Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog

Obama more exciting than McCainwhy this matters

2008-07-18T23:45:00.004Z

This is no surprise given the promotions that Sen. Obama has been getting in the media: ‘Obama elicits more excitement than McCain’, according to USA Today.
I want to be the voice of reason but 21 years in communications tell me that this is important. If your brand, personal or organizational, elicits excitement among its constituents, then you have a greater chance of mobilizing those people when you need them.
Even when it comes to politics, to get messages across to voters, one has to resort to the tried and trusted techniques of branding and marketing.
There are few in the present generations who will, as many bloggers do, investigate someone’s voting record or dig deeply into their histories. It would be nice to say that presidents are not elected based on how much excitement they can generate. Or that we should place greater emphasis on other qualities like honour and sincerity.
While some might point to exceptions, such as the Tory victory in the UK of 1992, I beg to differ. That campaign was hard fought by the Conservatives and depended on party unity—which was sorely lacking in 1997 when Tony Blair was elected. The National victory in New Zealand of 1990 was a result of the cry for change and the belief that Labour was leaderless.
And the cry for change is such a powerful message in politics, because politicians understand our nature: even the vaguest change is better than the strongest, best deﬁned policies if a party has been in power for too long.
Labour in the UK in 1997, National in New Zealand in 1990, Labour in New Zealand in 1999, Clinton in 1992—all these are examples of that message. And that, too, “excites”.
Sen. McCain should not pursue an excitement route himself, but he should capitalize on mistakes that the Obama campaign is making with greater regularity. The New Yorker gaffe—where Sen. Obama felt the need to comment rather than appear presidential and above satire—was an opportunity missed. Meanwhile, I wonder if people appreciate the maverick, go-it-alone style of John McCain, which plays well in the Senate, but could be symptomatic of future Cabinet divisiveness under his administration.
A winner is by no means clear, and a week remains a long time in politics. Months, as Sen. Clinton will attest as she went from dead cert to second-best, are an eternity.

Newspaper tries to drag down Miss New Zealand using racist agenda—and fails

2008-07-12T11:17:00.004Z

It’s quite easy to work out the agenda of the mainstream media when it comes to an article like this, trying to harm Samantha Powell’s chances at Miss Universe tomorrow night.
• Personal aggrandizement of the journalist, or, if not the journalist, then the newspaper editors or management trying to look like they can set agenda. (The part about Val Lott hanging up the phone, I understand, is total ﬁction—so if something so minor is untrue, can we trust the rest?)
• Trying to cause a split between pākehā and Māori when in fact there is none. Fact: the photograph of Samantha Powell doing the pukana was actually published in mid-June—and even ran in a rival newspaper here! There were no complaints from anyone, Māori or any other group, until the Herald made it a race issue yesterday. Or the Herald is trying to play catch-up because it missed the photos a month ago and was desperate for a fresh angle.
• Racism: come on, the headline is clearly poking fun at Māori and the pukana. I don’t appreciate the newspaper doing that, and I would say my Māori friends would be more upset at that than the Herald’s false defence of the haka. Like a newspaper owned by Australians (it’s listed on their exchange) and the Irish really understands Māoridom.
• Implying that two beauty queens are at odds with one another. False. Samantha Powell is in communicado for the most part in Nha Trong, Vietnam, and I severely doubt Miss World New Zealand, Kahurangi Taylor, would risk criticizing another pageant for fear of damaging her own chances when she goes to Miss World.
• Tall-poppy syndrome. (The newspaper failed there: the judges decided their top 15 last week.)
• Lack of patriotism: you would never drag the All Blacks down a peg the day before a big international. And places like Venezuela treat Miss Universe with greater fervour than we treat a rugby match. Pity: their business pages are good, so it’s a shame some of these others are dragging them down.
My views about the appropriateness of Samantha Powell’s haka are at the Lucire blog. I agree that Māori culture should be defended. But you couldn’t really call what Sam perfromed a haka. She just did a few moves. It would be like a Caucasian donning a lion mask and moving two metres and calling that a Chinese New Year’s lion dance.
As I said in Lucire: ‘I know of no Māori who, while rightly guarding against improper use of their culture, would deny a chance for it to be promoted or be rendered so “untouchable” to those who came later to Aotearoa. In fact, one kaumatua I spoke to says it is our duty, regardless of our ethnic origins, to be promoting Māori culture when we are abroad.
‘Sometimes, because we have not been immersed in the culture, we err. It is to be expected. And, when the one who errs is not of our own race, we forgive and we educate, but we do not criticize.
‘All New Zealanders should be proud to propagate Māori culture as the alternative would be to ignore it and pretend we are mere facsimile of Great Britain, as many Kiwis did 50 years ago.’
I’d hate to see us head back to those monocultural times—though it looks like the Herald wants that to happen by running a story like this.
Since the newspaper has been shifting a lot of its work to Australia, I imagine an Anglicized monoculture makes it easier to take more editing work away from Kiwis.
Marginalizing Māori makes it easier for newspapers to have less staff trained in the culture and outsource, buying in overseas stories that are sometimes cheaper to acquire.
Any time you see a story about over-sensitive Māori getting upset about the way the culture has been portrayed, think again about the agenda.
All the Māori I know put mana ﬁrst and would probably see this as an opportunity to reach out and educate in order to promote their culture.
A big fail for the Herald. Sam’s still going to wow the world tomorrow night.

In memory of Colin Morley

2008-07-07T22:30:00.004Z

July 7 marks the anniversary of the passing of our friend Colin Morley, who was killed in the 7-7 terrorist bombings in London three years ago. Since then we’ve tried to keep Colin’s memory alive by giving an award named for him at the Medinge Group, for the best branded non-proﬁt organization. My wishes go out to Ros and their children: Colin remains a great inﬂuence with his kindness, generosity and expertise.

