Series of Tubes

The power of honesty, and a contest

This is an attempt to rewrite a long and insightful post from a week ago that was eaten by the Internet and my own stupidity. Chances are that it will be shorter and less insightful, but that's because I'm still kicking myself for losing the original post. I'm hoping it will be worth your time and mine. Special thanks this time to the people who maintain Wikipedia, without whom I'd have to do real research.

I spend a fair amount of time talking about the importance of honesty, transparency, and willingness to admit error as keys to maintaining a relationship with customers. The book "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" illustrates the mechanisms behind why those good qualities aren't more common in life and in business. The reason is self-justification. In brief, our brains edit our memories whether we want them to or not, in an effort to reduce cognitive dissonance between our self-image and the fact that we screwed up.

Self-justification is like the Dark Side of the Force: once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny. It can be identified and controlled, but it's always something to watch out for. I've done it, you've done it, the person you admire most in the world has done it. It's like that old joke about masturbation -- "We know that 90% of men masturbate, and 60-75% of women do it...and the rest lie about it."

It's possible to get off the slippery slope (of self-justification, not masturbation ... that's a nasty image right there), but it takes courage. Again in brief, a great example of this is the incident involving Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of James Frey's fabricated autobiography "A Million Little Pieces." Yes, I know it's old news. It's still a fine illustration, and the authors of "Mistakes Were Made" use it.

When The Smoking Gun announced it had investigated Frey's story and found it to be crammed with falsehoods, Oprah initially backed Frey with strong statements about the emotional truth of the story and its value. As the truth became clear, Oprah could have done what most people would do, and stuck with her initial statements, justifying them as true as far as she knew when the book was presented to her, and the literal truth of it isn't an issue because it's such a strong story from which we can derive great lessons anyway. It would have ruined her reputation and destroyed her as a brand (yes, Oprah is a brand). Instead, she apologized, honestly and publicly, for her part in misleading the world and perpetuating a lie. It was a ballsy move, and it cemented her place of respect in American culture.

She brought Frey onto her show as part of her own apology, and took him to task for representing fiction as real life; even then, he weaseled around any admission of wrongdoing. Heard much from James Frey lately?

The last U.S. President to truly own up to the responsibility for a mistake was John F. Kennedy, regarding the Bay of Pigs invasion. When he admitted he screwed up, his approval ratings shot through the roof. Since then, we've had everything from "I am not a crook" to "it is best to defeat them there so we don't have to face them here"; from "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" to all the backtalk surrounding Iran-Contra. Is there any wonder why we don't trust government anymore?

Whether it's in business, politics, or personal life, please please PLEASE realize that if you might be wrong, it's better to admit it up front than to be found out, and have it dragged out of you later. Fight the urge to self-justify. Don't give in to the Dark Side.

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Now it's time for a contest. No matter how funny I find "Series of Tubes" to be as a title for a blog, I realize it doesn't really describe my subject matter. I'm opening it up to you, my handful of loyal readers: what should I call this thing, fer realz? The best suggestion (the sole criteria being my capricious nature and my twisted sense of humor) will get the job, as well as an outpouring of gratitude. Please note that I'm also incredibly lazy, so a sufficiently impassioned defense of the current title has as good a shot as something new.

Spam and Eggs

Originally, I was thinking of summing up my recent trip to Chicago for the Sage Summit (referenced in my last post). I'm not going to do that, except to say that Sage, like the Yankees, is in for a "rebuilding year," and they're being very open about the need to fix what's not working and to continue to have real conversations with partners and customers. Kudos for that—I'm a sucker for honesty. Also, there weren't a whole lot of announcements, so I have no material.

One other thing: Chris Gardner (the guy who wrote The Pursuit of Happyness, and was Sunday's guest address) is a highly engaging speaker, seems like a great guy with lots of wry humor, and had it even harder than it looked in the Will Smith movie. For starters, his son wasn't Jaden Smith's age at the time, but a toddler. Holy shit. There's more, but you should read the book instead of my blog. Wait. You should read the book after you read my blog.

What caught me as the kernel for today's topic was an email from Jason Brown, a business development executive from a company called Optinlists. I'll quote:

Hi Marshall !

I understand that you are the person responsible for prospecting initiatives and lead generation’s program? Optinlists provides online marketing solutions, which can aid you and your customers in their marketing initiatives. To discuss Mailing List Subscription service for the year 2007 -which can get you targeted mailing lists every quarter or every month.

I had a chance to look your website and I thought there might be a need for us to have a quick chat regarding your marketing initiatives and lead generation processes.

...

Please test our email append service by sending 100 sample records with contact name, company name, mailing address and telephone number. We will append missing email and or any other missing data at no cost. Test results will be sent within 48 hours with a match rate analysis report.

OK, it's clear that Jason (if there is such a person) has no idea who I am, is lying about having ever seen my Web site—actually, my employer's site, as this was sent to my destinationCRM address—and is tempting me with a baldfaced request to give him more poorly-qualified leads so he can do this to 100 more people. And these jokers want to have a chat with *me* about *my* lead generation and marketing?

Spam exists. Spam will always exist. But I'm feeling peevish. One of my new missions in life is to serve as an agent of corporate Darwinism. By sending crap like this to a business and social media journo, Jason and his company have demonstrated their unfitness to survive in business. So I will collect and publicize any such things that come my way in the hopes that I can hasten the corporate deaths of the senders.

Also, Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner service sucks. Its unreliability has made it nearly impossible to work from home, and I'm paying a lot of money for an Internet connection that doesn't work. I'll be looking to resolve this dispute, but I've got to say it really grinds my gears how Verizon and TWC slam each other in their ad campaigns when neither of them can get the job done. I'm tempted to go with dialup at this point.