Buddhist Marketer

It’s not evil for Citi to hand out bonuses

Quickly, as I have a call in a few:

1. On Morning Joe this morning, the yokels who run that show were kvetching about additional bonuses given to top performers instead of the President’s Award annual trip to a sunny locale
2. To yokel-paraphrase, “Why reward the top performers?  Where are they going to go?  Lehman?”
3. Implicit assumption: people who work at banks are only qualified to work at banks.
4. Every single star performer I met during my time working at or with Citi went on to work for a company not equal to a bank
5. If you let your top talent go elsewhere, do you think that will increase or decrease your chances of getting out of a troubling situation?  Do you think that top performers or the average-of-the-average are more likely to be able to put government dollars to good use?

Of course, I’ll also note that none of the top performers in my mind were ever invited to the President’s Award trip to a sunny locale.  There was one woman who I liked and didn’t entirely suck who went, but on the flip side, one of the most perplexingly mediocre people with whom I’ve ever worked was also invited.

Look, the organizational culture at Citi is already one that encourages yes’m'ing and discourages declarations that the shivering, nude emperor is, in fact, naked as a jaybird.  Frankly, I wish they’d flown the top peeps to that sunny locale instead of handing out loot.  At least in warm weather it’s not so wacky to be tromping around in the buff.  Maybe in that pants-optional environment, someone would feel more comfortable stating the obvious.

Rewarding addictive behavior

In which I use italics willy-nilly and try to figure out at what point good becomes bad

Kara Richardson Whitely, in “Reaching my peak” in the October 2008 issue of Self magazine, writes, bolding mine:

For a long time, I used food — and by extension fat — to insulate myself against all the bad things:  my parents’ divorce when I was 9, the family friend who molested me at age 12, the countless people who sorrowfully told me I had “such a pretty face.” …

I ate, pushing Little Debbie Zebra Cakes

(I’m more of a Donut Stick girl myself, or when available, Zingers, yum!)

into my mouth until I’d finished a box of 10 in a sitting…

I felt suspended between my desire to lose weight and my seeming inability to do anything about it…  I’d go to Weight Watchers, then swing by McDonald’s on the way home.  As my weight yo-yoed between 300 and 335, I felt frightened of what would happen if I lost more.  What would I do without the security blanket that had comforted me for so long?

Indeed.

Kara’s not the only one with an addictive behavior (you’ll have to read her full piece to know what happens; I don’t want to rob you after all), but her addictive behavior is pooh-poohed by society.  What about those of us who engage in self-soothing
behaviors that society rewards?

to insulate myself against all the bad things

I remember a specific moment during my writing class this summer, an intimate group of half a dozen women from our mid-twenties to late seventies, guided by the very awesome and highly recommended Elaine Edelman.  One woman had just finished reading her draft of a piece that closed with her, as a young girl, turning to the pages of a book immediately after being molested (by the teenage son of family friends as her mother chatted with his in the kitchen) (!!!).

“How heartbreaking,” one sixty-something woman responded, “that the girl immediately numbs herself with a book.”

I was nodding vigorously, thinking of my own public library denizen status as a young girl, and it was as if a lightbulb went off in the author’s head.  “Oh my,” this woman in her late seventies uttered quietly.  “I never made that connection.”

And why should she have?  We applaud reading, we give you Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas if you read a quota within a month, we remind you that reading is fundamental, and Levar Burton takes the banana comb out from in front of his eyeballs and devotes rainbows to the act.  Reading teaches you things and makes you smarter and we like smarts, so read!

But at what point is reading an escape mechanism?  At what t=bad does reading get in the way of, rather than contribute to, a happiness-optimized existence? Is there ever any way to tell when swimming into pages of black and white text has become the equivalent of jamming black and white striped cakes into your gaping maw?

Reading isn’t the only possibly-addictive behavior that our society rewards. I used to crank 90 hour weeks while taking two MBA classes, commuting 70 minutes each way, getting clobbered weekly by my best friend and her law school roommate in Scrabble, and running the national not-for-profit that I started.  Without even noticing. It would’ve been unthinkable for me to consider that I was cramming activities onto my plate as a way to escape myself — because I was wholly unawarez who and/or where this alleged self of mine was. Working long hours meant I rose up the ladder (and pay grade) quickly; getting an advanced degree was what you did as A Smart Person, and of course I was going to keep on running the organization that landed my name in the press. Duh. I mean, how could any of that stuff be bad? It’s not like I had track marks up my inner arms. Quite the contrary. Society was cheering me on.

And society cheers a lot of people on, encourages their addictive behavior.  “We’re a nation of consumers, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” coos an awful, terrible, very bad no-good Discover Card advertisement.  We’re proud when we’re workaholics.  We applaud industrious entrepreneurs.  And it’s a lot easier to go for that hit of instant gratification approval than take a moment to slow down, pause, and feel the twinkly warmth that comes from “little” things.

Like a warm hug from a friend.

The twinkle in the eye of a toddler.

The mesmerizing way the late afternoon sunshine floats through your curtains and twirls through the dust in the air.

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Last year I broke with tradition and brought my old man with me to the Yale Medal Dinner.  One of the recipients was none other than John Pepper 6Y0, former CEO of Procter & Gamble.  As President Levin announced the award, he also noted that an entire table was here to support Mr. Pepper.  What loyalty this man inspires!  They all stood up and continued to applaud Mr. Pepper, one of the newest Yale Medal recipients.  We all applauded, clap clap, clap clap.  The men, President Levin reported, were primarily comprised of his direct reports and close colleagues at P&G.

