This post has been brewing for (at least) a couple days -- these things take time, sportsfans -- and as it has developed, all sorts of odd synchronistic events and linkages have come to shape what will be, if I'm lucky and industrious, its eventual posting today. Lost you already, have I? Well then, let the longwinded explanation begin...

In yesterday's snail mail I received a package inside of which was, to my initial bewilderment, one of those 365-day desk calendar things, this one's pages consisting of quotes from that dastardly bastion of bestselling business books, Who Moved My Cheese?

"What the deuce?!" I exclaimed to myself, this book having caused me more heartburn than a six-pack of middling beer heedlessly sloshed over a lasagna dinner wolfed down in some Friday night greasy spoon. You get the general idea. I do not like it.

The mystery was soon solved, however, by the accompanying note:

page 1: Merry F***ing Christmas, you heathen.

[nicely scrawled sketch of a little pine tree]

page 2: I bought this before Christmas but haven't gotten to the Post office until now. Sorry for the delay.

Love, David Weinberger

Now, David and I go way back, much further back than The Cluetrain Manifesto, which we wrote with Doc Searls and Rick Levine. And much much further back than his own Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web.

Put it this way, despite the "love" in his signoff, David knows full well my feelings re the Cheese book. So its arrival represented another snarky mind bomb in a long series of snarky mind bombs stretching back into the dim reaches of time. And this back-and-forth mindbombing has continued, has indeed become something of a tradition over the years. Which is why, as I was preparing this post on a seemingly  unrelated theme (nothing is wholly unrelated in this medium; meaning language, not just the web), I was unsurprised to find this bit I'd written elsewhere, titled One for Weinberger.

But don't click that link! For three reasons:

1. it contains language unsuited to serious businesslike pursuits
2. it covers much abstruse intellectual history of the late 20th century, and
3. it may throw you off what I was intending to write about here -- though it is germane.

You see, I found that One for Weinberger page searching for what I was intending  to write about here, but seem to be having trouble getting to: i.e., the American behavioral psychologist J.B. Watson. The Encyclopedia Britannica article on whom says:

In 1920, in the wake of sensational publicity surrounding his divorce from his first wife, Watson resigned from Johns Hopkins. He entered the advertising business in 1921.

Evidently, Watson got kicked out of the academy after a string of sexual peccadilloes that were finally too much for the admisitriviasts of the day. But It's that final bit that interests me. Last year I began reading a biography of Abraham Maslow called The Right to Be Human by Edward Hoffman. However, I soon got sidetracked by Hoffman's tale of Watson and where he ended up making a lot  of money: the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

[Watson] found gainful employment with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency where, using techniques from his behavioural psychology, he showed that people's preferences between rival products were not based on their sensory qualities but on their associations. He went on to develop the selling of products like Maxwell House Coffee, Pond's Cold Cream, Johnson's Baby Powder and Odorono (one of the first deodorants). By 1924 he was on of the four vice-presidents of this very successful agency.

the above is from
The History of Instructional Design:
J.B.Watson and Comparative Psychology

So here we have J.B. Watson, father of American behaviorism, packing up all he knows about eliciting the Pavlovian slobber reaction, and wholesaling it to Madison Avenue. In 1921! Here's some background on the weapons of mass distraction he delivered to the enemy...

behaviorism: school of psychology which seeks to explain animal and human behavior entirely in terms of observable and measurable responses to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism was introduced (1913) by the American psychologist John B. Watson, who insisted that behavior is a physiological reaction to environmental stimuli. He rejected the exploration of mental processes as unscientific. The conditioned-reflex experiments of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the American psychologist Edward Thorndike were central to the development of behaviorism.

from: behaviorism
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Ed., 2004
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2004 Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

I've linked Edward Thorndike, above, because he was a) an early 20th century eugenicist, and b) a profound influence on Abraham Maslow. These notes are more for my mythical book than for current explication, so must remain mere hints of things to come. Instead of unpacking those connections here, let's move on to another case that parallels that of J.B. Watson, the psychologist, and J. Walter Thompson, the ad agency.

Edward Bernays coined the term "public relations." His book, Propaganda, jump-started the PR engine in 1928. It begins...