ANZ Bank: revelations from the executive level

2008-07-05T11:44:00.006Z

If you follow my ramblings, even when they don’t make sense, you know I had my knives out for the ANZ National Bank here in New Zealand for what I think is questionable practice. So it was interesting to meet a few people tonight who are employees of the bank, one of whom was very staunch about defending her workplace against my charges about, well, bank charges.
Humble pie time ﬁrst: Sir John Anderson left the bank as a director 18 months ago, so the criticisms I put at him were unfair. I apologize to Sir John.
Tonight, I don’t know whether I should be applauding the ANZ for brainwashing its younger staff so effectively or whether I should be congratulating myself for closing the overwhelming majority of accounts held there, given that there are people who do not give a damn about the customer.
While people should defend their positions, they should also be open to hearing others’ viewpoints. Respectfully. The customer is right. Not so, it seems, at the ANZ.
‘The bank must make a proﬁt, so it should make it from the mass customer base,’ I was told. ‘How would you do it?’
I answered, ‘Through investing, as you did years ago before charging us.’
She argued the usual points of the bank providing a service, before I confronted her with some basic logic that I have stated here before.
A deposit to the bank is, after all, my loan to the bank. When the bank loans to me, can I charge it a “Jack privilege fee”?
Around this point I was asked if we could change the subject.
There are several conclusions we can draw. First, an executive at the ANZ bank, a fairly high-up one, is not open to hearing from her customers. She has her own world, where she has been conveniently conned into thinking the monetarist solution is the only one, when history tell us it isn’t—and that the bank’s cutting of costs over the last 20 years should actually make it more efﬁcient.
Another member of the staff, a little older but I understand a little more junior, put forward her theory which made a bit more sense, about how mortgages no longer funded the bank’s costs as effectively. She did not know for sure.
But this shows just how bad the ANZ brand is. Different answers from different people—but the higher up you go, the less they care.
Front-line staff, as I discussed earlier, cannot offer a credible explanation about bank fees that any customer who has been there for 20 or more years can fathom. Fact: people do have memories.
And it seems that it is accepted as gospel that customers are to be taken from even at a higher level, no questions asked.
How well ANZ has managed to blind its staff.
A good brand is one that listens to consumers about their concerns—and actually levels with internal and external audiences about its policies.
This experience conﬁrms that the ANZ cannot level to either executives or front-line branch personnel, which means consumers are too far down the food chain for it to reach.
This Australian-owned bank has been proﬁting very well from everyday New Zealanders over the last few years, too.
But I cannot see that continue.
Any brand expert will tell you that for all the ﬁnancial analyses that a client shrouds itself in, the minute the brand falters, the effects on the bottom line will be felt.
One of the symptoms is what I describe above: one based around the hope that people simply do not remember how they behaved before they began cutting their services and putting up charges.
It is a failure to be transparent and to tell the truth to those consumers—and it only takes one who is aged over 30 to be able to remember the good ol’ days versus what I consider to be the unethical treatment that is metered out today.
Just as I said a few months ago, the TSB Bank seems to be the only choice New Zealanders have, and at least the proﬁts don’t make their way over to Sydney.
It was my ‘prerogative’, said the executive, for me to do as I wished with my money, if I had gone to the TSB.
No attempt to get it back—no promises to look into things. Even others have offered that to keep me on as a customer. Higher up, I guess, no one really cares. A lost customer isn’t important.
Even if the lost customer is a stubborn bastard with a big mouth.
Meanwhile, TSB is getting clients left, right and centre among people I know—on a limited budget a fraction of ANZ’s, and only one branch here in Wellington.
If the ANZ wishes, I am happy to run a seminar for them to inform them of the niceties of listening to their customers. Unsurprisingly, I understand tonight that its proﬁts are heading south this year.
This problem won’t be ﬁxed with advertising, rebranding or PR.
It might be ﬁxed by giving customers what they want and pursuing something other than short-term proﬁt—but the latter is exactly the message the ANZ has been sending me year after year.
Because if banks aren’t looking at the long term, then what heck are we entrusting a penny to them?

Why it still can be the American century

2008-07-03T11:05:00.002Z

In the spirit of July 4, I thought it would be interesting to explore the idea of the United States retaining its inﬂuence in the 21st century.
What many see is dire. Beyond the anti-war types’ opposition to the War on Terror, there are corrupt institutions, political and corporate, impeding progress on so many things, from innovations to ways society can function more progressively. The same institutions have led to a ﬁnancial crisis. Economic management has led to a weak dollar, to the point where some reject it for the euro.
So with the rise of India, and less so of Red China, where is the United States in all of this? How can I be so bold as to say it will remain the American century?
Because of Americans. Individuals. Those who have access to their own speaking platforms, highlighting what they see is wrong with their country, and having a nation that protects their free speech as sacrosanct.
The country that has championed individuality may well be saved, karmically, by individuals themselves.
No anti-American I know stands ﬁrmly in his or her country and disses individual Americans. They spit their venom at the government or their corporations. The Iranian blogs that I visited, to see where their root cause of anti-Americanism lay, targeted abuse through globalization. Maybe they have a point, because Americans themselves are not too happy about outsourcing. On one point their opinions do not differ much.
And because many Americans have the skills to put their words across, in what remains the internet’s lingua franca—English—and because they can identify the sources of their problems, they can address them.
What we, in the rest of the world should be doing, is engaging this dialogue. Putting forth our point of view.
It’s frightfully easy for people to either have a case of nation envy or tall poppies, dragging down the richest country on earth and pointing out its problems for a short-term feeling of superiority. This is childish at best. While I do not deny the US has its faults—and Americans themselves would be the ﬁrst to admit that—we should give each other perspective.
I talk about our healthcare system: not the best in the world, but I would rather be sick here than in the US, because of universal coverage. And if we chat to our friends in the US about this, it will give them ideas on how they might accomplish it—or avoid it, if they see faults in our model. The idea of the internet is a beautiful one, even if spammers and pornographers threaten its sanctity: the ability to have a small world where we can have one-on-one discourses, and better ourselves.
That free speech has to be defended at all costs, because even if the United States restricts the movement of people and the movement of capital, it needs to at least allow the movement of ideas.
It is something to be guarded jealously and taught in its schools.
It is, meanwhile, denied to many in Red China, unable to grow through dialogue. Instead its economy grows from the inﬂux of capital, going in on growth ﬁgures that have been veriﬁed by none except a communist dictatorship, or from the misappropriation of intellectual property. Red China understands the latter cannot continue and has put up some restrictions—but until the opportunities for growth are open to all, then it will not have the support of its citizenry in the way the United States does. Red China can only become a great nation if all of China rethinks the republic, perhaps a commonwealth, but certainly one based around the principles of Confucius and Sun Yat-sen. It can happen as suddenly as the collapse of the Soviet Union, or it may take many more years than we imagine.
Till then, the nation that may yet beneﬁt is one that has great dialogue with the United States, and embraces it, seeing it as a blending of cultures and an opportunity for growth.
That nation is India and while its opportunities have not ﬂowed through to everyone, and it, too, has its internal problems, it is poised to rise through the freedom of people, capital and ideas. The Indian century may follow the American century, but it may take a familiar form. Not far from now, if current trends continue, the Indian middle class will grow. It will form the basis of a strong national infrastructure. And the Indian century, too, will be based around freedom and liberty.
However, in the immediate term, provided the United States can unite itself around its real values, those principles that, in reality, are not uniquely American after all, I see no reason for the American century not to continue.
It is fortunate to have a holiday like the Fourth of July, a chance to remind everyone that freedom and justice are not buzzwords. That these principles really do mean something to the rest of the world—and that they need to be honoured. And that the power rests with everyone, because everyone has a voice.

Living up to its promise

2008-07-01T05:30:00.002Z

A review for Dan Herman’s Outsmart the MBA Clones: the Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing and Branding has been due on this blog for months. It’s taken me a while to get through it, not because there’s a single thing wrong with the writing, but because of my own time, my own ease at which I can be persuaded to buy more books from Amazon, and because of typography.
I am very sensitive to the composition in any book, probably because of my type design background, and it’s really the only thing that lets Dan down. It’s likely my copy was an advance review one and this is all a mystery to those who have bought Dan’s book since, but what I see looks like a digitally printed Sabon. Offset does make a difference, and there are some of us who can still tell.
It’s such a tiny criticism and one of the very, very few I can make. For a start, Dan begins with the idea that an MBA isn’t that great. Those that have them do tend to, unless they have or can forge a more solid background in business, engage in groupthink. The business schools don’t distinguish themselves from each other too well, so why should their teaching enable graduates to stand out?
He’s not wrong. In my own academic history, I purposely pursued a Master of Commerce and Administration rather than the MBA because I was told by my professor, Peter Thirkell, that the MCA was more academically rigorous. He was right.
I am willing to bet that any B.Com. graduate who wound up doing the ﬁrst parts of the MBA found it a walk in the park, and while the study does get more complex beyond that, it’s not really that huge an advance on what I found in my honours’ year in B-school.
One major reason you might not see Dan’s book reviewed in university publications is pretty obvious in light of the above.
But he doesn’t rubbish the universities. He proposes an alternative model and goes on to say one thing that I always have in my brand consulting work: differentiation is the number-one rule in branding.
As with most strategies, Dan spends a lot of time dealing with ﬁnding opportunities rather than executing them—but he is right to do this. This is the problem I face when doing seminars and people say I don’t give enough execution. Folks, sorry, but I don’t know what your company is like. All I can do is give you pointers on what to spot. And in this context, Dan has done things marvellously well—and in that respect I think his methodology does indeed outsmart the MBA clones.
In between there’s a slice of consumer behaviour.
It’s one of the few books I can recommend this year on branding, for companies thinking, ‘How can I differentiate my brand for greater success?’ Accidental Branding, which I am reading now, could be another—more when I ﬁnish that.