I looked around for a woman I ran track with, albeit briefly, during my freshman year. I wove my head and searched the tables near the dozen men who were standing and cheering on their man Pepper. I was hoping to catch her afterwards, say hello, catch up. I didn’t see her or anyone else that she might have been with (for example, her mom).

This surprised me, seeing as she’s his daughter.

It’s not easy to be there for your kids (I surmise) especially when they’re snarly-lipped teens.  But medal-givers and paycheck-signers and the lovely pages of books that don’t talk back and the warm gooey wonderfulness of food food food –

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Oh dear, how I love to write.  Oh my oh my oh my

On effecting real change, poor people or otherwise

My incentive for working on a very long marketing strategy playbook that I’ve been crafting for the past two weeks or so is to quickly read three blog posts from my feedr once I finish a few slides, which is how the following ended up on my radar during the work day:

From a post by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh in The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog: The Price of Advice: Chronicles of a Young Philanthropist, Part III:

… the donors had very rigid ideas concerning the capacity of poor people to change their behavior. When they met poor families (in Chicago and New York), they expected that their money would have magical powers. I exaggerate only slightly.

They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, [emphasis mine] the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.

As I really need to get back to this deck, here are two quick thoughts:

• This is exactly why I am a big, big fan of Yale & Harvard-educated lawyer Brooke Ritchie’s relatively new organization, the Resilience Advocacy Project. By empowering youth and helping them to understand the law as a tool that protects them rather than punishing them, and by helping these kids feel like their own change agents / architects of their own future, the intention is to plant vital seeds of self-worth in order to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. “Teach a man to believe he is worth a new suit” vs. “Buy a man a new suit” if you will. (Fine print: I’m more than just a fan; I’ve signed on to help Brooke hone and refine RAP’s positioning and messaging strategy; ending what I refer to as trickle-down f*ckonomics is key, IMHO, to ending ongoing psychological and financial poverty. Helping people to help themselves is one of my deepest passions.)
• The thing is, even if you aren’t poor, in order to effect true change in your life, you cannot do so by simply addressing surface issues. You need to dig deep and get into root causes, first principles, step one, and find the very first line of code where things started to veer off track. This, of course, requires an awareness of said root causes. Before you can own your pipes, you need to know that your pipes are there, know what they’re made of, and know a little bit about that which sullies them.

Back to architecting an NPV-maximizing conversion funnel throughput strateg-ery.

How publicly traded companies are like teenage delinquents

I have worked for and/or with a number of Fortune 100 companies, and there’s a commonality across all of them: the incentive structures for the employees. I don’t mean discount gym memberships or on-site child care; I mean the way in which different kinds of thinking and approaches to doing business are rewarded. There are significantly fewer rewards for corporate employees to act in a manner that is in the best interest of the corporation’s long-term value versus acting in a manner that’s good for this month’s numbers.

I know the street and its analysts like to think that they plug and chug long-term growth considerations into their equity valuations. Sure. I won’t dispute that this is the attempt and won’t even argue whether this pans out. But on the ground floor of a corporation, even enlightened companies who pretend to make decisions with some proxy for net present value as a factor will, when push comes to shove, make the decision to hit their raw numbers in terms of units sold, ad impressions bought, prescriptions written, whatever.

“Wait, but if we invest $1,000 of your $5,000 budget on strategically planning your marketing spend, the budget you have next quarter will be that much more intelligently deployed.”

“Nope. Don’t care. Just throw it all at media.”

Ah, how very responsible you are to … now. And how very irresponsible you are to tomorrow.

And this is how publicly traded companies behave a bit like teenage delinquents: the calculus operating in the minds of most corporate bees is, “I need to hit my numbers this month!” not “I need to maximize NPV over a five year period.” When one is optimizing over a timeline the length of one’s arm, they’ll tend to make very different decisions than if they are optimizing over a timeline the length of their ken (notable exceptions being someone who is visually impaired, but I’m hoping you get my drift here).

Similarly, teenage delinquents could really care less if stealing that old lady’s handbag is going to hurt their chances at getting into college. Applying to college is three years away; $20 and a crusty tube of lip balm is three seconds away: “I need to get some cash right now!” not “I need to maximize lifetime earning potential.” The timeframe over which mental calculus is conducted is significantly shorter for the teenage delinquent and their behaviors and actions crescendo accordingly.

In some ways, corporate bees are stealing old ladies’ handbags every day, if the old lady is the future and the handbag contains the incremental monies that the firm could have earned if a smarter, more strategic decision had been made at t=0. In the corporate world, when surrounded by other like-minded thugs whose decks, motivational posters, quarterly town halls and paintball-games-if-you-hit-your-numbers, act, in the aggregate, not unlike teenage hoodlums conspiring in the park (”There! There’s an old lady! She got nice shoes so I bet she has loot!”), it can be hard to make the difficult decision to choose long-term value or short-term gain (”Oh, wow, snap, you’re not gonna do it? What, you think you’re better than us?”)

Most of us don’t make the difficult decision. Most of roam corridors of softly-padded cubicle walls stealing old ladies’ handbags.

“Hey, team! We hit our numbers this month. Let’s go get some drinks!”