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The New Zealand economy of the mid-70s was not geared to overseas investment. It was tightly regulated and the labour force compulsorily unionised. Import licensing was a powerful protectionist bulwark against the establishment of any company that needed to bring in goods manufactured abroad. Rosalie Hawes, hired to be the first secretary for McDonald’s, was immediately thrown into the struggle to find the equipment for the restaurants before the opening day scheduled for 7th June 1976. ‘So I’d spend my days ringing around companies in Auckland to ask if they had any spare import licences for wallpaper, uniforms, anything that was going. I had to find the licence to cover what we were bringing in. It was very challenging – and it was fun, I guess. I was constantly ringing up members of Parliament and getting their assistance.’

Wally’s way of dealing with the restrictions was to circumvent them. ‘Every time I went to try and get something, they would say no,’ Wally recalled. The Labour government in power at the time was very reluctant to allow Wally to import a McDonald’s kitchen, declaring that it was nothing more than an assemblage of stainless steel and electrical parts that could be manufactured in New Zealand. When a search failed to turn up anybody that could produce the specified model, Wally was finally permitted to import a kitchen on the understanding that it could stay for only twelve months, as a template for a local manufacturer to copy, before being re-exported. But without a kitchen, there would be no McDonald’s. ‘And so, in order to open – and I remember making the decision, I remember it being a lonely one – I said we would put it into the Porirua store and say we were training from there. We could never, ever have got started if I hadn’t made that decision.’

The first brainstorming exercise produced thirty stories. The team combined these and narrowed them down to nine for further work, and set up four subteams to flesh out the scenarios along social, political, economic, and international dimensions. [...] They first addressed the nine scenarios in more depth and then narrowed the field to four that they thought, given the current situation in the country, were the most plausible and important. After that workshop, the team went back to their own organizations and networks to test these four scenarios. At a third workshop, in March 1992, the participants reviewed and refined the write-ups of the final scenarios and agreed how they would be published and disseminated. [...]

The team's final scenarios asked the question: How will the South African transition go, and will the country succeed in "taking off"? Each of the four stories gave a different answer and had a different message that mattered to the country in 1992. South Africa was in the middle of the contentious and risky transition negotiations. Nobody knew how or even whether they would succeed, or if the country would remain stuck, closed, embattled, and isolated. As a set, the scenarios provided a provocative road map for this transition.

There were three dark prophecies of futures to avoid: Ostrich, in which the nonrepresentative white government sticks its head in the sand to try to avoid a negotiated settlement with the black majority; Lame Duck, in which there is a prolonged transition with a constitutionally weakened government which, because it purports to respond to all, satisfies none; and Icarus, in which a constitutionally unconstrained black government comes to power on a wave of popular support and noble intentions, and embarks on a huge and unsustainable public spending program, which crashes the economy. Then there was one bright vision of a future to work towards: Flight of the Flamingoes, in which the transition is successful because all the key building blocks are put in place, with everyone in the society rising slowly and together.

Once the four scenarios had been agreed upon, the team introduced them into the national conversation. They inserted a twenty-five-page booklet into the leading weekly newspaper, arranged for the work to be discussed in the media, and distributed a cartoon video of the four stories. Most importantly, they ran more than 100 workshops for leadership groups of their own and other influential political, business, and civic organizations, where the four scenarios were presented and debated. President de Klerk reacted to Mont Fleur by saying, "I am not an Ostrich."

Icarus got the most attention. Here the leading economists of the left were warning their comrades of the dangers of irresponsible left-wing economic policies. Mosebyane Malatsi of the Pan-Africanist Congress, the ANC's main rival on the left, presented Icarus to his own top leaders. He said, "This is a scenario of what will happen if the ANC comes to power. And if they don't do it, we will push them into it." Malatsi was showing his colleagues both an unfamiliar and undesirable economic scenario for South Africa and the role that their own policies and actions would play.

My key insight was that South Africans had discovered an exceptionally effective way to solve tough problems. I proved this to myself with the painstaking logic of an ex-physicist. I knew that problems are tough because they are complex, and that there are three types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social.

A problem has low dynamic complexity if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn't run can usually be understood and solved by testing and fixing one piece at a time. By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. For example, economic decisions in New York affect the price of gold in Johannesburg, and apartheid-era educational policies affect present-day black employment prospects. Such problems--management theorist Russell Ackoff calls them "messes"--can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationships among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

A problem has low generative complexity if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future. A problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. South Africa, for example, was moving away from the peculiar rigidities of apartheid and into a new, post-Cold War, rapidly globalizing and digitizing world. Solutions to problems of high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives. In a well-functioning team, for example, members look at things similarly, and so a boss or an expert can easily propose a solution that everyone agrees with. A problem has high social complexity if the people involved look at things very differently. South Africa had the perspectives of black versus white, left versus right, traditional versus modern--classic conditions for polarization and stuckness. Problems of high social complexity cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.

My analysis gave me a neat answer to my first question: Why was the Mont Fleur work unusual and important? Simple problems, with low complexity, can be solved perfectly well--efficiently and effectively--using processes that are piecemeal, backward looking, and authoritarian. By contrast, highly complex problems can only be solved using processes that are systemic, emergent, and participatory. The Mont Fleur approach was important and unusual because it was exceptionally well suited to solving highly complex problems--to enacting profound social innovations. Our process was systemic, building scenarios for South Africa as a whole, taking account of social, political, economic, and international dynamics. It was emergent, because it recognized that precedents and grand plans would be of limited use, and instead used creative teamwork to identify and influence the country's critical current choices. And it was participatory, involving leaders from most of the key national constituencies. The mother of this South African invention was the necessity of its transitional vacuum: a highly complex system, in a fundamentally new context, in which no single authority had the wisdom or legitimacy to enforce solutions. With the practical option of intervention from "above" unavailable, South Africans had no choice but to rely on the miraculous option of working together.

My analysis also allowed me to recognize a widespread "apartheid syndrome." By this I mean trying to solve a highly complex problem using a piecemeal, backward-looking, and authoritarian process that is suitable only for solving simple problems. In this syndrome, people at the top of a complex system try to manage its development through a divide-and-con-quer strategy: through compartmentalization---the Afrikaans word apartheid means "apartness"---and command and control. Because the people at the bottom resist these commands, the system either becomes stuck, or ends up becoming unstuck by force.

Gorka Espiau, an Elkarri staff member, explained to me the interaction between violence and nondialogue: "If I know that you, my opponent, would approve of my being killed, that you do not have a basic respect for human life, then how can I have an open, human dialogue with you? And yet without such a dialogue, how can we end the violence? We have to start with a political dialogue to reach an agreement to stop the killing. Then we can have the human dialogue that we need to resolve the deeper underlying conflict."

I met with an opposition member of the Basque regional legislature who told me that the violence had now undermined all communication among the politicians. Once-cordial working relationships in the parliament had broken down into acrimonious exchanges and stony silences.

