An article in yesterday’s New York Times showed a widely ridiculed map attempting to describe the strategy of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. Using the spaghetti bowl nature of the PowerPoint page, the article, supported by comments from several senior officers in the US military, argues that attempting to describe causes and effects on such a scale creates such complexity that the human mind cannot conceivably wrap itself around it. Furthermore, the article suggests that conceptual representations of this type create the illusion that the game plan described by the map is the essence of the war, implicitly minimizing the importance of flesh-and-blood troops conducting field operations that involve both risk and courage.
Although PowerPoint is an easy target since we all love to hate Microsoft’s ubiquitous software, the real argument is whether the US military should attempt to create some kind of cause-and-effect representation of what senior officers think might (or should) happen as a result of some actions the coalition takes, or whether any action produces an outcome that is by definition unpredictable, solely driven by the talent of local troops in the specific context of each operation, rendering futile any attempt at anticipating any large-scale outcome from headquarters.
am hardly a specialist in military strategy, but using business strategy as an analog, it seems to me that the answer lies in the co-creation of the war agenda between field operators and headquarters. There is merit in starting with some kind of top-down representation by headquarters of how things might play out if everything were to fall in place perfectly – which it won’t, of course, but at least the military will have a straw model to build from as it learns more from actual operations. As long as this representation is understood to depict an intent and a hypothesis, and not imply any kind of deterministic pattern at the detailed level, it serves a useful purpose. Many businesses have dramatically improved their operations by building strategy maps for their operations, as a way of sharing priorities and mobilizing large numbers of people around the common goal.
The key is to accept that conceptual representations have a limited life. The co-creation point of view on strategy is that it involves short bursts of action, followed by brief moments of reflection. In this rapid cycle of actions and reflections, conceptual representations of strategy are helpful to co-create the insights generated by action reviews between all levels, from the Humvee driver’s observations to the views of the generals at headquarters. What outstanding managers do is develop terrain-anchored patterns of causes and effects that can be used to frame the next course of action, not only at the local level but also in a progressively larger theater of operations, resulting in an increasingly crisper view of how the entire war can be won. Organizing such a discussion requires putting in place an engagement platform that allows parties at all levels to shape a common point of view on what causes what at any given time, looking at the problem at various levels of granularity. In this view, the conceptual representation of the war is continuously co-created.
In the end, the issue is not so much the map as the process that leads to the development of the map, and its life cycle. There may be hope for PowerPoint after all.
One of the most influential business thinkers in this world passed away last Friday. C. K. Prahalad was both a leading business thinker advising many corporate CEOs, and a humanist whose teachings have influenced the way many political leaders around the world think about economic development.
I had met C.K. in the late ’80s, when he and Gary Hamel were developing their strategic intent and core competence concepts, for what became their best-selling book Competing for the Future. Gary Hamel was a brilliant platform artist who loved downloading wisdom at the speed of sound, but did not care much for consulting on specific business issues. C.K. was the opposite: a low-key, but passionate teacher who wanted to know what problem you were trying to solve. He had an intimidating presence for the (relatively) young professional type that I was, yet would display infinite patience with me because he sensed I was trying to learn from him. He’d started his career with Union Carbide in India – long before the Bhopal incident – and we’d occasionally talk about strategic issues at Carbide or the chemical industry. He was deeply involved with the Centurion turnaround program at Phillips. He invited me to participate in what seemed like an initiation: two grueling “valley of death” workshops during lonely weekends in Eindhoven, Netherlands. To this date, the intensity of engagement displayed and demanded by C.K. at these workshops has remained my model for how to transform a large organization.
We saw each other on and off for fifteen years after that, and got formally reengaged through a conference he gave at the University of Michigan about five years ago. At that workshop, he introduced me to his Michigan colleague Venkat Ramaswamy, who’d just written a book with him entitled The Future of Competition. At that workshop, C.K. introduced the concept of co-creation covered in the book, as well as a particular application of co-creation for emerging markets – the so-called “bottom of the pyramid” strategy. His passion for India as an emerging business power was a source of extraordinary inspiration, and I could listen to him talk about it for hours.
