Shorthand.

For the first twenty years of my forty year-career we didn't worry about what decks looked like. In part, because we didn't have decks.

We had foam core boards.

We'd arrange the foam core in order and present our work that way. Some people of my vintage learned to read upside down as they stood and flipped through ads and TV spots and even the occasional radio spot all enlarged and mounted on foam core.

A funny thing happened when you presented on foam core. The clients looked at you. And not the screen. You could look up and look in their eyes and actually talk directly to them.

We never designed presentations in those days. We designed work. Designing a presentation? That's like designing the rags you use to wax your car. How the rags look ain't important. How they treat your car is.

Today, we design presentations. 

As if the presentation is the communication, not the work in the presentation. And there are myriad online tools to have dissolves, reveals and sweeps to make your presentation cooler.

To my mind that's diametrically opposed to the line I've heard attributed to the recently-deceased legend, Sal DeVito. "Make the logo smaller and the idea bigger."

Today we make the presentation prettier and the ideas scarcely matter. 

See above. 

Vomit. 

Continue reading.

Back in my Ogilvy days I was chastised for not knowing keynote or powerpoint. I was told knowing them was the key to getting ahead.

Oh. 

Presumably that would allow me to put a slide in a deck that reads "We're on a Journey," as my boss once did while I was at Ogilvy. No. Magellan was on a journey. You're a brain-worm infested dweeb.

Late last week because they're spread around the globe, I had a client presentation at 5PM on a Friday. I don't like to work that late on Fridays. A) I'm tired. B) Most everyone else is too.

But in an effort to be gracious and accommodating, and because I wanted to sell some work and get my money, my Account Director and I agreed. From 5PM to 6PM on a Friday.

Here's the first page of my presentation. 

As ugly as the bottom of my shoe.

My client didn't care. My client didn't say anything. Nor did my Account Director. Nor I.

Here's a bit of the last page of my presentation:

What's salient here is the page number: 38.

Outside of the cover sheet, we had 37 pages of ideas. Of ads. Of lines. Taglines. Strategically based. Intrusive. Assertive. Bold.

Loud. PATW. (Punching above their weight.)

Yes.

I showed 37 ads.

37 different ways to do what I do for brands.

Define who they are.
Differentiate them from everyone else.
Demonstrate to readers so they can feel it not just learn in.

Often, I don't even think in terms of ads in the Wall Street Journal. I think about a deck that lands in front of an investor at Andreessen Horowitz. Or in front of a customer who for whatever reason gave my client a minute for a meeting.

What will make those targets salivate. Literally, salivate. And say "I need me some of that." Or "that's a great idea." Not, "that's a great ad." But "that's a great product."

I think advertising today is like established religion. Interested in dogma and minutia and monetary enrichment. Not improving lives and fulfillment. 

We're interested in aesthetics for aesthetics' sake. Not for functionality's sake.

Our industry has become deeply masturbatory. We're self-gratifying seed spillers. (SGSS. Not a bad name for an agency, right?)

Occasionally, I bring a little theory to a deck. But it's never more complicated than this. 

And then I jump into the work that does all that.

I couldn't give a rat's ass that I'm not A) on a journey. B) going to Cannes. or C) cool.

The only journeys I'm interested in are the ones my clients, and eventually me, take to the bank.

Escalation of Dumb.

A lot of our modern world, from discourse online, to advertising, to politics can be explained by a scene from the 1950s Broadway musical then movie, "West Side Story."

In the prelude to the rumble between the Jets and the Sharks, the weapons of choice keep escalating. 

Fists. Bricks. Hoses. Belts. Bottles. Chains. Knives. Guns.

The same madness is happening in politics and in advertising.

In just eight years we've gone from a Brick like Sarah Palin to an Automatic Weapon like Donald Trump. The darkness, ignorance and hate get more and more powerful. 

Because the only way to get attention in the outlandish dopamine-driven world we live in is to do something absolutely mad.

Trump, IMO, isn't competing with Harris for attention.

He's competing with the Dark Web. 

Whatever crazy-ass rumor starts there, he has to build on. Lest someone else get more attention than he does. 

This is truly truly frightening.

And dangerous.

And there's no turning back.