This pattern of not talking and not listening is a symptom of being stuck. Whether or not the actors are on speaking terms, they are not on listening terms. Like the Basque parliamentarians (and many parliamentarians elsewhere), they have made up their minds before their opponents speak. Even if they are silent and pretending to listen, they are really only "reloading," rehearsing their rebuttals. They are in fact listening only to themselves, to the tapes they play over and over in their heads about why they are right and others are wrong. My partner Otto Scharmer calls the kind of talking that takes place in these situations "downloading" because the speaker is reproducing an old file without alteration. The actors sometimes fight openly and violently, and sometimes cover their differences with politeness, skirting sensitive subjects in order to keep the peace. Either way, they are stunted, unable to express who they are in new ways and unable to take in what others are telling them. If they can change this pattern and start to talk and listen, they blossom.

I went to Paraguay to work with forty-five of the country's most open-minded and public-spirited politicians, activists, businesspeople, generals, judges, journalists, intellectuals, peasants, and students. They had agreed to talk together, but I was puzzled by how slowly our work progressed. Most of them seemed to be exceptionally suspicious, cynical, and pessimistic, and hesitant about speaking openly. They deferred to me even on questions for which I had no good answers. Conversations went in circles; understandings came unraveled; commitments were not kept.

I spoke about these patterns with Milda Rivarola, a member of the team and a respected historian. "You have to understand the impact that the dictatorship had on people," she explained. "We needed approvals and permissions for everything. No criticism of the government was allowed. The only way to have influence was to be a part of the government, the military, or the governing party. And by and large people acquiesced. Stroessner had a network of spies and informers (many of them had volunteered!) who set people against each other. Just like in other totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, social fragmentation was and is severe. What you are seeing in this group--the low levels of trust and initiative--are the after-effects of this repression."

The director of our project was a civic leader named Jorge Talavera, who had worked for decades in adult education and leadership development. He was sanguine about the situation and patient with our slow progress. "Paraguayans aren't used to managing themselves," he explained. "They are always asking 'Who's the boss?' People say that President Wasmosy, our first civilian president after Stroessner, used to assert his authority by asking, 'Who's the penis here?' In this project we are asking people to value their own experiences and to have confidence that they can influence the future. So we are asking them to make a fundamental shift in their way of being. This will take time."

In a dictatorship, the dictator does not listen, and the people are afraid to talk. The results are pessimism and cynicism; lack of self-confidence and self-management; hesitation to speak up and stand up; and painfully slow innovation.
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This description of the communications company managers echoes Rosenberg's description of the Chileans. I have noticed that many of the people in many of the systems I have worked with--including the presidents, CEOs, and generals--say these same words: "The people above me won't let me do anything." This is a symptom of the pervasiveness and internalization of authoritarianism.

The authoritarian approach to solving problems is that the boss, with his smart expert advisors and consultants, dictates solutions. For simple problems, this works wonderfully. Unilateral decision making is fine for a police officer directing traffic at a busy intersection. This problem has low dynamic complexity (cause and effect in the intersection traffic are nearby, immediate, and obvious), low generative complexity (traffic rules from the past apply perfectly well), and low social complexity (all the drivers share the same objective of smoothly running traffic and willingly defer to the officer's authority).

But the authoritarian approach does not work for solving complex problems. Consider a global computer company trying to sell into Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The CEO cannot successfully dictate the company's sales strategy. The development of the computer market is affected by decisions that are being taken far away (in Silicon Valley) and long ago (by Communist industrial planners), and so the sales "problem" has high dynamic complexity that can only be grasped as a whole--for which the CEO needs to think together with the company's front-line staff who are directly in touch with different parts of the system. The problem situation, in the midst of both political and technological revolutions, also has high generative complexity, which means that there is not one right answer that can be created in advance; the situation can only be addressed by working with it as it unfolds. And the problem has high social complexity because it can only be solved with the participation of the people who are part of the problem: global and local staff, customers, suppliers, government officials, and so on.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian approach, with its severe limitations, is the foundation of practically all private and public sector strategic planning.

Politeness is a way of not talking. When we are being polite, we say what we think we should say: "How are you?" "I'm fine." We do not say what we are really thinking because we are afraid of a social rupture: "How are you?" "I'm terrible." When we talk politely, we are following the party line, trying to fit in and so keep the social system whole and unchanged, even though the whole may be diseased or counterfeit. Talking only about concepts is one way of being polite. Usually we are not even aware that we are following rules of politeness, but when we first enter a system with an unfamiliar set of rules--as when I entered PG&E and Shell--we notice them.
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When somebody speaks personally, passionately, and from the heart, the conversation deepens. When a team develops a habit of speaking openly, then the problem they are working on begins to shift. By contrast, a habit of speaking overly cautiously obscures the problem and keeps it stuck. The Canadian team had a hard time agreeing on conclusions because our conversations did not go deep enough for us to find the ground that we truly had in common, and from which we could construct a way forward that we all believed in.

I started working with a brilliant South African consultant named Louis van der Merwe. He taught me that the job of a facilitator is to help the participants speak up, listen up, and bring all of their personal resources to the work at hand. Our job is not to direct or control the participants. He also taught me that even though we were remaining neutral with respect to the substance of the participants' work, our process was not neutral: it embodied values of openness, inclusion, and collaboration.

Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don’t have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don’t have real choice either.

Here are three ways of getting up in the morning. I have tried all three. Take your pick.
• Option 1. Wake in the middle of wars, natural and man-made disasters; lying politicians, greedy business people, doom mongering lobbyists and scientists, and scandals and corruption. That is called waking up to the news. Even the weather forecast may or may not cheer you up. Leave just enough time to get to work, so that each traffic delay, red light, or problem with public transport will send your anxiety and frustration soaring. I have tried this option for years: unlike wine, it does not improve with age.
• Option 2. Wake up with no radio, electricity, or running water. Your nearest water is 5 miles away in a muddy and crocodile infested river. By the time you have carried the water back, on your head, the temperature will be past 100° and your working day has yet to start. I spent seven years hanging out with tribes like this one in Africa, and started to develop a nostalgia for waking to news of war and cataclysm on the radio.
• Option 3. Wake up to your favorite music station. Go to the bathroom and discover a miracle: turn on the tap and fresh, cold, clean water comes out. Just like that. Turn on another tap and find another miracle: hot water comes out, without the need to collect firewood from the bush. After two miracles in two minutes it is pretty hard to have a bad day. Leave for work early, listen to an audio book or music. Feel fresh and relaxed, even if public transport has gone missing.
We can all choose how we feel. If we want to feel miserable, cynical, and stressed then that is our choice: option one will justify our decision.

I thought I knew how to read, until I came across Andrew. We were all sitting in the old-fashioned partners’ office. We thought we were all pretty bright, except for Andrew. If we shone as brightly as a hundred-watt bulb, he was a solitary, spluttering candle. But much to our annoyance, all the staff reckoned that Andrew was brighter than the rest of us.
One day, I saw Andrew scribbling away. I asked him what he was doing. “I have some associates coming in with a paper to test me,” he said. I had always thought that was our chance to test them, not the other way around. “They want to see if I can add any value to their draft. So I am making some notes.” He then patiently explained to me how he would pass his associates’ reading test. He had three rules:
1. “Make a note of my point of view on the paper. They are all smart, and I do not want to get caught up in their internal logic.” That hurt. I was always getting caught up in the internal logic of what I was reading: I would then find it hard to come up with an original insight.
2. “Make a list of all the topics that I expect to see covered. That helps me see the invisible: what they have not covered in their paper.” I was starting to see why they thought Andrew was so smart. I never spotted the invisible until too late: after they had left the room.
3. “Outline a few coaching points I can cover, so that they feel they have gotten something out of me.” Now I started to see why they not only thought Andrew was smart, but they liked him as well.