One of my greatest memories of C.K. in the recent era was running into him in a hotel line in Mexico City, only to discover we were speaking at the same conference about the same topic of co-creation, yet did not know it! After a lovely meal – C.K. was a connoisseur of fine things, something our Mexican sommelier learned at his peril – he decided he’d leave me to explain the basics of co-creation, and would “improvise on some new stuff” instead. Of course, the improvised new stuff brought the house down. C.K. was always off to a new idea and left to the rest of us to water the seeds left behind him.
Venkat Ramaswamy has since become my friend, partner and co-author for the book we have written together and which will be published later this year, titled The Power of Co-Creation. C.K.’s greatest gift to me has been to introduce me to Venkat. We both consider ourselves modest disciples of C.K., since he gave us both the passion for co-creation. The loss of C.K. is even greater for Venkat since C.K. had also been his academic mentor in addition to being an inspiration through his ideas. The flame of co-creation has now been passed. Our job will be to make co-creation live, for the memory of C.K. Prahalad, if nothing else.
They say taxes are bad. Me, at payment time, I feel almost giddy. I’ve been known to hug my company’s controller after completing our returns. I observe my electronic “send file” for a good hour after filing, imagining its path to exotic places like Missouri and Michigan. I frame the post office receipts confirming the hard-copy tax returns are really on their way. The filing of quarterly tax returns may represent the most spiritually intense moments of my year. My wife thought it odd recently that I suggested a day trip to Maine on the second Sunday after first-quarter filing.
There is great pain getting to this redemptive stage, however. The pain is not in the payment, but in the preparation. My tax experience is defined more by the arcane details of form 4562 on depreciation and amortization than by the actual dollars I pay Uncle Sam. Give me a flat tax any day. Impose a tax on complex returns, please. Reward streamlining through deductions. I want a tea party that simplifies IRS forms. I want the elected officials who cook up new deductions to be voted out of office. I suggest the economists who discuss the comparative fairness of income tax vs. sales tax file their own returns for a couple of years, then decide whether fairness trumps simplicity. I want politicians and policy-makers to stop thinking any tax deduction they concoct influences the behavior of tax payers. Most of us are too overwhelmed to understand your little incentives. We’re flying in such a tax fog that all we can do is pray that we stay compliant and avoid jail. The only way to protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the system is to “call the guy” and hope he keeps us out of trouble.
Adding insult to injury, many US politicians are considering establishing a Value Added Tax or VAT. Since my little business files in both the US and France, let me warn you fairly: VAT may be the fairest tax invented by man, but it is a filing whopper. When I look at cash flow in our US operation, I can at least see how the business is doing, with taxes largely proportional to how the business is doing. Not with VAT. There, my little firm is a tax collector on behalf of the French government. This is a side business, with no margin and a significant cash-flow risk since the shareholder has the diplomacy of your average loan shark.
So Mr. Taxman, if you want another check from me, just tell me, but please protect us from VAT. I don’t want all the joy of tax to be gone at once.
Chapter One - Cooking Soup
“How do you create value?” the wizard asked.
“I make and sell good soup for the peasants around my castle,” the manager answered. He smiled proudly. This was going to be easier than he thought.
“How do they interact with your product?” the wizard asked. “What’s their experience like?”
The manager could not repress a smile. “We’re all about experience,” he said. “In fact, we delight our customers through the experience we provide. They love our soup. We make sure it’s salted, creamy, hot, and delivered in an impeccably clean bowl.”
“Do they get to create their own experience?” the wizard asked. “For example, can they one day create one type of experience? Then come back the next time around and create a different one. You know, depending on mood, context or circumstances.”
Now it was getting a bit annoying. “Why would they want to do that?” the manager asked. “They love our soup as it is, salted, creamy, hot and delivered in an impeccably clean bowl.” The wizard smiled enigmatically. An uncomfortable silence ensued.
