“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:
1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.
2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.
3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.
4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.
5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.
6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.
7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.
8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.
9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.
10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”
Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Note: This was originally written in 2006.
“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
This book is at the same time engaging and appalling. Either which way you might interpret it; it is a book that you have to read. It provides clues into some of what has been happening in America. By tying together the success of the Republican Party in the last several elections, companies like Starbucks and Applebee’s, and the mega churches, the authors have pulled the curtain back on the tools, principles and mechanisms of manipulating people into doing what an organization wants them to do.
Life targeting, or micro-targeting, as it has been recently tagged, is a methodology of predicting the behavior of micro segments of a society based on lifestyle and demographics. Then identifying specifically who these people are by name and contacting them with a message targeted to their micro sector. It is not necessary that the organization really hold the values held by the members of the micro segment, only that the organization can make the people believe that the organization does.
In the 1980’s I came to realize that organizational values were the key to success in the marketplace. While at IBM, I developed an organizational change methodology to determine the values of the customers, and change the values of an organization to reflect those values. This was described in a book I coauthored entitled Innovate! (McGraw Hill, 1994). We pointed out that here must be a values match between the customers and the values those customers perceived from the organization. And, that it was set of values that differentiated one organization from another. Moreover, that same set of values controlled the type of innovation most likely to be produced by the organization. Efficiency and effectiveness of the organization depends respectively on the target of the values focus and the spread of the values focus.
We, the authors of Innovate!, assumed naively that organizations were really interested in changing their values…
Do I hear protests from the readers? Some of you may be saying, “But lifestyle targeting has been used by consumer companies for a number of years.” That’s true, but not in the same way. Examples in Applebee’s America are described such as Applebee’s convincing individuals that they really cared about what happened to them. (Remember the ad showing the coach retiring?) When’s the last time you believed that a large corporation really cared about what happens to you. It is a business and until business stops being totally driven by shareholder value, concern for the individual will remain a lost value. Yet many of us need to believe that the message is true, and the corporation continues to grow.
Sosnik, Dowd and Fournier repeatedly give example from politics, business and mega churches that can be interpreted as I have. Politics goes one step further however. With American divided nearly equally between the two major parties, and low voter turnout, a small group of voters actually determine who wins. Using concepts like business, politicians can calculate the cost per vote in these micro segments and allocate money accordingly. The message they delver to these micro segments, if effective, swings the election, even if the candidate holds the values projected or not. It’s not about the issues. The American public glazes over when issues are discussed. It’s about the values connection between the candidate and the voters. This technique will win elections but it will forever divide us for there is no benefit of collaboration among differences. It exploits the differences.
Hypocrisy is defined as “a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.” This is the line we have crossed over in the current use of micro-targeting.
Eventually hypocrisy is revealed. It is just too difficult to sustain a pretense, and actions do indeed prove louder than words. But what America’s powerful have learned is that it takes a long time for people to perceive the pretense.
In First Democracy, Paul Woodruff points out that in Athens the primary role of public education was to prepare Athenians to be able to participate in their democracy. Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.
To the author’s credit, while they do not take the low view I have of micro-targeting as it is now practiced, they do point out that the values connections has to be real to be sustained:
“Navigating the Stormy Present - How to Be a Great Connector:
I. Make and Maintain a Gut Values Connection. Voters felt President Bush was a strong and decisive leader. They felt President Clinton cared about them and would work hard on their behalf. Both presidents fell out of favor when they were not true to their Gut Values, proving that authenticity matters in this era of spine, not spin.
2. Adapt. President Clinton realized he needed to change his message and methods to appeal to Swing Is and Swing IIs. Eight years later, President Bush determined that there were no longer enough swing voters to make a difference and that he had to find new Republican voters.
3. LifeTarget. President Clinton barely scratched the surface of the potential to find and motivate voters based on their lifestyles. President Bush took it to a new level in 2004.
4. Talk Smart. Both presidents broke new ground in niche and local advertising, constantly looking for ways to communicate to their voters through the channels those voters used to get information.