Don’t worry about the jargon: at least we all recognize it when we hear it. The really nasty language in business consists of normal words with abnormal meanings. Here are 12 which should put you on high alert
1. Just. This is used to make a huge request or error seem trivial as in: “Could you just do this (500-page) document by Monday?,” a request best made late on a Friday afternoon.
2. But. Remember, whatever is said before “but” is baloney, as in “That was a great presentation, but...,” or “I would like to help, but....”
3. From. Much loved by advertisers, as in “Fly to Rome from $10” excluding $100 of taxes and other “optional” extras for a flight leaving at 4am, going to an airport about 100 miles away from Rome and the ticket has to be booked one year in advance.
4. Might (and any other conditional verb). Might is used to achieve two things: first it sets up a negotiating position as in “I might be able to do that if....” Second, it lays the ground work for excusing failure later on: “I would have done it, if only....”
5. Only. Closely related to “just”: it is an attempt to make a big request or problem seem small. “It was only a small error... we only dropped one nuclear bomb over London.”
6. Important (and urgent). Used to puff up any presentation: “This important new product/initiative....” Important to whom? And why? Maybe it is important to the speaker, but why is it to me?
7. Strategic. Important, with bells on. See strategic human capital division, formerly known as the personnel department. Also used to justify spending which has no financial payback.
8. Rightsize (downsize, best shore, offshore, outsource, optimize, redeploy, downshift, reengineer). How many ways are there of avoiding saying straight up: we are going to lay off staff?
9. Thank you. Normally “thank you” is good, except when used by automated voices at call centers saying, “Thank you for calling, we value your call... (and we have so much contempt for our customers that we cannot be bothered to answer your call promptly so we will put you on hold until you give up and try to use our impenetrable and useless online help instead).”
10. Interesting. Fear this word. When your lawyer uses it, you are doomed. When your doctor uses it, check your will is up to date. The recession is certainly interesting. A slightly less interesting time would be preferable.
11. Opportunity. Because the word “problem” has been banned in business speak, all problems have become opportunities. This means many opportunities are problems. There is a limit to how many opportunities I can solve.
12. Investment. This normally means wild and uncontrolled spending on something for which there is no business case. Important and strategic investments are the high road to bankruptcy.

The goal of strategy is very simple: you have to find a source of unfair competition which results in making excess profits. Regulators and competitors should hate you for this, but without it, you fail. Every firm needs to make “excess” profits somewhere to stay alive: this profit sanctuary will help to pay for all the projects that go wrong, for investments that take time to mature, and to offset the impact of competition, customers, taxpayers, and staff who always seem to want more and give less.
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All firms and clients say they like innovation. They lie. They like the results of successful innovation, which may lead to a source of unfair competitive advantage. But they hate the process of innovation. Next time you are asked to innovate, ask in return if your managers enjoy risk, ambiguity, uncertainty, expense, and failure. Then you will find out how much firms really want innovation. Innovation is fine as long as it is tried, tested and bound to succeed.
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Commission focus groups. These are powerful and often misused. Executives often ask, “What did the focus group prefer?” That is irrelevant. You are not looking for a statistically irrelevant conclusion from a group of eight customers. You are looking for the one insight about how they really think about you and your rivals, about how they use your product or service in practice, what annoys them most about the service, and what they would like instead. Given you are looking for insight, it is often worth listening to the entire focus group yourself: do not expect the moderator to hear what you need to hear.
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Some people fall in love with numbers for the same reason people fall in love with distressed donkeys: they are preferable to humans. But numbers are very dangerous. They give the illusion of certainty in a very uncertain world. You cannot run a business just by sitting behind your desk and dealing with the numbers. John le Carré wrote in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” That is as true for managers as it was for le Carré’s spies.
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Don’t be seduced by the average (mean, mode, or median). The average human being is 52% female and has slightly less than two eyes and two legs (go figure that). There is no such thing as the average human. From a business perspective, outliers and segments are much more interesting than averages: they tell you more about your business and its opportunities.
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The banker’s question: what are the assumptions that lie behind the numbers?
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Too many trainers are not up to the job. Once you have sat through two days of watching a facilitator with a flip chart and a franchised theory asking you to guess what they are going to write on the flip chart, the instinctive reaction is to discover your inner axe-wielding maniac.
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You have to find the context in which you can thrive. Above all, that means you have to be happy signing up to the culture of the firm you will join.
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One of the best managers I know makes a habit of ensuring he praises at least 10 times as often as he criticises. He keeps score. His criticisms are sufficiently unusual that people sit up and take notice. He has now found that even his occasional criticisms are a mistake. He can normally achieve the same outcome by making a positive and supportive suggestion which leads to action. He is one of those rare bosses that people want to work for, rather than having to work for.
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Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” People are even harder to understand.
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Never argue with toddlers, taxi drivers, or God: even if you are right, it will do you no good.
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Once you establish a reputation for tact, even a whisper of disquiet from you will sound like thunder. You build power, credibility, and allies by disagreeing well.
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The simplest way is to have a good coach: a good coach is one who does not answer a question with a question. Your coach should be someone who has seen all the management movies many times and can tell you what is likely to happen next, depending on what you choose to do.
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[on dealing with crises] Over-communicate and build your crisis coalition. As you lead, others will follow. But part of leading is having a clear and simple story which everyone understands about what you are doing. If you do not provide the storyline, then others will create a story about the crisis anyway: their story will invariably be negative. So keep control of the narrative and make sure all the power brokers support what you are doing and your story. This takes an endless amount of time: crises are time hungry events.
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“What did I learn from the meeting?”; “What did I contribute or achieve in the meeting?”; “What will I and others do differently as a result of the meeting?”. A good meeting will have good answers to all three questions for all attendees. If you are invited to a meeting where you expect to draw a blank on all three questions, do not go. If you are inviting people to attend one of your meetings, only invite those who will be able to answer all three questions positively by the end of the meeting. Construct the agenda so that you can achieve this result.
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Finally, remember that meetings should never be used to make decisions: there is a risk that attendees may make the wrong decision. Meetings should be used to confirm in public the agreements you have reached in private. So by the time you get to the meeting, you should know you have enough support, and you should also know who will object and why they will object. There should be no surprises.
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If you do not enjoy work, then your challenge is not about a work–life balance. Your challenge is to find work that you do enjoy.
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There are few good ways, and many bad ways, to die. Perhaps one of the ugliest ways to die is with a hundred bullet points to the head. PowerPoint offers every manager a compelling reason to retire early and start a vegan farm in the sticks.
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As one tribal elder told me: “Words are like gods: words create whole new worlds in someone’s head. So use words well.”
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When I first started out, my boss told me: “One of the benefits of this job is that you will never suffer the rush hour. You will arrive before it and leave after it.”

"Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. --Buckminster Fuller, "Oper

"Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. --Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963."