“But then, I’d have to be prepared to respond to their changing moods or desires” he shrugged. “And I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” the wizard asked.
“Because our soup servers would not know what to do with their requests,” the manager said. “They are professional sloshers trained to serve four hundred peasants an hour, not soup solution agents. My cook is equipped to cook leek and potato soup in 400-gallon cauldrons. He’s not in the tapas business. That’s why it’s so cheap and peasants can afford it.”
“What if customers themselves did some of that work of personalizing your products or services to their own need?” the wizard said. “Could customers become part of your value chain?”
“That’s a funny thought,” the manager answered, considering for a second the possibility. “But these guys are peasants,” he said, catching himself. “They just consume our stuff. What do they know about designing, making, marketing or selling our product? We’re professionals of the soup business here.”
“Are any of those amateurs passionate and knowledgeable about your business?” the wizard asked. “Maybe even more passionate than you and the other managers? Could you channel these customers’ energy and get it to work for you…maybe like in co-creation?” 
“Perhaps, I suppose, maybe,” the manager said. He seemed disturbed. “We have a few soup freaks out there who gather at night to talk about soup. Some of them even make experimental batches, with weird new ingredients like cauliflower and fish. What’s this thing you’re leading me to, wizard?”
“I am not leading you anywhere,” the wizard said. “It is for you to discover your own path. But there are forces in the forest you may not yet recognize. Armies of customers coming to you with new expectations.”
“What am I to do if these customer hordes shop up at my castle, wizard?” the manager asked.”Won’t I sell them leek and potato soup and send them on their way, as I always do?”
“This time, you may have to do a bit more,” the wizard said. “Engage them into building the meal with you. Maybe invite them into your kitchen and let them cook for themselves. Who knows?”
“This is enough for now, wizar,d” the manager begged. “My head spins. I’m disturbed by those visions of customers designing their own value propositions and becoming part of my value chain. I’m just a manager trying to sell soup. Let me catch my breath.”
A few years back, trying to explain co-creation was like describing an oasis in a desert. You had to get the other party to envision water, palm trees and the restful experience that might come with it. Today, establishing what co-creation is involves hacking at luxuriating vegetation with a machete. The jungle of co-creation has become so dense it’s hard to tell what’s what. So let me attempt to play jungle cartographer.
The word “co-creation” is everywhere:
Sony just announced a co-creation platform.
Michael Dell says that “co-creation is a big opportunity” for his company.
A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble says “you have to innovate with the customer, (…) and keep her involved, co-creating and co-designing with you throughout”.
The City of London is inviting its citizens to “co-create London.”
Copenhagen just hosted a Copenhagen “co-creation summit” on design.
If you’re into spiritual healing, you’re invited to “co-create your life and be in charge of your own reality.”
So what the heck is co-creation? The glib answer, of course, is “all of the above”, since one should have the right to co-create everything, including the definition of the word co-creation.
But since you insist on a more scholarly definition, co-creation is a theory of interactions. It involves changing the way the organization interacts with individuals, including employees, customers or any stakeholder. More specifically, co-creation involves setting up new modes of engagement for these individuals – platforms, in the jargon – that allow these individuals to insert themselves in the value chain of the organization. These platforms can be physical things such as a meeting or a store, or virtual things such as a web site. The idea of co-creation is to unleash the creative energy of many people, such that it transforms both their individual experience and the economics of the organization that enabled it.
Defined in this fashion, you can co-create anything involving an interaction, and there are all kinds of interactions. You can co-create a process. In that sense, co-creation is making a bid as the new reengineering. For example, Dell started its co-creation journey by redefining its customer service process – admittedly under pressure from Jeff Jarvis and other bloggers – by making it two-way.
Opening up the product development process to co-creation will lead you to co-create products. This is what A.G. Lafley did when he put in place the so-called Connect & Develop co-creation platform at Procter & Gamble, or what Sony is doing by inviting software developers to develop new applications for its Sony platform.
