I returned last night from attending “The International Congress of Esthetics and Spa”–a spa convention in Philadelphia.  It was the second such show I’ve attended on behalf of the anti-aging skin care brand I helped launch, Biobliss.  The products and claims made by manufacturers who sell their products at these spa show continue to amaze me.  Case in point, our booth neighbor featuring a Swiss-made body contour outfit that once drenched in their special fluid reduces your figure by 2 sizes in one month–no other diet or exercise required.  Really?

Or what about the Hungarian Blueberry Soy Night Cream, Yam and Pumpkin Enzyme Peel, or best of all their Garlic and Tomato Masque?  Are there really women who want to rub Garlic and Tomato on their face?

All of these spurious claims made me think about a campaign I once worked on for NEC.  This was a reseller directed campaign built on the theme “You can’t manufacture integrity, but you can sell it.”  What we meant to communicate was the idea that if a company–NEC–manufactured high quality products, made legitimate and honest claims, had fair pricing, and a consultative, helpful sales approach, that would constitute a process founded on integrity.  We believed at the time that NEC had such a process in place.

Is there integrity in skin care marketing.  Limited at best.  This is partly due to the never-ending pursuit of the fountain of youth.  Few of us want to age gracefully.  Our culture doesn’t support the idea of ageless beauty.  There are many truly beautiful women who reject that, ultimately hopeless, objective–women like Judy Collins who is as lovely at 70 as at 20.

Integrity also goes deeper in a company’s culture.  It’s based on the promises it keeps, not only with its customers, but with its employees, too. A company that doesn’t honor its commitments is dishonorable.  Contracts, agreements, even strong verbal commitments, have to be fulfilled–not ignored or violated.  When the latter is the case, the entire company is diminished.  The best people simply won’t want to work there.  And that culture of not honoring its personal commitments will permeate other parts of the company.

I don’t think maintaining integrity is too optimistic a goal.

It’s said we meet people for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime. I think we always hope it will be for a lifetime. I learned this year that the lifetime hope is fragile and often dashed to pieces. It’s learning that hurts. A lot.

But don’t companies experience the same three patterns? Many are founded for compelling reasons. Many only last a season. It’s ironic that Google sits on the former campus of Silicon Graphics. Facebook on SUN’s.
Corporate evolution moves far faster than human, I’m sure most of Google’s young employees don’t even know what Silicon Graphics was.

Same with Digital Equipment Corporation, in its day one of the world’s largest IT companies, second only to IBM in this country. When I was at DDB, I led and won a pitch for DEC’s global advertising. It was the largest new business win DDB had achieved at that time. We replaced more than seventy agencies around the world. Less than three years later, DEC was gone. Its former CEO Ken Olson made the fatal mistake of deeming PC’s snake oil, something no one would ever want. Hello IBM and their famous Charlie Chaplin campaign. Goodbye DEC. DEC was purchased by Compaq which was purchased by HP. Rapid evolution.

The day Digital closed its historic headquarters in Maynard, Massachusetts–The Mill–everyone cried.

Who remembers Digital today? Who remembers Wang? I date myself with these memories. When I was in Mannheim last weekend with my brilliant friend at SAP, he had never heard of Digital Equipment Corporation. Nor Wang. Nor Silicon Graphics. SUN will fade away, too. Thousands of lesser companies only survive in their founders’ memoirs.

IBM feels like a lifetime. P&G. Coke. Philips and Unilever survived the Nazis.
Yet we know there is no forever.

What does your company feel like?

While emailing this morning with my friends at Integrated Marketing Partners in San Francisco I made a silly typo: I referred to cloud computing as cloud commuting. Then I began to think that this isn’t so silly after all.  While images of the Jetsons come to mind, what I’m thinking about is how we do in fact use “the cloud” as a commuting channel.

This image comes from Wikipedia and illustrates my point.  Given the cloud’s agility and location independence, we  do commute from one device to another as seamlessly as walking from one room to another. We can be anywhere, anytime, and access all our stored data.  Commuting has never been easier or more productive.

As cloud computing progresses, our ability to adapt to the rapid pace of change in the world today becomes more efficient–if not easier.  This is evolution at the light speed.

Are you ready?

My astrologer David Pond has sent his annual Autumn Equinox newsletter.  He writes that for the next several years the world will be highly unpredictable and that social instability will last at least through the seven squares of Pluto and Uranus through 2015.  We don’t want to wait for life to get mellower; it’s not.

He asks ‘Is light a particle or a wave?’  It’s both, depending how you pay attention to it.  Light responds to our attention; so does life.  ‘Are you a particle or a wave?’  This can be a useful metaphor to guide us through these times.  When you are locked into a particle consciousness, you attempt to freeze yourself in time and space and it’s futile.  When you are in wave consciousness, you remain growing, changing, evolving with the energy of the field around you.

Does this feel like now?  The world we live in is today characterized by rapid change and constant disruption. If we want to live in it, be part of the exhilaration and the harrowing drama, then we must be waves, rolling, undulating, crashing.  Hence Spindrift: the spray blown from a cresting wave in a gale, the result of wind and complex wave dynamics.  Pure nature, raw and violent and beautiful.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the internet and within social networks.  Twitter is a wave.  Facebook has wave action built-in. Nothing ever grows old in these waves.  It’ either the future or the past, and old is not a concept.  New isn’t a concept, because when everything is new, new immediately becomes the past.  This is what we live with.  Only wave riders will survive.

How can we write a business plan in this storm?  Does next year have any meaning?  Five years?  The world will be such a different place in five years that an alleged five-year plan is as fictional as Alice in Wonderland.

I’ve spent the past six months launching a new product on a e-commerce platform that lives within a complex, many tabbed Excel spreadsheet five-year plan with as many assumptions as required to make the numbers work out. The plan is meant to give the investors a sense of confidence that the company is viable, and has a future.  The spreadsheet tells us so;  it must be true, real.