Why? may be a futile question in Ruslana Korshunova suicide

2008-07-01T05:04:00.002Z

[Cross-posted] As some of you may have expected, the media are analysing why Kazakh model Ruslana Korshunova committed suicide. Part of it is because the analysis keeps the story alive. Another part is because people are fascinated by this fashion world, and why shouldn’t a newspaper, normally covering dull stories, have an excuse to put the late Miss Korshunova’s face in its pages? (New York even thinks New York might have killed her. Other media are, as I predicted, attempting exposés on the cruelty of the modelling world, such as The Scotsman.)
I suppose I am doing the same thing, by critiquing the fourth estate and having an excuse to publish her name again. But perhaps we will refrain from posting an image of her in this post: this little opinion is not about beautifying a page to get some extra eyeballs.
I don’t know anyone who had unsuccessfully attempted suicide well. I met one woman who had survived slitting her wrists, but it was a verboten topic so I never raised it. I do know a friend who succeeded in his attempt in my university days.
No one, not even his closest friend, David, knew that Andrew was depressed or confused before he took his life with a shotgun in the early 1990s.
It unleashed a whole bunch of emotions with us, his friends, from sadness to downright anger. And knowing Andrew, the ever-alert cynic that he was, he might have had a chuckle at us, if there is an afterlife. (Then again, he didn’t think there was.)
But his decision remains a mystery after nearly 17 years.
And that is probably the folly of trying to rationalize why Ruslana Korshunova leapt to her death out of a ninth-storey window in New York’s Financial District last Saturday.
Anyone who rationalizes the action of suicide probably wouldn’t be committing suicide—because rationality says there are ways out, there are family members left behind who are hurting, and that there is always some hope. There are exceptions: it is possible that a very rational person sees no exit to their situation.
Suicide is, from my layman’s point-of-view (one which I am prepared to be corrected on), something usually irrational, and trying to judge Miss Korshunova’s last few months on earth through her blog postings won’t tell us too much.
The Daily Mail tabloid in the UK speculates that there were relationship woes for her, while friends report that they saw nothing that would cause her to take her own life.
Yet the rational part of me tells me that even at age 20, no relationship wound is deep enough for suicide. Heartache, yes. Even emotional turmoil for a period.
Why Ruslana Korshunova leapt out of her window on Saturday will probably be a mystery to all of us, not least her family who had to identify her body this week.
Perhaps we should stop speculating. ‘Why?’ is a very powerful question in newsmedia and we are always desperate for answers, but in some cases, such as suicide, it may be futile to seek them out. We should let the Korshunova family grieve privately.

Thank-yous to Cat and Karin

2008-06-28T13:14:00.003Z

My friend and colleague Cat Morley blogged that Maomao Publications will be publishing a book called Blogs: Mad about Design. Designers Who Blog, Cat’s blog, has made it into the book, to be published in Spanish and English, and it looks like she has very generously chosen yours truly as one of the featured banners. Thanks, Cat!
Meanwhile, I was interviewed by Dr Karin Sawetz of the very comprehensive Fashionofﬁce.org, with a single question, one that she sprang also on Felizitas Auersperg of Piratin and Paola Suhonen of IvanaHelsinki: ‘What movie has to be seen for its great costumes?’
There are many, such as Hotel with Rod Taylor, but the one that I always marvel at is Stanley Donen’s Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. Surf over to Karin’s site for my answer.

Its ofﬁcial: you cant get Botoxed any more

2008-06-27T06:55:00.003Z

[Cross-posted] Just as Google—the company that parodies its own logo—sent out notices to the media in 2006 on how to use its name, and suffered a small backlash from some quarters, Allergan is trying to protect its Botox trade mark by doing something similar.
We received a letter from Allergan’s legal associate for the Asia–Paciﬁc, Nicole Wilson, today, informing us that Botox is a trade mark of her employer and that it should not be used generically to describe other botulinum toxins. This makes some sense because I am not even sure if people know Botox should refer to only the Allergan product.
The DLE brochure included with her letter details how Aspirin, Thermos and yo-yo became generic terms and includes a how-to guide for using the Botox trade mark.
Generally, at Lucire we will signal a proper trade mark with capitalization. Hence, we write Formica and, as you see above, Aspirin and Thermos, though yo-yo has crossed the line into everyday English for us. Search around the site or in our print magazines and I am sure you will see Latex.
We will write Google as well, and to my knowledge, we have always written Botox with a capital.
We are asked in the letter to put the registered trade mark symbol next to Botox, which I cannot see happening because of our own house style. Basically: if we don’t do it for ourselves, why should we do it for anyone else? It’s simply not part of regular text composition. It would only, therefore, appear in advertorial if it were something we were setting.
And if we applied the suggested standard in a fashion magazine, we would have to see the symbol at least a dozen times per page when it comes to those pages showcasing products.
Meanwhile, the brochure gives some interesting examples that I wonder if it will be easy to enforce them in a busy sub-editing or editing situation:

Incorrect usages
She is receiving Botox.
Botox the patient. (The use of Botox as a verb.)
Botox’s proprietary information … (The use of Botox in the possessive.)

We patrol the usage of our logo and name, too, telling people about the case it’s meant to be set in, so I can see where Allergan is coming from, but these are going to be tricky.
The key to publishing is ﬁnding that afﬁnity with readers and writing in an accessible tone.
In the ﬁrst example, we are meant to say, according to Allergan, ‘She is receiving Botox injections’ or ‘Botox therapy.’ Now we’re aware, we’ll keep an eye out but this is one that I think will slip through every now and then because of common usage.
The second one will hardly occur in written text, but I have to admit to Googling things—Google says I should say, ‘search with Google’. I think any change to the Googling example has come a bit too late—but we would never talk about Googling in reference to searching in Yahoo! or Windows Live. But I can go along with this: Botox is not a verb, and it was never conceived to be a verb. Allergan has caught this in time, I believe.
The third one is rather unreasonable, however. To say a word cannot be formed into a possessive goes a little too far. For the second example, since the trade mark was never conceived as a verb, Allergan is right to clamp down. At a stretch, the ﬁrst one is tolerable and even understandable. But to limit the usage of everyday English rules—that this one noun is so special that it cannot be turned into a possessive? (It also asks that it not be turned into a plural, i.e. no Botoxes.)
We do not, for example, play the game where, if a company insists that its trade mark be all uppercase, that we follow. There is a house style here, and we would open the ﬂoodgates if everyone insisted on their own. Even advertisers don’t get greater accommodation: last year, we wrote Audi Allroad Quattro (Audi thinks the model’s name is all lowercase).
However, what we can deﬁnitely promise Allergan is that we would never refer to a rival product or anything in the botulinum toxin category that it does not make as Botox—which is the same standard we apply to Lycra, Lurex and similar names that have either fallen, or are in danger of falling, into generic usage. But the third request is plain weird—and, as far as I know, this is the only time someone has said that their trade mark cannot be turned into a possessive.
We’ll help Allergan, but within reason.

