Madagascar chocolate

Earlier this week I wrote about Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin, and posted a love poem from Madagascar at Words Without Borders, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Now, by one of those odd convergences, Seth Godin and Madagascar and Valentine’s Day have come together again. Godin says he doesn’t do consulting, but apparently he’s been talking to the people who make Madécasse Chocolate, “the only imported chocolate made on the continent with local beans.” (Well, Madagascar isn’t technically on the continent, but it’s considered part of Africa.)

As it turns out, Madécasse is based in Brooklyn, not far from where I live, and the chocolate is sold, among other places, at one of my favorite independent bookstores, McNally Jackson.

At any rate, Godin’s point is that you can’t market effectively by being all things to all people. Pick a story and go with it.

For example, the Madécasse story about made by Africans in Africa is very powerful, at least as powerful as fair trade, if not more (they keep four times as much money in Africa by selling a bar as they would if they just sold beans to other companies).

If that’s true, then why not put your workers on the label? Big beautiful pictures that would be an amazing juxtaposition against all the other abstract stuff in the store. Tell me the story of the worker on the back. Make each one different and compelling. Packaging as baseball card. I wouldn’t put a word on the front, just the picture.  Now I not only eat something that tastes good, but I feel good. You’ve made it personal. The story on the back is about a real person, living a better life because I took the time to buy her chocolate instead of someone else’s. When I share the chocolate, I have something to say. What do you say when you give someone a chocolate bar? This package gives you something to say.

The illustration I’ve borrowed here is apparently Godin’s idea of what the Madécasse package should look like. I think it works, and I’ll be interested to see if the company goes with the idea.

Linchpin by Seth Godin

Over the weekend I bought Seth Godin‘s new book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? On Monday I finished reading it, and in the evening I went to hear the author at the Borders in Columbus Circle, where he was appearing with Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art.

The idea of Linchpin is an attractive one. At a time when the economy has drummed into us that no one is indispensable, it’s appealing to be told that we may be indispensable after all, or that this book can tell us how to become indispensable. But the book quickly makes it obvious that it’s not so easy. Career survival requires being genuine, creative, and willing to take risks, says Godin. In fact, it requires being a kind of artist, and artists are subject to blocks.

The reason for that block is what both Godin and Pressfield call Resistance, and Resistance is very hard to overcome. Facing it requires facing our fears, and as Pressfield put it, you may find that the thing that scares you the most is the thing your soul needs. It’s easier to avoid doing difficult creative work by procrastinating on Twitter or Facebook or by keeping busy with routine, following-the-map tasks.

How do you overcome Resistance? Welcome your ideas, says Godin, even the bad ones. (I was reminded of Anne Lamott’s chapter on why “shitty first drafts” are a good thing.) Set deadlines, meet them, and move on to the next thing. Shipping all the time, he says, is the way to avoid burning out.

In the end, said Pressfield, he found that the pain of not doing the work he wanted to do was greater than the pain of doing it. Similarly, Godin said that if he ever stopped shipping, he would have to become a bank teller, and then he would have to blow his brains out.

Even if you make a habit of overcoming your Resistance and doing the creative work you were meant to do, there is no guarantee that it will make you money. It has made money for Godin, but he isn’t fooled by that into thinking it will do the same for everyone. After twenty years of studying successful people, Godin said, the only thing he’s found that they have in common is that they’re successful.

In Linchpin he makes it clear that trying to make your art pay can debase it, and that the best course for many people may be to bring their genuine, creative selves to both their day job and their novel—but without any expectation that the two can be combined.

One mango at a time

In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.

About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”

Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.

For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.

Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.

How Air America lost teen spirit

One of my favorite maxims on marketing comes from advertising legend David Ogilvy: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

The people who made Air America what it started out to be—Marc Maron, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Jim Earl, Brendan McDonald, Mike Malloy, Rachel Maddow—understood that.

The suits at the top, notably CEO Danny Goldberg, did not.