A city administration can co-create with citizens and invite them to imagine how they’d like to experience the city, as London does. And ultimately, you can attempt to co-create the entire world order, and Copenhagen is as good a place to start from, since the Vikings did it once before already.
Now, that’s co-creation from the organization’s standpoint. From the individual’s standpoint, co-creation suggests each of us can engage differently with businesses and organizations, as employee, customer or citizen. If each of us is a co-creator, this may even lead to a redefinition of our interaction with God, but I’ll leave spiritual healing for another blog entry. This organizational co-creation thing is hard enough as it is.
This week, Forbes.com named Cleveland, Ohio, the most miserable city in the United States. The article explains that the city achieved this dubious honor “thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams (Cavaliers of the NBA excepted).”
I will not attempt here to defend the city, but some good things do seem to come out of Cleveland. The Cleveland Clinic is one of them. In a recent Fortune magazine article, Geoff Colvin interviews Dr. Delos Cosgrove, its CEO, on what allows the hospital to be both among the highest-rated hospital in the country – most notably for cardiac care – yet display great efficiency and cost control discipline.
Dr. Cosgrove shares many best practices in the interview: doctors are salaried and receive a yearly review, the Clinic is physician-led, and it works to provide a hassle-free experience for the doctors who work there, among others. But what really caught my attention was the dialogue, triggered by an insightful question by Colvin, on how patients at the Cleveland Clinic are allowed to look at their own charts. Here is the exchange:
Geoff Colvin: You do something at the Cleveland Clinic that I’ve never heard of elsewhere – you let patients look at their own charts. What led you to do that, and what have the effects been?
Dr. Cosgrove: I thought, “If I’m in the hospital, I want to know what those guys are writing about me.” Why should it be the hospital’s chart, as opposed to the patient’s chart? It’s really about the patient. So I said, “Why can’t we do this?” So we did.
We have an electronic thing called MyChart, where you can go on the Internet and read your record. Few other hospitals around the country have done it. But we think it’s the patients’ information. It’s about them. We’re working for them. Why shouldn’t they have the data?
Geoff Colvin: Inside the organization what were the fears about this?
Dr. Cosgrove: The fears were that patients would get information they weren’t ready for – diagnosis of cancer, for example, or psychiatric information. So we put filters on that; the doctor has a week to get to the patient and let them know about this sort of thing. But what happened was doctors then improved their communication with patients, and patients got the information better, and it worked well all the way around.
What is most intriguing about this practice is the transparency it conveys about the care being provided, and the attention placed on the quality of the patient’s experience that it highlights. This little exchange exemplifies the value created for both sides when a company decides to make itself into a glass house. Fears of misinterpretations and anxiety about misuse of the data by laypeople are common. Over time, though, both sides work out the process through which the data should be shared, and both sides end up with a better experience and a reduced cost and risk. Transparency is the mother of co-creation.
And there may be hope for Cleveland after all.
I am routinely defeated by the two pieces of luggage I own. So much so that I desperately want to meet a luggage designer and have him (I think) explain why my luggage is conceived that way. It’s now verging on an obsession. I’ve been known to ask at cocktail parties whether anybody knows a luggage designer I could talk to. I’ve become a bit of a stalker.
It all started with the two pieces of luggage I own. The first one is a large computer bag with wheels. This thing was clearly designed by fly-fishermen because it has so many pockets they must be built for wooly buggers, tippet and fly-tying material. The business cards pocket buries them so deep it takes sticking most of my head inside the bag to extract one. When I prove unable to provide a business card to my adoring fans upon completion of a triumphant speech, I have to move to a lame “wait a minute, I will write my e-mail address on a piece of paper”. But the pen compartment inside the outer pocket of the bag has no bottom, so pens routinely get lost inside the bag, producing more archeological digging on my part. Finding paper in the file section of the bag is equally challenging because the file section of the bag is divided into four vertical areas, with no room for marking, and no way of knowing inside the darkness of the bag what each section contains, so the only way to get at anything is to dig the whole deck out of the bag and sort it out. Sometimes, I can’t even find the laptop in my laptop bag.