"Those who never take risks can only see other people's failures. --Paulo Coelho

Porter's Five Forces:
1. The threat of substitute products, e.g. downloading films from the Internet versus buying them from a video store.
2. The threat of current competitors, e.g. the overstocked sandwich market in the UK.
3. The threat of new players with a totally fresh approach, e.g. the new luxury chocolate market.
4. The bargaining power of suppliers, e.g. negotiating with a top brand name.
5. The bargaining power of customers, e.g. customers using Internet shopping sites which compare prices.

"You must give your customers a powerful and positive and enlivening experience, one which is so good that they want to return."

"Get big, get special, or get out."

Price: cost, perception of value, signaling, elasticity, relationship with market share.

Do this for hard and soft value: (THE MEASURABLE BENEFIT TO MY VIP CUSTOMER WAS THAT WE...) (AND WE DELIVERED THIS BY MEANS OF A UNIQUE PROCESS THAT ALLOWED THEM TO...)

Benefits first - advantages second.

Pitch style, incorporating "balanced gain" showing how you get what you want without giving up what you have, and time-bounded: Based on experience dealing with marketing initiatives in your industry...we suspect we could increase targeted consumer awareness of VITO, Inc.'s products by as much as 30%...while REDUCING marketing costs...within the next 90 days.

Work on this, turning it into a short (35 word max) pitch: "Five CEOs in your industry trust and rely on us to enhance shareholder value and dividends by increasing new business revenue by as much as 15% - while containing operational expenses. Time-to-value? 90 days."

VITO priorities: increase revenue, increase efficiency and effectiveness of employees & processes, reducing expenses, and compliance.

Quotes from happy customers. Good: similar industry. Bad: competition. Seek permission to use, and never lie (duh).

Big idea, name, then next-step with time. "What's the fastest way for us to find out if our proven process could be of greater interest to you and your team by the end of this calendar month?

Pain: problem, reasons, impact. "What do you feel is the cause of it?", "What have you personally put into action to remedy this situation?", "And did that meet your expectations?", "How much has this situation cost you and your [operation], [shareholders], [customers], [suppliers] in the past [quarter]?", "How do you personally feel about that?", "Have you decided to resolve the situation at a later date?", "If we could help you (eliminate your problem) by (using X strategy), what would that mean for you personally?", "What would that give your operation an opportunity to do?", "How important is that between [now] and the [end of this month]?" ....

"At this point would you rather have one of your key advisors take a closer look at this, or would you rather move forward with our conversation right now?"

Shunts: CE pushes you to subordinate, response being to know subordinates ahead of time.

1. Don’t generalize; specialize. If you focus on doing one thing well and hire specialists in that area, the quality of your work will improve and you will stand out among your competitors.

2. Relying too heavily on one client is risky and will turn off potential buyers. Make sure that no one client makes up more than 15 percent of your revenue.

3. Owning a process makes it easier to pitch and puts you in control. Be clear about what you’re selling, and potential customers will be more likely to buy your product.

4. Don’t become synonymous with your company. If buyers aren’t confident that your business can run without you in charge, they won’t make their best offer.

5. Avoid the cash suck. Once you’ve standardized your service, charge up front or use progress billing to create a positive cash flow cycle.

6. Don’t be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you’re serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you’ll get to people who need your product or service.

7. Take some time to figure out how many pipeline prospects will likely lead to sales. This number will become essential when you go to sell because it allows the buyer to estimate the size of the market opportunity.

8. Two sales reps are always better than one. Usually naturally competitive types, sales reps will try to outdo each other. And having two on staff will prove to a buyer that you have a scalable sales model, not just one good sales rep.

9. Hire people who are good at selling products, not services. These people will be better able to figure out how your product can meet a client’s needs rather than agreeing to customize your offering to fit what the client wants.

10. Ignore your profit-and-loss statement in the year you make the switch to a standardized offering even if it means you and your employees will have to forgo a bonus that year. As long as your cash flow remains consistent and strong, you’ll be back in the black in no time.

11. You need at least two years of financial statements reflecting your use of the standardized offering model before you sell your company.

12. Build a management team and offer them a long-term incentive plan that rewards their personal performance and loyalty.

13. Find an adviser for whom you will be neither their largest nor their smallest client. Make sure they know your industry.

14. Avoid an adviser who offers to broker a discussion with a single client. You want to ensure there is competition for your business and avoid being used as a pawn for your adviser to curry favor with his or her best client.

15. Think big. Write a three-year business plan that paints a picture of what is possible for your business. Remember, the company that acquires you will have more resources for you to accelerate your growth.

16. If you want to be a sellable, product-oriented business, you need to use the language of one. Change words like “clients” to “customers” and “firm” to “business.” Rid your Web site and customerfacing communications of any references that reveal you used to be a generic service business.

17. Don’t issue stock options to retain key employees after an acquisition. Instead, use a simple stay bonus that offers the members of your management team a cash reward if you sell your company. Pay the reward in two or more installments only to those who stay so that you ensure your key staff stays on through the transition.

Domino’s was the first company to offer home-delivered pizza and remains the leader in that particular market. Coca-Cola, the world’s top five most popular and financially successful brand, was the first in the cola category.
As Chapter 10 will make clear, this theory breaks down, however, in technology markets. Owing to the fact that consumer behaviour tends to be approximately five years behind technological breakthroughs [emphasis mine], the first mover advantage is often lost.

As you would expect with a brand that has built its name through uniformity, McDonald’s is heavily centralized. Most branding and marketing decisions need to go through the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. The recipe for the Arch Deluxe itself came from the Oak Brook kitchen. This contrasts with McDonald’s major product successes such as the Big Mac, the Hot Apple Pie, the Egg McMuffin and the Filet o’ Fish, which were all invented in operators’ kitchens out in the field [emphasis mine] (whereas other flops such as the McLean burger and McPizza were also conjured up at the Oak Brook headquarters).

Holding companies rule the industry. Avid watches of Mad Men know that the Sterling Cooper agency was bought by a holding company in the third season. Ownership limited the decisions the leadership could make. Ultimately, the limitations imposed by the holding company spurred the major players to launch out on their own. Once upon a time, agencies were truly run from the vision of their leadership. Today, four holding companies (the Interpublic Group of Companies, the Omnicom Group, the Publicis Groupe, and WPP) control much of the global industry. Holding companies set corporate strategy, direct collaborative relationships among agencies within the corporation, and dictate operational and fiscal management of their agencies.

Awards are still important. There are many awards sought after in the industry, such as Cannes Lions, One Sow Pencils, Clios, Addys, and Effies. The interviewees and their agencies hold many of these awards. Mike Hughes discusses the role awards can play in driving the work of creatives, and Susan Creadle explains in her interview how her team uses Leo Burnett's HumanKind scale to evaluate and judge the quality and potential of their ideas. Though awards aren't the only measure of an idea's success, they are critical to recognizing the value and influence of ideas. They are important to agencies as recruitment tools for both top talent and new clients.