Meanwhile the same descent is happening over on what used to be called "Madison Avenue." It was called Madison Avenue before the entire, hugely profitable industry was bought up, eviscerated and relegated to the fringes (the ad industry is no longer located near its clients, because the ad industry is no longer important to its clients).

Now, we do handbags that hold mayonnaise jars. And every agency that pays an electric bill blathers on about the myriad awards they've won when viewers like you and I can literally go months (if not years) without seeing a spot or an ad we actually notice and like.

Seriously, when was the last time you said, "I wish I did that?" About an ad that actually ran. Not a stunted stunt that twelve people outside of the agency bubble will ever see.

The post above, er, the inscrutable post above is a good example of sludge swirling down a clogged drain. 

A couple days ago I saw on Linked In the promotion I pasted above. I've shared it with friends. Friends 30 years younger than I and friends who used to lead large New York agencies.

This isn't more Ogilvy bashing on my part.

I literally can make no sense of the (long) sentence above. Part of that might because they decided not to punctuate it. But a larger part is that it's just plain-old baffling. And now, someone will have to say something more absurd to knock that absurdity off its pinnacle.

[As always, if anyone at Ogilvy would like to explain this, this space, and my 85K weekly readers are all yours. I won't even edit.]

Bringing this back to my West Side Story example above, this is an escalation not of street weapons but of a dangerous grasping at what's momentary, while ignoring (because you're social first) the millions of people who aren't social first and who don't understand what you're saying or who want something very different from the marketing they get.

We live in a world where it seems the majority can no longer discern the difference between truth and falsehood. You see examples of that every day. And not just if you read Orwell.

You see it in advertising, too.

No one anymore knows what's good. What works. Or how to reach people.

I'll wait for the definitive white paper on the topic.

Vout-o-Roonee.

This fell into my feed late last week and made me laugh.

Then cry.

Because if you think about it, it's exactly what's gone wrong with modern amerika mass-production assembly-line advertising. 

We no longer strive to make creative good so people notice it. We make it ubiquitous so people run away from it at top speed and it keeps chasing.

It's Stalkertising. Not Advertising. 

Everything sucks. But damn, we're efficient.

On September 22, a client sent me a document on a platform I'd never heard of called "Loom." I might have had to register to get the document but I certainly didn't want or need another messaging platform. Since September 22, I've gotten a dozen emails from Loom. Reminding me to upgrade. Beckoning me to take a tour of my workspace. Warning me that I'd be downgraded if I didn't upgrade and upgraded if I didn't downgrade.

Not one email was remotely interesting, informative or otherwise noticeable. They were merely stalkers. Chasing me. Following me.

Not givers. Takers. Urging me to engage the way a drug pusher might.

Wednesday night, I had a facetime call with my elder daughter, S, and my two-year-old grandson, J. Facetime is a marvelous thing. It doesn't equal in-person contact, but it beats dipping my quill pen in an ink pot and writing a letter.

J, like many two-year-old boys, is heavily into cars. He can identify many different sorts of vehicles and every construction vehicle this side of a major government infrastructure boondoggle project. 

While we were speaking, J showed me various diggers and pushers and lifters and was thrilled by them all.

While J and I were talking, I remembered an old r&b song called "Cement Mixer" by the great and today unknown, Slim Gaillard. I quickly found six-minutes of Slim performing the number from a 1962 appearance on the old Steve Allen Show.

For whatever reason the YouTube downloader I usually use to remove a clip from YouTube to my hard-drive won't let me download this clip of Slim. But you really owe it to yourself to take the time to watch it. Maybe more than once.

In fact, if god forbid, I still worked with the creaking edifice of some decrepit holding company agency (count the redundancies in that single sentence) I think I'd make the video required watching.

Because Slim Gaillard is creative.

Creative.

He does what everyone else does. But makes it unique. Ownable. His.

You've seen a thousand people play keyboard before. You've never seen anyone play like Gaillard. 

Never.

Gaillard is the pithy core of what creativity and creatives are supposed to be.

Original. Funny. Unexpected. Spontaneous. Irreverent. Joyous.

Every agency in the world every three months wins a "Best Place to Work" Award as paid for and pronounced by some website you've never heard of and never read. Not a single one of them has any elements of any of the adjectives I used above.