5. Find Navigators. President Bush's campaign identified more than 2 million people who could influence how their friends, family members, and associates make political decisions.”
In each of the three markets they analyzed, they provide the above roadmap.
Applebee’s America describes a methodology that is borrowed from Myer’s Briggs Personality Type, the concepts of lifestyle, the concepts of generations, demographics and the concepts of the tipping point. It’s pieces of these sets of concepts lashed together in a way that is incredibly effective, according the authors.
Oh, by the way, how did the Republican’s get the specific names, addresses, telephone numbers and in some cases e-mail addresses for the members of the micro-target sectors? Well, they got them the same way that business do from credit card transactions, and from the membership of some of the mega churches. Is this ethical?
So far I’ve been writing about the first part of the book – Great Connectors. I personally found the second part of the book – Great Change – much more professionally interesting. The chapters on anxious Americans, the 3 C’s (connectors, community and civic engagement), navigators and generation 9/11 give a good, insightful view of present day America with some views of the future. However, as a professional I would have preferred to get accessible references to the data they quoted to make a point (none are given). Example:
“…’protecting the family’ rose to become the No. 1 value of American’s (cited by 53 percent of respondents in a 2000 Roper analysis.”
Anyone who works with data taken from surveys knows that it is important to know the context and how the data was collected and what else the data indicates in order to interpret it.
The author’s provide:
“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:
1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.
2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.
3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.
4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.
5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.
6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.
7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.
8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.
9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.
10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”
In spite of my negative reaction to what they were saying in the first part of the book, I liked the book. It’s a book that should be read by many and the focus for a lot of discussion.
It was very curious to me that the book (inadvertently?) undercut the approach of the first part of the book with the second part. In politics, the battle between micro-targeting and grass roots civic engagement is being fought out in present and future elections. If I have a vote, I vote for the latter.
Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)
“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
This book is at the same time engaging and appalling. Either which way you might interpret it; it is a book that you have to read. It provides clues into some of what has been happening in America. By tying together the success of the Republican Party in the last several elections, companies like Starbucks and Applebee’s, and the mega churches, the authors have pulled the curtain back on the tools, principles and mechanisms of manipulating people into doing what an organization wants them to do.
Life targeting, or micro-targeting, as it has been recently tagged, is a methodology of predicting the behavior of micro segments of a society based on lifestyle and demographics. Then identifying specifically who these people are by name and contacting them with a message targeted to their micro sector. It is not necessary that the organization really hold the values held by the members of the micro segment, only that the organization can make the people believe that the organization does.
In the 1980’s I came to realize that organizational values were the key to success in the marketplace. While at IBM, I developed an organizational change methodology to determine the values of the customers, and change the values of an organization to reflect those values. This was described in a book I coauthored entitled Innovate! (McGraw Hill, 1994). We pointed out that here must be a values match between the customers and the values those customers perceived from the organization. And, that it was set of values that differentiated one organization from another. Moreover, that same set of values controlled the type of innovation most likely to be produced by the organization. Efficiency and effectiveness of the organization depends respectively on the target of the values focus and the spread of the values focus.
We, the authors of Innovate!, assumed naively that organizations were really interested in changing their values…
Do I hear protests from the readers? Some of you may be saying, “But lifestyle targeting has been used by consumer companies for a number of years.” That’s true, but not in the same way. Examples in Applebee’s America are described such as Applebee’s convincing individuals that they really cared about what happened to them. (Remember the ad showing the coach retiring?) When’s the last time you believed that a large corporation really cared about what happens to you. It is a business and until business stops being totally driven by shareholder value, concern for the individual will remain a lost value. Yet many of us need to believe that the message is true, and the corporation continues to grow.