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

- quote taken from the Wikipedia article on
Edward Bernays

Note the date of the following article and the fragment I've bolded.

To hear the flacks talk, they're hot not just because companies are more than ever in the public eye but because public relations firms in the last decade have acquired a whole new arsenal of scientific techniques and high-tech gadgets to help them pitch and plant clients' stories. Videotape "press releases," national public opinion polls, lobbying offices in capitals around the world -- all are part of flackery's bold new superhype. The pitch gets heard because the media are multiplying, particularly electronic media like broadcast and cable TV and radio, which devour information and constantly clamor for more.

Much of the PR game may be new, but is any of it really different? For all the newfangled jargon of "awareness quotients" and "crisis containment," has anything really changed? FORBES figured no one should know better than Edward Bernays, at 93 the oldest living (and still practicing) PR agent in the game. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays has numbered among his clients Thomas Edison, the Procter & Gamble Co. and even Diaghilev's Ballet Russe.

from: Beyond ballyhoo - interview with PR doyen Edward Bernays
by Lisa Gubernick
source: Forbes, 23 September 1985
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1985 Forbes, Inc.

And finally, here's a review of a BBC special that underscores the Freud-Bernays connection...

The first part of The Century of the Self was indeed a wonderful programme... The premise goes something like this: those Freuds have got a hell of lot to answer for. The first part started off with Sigmund, then moved smartly on to his nephew, Edward Bernays, the man who coined the phrase "public relations". ...his influence has proved to be as great -- and even more pernicious -- than his uncle's. It was Bernays who realised that there could be a commercial angle to Uncle Siggy's theories. The trick here was to convince people to buy stuff they desired, rather than simply needed.

from: The man who cashed in on Freud Television by John Preston
source: The Sunday Telegraph, 24 March 2002
via: HighBeam Research

From these two unconnected cases, it appears obvious that early 20th century psychology put itself fully at the service of advertising and PR. To what other questionable causes and coffers are today's psychologists lending their considerable clout? Now that, gentle readers, is a question that bears deep pondering...

For over 20 years now, I've followed the high-tech harvests: from Boulder to Phoenix to Tokyo (Fujitsu, Ricoh, the Japanese government's "Fifth Generation" artificial intelligence project) to Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute) to Chicago (CIMlinc) back to Boulder (Avalanche Development [SGML]) to Long Island (CMP Publications) to Westport, CT (Mecklermedia, Internet World) to Washington, DC (MCI) to White Plains, NY (IBM) and once again back to Boulder to work on microdisplay hardware tech, then exploring the prospects of an MP3 startup. Fortunately, the last company bellied up before Napster even came off the blocks, thus saving me from horrible embarrassment, and forcing me into "consulting" and "enterprise wide" web manifesto production. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Maybe I'm history too. Some days I wonder. Those are the days I freak out completely and have to spend long afternoons re-reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Because at those times, The Power of Then just doesn't cut it. Look for my forthcoming book: The Power of Getting Too Old for This Shit.

At the end of my last massive core dump, below, I promised to say something about how all that RageBoy Goes to West Point business applies to what I've been attempting here on Chief Blogging Officer, and what all that has to do with HighBeam Research. This could make for a book in itself, but let's see if I can stitch something together in less than 25,000 words.

To begin with, the migrant knowledge worker theme is highly germane. Consider. In the last 20 years, especially in the '90s, organizations became more permeable -- in the sense that people moved around a lot. And I mean: a lot.  Before the proverbial Bubble burst, the economy was virtually ka-booming, and changing jobs -- usually trading up -- took about as much effort as ordering a Starbucks vanilla half-caf skinny latte. To go.

This is the trend that blogging has continued. Nota bene. Or nota not so bene, as the case may be. We've all seen more than our fair share of organizational stupidity, been around the block a few times, aren't taking any wooden nickels -- and we're still comparing notes. Think of it as the right-now low-brow approach to "Knowledge Management."

Allow me to illustrate...

Has this radical planet-wide change had an effect on marketing?

Yes, Virginia, and the Pope is Catholic.