Think about Gaillard when you check your email today and when you see 47 different subject lines from 47 different companies that read, "Spooktacular Savings," or "Our $49.99 Triple Play is all Treats, No Tricks!!!"

All the originality of asphalt in a pothole.

BTW, the world in real life wasn't big enough for Slim Gaillard. He couldn't in fact be constrained by the limits of the English Language. So he invented his own language. And as much as I love the magic of the English language, Gaillard improved it.

If you look hard enough online, you can find his Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary. You can find your own copy. You'll never use English the same way again.

A Guest Post from an Ex-Marine.

Some weeks ago, I got a message on LinkedIn from a connection I don't really know, though we've been "linked" for over five years and we, apparently, worked at Ogilvy during the same time.

Brett Jones.

Brett asked if he could write a guest post in this space. A lot of people ask--and I almost always say yes. Partly because most people intend to write and then lethargy-out when they realize it's hard.

Brett, however, sent me this and I was sold.

Like 97-percent of the cognitive world, I love a good origin story, and Brett's seem interesting and off the beaten bivouac. In just a few days, Brett was back in my mailbox with the post below. It's good.

Read it, Maggot.

Fire and Maneuver: 

Becoming a Caddy and Rediscovering the Art of Client Service

By Brett Jones, a MadMan/Caddy for hire

Growing up I watched my father do very well for himself working in advertising. As a rebellious teenaged youth I wanted no part of corporate America but after some reflection I decided to follow in his footsteps, both into the United States Marine Corps and then into Advertising. After swinging with the Air Wing for almost 5 years I spent the better part of a decade working at places like McCann and Ogilvy learning the ins and outs of client service. 

I’ve met a lot of smart people and studied the art of client service next to some of the best in the business. I take notes from great account leaders like Adam Tucker who says, “Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” and creative leaders like George Tannenbaum who has 15 great pearls of wisdom on how to be a good account person like number three, “Be curious. Question everything and everyone. Get out of the office and look around. Learn from others.” 

I’m constantly on the lookout for how to transfer knowledge from one domain to another. See my book, “Shock and Awe, RECRUIT! (or how I learned the fundamentals of advertising in Marine Corps Basic Training) for more on that front. Advertising has a lot of similarities to the military, filled with challenging campaigns, exciting projects or missions, and glimpse of top brass like the Secretary of the Navy or the occasional A-list celebrity. 

It’s not all ponies and rainbows though. Life threw me and my family a curveball when I was laid off from Comcast in March of last year. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I had never been laid off before. I knew I could bounce back. 

I had already done a stint as an entrepreneur when I helped an A-lister launch a global lifestyle brand just before COVID broke. After going through the turmoil of being a business owner and living through COVID with two young kids my wife and I both agreed a steady W-2 for my next gig was the right path. So I hit the job boards and applied to scores of agency account gigs and marketing roles on the ‘client side.’ I got a few looks from HR and even a handful of first and second round interviews, but no offers were coming. 

It seemed the entrepreneurial path beckoned once again. I launched my own agency last summer when I met a prospective client sitting across the aisle on a plane back from a family reunion in Utah. Semper Ads came about later that week and before I knew it I was sitting in rooms with futurists and AI luminaries by helping promote the NYU Intellibus AI Masterclass and filming content for an AI initiative concerning World Digital Governance.

From there I built out a client base and have been helping with building websites, helping with SEO, and developing go-to-market strategies whenever the opportunity comes up. The work is rewarding, but also stressful. Running your own business, you quickly learn it’s a feast-or-famine lifestyle. Some months are amazing; others leave you wondering if you’re in the right game. That’s when I realized I needed another stream of income to steady the ship.

Enter caddying, a gig where you carry a golfer's clubs, read their putts, and polish their balls. 

Yeah, I became a caddy—a move I never would have imagined for myself back when I was leading big advertising campaigns. At first glance, it might seem like a drastic step down. But trust me, the job’s not just about lugging clubs and cleaning balls for a tip. It’s about reading the course, analyzing the situation, and giving real-time guidance—skills I honed in the Marines and in the world of client-service. 

