This Will be Complicated.

This post is about two books I've read over the past eighteen months or so. I wish more people would read them for two reasons.
a) I'd like to have someone in this stupid world to talk to. And
b) I think our industry (and our world) would be a better, more prosperous place if more people took the time to think not about the day-to-day of our business, but about some larger happenings.

I read "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber back in December, 2024. It's a complicated book, that I'll try to condense to a few sentences. (That's what I do best.)

You can buy it here, buy a machete here to cut your way through it, and read The Wall Street Journal review here.

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

All the things modern social organizations, enterprises, laboratories, research centers, universities and even ad agencies do to increase their bottom lines run counter to their need to create something great.

Cost-accounting will never produce the first lightbulb, cheese in a can, or great ad.

Yet, in every sphere of our lives, cost-accounting is our sine non qua. That's Latin for "our scrotum in a vise."

Huber and Hobart talk about how in academic research roughly 47 out of 100 hours is spent on writing grants. And probably another 20 to 30 hours is spent looking for citations and precedents. Leaving about one-hour-in-five to actual thinking.

That's not counting meetings, meetings about meetings and the meetings we have to complain about having too many meetings.

The advertising parallel is there for all to see. We probably spend 47-percent of our time on award entries. 30-percent of our time studying previous award-winners for tips, and 20-percent of our time watching HR's "handy" videos. I call them handy because they're usually about not touching anyone and not greasing any palms.

In both scenarios, the dynamic leads to something very dire. Work that is only incrementally different from work that went before, that is work that is "stagnant," not "inventive." Our work doesn't go from the Wright Brothers to Lockheed's Skunk Works. It goes from a 20-watt bulb to a 20.5-watt bulb. That we get awards for.

If you want to think about it, most everything today operates under these strictures. It's why almost everything sucks. From your expensive meal to your cheap one, from your government to your subway ride to work.

What's The Least We Can Do and Get Away With It?

Huber and Hobart believe in the lack-of-common-sense-ness of bubbles. Massive expenditure of things that could change everything--that might never happen.

Those bubbles--whether they burst to build--create standards, enthusiasm, opportunity, competition and spillover effects. 

For instance, if an agency has one real account where good work is done, the entire agency improves. Everyone competes to do the good work. And people who can't get into that account get angry and work to make their business great.

That's how Boom businesses, Boom agencies and Boom careers are made.

"How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations" by Carl Benedikt Frey is infinitely more accessible. You can buy the book here. And read the Wall Street Journal review here.

This is a simplification, but I think not a bad one:

Frey divides the world (nations, economies, businesses, etc) into two types.

There are the risk takers.
There are the efficiency-ers.

Think about those two classifications in agencies.

Risk-takers say "yes, we can do that." Great work and success often happens from those risks. Splashes are made. Victories, awards and accounts are won. Because the business, or nation, thought big and did something bold.

At this point, something happens.
The "winners," don't want to lose what they gained. They don't, in short, want to risk things. 

So, they start incrementalizing.
They start talking about processes and how to cut costs.
Before long they've cut the very verve and elan that made them successful in the first place.

"Boom" and "How Progress Ends" share this idea.

They both tell of entities that use sparks to advance.

Then they get afraid that subsequent sparks will lead to wildfires and destroy everything in their way.

The inventors--the nuts--are cast out.
The "don't make wave-people" are ascendant.

If you'd have the mind for it, you can squeeze nearly any entity and even any relationship into these binary structures.

People want Booms--but don't want to accept the Busts that make Booms possible.

People want Risk but limit it by demanding incremental risk, that is efficiency.

Risks and Busts are pre-conditions for Progress and Booms.

I read something from yet another book not too many months ago, about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, operation Barbarosa. 

A German tank commander observed at the time that the Wehrmacht needed to stop its bloodletting at the hands of the Soviets “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Write those words down somewhere.

If we do not intend to win ourselves to death.

You can swap out "win" and replace it with "efficiency." Or "agile" or "downsize" or "cost-cut" or "get rid of the trouble-makers."

The entirety of the ad industry and/or Western Civilization has won itself to death.