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RE: Irony of ironies
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Christopher Locke
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Jul 04, 2001 08:32 PDT
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Tom Matrullo writes:
| | Can corporations speak with the voice of an/the individual?
1. Yes, but they must be taught (Doc, among others)
2. Maybe, but if not, accept them and make the best of it. (Cunningham,
possibly others).
3. Read my book. (Locke)
4. No, they cannot (raising a host of unexplored, unsettling consequences).
Isn't it rather odd that no one has attempted to articulate and defend #
4 - the position that, when all is said and done, seems closest to the
insight of the book upon which all this conversation is based?
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Since there's a gotcha in #3, the "book" in question not yet being
available, here's another clip from it on #4, which is the answer it
gives -- if not the prescription. For that, you'll still have to fork
out in October. ;-)
unsettlingly,
chris
---
from Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
Chapter Three: The Value Proposition
...
Sometimes a great wind comes out of space and shifts the points of
the compass completely, revises long held notions of what’s valuable,
what’s worth spending life on. That’s what happened to me in the
course of writing this book. I fell in love. And how does something
like that fit into the context of a business book? I ask you. I ask
myself. Business books are boring. They’re supposed to be boring.
Dispassionate and objective, detached from personal concerns. The
world of business is a world unto itself. Whatever insight business
books may deliver, they must do so within a strictly circumscribed
set of boundaries, within a framework that validates and reinforces
their core subject. Which is of course: business. The tautology is so
neat it’s seamless. The business of business is business. Not even
daylight can slip through the cracks.
But last time I checked, there was no world of business somehow
separate from the world as a whole. There was no reality to the
separation we speak so easily about between work life and private
life -- a.k.a. "real life." These are artificial distinctions,
convenient fictions. But whose convenience do they serve? Yours,
gentle reader? Mine? I don’t think so. Something is desperately wrong
here, I think. Then I think, well... maybe it’s just me. Maybe I got
bored with the power and majesty of commerce, with its challenges,
obstacles, impact and opportunities. Got bored with its limits and
limiting definitions of value. Got bored because I looked into my own
heart and found something far more valuable there. I ask myself if
I’m alone in this. And again, I don’t think so. I think I’ve got
company.
Hmmm, "company." Now there’s a business word if there ever was one.
But how does the company I’ve got in my boredom with business differ
from the kind of company a business creates? Language is funny stuff,
mixing us up at every turn. Or perhaps, since I love a good
conspiracy theory as much as the next poor sod, being used to mix us
up. Webster's Third provides help in the form of linguistic
archeology. The word "company," it tells us, comes from the word
"companion," which originally meant someone with whom you shared food
-- specifically, with whom you broke bread (panis in Latin)... That’s
strange. Gets sort of Biblical there, doesn’t it? But maybe this is
leading us further away from the inherent nature of value. Maybe I’m
just tripping here, reaching for a rationalization for why I’m so
bored with business. Me and all that company I suspect I’ve got.
But it gets even stranger. How does a company, a corporation, come
into being? Not a trick question: it incorporates. But it is a trick
answer. Back to the archeology, corpus in Latin means body. So to
incorporate means to become embodied -- to be made flesh. Is it just
me, I ask myself, or are there linguistic clues here that business
first sought legitimacy in the deepest mysteries of Christian
theology? Maybe so. Legitimacy was certainly a problem for early
business...
...
So, could "incorporation" have been playing off the Christian mystery
of transubstantiation -- Word become flesh? Whatever the answer, the
fact remains that this term we use every day, along with its
shortened form, corporation, hides an anthropomorphic metaphor that
has no basis in reality. No corporation has ever become embodied. But
however mistaken, this metaphor has great power -- more so because it
is perceived unconsciously. On the other hand, ad agencies apply a
variation of it quite consciously in the process of product branding.
Citing the Jolly Green Giant, the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury
Doughboy, a book titled Brand Spirit states: "While there are many
executional typologies in advertising, some of the most prevalent and
successful are those which exploit brand anthropomorphy to the full."
The authors are associated with the advertising firm of Saatchi &
Saatchi.
The embodied-corporation metaphor allows corporations to mimic human
beings. To act as if. But the corporation has no heart. The cries
will go up at this one, I know. But the reaction is based on another
misplaced metaphor. Forget how much your business gave to charity or
how it’s planting trees or teaching ghetto kids to use computers (so
you can hire them later at minimum wage). I mean, the corporation
lacks the physical organ we call the heart. That thing in your chest
that goes thump-thump. Here, I’ll make it easier for you: the
corporation has no sex. Those who protest even at this obvious truth
need to be reminded: it can only screw you metaphorically. But this
is serious. This is important. Embodiment is a very big deal. Bodies
don’t come into being through mergers and acquisitions. They are born
of woman, as King James put it. Bodies don’t file for protection
under Chapter 11. They die.
No corporation has ever fallen in love. Reflect on that a moment.
Roll it around on your tongue, in the back of your mind. Does it seem
a non sequitur, irrelevant? It’s not.
Companies don’t fall in love. But people do. And whether we speak
about it publicly or not, as a species we tend to place great
importance on this fact, this entry into a larger more connected
world. Easy to ignore, forget, but this is vital. Love opens our
hearts to each other, to people other than ourselves, and to the
space we share as human beings cast into life without a manual,
without a hardwired set of instructions. If, in our 100,000 years or
so, we have made catastrophic mistakes, fought devastating wars,
pillaged and raped and killed, we have also created complex cultures,
built societies, created fabulous art out of nothing but imagination.
Drawn on by the longing in our hearts, we have survived. Error but
also Eros. Love has shaped and informed and colored our world as much
as power. More. But we forget. We get embarrassed. Why? There is a
reason, and that reason will unfold as we explore. This time of
change is not any time. This world not any world. It is ours and we
are here today, as never before, to chronicle and celebrate its
wonders. To take it back.
Copyrright 2001 Christopher Locke. All rights reserved.
October 2001 <> Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
sample chapters: http://www.gonzomarkets.com/intro.html
http://www.gonzomarkets.com/8mileshigh.html
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