You may recall that our adventure began in Chapter 1 with the words, “Nick, we just finished 1963 all over again, but this time we’re headed in the opposite direction.”
Had I fully understood the alternating directions of society’s forty-year Pendulum, I might have more accurately said, “Nick, 2003 was 1923 all over again. Same position. Same direction.”
The “Monday Morning Memo” for January 13, 2003:
Figure 16.1 The first half of an upswing into “WE”
Year of the Internet’s Bar Mitzvah
During the second half of the 1990s the first hand in the air following every public session I taught would be followed by the question, “What about the Internet?”
My answer never changed: “The Internet is a baby born prematurely. It will grow up to become everything you’ve been promised, but it can’t possibly happen as quickly as they’re saying.”
When I followed that statement with my prediction that the price of Internet-based stocks would soon be dropping like a rock, I received sneers and jeers from smug, little reactionaries who considered me to be “a dinosaur stuck in the land of bricks and mortar.”
Remember those days?
iStockphoto / boy: doodlemachine, cloud: kysa
Then, in January of 2001, reporter Rich Kyanka wrote, “If you’ve heard news regarding any online networks lately, their name was more than likely followed by details of massive layoffs, delayed payments, breaches of contract, or even their imminent demise. . . . Why has Internet advertising failed? . . . Despite all the intensely positive predictions and glorious outlooks to the future, something suddenly went wrong. Investors began demanding to know where all their money was going and when they’d get to see their cash return. Suddenly the business plan of having no business plan began to taste sour. Companies refused to sink further funding into an industry that was essentially founded on smoke and mirrors. The lure of having your name attached to a dot-com began to seem less and less appealing, and investors began to pull out at unbelievable speeds. . . . Simply put, the current [Internet] advertising model does not work. Readers know this, companies know this, and online advertisers definitely know this. Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by, need things that aren’t currently being offered.”
Longtime readers of these “Monday Morning Memos” will recall that during a year after high-tech’s crash of the NASDAQ I wrote to you saying, “Make no mistake. I still believe that the Internet will ultimately deliver all that it promised, but not quite yet. . . . I’ll tell you when it’s time to get in.
Figure 16.2 Drivers of a “WE” cycle.
| WE | DRIVERS OF A “WE” CYCLE |
| WHAT’S ON THE HORIZON? | |
1. Conforms for the common good 2. Assumes personal responsibility 3. Believes a million men are wiser than one man 4. Yearns to create a better world—”I came, I saw, I concurred.” 5. Takes small actions 6. Desires to be part of a productive team 7. Values humility and thoughtful persons 8. Believes leadership is “This is the problem as I see it. Let’s solve it together.” 9. Focuses on solving problems to strengthen society’s sense of purpose |
|
Now Is That Time
The buying public has finally figured out what the Internet is currently best suited for—information gathering and features-based comparison shopping. A recent report by Reuters indicates that 79 percent of today’s Internet users expect businesses to have a website and for that site “to give them information about products that they are considering buying.”
The Internet is no longer a new and strange phenomenon. America has grown accustomed to it, and we’re turning to it for information with increasing regularity. According to Google.com, more than fifty-five billion searches were conducted on their search engine alone last year, and nearly eighty million searches “of a commercial nature” are being conducted each day. This is a number equal to about one-third of the total US population. And that’s a daily number.
Your customers are among those conducting these “commercial searches.” Is your information there for them to find? Without question, 2003 is the year for business owners to get serious about their Internet presence; but here are some important things that you should know:
Figure 16.3 Mindset and values in society during a “WE” cycle.
| WE |
| TIPS TO CREATE A SERIOUS INTERNET PRESENCE IN A WE CYCLE |
1. Informative is the jumbo jet that will take you where you want to go. 2. The web is an information delivery system. Not an advertising vehicle. 3. Use your site to build confidence, inform your customer and anticipate and answer questions 24/7. 4. Insightful website architecture and exceptional writing tromp dazzling graphics. 5. Make it easy on your customers. Frustrate them and they’re gone. |
WE |
I never jump on bandwagons, but instead, always wait for the armored car that hauls the money. The Internet bandwagon crashed and burned in 2000. Now is the year of the armored car. |
| Are you ready to ride? | |
Like any accurate prediction, my assertion in January 2003, that “Now is that time” seems self-evident. But keep in mind the Internet was still something of a wasteland at that time. Very few people had heard of Wikipedia. Google was still struggling with its business model, and PayPal™ was looking for early adopters. Facebook hadn’t been launched yet, and YouTube was still three years away. Twitter was barely on the horizon, four years in the future.
