In Which I Give it All Away for Free.

I don’t know how it works with real writers, real artists and real musicians, but as I near the aging witching-hour of 65 years of age, I notice that my aperture in some ways is narrowing. 

I never much liked, when the Mac entered our lives their boast “millions of colors.” I can see lots of shades ok, but there just aren’t that many colors. If nature is any guide, rainbows max out at seven and while austere that seems essentially right.

It seems to me that many creative people as they enter their dotage zero in on fewer tools and themes. Their minds and work are more focused than in their younger years.

What I’m driving at is simple. As I get older, I’ve seen the advice I’m asked to bring to clients and friends narrow down to fewer and fewer offerings. I find myself repeating myself. Repeatedly.

At times I feel like an old-timey magician doing that pick-a-card- any-card spiel. But instead of 52 options, I have really only 15 or 20.

I think that's ok. It's ok to have just a few things, if those few things are good. That's true with comedians, baseball pitchers and old people like myself.

For instance, with my adult daughters whom I adore and esteem, it’s not unusual to find myself in fairly pitched combat. As often as not, when I seek to reassure them, I proffer the words of Robert Frost in his great poem, "Death of a Hired Man." 

“Home is the place when you have to go there/They have to take you in.” 

As a boy who grew up loveless, parentless, hugless and homeless, maybe I myopically find reassurance in those words. That’s what I’m aiming for, in any event. It's pretty good. Why not trot it out when the time comes?

My point is the same as Pareto's Principle. Eighty percent of the world's problems can be solved with about twenty percent of the solutions. Just as 92 percent of all tech problems can be solved via rebooting, most human issues can be solved with five or six precepts that, if followed, will help you survive.

I was on the phone early last week with a prospective client. She was explaining her problems and I was answering with what I thought she needed. “I’m not a boxing fan,” I began telling her "but from an advertising point of view, I find wisdom in the way Joe Louis fought. I watch old fights on YouTube and I learn.”

She looked baffled but I continued.

“Doing advertising is like Joe Louis. Jab, jab,jab. Find an opening, then pow. Then pour it on. That’s how it ought to go, I think. One ad ain’t a panacea. You've got to jab a lot and wait for your moment.”

In fact, the six-minute clip above, as far as I'm concerned, is about all you need to know about media strategy. Don't back down, and keep looking for an opponent's weakness.

A lot of my friends and colleagues, like me, have lost their jobs of late, or have left them. They haven't been caught absconding with corporate funds (for that you get promoted) they've aged-out or wised-up and left the business.

God bless them.

They come to me and ask, "George, how can I do what you've done?" I'm a moderately talented guy who's made an outsized name for himself.

Again, I don't have a lot to say. Basically, just three or five little things I've learned. I ain't exactly the Oracle of Delphi, but I am pretty good at coalescing my experiences into fairly universal guidance.

1. Figure out what you do that other people don't, can't or won't do. Then make that something your unique selling proposition. 

When I was fired at the age of 56, I feared I'd never work again. I decided no one was better than I at making complicated shit simple and explaining it with some euphonious wit. That's how I got hired. That's how I sell today.

2. Do that thing every day. Don't just say you're a great plumber, find a way to show the world. Daily.

The problem with creative portfolios is that they're backward-looking. They show what you've done in the past. Not what you can do. Show what you can do, every day.

3. Be you. If you make uncomfortable jokes, make uncomfortable jokes. If you have unusual thoughts, share them. You don't want to hide yourself, you want to show yourself. If people don't like what you show, they're not ready, or good enough, to accept you.

4. Don't succumb to shy. I am one of the shyest people on earth. Christie Cordes, the great recruiter and friend, kicked my ass about that. If you're in advertising and you don't believe in advertising, why are you in advertising?

5. Pick on someone. Everyone has worked with someone who isn't very good but has risen very high. Pick on that person. Convince yourself that if "Ambrose" is worth that much a day, you're certainly worth that much a day. 

6. Walk away. From jobs, from people, from enticements if they try to nickel-and-dime you or otherwise sully your resolve. My therapist of two centuries taught me a sentence and I stick to it: "I'm sure you can find someone to do what you want at the price you're willing to pay." That's all. No good relationship, business or personal starts with a negotiation.