[Raih] I’ll tell you something my uncle taught me. I was home for Thanksgiving or something a couple of years ago. I asked him, “How do you decide what to take on or what to tackle?” I am going to butcher this relatively slick piece of advice he gave me, but I will do my best. He basically said, “Think about a bull’s-eye. In the center of that bull’s-eye is where you bill out at a high hourly level.” Not to make it all about dollars and cents, but basically what he was saying is that as a founder, I am the center of this bull’s-eye. I need to spend as much time in that bull’s-eye to further the company’s interests. The further I get out in those concentric circles, the less I am serving the best interest of the company. That is something that I took to heart. I try to stay in that bull’s-eye as much as possible while not becoming detached from the front line.

[Raih] At Zambezi, we try to keep the collective IQ high. We have instituted a multiplatform, internal entity called Bites. On a weekly basis, we curate and distribute an HTML recap newsletter of the eight or ten most pertinent stories in marketing, sports entertainment, and tech. We distribute it to not only to our people, but also to our clients, production partners, and media partners. We distribute that once a week and then we get together once a month for a Bites immersion session. These sessions are mandatory, all-company meetings. They are a chance to put the pencils down and get away from computer screens.
Sometimes we meet off site or bring speakers in. We may go see an art exhibit or a show. We may do a show-and-tell session. For example, our most recent session was Friday. We had a couple of different things going on. Some of our creatives presented side projects. These were cheeky videos which brought the freaking house down. Lastly we did a kind of deep dive on media. Our media staffers presented on key terms, industry developments, new metrics, and that kind of thing. It was very well received.
Last month we went to the Tim Burton exhibit at the LACMA, the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, and sometimes we will go to a Dodger game or what have you. We typically parlay a Bites emerging session with two goals: team building and keeping our collective IQ high. My perception, and maybe I am blind to it, is that our staffers really love what we do with Bites. It is so sharp and it’s good enough that six months ago we started submitting it externally. Every client gets a copy of Bites from Zambezi, which underlines and speaks to being on the bleeding edge of what’s new and relevant in marketing, pop culture, technology, and sports entertainment.
Bites is branded by Zambezi, and it serves as tangible evidence that Zambezi is curious and hungry to know more. Bites hits the inbox of all of our clients all the way up to CMOs and CEOs.

[Raih] You can’t sell to today’s young consumers. You have to provoke them.

[Raih, an example of wording that makes me dislike advertisers] With the provocative content and really strong social media engagement using Facebook and Twitter, the video became very well trafficked. We were able to hijack the mindshare around fantasy football.

[Raih] First of all, we get out of bed every morning and we still have flat bellies and sharp spears.

Kristen Cavallo] We toyed with the idea of my family moving to Boston and for various personal reasons that did not pan out. I withdrew from consideration for the job. I was really disappointed about it and I thought it just wasn’t in the cards. Then in February, Alex Leikikh [Mullen’s president] called back and said, “I am staring at Fast Company’s list of the top ten Most Innovative Marketing Companies in the country.” Mullen had made the list. He said, “It occurred to me that we are not being very innovative about this, so let’s start over. Let’s rewrite the rules and figure out a way to make this work.”

[Cavallo] Take yourself seriously, read, travel, be well-spoken. When you go into the room, take a seat alongside key decision makers. Believe that you belong there. If you don’t believe you belong there, or if you sit shyly on the sidelines, then you won’t be invited back.

[Cavallo] Mullen really has a sweet spot with thought-leader brands. By thought-leader brands I mean brands that tend to be outspent, brands that tend to not be the market share leader in that category. Thought-leader brands must challenge the product category and do business differently. These are brands that have to think their way out of a problem because they don’t have the luxury of throwing money at it. Market share leaders tend to have the lion’s share of money and customers. It’s a totally different situation in how to approach the market. With these brands, usually we move at a really fast pace and are constantly asking ourselves, “What’s next?”
Our clients tend to feed their consumer-based social conversations with lots of initiatives, or topics in succession, much more frequently than maybe a market share leader would. That’s because they are trying to turn the category conversation in their favor, always trying to pull people to their brand. And since they don’t spend more than the market share leader, they have to say more provocative things to cause consumers to reappraise their choice.

[Cavallo] Kohler plumbing is one of my favorites. I have worked on that brand twice—once at Mullen and once at Martin. Now every time I redo a new house, I redo it in Kohler from head to toe. I just love the whole mythology of that brand. I love the fact that Kohler is the name of the brand and the town it originated in, and the head of the company is the mayor of the town. The work they do is beautiful. They have a soul. They have one of the largest artists-in-residence programs of any company. Ten feet away from someone spray-painting enamel on a toilet, there is someone painting a fresco of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Mr. Kohler wants his employees to feel like artisans, not workers in a factory. That passion is reflected in the beauty of the Kohler products. I love that! I loved the whole spirit of the company.

[Luke Sullivan] I often think there are three main chapters to a creative person’s career. Getting famous, getting money, and getting settled. When you first start, you’re all on fire and you want to show the world you can do this. Your focus tends to be on awards because the recognition is evidence that you can do the work. Then after you’ve convinced yourself, “Dang, I really can do this,” you think, “Hey, I should get paid more for this. I do it really well.” That comprises much of the middle of one’s career. And then there’s that time when you want stability more than anything else. You have kids. You don’t want to move around as much anymore. So you look for a long-term home, a place you can see yourself happy in for ten, fifteen years.

[Sullivan] Bertrand Russell said, “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

[Sullivan] When I was young, there was no boundary between work and life. Work was life. That may still be okay for those without spouses or children and for people who know how to keep sane in a business that does not promote sanity. But in my middle and later years, I drew a line in the sand and said this is work and this is home.
I always tried to be in the car at 5:50 or 6:00. I was fortunate enough to work at places that weren’t driven by what I see as a destructive work ethic. We all hear about them. These are places where you work until midnight all year long. Personally, I think such an ethic is destructive, even for young people. It’s not a sustainable model, not on a personal level anyway. It’s probably sustainable for the shops—they just need to keep the new meat coming in the side door as the burnouts are being poured out the back. But it’s not for me. Nothing is that important anymore. Only my family.

[Mike Hughes] Reporters—newspaper, magazine, and all kinds of reporters—they go out and cover what’s interesting. In advertising, the content may or may not be inherently interesting. We have to find ways to interest people in what we’re writing about. So it’s a different kind of discipline.

[Hughes] One of the things that I’ve been working on a lot for the last year and a half is this notion of storybuilding. Once upon a time we were brand storytellers. Now we start a story and the audience—our customers and our observers and everybody else—joins in on the conversation. We don’t tell the stories. We build them. That also means that storytelling is no longer media-specific. The story can be told through all the things a brand does. We’re trying—I’m trying—to encourage companies to be a little bolder and not so thin-skinned about what people say and how people add to their stories. It’s hard for a company to respond quickly to what happens online, for example. But, on the other hand, companies must be responsible with their responses to how others expand their brand stories.

[Hughes] I’m also getting involved in serious discussions at meetings. A couple of years ago, I was kind of frustrated because I’d go to meetings and I’d hear the same people speaking up in every meeting. I wanted everybody to speak up and I thought we needed to hear more diverse voices. I developed this thing I called “Beer and Popcorn.” People came into the room at four o’clock, and I put some subjects up on the wall. I said, “Let’s pick which one we are going to talk about today.” These topics had nothing to do with advertising or the agency. One day we ended up with this conversation about religion. Of course, that’s one of the things you’re not supposed to be able to talk about, but I wanted to demonstrate to people that we could talk about anything. We had a fabulous discussion that continued in e-mail messages for weeks afterwards. Being part of the conversation, being part of the thinking that goes on in a company that is supposed to be both strategic and creative, that can be an exciting possibility.

