So often it seems that the knowledge we bring to bear on developing marketing strategies and sales tactics is based on a limited set of criteria as one might find in a Marketing 101 class.  We add to this past experience and parallels to other brands, in other categories.  Especially within large and established companies, the tendency is to proceed on what we know, what we have tried, and what we know about the brand and its customers.  All of this is necessary—but it’s not complete.

Human nature is fickle.  People don’t always do the expected.  Choice can be random.

The reasons consumers walk into a store and buy nothing are usually more interesting than the reasons why they do make a purchase.  (Paco Underhill has written about these shopping experiences with insight and delightful investigative skill.)  With online and social behavior consumers have infinitely more choices and paths to search for what they want to know.  Along the way they make discoveries they didn’t intend; they take left turns; they move from one brand to another as quickly as a click.  We all know this.  Yet marketers stick with the old methods based on “learnings”—I’ve always wondered what this means.  Presumably, things we’ve learned.  But the word is empty and implies something superficial, vague: awful marketing jargon.

We need to know more and apply everything we know without the bias of learned experience.  This is hard.  It takes a suspension of belief to open up to everything we don’t know and imagine something new.  We try to imagine the destination before we know the roads to take.  This only leads us back to where we started.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her August 15^th New Yorker article about Neanderthals:

“We know the end of the story,” he (Shannon McPherron of the Max Plank Institute) told me. “We know what modern culture looks like, and so then what we do is we want to explain how we got here.  And there’s a tendency to over interpret the past by projecting the present onto it.  So when you see a beautiful (Neanderthal) hand axe and you say, ‘Look at the craftsmanship on this; it’s virtually a work of art,’ that’s your perspective today.  But you can’t assume what you’re trying to prove.”

Isn’t that just what we try to do?  Assume what we’re trying to prove?  We know so much and never use a 10^th of it because we’re so busy pursuing our assumptions. Marketing is deadly serious, yet could be so much more fun if we allowed everything we think we know about a situation to be set on a shelf to wait for later, possible,  validation.  Then we can pull out from the deep crevices of our brain all the bits and pieces of random associations and surprising insights culled from completely other experience.  It’s not Right Brain versus Left Brain.  It’s Whole Brain thinking.

John Seely Brown of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge writes that new tech start-ups more often succeed in unearthing new ways of thinking about their product because they don’t assume a market positioning in advance.  They have no market experience to fall back on to lead them to assume what they’re trying to prove.

We can’t know everything, which is why small teams of different kinds of specialists work best.  The last man said to know everything was Alexander von Humboldt, who when he died in 1859 was the last great generalist before an age of specialization definitively set in.  His work ranged across geography, geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, climatology, chemistry, astronomy, demography, ethnography and political economy.  He enjoyed cult status around the world as a scientific hero and genius.

We’re not so lucky.  The ease with which we can Google anything, look up anything on Wikipedia, ask questions on Quora, ask our friends in groups on LinkedIn and the like makes us lazy.  We don’t have to tax our brains.  Just when we need it most, we don’t engage in deep thinking.  Marketing needs to try harder.

All marketing is personal.  It begins with one individual’s vision, his worldview, his passion, his courage.  Brands are forged by these visions.  Nothing exemplifies this more dramatically than the story I’m going to tell.

In 1996 I assumed the leadership of the Philips Electronics business at Messner Vetere Berger MacNamee Schemetterer/Euro RSCG in New York.  The agency had already had a convoluted involvement with Philips, both in the US and at Euro’s Paris office.  If any client/agency relationship can claim to contain elements of high drama, both comic and tragic, it was Philips and EuroRSCG.  The agency began losing the business the day it gained it.  And the slow loss was due to one man.

GD was the worldwide marketing director at Philips.  He reported directly to Cor Boonstra, the Dutch CEO of Philips.  They were soul mates.  Through Cor, Gerard assumed strength beyond the mere reach of his position.

The story goes that years before, when GD was in charge of the Philips Lighting business at EuroRSCG in Paris, he and Cor, meeting for the first time in Hong Kong, were stranded in their hotel by a typhoon. There, over the course of several days, they fell in what amounted to professional love: mentor and mentee.  Father and son.

GD, by birth half French and half Catalan, by temperament romantic and mercurial, with matador looks and Gallic arrogance bordering on the megalomaniacal.  Married twice, engaged to his beautiful, and much younger, former assistant at Euro, he played his emotions like a piano, sometimes soft and lovely, at other times thunderous, angry, scornful.  He would have been at home in the Renaissance Vatican.  He counted few friends—though those he counted he lionized—and many enemies.  He once fired his loyal and excellent English advertising director, telling him, “You made friends with my enemies.”