What recession?

2008-06-21T05:04:00.002Z

I was chatting to a company head serving a high-income, premium niche. And he’s felt no recession. He’s wondering if he should.
For his company, sales are up and he’s even been able to focus on the higher-priced items at the expense of the lower ones.
The general wisdom is: the rich niches do weather things well, but the premium sector feels recessions ﬁrst and the effect trickles down. There are exceptions, of course.
My own experience when at the bottom of the scale in the 1980s was similar: I didn’t really feel the pinch of the post-1987 closings till 1991 or thereabouts.
As my company moved up the pecking order, we did indeed sense economic downturns sooner rather than later.
But the company I began writing about—there aren’t that many in the sector and I have no desire to reveal any conﬁdential information—is not exactly selling a necessity. If there was an economic downturn, it would have sensed it ﬁrst, not just because it serves a premium niche.
Another company in fashion design says its experience shows that a predicted global recession is less relevant to New Zealand as it knows of high net worth individuals leaving their US and European bases for our shores and bringing their wealth with them.
These could be exceptions rather than the rule as perception is reality when it comes to consumer conﬁdence, and New Zealand is too closely tied to the global technocracy, thanks to the path set by the Labour Government of 1984–90.
But the perception might well be based less on fact than fearmongering.
April and May 2008 showed increases in consumer spending here, which one of my clients says is due to New Zealanders ‘just getting on with it.’ They, he believes, remember the earlier recessions and one cannot just cease marketing or operating. The trick is to be more careful about it.
However, talk of a recession could be a way for technocratic business interests to oust a government that has grown a little too institutionalized to be effective.
They are quite happy to return to power a conservative opposition, not because policies will change drastically (after all, National voted for a lot of the same, unpopular things that Labour proposed), but because it has fewer ready connections in the establishment having been out in the wilderness for nine years.
That means the technocrats believe they will be more the focus of National’s efforts in its ﬁrst term than the interests that Labour had picked up in its nine years.
It’s also why the mainstream media (MSM) fail to expose just how closely National has voted with Labour on many bills in Parliament, particularly during John Key’s stint as Leader of the Opposition.
I would be stupid to ignore the basic fact that high fuel prices are making people’s lives difﬁcult and this is having an effect on many things in commerce. However, ‘getting on with it’ might not be a bad mantra to have, because it will be up to citizens, not governments, to keep the economy moving.
A National victory is not a panacea, especially as it will fail to make any real dent in the price of crude and the declining value of the US dollar. The fact that it may be elected in at the same time there is a change in the US White House might make it appear effective, but it will only be a conjurer’s short-term trick.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is up to us.

When institutionalization is troublesome

2008-06-15T11:08:00.003Z

One theme that has been emerging—or I am reading way too much into it—is institutionalization. In the casual posts I put on to my personal blog over at Vox, the theme has come up a couple of times: once in a post about oil consumption dropping (really), and once in the Yale Class of 2008 speech from the Rt Hon Tony Blair.
Uncharacteristically, the oil post was a little more serious and I had been thinking about reposting it here for a few days.
Some of us look at large organizations such as the UN and see not an effective group of people, but an impotent gathering bogged down in internal politics. Political parties themselves, once they are too big, seem to exhibit the same behaviour—watch as the New Zealand Greens are beginning to duke it out internally now. The institutionalization that is apparent in the media also gives rise to reporting sloppiness as journalists target sensationalism ahead of truth.
Masters’ and doctorate candidates might be interested in studying how to keep an organization dynamic and entrepreneurial in the face of growth—and how brands might adapt themselves to such a world.
The oil consumption post has a very interesting graph:

I wrote:

So if oil consumption is going down, and the law of supply and demand holds, why are prices at an all-time high? The Historian gives some decent horse sense on this—and it should remind us that the oil companies have a vested interest (and the MSM are too dumb) to keep the panic going.
According to this graph, which I haven’t looked further into: global demand on oil is decreasing. The US dollar is weak, so prices are high relative to that dollar—but high oil prices should have less of an effect on other countries who are converting their own currencies to US dollars to purchase crude. Let’s also not forget that OPEC is a cartel that sets its own prices, and the oil companies are setting their own prices, too, raking in multi-billion-dollar proﬁts per annum.
He also points out there is speculation—which means the bubble will burst at some stage.

It was really a comment that inspired this post: ‘The reason can also be from the institutional investors taking over the commodity futures market over the last 2–3 years.’
We have institutions to blame for this, just as we might point to other institutions that are keeping the human race from progressing in other spheres. They are geared to proﬁt, not social responsibility—and that money can only be squeezed, at least in the western world, from private citizens.
It’s why there is some wisdom out there that points to small groups being more effective given so many inhumane organizations, and we return then to the theme that the internet is a great equalizer and leveller in allowing those groups to emerge.
I would like to partly counter that by saying that large institutions can be run effectively if the core, the vision and the strategy are properly directed, either to service the public or some great cause.
Corruption and a lack of education are the enemies of these institutions, just as they are the enemies of a successful nation.
Richard Branson’s Virgin empire is an effective example of a good brand, because of its underdog position. This approach sees its staff adopt a ‘We try harder’ approach that one might associate with Avis. And it should be noted that it once worked for Avis, too.
Success breeds growth, which may explain why in some organizations, the rot sets in after a while. Virgin has been fortunate in some respects. But it has also been very skilful at choosing people with the right mindset. Others have been less fortunate, and we see the decay come in—and allegations of corruption made, such as against the UN.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was the received wisdom (of the postwar technocrats) that governmental organizations were decaying and a new approach was needed. A generation on, with the rich–poor gap rather more sizeable than it was in 1980, it is apparent that that wisdom was either wrong or the rot has set in to the privatized organizations.
The New Zealand Government’s decision to renationalize the railway is, in such a context, not a bad idea in terms of inspiring new organizational behaviours. The danger is that the same party had been telling its citizens that the technocratic, monetarist approach is superior to the Keynesian since 1984. It almost seems to have picked up the railway because it was proved to be an unwanted asset of the technocrats, cast aside for the taxpayer to pick up the tab.
What the railway needs for success is a rebrand in a huge way: New Zealand needs to inspire its population with the idea of excellence in public service, as one might ﬁnd in Singapore or at Absolut Vodka. It will be quite hard to overturn the 24 years of indoctrination. But it is not impossible to reinstil those behaviours, ones that actually existed in New Zealand in the middle of the 20th century. (On a related note, the appeal of such a drastic change is also why Sen. Obama’s campaign has been successful, because people instinctively realize there is something rotten with the institutions of the status quo.)
It’s also institutionalization that is preventing the truth about oil prices to get out to the public. Last month I discussed alternative fuels and the Muldoon administration—and while my friend Jim Donovan put up very valid arguments against them, the fact remains that the media neglected to talk about the topic. Similarly, the domestic media has missed the above and some very simple facts.
Just last week I was listening to the radio—one of the foreign-owned stations that seem to populate the FM airwaves (probably Coast)—and the DJ gave one of the less intelligent commentaries about oil prices I had heard.
Petrol prices in New Zealand rise and fall based on American news—something that is not that relevant when it comes to how much we pay for oil. When there is a rise in the US dollar oil price, but the New Zealand dollar has strengthened over the same period, then that rise should not be felt at the pump as greatly.
Let’s assume oil prices are at US$120 a barrel and there is no inﬂation between 2000 and 2008. (Of course, it was less than $120 in 2000 and more than $120 now.)
In 2000, with the New Zealand dollar at an all-time low against the greenback, we would have had to fork out NZ$300 to get that barrel.
In 2008, with the New Zealand dollar having gone back to around 1982 levels against the greenback, the equivalent is NZ$154.
So for a New Zealand company buying oil, it actually costs less.
However, I am ashamed to note that once you factor in the real prices, we are looking at these ﬁgures:

2000 price of crude, US$27·39 (real, not adjusted), equalling NZ$68·48
2008 price of crude, US$134, equalling NZ$171·79

Pump prices—and I know I am ignoring reﬁning costs and a whole bunch of other stuff—are:

2000: NZ$0·97 per litre
2008: NZ$2·14 per litre

This actually means the rate of increase New Zealanders are experiencing is not as bad as the oil prices offshore based on New Zealand dollars, even if our prices are rising more quickly than Europe’s.
Whatever the case, I think it’s worth informing the public—especially on whom we might be able to blame these price rises. And that demand and supply have nothing to do with these high prices, because demand is actually dropping—so we can stop blaming the Americans for their big SUVs and the Red Chinese for buying new cars.
The targets are most likely the speculators, institutional investors, price ﬁxers, the corporations and the cartels.
And it seems to lend some weight to isolating a small country from these threats, globalizing where it makes sense—and in other areas, developing a better model in isolation to show the world how things might be done.
Finally, may I quote Mr Blair: ‘The world in which you, in time to come, will take the reins, cannot afford a return to twentieth-century struggles for hegemony.’
And hegemony is the worst form of institutionalization. It emerges because we, as humans, haven’t discovered how to get on, preferring to be superior to someone than allowing both parties to be equally happy. Earlier in the same speech, Mr Blair said:

A few days before that, I was in Jericho. If you look up from the town centre, to the left is the Mount of Temptation, where Jesus stayed 40 days and nights. To the right, you can see Mount Nebo where Moses looked down on the Promised Land. And right in front of you is the Valley of Jordan.
My guide, a Muslim, turned to me, and said, ‘Moses, Jesus, Muhammad—why in God’s name did they all have to come here?’
But in God’s name, they came, and for centuries, their followers have waged war in the name of prophets whose life work was in pursuit of peace.

The core message—the vision—was corrupted by followers, in that quest for power, borne from ill education and small minds.
Hence so many organizations fail after their founders pass away—the great mind is gone, along with the direction, and the scavengers swarm.
And why, as individuals, we ultimately hold the power to group with like-minded citizens, forming small groups to do the things that need to be done for justice in this world.

Another What the ? from Microsoft Word

2008-06-10T01:26:00.003Z

Many people know I believe Microsoft Word to have been concocted by skinheads, the writers of the Michael Fish hurricane gag and William Shatner’s toupée.
I am one of the last remaining people using WordPerfect because on WordPerfect, I can set the typeface and point size (i.e. font) and margins, and type away. Miracle of miracles: the text stays in that font and with those margins until I tell it otherwise! I know, it’s radical.
Every time I use Word the margins can change, the font can change, even the entire formatting (I will be doing a bulleted list, for example, and it decides for me that I no longer am doing one) will change.
Sometimes I want to enter my own paragraph indents but Word adds them for me, which I can see would be helpful to some—but not when that text gets imported into InDesign or some other program. It totally warps the layout. And if it adds indents, why doesn’t it add one to the paragraph before? No: it leaves that one with the manually inserted indent so you can’t do a global search-and-replace.
Of course, since people send me Word ﬁles I have no choice but to do the odd piece of work on the Microsoft program.
MS Word trainers look at me like I am a completely helpless incompetent and swear black and blue this never happens to them, but I think this is part of the skinhead–Fish–Shatner conspiracy.
I can show any of these experts that this crap happens to me every time I use the program. Set typeface. Set point size. Set margins. Type. Word decides after one or two paragraphs that it does not approve of my style and that Times New Roman 12 pt with one-inch margins is superior.
There is no freaking way on God’s great earth that Microsoft Word is the most efﬁcient way to word-process (we used to say compose or type).
And answer me this, Word-trainers, what heck is going on here?

Here I am, responding to some interview questions. Each time I type magazine (I did it a few times to be sure), the I is capitalized! (They’re the two redlined words. No s***, I know it’s wrong. But I typed it correctly.)
And no, I did not feed in an automatic replace setting. There is nothing in there (that I can see) that would suggest that the word magazine should be replaced by magazIne. Yes, Word buffs, I have gone in to the Autocorrect menus.
I am going to import this text into WordPerfect, answering it, then exporting it back into Word format.
I guess no one has ever had to type the word magazine in Word in the history of word processing for this not to be picked up.
For all those pedants (like me) complaining about young people and all their weird capitalization, trying to make things look “trendy”, don’t blame them. It’s the software doing it.

A big Vista bon voyage

2008-06-04T11:31:00.003Z

Bon voyage to Natalie, heading on vacation to Melbourne in the morning. Safe travels—and don’t lose your luggage! (Not that she is likely to, but I keep an eye on this astrology malarkey.)

