May 12, 2008
hugh & the rabbi, episode 4
Rabbi Pinny, Johnnie, Euan Semple and myself recorded a new podcast a couple of weeks ago. Johnnie wrote the show notes and originally posted them over on his blog. It was a lot of fun.
Podcast RSS feed for Hugh and the Rabbi podcasts
SHOW NOTES:
0.00 Intros, Hugh forgets who "the Scottish guy is" and isn't sure what Euan does but settles for rock star.1.00 Hugh sets up the idea of love, recalling a talk about this by Euan at Reboot.
1.45 Euan talks about the L word, and people's reactions to it. It's about people's basic desire to connect to each other, caring about things, getting passionate about things. So much of the business world sanitises passion out of things.
3.15 Pinny wonders about how companies show love. References Lovemarks. In relationships, if you don't go to the nth degree, everything else doesn't count. Talks about how mistakes by Facebook and Apple get pounced on by the blogosphere.
4.40 Lovemarks proves a red rag to Johnnie's bull. Love means different things to different people. Johnnie wary of the fanatical idea of love, the pursuit of perfection. It's more about being human, fallible.
5.50 Euan chimes in against fixation on the romantic idea of love. Instead favours "the passion that grows out of day-to-day stuff".
6.45 Hugh asks Euan about his World Service experience at the BBC.
7.30 Euan: Roughly 47 different language services in the same building. Lots of characters, different cultures. "If you were climbing ladders, they were all against different walls." - so less ego and tribalism than in the rest of the BBC. You had to get on quickly with people, the ability to engage and connect, and move ideas round the building was a formative experience.
9.00 Product of World Service is ideas but also the kind of intimacy you can create on radio.
9.50 Hugh talks about the purpose idea - what are we here for, why are we doing this. Trying to get a sense of purpose going.
10.30 Euan: purpose is good, so is obliqueness. Says what he likes about podcasts is that they are not like broadcasts. Meandering semi-conversations that get under skin in a different way than stuff projected at you in broadcasts. Conventional radio output sounds increasingly patronising.
12.20 Euan on how he pays each month to support Leo Laporte's podcasts, more than half he pays in the BBC licence fee. "That's me doing that to an individual because I really don't want him to stop podcasting." People will pay for stuff that's passionate and accessible.
13.00 Hugh contrasts Euan's story with a UK show, Newsnight Review and its affiliation with the Notting Hill cultural elite. New media is a threat, not so much to cash as to old media privilege.
14.30 Euan recalls David Weinberger saying conversations can only take place between equals.
15.00 Hugh on fanboys.
15.20 Hugh asks Pinny a question "as the only guy here with a real job": does this podcast affect your business.
16.10 Pinny: it's not affecting the business... what it affected is how people view him. Discusses impact on his employees with Hugh.
18.45 Hugh on podcasts as disruptors. Euan says disruption is a word with all sorts of baggage but we get involved in this stuff because it makes a difference. How can governance cope with these changes? It's going to change power dynamics and who is successful and why.
21.10 Pinny returns to the theme of love, inspired by his nephew's wedding where a Rabbi talked about what happens when you aren't in love with love, but with the other. Companies need to own up to mistakes.
23.00 Hugh: gosh, act like a human being, not a robot. Johnnie: intimacy an important word in Euan's story. There's something about "ordinary smallness", the ability to have a real conversation; how meetings that strive to be effective often fail. The need to feel each other as human beings.
24.30 Hugh on how small town, West Texas experience has affected him. How it's safe to have a guy walking round with a ten inch knife, because everyone knows who he is and what the knife is for. Euan reminisces about Glasgow and Pinny, Israel.
27.20 Euan: the danger of homogenisation of success. Quote Doc Searls about things being valuable without being important.
28.00 Johnnie on spending Sunday morning with the papers and someone else, where you don't talk but there's a feeling of companionship. You can't put that on a spreadsheet.
29.15 Johnnie on a twitter-related experience of finding work in a very accidental way. If fell out of a conversation where he wasn't trying to make something happen.
30.30 Pinny: the unplanned as the eureka moments of our lives. Getting beyond ego.
32.10 Pinny on the online course Oprah is doing with Eckhart Tolle. This is why the web was created: to spread goodwill.
33.00 Hugh: a lot of people are trying to use the web to do business the way it's usually been done, which misses the point.
34.00 Euan wonders about how these changes connect to our spirituality. Hugh recalls a Catholic priest who influenced him. God as a metaphor rather than a bearded sky fairy.