7. Remember Rabbi Hillel. All 18 words of his famous maxim. “If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when.”

This is about all I've got. And it's probably not right for everyone. But it's about all I've got, so it's good enough for me.

Besides, as a wise man once said to me, free advice is worth what you paid.

 

Not joking.

Not too many hours ago I was in our kitchen up in our small ramshackle cottage in Connecticut. I was getting ready to run to the grocery store for our once-a-week-provisioning and I, more than somewhat stupidly, said to my wife, what if I drove through the garage door without opening it. I pictured a Simca-shaped silhouette with splinters and crap flying all about.

My wife, breathtakingly level-headed, has this analysis of me. She'll say, "You watched too many cartoons when you were young." Then her eyes will circumnavigate her cranium like Magellan the earth half a millennium ago.

I wasn't stymied by that eye-rolling and speeded ahead. As Cary Grant quipped in "Arsenic and Old Lace," "insanity doesn't run in my family, it gallops."

"That reminds me," I started, "of the old Henny Youngman joke. Guy comes home from work and sees the car in the kitchen. He's furious and asks his wife 'how'd the car get in the kitchen?' 'Easy,' she says, 'I took a left at the living room.'"

As I drove to the grocery store, I started thinking about jokes and Henny Youngman. When I was a boy in New York, Bell Telephone was trying to get people to use the phone more. So they created a number where you could get the weather, the time and, most famously, "Dial-a-Joke." More often than not Dial-a-Joke featured Henny Youngman, who it was said could tell eight one-liners during your minute call.

My best friend, Fred, and I were enamored of Henny. And not too long ago I said to Fred, "No one tells jokes anymore. When I tell one at work (I was still at Ogilvy at the time,) people roll their eyes or call them Dad jokes. 

Since we had that conversation Fred has died, but I often think about how jokes like the ones I grew up with have fallen from fashion. Today we are stuck with observational humor. Nothing wrong with that, but I for one miss hearing about, for instance, the Frenchman who invented sandals: Felippe Fillopp. 

Late last week I saw an important book review in "The New York Times" about a book by Peter Brooks called "Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative." I promptly ordered the book and while I haven't yet read it (though it's just 174-pages) I started thinking about all the nimrods in the advertising business and the marketing business who are very "on-fleek" and call themselves 'storytellers.'

I've a Master's Degree in English and Comparative Literature and have read a good number of classics, including some of the oldest literature known to our species. I have a good idea of what a story is, and I never really saw how it applied to about 99.7-percent of the work we do in advertising. I am unable to find the story in 99.9-percent of commercials, and haven't ever, truth be told, used the word "narrative." It all seems too complicated for me.

What's more, I can't believe there are nine people of the eight billion or so on our dying planet who care about or want to know the story behind Hellman's mayonnaise, for instance, or Glad plastic wrap. They just want to take a tuna salad sandwich to work without getting tuna effluvia all over themselves.

But in all, I think our modern embrace of storytelling, or observational humor and our abeyance of jokes, one-liners and word plays has hurt our creative output. As Peter Brooks says, he prefers stories that don't involve "trapping us in a shoddy contrivance with heavy-handed manipulation."

Of course, Brooks is talking about literature, and I'm talking about Ozempic commercials or Volvo commercials, where one's heart is reinvigorated or another feels comfortable and safe because she can pick up her kids from soccer in the rain in a Swedish car built in China and loaded with malicious surveillance code.

Sure this all is a little bit inchoate. But I do wonder if jokes are a better model for making memorable communications than observational chazarei, narratives or storytelling.

Jokes set up a situation, accentuate a feeling, create a tension and defuse it with a skillful misdirect. 

They don't ask much of the viewer. 

And they give a reward.

BTW, it was always funny to me to see people ad agencies screen commercials. People would sit in the interlock room or a conference room and study them like they'd study Truffaut's "400 Blows." The pretense is staggering. It led to us calling TV spots 'films', and boasting to our friends that we shot with the same DP that shot "The Life Aquatic" or "The English Patient."

I'm not sure that the idea of storytelling--except maybe in the case of something like Apple's "The Underdogs"--not afflicted by a similar degree of pretense.

Or even this by my old crew on IBM.