Shortly after the portentous meeting in Hong Kong, GD left EuroRSCG to become the global head of marketing at Philips, thus setting in motion Euro’s eventual loss.

GD felt humiliated by the EuroRSCG management.  He believed his career was thwarted while other partners became rich and famous.  His smoldering anger centered on Bob Schmetterer, his senior colleague at MVBMS who went on to be the CEO of EuroRSCG.  It was a love/hate relationship that drove all future events.  Remember: all marketing is personal—some deeply personal.

GD’s ill humor was famous at the agency.  On the day before he announced his resignation to become the client, he had a terrible row with Louise MacNamee, the CEO at MVBMS, where he was at the time based.  Louise was from Memphis where she grew up down the street from Graceland and had been often been invited by Elvis for Coca-Colas in his garden.  She was the essence of Southern grace.  On the day of the argument, Louise heard GD shouting in his customary manner at one of the junior account people on the Philips business.  Louise stepped in and demanded he stop shouting. GD exploded.  His rancor against Louise ran deep. He harbored a grudge for not being provided with a suitably grand, and solitary, office when he arrived from Paris to 350 Hudson Street in Soho.  Everyone at MVBMS shared an office.  All of the partners shared offices.  I shared an office with the CFO.  Louise shared an office with Ron Berger, the chief creative partner.  With his immense Napoleonic pride, he could not stand this seeming insult.  To calm him down, he was eventually given a small single person office off the main Partner floor.  Of course this only added more insult to injury.

When I met GD for the first time, he asked me, “Where is your office?”  Not hello.  Not pleased to meet you.  I had no idea how politically charged the question was.  I told him I was on the 9th  floor with the CFO—a very large office overlooking Hudson Street.  This instantly provoked a torrent of outraged criticism about how he was abused by the Messner partners, especially Louise.  Still no hello.

GD’s presence was that of a Renaissance Prince.  He was totally captivating, totally commanding.  One didn’t cross GD lightly.  He was in all respects a one-man show.  His vision was to create a new global brand campaign that would replace all the regional campaigns then implemented.  Because of his intense relationship with Cor Boonstra, all the divisions and regions distrusted him at best, hated him at worst. His personality was so large, his grandeur so grand, he suffered no fools and needed few lieutenants.  Within Philips he was mostly despised.

Whether in envy of his relationship with Cor, which at the beginning was impenetrable, or as a defense against his little concealed contempt, the divisional presidents fought him, finding his talk of brand vision bewildering, something that undermined their quarterly sales.  They wanted to sell product.  He wanted to make Philips famous.  The management chafed at being made to follow this mad Frenchman, based in New York.  Taking no captives, GD engaged in hand-to-hand combat.  Very few were his allies; in the end, none were.

When he collapsed in that fateful meeting in Amsterdam in the fall of 1999, his death knell was rung immediately.  Abandoned by Cor, hated by his colleagues, wounded, in deep physical and emotional pain, he became Philip’s Lear.  Three times his heart stopped beating.  He was dead and resurrected.  He had surgery and a pacemaker attached to his heart, an irony even his harshest critics couldn’t escape without shame.

But that came later.  It’s the end of the story.  GD did in fact create his vision.  He made Philips famous.  He made the agency famous. His campaign won the gold medal at Cannes. He zealously pushed his vision of one company, one brand, indivisible, united by a common theme, common language, common imagery.  He was messianic in pursuit of his vision.  Only defenders of the faith were admitted to his inner circle.  He was the prophet anointed by God to lead Philips out of the wilderness.  He was willing to sacrifice everything, his friends, his family, his security, his health, to achieve his goal.  All marketing is personal.

This is also why GD was the ultimate romantic.  It was the romance of the doomed, yet it was romance that saved him.  The breathtakingly beautiful NLaF said yes to this fallen knight; their romance straight from the chivalrous courts of the Middle Ages.  Nearly old enough to be her father, he became her warrior and wounded lover. Without N, he would have died.

I need to say here that GD was the greatest client I ever had.  It would be too simple to say I liked him.  Like played no role in our relationship. I was in awe of the man.  I had never known anyone like him—and have never afterwards.  I wept when GD fell.  Like Richard III, deserted by his army, fallen and dying—but no country was at stake.  All this passion, this glory, this agony, began being about his brand and grew to be about his soul.