35.40 Pinny the web is teaching religion to say it's about human beings, not about God. It's teaching companies it's about what the customer wants to pull, not what the company wants to push. Strip away the disease of entitlement and learn humility. Connects to the rise of Barack Obama.
37.20 Johnnie on the difference between Clinton and Obama. Clinton's positioning as the leader, Obama's emphasis on us.
38.20 Euan: authority used to mean authority as conferred; now it means having a compelling argument or idea.
39.00 Johnnie on authority as being the authors of our own experience. You don't take authority from the BBC any more, you participate.
40.00 Hugh wraps by asking what advice we'd give corporate man in light of all this. Euan: be brave. Pinny: don't be stupid ("Be brave but have a day job") Empty your mid once a day for opportunity to happen. Hugh: be compassionate to those above you. Johnnie: you already know what to do.
44.35 Ends
March 15, 2008
hugh & the rabbi, episode 3
Johnnie, Mark and Rabbi Pinny all gathered for our semi-regular podcast. It was so far my favorite show, by a long shot. I think we're slowly getting the hang of it. Rock on.
The Show Notes:
The conversation begins with a document from 2002 that Mark e-mailed us all, entitled “Beyond Selfishness”. So why did he send it to us?
1.10 Mark: I was recommended this document a few years ago by a client, and I found it really expressed passionately the ideas I was starting to have, about where we were going wrong with Capitalism.
1.45 Mark: The document contradicted certain very common ideas in business- “The Heroic Manager”, or “Shareholders are the only people who matter in a business” etc.
2.18 Pinny: The document reflects something much larger going on in our times: The ever-growing need and demand for people, especially leaders, to be more “transparent” and “accessible”.
3.15 Hugh asks the question: Do y’all see this happening all over in real life, or is this something most of us are just paying lip service to?
3.40 Pinny: It’s something that really started with the internet companies, but spreading outwards. Mentions Mark Zuckerberg: Somebody worth $15billion yet still shows up for work wearing no socks.” The big companies will still stay the same, but the change will come from the newer, younger companies.
4.30 Hugh talks about a conversation he had with a few people inside Microsoft- how there’s a generation gap growing within the company, between the Old Guard, and the new generation of Microsofties, who see their company in much more open, organic terms.
5.45 Johnnie talks about how all these “Web 2.0” tools [that simply were not available 10 years ago] allow people to conduct business on a far more organic, natural and HUMAN manner, in a nimble and agile way that big companies simply will not be able to compete with. “The Revolution will not be televised, because it’s already happening around us.”
8.00 Pinny: The internet allows human beings to “Tap into the Infinite”.
9.15 Hugh: I’ll always go back to Euan Semple’s comment: “What makes the internet interesting is Love.”
9.30 Mark: The internet is about people, not technology, not machines. However the “machine” is the abiding metaphor for business and government.
11.00 Hugh asks Pinny: Being a guy who has a large business, how do you balance the need to “Grasp The Infinite” with the more prosaic realities of running a business- meeting payroll, paying suppliers etc etc.
11.30 Pinny: The way to make the balance to understand what the “Purpose” of the business is, and then make sure the wheels underneath are running.
12.30 Pinny tells a great story about “The Fifteen Hats”, when he, his brother and two others first started the company. They literally put eleven hats on the table, each one labelled with one of the eleven executive job titles, and then they shared the hats out amongst themselves. Now Pinny’s company has 100 employees, ergo “100 Hats”. In 8 years, their company has never had one person quit. Which for an internet company, is a “pretty big deal”.
13.50 Mark: Every manger would LOVE to have their employees loving their work, love coming into work, but simply won’t have this by treating people like “numbers” or a “piece of resource”.
14.20 Johnnie: How we’re saddled with this idea of “Homo Economicus”. If we’re not going to buy into the “Rational Man” model, then we have to get used to talking about concepts like “Love” and “The Infinite”.
15.45 Pinny: I believe the companies that “get this message across” are going to be the ones that will succeed.
16.25 Hugh asks Johnnie: So when we’re talking about things like “Love” and whatnot, how do you educate your big corporate clients with all this stuff?
17.00 Johnnie: I remain optimistic. Most people who work at a company know the company works not because of their rigid models, but people’s willing ness to work around those models. Most people are “just one intervention away” from a more human relationship with the company.
18.30 Hugh talks about The Blue Monster, and how it came about. “I didn’t invent something for them to believe, a-la mission statement, I just articulated a belief that was already there.”
20.45 Mark talks about working with a client of his, a large TV company. How he got them to articulate a shared sense of purpose, rather than a “mission statement”.