So have corporations, in their usual great wisdom, figured out what all this means for them? Of course not. What most have figured out -- years after the phenomenon was rocking the net to its roots -- is, wow, there sure are a lot of "blogs" out there all of a sudden! Zounds. And they are now asking themselves how they can leverage, co-opt, bend, fold, spindle and otherwise mutilate a truly original idea to their pedestrian low-IQ advantage. Gimme a D. Gimme a U. Gimme an H...

What does it spell? Balderdash.

Why? Because the people who've developed this new skill of comparing notes -- across once-rigid company departments and divisions, across legends-in-their-own- mind corporate monoliths, across across still-ossified industry lines of demarcation -- are not going to pay much heed to some johnny come lately "corporate blogger" telling them some useless information about how white their shirts can be. To paraphrase Mick and and lads: that don't give no satisfaction.

Instead, here's an idea! What if companies first: paid attention to who's writing about what, and what for, and how well; and second, picked someone who seemed to be talking to people who overlapped with some part of that company's market?

Take an example. We can all laugh at cat sites. Ha, ha-ha. We are so above that. But look, some people really are that into cats. And at least one of these cat fanatics must write cogently enough to draw an audience of less articulate but no less enthusiastic cat fanciers. Right? Are you tracking? I know this is pretty complex stuff.

So wouldn't it make sense for Purina Cat Chow or IAMS or one of those to underwrite such a skilled cat-o-blogger? Yes, it would. And would this person then turn into a shill for Purina or IAMS? Not if the corporate braincase had retained sufficient neural capacity to understand that such a move would alienate the very audience it wanted to impress with how blog-savvy it had become.

So what would our cat blogger change after becoming the beneficiary of such underwriting? Here's what: NOTHING. No, she would continue just as before to chronicle the ineffable cuteness of kitties and the insufferable yet endearing aloofness of cats. And there in the upper left corner, say, of this fabulously catty blog's pages it would say something like "Underwritten by Purina -- Your Pet, Our Passion™" or somesuch.

Just as it says in the upper left corner of this blog "Underwritten by HighBeam Research." And this is what I've changed about my style of writing here: NOTHING. (Except that I say the fuck-word less often.) What I write about is not HighBeam's service -- though I do demonstrate it's use. But I demonstrate it's use by doing precisely what I'm already inclined to do: dig up weird but credibly sourced information on a disturbingly wide range of subjects. Why? Because I'm barking mad, that's why! But it doesn't matter. I am the info-junkie analog of the cat fanatic. We're all a bit mad, when you come right down to it. I mean, aren't we? And some have equated this madness with passion -- the kind of scary energy and enthusiasm it takes to write endlessly about Seal Point Persians and Curly Abyssinians -- or Madame Blavatskys and Ralph Waldo Emersons.

Do I need to dot the i's and cross the t's to end this one? I think not. Much as I hate to invoke the old internet litmus test: you either get it or you don't. It takes so few intellectual ergs to grasp what's going on here, you'd have to be a total dunce to miss the point.

But if the hat fits, wear it.

dunce cap: a cone-shaped hat that children slow at learning were formerly forced to wear in school.

from: dunce cap
source: Webster's NewWorld Dictionary, January, 1988
via: HighBeam Research

dunce by Douglas Thompson x
the artsnob

Disclaimer: those Friskies Salmon & Shrimp Treats (pictured above) are the only ones my cat (hereinafter, Kitty-Kitty) will eat. The materials on this page do not imply any association with or relation to Purina or imply in any way that any materials from http://www.purina.com are maintained within the Chief Blogging Officer web site. [WTF???] I was not paid to say this. Kitty-Kitty made me do it.

There's more to this one. A lot more. And that's precisely the problem at the moment. I have to run out for a while, but stay tuned. I'll reveal more of this strange late-breaking story this evening...

[Well, that was a long "evening," because I wrote the above on Friday afternoon, and now it's Sunday night. The updated version continues below the perplexing Army book cover (it perplexed me) and the cryptic communique.]

I received this in yesterday's snail mail, along with a personal note from the authors... "...we wanted you to have this book as evidence of the impact you're having!"

But first, in keeping with the overall style of this blog, some seemingly unrelated background. Once upon a time, I wrote...