None of this is hyperbole.  The antics of Madmen are small and ridiculous in comparison.  This was real.

I remember the afternoon in Amsterdam, when Ron Berger and I went to present the new campaign to Philip’s board of management.  This was GD’s moment.  The campaign had tested brilliantly around the world.  The Beatles’s song “I’ve Got to Admit it’s Getting Better” had been licensed for $15 million dollars.  The board loved the work and endorsed the campaign.

The day was a total success.

But success combined with pleasure was not in GD’s DNA.  Never content to let success happen, he used the occasion to denounce publicly the head of Philips’ Communication Products division, present at the table.  The attack was bitter and personal, a Savonarola spiked denunciation.  The room was stunned.  My colleague in Paris and friend John Leonard, always GD’s ally, held his head in his hands, his tears falling on the table.  Again the end arrived before it even began.

The campaign ran around the world.  Twelve commercials were produced.  For a moment in time, Philips was famous.  It was the unequalled advertising experience of my life.  Everything that’s come afterward has been a diminishment.   A star exploded and was gone.

Everyone’s gone now.  GD recovered and retired to New York with N, who had his child.  John Leonard lost his job and moved to Chicago.  Louise left the agency and moved to Seattle with her husband.  I hear she’s in London now.  Cor left Philips after a highly publicized affair with the richest woman, after the Queen, in the Netherlands.  Kevin Green, GD’s global advertising director (who had made friends with Gerard’s enemies) went to live on Guernsey.  I moved on to other accounts at the agency.

This is just a story about an advertising campaign and the man who made it happen.  Nothing really could be less insignificant.  Campaigns come and go.  None stay very long.  A new chief marketing officer arrived and changed everything.

Or is it?

11.11.2011

The date seems auspicious, of what I don’t know.  A set of three elevens.  It’s the end of a week I’ve spent in New York, connecting, and reconnecting, with family, friends, business colleagues—who are also friends.  My ecosystem.

I met up with my friend Paul Wolfe, arguably the most creative writer I’ve ever worked with.  To call Paul a copy-writer is far too limiting: he’s a brilliant, and funny, all-round creative genius.  Paul’s also a Cabalist, a player, a father, a charmer.  We were Partners together at MVBMS/EuroRSCG—and collaborators on the stupendous disaster of an over-ambitious, extravagantly produced, TV commercial for Universal Theme Park’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando.  Messner had launched the new park the year earlier with a series of multi-million dollar CGI commercials featuring Spider Man, dinosaurs, even Dr. Seuss.  In a last ditch attempt to retain the business, sparked by new Universal management, Paul and his art director partner John Tumulty—the wonderful, out-there John Tumulty—created a visual theme and TV concept based on Madonna’s “Ray of Light” video.  Therein began the problem.

I remember the day the agency presented four campaign concepts to the new team of Universal executives.  Paul and John’s presentation was last—and it was a performance.  John wore a blue mechanic’s jump suit with a banana in his breast pocket.  Paul always wore black—still does. First showing the “Ray of Light” video, they described how the high-speed time-lapse photography would be similarly used to film the park, incorporating stop-action and full screen titles to emphasize the drama and excitement of the rides and attractions.

Part of the equation of how successful this commercial would be involved hiring the same Swedish film director who shot and produced Madonna’s video: Jonas Ackerlund.  The “Ray of Light” music video had won the 1998 MTV Best Music Video of the Year and the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video.

Ackerlund had never produced a TV commercial before.  His most recent production was a blatantly violent and pornographic music video for The Prodigy’s  “Smack My Bitch Up.”  Universal was thrilled to hire him.

The disaster began with the shoot.  Literally miles of extra, above budget, film was needed to film the fast-action backgrounds.  Miles and miles.  Then, all the film had to be shipped to Stockholm to be edited at Ackerlund’s studio.  Paul went to supervise the editing.  All of the editing took place over the Christmas holiday.  We had Paul in Sweden, the clients in Orlando and Hollywood, John and I were in New York.  Universal used a creative consultant and he was at home in Santa Fe.

The first rough-cut was so astoundingly confusing Universal’s consultant wouldn’t let it be shown to the clients.  Ackerlund insisted on handling all aspects of the production, including the music, which was even more bizarre than the footage.  When the Universal clients finally saw the cuts, they were speechless.  Rough-cut after rough-cut was edited and sent to New York, where we would present it to the clients.  I remember Christmas Eve being on the phone simultaneously with Paul in Stockholm and the consultant in New Mexico, each hysterical over what was happening.  Paul couldn’t control Jonas, who ran a closed shop, never listening to any of the agency’s recommendations and eventual demands.  I was the go-between with the creative team, the consultant, and the clients.  No one was remotely happy.