As we moved into the six-year transitionary window of 2003 to 2008, the Pendulum was in the same position it held in 1923, at the beginning of the last “We.” The top songs in a “We” are never the “apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves” of a “Me.” Do you remember the whining and complaining lyrics of 1923 as Western society embraced cold, hard facts and reveled in the pain of clear-eyed reality?
Figure 16.4 Popular music themes in a downswing from a “WE” cycle.
| WE | POPULAR MUSIC THEMES: FIRST HALF OF AN UPSWING INTO “WE” (2003–2013) |
| 2003’S TOP SONGS | |
1. “Where Is the Love?” The Black Eyed Peas |
MESSAGE |
| What’s wrong with the world, mama? Selfishness got us followin’ our wrong direction. |
People don’t practice what they preach. |
2. “Hey Ya!” OutKast |
|
| My baby don’t mess around because she loves me so. And this I know for sho. But does she really wanna? |
I’m not as sure as I want to be. |
3. “All the Things She Said”—t.A.T.u. |
|
| I’m in serious shit, I feel totally lost And I’m all mixed up, feeling cornered and rushed. |
I’m confused and unsure of what to do. |
4. “Shut Up,” The Black Eyed Peas |
|
| And we try to make it work But it still ends up the worst. |
We try and try, but we just can’t get along. |
The year 2003 was the year the Hollywood movie formula was turned on its head. Motion picture studios had long known that all they had to do to ensure a movie’s success was to pair the hot leading man of the moment—at that time, Ben Affleck—with the hot leading lady of the moment—Jennifer Lopez—and fan the flames of a tabloid romance. Then release a movie starring the love-struck pair and—ka-ching!—watch the money roll in. Hollywood worked this formula perfectly in 2003. Ben gave Jennifer an engagement ring with a six-carat, pink diamond worth $1.2 million, and the pair were photographed together everywhere.
The movie they made, Gigli, was released in 2,215 theaters on August 1, a Friday. Ticket sales were down 27 percent the next day, and by Sunday the movie was deader than a bag of hammers.1
Gigli was pulled from theaters on August 21, having taken in only slightly more than $7 million worldwide. Unfortunately, that movie cost $54 million to produce.
A two-word text is all it takes to stand Hollywood on its head and bring a movie to its knees: “Gigli sucks.”
Lesson learned: blog posts and e-mail can quickly counter promotional hype.
iStockphoto / PashaIgnatov
Like a mighty ocean wave, a second text pushed a different movie far beyond where it was expected to go. This movie came out on a Wednesday, and ticket sales jumped 19 percent the next day.2 By Friday a ticket to this movie was impossible to find. “Pirates rock” was all it took. Pirates of the Caribbean remained in theaters worldwide for more than six months and brought in more than $654 million. Johnny Depp’s four-movie franchise about a not-dangerous pirate who acts like a semi-drunk Keith Richards is currently at $3.8 billion and climbing. Consider the clash of perspectives during a six-year transitionary window: a “Me” is about dreams, possibilities, positive thinking, and inspiration, whereas a “We” is about small actions, consequences, realistic appraisals, and damage control. These very different outlooks led to an interesting series of exchanges between slow-to-change parents and their quick-changing children during the transitionary window that followed the tipping point of 2003.
A new college graduate sent out her résumé and received an invitation to be interviewed for a job in another state. She asked her “Me” generation parents for an airplane ticket and was told, “Honey, you just tell them that if they want the best, they’re just going to have to send you a plane ticket. You need to make these people understand how special you are.”
Her parents weren’t tightfisted and stingy; they just didn’t realize that the workplace was no longer catering to the posturing delusions of “Me.” Her parents were sharing what was once traditional wisdom, not realizing that times had changed.
