(Situational) condescension is a moral obligation
The bubble might not have gotten so big in the first place if corporate cultures didn’t discourage the public denouncement of bad ideas
I don’t place a premium on blowing sunshine up people’s hindparts.
At my high school, a math/science magnet, you came strong or not at all, an intellectual style that suits me, but generally pisses most people off. Even some circles at Yale felt the dismissive, condescending tone that my skewering of poorly-considered arguments generally took was inappropriate for the cashmere-sweater and pearl-necklace set. Whatevs. I was trained in a school of thought that assumes we’re all intelligent people, and none of us are going to cry to our mommies if someone rips our moronic ideas a new orifice. Au contraire: we’ll become stronger people for having endured the thrashing. (Cue Nietzsche.)
This is not an approach that lubricates one’s path to a corner office at a large corporation. (Cue Kafka.) Playing nice with others is paramount, is more than half of your annual evaluation come bonus-time. As someone put it this weekend, “Do you want to show the other person that they’re wrong and you’re right, or do you want to persuade them?” In corporate America you need to persuade 25/8/366; it’s more difficult to do this when your emails are laced with vitriol and your presentations rife with eye-rolling.
The Bell curve makes it clear that the vast majority of humans are, well, average. It follows from this that the insights of the vast majority of humans will also be average, and the length of time that it will take them to appreciate the brilliance of your insights will be longer than it took you to architect them. So, in opposition to that which is generally celebrated in the places I feel most at home (think: a room full of people who prefer quad-ruled paper), in corporate America you must place a high premium on making others feel good about themselves. Or, at the very least, you must be considerate of how what you’re saying and doing might make other people feel like idiots. (Whether they are, in fact, idiots is not relevant. Remember: do you want to be right, or do you want to persuade?)
Now, let’s think about this: yes, I oftentimes “skewer” other marketers’ fumbles. I’m not trying to shame anyone (anymore) but at the same time, as I informed a waiter at a restaurant in Santa Monica last month, “I’m allergic to mediocre food.” If you know me, you know this about me. As one of my dear friends Chris Sandeman, the CEO of Sandeman’s New Europe, has put it, “Anittah’s only draw-back is the occasional allergic reaction to stupidity and mediocrity in co-workers.”
I’m not happy when I find out that someone has taken deep offense at me taking the red laser pointer to their public boo-boos. I mean, I’m not out to hurt anyone’s feelings. If you know me, you know this too. But certainly the language I speak is often at odds with the language spoken by the dominant status quo — and by definition, the middle chunk of the Bell curve is the dominant status quo. And the dominant language is one that makes others feel good about themselves, gently persuades them to agree that 1+1=2, and blows sunshine up their grade-inflated, “Hooray For Everything”, if-it-weren’t-for-Spanx-it-would-occupy-four-zip-codes backsides.
Feel-good group-think. A Ponzi scheme of back-patting. A lemmingistic, no-whistle-blowing, now-is-the-perfect-time-to-buy we-are-all-bobblehead-dolls chorus of conformity. I mean, how could the clowns be anything but wise when wisdom is, definitionally, whatever the clown-crowd comes up with?!
It isn’t too far from this line of thinking to suppose that the mandate of playing nice and being nice if you want your bonus is an incentive to not announce, “The Emperor has no clothes!” It isn’t too far from supposing that throughout organizations across the world, there were individuals who smelled what the securitizing of debts was cookin’, but knew better than to circulate memos to this effect. It isn’t a huge stretch to imagine that maybe if there were a diversity of workstyles — which is to say, well-socialized people who go to work for a fashion show alongside poorly-socialized people who stockpile notebooks of graph paper — incented in corporate America, rather than the simple celebration of the uncritical, perhaps the amplitude of the markets would be dampened.
All of this is to say that even on my most Buddhist of days, I’m still likely going to be perceived as a jerk amongst those who take analysis of their work product personally. It’s not like I’m trying to personally attack the people who slap together shoddy PowerPoints; they, too, have a right to intake oxygen (just, perhaps, at a reduced paygrade ;). But if we’re going to
- Elevate the level of discourse about marketing
- Discourage a culture of conformity within the world of generally-unrepentant capitalists
- Minimize the incentive to simply nod our heads and do what our boss or policy dictates simply because it pays the mortgage
then suit-wearing punks like myself practically have a moral obligation to audibly slap their foreheads when a marketer engages in the mediocre.
I mean, if I sat here and simply accepted a continuous stream of poorly designed emails and abhorrently executed social media campaigns, wouldn’t my silence practically make me an accomplice? (Cue Zizek.)
Benevolent evil-doing on marketing’s landscape is evil-doing just the same. It’s an assault on excellence. I can’t take it. I won’t stomach it. It gives me hives.
Maybe I’m being a complete Adhole, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask to require that marketing — and marketers — do a bit of thinking. And so, this blog exists to inject the thinking back into marketing.
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Not sure if you have a moral obligation to condescend? Here’s a handy chart!
* Either in the form of lowering the bar of others (who will think that misplaced apostrophes and its ilk are okay) or not discouraging continued sup-optimal-ness on the part of the actor)?
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5 Responses to “(Situational) condescension is a moral obligation”
Brilliant, point-on post. The problem is that effectively communicating with those mortals skewed left on the Bell curve is an exercise that would make Sartre proud. A simple example will suffice. Let us posit a Marketing IQ, subject to the same statistical parameters as a Wechsler or Stanford-Binet IQ (except the latter has an SD of 16, not 15, but we’ll ignore that). Now, your average corporate animal has a Marketing IQ, by definition, of 100. In contrast, a person, who through no fault of his own, has severe brain damage, may have an MIQ of 40 (e.g., -4 SD). Now, let’s assume that you have an MIQ of 160 (+4 SD). Your chances of communicating effectively with your average corporate animal are precisely equal to that animal’s chances of communicating with the severely brain-damaged individual. 4 SD is an unbridgeable intellectual chasm; the difficulty in crossing it is akin to creating a perpetual motion machine or to reducing the US deficit to zero. There is a solution, for which, to paraphrase Fermat, this space is too limited to expound on my wonderful formulation. But, in brief, the solution is to choose to work with individuals who are no less than about 2 SDs below you, because they’ll appreciate what your saying and they’ll be capable of implementing it.
By Steven Mason on Feb 26, 2009
Despite the somewhat contrived erudition, you spelled “you’re” incorrectly. Ah, irony.
By VoR on May 18, 2009