Just like in advertising, being a caddy is all about strategy and support. You’re there to make the client (or golfer) look good, help them achieve their goals, and manage expectations. There’s a lot of prep work involved. Before a round, I study the course, think through the conditions of the day, and figure out where the traps are. Just like pitching a campaign, you’ve got to know the landscape before you offer guidance. On the green, when reading a putt, I have to size up the terrain, think about the speed, and give my golfer the best advice I can. And it’s not always perfect, but it’s my job to help them navigate and improve their game, just like it was my job to help clients improve their business.

Yes, Indeed. I'm Walking.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is more than just me. GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is also the books I read and the thinking, the information, the ideas and the inspiration I get from them.

The single TV in my small assemblage of sticks and bricks on the Gingham Coast has more and more fallen out of use. I rarely watch anything--since anything I watch seems increasingly insulting or barbarous or just plain dumb. 

Though many people tell me about this series or that, and though the men I meet with in the evenings so our dogs can play tell me about slow horses and fast women, I've never watched a single minute of Netflix, or Hulu, or Paramount, or Apple TV. It's all too much work for me and I have too little time.

I find the world of reading much richer.  

(BTW, when I bring up what's been called "the greatest narrative film ever made, Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," I get nothing but blank looks back. I'll watch what I like. You do the same. And please don't judge me.)

I've always been a reader, but Owen, my wise therapist of almost half-a-century has pushed me deeper into the literary abyss. He started calling my nightly two hours of reading "My restorative niche." I like that, and I hold both the place and the practice as sacrosanct. That is, I scarcely ever miss an evening.

To friends, I call my reading "spending an hour or two with a genius." And even when I read books that are over my head--about one-book-in-three baffles me, I gain value from the very act of reading. 

The other day while on vacation, I stumbled on a neat little bit of Latin, "Solvitur Ambulando." It means, simply, "it is solved by walking," and the fifty or so miles a week I walk along the Connecticut coast, either with Sparks, my one-year-old golden retriever, or solo, help me immensely.

Over the past week, I've gotten a dozen inscrutable emails from a new client. They remind me a bit of notes smuggled out of solitary confinement, written in a minuscule hand on the tiniest scraps of paper. 

To be blunt, I can barely make sense of what my client is trying to say other than, "I need you, George."

I think a lot of people in advertising spend their entire careers not feeling needed by clients. It's a pretty potent feeling when it happens. And it's a lot of pressure.

Remember when agencies were needed? When they were vital to success--which was their purpose, not what it's been replaced by, "always-on content."

My account director, H, was cavalier about these notes. "You'll figure them out, G," she blithed. "You always do."

But, as I also always do, I had my doubts. 

So I threw on an old pair of sneakers, left Sparks sleeping on an expensive sofa, and went out for my second seaside walk of the morning. 

Within the first hundred yards, I started thinking about the old "Supply and Demand" graphs I studied in Econ 101 in that great old textbook I learnt from in the early 1970s. What if, I asked myself, I told their story how Stephen Rattner, the thief and founder of the Quadrangle Group, tells stories in "The New York Times"? What if I told my client's story--their purpose, their solution, their value, not in prose, but in charts?

--

I wondered as I wandered, and before another hundred yards went by, I had drawn in my head two more charts. By the end of half a mile I had an idea, a title, a headline, and five more charts.

When I got home after my 2.2 miles I went right to my office which is girded with books. I found the economics textbook I was looking for. Written by Princetonians Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. 

 

Then I sat down in my second favorite seat and typed out my headlines and the twelve charts I derived while I was out walking.

 

When I was finished, before the pixels were even dry, I sent my document to H. Among H's many talents is her machete-cutdowns of bullshit and ability to take a blowtorch to confusion. Within minutes, H sent me this:

Sometimes the most-important help you can get from a work colleague is a small affirmation that you're not off your rocker. That an idea--even a wisp of one--is worth pursuing, even if it's a little strange.

I suppose there's a lot in this post for a Friday post where I usually try to layoff the deep-dish stuff because I'm tired and my readers are, too. But this all really happened. Just now. Just as I wrote it here.

And that's that.

 

Besides, I'm too tired to go out for another walk.

 

 

Math. Not New.