My other piece of luggage is a suitcase that requires memorizing a complex algorithm, just to get it open. I’m waiting for the blue tooth version. The suitcase has a zipper used to expand the size of the thing. Of course, this is always the first one I unzip, since my zippers visual memory has vastly eroded with age. When I manage to get inside the bag – I bat about 50% — I’m confronted with the next challenge: configuration. The suitcase has several pockets that can be zipped or unzipped. I suspect they were originally designed for trout and striped bass. The suit compartment involves a three-part folding contraption, plus a mesh that can be zipped along the foldable device – the original design must have been for tarpon or marlin, before being adapted for business suits. It takes a couple of hours to configure the suitcase – half of that is watching the video – and about the same time to pack – not including laundry time. As for fly-fishing, hiring a luggage coach is the best way to go.
My luggage self-esteem has been so damaged over the years that I’d like to benchmark my luggage IQ vs. the IQ of other luggage users. Call me competitive, but I’d like to know whether I’m at the stupid end of the luggage intelligence curve, or whether only designers and a handful of luggage power users are at the top, with most of us totally confused by their over-design. I’d like to know what data designers looked at when they conceived my two pieces of luggage. Did they co-create it with people like me in front of them, or did they look at focus group data gathered by some market research company, then concocted these massively over-designed pieces because it was more fun for them? I’d like to know what the technical and cost constraints involved in designing luggage are. I’d also like to find out why the overwhelming majority of upscale men’s luggage is black. Are there other people like me out there who would like to avoid the confusion created at airport luggage carrousels by the fact that most men’s suit cases are black, leading to the lifting of an average ten bags before finding your own? Is there something in cow hide pigmentation that prevents me from having a pink suitcase with giraffes? I’d also love to see these guys show me the color trend books they look at, share where their inspiration comes from, and sketch things out in real time in front of me. I’m sure this would trigger my own imagination on what would work for me and others in the market.
So let me warn you fairly, all of you luggage designers out there. I will be calling. My intent is to march onto Tumi, Travelpro and Victorinox Swiss Army headquarters, start a luggage tea party, and demand immediate simplification of luggage and the removal of useless pockets. I trust you designers are good people – you may even do some traveling of your own and might even use some company bags in the process – but you’re desperately out of touch with your market. The time has come for transparency of design.
The days of recycled fly-fishing bags masquerading as travel luggage are numbered.
As a child of the Cold War, I have a special place in my heart for Berlin. For the first 35 years of my life, the only images of Berlin I carried were the decadent pictures of Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel, the ominous display of the 1936 Olympics, black-and-white television pictures of the wall, and drab East German buildings under Communism. Since my parents were both high school teachers of German, there were lots of discussions of Germany at home, but the stories always pertained to the Federal Republic of Germany in the West, never to the German Democratic Republic in the East.
One day, we received a letter from a young East German boy who wanted to have a pen pal in the West. I am not sure how his letter got to us, perhaps through the high school where my parents taught, but my parents got the relationship going. About two years into the process, they decided to send the boy a small present – a simple scarf bought at our local department store – only to find out that the East German authorities required a “disinfection certificate.” My father was so incensed that, probably in the only act of duplicity in his entire life, he created a fake French disinfection certificate and sent it with the scarf. Our pen relationship stopped abruptly – probably because our pen pal got tired of writing – but we speculated that maybe the Stasi, the East German secret police, had figured out the certificate was fake and confiscated the scarf, which further reinforced the dark mystery of East Germany in my child’s mind.