Finally, all of the footage was shipped back to New York, at which point Ackerlund washed his hands of the project and was never heard from again.  The agency pieced together a final edit, which was true to the concept but hated by Universal.  To kill it once and for all, Universal threw it into an ARS television test to prove it was hopeless and could never air.  As a gift from Santa himself, the commercial scored higher than any other theme park ad in the history of ARS—higher than any from archrival Disney.  The clients again were speechless. The spot aired a few times and in a fit of pique Universal fired the agency a few months later.  I forgot to ask Paul whether he still has the original spot on his reel.

I don’t think even Universal Studios mounts these extravagant, and extravagantly expensive, TV commercial productions anymore.  Branding today is more about igniting conversations than about creating images.  Budgets are lower.  ROI must be determined before a campaign hits.  Still, for the practitioners, those earlier days were tremendously fun, creative and filled with drama–truly Islands of Adventure.

Spending the past three days with my son Adam, a senior at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has made me once again appreciate the value of a liberal arts education in a time of technical and discipline specialization.  I also graduated from Bowdoin–four of the happiest and most stimulating years of my life.  I understood as a student, and increasingly with each passing year, how special my education was and how special Bowdoin is in the history of New England and national education.

Once last year while walking on the Stanford campus, a young student came up to me, pointed at my Bowdoin cap, and asked, “what’s that?”  I replied,”that is a college in existence nearly 100 years before this university was a gleam in Leland’s eye.”  Or course there’s no comparison between Stanford and Bowdoin, one a major university in California and the other a small college in Maine.  Opposite ends of every spectrum, except each having the same commitment to a superior eduction.

Bowdoin was founded in 1794 as the “Harvard of the North,” at a time when Northern Massachusetts (there was no State of Maine then) was too far from Boston to send its sons to college.  The college’s legacy began with James Bowdoin I, a major Boston ship owner and the wealthiest man in the Colonies.  His son, James Bowdoin II became Governor of Massachusetts.   In the early days of the new Republic, Massachusetts Governor Samuel Adams chartered the college named for his predessor.  James Bowdoin III, a patrician Boston philanthrophist, was  Bowdoin‘s  major benefactor..

When as a high school student in Sewickley, Pennsylvania I learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow both graduated from Bowdoin in 1825, I knew this was the only college where I wanted to go. I applied early decision, was accepted and arrived on one early Autumn day to begin a love affair that continues to this day.

Did anything I learn at Bowdoin prepare me for a career in advertising and marketing?  Nothing in particular and everything in general. I majored in English and minored in American Government.  I took courses in history, ornithology, economics, philosophy, art, French, Latin and drama.  I swam on the swimming team and was treasurer of the college newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient. The most influential course I took was Literature as Philosophy, taught by philosophy professor C. Douglas McGee.  The course explored how moral lessons in literature could provide a framework to live one’s life. I think of Doug, who became a close friend until his death in the mid-1990’s, and the books we read, every day since.

Marketing rests on an understanding of human nature, of culture, of what motivates and demotivates people to do anything. Biochemical evolution from the dawn of man driven by the laws of natural selection underlie much of consumer choice. Our culture adds another dimension.  It’s the classic combination of nature and nurture. Is this what one learns in business school?  Or can Heart of Darkness tell us more about a man’s soul than Economic History.  For me they complement each other

Marketing emerged as a field of study in the early 1900’s and grew into a business school discipline in the 1950’s, largely based on the sales tactics of early consumer package goods companies such as P&G and Lever Brothers.  From these beginnings marketing has evolved into a multifaceted foundation for careers not only at CPG companies, but for tech, pharmaceuticals, B2B, even law and medical practice. As an adjunct marketing professor at Stanford and the University of San Francisco, I’ve taught courses ranging from branding, social media marketing. open platforms to marketing 101 and specialized technology marketing.

Over the past five years the value of an M.B.A. has been debated.  If you don’t go to Harvard Business School, Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, NYU Stern or a few other top-tier schools, is an M.B. A.worth the time and expense involved?  Like other professional qualifications, a degree from a second tier school is perhaps only a route to a second tier job.  There are always exceptions.