[Susan Credle] I think as a leader or as someone in this position—sometimes I just want to go kill everybody. But as a leader you want everything to be right, you want everybody to come through for you. I think if you’re not careful, your first instinct is to really be frustrated with people, and while that’s the feeling, I don’t think it gets you anywhere. So I’m trying to reframe everyday frustration into something else. If I’m frustrated, it means that people need me to help them do something that they’re not doing right now. To me, I’m blaming myself as much as the people that I need to do something. It’s like, “I must be doing something wrong because they’re not getting where we need to get.” So, that’s a hard one.
I did have a boss years ago who said something beautiful. I asked him, “How do you lead? How do you get people to do stuff?” And he said, “You know, interestingly, it’s not one leadership style. For every individual, I have to think about what would motivate them—because we’re not all motivated by the same things.” And that was really interesting. He said to really think about people. “What can I tell them? What can I do for them that will motivate them to be better?” There’s no one answer.

[Credle] My dad was asking me for some help. He’s with UNC Memorial Hospital and he needed to name a residents’ program that he was working on. We were hanging out, and so I said, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” About fifteen minutes later, I sent him an e-mail across the room with an idea that I thought would work. He e-mailed me back saying, “How much do I owe you?” And I e-mailed him: “$30,000.” And he said, “That only took you fifteen minutes.” And I replied, “No, it took me forty-eight years. You just saw the last fifteen minutes.”

[Marshall Ross] I think that all successful marketing people are successful because they understand how to link desire with solution.

[Ross] I think that’s a very nice, succinct way of saying that the art of persuasion is to make sure that your idea is actually their need. That’s why I call it “linkage.” I think sales is about connecting. The art of persuasion is making that connection feel obvious, innate, and inarguable. If you’ve done a good job of making their issue and your solution become indelibly connected, their response is, “Well, what else would I do?”

[Ross] I remember when I was at a large holding-company agency [Foote, Cone, & Belding, part of the Interpublic Group] and recognized one of the motivations for starting my own agency. I literally just started to keep track on a piece of paper where my time was spent. I figured out I was spending something like seventy percent of my time negotiating internally for what I could show to a client versus working with clients and working on the craft of making things great. That statistic just sort of blew my mind. I said, “This is insane. [...] You know, we’re a bigger hurdle than the world is."

[Edward Boches] I got bored with just delivering other people’s messages to other people’s audiences with other people’s money.

[Boches] For a long time, we made ideas out of words, pictures, and stories. And now ideas are also made out of technology and applications and utility.

[Boches] I think the brief ought to start with the problem that we’re trying to solve. The problem, by the way, may not be an advertising problem. It’s what kind of problem are we trying to solve that would make our brand of more value to this consumer?
I think the second thing it has to address is the use of media, technology, content, and community by the users, customers, or target audience or community members. Thinking about how somebody interacts with stuff beyond just the brand and the category is really important. I would actually go so far as to have every brief basically say, “You can’t solve this problem with an ad. You have to solve this problem with an idea that isn’t an ad.” Then you get to invent this idea or creative that might be worth advertising, right? I think another way to look at it is to really figure out the problem behind the problem. The problem can’t be, “Oh, we want know about this product.” The problem might be, “Well, what problem do these people actually have that we could solve?” And maybe solving it and actually doing something of value in the world of social media, etc., might be the reason that gets them to pay attention to us and might turn them on to the product we want them to know about. That’s almost coming at it from an extreme perspective in order to fight the inclination to solve problems with a TV commercial.

[Boches] Now all of a sudden, these three, four things crashed into my brain and I came up with an idea. The basic idea is “can mandatory social media service save America?” My thought is instead of having mandatory military service and mandatory community service, what if we had mandatory social media service? What if the basic idea was you get recruited and you get put into a circle, a Google circle if you will, with eleven other people from different regions, different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., and you get handed a problem? The problem could be obesity, or poverty, or unemployment, or the fact that young men get all their sex education from watching online porn. You get handed the problem and you have to solve the problem as a group, not unlike a jury. You have benchmark goal setting and procedure. There’s a proctor who pays attention to this thing and the result comes out and gets posted on a common web site, where legislatures and the press and academia and business can get ideas and begin to implement them.
Maybe we will solve problems and maybe we won’t, but the idea is that we’d have a pretty good likelihood of increasing empathy, interdependency, and an understanding of other people’s perspectives by having mandatory social media service. The service would not be that demanding since basically every eighteen-year-old in America is on social media already. And yes, there are three or four things we have to figure out, such as the multilingual thing, access to technology for everybody, and how to actually implement this thing. But it’s the best idea that I’ve had all year. Do you think it’s any good?

[Doug Fidoten] at the little shop I was kind of a jack-of-all-trades. In a real agency, nobody does everything. This was exacerbated in that at the small shop, nobody was really giving any credit to what I was doing. Plus, I couldn’t point to any of the clients as being anything anybody would actually pay any attention to!

[Fidoten] It was my first opportunity to bring a brand into a category where it was so hard to distinguish one brand from the next. Literally, the only thing that would distinguish one brand from another in this product category was the name placed on the box. [...] we really hit on this idea that we would separate the product by claiming it. By identifying it on the packaging, by creating this notion of the gold standard, creating literally a seal, making it part of the box, making it part of the campaign. We introduced the brand as the gold standard, in a product category where there was no standard. There was no way of distinguishing one from the next. This concept meant that when a prospect looked at the packaging, immediately it was clear that there’s something about this brand that’s different than the others.

[Fidoten] No matter how many steps you take from the first time you’re sitting at a desk to years and years later, you don’t actually shed any job.

Could there be a productive outcome from this argument?
Is it better to have the argument in private or with other people around?
Do you have the information you need to make a good argument?
Are you feeling emotionally ready for the argument?
Is the other person emotionally ready to hear your arguments?

Burden of proof. This is a really important issue in arguing, but many people don’t appreciate its significance. Consider a chair of a meeting who says this:
“Well, this proposal looks very interesting. Can anyone think of any reason why we should not proceed?”
By putting the question this way the chair has put the burden of proof on those who don’t think that the proposal should go ahead. There’s no need to make the case for the proposal, that’s assumed. Imagine if the chair had said:
“Well, here’s the proposal. Does anyone think a convincing case has been made to adopt this?”
Hence the approach to take in arguing in favor of buying a particular new car is to say:
“Give me one good reason why we should not buy this car.” By saying this the assumption is made that buying the car is good. You might have said:
“Give me one good reason why we should buy this car.”
But that would put the burden of proof on finding good reasons to purchase the car. So in arguing, seek to steer the argument into asking why your point of view should not be accepted. That way skeptics will remain on your side, unless they’re convinced that there is a good reason to go against you.

To illustrate that point, I want to bring you to perhaps the most hierarchical, inaccessible, closed environment I know of: an American public high school. In particular, I’d like to take you to Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, where our youngest son, Charlie, is a student. The school opened in 1927, and it has not changed much since then.