Years ago I was the co-head of a mediocre independent agency that had a financially-savvy CEO. He was there to gin things up in preparation of selling the agency to one of (it didn't matter which one) the giant advertising holding companies. When I worked there, the place was valued at one-billion dollars. The CEO was hoping to get it to five-billion bucks so he and the other shareholders would be so rich they never again had to pay taxes.

Around that time, or a few moons later, the world was wholesale switching from Blackberries to iPhones. Talk of a game called Angry Birds was dominating my social feeds. There would be ten, twenty, fifty LinkedIn posts a day, "Lessons You Can Learn About Customer Relationship Management from Angry Birds." Or "What Angry Birds (and my teenager) Taught Me About Business Continuity." Hollywood, never one to miss an intelligence-insulting trend made an Angry Birds movie. 

One day, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I read two different articles in whatever paper I was reading. 

Rovio, the parent company behind Angry Birds, one article said, had a market cap of $70 billion. (Again, if my memory is right.) While the New York Times, another article said, had a market cap of just $2 billion.

Even if my Rovio numbers are off by a magnitude of 10 and Rovio peaked at a $7B cap, I wondered. How can Angry Birds be worth between 350% and 3,500% of what's arguably the world's most-important newspaper, a paper read by millions of political and business leaders and high net worth people?

It seems to me two things are coming into play here, neither of them good. 

One: We're confusing momentary attention and intrinsic value. One is like a smack across the cheek. The other is a deep, long-lasting effect. One is a bruise. They other is trauma. 

Many in the ad industry are doing the same. They're creating some sensation (usually propagated via unpaid channels) of brief notoriety. While neglecting the more valuable, and more difficult long, tedious slog of brand-building.

The latest Burger King bushwa is a great example of this. As far as I know, their same store sales have been down year over year decade after decade. They've burnt through agencies like trump burns through cranial merkins. For many people, the brand has fallen into complete irrelevance and it's dropped off people's consideration list. 

Pay no attention to that.

Look! A new mother eating a burger. 

Two: As a culture and an industry, we've become card-carrying believers--adherents, even--of the Greater Fool Theory. As long as someone will buy something, it's worth selling it, no matter the long-term effects of the something you're offering. In so many ways, the Greater Fool Theory is peak "something for nothing-ism." Peak short-term thinking.

Ginning up a company's share price to profit from a sale or doing fake ads and getting a gullible company to buy them for the buzz they'll get are two faces of the same coin.

Neither helps bolster or create enduring value.

They're both packaging. 

Wrapping shit in gold leaf and hoping you're out of town by the time the buyer is hit with the stench.

More and more of what I see in our industry is like a politician's promise of a tax break. It might win some votes. 

While bankrupting all of us.

Tactile.

My wife, Laura, and I just returned from five days at the most extraordinary and expensive place I've ever stayed, Castle Hot Springs in the Bradshaw Mountains about two hours north of Phoenix.

Like Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," I came for the waters--five hot springs that lowered in temperature as you descended the mountain to the spring-fed swimming pool. The uppermost was 106-degrees and the pool was about 85-degrees.

I'd say 40-percent of the guests came for the springs. Another 20-percent came to hike. And the remaining 40-percent came for the food.

The food.

The food was the best I have ever eaten in my life by far.

Hold on, I'm rounding into a point here.

While I was on vacation, I became detached from my electronic devices. The resort itself, by design, had only spotty cell coverage and you could really only get wireless in either the lobby or your room. In fact, the resort's wifi password was DoYouReallyWant2?

Just now I read a Wall Street Journal review of "The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen. Here's the sentence that started me thinking: "new things drive out old things, sometimes so quickly that no one pauses to ask whether it was a good trade." Rosen, the review tells us, "implores readers to 'consider what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives.'"

And maybe this is the key part. Some things we, as creative human beings, need to spend time thinking about, not googling about:

Daydreaming, of course, can’t happen if a person picks up her smartphone for a micro-burst of entertainment the moment she has to wait in line at the supermarket; nor, buried in her screen, will she shoot the breeze with other customers or the cashier. Evidence marshaled by Ms. Rosen suggests that a person who doesn’t daydream is a person less inclined to introspection and invention.