Dissecting an Obama victory

2008-06-04T10:53:00.003Z

It’s been interesting watching the MSM dissect the Clinton campaign with a whole range of experts saying why she will not be the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency. I would venture to say these are the same experts predicting a Hillary Clinton win a year ago.
It’s that which I have found remarkable today as Sen. Barack Obama becomes the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, rather than the very strong likelihood that Sen. Obama has won.
For months, the mainstream media have been promoting Sen. Obama heavily. One reason is that he is newsworthy to the left. More often than not, his race is used as the reason behind that promotion. In essence, most New Zealanders, and I would say most non-Americans who watched the news from the US, were left in little doubt that he would take the Democratic Party contest.
Image sells in American politics, and probably politics in many western countries. George W. Bush got people used to thinking about a Republican president in 2000 by forming his cabinet while lawyers battled Florida. When he did win, only diehard Democrats tried to tell the American people they had been hoodwinked. Everyone else awaited the January 20, 2001 swearing-in. Go back a few years and Tony Blair, too, gave an inevitable image of a Labour victory in 1997.
This time, Sen. Obama has done the same, and it has been a well thought-out campaign: his book, writing from a humanist perspective and admitting any faults that his rivals were likely to dig up; a consistent branding scheme (the use of the Gotham typeface, for example); and vagueness (to give his opponents less of a target).
On some of these aspects, Sen. Obama has ﬁelded a very different campaign. Only vagueness seems to be the common thread with other winners. A pre-campaign book was clever as well as admitting to things no other potential presidential nominee would, such as his having tried cocaine.
In fact, when he began getting speciﬁc after a challenge by Sen. Clinton, he actually lost traction.
I do not pretend to like all of Sen. Obama’s policies if I were to look at his voting record in the Senate, any more than I ﬁnd myself in accord with Sens. Clinton and McCain.
As a minority, I am glad that a racial barrier has been broken in American politics. Even though Sen. Obama is biracial, he has been branded an African–American through his father’s homeland, showing just how people are habitual pigeonholers. If by the quirk of genetics he had his mother’s skin colour, would his race have become such an issue?
That one matter shows how far his campaign has come, in a country that would not have fathomed a “black” president other than in ﬁction, in the form of Morgan Freeman or Dennis Haysbert.
We can accept God being played by Morgan Freeman, but a black president?
While having huge African–American support, I totally understand the campaign Sen. Obama ran in terms of race: he plain didn’t mention it.
I wouldn’t.
Any member of any minority in the world, whether that minority is black, yellow, brown or white, who has been brought up on the idea of hard work and dignity, would not make race an issue—with perhaps the exception of others making race an issue for him or her.
I think that earned Sen. Obama brownie points among many of the United States’ immigrants and people descended relatively recently from immigrants.
It ﬁnally proves so many of those lessons from our parents right: that if you work hard, you can become a leader.
Once upon a time, parents said that but knew that it would take a miracle for a minority to get there, whether we are talking about the US or New Zealand.
Barack Obama is proof not only of his own abilities, but he represents the hope that the presidency is no longer governed by skin colour, but by sheer hard work. That speaks to a large part of the electorate, including Caucasian–Americans.
In some ways this has allowed his policies to be overlooked, which is actually unhealthy for democracy. Americans need to be voting on who can bring them true honour and meaning. But just as Sen. Obama began attacking Sen. John McCain’s policies as he presumed himself the Democratic nominee, it will be up to Sen. McCain to reveal his opponent’s policy shortcomings.
However, it was not always in the bag.
Those same MSM experts seem to forget that Sen. Clinton, using a campaign that broke the rules on branding (a confused message and confused visual communications) got so close to Sen. Obama that it actually was a miracle she survived and gained as many votes as she did. Writing in a country that has had two successive female prime ministers and, at one point, women in the Governor-General’s and Chief Justice’s role as well, the gender difference means far less to me. What I saw was a clumsy campaign that had more traction than logic would allow me to admit.
Sen. Clinton’s progress was nothing short of amazing considering she did not play from the rulebook, and we brand consultants will have to at least acknowledge her case and say: anomalies exist in marketing strategy.
The question is now whether there is a Clinton vice-presidency, but Obama aides are dead set against it. Equally, Clinton aides would not want their senator cosying up with Sen. Obama.
If the Clinton image of “will say and do anything for the top job” is accurate, and as Sen. Clinton herself mentioned the possibility of assassination, I would not consider the senator from New York to be a vice-presidential nominee if I were Barack Obama. I might get “Arkancided” in the hope of her succession.
But right now, Sen. Obama has a Democratic Party to reunite and invigorate, something that Sen. McCain may have difﬁculty doing for an uninspired GOP. Sen. Obama has media visibility on his side, reaching internal as well as external audiences.

Why Yves Saint Laurent’s passing is so felt in fashion

2008-06-02T11:59:00.003Z

[Cross-posted] Yves Saint Laurent’s passing is such a shock to the fashion media because he was the world’s greatest couturier.
When we broke the news on Sunday night at Lucire, it was obvious that we were marking the end of an era.
The casual observer might say that the end occurred in 2002, when Saint Laurent retired to his house in Marrakech. But while he remained alive, there was always that link to one of fashion’s pure geniuses.
Saint Laurent, perhaps like Mozart, did not have formal training when he created clothes for his sister and mother. He was talented enough to be accepted into the Chambre Syndicale. When he created the trapèze look at Dior in 1958, he was not following some great marketing-trend projection. Nor were brand advisers present with studies about liberating women when he gave the world le smoking or the safari look.
It was only with hindsight that we, the media, made the connections for him, hiding the real inspirations that he had in his quest to become France’s greatest couturier.
The great irony is that as his inﬂuence grew, so did the YSL brand, which meant his name became so tied up with marketing, business, ﬁnancial projections and trend forecasts.
While that brought Saint Laurent wealth, it was always clear that he was happiest simply being a créateur. It was a sign that it was better to preside over a genuine maison de l’amour than seeing if money bought happiness.
His passing perhaps marks the demise of a pure couturier who drew from something within, ﬁnding the essence not only of his muses, such as Catherine Deneuve, but of himself.
Today’s couturiers, while incredibly talented, are also more calculated and savvy. Saint Laurent could leave the calculations and savvy to his lover and company president, Pierre Bergé.
I am not saying one method is better than the other. But I do miss that era where we praised Saint Laurent because he was simply so good at what he did, setting the Zeitgeist for the simple reason that he did not watch the Zeitgeist.
Today’s designers, such as Gaultier and Ford, and even to an extent Saint Laurent’s contemporary, Lagerfeld, have a more balanced outlook, which obviously have kept them away from the down sides of Saint Laurent’s behaviour: his severe depression and his reclusiveness, especially during the 1980s.
It is also Yves Saint Laurent the recluse, the victim of school bullying, the man who saw himself as a latter-day Swann, that also makes today’s story all the more compelling. But again, it hides that single-minded desire, one which few of us would dare to do because we know of its personal cost.
When President Sarkozy made him an Ofﬁcier of the Legion d’Honneur, the title of ‘hero’ wasn’t inappropriate for Saint Laurent.
He is a hero for that reason, and he has set the bar so high that it will take an extraordinary person to beat his record.
The Proust connection—Saint Laurent as Swann, by his own reckoning—does point to how he saw himself, cast out by society. It is invalid, because we are all the poorer now.
We have lost one of the purest designers; one fewer great ﬁgure on whom we can not only report, but bask in his genius.

Nein, nein: nine

2008-06-01T22:47:00.004Z

Hop on over to Edwin’s blog at Vox and see if you agree that he’s been conned by Royal Mail.
He purchased an album for his stamps, and the Royal Mail website says it ‘holds 30 Miniature Sheets.’
When he received it, there were nine miniature sheet holders inside.
Upon complaining, he was told, ‘The Album can hold 30 mini sheets but does not come with this number of sheets in the album.
‘Additional pages can be purchased PA699 costing £3.45 for a packet of 10 plus a handling charge of £1.45 to a UK address.’
If it says a product holds 30 miniature sheets, then it should be able to hold 30 miniature sheets—and come with 30 miniature sheet holders.
There is no sign anywhere saying that the holders are an optional extra. And how did Royal Mail come up with the grand total of nine? It’s not mentioned anywhere.
Royal Mail later sent Ed another 10 holders. He needs 11 more to get what was originally promised him.
At best, this is confusing, but it does look like Royal Mail is being intentionally deceptive.

Vincent Wright driven to the brink of suicide: can you help?

2008-05-30T23:48:00.003Z

I thought I was saddened enough last week when Vincent Wright, arguably the world’s biggest evangelizer of LinkedIn, decided to sever his ties with the service. Now I wake up here in New Zealand to news that he was seriously contemplating suicide and left a note for members (the chilling ‘By the time you read this, I will be dead’ type) of one of the biggest LinkedIn discussion forums.
Vincent says clearly that it was not the LinkedIn treatment that drove him to this decision, but events at Cigna and his allegedly unjustiﬁed dismissal in 1996:

I wanted to be somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, somebody’s supporter, somebody’s champion. I just could not ﬁgure out how to recover from Burkholder’s deception and how he set me up at CIGNA Corporation on October 22, 1996. He lied through and through and tricked CIGNA Corporation into using its power to back him against me. CIGNA’s backing helped to turn October 22, 1996 into my personal September 11th. …
I don’t have time to go into details with you tonight but, I knew I was a dead man as soon as I read Burkholder’s false dismissal notice on October 22, 1996. Burkholder accused me of missing a meeting with a CIGNA Executive whom I considered a personal hero. And Burkholder accused me of offering a woman a job in exchange for sex. Trouble is the woman DIDN’T EXIST! I tried for years to convince anyone who would listen that Burkholder made up that story. And he made it up to cover up how badly he was mismanaging the Stafﬁng Department at CIGNA. For example, he paid an exorbitant amount of money to was of his business colleagues to teach a class on Behavioral Interviewing Skills. Burkholder forced me to go to that class on October 23, 1996. Oddly enough he knew from my resume that I’d taught that class to approximately 60 IT Managers at United HealthCare immediately before he seduced me to leave UHC to come to CIGNA. He then accused me of missing an appointment ON OCTOBER TWENTY THIRD NINETEEN NINETY SIX. In spite of the fact his friend Lynn Nymser signed a certiﬁcate indicating that I was in the all day class with her and other HR Managers, Burkholder used that date to indicate that I had missed a meeting. Folks even as I’m about to commit suicide what Burkholder did to me sickens me more than my imminent death.