In 2003, Goldberg published a book called How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Two years later, while the paperback edition was fresh off the presses, he pulled the plug on Morning Sedition, which more than anything else on Air America had the intelligence, sharpness, and hilarity to grab young listeners (as well as the not so young).

It’s hard to recall just how exciting it was to discover Air America when it was first on the air—and especially Morning Sedition. Jenn and I turned it on when we were barely conscious, and even before our first cup of coffee we were laughing at Morning Remembrance, Future Marc, the Pitch of the Week, and all the other inspired insanity.

Danny Goldberg put an end to all that. In a guest post at the Down with Tyranny blog, he defends himself at length—but scroll down to see what Brendan McDonald and Jim Earl have to say. I’ll let Jim Earl have the last word:

Aside from applauding everything Brendan’s already written, I’d like to add these choice bits:

I wrote for Air America from the beginning, but ended up mostly performing and writing for Maron’s show—this, despite his atavistic predilection for pouring warm spittoon tailings into the break room coffee-maker every morning.

Aside from that, the most peculiar thing I ever witnessed at Air America, including the time Riley secretly married a breakfast roll in the basement, was how a liberal network whose concept was rooted in the goal that it not become a humorless copy of NPR, had now become a humorless copy of NPR. And that was Danny’s genius. No one could suck the happy out of a building faster than you could. And that’s what killed the best, most exciting shows at Air America: some guy who didn’t like or didn’t get jokes. You know—satire, parody, sarcasm. Things that can actually catch people’s attention in politics. Instead you opted to bore the crap out of radio audiences—much like you did to me half way through your blog. Radio audiences don’t like being bored, Danny. And if you hadn’t spent most of your job time recuperating at your Malibu beach house or bunkered in the corner office atop a pyramid of TaB, perhaps you would have discovered that.

What the Dog Saw

The enormous success of Malcolm Gladwell’s books has a lot to do with his beautifully clear and engaging way of telling a story. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that the main ideas of those books are of particular interest to businesspeople and especially marketers.

The Tipping Point argues (as does Seth Godin) that success in marketing comes when you reach not only the groups and subcultures that will be most enthusiastic about your product, but those that are well connected enough to spread the word widely and rapidly.

Blink holds out the promise that the right decision may come to you in an instant (though only if you’ve devoted enough time to learning your subject). (Outliers, on the other hand, may have less appeal to the titans of industry—arguing as it does that success doesn’t always come from hard work or innate talent but usually requires timing, luck, and personal or cultural advantages.)

Anyone with three back-to-back number-one bestsellers is going to generate a certain amount of resentment. Participants in the Gladwell backlash accuse him of oversimplifying and cherry-picking his data and anecdotes. Life is not that simple, they argue.

As if in response, many of the essays in the new book What the Dog Saw make the point that in many situations the quantity of data, of noise, and of complicated interrelationships is such that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, whether you’re in business or not. Storytelling itself is a response to uncertainty, a way of finding (or creating) a narrative thread that makes sense, or seems to make sense, of our experience.

In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell explodes the very kind of appealing narrative explanations that he’s purveyed himself. Criminal profiling, he argues, is no more accurate than the predictions of sideshow psychics based on generalities and leading questions. The experience of being an NFL quarterback is so different from being a college quarterback that there is no way to predict which college stars will do well.

Enron, says Gladwell, didn’t really hide its financial risks—they were simply buried in the mountains of documents they disclosed. Similarly, the warnings about the safety of the Challenger space shuttle, and about the 9/11 terrorist attack, weren’t ignored—they were simply lost in the mass of similar warnings that seemed equally significant. And so on.

All this is interesting, but somewhat unsatisfying to those of us who are looking for guidance in how to make decisions.

One of the few people Gladwell finds who has actually found a way to profit from uncertainty is Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, whose investment strategy is based on buying insurance against large and unpredictable disasters. NInety-nine days out of a hundred, or more, this is a strategy that loses a little money. But every so often—for instance, during a global financial meltdown—it pays off big time.