Stories--aren't that complicated. Or at least they don't have to be. Spend four minutes listening to Kurt Vonnegut. He'll set you straight while making you larff.

No one in real life cares that hard. No one looks at your cinematography. They want a beginning, middle and a laugh at the end. They want their time not wasted.

--

By the way, almost 50 years ago I saw Henny Youngman live on Navy Pier during Chicago's "SummerFest." He opened to riotous applause and then a joke.

"I love this town, I love this town."

More applause.

"I love this town. You get paid an hour earlier."

Creative Direction from 440 BCE.

For about twenty years now, I've been trying to find the time, the brain-power and the courage to read a 2,500-year-old book.

Last week, I finally swam through the first set of breakers on my way to open water.

The book is "The Histories" by Herodotus. It's widely considered the first history ever written and Herodotus is widely considered to be the world's first historian. While I read a lot about the ancient world, until now I haven't had the moxie to go to the source. But having gotten to the source, I'm glad I did.

Naturally, I am reading a translation of Herodotus--and translations are never perfect. Nonetheless, I'm reading Herodotus for two reasons.

1. I love history--and of late I'm particularly interested in the East-West wars between the Persian Cyrus and his successors and the Athenian League and the Lacedaemonians (aka the Spartans.)

2. I love writing and I wanted to go back to some of its earliest examples. I wanted to see if I could learn anything about clarity, humor, description, that vile phrase storytelling, or anything else. 

For about the past 25 years, since the rise of the internet, I've heard a whole bunch of folderol about how writing for the internet needs to take a different style or form. 

In the early days of the web, there were people who specialized as web writers. If I said, "I'll help," or "I'll do it," I would quickly be slapped down and told I don't know how. As if writing on a backlit rectangle was different from writing on a paper-pulp rectangle or a cathode-ray rectangle or a projected rectangle. Or for that matter, a vellum rectangle.

I've been told that people reading online don't like clever. That they want short, to-the-point sentences. And overall, they want short most of all, because, we're told, no one cares about information anymore and no one anymore has anything like an attention-span.

There's been a great, nodding acceptance to this mongrel dogma, with no one, really, asking for data to back up any of these assertions. They're said with such conviction, and so often, and by people in such big offices, that we have come to believe them.

Except.

I don't really.

As Annie Savoy said in the movie "Bull Durham," "a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay."

That's not an exact quote from Herodotus, but it could be. 

In fact, all throughout the world until very recent times when we willingly kanyedashianed our culture, people would gather to hear Herodotus read. 

Because

It's good.

It's sad.

It's universal.

It's war.

It's love.

It's violence.

It's serenity.

It's truth.

It's exaggeration.

It's timeless.

It's timely.

It's intelligent.

It's fun.

All 953 pages and 3.4-pounds of it.

There are a lot of things people say about writing. I've read, of course, Elmore Leonard's rules. Stephen King's rules. I know my Gossage. I'll even include Billy Wilder's rules on film-making, and Preston Sturges'. Not to mention David Ogilvy who loved rules like a pig loves truffles.

They're not telling me anything Herodotus ain't showing me.

I really don't want to hear that things and people and circumstances are that different today in almost 2023 than they were Herodotus was pounding his Smith-Corona back around 440 BCE.

People were crazy, stressed, schizoid, worried about plagues and existential disaster back in Halicanarsus every bit as much as we are today in Brooklyn, the Bronx or even up here on the Gingham Coast.

We have Putin. They had marauding Scythians. We have Covid. They had leprosy. We have climate change. They had climate change. We have angry religious zealots. They had angry religious zealots. And so it goes.

To minimize the demands of life lived 2500 years ago is about your lack of understanding, not their lack of busyness and anxiety.

Mainly, if you want to be read--whether it's a shopping list or a novel--be interesting, respect your reader, tell a joke or turn a phrase now and again. Give them a reward.

Why do we make things so complicated?

--

[You won't like this writing, it's old:]

Quiet, Please.

Back in the 1950s, Harvard professor, economist and advisor to three Presidents (Truman, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) wrote a great book called "The Great Crash of 1929." I'm not entirely sure (and I am entirely in awe) how Galbraith packed so much brilliance into just 224 pages, but he did. 224 pages is shorter than most new business PowerPoint decks and Galbraith filled those pages with facts and insights not stunts no one would ever care about and mobile ads literally the size of the nail on my big toe.