22.00 Hugh: If you look at all the great brands that have emerged in the last 2 decades [Nike, Starbuck’s etc], one thing they have in common: They’re all GREAT at “articulating belief”.
22.30 Mark: A lot of the current marketing schtick is about imposing something that isn’t there. Which what makes so much of it false, shallow and objectionable in the real world. Maybe the job of marketers in the future will be to “articulate what’s already there”.
23.00 Hugh talks about working on the McDonald’s advertising account in 1997. “Stay Hungry”. Conclusion: The stuff that makes companies interesting is the same stuff that makes the Bible, the Torah and the Iliad interesting.
27.00 Pinny: When a company grows, the thing they must remember is the beliefs they had that got them there in the first place. Not always an easy thing to do.
28.00 Mark talks about the disaster of Quaker Oats buying the Snapple brand. The got into serious trouble because “They didn’t know how to handle a company built on belief”.
31.00 Mark: The marketing myth of “Best Practices”.
31.45 Pinny tells a great story about one of his favorite marketing campaigns. Advertising for Zappos Shoes, inside the plastic buckets they use in American airport security, of all places.
33.00 Hugh talks about being a Jeff Buckley fanboy re. Playfulness and virtuosity- a powerful combo- in marketing, as much as in music etc.
35.30 Hugh talks about “Innocent Drinks”, a brand that comes up pretty much in 90% of all British branding conversations. “Minor Interventions of Happiness”.
36.50 Pinny talks about “The A-Ha! Moment” in all very successful [and very unsuccessful] marketing campaigns.
37.15 Johnnie: “The Tyranny of Big Ideas”. Talking about Improv Theatre: “When you try to take too much control, you take away the humanity from the process.”
38.50 Pinny: “There are no Big Ideas. There are only Little Ideas.”
40.43 [FINIS]
February 17, 2008
hugh & the rabbi, episode 2
Rabbi Pinny Gniwisch of Ice.com, Marketing contrarians Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, plus myself gathered together over Skype for our second "Hugh & The Rabbi" podcast. We started talking about "Influencers", in the marketing sense of the word. We ended on something far more interesting. A good time was had by all.The Minutes:
00.32. Today’s show is about “Influence”. How clients imagine that there are these secret “Levers” out there, and all a client has to do is sign a check to make the marketer magically pull it.
01.30 Mark: Talking about how things go from being minority popularity, to majority popular. One school of thought places high degrees of emphasis on reaching “Influencers”. Another school of thought places greater emphasis on a high degree of “Random Acts of Traction”.
3.25 Hugh: All a marketer can do is create lots of opportunities where “Random Acts of Traction” can happen.
03.35 Pinny: How can you tell me that you’re going to create an uber-widget for me, when you’ve already admitted that your one big success story came down to luck?
04.10 Mark: Who wants to go into a meeting with a big client and say, “Most of this, by the way, is just chance”…? Most of us want to say, “I’ve got the secret sauce that’ll give you the edge…”
04.40 Johnnie: Paradox: Being primates, we’re all hardwired for fair play. Yet we all want to be the one with the unfair advantage.
05.35 Hugh: “All is vanity.”
05.40 Pinny: Success is 5% wisdom, and 95% luck. If it were the other way around, we’d all be a lot happier.
07.00 Mark: On creating one’s own luck: The one thing the great minds of the Twentieth Century all seem to have in common was: a very petit-bourgeoise work ethic. “You have to be there, working at your desk, when a random act of Luck comes your way”.
08.20 Pinny: The ones that influence the world are the ones who show up; the ones who are there. Anyone can create a “Vessel for Blessing”, but you have to “be there” in order to do it.
09.00 The “Influential” model is most often touted by people who would like to be seen as “Influentials”, or at least, “Friends of Influentials”.
09.30 Mark rants about “Cool Hunters”.
10.00 Johnnie: Group behavior in assessing music varies WILDLY, depending on whether people in the group are being observed by other people in the group.
11.00 Johnnie: In marketing, the order of events we post-rationalize is much, much more random than we realize, let alone admit.
11.30 Mark rants on about the record business.
13.15 Johnnie: The futility of trying to out-think the market.
14.00 Johnnie: One has to be “in the moment” [to use the Buddhist phrase] in order to truly understand the market.
14.25 Pinny: Being “present” is what truly creates sustainability. That, and staying “humble”.
15.05 Just because Malcolm Gladwell is wrong, doesn’t mean Mass Marketing is right.
15.40 Hugh talks about Russell Davies: Successful brands don’t do “One Big Thing”, they do lots of little things.
17.00 Hugh talks about the “Blessing and the Curse” of when things go viral.
18.30 Mark: It’s far more sensible to try lots of different LITTLE experiments, than try to put all of one’s weight behind the ONE BIG IDEA.