The plan is a set of handcuffs limiting spontaneity, quick left turns, improvisation, zigs when the situation calls out for zags. Everything must be evaluated within the context of the plan.  It assumes the external world is a static place, where change never happens, where success one day is always replicated.  One order must be followed by 3x repeat orders, in a specific time period of time.  And if this order sequence isn’t met, is the product a failure?  Will the investors release the next round of funding?

This isn’t marketing.  It’s lunacy. My work here is complete.  The product has been launched; the case has been written.  Whether it succeeds in the marketplace will be subject to the waves in which it’s tossed.

“…in the areas of technology and globalization, organizations must have the right talent to respond to the constant disruption and changes in the market.  And, the right talent for all of this is the passionate knowledge worker.  How does an organization accomplish this feat in the face of the very real war for talent?  The best answer is that forward-looking companies will gather and connect passionate external workers around the world and engage them as part of a virtual network, which very well may be attached to their organization.  And they will do this by taking advantage of the powerful advances we have seen in social software and cloud computing.”

Eric Openshaw, Deloitte

Let’s create a global team of friends who want to work together in new ways to innovate, share ideas and solve business problems collaboratively.  “Passionate external workers.”  The key here is friends.   Friends who know each other, like each other, want to work with each other, have a range of talent and expertise, have lives outside of work, and many passions.

We live and work in different cities and countries and draw inspiration from our time, place and culture.  We know where we are in the world.  And where we might want to be.

Most of us have worked together before.

We’re different ages and different nationalities and come from different backgrounds.  As individuals we’re unique; as a team even more so.

These are my friends.

Try us out.

Among the many things we can’t control are the weather and flight delays, especially when they come together to keep us from getting where we want to be, when we want to be there.

I’m returning from Amsterdam today, by way of London to Boston, having spent the past week there and in Mannheim, Germany. Apparently high winds and the possibility of October sleet at Heathrow have delayed my flight by over two hours, resulting in a missed connection and the likelihood of an unexpected overnight visit in the UK. Nothing but to go with the flow.

The past week was momentous: one of those times in life that happen just when they’re supposed to happen but we don’t know that until afterwards. I didn’t plan for this–although I did make decisions that led to the experiences that opened a door that just may, if I hold on to the vision, lead to a future more satisfying and true to who I am than I ever could have imagined.

Earlier this year I was asked to speak at Enterprise 2.0, a social media marketing conference held in Amsterdam. My topic was Creating Influence. I’m returning from that speaking engagement now. In January 2010 I attended the same conference at which I met several people who have remained in my life. That earlier trip to Amsterdam was special in many ways, not least because I was with a woman with whom I was deeply in love. The conference was the backdrop to a winter idyll among the snowy canals and holiday lights that will remain in my heart forever. That’s another story for another time.

Of the many people I met in Amsterdam at the first conference, Sean MacNiven, an Australian working at SAP in Waldorf, and the brightest, most engaging young man I know, has become a good friend with whom I’ve corresponded and chatted on email for the past year and a half. Initially an intellectual soul mate, Sean, together with his lovely wife Gabi and two sons Max and Paul, has become a warm and constant friend. So it was a dream come true to visit Sean and his family in Mannheim this past weekend before returning to the States.

Sean knows more things than anyone else I know. Whether it’s the emotional life of bees, chimpanzee sign language or the complexities of the German secondary educational system, Sean has the facts and the story telling skills to bring his knowledge to life. We spent the weekend visiting nearby Heidelberg, with its caste and university, and the quiet town of Ladenberg on the banks of the Neckar, dating from Celtic and Roman ages. We walked, and looked at everything, and took pictures of each other next to the largest wine vat in the world.

We also spent many hours talking about life, happiness, work, family, our dreams and aspirations, and, with particular regard to me, how to chart the next route on my life journey. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide.

I’ve spent the past six months working as a contract CMO for a bio tech company in Providence, Rhode Island. The company’s founder developed a patented transdermal infusion process by which active ingredients are pushed to the skin by means of a battery powered flexible circuit patch. It’s like wearing a tiny, wafer-thin computer on your skin. Due to a series of circumstances which if I described them they wouldn’t be believed, the company decided to launch a consumer product based on its technology in the women’s anti-aging skin care category. I used this product as the example to illustrate my points in the Amsterdam presentation.

Now that the product’s been launched–e-commerce site built, digital campaign developed, PR driven influencer support established and direct sales initiated into the spa channel–my work is finished and I’m returning to San Francisco.

Initially I thought the weekend away in Germany would be the break I needed before getting down to business figuring out what to do next. Instead, it became the business itself. Everything has changed in the way I’m thinking about the future. Having spoken at the conference in Amsterdam, listening to the other speakers and talking with the participants, and spending the weekend with my friend Sean, I now know what change is required and have the confidence to make it real. II’ve needed change for a long long time, and now is the time. Everything that’s come before is preparation for this moment.

Having been accused of spending too little time on a canvas, James McNeill Whistler was once asked how long it took him to paint a painting. His answer was “a lifetime.”
That’s where I am. I have a lifetime of knowledge and experience to bring to bear on anything I want. I don’t want to be in a box, constrained by unachievable metrics and historical handcuffs. I’m finished with boxes. The free-fall I’ve dreaded is today a liberation. Hello tomorrow.

I’m finishing this piece relieved to be on board a late BA flight to Boston, having missed my original connection, and then having been transported from Terminal 5 to Terminal 3 and then back to Terminal 5, enduring two separate security checks, finally to arrive a my new gate only minutes before the doors were closing. As I said, one can only go with the flow, and sometimes it just works out.

10.17.2011