I recommend Galbraith, especially if you're a Keynsian--and not a believer in the serial frauds of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and their promulgation of tinkle-on-me economics.

One of the things many digressions in Galbraith's otherwise very tight book is a look at the reasons meetings are convened in so many offices and across so many Zoom calls. I'll print the whole thing here. Then I'm going to focus in on a couple of sentences and talk about my favorite topic: me.

"Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."

Let me start with the last two sentences, which I've highlighted in a color I'll call "George's Eyes Blue."

I've written many times before that if I ever opened an agency and needed a physical space replete with conference rooms, I'd buy some white Carrera marble, find a stone-engraver like my grandfather on my mother's side, who carved gravestones and I'd have those sentences up where the Crown molding ought to be. If more agencies did that, there'd be more agencies that are profitable.

That's all besides the point. 

The sentences I want to talk about are the two I've highlighted in green.

1. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. 

and

2. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. 

It's been three years since I've worked in an office. Three years since I've been surrounded by people and the inescapable din that comes with a modren workplace. And in that time, I've thought a lot about loneliness.

Since Covid, of course, the world has been suffering a loneliness crisis. You could say loneliness is the malady of our age. (I think Marx called it "alienation.) And loneliness leads to what are today called "diseases of despair," obesity, depression and a host of substance problems.

As a solitary, non-office worker, I believe you are more susceptible to loneliness. 

After all, you spend much of the day alone.

Like I said, I think about loneliness a lot.

As always I am busy. I often say to my wife, "I'd rather be running at 150-percent than 75-percent." That's something I think most project managers and their ilk don't understand. Most people do better work when they're just a little bit stressed. From an evolutionary point of view, it's probably a survival technique we learned from being chased by tigers, a snake, or in my ancestor's case, a vicious and vengeful snail.

Today, I had two work phone calls with long-time friends, bosses and partners. 

We're all people of a certain age "doing our thing" on some fairly lucrative, prestigious and important assignments. They're actually better assignments than I used to get while working at agencies.

Maybe because I'm a private person, I tend to get along best with private people. Also, people who err on the laconic. That is they don't talk too much. Most people I get along with resemble Sam Spade in a scene with Kaspar Gutman in John Huston's production of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon."

Additionally, many of the people I work with and get along with seem to follow the Duke's advice on acting: "Talk low, talk slow and don't say too much." (I'm no John Wayne fan, but I'm a sucker for rhyming advice.)

Back to today's phone calls and busyness. 

My work compatriots and I are economical when we go over work. We don't get paid for gabbing. We get paid for thinking up ideas and putting them down on paper and showing them to clients when we're happy with them. Then selling them.

What's more, we're flinty. In other words, it doesn't take much to hit us and light a spark. Once we have that spark we want to play with it.

We are the opposite of those that find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. We're not being austere about things--but there's a time for talking and there's a time for solitary marination. We don't conflate the two.

Finally, I think we simply don't find tedium in solitary duties. In fact, I think we all like our alone time. I suppose we're all the types that can see a movie alone, or go to a museum, or for a long run. If your brain is an internal combustion engine, there's no tedium in the solitary.

Of all the things "management" got wrong when they declared that open offices were more creative and then mandated that steerage was better than a private cabin, the worst was a fundamental miscalculation. Sometimes we need collaboration. Sometimes we need uncollaboration. It's not one of the other. It's both. Management chose the vastly cheaper alternative and foisted it upon us as a purposeful decision.

I can sum all this up in six words.

The best thinking comes from thinking.

  1.    2.        3.          4.      5.        6.   

I Owe it to Advertising.

About two years before I was fired from Ogilvy, I knew I was going to get fired. This wasn't due to any perspicacity on my part, just observation. No one within 300 yards of me at the office was within two-decades of my age. And because of my age, the agency figured they could treat me like shit--no going to Cannes, no raises, no bonuses. Where else could I go?

I realized something else at that time. 

I wasn't just on LinkedIn. I had created a "network" or a "channel" for myself. Whenever I posted something, thousands and thousands of people would see it.

