That Didn't Work Out.

Just Monday, I read a book review in the alumni magazine of Columbia University of a book bluntly called "Why Nothing Works." It didn't take me but a few sentences to start applying some of the thinking in the book to the nearly comatose ad industry. Somehow (BTW) the ad industry brings this clip from "The Princess Bride" to mind.

You can read the review here, assuming there's no pay wall--though everything in higher education is behind a pay wall.

BTW, the most important "thing" my father gave me was a piece of advice. He said to me probably 55 years ago, "The smartest people at The New York Times write book reviews. If you want to be smart, read them." 

I've taken that counsel to heart and probably read a dozen book reviews a week, from the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Mad Magazine. You can get a lot of information in a thousand words or so. And often that information, somehow, informs how I approach a problem my clients might be facing. 

You get, in short, a world view. Not a trend view. Or a fad view. Or what won an award-view. You get, from book reviews, perspective. You get even more if you actually read some of the books.

Take this passage of the review as a metaphor not just for amerika's "mostly-deadness" but our industry's. Substitute agency language for amerikan governmental language:

In examining how we got here, Dunkelman ’01CC, a political historian, takes us back to a United States that once moved fast and didn’t break but built things — big things, like public works (dams, reservoirs, and electrification projects that, in the case of the New Deal–era Tennessee Valley Authority, brought electric power to an undeveloped forty-thousand-square-mile swath of the rural South in just over a decade), public spaces (parks, forests, nature trails), and public transportation (tunnels, bridges, railroads, and highways that spanned a continent). How did a public sector capable of such accomplishments devolve into one that, to invoke a widely publicized recent boondoggle, was prepared to spend $1.7 million and ten years to install a single public toilet in San Francisco?

The parallel to the ad business is all-too obvious. How did we go from Absolut, FedEd, VW, BMW, Avis, Apple to tweets about Sydney Sweeney--and literally millions more ads of even less consequence and impact?

How did we go from sitting along-side CEOs (not CMOs) and shaping brands to becoming chosen on criteria selected by bean-counters in procurement? How did we cede our stature as the creators of more wealth than any other industry in the history of the world to, like WPP, losing 75% of its market cap in just a dozen years?

Dunkleman, the author, attributes amerika's declining ability to "get things done" to an era of "guardrails." What he calls, "important checks on power that were designed to curtail such abuses and restore accountability to the citizens whom government was supposed to serve. The downside? Limitations on power generate so much fine print and so many hoops for planners to jump through that even the worthiest projects often fail to come to fruition."

This, too, can be translated so it relates to our industry, for instance: 

guardrails were important checks on power that were designed to curtail agency excesses and restore accountability to the clients agencies were supposed to serve. The downside? Limitations on power generate so much fine print and so many hoops for planners to jump through that even the worthiest projects often fail to come to fruition.

In short, we eliminated risk taking and replaced risk taking with mandatories, best-practices and focus-group consensus.

In a similar book, "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, the authors suggest that the way to break the stranglehold of stagnation is to do what's most counter-intuitive to the cost-accountants and public-opinion pollsters who currently run our business and the world.

Though I shouldn't sum up an almost 400-page heavy-duty book with one sentence, I will.

We have to over-index on risk and taking chances.

Or we have so-focused on Minimal Viable Products that we have become a minimally viable species. 

Current course and speed, playing it safe, will deliver us even deeper into the slough of despond that the world seems mired in.

Having fun, taking chances, being dumb, mad, special, opinionated is the only way out.