Since the fall of the Wall, I have been invited to go to Berlin on several occasions, and each trip has slowly helped erase the gloomy images of the city. A couple of weeks ago, I was there for a European co-creation workshop on agriculture at the invitation of a large chemical company. The city was appropriately cold, snowy and dark. I stayed at a modest hotel across from elevated train tracks from the city transit system in the so-called Downtown area (“Mitte”). This new city center is the former no-man’s-land between the two Germanys, a kind of compromise between the old West Berlin city center built around the posh Kurfürstendamm and the old East German city center at the Alexanderplatz. When the taxi passed the old Checkpoint Charlie at dusk, it still felt like a John Le Carré book.
But Berlin is now full of life, with students and artists giving the city a unique cachet. The city is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, unbowed by its Nazi and Communist history. I keep promising myself I will one day find the time to visit the DDR Museum, which describes what living in East Germany was about (to exorcise my fears, if nothing else). The Holocaust Memorial, which lies only one block from the Brandenburg Gate – which saw many of the recent commemorative events of German reunification – is powerful testimony to the willingness of the new Germany to come to grips with its dark history. Against all reason, I have promised myself I will one day search to find out what happened to my pen pal after my father compromised him with an inappropriately disinfected scarf (although reason suggests he’s probably peacefully retired from a middle management career in a local government office). The workshop I was involved in was at the Kalkscheune, a giant loft for hip parties and punky Berliners. There was a delightfully incongruous quality to having conservative agricultural people meet there and deal with the clumsy staircase, the squeaky wooden floors, the oddly situated statues in the meeting rooms and the pictures of Amy Winehouse on the wall.
And when it comes to co-creation, it is hard not to think of the generosity of 63 million West Germans who took it upon themselves to reunite with their 16 million East German brethren, giving them in one fell swoop access to the rich resources of a powerful Western European democracy and taking on the cost of reunification without much hesitation. At a time when democracy in the US is struggling with creating any kind of consensus, one might do worse than look at how Chancellor Helmut Kohl led his country into this giant act of German solidarity, single-handedly wiping out the wounds of several decades and bringing a fragmented country together.
Ich auch bin ein Berliner.
It dawned on me this morning that they’re all gone. Someone must have come for them in the middle of the night, but they’re no longer there. The nice old-fashioned executive assistant who gave you hell when you asked to see her boss, then became downright maternal if you groveled a bit. Gone. The middle manager who complained about being overworked, yet came in at 9 am and left at 5:30 pm on the dot to catch his train, but somehow found the time to organize the March Madness pool and keep the books for the department. Also gone. And then there was the kid. She wasn’t quite sure why she worked there, but it paid the rent and they all thought she’d one day get excited about some business thing and go somewhere. Also gone.
American businesses have stopped growing because all the people have gone. The modern-day American enterprise is like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon: everybody in it is above average. We’ve become so good at weeding out middle- and low-performers that only the best have survived. As a result, US businesses are highly productive. But there’s no backfill for these high-performers. They’re so darn busy they can’t take on anything remotely growth-oriented. They have a job to do. And although they’re financially rewarded, most of them are miserable, crumbling under the demand for their time on task forces for development projects.
We’re killing the high-performers. The executive assistant used to protect the calendar. The middle manager could deal with some requests for information from his boss or other departments. And the young kid could every now and then get excited enough to do a worthy piece of development work that helped the cause. None of it was earth-shattering, but it did help our high-performer. No more. Now, our high-performer puts that work in his or her suitcase every night. And you want her to be on an innovation task force? Go participate with some customers in a co-creation effort?
The scarce resource for innovation work used to be money for external help. Now, it’s the people inside. “The only thing we’d consider is a project that would help us rationalize our initiatives and give some time back to our people,” I’m often told. When the launching of a growth project is conditioned by a bureaucratic allocation of time exercise, you know you have a problem. Sadly, this is the reality of many US businesses.
Yet this seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. Businesses in emerging countries are full of people experimenting with new models at the margin of the existing enterprise, even in traditional industries. Even European companies, perhaps because the social and regulatory environment doesn’t allow them to push out low performers so readily, have kept more resources to explore new ways of doing business. Average performers are not the right people to do creative innovation work, but they are the support mechanism for the high-performers who do.