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

thesis #12
cluetrain.com

I bolded the first bit of that because that's the main point here: no secrets. It doesn't take much googling to discover that your author here, Christopher Locke (that's me) also has an evil online twin: one so-called self-styled RageBoy. Above right is the only extant photograph of "the two of us" together -- thanks to some creative photoshopping by Gary Turner in the UK. If you click on the photo, you end up at our wedding registry on Amazon. Yes, we decided to get married at one point, but then we had a terrible falling out. It's a long sad story. For another time perhaps. But probably not. This page snip gives you a rough idea of the kind of thing we asked well-wishers to gift us with on the would-have-been Happy Day...

Amidst all that aforementioned googling, you might find this piece in The Guardian from a couple years ago. I met with the author while I was in London in May, 2002, speaking to the BBC about blogs and what they might be good for.

Rebel without a pause

Chris Locke, better-known as RageBoy, could have saved dotcoms millions of dollars. But he reckons 'gonzo marketing' could still lead a renaissance, writes Jack Schofield

[snip]

"You can broaden the pipe as far as you want, [Locke said,] but if everybody can play, it's not broadcast any more. There isn't that control of the passes. The channel is out of control and that makes it a different game."

What replaces mass market, broadcast advertising is Locke's "gonzo marketing", which is not really marketing but "market advocacy" through participation, sponsorship and support. The internet replaces the us-and-them relationship (creative people broadcasting to couch potatoes) with a network of conversations, which is all markets are, really.

It's the difference between a media empire such as AOL CNN IPC Time Warner and 100 million bloggers. The explosion in the popularity of blogging, peer-to-peer file-sharing, cooperative (open source) programming and similar movements means Locke's ideas are now being taken seriously by major corporations including merchant banks and the BBC, the latter having paid for his latest trip to London. But he has been saying the same things for at least eight years, both as a big company employee and as RageBoy, a "seriously maladjusted mental case and towering egomaniac with an advanced case of Tourette syndrome".

In that last bit, Schofield (the Guardian's longtime computing editor) is quoting me describing myself. Not from what I told him in our interrupt-driven interview over an excellent if somewhat chaotic Chinese dinner, but from his reading of RageBoy's whacked-out surrealism going back to 1995. Jack's been a subscriber from the start. In the first sentence of the piece, he identifies me as "a man famous for interviewing a talking horse." Mr. Ed, to be precise. You can read the interview here. I was working for IBM at the time I wrote it.

As it turned out, the BBC, though clearly fascinated by what I told them about blogging, didn't pick up on the idea of creating a Beeb-blessed blog "portal" of sorts -- thus creating instant (and cheap!) mutual advantage for themselves and the best writers emerging on the net. But The Guardian did, mere weeks later. And one of the first blogs they listed is called out there as "Rageboy." Happily, it's still there. I just checked. Brave of them, too, as RageBoy has a mouth on him, no lie, and a proclivity for, let us say, the graphically risque.

What exactly is going on here? Is it all one big joke? Or is there something else, something deeper afoot? Is there, as I once suggested, a code within the code? A method in the madness? I'm not sure if I can, or even want to, venture a serious answer to that. Explaining why a joke is funny makes it supremely unfunny. Explaining the profound reduces it to the pedestrian. My motto: keep em guessing. Because when you have to guess, you're not sure. And when you're not sure, you have to think.

But, as Dewey says to Randy in Scream 2: let's move on...

Also amidst all that googling for "locke and rageboy" you'll find roughly another 13,000 hits in which we "both" appear. Even the far more more selective Highbeam Research lists 28 articles in which the dynamic duo is mentioned. One of these is from Fast Company back in "the old days" of 2000, where I was introduced as "Locke, 52, a consultant who is best known for his alter ego, 'RageBoy'." (Ah, to be 52 again!) The article opens thus:

Do you have a clue about what the power and reach of the Web mean for the future of business? The creators of the Cluetrain Manifesto think they do. And they're eager -- make that determined -- to share their point of view with the "People of Earth" ( to whom their manifesto is addressed ). You might not agree with everything that these Web provocateurs say, you might not like their tone, but you will ignore their ideas at your peril. "People finally have permission to be human in the context of their work," says Christopher Locke, one of the manifesto's creators. "That's the real Internet story."

from: Clued In? Sign On! by Katharine Mieszkowski
source: Fast Company, 1 March 2000
via: HighBeam Research

OK, so that's the long perhaps, but necessary, setup to explain -- or at least put into context -- my surprising gift from CompanyCommand, whose mission is "building combat-ready teams." On the surface, this is a far cry from my personal mission. If you read the previous post and see that it ends with a picture of the "Davy Crocket" nuke launcher, you might get the impression that I didn't exactly put it there as a ringing endorsement of America's current military adventures. Nonetheless, here's the letter (verbatim) that came tucked into the book, Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession...