My experience working with a diverse range of clients is that regardless of someone’s education, marketing is always personal.  Marketing strategies and the resulting advertising and promotion programs are always the reflection of one individual’s taste, experience and preferences.  This is clearly evident from the fundamental changes to strategy and advertising, even media and web strategies, that shift from one CMO to the next CMO.  With the tenure of CMO roles around eighteen months, this is a lot of change. It’s a truism that CMOs and their marketing implementation are consistently blamed for everything from product deficiencies to channel problems.  As with the short tenure of CMOs, so with the short tenures of advertising agencies.  Will new advertising solve the decline in sales of brands such as Chevy?  As DDB’s founder Bill Bernbach observed, “Great advertising makes a bad product fail faster.”

Why do people buy anything?  It’s some combination of wants and needs.  Consumers are fickle, and today have ways of expressing that fickleness unknown ten years ago. A single tweet can ignite a wave of consumer action for or against a company, a brand or a product. A CMO has always had to have a finger on the pulse of consumer opinion.  Account planning (originally know as research) was created as an agency practice precisely to address this need.  But in a world of rapid change and constant disruption, that pulse has already flat-lined by the time it’s identified. Marketing at big corporations tends to start with past experience coupled with a sure knowledge of a new product’s positioning and sweet spot. Wayne Gretzky understood this error in thinking when he said, “I don’t skate to where the puck is; I skate to where it’s going to be.”

Where does this leave our CMOs?  I’d suggest the best approach would be to assemble small collaborative teams of people with diverse backgrounds, operating with limited marketing dollars and fast timetables that require close daily attention to marketing analytics and constant program iteration.  In other words, rapid changes for rapid change.  This was the strategy employed at my recent experience at Isis Biopolymer when we launched the new Biobliss brand.  We iterated, and improved, daily based on web analytics that a larger company with more marketing dollars would have spent months analyzing before implementing change.

Finally, where does this leave an M.B.A. degree, from any school?  The acquisition of skills needed by only one of a nimble marketing team?  A price of entry? The establishment of a network of classmates?  All of these can be benefits, but before embarking on the B-School route, it would be best to identify exactly where that puck is going to be and how you’re going to skate there.

I’ve been a book collector since the age of six.  To my delight/dismay I own somewhere north of 8,000 books.  Many are what one might call “rare;” others are long out of print; some are in large collections, such as the 300+ books on Japanese woodblock prints.  The obvious problem with so many books is that I have no place to keep them.  My apartment can’t hold even one more (well, maybe one more.)  My storage room in the basement is full of book boxes. Eighty cartons are in a storage facility in New York.  Clearly, this is too many books.

I bought a Kindle.  Except for a few business books that  date quickly and require only one reading, the experience is less than satisfactory.  I miss the physicality of a real book.  I love paper, and type, and book design–even with a paperback.  Vintage Penguin paperbacks are treasures.  The presentation on a Kindle is just another way to give the reader a page, albeit an electronic one.  It’s economical and saves space, but for me it’s a poor substitute.  My Kindle lives in a desk drawer.

I’ve recently been introduced to Inkling– http://www.inkling.com –the interactive text books for iPad publishers.  What I like about Inkling, and interactive books in general, is that they aren’t books.  Interactive books don’t try to be books.  There are no pages.  You don’t have to follow a linear format.  They are experiential, defined by the reader, not the publisher.  While they are not the bound book I love as well, they are a new and different way to “read” content.  It’s like going from a slide show to a movie.

Does this spell the end of books?  I don’t think so, at least no more so than the decline in reading, the proliferation of books not worth reading or the reduction of literature in high school English classes (which I guarantee will soon be renamed something like “Content Consumption,” certainly not “Literacy Skills.” When was grammar last taught?)

Interactive books might save many traditional books from disappearing.  Inkling’s text book publishing, available for download on an iPad, may be just such an example.  Everyone knows that textbooks are a kind of scam, a way for teachers and professors to earn more money by annually revising their work and then requiring students to buy the latest high-priced editions.  One can’t blame the authors, who need to supplement their meager teaching incomes in more legitimate ways than becoming house painters for the summer–a solution to which one Ivy League professor I know resorts to support his family.  Students, and parents of students, already bulk at this scheme which accounts for the rise of textbook rentals, used textbooks (usually earlier editions, which rarely make any difference in most fields) and the abandonment of textbooks all together in favor of free online source material.