There are also social consequences to this ruthless pruning of the American corporate tree. In its never-ending quest for productivity, American business has externalized the cost of caring for the less gifted or less motivated part of the population. There’s no longer room in business for the young college graduate who’s not yet figured out what to do with her life, the middle manager who’ll never be a star but could do a decent job at a middle-income level, or the end-of-career expert who could never figure out how to sell or manage. Let the system deal with their unemployment, their healthcare needs and the sociological consequences of their demise.
We used to have a basic solidarity. High-performers with a good education and high intellectual aptitude used to create jobs for others. Not everybody was geared for the fast track. It was OK to be a career middle manager, a factory worker or a secretary. The implicit contract was that the fast-tracker would manage a department of middle managers and have a secretary. Plants were meant to absorb people with good manual dexterity and good work ethics, but not necessarily the greatest conceptual abilities. Today, the fast-tracker is asked to weed out the middle managers and do his own clerical work through technology. As for manufacturing jobs, they’ve largely migrated to lower-cost countries. Who’s to fulfill the social role that used to be played by business?
Of course, businesses are not charitable institutions. They do need the best talent to compete, which fosters a Darwinian logic, at least to some extent. But embracing diversity is also creating jobs for those who don’t have the ability to create them for themselves. We cannot only be a nation of solo entrepreneurs. Some people need the help of others. It is easy to understand that for handicapped people, or members of ethnic or religious minorities. Why not extend that to people of average gifts or motivation?
In America, our businesses have become too efficient to innovate. We’re dying completely healed.
I’m going through a mind-splitting experience. In the day time, I write a book – The Alchemy of Co-Creation, with my friend and colleague Venkat Ramaswamy, for Simon & Schuster Free Press. At night, I write this blog. Every time I switch from one to the other, I have to remind myself whether I’m Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.
For book writing purposes, I offer my best incarnation of the thoughtful middle child who plays inside a gang of my co-author, the publisher’s editor, our literary agent/coach and our in-house editor. We plot our crimes long in advance and in systematic fashion, carefully balancing conceptual integrity and consumer appeal. We endlessly rewrite the plan in minute details, complete with fact-checks and footnotes. Some of the crimes we describe will be three years in the making by the time they take place and our book describing them gets published in October 2010. I sometimes wonder whether our forensics will still be fresh at the time.
Of course, we’re going for the crime of the century, something between the Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Our marketing people are already hard at work with the press. I’m thinking Robert Downey Jr. to play me, and Denzel Washington to play my co-author. I’ll need a new look for the book tour – maybe a pork pie hat or a pompadour – and I must remember to trade my RAV4 for a Ducati. It’s fun to think about it, but it may or may not happen – particularly the pompadour – and it’s far away.
From the author’s point of view, though, crimes of the blog are a lot more fun because they’re more intimate and produce instant gratification. I can skewer quickly, and immediately find out the impact of what I’ve done. Before corpses harden, I can go on Google Analytics and see how many people read my stuff and where they live. I’m dying to know the two Sofia, Bulgaria, readers who jump on my latest entry every time. If Google tells me that my partner-in-crime from Montclair, New Jersey, has not read my blog within 48 hours, I can call him and question his commitment. I’ve learned that many people don’t like to publicly associate themselves on the blog with my crimes – perhaps they don’t share my exhibitionist tendencies – but they encourage my murderous instincts through private e-mails.
I’ve learned the two secrets of blog-writing: stick with murder, and build lists. My readership goes way up when I injure or kill. Taking on British Airways has brought me minor celebrity status, particularly in the UK. By contrast, my story about Joseph Campbell’s dancing monks has produced an enthusiasm limited to my mother and sister (my wife’s on the fence). The list of “Co-Creation from A to Z” has rocked the chart because I took on the entire advertising and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industries, and everybody hates these guys. My list of “Ten Excuses Not to Do Co-Creation” has also been picked up by several corporate types who like it when you give them a reason to slack off.
Who said crime doesn’t pay?