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"Individuals have more power than ever.
Managers can see this as a threat, or as an opportunity.
Think about it. Any of your customers could trash your reputation at any moment. They could write a video about his bad experience that attracts 8 million views, which is what Dave Carroll did after United Airlines baggage handlers broke his guitar. They could tell a million people to never buy your product, which is what Heather Armstrong did when, surrounded by soiled diapers, her frustration at Maytag's inability to fix her new clothes washer boiled over.
For managers, the only defense is to empower your own employees to solve those customers' problems."
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"In this manifesto, I'm going to introduce you to rules-based mechanical investing (also known as naked investing strategies), which has been available for years. In fact, Warren Buffett wrote about this in the forward of the 1973 edition of The Intelligent Investor.
But these techniques have languished for decades, as mutual fund companies—with big dollars to spend on advertising—have purchased the souls and minds of the financial press. And employing systematic naked strategies is simply a more effective way to make investing decisions than relying on the judgment of Wall Street investment experts."
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"A manager's emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It's the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended, and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers."
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"All of this was difficult, amazing, perplexing, astonishing—but so was the laying of the railroads and the sending of telegraph signals across the ocean. And historians of technology like to point out that great fanfare and promises have greeted all sorts of new devices, from the radio to the fax machine. But even before former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow penned his 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' ('Governments of the industrial world,' it began, 'you weary giants of flesh and steel'), the internet was no mere fax machine. From the first, and in no small part because of its fervent supporters, it has felt less like a technology and more like a social movement—like communism, like feminism, like rock and roll. An ideology we could call webism. While the rest of us look up movie times, buy sweaters, and post jihadi videos, the webists proclaim the new age."
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"For those who work in advertising, simply being fascinated with the future isn't enough. We have to glean insight from it and process it and wrap it up in a bright shiny message that sells this incrementally better future to the rest of the human race (or, at the very least, our target market), brought to you on behalf of Brand X. [...]
Of course this has never been an easy task. But today, for a number of reasons, advertising the future, and the future of advertising are more difficult and complicated propositions than ever. Because today, not only do advertising people have to fully understand and market the past, present and future of their brands, more than ever they must have a thorough grasp of the seemingly infinite changes that are shaping the future of their industry. This includes everything from the rapidly evolving media landscape to the constant emergence of new messaging delivery vehicles to the very ways in which creative and strategic ideas are developed, shared and created anew."
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