Last summer, Charlie was happy to learn that he had earned a 5 on the AP Art History exam. This made him eligible to serve as a sort of teaching assistant for this year’s Art History class. All he needed to do was align his free period with the scheduled slot for Art History.

I don’t know how many of you have tried to parse a high-school scheduling API. It seems to rely on green-screen devices, stacks of forms, and a queueing process that means you won’t have your new schedule in hand until two weeks after the start of the school year.

On a Friday in July, Charlie came home to find his junior-year schedule in the mail. His free period did not align. Charlie has seen his brother and sister fight the powers that be at Columbia High School, at times unsuccessfully, and he decided to pursue a different course.

Lacking access to the master schedule, he went to a free resource—Facebook—posted his schedule there, and asked anyone who attended Columbia High School to do the same.

By Sunday morning, he had gathered enough data to compile his own master schedule. With this information in hand, he rearranged his classes, filled out a home-made “change form”, and sent it to the high school on Monday morning. “Please give me this schedule,” it said. Problem solved.

Stories like this one … have led me to see piracy as the consequence of a bad API. 16-year-olds expect access, or they invent it.

Content is no longer just a product. It’s part of a value chain that solves readers’ problems. Readers expect publishers to poin them to the outcomes or answers they want, where and when they want them. We’re interested in content solutions that don’t waste our time, a precious commodity for all of us.

Readers expect that their content solutions will improve over time. They don’t care that much (or at all) about how it happens.

When you were dealing with Papa, you were dealing with something inevitable. You couldn’t escape him anymore than you could escape winter weather or a hard wind. You could try to hide behind something for a little while, but sooner or later you always had to step out and face it.

Then Mama began to cook supper. Lord, she could cook. She ran the house, just as Papa ran the outside work. He didn’t tell her how to cook a meal, and she didn’t tell him how much wood to chop so that we could get through the winter. It was a good setup. I don’t actually recall but one or two loud conversations, where it was obvious even to a kid that they wasn’t agreeing on something. Through them, I came to believe even then that if you take care of your corner of life, you’ll find a partner that will take care of theirs, and then you’ll have a long and happy togetherness. Otherwise, you’ll fight all the time.

Like I said, that’s the saddest song I’ve ever sung. It’s supposed to be a true song, too. And I believe it. Back when I was boy, if a girl got pregnant, she never did return home. Not pregnant and single. She just wasn’t welcome. Sometimes we’d notice one of these girls missing, and being children, we’d ask, “Where’s Mary?” The grown-ups would always have the same answer, “She’s off to college.” Even as kids we knew better. These people were just like us, so poor they did good to get a kid through grade school, let alone college. So if they said they sent one to college, it’s a sure bet she wasn’t never coming back, not unless she had a husband. And then only after many years.

“Ain’t nobody ever died of being bashful,” Papa said. “Tell you what, boys, if you’re that nervous, crawl under the bed here where we can’t see you, and do your singing there.” So Ira and I crawled under the bed, and from there we sang “Mary of the Wild Moor” with our tails together, facing opposite directions. We must’ve done a good job, too, because the room was pretty much dead silent when we finished. No giggling or chuckling at all. Still, we didn’t give Papa a chance to ask for another one. We slid down to the end of the bed, and then ran like hell out the front door. We were screwed after that, though. Once Papa’d figured out that trick for us, we had to sing from under the bed pretty much anytime anybody stopped by the house. And if we went any place, he expected us to sing at the drop of a hat. Just walking down the road, Papa’d pop his fingers and say, “Do ’em one,” and that’s the way it was. We’d do at least one song, even if that’s all we had time for. Papa saw to it. Lord, we hated him for making us sing like that. But as always with Papa, there was probably more to it than what we saw. He worked in ways you couldn’t always figure out at first, and as much as we got pissed off at having to sing, he trained all the bashfulness right out of us. By making us sing those songs for folks, he forced us to learn how to perform. And we began to understand that we could entertain folks.

That first song was electric. The whole church filled with the music of our voices. This was the first time I was really expected to sing along, but I joined in as easily as if I’d been doing it a hundred years. The human voice, that’s what they’re talking about when they say Sacred Harp, and there’s nothing like it in the world. You can’t really record it, either. Since everybody sings, it’s awful hard to get a microphone positioned so you can mix all of them. But it does your soul good to hear it.

“Come on, Charlie,” said Ira. And as scared as I was, I looked up at him. He was smiling down at me, confident and tall. And that was the thing about Ira, as much as he could convince me to do something I knew I shouldn’t do, like chop down that damn persimmon tree, he could always help me on the path to something that needed doing. There was two sides to his gift for convincing, as there was two sides to everything with him.

That was another of Ira’s gifts. You could play him a piece of music and he could take it down to its parts, pull out what he needed, and use it. He could do it with people, too. That’s why he was so good with women, even at an early age. He wasn’t ever as good-looking as he thought he was, but he could see right into them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always a gift for the rest of us. As surely as he could pinpoint something he could take advantage of, he could spot a weakness. And if he wanted to, he could take your flesh down to the bone with it. Sure enough, from then on after he saw that girl, there’d come a time when we were singing together that he’d slip into one of those high parts and then come back down, just like she did. He built it right into our act. In a way, our entire career was built on doing unorthodox things like that, things no sensible person might do, and we learned a lot of them from Sacred Harp. Sometimes the tenor and the melody would work together, and I would go down as Ira went up, and we would end up in the same place, only he would be twice as high as I would be, and we got so many compliments on it that we started using it fairly regular. It baffled a lot of people, too, how we could change parts without nudging or winking at each other. He’d take the high lead and I’d do the low harmony under it, and he knew exactly when my part would get too high for me just like I knew when his would get too low for him, and we could change in the middle of a word. Part of the reason we could do that was that we’d learned to have a good ear for other peoples’ voices when we sang Sacred Harp. But the other part is that we were brothers. There’s no one that knows your weaknesses like a brother. I knew Ira’s, and, as he proved time and time again in our career, he surely knew mine.

Anyway, we worked the whole rest of that season from sunup until sundown. We worked until it was too dark to work, and then stumbled down to the house and rinsed our bloody hands down with rubbing alcohol, so they’d be ready to use again the next day. Because at the end of every day, Papa would show each of us that tally and say, “You’ll do that every day, or you’ll get your ass whipped.” So who was the dumb one? It sure wasn’t Papa. But being worked liked that, meeting Papa’s tallies, set us on the path of music just as much as our love of singing did. For Ira especially. One night, while climbing into bed, bone-tired after another day of picking, he said to me, “We ain’t got no choice, Charlie. You know that.” “No choice about what, Ira?” I said. I already had the blanket up to my chin and I could hardly keep my eyes open. “No choice about whether or not we make it as singers.” His voice sounded choked up, and I looked over at him. He was older than me, almost full grown, but he looked like he might just bust out in tears. “I can’t do this for the rest of my life.” “I know, Ira,” I said. And I did. I probably didn’t understand how much his back hurt from having to stoop over to keep up with the picking. Nor did I know what it felt like to be the oldest, to take Papa’s beatings the way he did. But I knew what he meant. That having a music career didn’t mean the Opry or riding around in a fancy automobile anymore. It meant not picking cotton for the rest of our lives. It meant survival.