Do you remember the weird exchanges triggered when parents tried to soft-sell their children? “Would you cut the crap, Mom and Dad? Seriously! Just give it to me straight. Quit trying to sugarcoat it. You’re treating me like a five-year-old! I’m eleven, dammit.”
Here’s the “Monday Morning Memo” that this conflict of perspectives triggered:
Opie Don’t Live in Mayberry No More
Childhood’s innocent mischief is nearing extinction—an unanticipated side effect of the explosion in technology. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have become dusty icons of an earlier society. Today’s kids are finding it difficult to relate to the drawings of Norman Rockwell; most have never sat at that Thanksgiving table, played marbles with those neighborhood kids, or skinny-dipped in that swimmin’ hole.
Have you watched cartoons on TV lately? The level of social satire in cartoons targeted to six-year-olds would astound you. Ambushed by unexpected adulthood, children are being robbed of the carefree days that would have rooted them in reality and sustained them with a lifetime of memories.
Today’s kids are a savvy, streetwise generation that was never given a chance to be naïve.
But the techno-explosion that robbed them of their childhood also empowered them to stay connected. A new message is being whispered, and we had better take it seriously: “Your advertising may fool one of us. But that one will tell the rest of us.”
Word-of-mouth has grown into the muscular beast, interconnectivity, and it moves with lightning speed. Cell phones and e-mail are rewriting the rules of commerce. Online chat-rooms, blogs, and instant messaging are ensuring that whether good or bad, the word gets out.
We’re moving into an era of transparency in which it will become harder than ever to win new customers through hype alone. We’re beginning to hear the sound of the new branding, and it’s the sound of “real.” Today’s hunger is for reality and truth.
I think Carl Rogers said it best when he said, “What I am is good enough, if only I would be it openly.”3
And what you are is good enough too.
Be it openly.
Figure 16.5 Tips to create a serious Internet presence during a “WE” cycle.
| WE | UPSWING INTO “WE” |
| VALUES | REJECTS |
• Authenticity • Teamwork • Humility • Small actions • Personal responsibility • Cold, hard truth |
• Hype • Posing • Arrogance • Wishful thinking • Self-righteousness • Sugar-coated B.S. |
Paul Townsend
WE |
Remember L’Oréal’s famous “Me” slogan, “Because I’m worth it?” As society passed the tipping point of 2003 and the “Me” became fully unwound, the old slogan was replaced with “Because you’re worth it.” |
Figure 16.6 Popular movie themes in an upswing into a “WE” cycle.
| WE | POPULAR MOVIE THEMES IN UPSWING TO “WE” |
| WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE COMMON GOOD | |
| Fight Club (1999) | MESSAGE |
| A depressed young man becomes a cog in the wheel of big business. Don’t put stock in the materialistic world. One can learn a lot through pain, misfortune, and chaos. | You ain’t all that dog, you ain’t all that. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. |
| 8 Mile (2002) | |
| A Rosetta Stone. Young, frustrated, blue-collar worker transcends meager beginnings and rises from a trailer to millionaire rapster. | I’m not perfect. I have problems. Money and fame don’t turn life into a “happily ever after.” |
| Lost in Translation (2003) | |
| Boy meets girl, they fall in love, and true love doesn’t prevail in the end. | Sometimes love hurts because you have to deny your feelings and do the right thing. |
| Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) | |
| A story about misfits who can’t succeed alone and who show they are all equal in finding success. | Working together is the only way to get what we want. |
| Napoleon Dynamite (2004) | |
| Weird misfits can be happy too. | Are yesterday’s losers the winners of tomorrow? |
| Juno (2006) | |
| Teenage girl deals with pregnancy and the harsh realities of life and the bumps along the way. | Teen pregnancy is a reality. Deal with it. |
| Little Miss Sunshine (2007) | |
| A tragically funny (and realistic) look into the world of child pageants. | Dysfunction is okay. We can still solve problems if we work together. |
In 2006, the fourth year of the six-year transitionary window, a discussion thread appeared on Harmony Central Forums:
Because You Deserve It!
Is anybody else as irritated by this line of marketing as I am? I swear that every time I listen to the radio or turn on commercial TV, I get inundated with ads telling me that I deserve 200 channels of television, I deserve-wrinkle-free skin, I deserve to eat at the best place in town, I deserve to drive a luxury vehicle, I deserve perfect children, I deserve to live in a mansion, I deserve perfect health, etc., etc., etc. . . .