I have no way of verifying this information but this was the part of the note that struck me most. One or two negative people can indeed send you on a spiral of greater negativity and self-doubt. This is clearly what happened to Vincent and it’s a lesson to anyone thinking negatively that they can turn things around.
Vincent hung on for decades afterwards, and his championing of LinkedIn, promoting individual members’ causes and leading by example on how to network made him a friend and even an idol to those using social and business networking websites. In fact, he says his worked championing LinkedIn encouraged him to keep on living.
However, this hid the fact that ﬁnancially, he was in terrible trouble.
I can tell you that Vincent is still alive, according to members, who over the last 12 hours have been tracking him down and a donation process is now under way to at least help Vincent temporarily. This is the great thing about the human character: when someone is down, his or her back against the wall, people do rally around. (You can donate, too, by surﬁng to mylinkingpowerforum.ning.com and clicking the button in the top right-hand corner. It’s a PayPal account and all credit cards are accepted.)
I’ve offered my skills in résumés and graphic design to help Vincent get back on his feet when he’s able.
Once things are stabilized and things are looking brighter, there are few who would deny that Vincent Wright has amazing strengths in writing, networking, communication and online media.
Google Vincent Wright (including the Blog Search and News Search) and you will see supporters from all walks of life, all over the world.
If you know Vincent, or you have been a supporter of the work he has been doing, please consider helping in any way possible. He is a brilliant man who deserves it.

Vincent Wright says, ‘Enough is enough,’ with LinkedIn

2008-05-26T23:13:00.004Z

I was saddened to receive the following email from my friend Vincent Wright, about the experiences he’s had with LinkedIn Corporation.
I have been a LinkedIn user since 2003, and was probably one of the earliest users on it. As long as I’ve known Vincent, I’ve known him to be an evangelist for the service.
He’s set up groups championing LinkedIn, and while they do use the LinkedIn logo, traditionally most companies would allow that.
It looks like it’s got nasty for no real reason on LinkedIn’s end.
While Vincent has championed LinkedIn, it hasn’t been reciprocated. I should note that this is Vincent’s side of the story only, and I shall be interested to learn of any responses from LinkedIn.
I know it takes a lot for Vincent to be pushed into a corner where he has no choice but to take pretty serious action. He’s a very patient guy, but when LinkedIn made its last phone call to him in March 2007, I can’t blame him for running out of patience.
It looks like LinkedIn got lawyers involved. Lawyers who do not know all the facts, as usual.
I wonder if any company or organization would threaten its own fans in such a way—perhaps the Obama campaign asking netizens to remove their Obama ’08 logos?
The following has only been edited for paragraphing and a few style items (e.g. quotation marks) to match the rest of this blog.
I welcome LinkedIn contacting me so I can blog its response, if it so wishes.