Sosnik, Dowd and Fournier repeatedly give example from politics, business and mega churches that can be interpreted as I have. Politics goes one step further however. With American divided nearly equally between the two major parties, and low voter turnout, a small group of voters actually determine who wins. Using concepts like business, politicians can calculate the cost per vote in these micro segments and allocate money accordingly. The message they delver to these micro segments, if effective, swings the election, even if the candidate holds the values projected or not. It’s not about the issues. The American public glazes over when issues are discussed. It’s about the values connection between the candidate and the voters. This technique will win elections but it will forever divide us for there is no benefit of collaboration among differences. It exploits the differences.
Hypocrisy is defined as “a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.” This is the line we have crossed over in the current use of micro-targeting.
Eventually hypocrisy is revealed. It is just too difficult to sustain a pretense, and actions do indeed prove louder than words. But what America’s powerful have learned is that it takes a long time for people to perceive the pretense.
In First Democracy, Paul Woodruff points out that in Athens the primary role of public education was to prepare Athenians to be able to participate in their democracy. Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.
To the author’s credit, while they do not take the low view I have of micro-targeting as it is now practiced, they do point out that the values connections has to be real to be sustained:
“Navigating the Stormy Present - How to Be a Great Connector:
I. Make and Maintain a Gut Values Connection. Voters felt President Bush was a strong and decisive leader. They felt President Clinton cared about them and would work hard on their behalf. Both presidents fell out of favor when they were not true to their Gut Values, proving that authenticity matters in this era of spine, not spin.
2. Adapt. President Clinton realized he needed to change his message and methods to appeal to Swing Is and Swing IIs. Eight years later, President Bush determined that there were no longer enough swing voters to make a difference and that he had to find new Republican voters.
3. LifeTarget. President Clinton barely scratched the surface of the potential to find and motivate voters based on their lifestyles. President Bush took it to a new level in 2004.
4. Talk Smart. Both presidents broke new ground in niche and local advertising, constantly looking for ways to communicate to their voters through the channels those voters used to get information.
5. Find Navigators. President Bush's campaign identified more than 2 million people who could influence how their friends, family members, and associates make political decisions.”
In each of the three markets they analyzed, they provide the above roadmap.
Applebee’s America describes a methodology that is borrowed from Myer’s Briggs Personality Type, the concepts of lifestyle, the concepts of generations, demographics and the concepts of the tipping point. It’s pieces of these sets of concepts lashed together in a way that is incredibly effective, according the authors.
Oh, by the way, how did the Republican’s get the specific names, addresses, telephone numbers and in some cases e-mail addresses for the members of the micro-target sectors? Well, they got them the same way that business do from credit card transactions, and from the membership of some of the mega churches. Is this ethical?
So far I’ve been writing about the first part of the book – Great Connectors. I personally found the second part of the book – Great Change – much more professionally interesting. The chapters on anxious Americans, the 3 C’s (connectors, community and civic engagement), navigators and generation 9/11 give a good, insightful view of present day America with some views of the future. However, as a professional I would have preferred to get accessible references to the data they quoted to make a point (none are given). Example:
“…’protecting the family’ rose to become the No. 1 value of American’s (cited by 53 percent of respondents in a 2000 Roper analysis.”
Anyone who works with data taken from surveys knows that it is important to know the context and how the data was collected and what else the data indicates in order to interpret it.
The author’s provide:
“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:
1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.
2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.
3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.
4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.
5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.
6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.
7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.
8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.
9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.
10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”
In spite of my negative reaction to what they were saying in the first part of the book, I liked the book. It’s a book that should be read by many and the focus for a lot of discussion.
It was very curious to me that the book (inadvertently?) undercut the approach of the first part of the book with the second part. In politics, the battle between micro-targeting and grass roots civic engagement is being fought out in present and future elections. If I have a vote, I vote for the latter.
Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
This book suffers from only one problem and it’s in the subtitle – community making and peace. The two topics are so widely divergent, that the narrative is almost sure to fail accomplishing one or the other. In this, it does a good job at describing community making.
However, even that part of the book has to be viewed from the perspective of the person who wrote it – a psychologist steeped in group therapy.