20 January 2005

Chris, As you will see in our new book (p. 191), we share with our readers sixteen books from our bookshelf -- books that have impacted our work in a significant way. Cluetrain was one of the very first books we read after we discovered that there were actually people -- other than ourselves -- thinking about connecting leaders in conversation via the Web (yes, we were sheltered). You helped set us ON FIRE! ...and we want to thank you for it by sending you a copy of our new book that tells the story of company commanders connecting in conversation to improve their effectiveness.

We appreciate you, and we wanted you to have this book as evidence of the impact you are having!

Very Respectfully,
Nate, Tony, Pete, Steve and Nancy
on behalf of the CC Team
http://CompanyCommand.army.mil

And scrawled below the typed, formal body of the letter...

Rock on Chris!
Tony

Maybe it's just me, but I find something quite moving in this. We're all of us dealing with large organizations of one form or another, whether they be companies or, as in the case above, Companies. David Weinberger, Doc Searls and myself told a lot of very bad jokes in Cluetrain. (And I've certainly told my share here.) But was it all one big yuk-fest? Is it today? The above letter seems to indicate not. And the "Rock on" addendum makes me guess that at least Tony Burgess -- and probably the rest of the team -- are well aware of my evil twin, RageBoy. The web surely makes for strange bedfellows.

This is too long already, but I want to wrap it up with a clip from an interview I ferreted out on Highbeam with "Unleashing" co-author Nancy M. Dixon, who also wrote Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know. As you read these thoughts from way back at the turn of the century, think about how they apply to blogging today. (Hint: they do.)

[interviewer]: ...what do you think is the most interesting thing going on in the world of KM [knowledge management] today?

[Nancy Dixon]: Well, we hear a great deal about the need to change the culture of the organization in order to make knowledge sharing possible. But I see just the opposite happening, i.e., sharing knowledge beginning to change an organization's culture. One of the ways in which I think organizational culture is changing is a heightened respect for local knowledge, which is created in the task of doing one's job. Local knowledge always competes with "sanctioned knowledge," i.e., knowledge that the organization has declared as valid. Sanctioned knowledge may come from outside the organization, or it may come from internal experts or task forces.

Historically, managers have held very little regard for local knowledge, and instead gave prominence to knowledge created by individuals not directly engaged in the task. However, disregarding the knowledge garnered through work creates disrespect between management and employees. Employees see managers as removed from real work, while managers see employees as resistant to sanctioned answers.

Through knowledge management, however, organizations are now beginning to value the knowledge that individuals learn through their work experience. This cultural shift certainly is not something that knowledge management is bringing about all by itself, but it is exerting a strong influence. Most knowledge sharing is done between peers, and the organizational "sanction" for this kind of exchange, is an implicit recognition that local knowledge is important.

from: Exploring Common KnowLedge: An Interview with Nancy Dixon by Jeff De Cagna
source: Information Outlook, 1 October 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Special Libraries Association

Nancy M. Dixon is an Associate Professor of Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University. Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession, of which she is the lead author, is published by the Center for the Advancement of Leader Development & Organizational Learning, located at West Point, NY. So the title of this post -- RageBoy Goes to West Point -- is not a joke. Although, to me at least, it's pretty damn funny. As Bruce Willis says in Die Hard: who knew?

Tomorrow, or later tonight -- whichever comes first -- I'll say more about how all the above relates to this particular blog. And what that says about CBO's underwriter, Highbeam Research. Until then, as in so many circumstances we find ourselves facing in these strange postmodern times, the following immortal words are well worth remembering...

Randy:[from the Scream 2 trailer] There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to create a successful sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate - more blood, more gore -- carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.