20.05 Pinny: Companies have to be not top-down, or bottom-up in order to be creative- they must be “sideways”.
21.10 Johnnie: Companies have to be Peer-to-Peer [i.e. “Sideways”], not top-down or bottom-up. People find it hard to work together without hierarchies.
22.00 Hugh talks about meeting Tim Burton in 1989, and how he described directing movies.
24.00 Pinny: Companies that allow Peer-to-Peer will flourish. The dialog rabbis have with their congregants is much different than it was thousands of years ago. Far more peer-to-peer etc. "Over time, the big answers never change, but the big questions do."
25.00 Pinny: Kids are much stronger "consumers" than they were 100 years ago. Their questions get bigger.
26.12 Hugh: The reason Web 2.0 is so “charming” is that what drives it at its core, is a lot of young people, “Just trying to build and share cool stuff with their friends.” Apps are built around pre-existing relationships, not trying to create relationships. For their own sake.
29.30 Hugh and Pinny talk about the diamond business. “It’s not the rock that’s interesting. It’s that Tom and Jill love each other and are getting married, that is interesting”. Getting the product to “Transcend its own utility” is where the action is.
31.00 Mark talks about how Web 2.0 shows us so much about our real, “Social Ape” selves, not our “Scientific Marketing” selves.
32.50 Hugh talks about Euan Semple’s thesis about “Love” being the main driver of Web 2.0.
34.40 Pinny: The Five Levels of Mysticism. How as time goes on, we get deeper into the soul. Society is getting deeper in the spiritual level.
36.40 Mark talks about getting away from business being seen as a mechanical thing, towards something more based on “Belief”. The companies that excite us the most are not “just about the metrics”. People need “Belief”, both as individuals and as members of groups.
39.30 Hugh: “Sing like you mean the words.”
39.45 Johnnie tells a great story about the actor, Charles Lawton. “I know the psalm, but she knows the Shepherd.”
41.15 Mark tells a great story about a theater group. “Even when nobody is watching…”
44.15 Mark talks about the great 1973 Barbarians vs All Blacks rugby game, as a metaphor for achieving greatness.
46.50 Pinny tells a story about grabbing a dropped scroll while crossing the street in heavy traffic. A metaphor for “Always being on”. Being transparent means “Always being on”. Hugh: “When you’re in that state, you are in a State of Bliss, a State of Grace.”
49.43 Finis.
January 22, 2008
hugh and the rabbi [podcast]
When I was last in the USA, I had the great pleasure of meeting Pinny Gniwisch, Co-Founder and CMO of Ice.com, who was introduced to me by a good mutual friend, Leah Jones.
Pinny's a lovely and interesting guy. He's a Hasidic rabbi, with a long background teaching in elementary schools. Nine years ago he and his brother started Ice.com, an online jewelry store. His company is to selling diamonds what Amazon.com is to selling books. They recently secured $47 million from Boston investment banking firm Polaris Venture Partners, which as the schpiel puts it, "will enable Ice.com to consider acquisitions, build up its e-commerce infrastructure and target new niches in affordable luxury goods." Not bad going at all.
Though his company has been this amazingly successful, he still carries on regularly teaching kids in elementary school.
There's not many people who can claim such hands-on experience in both spiritual and internet matters. I thought he'd be a great guy to share a podcast with. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy.
The Minutes:
0.00 Intro to Pinny.
2.00 Pinny talks about why he decided against ending up working in a synagogue.
3.00 Pinny explains how, since he became a "successful entrepreneur", he can talk about spiritual matters in places that, if he were a normal rabbi, he'd never be invited to.
3.59. Hugh: Few people are both Rabbis and successful dotcom entrepreneurs. There's an obvious tension there, between the spiritual and the entrepreneurial, but that might ultimately make for something very creative and interesting.
4.35 Pinny: "We are finite beings, Masters of the Infinite."
5.05 Hugh talks about the meaning behind the Chinese Dragon: "Serpent meets the Celestial": a metaphor for the Human Condition etc.
7.15 Pinny: "No technology will make up for the fact that we are ruled by both the Ego and the Spirit."
8.20 Pinny talks about the time his teacher told him about his battle between the "animal soul" and the "spiritual soul". The rabbi said, "Pinny, this is your battle, for the rest of your life. Get used to it."