The heart of the book is his stages of community building:
1. Pseudocommunity
2. Chaos
3. Emptiness
4. Community
Some of characteristics of community he describes are: inclusivity, commitment, consensus, realism, contemplation, a safe place, a laboratory for personal disarmament, a group that can fight gracefully, a group of all leaders and a spirit.
In the first stage – pseudocommunity – “The members attempt to be an instant community by being extremely pleasant to another and avoiding all disagreement.” At this stage a group avoids conflict by telling “white lies” and avoiding the recognition of differences. “To avoid the risk of conflict they keep their feelings to themselves and even nod in agreement, as if a speaker has uttered some universal truth.”
Chaos erupts when people begin to acknowledge differences but do so in a destructive manner, often with the motive to heal and convert others to their way of thinking. “In the stage of chaos individual differences are, unlike those of pseudocommunity, right out in the open. Only now, instead of trying to hide or ignore them, the group is attempting to obliterate them. Underlying the attempts to heal and convert is not so much a motive of love as the motive to make everyone normal – and the motive to win, as members fight over whose norm might prevail.”
“There are only tow ways out of chaos…One is into organization - but organization is never community. The other way is into and through emptiness.” To enter emptiness the members of the group need “to empty themselves of barriers to communication.” These barriers are: expectations and preconceptions; prejudices; ideology, theology and solutions; the need to heal, convert, fix or solve; and the need to control. This requires sacrifice and “sacrifice hurts because it is a kind of death, the kind of death that is necessary for rebirth.”
“When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It’s a kind of peace.” But, although joy is the prevalent mood of a true community, not everything is sooth. The real work in community is difficult. It is still a struggle it’s just that people seek the third position, not either or, but a creative act of love.
If one were to draw a figure representing this process, it would quite likely be a “U”. Pseudocommunity is a nice comfortable stage at the top left of the “U” and “Community at the top right of the “U” lively and intense. The temptation is always to jump across the “U” without the descent into the “hell” of chaos and emptiness. But, that doesn’t work.
Many other models of change result in a similar “U” pattern. As described by Richard D. Grant from “Mastering the Change Curve”, by Dennis Jaffe & Cynthia Scott, organizational change begins with the comfort and certainty of the past. The final stage is the future rationalized. In between is all the messy work of relationships and spontaneity. In Presence, Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski & Flowers, describe a “U” that begins in the upper left and proceeds through the bottom to upper right through suspending, redirecting, letting go, letting come, crystallizing, prototyping and institutionalizing.
Real change, no matter what the goal is messy and requires a lot of work. That’s why change is so difficult and why people and groups rarely change. Like paradigm’s progress, we’d rather ignore the anomalies, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain spinning the controls, and pretend that everything is OK until the world collapses around us. We’d prefer that rather than facing the fear of having to change what we believe.
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, M. Scott Peck, Simon & Schuster, 1987, 334 p
However, even that part of the book has to be viewed from the perspective of the person who wrote it – a psychologist steeped in group therapy.
The heart of the book is his stages of community building:
1. Pseudocommunity
2. Chaos
3. Emptiness
4. Community
Some of characteristics of community he describes are: inclusivity, commitment, consensus, realism, contemplation, a safe place, a laboratory for personal disarmament, a group that can fight gracefully, a group of all leaders and a spirit.
In the first stage – pseudocommunity – “The members attempt to be an instant community by being extremely pleasant to another and avoiding all disagreement.” At this stage a group avoids conflict by telling “white lies” and avoiding the recognition of differences. “To avoid the risk of conflict they keep their feelings to themselves and even nod in agreement, as if a speaker has uttered some universal truth.”
Chaos erupts when people begin to acknowledge differences but do so in a destructive manner, often with the motive to heal and convert others to their way of thinking. “In the stage of chaos individual differences are, unlike those of pseudocommunity, right out in the open. Only now, instead of trying to hide or ignore them, the group is attempting to obliterate them. Underlying the attempts to heal and convert is not so much a motive of love as the motive to make everyone normal – and the motive to win, as members fight over whose norm might prevail.”