Is this line of marketing indicative of deeper societal issues?
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t deserve shit save only two things: that which I have earned through hard work and sacrifice, and that which I have paid for with money earned from my hard work and sacrifice.
Am I right in my thinking or just old and cranky?
All the readers who left a comment agreed with this post. No one thought he or she was just old and cranky. “Yes, hard work and sacrifice deserve our praise! Hard work and sacrifice! Hooray!”: society is definitely in a “We” again.
In 2008, we saw the implosion of an American economy created during a “Me.” Although it is dangerous to make specific predictions regarding the economy or a political election based on the swinging of society’s Pendulum, it is reasonable to recognize that during the six-year transitionary window into a “We” (2003–2008), society will begin to demand increased transparency within the system. This usually leads to alarm when we realize how truly absurd the system has become, and it’s not unusual that a recession will mark the transition from “Me” to “We.”
WE |
Coauthor Michael R. Drew spoke at length to author Harry Dent Jr., whose books on economic theory seem to indicate that a recession/depression will always occur at the beginning of every “We” cycle. (Coauthor Roy H. Williams is less convinced than Michael R. Drew, but Williams is old and cranky.) |
In 2009, at the end of the six-year transition, consumer psychologist Dr. Maxim Titorenko convinced L’Oréal to change their famous slogan to “Because we’re worth it.” Nice try, L’Oréal, but you still sound a tiny bit full of yourself.
2010: A single website, amazon.com, brought in more than $34 billion. That’s more than $93 million a day, nearly $1 million every fifteen minutes. YouTube is the second most widely used website next to Google, and 750 million people exchange information each day on Facebook. The Internet is finally delivering everything it promised during the dot-com bubble fifteen years earlier.
HubSpot reports that 24 percent of adults have posted a review of a product they have purchased. This means that one of every four customers believes enough in online reviews that they’ve gone to the trouble to post one themselves. Have you ever posted an online review?
2011: L’Oréal hired Hugh Laurie (aka, Dr. Gregory House) to be their spokesperson. In the first video posted on YouTube, Laurie mocks the idea of cosmetics for men while at the same time making it seem perfectly natural. At one point in the video he says, “It’s an interesting question to pose: ‘Because you’re worth it.’ I hope I am, I hope I am. I hope you are. I hope we all are.”
Gutsy move, L’Oréal. Hugh Laurie plays a self-centered “Me” dinosaur as Dr. Gregory House. To have him evolve on camera into a charming and self-effacing “We” spokesman is a brilliant stroke of casting. Whether or not the public will accept it as credible has yet to be seen.
The June 6 cover of the New Yorker featured an illustration of three citizens with their heads and hands in stocks, being punished as though in colonial times. The sign above one man says, “smoking.” The sign above the woman next to him says “salt.” Another man’s sign says “carbs.”
It would appear we’re becoming judgmental and self-righteous again, right on schedule, halfway up a “We.”
Laurie Jacobs Shore
iStockphoto / drbimages
The June 13 issue of the New Yorker featured the cartoon of a rather bewildered superhero (p. 103). The caption said, “Able to leap tall buildings because he should, because it’s the right thing to do, and because he would feel guilty if he didn’t.”
When the covers of magazines reflect sanctimonious judgmentalism and we can identify with cartoons about being riddled with guilt, our society is most definitely in a “We.” Magazines in a “Me” have heroic figures on their covers, and their cartoons are about ego and superficiality.
These examples are just a few of the thousands that are all around you. Look at any magazine, TV show, or movie; read any best-selling book; listen to the most popular hit songs—and then decide for yourself if what we’re telling you is true.
“Is the Rock Format Dead?” In July, 2011, Radio Ink magazine quoted a story that had appeared in the Chicago Tribune the previous day, saying that Rock “is not the dominant sound that it was in the ’60s and ’70s, when Rock really was the sound of a generation.” The article went on to say that radio programmers who think “alternative Rock has eclipsed Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen believe a fork should be stuck in ‘the old-fart format’ . . . Is it time to put the Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent format to sleep for good?”