It occurred to me, being an old ad guy, that I had something most people selling things would die for. I had "reach." I could disseminate a message and get it to the people I wanted to get to. 

Following all the "old" dogma, I knew I next needed frequency. I'd seen too many marketers think they'll succeed by running one ad, going dark for six months, then running another. If you have common sense, you know better than that.

Finally, I knew I needed a tone of voice and a look and feel. Tone and humor have been my hammer and anvil since I entered the business back in the waning days of the Jimmy Carter administration. As for look and feel, here I was helped by my lack of skills. The only typeface I "understood," was Futura Extra bold Condensed. That's what Ammirati used in some of the best ads ever done--the ones they ran for BMW.

I sat down at my rickety workspace and created some ads.

Then I waited.

Even for someone as rash as I, it would have been impolitic to run ads for myself while I was being paid by Ogilvy. As the weeks leading up to being kicked to the curb with a peon's severance went by, I kept working. I accumulated a dozen ads or twenty.

Before too much longer, I was of course shit-canned. I say, bluntly--and I dare anyone at WPP to refute this--that I was fired for being old, because I was certainly making the agency money. So it wasn't about salary. It was about white hair. 

In any event, I ran this ad and right off the bat got something like 70,000 impressions.

I quickly noticed something.

Every time I ran an ad for GeorgeCo, LLC, a Delaware Company, I'd get a phone call or an email, or ten. So, I kept running them.

To date, I've probably run 300 in all. And while some perform better than others, I never really know why (it could be the weather) but they all have given my bottom line a bit of uplift.

Late last summer, I entered five of my ads in CA. On Friday I received my trophy in the mail. Today, the magazine has released its online edition.

A couple of executives have asked me through the years to "lay off" of the WPP-bashing. [One person's bashing is another's simply telling the truth.] After all, I'm independent now, I don't have picayune bosses to deal with or Concur or timesheets. I'm doing better than I ever imagined I would do.

But I ain't laying off. 

Being fired is a kick to the groin. 

Being fired for being in an unprotected-protected group hurts even worse. It's just not fair. Especially when the CEO in public disparages you for being old.

There are just two things left I can say.

1. Thank you.

2. Fuck you.

Not necessarily in that order.

By the way.

I never got an apology.

AGENCIES

WPP CEO Mark Read Tries to 

Apologize for Ageist Comments

• 
• 
• 

By Minda Smiley on Aug. 31, 2020 - 2:31 PM

ICYMI, the CEO of WPP Mark Read found himself in hot water last week. During the company’s earnings call on Aug. 27, he said the “average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30.”

“They don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily,” he added.

These comments, unsurprisingly, did not go over well. On Twitter, MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop, former Ogilvy ecd and copy chief George Tannenbaum and Fearless founder Ian David 
criticized Read’s remarks and described them as ageist.

Over on LinkedIn, things aren’t much better. A handful of people have called Read out: Matt Kandela,
CEO of brand and experience design agency Dear Future, said it is “frankly terrifying that [Read] believes
this is a real benefit to clients.”

Somewhat bizarrely, Read spent part of the weekend individually responding to criticisms in copy-and-paste
fashion (with typos to boot). He told two LinkedIn users that “all ages are we valued at WPP and the last
thing I would want to suggest is otherwise.” On three separate posts, he wrote that he doesn’t want to “suggest
that age is any way a good thing on it’s own and I’m sorry that is how it reads.”

Read also attempted to explain his rationale: “I was asked by an analyst if we had too many people who just
did TV ads and this was my response,” he wrote below one post. “I guess I said it to make a point in defence
of all our people. It is an average and we luckily have many above the average, including me.”

On Twitter, he said he was “wrong to use age to try to make a point.”

Read’s comments, and his subsequent attempt to make amends, come as the advertising industry 
grapples with ageism and its longstanding fixation on youth.

A quick glance at WPP’s 2019 Sustainability Report shows that the majority of its employees, or 74%,
are under the age of 39. Only 7% are between the ages of 50 and 59, while a mere 1% are over 60.

Last year, Duncan Milner, a TBWA\Media Arts Lab creative executive who led some of Apple’s most 

iconic ad campaigns, sued the agency for age discrimination. A similar lawsuit is currently unfolding 
between Doner and one of its former creative directors, Susan Walsh.