“There are only tow ways out of chaos…One is into organization - but organization is never community. The other way is into and through emptiness.” To enter emptiness the members of the group need “to empty themselves of barriers to communication.” These barriers are: expectations and preconceptions; prejudices; ideology, theology and solutions; the need to heal, convert, fix or solve; and the need to control. This requires sacrifice and “sacrifice hurts because it is a kind of death, the kind of death that is necessary for rebirth.”
“When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It’s a kind of peace.” But, although joy is the prevalent mood of a true community, not everything is sooth. The real work in community is difficult. It is still a struggle it’s just that people seek the third position, not either or, but a creative act of love.
If one were to draw a figure representing this process, it would quite likely be a “U”. Pseudocommunity is a nice comfortable stage at the top left of the “U” and “Community at the top right of the “U” lively and intense. The temptation is always to jump across the “U” without the descent into the “hell” of chaos and emptiness. But, that doesn’t work.
Many other models of change result in a similar “U” pattern. As described by Richard D. Grant from “Mastering the Change Curve”, by Dennis Jaffe & Cynthia Scott, organizational change begins with the comfort and certainty of the past. The final stage is the future rationalized. In between is all the messy work of relationships and spontaneity. In Presence, Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski & Flowers, describe a “U” that begins in the upper left and proceeds through the bottom to upper right through suspending, redirecting, letting go, letting come, crystallizing, prototyping and institutionalizing.
Real change, no matter what the goal is messy and requires a lot of work. That’s why change is so difficult and why people and groups rarely change. Like paradigm’s progress, we’d rather ignore the anomalies, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain spinning the controls, and pretend that everything is OK until the world collapses around us. We’d prefer that rather than facing the fear of having to change what we believe.
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, M. Scott Peck, Simon & Schuster, 1987, 334 p
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
nnovation Watch
by Seth Godin
New York: Portfolio, 2008
A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.
Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All these blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born -- groups of ten or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.
Who is going to lead all these tribes?
The Web can do amazing things, but it can’t provide leadership. That still has to come from individuals -- people just like you who have passion about something. Anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at her fingertips.
If you think leadership is for other people, think again -- leaders come in surprising packages. Consider Joel Spolsky and his international tribe of scary-smart software engineers. Or Gary Vaynerchuck, a wine expert with a devoted following. Chris Sharma leads a tribe of rock climbers up impossible cliff faces while Mich Mathews, a VP at Microsoft, runs a tribe of marketers from her cube.
If you ignore this opportunity to lead, you risk turning into a "sheepwalker" -- someone how fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you (or your organization) any good. Sheepwalkers don’t do very well these days.
Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities for leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, readers…It’s not easy, but it’s easier than you probably imagine.
Seth Godin is the author of ten international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestseller The Dip. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and include Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Meatball Sundae.He is also the founder and CEO of Squidoo.com (a huge and fast-growing tribe) and the most popular business blogger in the world. Visit www.SethGodin.com and click on his head to read his blog.
More
by Seth Godin
New York: Portfolio, 2008
A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.
Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All these blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born -- groups of ten or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.
Who is going to lead all these tribes?
The Web can do amazing things, but it can’t provide leadership. That still has to come from individuals -- people just like you who have passion about something. Anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at her fingertips.
If you think leadership is for other people, think again -- leaders come in surprising packages. Consider Joel Spolsky and his international tribe of scary-smart software engineers. Or Gary Vaynerchuck, a wine expert with a devoted following. Chris Sharma leads a tribe of rock climbers up impossible cliff faces while Mich Mathews, a VP at Microsoft, runs a tribe of marketers from her cube.
If you ignore this opportunity to lead, you risk turning into a "sheepwalker" -- someone how fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you (or your organization) any good. Sheepwalkers don’t do very well these days.
Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities for leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, readers…It’s not easy, but it’s easier than you probably imagine.