When a person trades momentary boredom for a shot of screen-based dopamine, she gets the pleasure of escape but misses out on being awake and present in the moment and perhaps forgoes an insight or a recollection that would have added something to her life. A person who avoids interacting with others fends off potentially awkward exchanges but may also gradually lose the skills to recognize social cues. There is an opportunity cost to picking up your phone.

As a creative who 99.7-percent of the time presents to clients on Zoom, this passage stung:

"Being human has traditionally involved being a kinetic, tactile mortal who has evolved to read the faces and gestures of other mortals and to perform complex physical actions." 

Reading faces always served as a guide when presenting. It always gave me information. I think it made my work better. Likewise, visiting a client's office, seeing their factory always did the same. In person you learn things you don't learn via screens and garbled phone calls.

I think it's premature to say reading faces is gone. Or that we haven't found ways to overcome the lack of human contact that afflicts so much of our lives. But I think we need to think about the digital immateriality of so much of our living.

One more thing, at dinner each night at Castle Hot Springs, the maitre d' would hand us our menus and say something like, "Your menus for our five-course dining experience..."

 
As much as I value human connection, that phrase made me want to slug him.

Swing and a Miss.

When I was just fourteen and playing varsity baseball for a purportedly elite private high school situated on a triangle between two interstate highways and a crappy mall built on marshland, there was a player on the team--he was a junior when I was a freshman--called Joe Tartaglia.

Though I scarcely talked to him when we were team-mates and though I can safely say I never ever had a substantive conversation with Joe, I think about him with some frequency.

Joe Tartaglia had the single best baseball swing I have ever in my life seen. That includes looking at vintage footage on YouTube of Ted Williams or Stan Musial or Frank Robinson. Whenever one of our coaches needed to demonstrate exemplary batting form, they'd blow their meathead whistles and scream at the assembled, "Takalookat Joe. Joe, swing atta couple."

What made Joe a better metaphor than a ball player is that I can't honestly think of one time I remember him actually making contact with the ball. He had a perfect swing but he always missed the mark.

It's been said by many of the world's legion of horsehide cognoscenti that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the hardest task in sport. And Joe seemed to prove that.

Sunday night I flew in from Phoenix to Boston on an American Airlines flight that was due to land at midnight and instead landed at one a.m. Though my wife and I flew business class, the service on-board was as brusque and surly, as we've come to expect. 

That experience brought to mind Joe Tartaglia.

Just as there is a huge gap between having a beautiful swing and having the ability to drive a ball with regularity, the world's practitioners of advertising seem to have forgotten that there is a vast difference between "branding" and a brand.

My American Airlines plane was well-branded. The flight attendants' uniforms were well-branded. The inflight materials, the canned "safety" announcements and canned inducements to sign up for American Airlines Sky Miles all we're well-designed and up-to-guidelines. If the brand police were aboard, the flying aluminum cylinder of germs and filthy bathrooms and lethargic personnel would have gotten high-grades.

The branding was good.

The upholding the values, standards and meaning of the brand was a swing and a miss. As we used to rag, "y'swing likea rusty gate."

Just as a good-looking swing is different from being a good hitter, most marketing people fail to understand that good branding does not make a good brand. Somehow as an industry, we've chosen to focus on the ephemeral, decorative aspects of being a brand and chosen to neglect the material and functional meaning of being a brand. Worse, we fail to consider the damage to the value of the brand that results from the subject-object split between how the brand looks and how the brand works.

Looks good/works bad is even more dangerous than looks bad/works bad. Because it's more disappointing. 

In the social media ad world as displayed daily by a thousand chimer-inners on LinkedIn and other social platforms, more and more people seem to be applauding more and more ads that are all show and no substance. They're not real. They're not newsy. They're not honest. And they're usually not based on anything other than shocking the viewer, thereby gaining talk value and awards-show-currency, aka notoriety.

These ads below, which have for the past week clogged my feeds like pubic hair in a boys' locker room shower-drain hurt our industry and the clients we purport to serve.

They're not only false they encourage a false narrative. 

It's time we got back to not looking good while striking out. But looking good while hitting the ball.

That takes two things.

1. Work based on a human insight.
2. Honesty.

PS. If you see a mother eating a fast food burger while nursing her baby, don't notify the judges at Cannes. Notify child protective services.

Anti-Fragility.