Interactive books provide a different, often more compelling, learning experience.  Inkling’s textbooks are one approach.  Others are children’s “books” that open to a world of wonder; art and design books; instructional manuals.  Imagine what interactivity could do for manga?  Of how it could open up new possibilities for  dyslexic readers.

I’m working this week in Boston out of the offices of my friend Bruce Shaw’s Harvard Common Press, one of the country’s leading cook book and childcare publishing companies.  Bruce and his associate publisher Adam Salomone are constantly exploring the future of book publishing, specifically HCP’s specialties.  Where are cookbooks going?  Who will want another traditional cookbook?   Many are purchased; few are used.  Bruce and Adam are heavily involved in the food blogging world; they experiment with Kindle editions; they attend digital conferences.  They are involved with a Silicon Valley recipe start-up called Yummly, now the 5th most frequently clicked food site on the web.  Interactive cookbooks are the next evolution.  It would be like bringing the Iron Chef’s actual studio–not the flat TV screen–into your kitchen.  The last thing cookbooks need are sequential pages. The social features Inkling offers–the opportunity to communicate in real time with friends–would be a marvel in the kitchen.  Interactivity will revolutionize cookbook publishing.  It may also save it.

Taking this one step further, what if Yummly had its own iPad app that instead of serving its subscribers weekly recipes based on their individual taste preferences, it took those same subscribers into a virtual kitchen experience where via an interactive platform the cook and the screen became one seamless experience.  No more trips to a Tuscan cooking school. It would be in your kitchen.

Interactivity in the publishing world is at its beginning.  It’s future is bright–even dazzling.

Maybe some people lead lives of consistency, in a single, sure trajectory.  In the Navy it’s said that a ship is all about velocity and vector.  It’s the vector I wonder about…perhaps true for a ship but less true for most people.  Certainly less true for me.

I was reminded of this in Commonwealth Books this morning in Boston, where I stopped by to check out the recent arrivals at one of my favorite rare & secondhand bookstores in the city.  Of course I always find something and today was no exception: a memoir by James Laughlin called Byways and written when he was eighty, published after his death.  James Laughlin was both a writer and poet himself but more famously the founder and publisher of New Directions, the imprint of the best of modern literature ever published in America. Scion of a great Pittsburgh steel family he was patrician to the core yet a friend of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and an entire generation of new writers.  I had lunch with him once at Meadow House in Norfolk, CT on a warm summer afternoon.  I think his cook gave us tuna fish sandwiches.  Being a young editor at a photographic publishing company and he the great man of American literature–he published Ezra Pound’s Cantos–he could have given me anything and I would have thought it the best meal in the world.

This was a period of my life when books and literature were what I knew. I had recently returned from Trinity College, Dublin with a masters degree in Anglo-Irish literature and on the basis of that was hired as the managing editor of Aperture, the nonprofit photographic publishing firm.

During those years I met every great photographer alive, from Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Cole and Brett Weston, Paul Caponigro, Henri Cartier Bresson to a younger generation of photographers such as Lee Friedlander and the great photographer of Gypsies, Josef Koudelka. While at Aperture I also became involved with other small presses of notable fame, chiefly The Jargon Society and the Eakins Press.  With the kind and generous Leslie Katz, publisher of the Eakins Press, I had lunch with Monroe Wheeler in New York, many dinners at Lincoln Kirstein’s amazing house, coffee with Mikal Barishnikov, tea with Father Fly of  James Agee fame, the only man I ever knew who used an ear trumpet.  I had breakfast with Lord Mountbatten, arranging for him to write the introduction to an Aperture book I was editing: Photographs of British India.  Mountbatten had been the last Viceroy.  On another occasion I was sent to the editorial offices at Doubleday to meet with Jackie Onassis.

That vector lost velocity when I went to business school and turned my back on a world I had loved.  After graduation I went to work for Benton & Bowles, then the finest, classic package goods advertising agency in the business.  My first assignment was as the assistant account executive on P&G’s star product Rely Tampons (yes, me) only months before Rely was implicated in Toxic Shock Syndrome and taken off the market.  Baptism by fire. Because P&G had boasted that it had reached 95% of the women target in the country, the FTC made the company run “remedial” advertising to the same 95%.  It cost P&G over $60 million in remedial advertising alone.

When I hear young agency people talk about stress–like nearly all the young women at a tech PR firm I recently worked for–I look at them and think: you have no idea.  The publisher of Aperture had a notoriously bad temper and frequently would make our only woman employee, the lovely Ann Kennedy, cry. When she did he would scream at her “Crying’s not a proper officer tactic. Go home to your playpen and come back when you feel like being a grownup.”  Hardly to be condoned, but the young women at the PR firm–and there were mostly young women–would likely have to have been hospitalized.  They were so naive and vulnerable they couldn’t even deal with listening to someone’s distress.