Seth Godin is the author of ten international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestseller The Dip. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and include Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Meatball Sundae.He is also the founder and CEO of Squidoo.com (a huge and fast-growing tribe) and the most popular business blogger in the world. Visit www.SethGodin.com and click on his head to read his blog.
More
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Adam Smith 2.0
By Irving Wladawsky Berger, AlwaysOn
The other day, I came across an interesting story about Adam Smith in The Economist. It appears that Adam Smith - the 18th century philosopher and economist, who is generally considered the father of free-market, free-trade capitalism - has been treated with remarkable indifference in his native Scotland. The 17th-century house where he spent the last years of his life has only a small, tarnished bronze plaque mentioning his name. His grave was overgrown until recently, and is still not easy for visitors to find.
The Economist story attributes this indifference to one of Scotland's best known sons to modern politics and historical ignorance. "Smith's most famous work, The Wealth of Nations," the article says, "which describes wealth creation in a competitive commercial economy dominated by the market's invisible hand, has long been appropriated by right-wingers and anathema in left-leaning Scotland."
Driven by their narrow political ideology, some people seem to think of open markets as reflecting a kind of survival of the fittest competition in which anything goes. But such people, I believe, have totally misrepresented not just Adam Smith and open markets, but the principles governing evolution and natural selection, especially as it applies to social animals like us humans.
The Economist story goes on to say that, - led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, himself a Scot, - people are discovering that Adam Smith is not the right-wing ideologue he has been misunderstood to be. "Leftists much prefer Smith's other big work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments," it says. "Its deeply Scottish Presbyterian fulminations against materialistic desires for trinkets of frivolous utility, and lofty observation that man has some principles which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, can be made to sound almost socialist."
I don't think that Adam Smith had socialism in mind, but something much deeper - sympathy, that is, the very human ability to have a strong feeling of concern for another person. Experts generally agree that Smith advocated both the self-interest of Wealth of Nations, and the sympathy of Theory of Moral Sentiments, with no contradiction between these two positions. In his view, "individuals in society find it in their self-interest to develop sympathy as they seek approval of what he calls the impartial spectator. The self-interest he speaks of is not a narrow selfishness but something that involves sympathy.”
Read the entire blog by clicking here.
The other day, I came across an interesting story about Adam Smith in The Economist. It appears that Adam Smith - the 18th century philosopher and economist, who is generally considered the father of free-market, free-trade capitalism - has been treated with remarkable indifference in his native Scotland. The 17th-century house where he spent the last years of his life has only a small, tarnished bronze plaque mentioning his name. His grave was overgrown until recently, and is still not easy for visitors to find.
The Economist story attributes this indifference to one of Scotland's best known sons to modern politics and historical ignorance. "Smith's most famous work, The Wealth of Nations," the article says, "which describes wealth creation in a competitive commercial economy dominated by the market's invisible hand, has long been appropriated by right-wingers and anathema in left-leaning Scotland."
Driven by their narrow political ideology, some people seem to think of open markets as reflecting a kind of survival of the fittest competition in which anything goes. But such people, I believe, have totally misrepresented not just Adam Smith and open markets, but the principles governing evolution and natural selection, especially as it applies to social animals like us humans.
The Economist story goes on to say that, - led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, himself a Scot, - people are discovering that Adam Smith is not the right-wing ideologue he has been misunderstood to be. "Leftists much prefer Smith's other big work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments," it says. "Its deeply Scottish Presbyterian fulminations against materialistic desires for trinkets of frivolous utility, and lofty observation that man has some principles which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, can be made to sound almost socialist."
I don't think that Adam Smith had socialism in mind, but something much deeper - sympathy, that is, the very human ability to have a strong feeling of concern for another person. Experts generally agree that Smith advocated both the self-interest of Wealth of Nations, and the sympathy of Theory of Moral Sentiments, with no contradiction between these two positions. In his view, "individuals in society find it in their self-interest to develop sympathy as they seek approval of what he calls the impartial spectator. The self-interest he speaks of is not a narrow selfishness but something that involves sympathy.”
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