OK then, here's part the second of Gonzo Marketing. Part the first being
here. The leading bit below (in red) is for continuity with what came immediately before.
...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.
At times, the recombinant results may strike you as freakish, as frivolous. Feel free to sue me. However, you'll get far more satisfaction by thinking of yourself as I do: as a Raider of the Lost Arc. To sample once again the comedy stylings of Johan Huizinga...
"The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write." [9]
As Lou Gerstner, chairman and CEO of IBM once said, "Hey, I can dig it."[10] The concept of gonzo marketing would never have come together at all if I'd had to rigorously research every damn thread we're about to touch on. Will some of these lead us into curious intellectual culs-de-sac? Yeah, probably. Are you likely to encounter grievous gaffes and disquieting half truths? Sure, but what else is new? By screwing up royally here, I hope to provide a new kind of model demonstrating to business that it not only can, but must move beyond its unhealthy fear of error and imprecision. Today, it is certainty that is not an option. Failure is almost guaranteed.
In addition to being a sort of indie-Indy, I also think of myself as An Amateur and a Dilettante. The caps are there to echo the title of the movie, An Officer and a Gentleman -- though as you're already finding out, I'm neither. At its heart, gonzo is animated by an attitude of deeply principled anti-professionalism in the best sense. And there is a best sense. Historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin once wrote: "Democracy is government by amateurs.... The survival of our society depends on the vitality of the amateur spirit.... The representative of the people...must be wary of becoming a professional politician."[11]
Here, amateur clearly doesn't mean incompetent or unskilled. It doesn't mean unprofessional. But professional-ism is something altogether else. Over time, any functional specialization tends to forget its relationship to the larger social context it was created to work within and serve. Instead, it concentrates on developing an inner sanctum of specialists who talk among themselves in a private language inaccessible to outsiders. Almost without exception, such professionals despise amateurs. Or worse, accord them a patronizing form of faux eye-rolling patience.
Related to "amateur" is the even more pejorative term "dilettante" -- someone who practices a craft or studies a field of knowledge in which he or she is not a "recognized professional." But the etymological roots of these words tell a different story. Amateurs do what they do for love (from the Latin amare), while dilettantes are not mere casual dabblers, but instead are inspired by delight (from the Italian dilettare by way of the Latin delectare). But delight and passion for the work are precisely the qualities professionals tend to lose first. The opposite of professionalism is what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki called "beginner's mind" -- an ability to look at the world with fresh eyes and an open spirit.[12]
Boorstin's observation can be equally applied to the commercial sphere. In marketing, just as in government, professionalism tends to hew unimaginatively to its own timid orthodoxy. It does not provide leadership, enthusiasm or the kind of impassioned personal engagement that has come to be called gonzo. In stark contrast, business professionalism tends to be arid and passionless, narrowly focused, self-involved. However, this doesn't mean that everyone in business fits this damning characterization.
Far from it. In my own experience, there are many more lively intellects at work in the workplace than the misbegotten "corporate communications" coming out of those places would lead one to believe. There's often more going on in today's corporation than today's corporation would care to admit. New life is growing between the cracks in the corporate edifice, and it's spreading like a weed.
In the past year or so, I've had the opportunity to test many of
the ideas in this book before very live business audiences from
Maui to Bangalore. At places like Peoplesoft, Gartner Group, Sun
Microsystems, SAP, First Union Bank, the Direct Marketing Association,
and Andersen Consulting -- now, for their sins, renamed Accenture. To
be fair, my Accenture-nee-Andersen audience was great. It was clear
they'd been around the block. They'd seen it all. They laughed in all
the right places. On the other hand, the Direct Marketing crowd was
thoroughly unamused. Understandable. The rending of garments and
gnashing of teeth would have been appropriate responses.
The day before I spoke at Swiss Re (the Re is for reinsurance, a
hugely lucrative niche), my hosts opened an impressive mucho-multimillion-dollar conference facility called Rüschlikon.
[the luncheon was superb]
The festivities included a Chinese dancer performing on a rooftop in the
snow to piano music piped to her wireless headset and further
accompanied by nocturnal animal cries taped in some Southeast Asian
jungle. In addition, there was an extremely Zen- looking Japanese guy
playing a 2000 year old stone flute that appeared to be nearly as
ancient as himself, and a terrorist-looking dude with his face weirdly
painted in striking primary colors, who read long strings of numbers
in German, timed to a strobe light. Acht hundert neun und zwanzig,
sieben hundert vier und dreizig... Yeah, just another day of business
as usual. The center's director, Fritz Gutbrodt, told me over a
wonderfully animated dinner that he still teaches literature at the
University of Zurich.
from: Swiss Re opens centre for global dialogue in Ruschlikon
source: Business Wire, 15 November 2000
The investment banking firm of Dresdner, Kleinwort, Benson was a slightly different story. IT director J.P. Rangaswami runs offsite swat teams that take a real problem, break it down, come up with a solution, code it, and integrate the results into the corporate computing infrastructure -- all within a week. In an industry where this sort of thing is usually measured in months, quarters or years, such results are astounding. Everyone on the team is expected to drink copious amounts of beer, liberally provided, between the impossibly long, often round-the-clock, hacking sessions. J.P. is working on a book about certain structural and management challenges facing large corporations. Working title: Fossil Fools. We had many deep exchanges about what's truly important in this industry at the moment. He turned me on to a Dire Straits bootleg. I convinced him to buy a pricey but totally kickass Roland guitar synth. "Damn you," he wrote later in email, "you are starting to cost me real money!"
"JP Rangaswami thinks Sun's willingness to have a community -- and to cede some authority to the users -- ultimately saved Java. Or, more accurately, the community that grew up around Java saved it, says Rangaswami, chief information officer and managing director for the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein investment bank in London. The users demanded a more open system and got it."
from: Dan Gillmor's column
source: San Jose Mercury News, 27 June 2004
The Dresdner gang isn't cheap, though. They gleefully fete me with sumptuous dinners in Mayfair, theater tickets, limousines. Would I care to take in The Tate? They put me up in the Docklands, an outrageous suite overlooking the Thames. I drop some laundry off with the valet and it comes back wrapped in rich brocade, my socks and underwear not only ironed -- what were they thinking? -- but also tied into little bundles with red ribbons that say "Four Seasons Hotel - Canary Wharf." It's totally over the top. I love it. But finally I have to get out, get real again. I give my talk on gonzo marketing, then ditch the chauffeur. I take a train, then a bus. I get lost. London is better at eye level...
to be continued
NOTES
[9] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Beacon Press, 1955.
[10] http://www.ibm.com/lous-grooves.html Unfortunately, this page now reports "Our apologies... 404 multifail."
[11] Daniel J. Boorstin, Hidden History, Vintage Books, 1989.
[12] Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Weatherhill, 1972.
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