Obvious.

There's a lot you can learn about creating good advertising from getting on an airplane and watching the flight attendants tell you about your seatbelt, the in-floor lighting, the location of the exits and how to put on a lifevest.

My guess is that 98-percent of the people on your flight pay absolutely no attention to that message and 99.9-percent forget all about it the moment the spiel is over.

And this is something that isn't long and could ostensibly save your life.

What can we learn from this?

I take-away something exceeding basic and exceeding important when it comes to advertising success.

If you do the same thing over and again, if you say the same thing over and again, if you show the same thing over and again, no one will notice you.

To get noticed (and liked) you have to do something different. You have to provoke, poke, tickle, insult. You have to do something upside-down.

As I go through life, I see just about every brand and every practitioner of advertising adopting a small set of visual and verbal cliches that essentially work to make them invisible. Even if you leave this post and check out profiles on Linked In, you'll see that the way most people describe who they are or their accomplishments are as flat as a plate of piss.

Why would anyone say "I am an insight-driven, data-guided storyteller."? Or "Award-winning film colorist." Or "I create communications at the intersection of ingenuity and where the customer is in the buy cycle."

Not only are these descriptions meaningless, they're as bland as a flour sandwich on white bread.

They don't recognize the most salient truth in the world today: There are a million of you. You are a dime a dozen.

At least you are if you don't say how you're different and do it in a way that makes people notice.

In the world of technology, where I sow a lot of fields, the language is so cliche and meaningless it's no wonder that of all the billions spent selling x, y or z, so little is effective.

Do words like scalable, agile, robust, secure mean anything to anyone anymore outside a core of MBA's Koolaidophiles?

I could ask the same about virtually any category, from Telco to Automotive to Cruise Lines. 

I worked with a client once who was finished. He was younger than I am now, but he was consumed with fear and spent his long hours day and night hoping no one would notice him. To be noticed, if you cease learning, is to be fired.

One night after the Christmas party he had had about eleven drinks too many. I took pity on him and even though he was 25 years older than I, I role-reversed into his dad and took him home in a Checker Cab.

"George," he slobbered. "I know I'm finished. I'm just trying to hang on because this is all I know." Here's the part that scarred my cerebellum. "You want to know what my philosophy is? Fly low. Fly slow. And try not to crash."

Most brands and people these days, most messaging, seems to follow that dicta. 

It's suicide.

--

Which would you notice?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Game of One-Person Ping-Pong.

I wrote this two Fridays ago. Content management being what it is, I am posting it this morning.

--

It's late Friday afternoon as I type this. 

The end of one of the busiest weeks of my 42-year-long career. A week where I'm afraid to check my email or my cell phone because every time I do, I seem to get two more assignments.

I just got off a 6PM Zoom with three clients and a co-worker. The co-worker is a former Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, one of the men behind Apple's "1984" commercial and probably the smartest person I've ever met.

The three clients are scary-smart and scary-demanding as well.

And then there's me.

As the Coasters sang in their Lieber and Stoller hit "Charley Brown," "Why's everybody always picking on me?"

I think work for most people, or sports, or asking someone out on a date can often feel a little bit like a game of one-person ping-pong.

One half of you says: Do this.

The other half says: I can't.

Do this.

I can't.

Do this.

I can't.

This is the battle of growth. THE battle of growth. Of growing, of self-improvement, of challenging, learning, wanting more.

More money. More responsibility. More control. More possibilities. More tomorrows.

There are a lot of "I can'ts" in the world. And a lot of reasons for them. 

I'm tired.
I'm old.
That's not my job.
I don't know how to do that.
That's not what I do.
That scares me.
I'm too busy.

That half of the ping-pong table reverberates through a lot of brains, in a lot of agencies, in a lot of freelancer's apartments. The volume of that half of the ping-pong table is set at 11. And you'll usually find a host of enablers around who will encourage you to heed the "I can'ts."

Don't be so ambitious.
That assignment sucks.
That's not your job.
Come have a drink.

And so on.

Those are all bona-fide I can'ts.

They're hard to ignore. They know how to get under your skin. They capitalize on your fears and tell you it's ok to let fear win.

The "Do This's" are quieter.

They're fearful.