My vector has diverged many times.  Left turns, cliffs, mountains, clear skies and clouds.  All good in their own way, though often not perceived so at the time.  In every case where something didn’t go my way, a new and usually unexpected pathway opened up.  Trust fate even when it’s hard.

It’s about being open: open to what comes next, to new ideas, new people.  Be open to life.  Sometimes we may feel like Job–2011 has been such a year–but it’s the tests that build us.  Even Steve Jobs had setbacks at Apple and returned to create the company we know today.

It’s in this spirit that I’m building something new.  I hope people, and business, will join me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about uncertainty, how every minute of our lives is an uncertain minute no matter how we have planned or projected.  Uncertainty is the residue of the constant change and disruption in our world.  Every new business lives on a knife-edge of uncertainty.  Even great businesses have an uncertain future. They just don’t know.  No one knows.

In quantum theory, the uncertainty principle implies that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the present position while also determining the future motion of a particle.  Can quantum theory be a basis for understanding market dynamics today?  Since we can never measure where we are while predicting where we’ll be, the goal is the quest.

Inevitably this leads me to think about Michael Frayn’s brilliant play Copenhagen.  Three actors: Nils Bohr, his wife Margrethe, Werner Heisenberg.  The plays ends like this:

Margrethe: And sooner of later there will come a time when all our children are laid to rest, and all our children’s children.
Bohr: When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.
Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonored and beloved world?
Heisenberg: But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.

That final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.  Isn’t that what life feels like?  How dull would it be if life were certain?  A little certainty might be comfortable.  We all want to hold on to what is certain in our lives, but in the end that life-line is frayed and torn and we are cast in the waves again and again.

I’m lucky to be a swimmer.

Tomorrow is my last “official” day at Isis Biopolymer–official in the sense I will no longer be on board in Providence, but still unofficially involved as an advisor and friend.  The past six months have been an adventure and a privilege.

It’s a rare opportunity to get to create and launch a brand from scratch.  Even rarer when it’s accomplished from an unknown company with limited resources.  Developing Biobliss has been such an opportunity.

I remember well the first board meeting I attended in mid-May of this year, presenting the “fast-fail” approach to taking a technologically advanced patch and turning it into a consumer product, in the very competitive arena of women’s skin care.  Well, we did go fast–and we didn’t fail.  The entire Isis team in Providence, together with the Board’s support, collaborated to bring our new brand Biobliss to life and launch it out in the world.  It’s our collective child.

The story of Isis Biopolymer is a book unto itself.  As one of my friends on the Board said to me, “I would like to write the history of Isis but it would have to be a novel because no one would believe it if non-fiction.”  The story begins with Emma Durand who founded Isis in 2006.  The company was established to exploit the emerging fields of conductive polymers, flexible circuits and advanced micro-electronics.  Isis’ first product area was in the development of intelligent transdermal drug delivery. This became the foundational technology of the Biobliss line of products.

Emma was no ordinary founder.  She had founded and sold other successful companies before Isis.  Educated at MIT, everyone said she was brilliant.  I regret never having known Emma.  She died in October 2010.  In her earlier life, up until her late 40″s, Emma wasn’t Emma, but David.  That change is a piece of her story.  Some of my colleagues here at Isis knew David, then David becoming Emma.  She loved fast cars and cool technology.

Isis initially focused its transdermal infusion process on the pharmaceutical industry.  They struck a deal with Novartis to apply their technology and manufacture Novartis’s nicotine patches.  At the 11th hour, Novartis pulled out of the nicotine patch market. Later, Isis signed a deal with a OTC company to manufacture anti-aging patches sold through the mass drug channel.  For complicated reasons that deal went south rapidly.

After Emma’s dramatic death in late 2010, two Isis Board members took over the reigns of the company and steered it toward the development of its own line of anti-aging products, and in the process saved the firm.  There should be a plaque commemorating this achievement at the front door.  The dedication of these two Board members, the patience and support of the investors, and the loyalty and commitment of the Isis employees is a miracle.

What have I learned from this experience: that a brand can be created in 90 days–from naming, to logo and package design, to an e-commerce website build, to a marketing and support program, to a direct channel sales operation, to a PR program implementation–all on very limited funds.  This wasn’t J&J launching a new product.  This was an unknown company with a weird technology, launching a new brand, in a category filled with doubt and suspicion. Our marketing budget was $30,000 a month.  Yes, you heard that correctly: $30,000 a month.

