massiest mass marketing morass the world has ever seen. It's ironic.
In a wonderful Newsweek article titled "Will We Ever Get Over Irony?," David Gates writes about the postmodern inclination to rip (off) ideas from a broad range of historical contexts and recombine them in odd and often glaring ways.
Now here's something odd. I'd forgotten until just this minute -- really, I'm not making this up -- that I originally found this article via eLibrary, which later morphed into Highbeam Research. I was thinking I should insert some Highbeam refs along the way as I republish this stuff, but in this case (and many others), they're already embedded in the book -- though I don't think I ever gave eLibrary credit. My little secret until now.
from: Will We Ever Get Over Irony? by David Gates
source: Newsweek, 1 January 2000
"Such juxtapositional ironies flourish in the 20th century's most characteristic artistic mode: call it collage, assemblage, bricolage, pastiche or (to be less Frenchified and more au courant) sampling."[6] Aha! Now we're getting somewhere -- though these equivalents make the overall effect no less odd. The glare produced is still a kind of cognitive dissonance. Things that don't fit together in expected ways can make your head hurt. However, under the right conditions, this pain can also produce insight. It can illuminate not only the box, but the EXIT sign as well.
I can see already that you're skeptical, gentle reader. This isn't sounding entirely level-headed, is it? Doesn't quite have that grim-visaged wrinkle-browed aura of unassailable fact. Hmmm, must be time for a quote from Harvard Business Review. "Pragmatic managers... know what resources are available and how to round up more on short notice," write a couple of bona fide Ph.D.s, doubtless recalling how they managed to scrape by on assistant professor salaries. "We call this aspect of pragmatism bricolage... Effective managers are bricoleurs... They play with possibilities... They tinker...."[7]
Now you believe me? Well, good. Oh yeah and by the way, Levi-Strauss says bricolage is analogous to the mythical thinking typical of primitive peoples. Savages. You know, the kind of uncivilized barbarians you get in places like Harvard, Borneo, New Guinea and the World Wide Web.[8] So, taking all the above into account (along with a grain of salt and two aspirins), think of this book as playful bricolage involving serious matters. As sampling. As a hip-hop cover of boring old best practices played backwards and burned into a bad-ass MP3 dance remix download.
NOTES
[1] Encarta Book of Quotations, developed for Microsoft Corporation by Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999.
[2] Look for the January 2001 Forrester Report "The Snooze Factor: Sleepy Time in the Management Aisle." You won't be able to find it, however, because it doesn't exist. If you believed it did, seek immediate help from a professional gullibility counselor. Harley Manning, on the other hand, is a real research director at Forrester who reads Entropy Gradient Reversals and does, in fact, believe that most business books are better than Valium for getting to sleep at night. Much to the credit of both Manning and his company, this gratuitous chain yanking is published with knowledge aforethought and prior consent. Whatever those mean.
[3] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Beacon Press, 1955. First published in Dutch, 1938. Quotes from the original [English] foreword.
[4] Encarta Book of Quotations, op. cit.
[5] Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind , University of Chicago Press, 1966. Originally published in French as La Pensee Sauvage, 1962.
[6] David Gates, "Will We Ever Get Over Irony?," Newsweek, January I, 2000, p. 90.
[7] Nitin Nohria and James D. Berkley, "Whatever Happened to the Take-Charge Manager?," Harvard Business Review, January, 1994, p 128.
[8] No, we're not really putting down the fine indigenous cultures of Borneo and New Guinea. See irony, supra. Even better, see a headshrinker.
That penultimate reference is another article I got from Highbeam Research (nee eLibrary) back at the end of 2000 when I was slaving away at the book. Now you can read the whole thing instead of just a crummy footnote...
from: Whatever Happened to the Take-Charge Manager?
by Nitin Nohria and James D Berkley
source: Harvard Business Review, 1 January 1994
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