They don't like to speak up. They're the "still small voice" Jiminy Cricket talks to Pinocchio about. The one people don't listen to.

Of course there are people who will high-five you and say, "You go girl," to you via online platitude delivery systems.

But the "Do This's" have to come from inside your head. If you're lucky you'll find a mentor, or some close friends or a partner who knows how to cattle-prod you.

Do this.

I can't.

Your choice.

Getting the Business. 14th-Century-Style.

There's no shortage of books about business, and no shortage of people asking me if I've read this, that or the other thing. I read Bob Hoffman's books, voraciously, and of course Dave Trott's books as well. I think I've read every book Rich Siegel has published and one or two other books about advertising, including George Lois' rant, "Damn Good Advice," and Ogilvy on advertising and Jerry Della Femina's "Pearl Harbor" opus. 

But mostly I read big histories that, no matter what their topic, to my peripatetic mind help me unravel the universal truths of life on our fading pale blue dot.

I subscribe, by the way, at least conceptually, to the old idea that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." That is the processes of a single organism resemble the processes of an entire species. Think about how our planet got populated with mammalian life and how a human being is born. From water, growth, emergence. That was stupidly simplified, but I hope you get the point.

In any event, it seems to just about everyone in my social circles, most of whom have spent a lifetime in advertising, that advertising as we've always known it has collapsed or is collapsing. So, accordingly or lugubriously, I've been thinking about the life-cycle of business and the businesses that make up an industry.

In my time, I've seen so many agencies come and go. Places that seemed great and unstoppable one year seem to be gone the next--literally just disappeared without a trace. Ammirati. Scali. Ally. Levine. Hal Riney. Cole & Weber. Borders Perrin Norrander, Mandlebaum Mooney, Goldberg, Moser, O'Neill and many others I'm forgetting for the moment. 

Sure, most of these have been merged or subsumed by another agency--but to have left nothing behind, seems sad to me. It's worse than those ghost towns you hear about that at least left some old buildings and a parking meter or two. With an enterprise based on intellectual capital, there are no physical remnants to toss onto the ash heap/dust bin of history.

I'm reading right now (my most-often repeated sentence) a book called "Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World," by Anthony Sattin. 

It's a fairly comprehensive treatment of peoples we tend not to think about. After all, Nomads don't leave behind great cities, or written texts, or statues of their heroes. They travel light and throughout history have left hardly a trace. (Though it's been estimated that 1/200 people on our dying sphere have some of Ghenghis Khan's DNA floating through their veins. He was a notorious trick-or-treater, but wasn't looking for Twizzlers.)

Sattin writes about a great 14th and 15th Century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun who most-famously wrote the "Muqaddimah." Critics have compared Ibn Khaldun's work to "influential European philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte as well as the economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith, suggesting that their ideas found precedent (although not direct influence) in his."

Back to the agency world.

And the rise and fall of it as we speak.

Here's how Khaldun writes about the rise and fall empires. It seems to align with every agency, every entity I've ever seen or worked at.

‘The first stage is that of success, the overthrow of all opposition, and the appropriation of royal authority from the preceding dynasty.’ This is achieved thanks to asabiyya [A group of enthusiasts that forms around a charismatic or powerful leader].

The second stage consolidated power and royal authority in the hands of the leader, but to the exclusion of the group – the aim, here, is ‘to blunt the aspirations of the people who share in his group feeling’.

 

In the third stage, the leader settles for a life of peace and luxury, decrees laws, commissions buildings, equips a fine army and hands out largesse to his own people and to foreign ambassadors.

 

Next comes a phase of contentment in which the new ruler mimics his predecessors, lives in peace with his royal peers and ‘thinks that to depart from tradition would mean the destruction of his power’.

 

Finally there is the downfall, in which ‘the ruler wastes on pleasures and amusements (the treasures) accumulated by his ancestors."

Considering my age and my wisdom and my success with GeorgeCo., it strikes me as sad that there's not a single "leader" in the advertising industry, at either the holding company or the agency level, who will read this or even care to discuss it. I can barely think of one who would consider it possible for a "creative" to have a business continuity or leadership thought.

But as far as I can tell, Ibn Khaldun laid it all out for us, and maybe for our benighted country, too.

In any case, that's why I don't read "business" books.