Today, though not entirely out of the weeds yet, Biobliss is an established brand with a growing following.  Skillful sales execution and product line development are the next chapter.  I’m proud of my involvement.

At the beginning of November I head back home to San Francisco.  I will miss Providence, a lovely small historic city.  If you’re passing through, be sure to visit the RISD Art Museum which has possibly the finest collection of any small museum in the country.  Walk down Benefit Street to see the longest continuous stretch of Federal Period houses in America. What I will not miss is my sketchy living situation.  Unable to sign an annual lease, I first lived in a hotel.  Then in August I rented a room from three Brown University students in their off-campus house.  They were, and are, very nice guys, but honestly, living in a room in a student house wasn’t my life dream.  Nor was moving for September and October into my office.  I was homeless in Providence.  All the students were back and there were no rooms available.  I still couldn’t sign a lease.  So here I am writing this post in my office/bedroom/sitting room.  Call it either a start-up mentality or lunacy.  Likely both.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.

I was talking to my son David yesterday who is completing a PhD at Columbia with the goal of being a physics professor.  He was telling me about the controversy surrounding the on-going debate on establishing Federal guidelines for education standards.  This is a complicated topic, with many pros and many cons.  It begins with Federal jurisdiction versus State jurisdiction and continues with which State’s present standards get lowered and which State’s standards get raised.  Then there’s the issue of focus–math and science (for sure) versus literature and the arts.  Does the USA follow the standards imposed in high test scoring countries like Singapore and Japan?   Interestingly, at grade 4, the USA ranks in the top three; by grade 12, we fall to nineteen–well below France, Slovenia, Australia/New Zealand and all of Scandinavia. What happens in American middle and high schools?

Critics of Federal standards claim that they only promote the creation of good corporate employees and de-emphasize innovation and creativity skills.  One Federal provision recommends that middle school students should predominantly read non-fiction to prepare for analyzing science texts in high school. This is based on the belief that literature is a pleasurable past-time, not a route to increasing future test scores.  (Google would very likely agree. Its hiring criteria is entirely based on “the data.”  Even a 50 year old with outstanding work experience has to produce her high school SAT scores. And by the way, 50 year olds are an extraordinary exception to the rule.)

My own background, and educational preference, is strongly liberal arts.  I was an English major at Bowdoin and then got a masters degree in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Talk about an un-marketable eduction!  But it was a wonderful, life enhancing education that gave me skills and never ending passions I could not have achieved otherwise. That said, I did have to earn an MBA to begin the hike up the corporate ladder.

Early in my career I hired a young man who had graduated top of his class at Williams as an English major.  His senior thesis was writing a novel in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bowdoin 1825.)  Unfortunately, everything this fellow wrote was in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Our P&G client did not appreciate a 19th century approach!   To his dismay, he had to be sent to remedial writing classes to learn how to write a simple business recommendation. He would have been better off copying Ernest Hemingway.

Email takes us even further down the road of less than literary.  I even heard the other day that typos in emails are now seen as a sign of speed and efficiency–a good thing.

So how can education standards address all the needs required to be both a civilized human being and an effective business person?  They used to be the same.  In the MBA classes I teach at the University of San Francisco, if I reference a writer or artist, in a legitimate comparison to something we’re talking about, I get 100% blank stares.  Frankly, if I reference a famous company from the 1970’s/80’s, I get 100% blank stares. I often wonder if this matters.  If you’re founding the latest tech start-up, does it really matter whether you’ve ever heard of Digital Equipment Corp, much less Wallace Stevens?  On the former, a lesson in corporate hubris might be useful.  I won’t even argue for Wallace Stevens, although it’s interesting to note that one of the greatest American poets was also a successful insurance executive in Hartford, CT.

Parents play a huge role in establishing learning goals for their children, for filling in the gaps the system, whether Federal or State, inevitably create.  My own sons are pursuing degrees in science eduction, law and medicine. They also love Haruki Murakami, play classical piano and jazz saxophone, happily go to summer Shakespeare festivals, and don’t complain too much being dragged through every art museum in Europe.  I admit that my former wife and I may not be typical (whatever that may be)  American parents, and that children from less well educated families are at a disadvantage.  This is a gap the Federal standards are meant to address.

I wish there was an easy answer to this.