9.45 Pinny tells his five kids: "Success breeds Humility."
10.00 Hugh tells about the time he met Mark Zuckergerg, the founder of Facebook.
12.00 Pinny explains how he spent ten tears between leaving his job as a synagogue rabbi, to starting a dotcom, teaching in elementary schools. Teaching about 11,000 kids a year.
13.58 Pinny: "Talking to kids is where you see the light bulb go on."
16.30 Pinny asks a group of kids, "Who experienced a miracle today?" One of the kids answers, "I woke up!"
19.20 Hugh talks about how it's much more easy to find inspiration in "small things".
20.13 Pinny: "When I visit New York, I get the most inspiration from talking to homeless guys." Pinny talks about how the guy who gives to charity gets more in the end, than the person receiving it.
22.40 Hugh: "It's in the small things, where you really see the 'juice' of creation."
23.10 Pinny tells the story of how we went from teaching kids, to starting "Ice.com", an online jewelry store, with his brother. Inspired by listening to an NPR interview of Jeff "Amazon" Bezos in the car.
24.40 Pinny: "Razorfish offered to build us a site for 3 million dollars." Eventually he got it for much less from somewhere else.
26.00 Pinny: "We were really doing it for the excitement."
27.15 Pinny: "Nobody knew what they were talking about back then. It was new industry. Nobody had an internet background back then. It was a bit like starting out like Christopher Columbus, except there were thousands of boats along with you."
29.00 Pinny talks about the importance of already having family in the jewelry business: "You can't just wake up one morning and decide you want to be in the diamond business. It's a business with hundreds of years of tradition and close-knit family ties."
31.40 Hugh and Pinny talks about the perils of internet company growth. Pinny talks about having to hire "A real CFO and CMO". The challenge of "Ego vs. The Bigger Picture".
33.55 Pinny: "Our company just raised $47 million from an investment bank. So know we have to grow the company in a corporate direction."
35.00 Hugh: "So why did you want to grow the company?" Pinny: "It was inevitable." Talk about company growth being a manifestation of personal growth within the organisation.
38.00 "More stuff creates more worries." And then you die with "more stuff". And nobody cares.
39.00 Hugh talks about his friend, Jonathan's father, who flew Spitfires in WW2. Looking back, nobody cares about how much "stuff" he had after the war. All that matters was that he "was beating the shit out of Nazis", and that is enough.
40.40 Pinny talks about how being a rabbi kicks into the human side of his business. Something you don't see in a lot of corporations. Creating a work environment "Where work feels like 'Family', that is the gift."
42.10 A lot of what keeps large companies in business is coercion and fear.
44.30 Pinny talks about creating a work environment without Fear, like "You were on vacation".
45.30 Hugh talks about Charles Hope over at Blip.tv. "I only work about 3 hours a week. The rest of the time I just play."
46.30 The podcast reaches the last furlong. Hugh ends the show with one last question: "You've been a marketing guy, you've been a rabbi guy. On paper, they are quite different. But what do they have in common? Pinny: Rabbis have to market God, and marketers have to market their products. Sometimes you're doing the exact same thing.
The reason the temples are empty today, is that rabbis are no longer transparent. Marketers, like rabbis, have to learn to become transparent again.
48.25 Hugh: A lesson in marketing transparency: Moses meeting the Burning Bush. Moses asks God, "Who are you?!!" God is taken aback.
49.00 Pinny makes the point: What's true in religion is also true in marketing: As the generations go on, people want more transparency.
50.50 Closing thoughts and winding down....
54.04 Finis.
January 11, 2008
podcast update
Just in case you missed it, here it is one more time:
Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, my two favorite British marketing bloggers, joined me last weekend on a podcast, where we riff about the "Death of Advertising" and, more importantly, what comes after it.
The podcast is here on Johnnie's blog. We had a most enjoyable 45 minutes or so. Hopefully you'll concur.
P.S. In case you don't have 45 minutes to spend listening to a podcast, Johnnie also kept pretty comprehensive notes on the minutes:
40.35 Mark's looking at how behaviours cascade through populations and we do we work with them or subvert them. Hugh: companies don't like to work with random.Rock on, Johnnie.41.35 Hugh: what's worked for me is to get away from the idea of message and think instead of social gesture. How this works for Stormhoek.
43.05 Johnnie: Social objects are incidental to the fundamental process of relating. The brand is secondary to the process and branding goes wrong when it tries to make the product the star. Hugh: paying more attention to the conversations that are happening rather than creating a message.