Imagine a guest in your home whom you’ve made every effort to be courteous and respectful to—watching your every move—with jaundiced eyes—for 3 years.
   Imagine that in the last year the guest continued to stay in your home but stopped communicating with you—though there is much, much, much to communicate about.
   Even if the guest in your home doesn’t think you, as host, are worthy of a conversation, such a silent guest can make your own home seem inhospitable to you, the owner. Imagine how creepy that would be and what it does to your home environment…
   Since March 16, 2005, at least 10 Linkedin employees, including Linkedin’s Founders, have voluntarily made themselves my house guests at www.MyLinkedinPowerForum.com*
   That’s 99·999% of the lifespan of MyLinkedinPowerForum.com.
   My Linkedin house guests invited themselves. None received an invitation from me.
   Over the past 3 years of developing MyLinkedinPowerForum.com, when Linkedin employees would join, I’d rapidly give them permission to post unmoderated messages to to MyLinkedinPowerForum.com and any other of my groups I was aware they’d joined. Several Linkedin employees readily availed themselves of the opportunity to post unmoderated messages to MyLinkedinPowerForum.com.
   As you might imagine, over the past 3 years, there’s been a lot of communication within the house I call MyLinkedinPowerForum.com—almost 40,000 messages—most of which were respectful of my house guests—some, of course, may have been a bit challenging for Linkedin to listen to.
   As their host on My Linkedin Power Forum, it had always been my preference and, indeed, my intention to be respectful and hospitable to the Founders and to the employees of the company on whose corporate name My Linkedin Power Forum was derivatively conceived.
   For the most part, historically, the house guests have been tolerable—especially considering that the guests once made contributions to the conversational welfare of the household—no ﬁnancial contributions, no structural, or maintenance contributions, however. The guests’ contributions were exclusively conversational, informational. My Linkedin guests contributed to conversations centered on their own primary concerns. Not infrequently, Linkedin Corporation would make weekly announcements on Friday nights about upgrading its own home at Linkedin.com
   Thousands of members of MyLinkedinPowerForum.com found many of those updates informative and some would contribute their own feedback about the Linkedin upgrades. (See the 40,000 messages in the archives for MyLinkedinPowerForum.com: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyLinkedinPowerForum/messages**** )
   Because within the past year, Linkedin Corporation has shown itself to be completely indifferent to MyLinkedinPowerForum.com in general and to me, personally, I think it only appropriate to reciprocate in “the Linkedin manner”. Meaning: I’m clear that Linkedin’s success or failure has nothing to do with MyLinkedinPowerForum.com, in general, nor with me, personally.
   Further, Linkedin, my house guest, has taken to a vow of silence over the past year or so.
   Linkedin’s silence leads to this most fundamental question: What good is a house guest who won’t speak to you?
   Finally, Linkedin, my house guest not only has taken to its vow of silence with respect to me and my other guests, since September 27, 2007, Linkedin has been hanging the issue of its vaunted trademark and indecipherable group and photo policies over our heads like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.
   One shouldn’t feel that uneasy in ones own home.
   And, too, Linkedin has unilaterally made decisions to force me to change the group name and icon for My Linkedin Power Forum on Linkedin, though they okayed BOTH as an “ofﬁcial” Linkedin group on July 15, 2005. (Though it was costly to make such an inordinate amount of changes, this one I can understand.)
   Linkedin has unilaterally made a decision to take down an icon for my photo. No, “Hey, Vincent! You can’t have an icon on Linkedin!’
   Linkedin has unilaterally suspended my group called “Keep STRONG”, one of the most innocuous, non-threatening groups I’ve ever created
   Here’s the heart of the matter about Linkedin’s decision regarding “Keep STRONG”: its rationale for suspending the group makes NO SENSE.
   If Linkedin followed its own rules and applied them without discrimination to all other groups equally, it would have THOUSANDS FEWER GROUPS than it now has. If Linkedin followed the guidelines it used to justify suspending “Keep STRONG”, Linkedin would have to suspend other groups of mine which they formerly approved—groups such as “The Encouragement Engine” and “The Science Of Encouragement” and “Pursuing Relentless Optimism” and “Attractionese” and “Linkonomics” and “Yearnalism” and “Linking And The Secret” and “The Biggest Business In The World” and “Linking Eyes To Find Missing Children”
   Linkedin has made all its decisions without discussion, without phone calls, without advanced warning via email, without a hint, without a clue…
   All with suddenness. All with maddening inconsistency.
   Inconsistency is infectious. Those of us trying to follow Linkedin’s lead have, ourselves, seemed inconsistent.
   It is also my belief that Linkedin has sent or authorized to be sent a letter to me claiming that I am intentionally violating their trademark/brand name in using the domain GetLinkedin.info. (That letter indicated that I was abusing Linkedin’s trademark with the logo I have on the site associated with the URL for GetLinkedin.info. Apparently, the author of that letter wasn’t aware that though I conceived the logo, Linkedin Corporation rendered the logo, sent it to me, and permitted me to use it for My Linkedin Power Forum *on* Linkedin.com starting on July 15, 2005 and lasting through about September 27, 2007. Again, though I conceived the logo, Linkedin rendered the logo. To the unbiased, this should be proof positive that not only has Linkedin been aware of my using the logo for MyLinkedinPowerForum.com but, indeed, they were complicit in helping me to create and use the logo which shows at MyLinkedinPowerForum.com, GetLinkedin.info, and PromotionPromotionPromotion.com. The logo in question was used by My Linkedin Power Forum for more than 2 years in the groups section directly on Linkedin.com
   I’ve reached out.
   I’ve waited.
   I’ve been patient.
   I’ve heard nothing—for more than half a year…
   Linkedin’s last phone call to me was March 23, 2007—an impossible date to forget.
   Many others have told me that they, too, have reached out, have waited, have been patient, and have heard nothing from Linkedin. Some surprising, long-time supporters have told me that they’ve also been cut off of Linkedin’s loop.
   Certainly, Linkedin deserves to have time to make itself into whatever it’s making itself in to—I hope and pray it’s something really good—something worthy of the alienation grassroots supporters have been subjected to—but, I’m convinced that not one single Linkedin employee—Founders included—would like to be subjected to the same silence some of Linkedin’s former evangelists have been subjected to.
   I choose to no longer wait for my mute house guest(s).
   And, too, please bear in mind that there are other matters in my relationship with Linkedin coloring my decision to no longer wait for my mute house guests. They are too numerous to fully go into in this letter but, a couple of examples:
   1. Linkedin has questioned certain posts I made on MyLinkedinPowerForum.com. For example, in that MyLinkedinPowerForum.com is based on Yahoo Groups, when I made an announcement regarding a new Yahoo service, I was asked by one of the Linkedin Founders why I posted something about Yahoo on a Linkedin-centric forum. Now here’s the interesting thing about that particular question: I only found out about that Yahoo service because the very Linkedin person who questioned me about it sent me an invitation to join him ON that Yahoo service! I’d never even heard of that Yahoo service until I received an invitation from Linkedin’s Co-Founder. So, I was dumbfounded when I got his email questioning why I’d posted something about Yahoo on my Linkedin-centric group which is HOUSED ON YAHOO GROUPS! Please think about that and let it soak in for a moment.
   2. Also, I was questioned about the content of member posts on MyLinkedinPowerForum.com. For example: One person who’d been highlighted on Linkedin *by* Linkedin, joined MyLinkedinPowerForum.com and posted about enjoying Linkedin AND one of its primary competitors at the same time. Not only was I questioned about that particular post, Linkedin informed me that they were removing this person as an example of the type of person they wanted to highlight. Because this member had deigned to blog about a Linkedin competitor, that person instantly became persona non grata to Linkedin. They’d done nothing wrong, nothing egregious—other than complimenting the merits of one of Linkedin’s competitors. (I never told this person about that behind the scenes conversation.) Of course, this left me feeling constricted about what members could and could not post and what I could and could not do with my own little grassroots discussion group.
   This questioning indicated that I’d have to pay a lot more attention to member posts than I’d originally thought when I conceived of MyLinkedinPowerForum.com back in 2005. It proved to be exhaustingly time consuming. So, I balked at adhering to Linkedin’s guidelines.
   Thus, after investing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of uncompensated hours championing Linkedin and answering the questions of thousands of Linkedin users, I must say that even were every Social Network Analyst, every Ivy League School, every law ﬁrm, every Journalist in the world, every Venture Capitalist under heaven’s sun, every Fortune 500 Company, every one of Linkedin’s 21,000,000 members were to take Linkedin’s side in this matter, today, Memorial Day, May 26, 2008, I am evicting Linkedin from MyLinkedinPowerForum.com
   Some may say that this is unduly harsh and that I may be overreacting by taking such a dramatic step. But I say “enough is enough”. I’ve had more than enough to convince me that I no longer want to champion Linkedin in its current manifestation. Sometimes silence forces us to take the most dramatic actions available to us. Some of us feel compelled to take fairly strong, declarative steps to back away from Linkedin as it goes on to the next phase of its existence. But even if Linkedin were to become the greatest Internet company in the history of humanity over the next 1,000 years, I want to focus on something healthier than on a company which alienates its former grassroots evangelists the way Linkedin has chosen to do…
   Now, I have no expectation that the gesture I make today will have any measurable impact on Linkedin. My action is not meant for that. After all, they are more than Goliath and I’m less than David. Rather, my gesture this Memorial Day is intended as a personal declaration of independence. And I’m forcing the issue today because some of the recent gestures Linkedin has been making towards others and towards me, have left me feeling completely uncomfortable having Linkedin employees as my guests. And though I still have a free membership there, I’m starting to be uncomfortable being a guest in Linkedin’s home at Linkedin.com The trust is gone…and likely irreparably so…
   On a completely human level, I must tell you I feel the pain of evicting Linkedin en masse because there is one Linkedin employee who seems like a real human being—one who really seems to understand Linkedin’s purported philosophy that “Relationships Matter”.**
   While Linkedin seems to have an unhealthy distrust of some of its members, candidly, as it shifts from a small company to a potential Internet powerhouse, I no longer know how to trust Linkedin… Thus, I can no longer trust inviting my friends to join me on Linkedin—so, I don’t. And I won’t.
   Of the hundreds upon hundreds of Linkedin-centric groups I developed both on and off Linkedin.com, Linkedin Corporation knows of no group of mine set up to be anti-Linkedin. It’s never been my intention to ever work against Linkedin. It was my exclusive intent to work with those parts of Linkedin available to me and users like me. (FYI: I’ve spent almost 6 months unraveling the Linkedin-centric path of networks I built over the past 3 years. Most recently, I’ve changed LinkedinBusinessDiscussionIndex.blogspot.com to WhyKeepSTRONG.blogspot.com. This change is meant, speciﬁcally, to memorialize to me the ﬁnal straw in my relationship with Linkedin.)
   Recognizing that some may have thought this day might never arrive, nonetheless, it’s here. It’s the day of “the audacity of nope” as in “Nope, I no longer want Linkedin as my house guests on MyLinkedinPowerForum.com.”
   Though I do wish to thank Linkedin for the coffee cup they sent me, after 3 years of openly marketing My Linkedin Power Forum—as Linkedin Corporation watched—I will not voluntarily change the name of MyLinkedinPowerForum.com
   Upon the publication of this letter, no known Linkedin employee, Board Member, nor internal advisor, nor consultant will be a member of MyLinkedinPowerForum.com
   Obviously, there’s more to this story. If interested, you may wish to stay tuned…