“Charlie,” he said. “You’re gonna have to learn to play the guitar.” Well, I would have rather somebody pissed down my leg than told me something like that. “I don’t want to,” I said, hanging my head. “It’s necessary, Charlie,” he said. “The Blue Sky Boys got a mandolin and a guitar, the Monroe Brothers got a mandolin and a guitar, the Delmore Brothers got a tenor guitar and a regular guitar. I’m gonna take up the mandolin, and I need you to take up the guitar.” He was right. There was no getting around it. Every duet had what you’d call a lead instrument and a rhythm instrument. And since there was only the two of us, it wasn’t too hard to figure out who was talented enough to play the lead instrument.

It didn’t hurt us, but it convinced us that working in a woolen mill wasn’t what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. And maybe it helped us understand that working for Papa wasn’t really any worse than working for anybody else. If you’re killing yourself to make somebody else money, there ain’t no future in it.

I’ll never forget this one pool hall. It was run by this crook who’d pay us to clear beer bottles off the tables in between songs. Only instead of throwing the beer bottles away, he’d have us take all the half-full beers over to this special cooler, where he would fill them up with other half-full beers and twist a new cap on them. Then when some guy got tipsy enough where he couldn’t tell one beer from another, this guy would sell him one of the old beers. Hell, he’d fill up more than a hundred and fifty bottles of beer a night that way. You wouldn’t believe how many half-full beers people will walk off and leave. We’d clear tables like that for an hour, and then get up and play some music.

You can weather any storm if you believe that it’s gonna be better on down the road.

We missed out on a lot of sleep, but that was part of the business. Besides, they had pills for it. Some of the boys back then, they took them even if they never got close to the steering wheel, just to get high, but I used ’em to drive. I had to. Ira couldn’t hardly drive at all because of his back and, sometimes, the beer. I used to be able to get them that were called Old Yellers, and one of them would carry me five hundred miles to do a show and five hundred miles back without sleep. Other people would take one starting out and then two more to make it there, and then three to get back home, but I never could take that many. My body’s too timid. I couldn’t handle ’em all. We were always racing the clock, pulling up just as the show was about to start. We’d pile out of the cars, and the first thing I’d say to the show’s organizer was, “You got a creek around here?” “Right down there,” they’d say, and point me at it. So I’d step down to the creek, and it’d be running just as clear and cold as could be, and I’d pour that water up on my face, then take my handkerchief and dry off, and say, “All right, let’s go.”

He always insisted that if you want to be a star, then the first thing you have to do is look like a fucking star. If you look like a star and you act like a star, then you stand a chance. But if you look like a bum and call yourself a star, they’re only gonna call you by the first name. You’re just gonna be a bum.

The good times with Eddie couldn’t last forever. Nothing does. Around 1949, Ira and I were starting to figure Memphis was getting played out. It was just like every town before. We’d done every venue that was big enough to hold a show two or three times over, and that’s just about all people will put up with from you. They won’t come to see the same program over and over.

I never could understand the drinking. Not with Hank, and not with Ira, either. Whiskey don’t cure nothing. You might forget what you’re trying to forget tonight, but when you wake up tomorrow, it’ll be back. And so will your headache and hangover. It’ll just multiply on you, and eventually whiskey won’t do any good at all for what you’re trying to use it for. Whether it be to forget or to have a good time, there’ll come a day when it’ll require more than you can drink, more than anybody can drink. And that will be your complete downfall. That’s what happened to Hank. It got to where the whiskey couldn’t do him any good, so he had to move on to something stronger.

If I was looking at someone else with the career path we had, I’d have probably told them to let it go at that point. I don’t know how long you should keep trying if you don’t seem to be making any progress. There comes a time when you just have to say, “I’ve given it my best and it wasn’t good enough.” But we never could do that.

We’ve had some others in Nashville that you never saw totally straight, that’s for sure. George Jones was probably the worst. I worked a show with him once and we were standing back in the wings waiting to go on. He was acting a little peculiar, so I asked, “You been drinking, George?” “Naw,” he said. “I been working on my drinking problem.” “How’s that?” By way of an answer, he reached in his coat pocket, pulled out a handful of cocaine, and buried his nose in it, snorting. Then, when he’d fixed up that side of his nose, he went after the other.
“How’s that working for you?” I asked. “Pretty good,” he said. “Waylon told me it’d help.”

A lot of times I’d come home, and the first thing she’d do is tell me that she’d told one or another of them that I would whip his ass. But I never did have much stomach for that. I’d say, “Hey, I didn’t come home to beat the kids. I come home to enjoy them.”

Teddy and Doyle of the Wilburn Brothers didn’t get along. And the Delmore Brothers didn’t get along, either. It seemed like in every duet, there’d be one of them that was a drinker. In the Delmore Brothers, it was Rabon, and in the Wilburn Brothers, it was Doyle. You’d think two brothers from the same family would be something alike. But it never worked out that way.

It’d get him trouble now and then, too. Once we were working a dance in Buzzard Roost, Texas, and some guy came over and asked Ira, “Buddy, would you do me a great favor?” He was a big old boy, as tall as Ira, but about twice as broad. “If I can, I will,” Ira said. “My wife really wants to dance with you,” the guy said. “She does?” Ira said. “Which one is she?” “That’s her right there,” the guy said, pointing. And she was a real beauty. Had to be the prettiest woman in Buzzard Roost, anyway. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Ira said, but he was still looking at her, ogling her, really, and I could already tell how this was gonna end. “Aw, there’s nothing to it,” the guy said. “Just do me a favor and dance with her for one song.” Well, Ira got out there and started to dance with her. And as the song wore on, they kept moving a little closer together. Right up until that guy walked out on the dance floor, grabbed Ira’s shoulder, and just knocked the shit out of him. Laid him out on the floor. “What the hell’s wrong with you, man?” I said. “You talked him into it.” “I asked him to dance with her,” the guy said. “Not fuck her on the dance floor.”

It’s not very cool when you go to enough funerals to eradicate an entire family, an entire generation. It’s the worst feeling in the world, if you want the truth.

Old age is different from anything you’ll ever encounter in your life. Your head will lie to you, your heart will lie to you, and your pecker will lie to you. You’ll see something sitting there that you used to handle with one hand, just pick it up and sling it, and your head will tell you, “Are you kidding, man? You’ve lifted twice that much.” Then you’ll grab ahold of it and find out that it’s more than you can handle. Those golden years they talk about, they’re bullshit.

Big car, little dick
Currus magnus, mentula minuscula

Big car, little dick
Currus magnus, mentula minuscula

Athletes who complain about their pay end up in an urn
Athletae qui queruntur de mercedibus mox in urnas funduntur

The theory of evolution is baloney. Everyone knows the whole universe came out of Saturn’s nostrils
Theoria Darwiniana evolutionis specierum absurda est. Constat inter omnes universitatem rerum ab naribus Saturni venisse

Make the mother the father, change the cat to a dog, and lose the kid with cancer
Muta matrem in patrem, converte felem in canem, amitte puerum cancerosum