For the first approximately 55 years of my life, I had never really heard the word resilience. Today in the modern Ecch-o-system of life, I hear it with stomach-turning frequency.

You hear it about sports teams that bounce back from twelve runs behind, or who start the season 2-7 and then somehow manage to make the playoffs (though it seems nearly everyone makes the playoffs.) You hear it about people who had a crappy childhood and somehow overcame hardship. Or people who had some horrid disease or a bad, debilitating run of misfortune.

But mostly at least to my ears, you hear about companies that have resilient supply chains, or IT infrastructures, or who have rebounded from a serious downturn or skein of bad judgments. 

In fact, I never much thought about the word and its meaning. Most of the people I know and most of the companies I work for and with have a certain degree of resiliency. Who hasn't come back from adversity or, to some degree, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Most everyone I know has had something lousy happen to them--they've lost a job, somehow gotten into serious debt, or lost a loved one tragically. You keep going. That's life. Today, that's what we call "resilience."

Right now, I'm reading Eric H. Cline's great book, "After 1177 B.C.", which is part of the multi-volume Turning Points in Ancient History series. It's a sequel to the second picture below, "1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed."

Most people don't realize, the world of the eastern Mediterranean before 1177 B.C., was a pretty vibrant place. There was international travel, trade and exchange of ideas. Then, to misquote William Butler Yeats, the center stopped holding. And civilization after civilization--from the Egyptians to the Cretans, to the Cypriots, to the Babylonians, to the Assyrians, to the Anatolians, and more collapsed. 

For years, historians and archaeologists attributed such world-wide catastrophe to a mysterious people called the Sea People. No one knew where they came from or how they invaded the Mediterranean world--but the destruction of that world was attributed to those Sea People. For centuries global collapse was allegedly due to their advanced technologies (weapons and low-draft, fast ships and fierce deportment.)

However, more recently, historians and archaeologists have let the Sea People off the hook. Collapse was due to the same collection of forces that are affecting seemingly most of the world today. They include, "climate change, attacks by foreign enemies, social uprising, natural catastrophes, systems collapse, and changes in warfare.”

Those circumstances, 4000 years ago and today, almost inevitably lead to "(1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a breakdown of the centralized economy; (4) a settlement shift; and (5) population decline. To these, as additional symptoms specifically of a dark age, I would add (6) a loss of writing; and (7) a pause in the construction of monumental architecture."

Now, after all that comes the point of today's post.

Cline cites a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who  introduced me to the notion of the Black Swan event. (A Black Swan event is an unpredictable and unforeseen occurrence that has severe and widespread consequences.)

Taleb in writing about civilizations that endured the collapses of 1177 B.C. uses the phrase, “anti-fragile.” Not resiliency. Anti-fragility. 

Resiliency is bouncing back. 

Anti-fragile is more. Better. Stronger.

Anti-fragile people and systems and governments actually  “thrive under the right amount of stress.” They don't just get back up again. They take advantage of adversity. In dark times, they don't just survive--they flourish. 

Taleb says it best: Anti-fragile entities "gain from disorder.”

When I look back on my long life in the advertising business, I know no successful person, no successful agency that isn't, as you'd expect, resilient. 

Resiliency is the sine non qua--the essential element--of being a human. 

When I got fired by Ogilvy at the age of 62 for being too old, I wasn't merely resilient. I created a new way of creating for myself. I became better--smarter, faster, more-aggressive and more driven than I ever was before. I became more reliant on myself. I became more determined to succeed--for myriad reasons--nor the least of which was showing the WPPCPAs that their narrow-minded and larcenous modus operandi would not do me in.

Much of the work I do now is with start-ups and with technology companies. Working with them is a bit like working with yearling horses. Somedays they're riding high and they look like a shoo-in to run for the roses at Churchill Downs. Other days--they're yearlings, remember, they can barely make it out of the paddock. No one is born a champion. No one is a champion every day.

That takes work.

That takes anti-fragility.

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BTW, Cline's books are frightening in their relevance to our world today. While he is not an "easy" writer and there's a lot of Aššur-reša-išis, wandering Aramaeans, and  Nebuchadnezzars to wade through, there are lessons to be learned and things to think. On nearly every page.

Would that the world's leaders actually read books about the world they purport to lead.