Recently in Ethics Category

A random Google search brought me to this Wired article, "The See-Through CEO," from March 2007 (remember 2007?). Though it seems kind of old-hat now, the thrust of the article (is it strange to use "thrust" metaphorically in a corporate blog?) is summed up thusly, "Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead." That is, trying to be stealthy about the real workings of your business is pointless because, the truth will out (on the interwebs).

The author suggests that the most adequate response to inescapable visibility is transparency:

All of which explains why the cult of transparency has so many high tech converts these days. Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?

This kind of got me thinking about transparency at Aquent and in our business more generally. For example, the way our business works is that we pay the talent less than the client pays us (if you didn't know that already, I'm sorry to just spring it on you). We generate the bill rate (what we charge our client) by adding a percentage of the pay rate (what the talent gets) to the pay rate. Now, depending on a number of factors, that percentage can range from 45% to 100%. The money we make comes from that split times the number of hours worked.

I'm assuming that, if you have worked through us or other staffing/temp agencies, you are aware of this set-up. My question is: How frequently have you been told specifically what we (or anyone) is charging the client?

My belief is that we should share this info for the same reason that companies should be transparent: People will find out anyway. (I know I did when I temped through MacTemps.)

What do you think?

It's always dangerous to advertise something as "humorous" when it's quite possible that no one finds it funny. Here goes anyway.

Two years ago, there was a modicum of hub-bub about the "no A-hole rule" and a lot of discussion around hiring people that you'll actually enjoy working with as well as working productively with people who are "jerks."

Two years later I'm browsing the Mind Hacks blog and come across a post entitled, "Making Sense of Bastards." Intrigued, I follow a link to this paper, "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."

I haven't read the paper yet but I love the euphemism-laden abstract: "Our patience with forming interpretations and reinterpretations of others' behavior is not unlimited. The time comes when we lose interest in trying to understand, and conclude that another person is behaving in a way that is simply unacceptable [read: "decide someone is a bastard" - Matt]. This paper explores the narratives that go with immoderate indignation [i.e., "concluding someone is a bastard"], even for those best versed in the idea that they should attempt to understand the perspective of the other...."

I couldn't have said it better, or nicer, myself. Anyway, check it out. Who knows, maybe it will help you avoid "immoderate indignation" when "concluding" that certain relatives "behave unacceptably" this weekend?

Have a happy holiday!

Cory Doctorow recently published an essay, "Why I Copyfight." His basic point is that sharing knowledge, stories, music, etc. is an essential part of human culture (in this, his arguments echo those of Jonathan Lethem), but that internet technology has made such sharing and copying virtually indistinguishable, and therewith criminalized an ubiquitous and, to a certain degree, essential human behavior. The danger now is, if you enforce the laws, and eliminate copying, then you effectively abolish human culture. (I may be exaggerating the point a little here.)

Reasonable copyright law, he goes on to say, must make a distinction between "good" copying, which is just human, and "bad" copying, which is stealing. Doctorow demonstrates that the former is actually penalized more harshly than the latter by pointing out that the penalties for bootlegging DVDs and hawking them on the street are actually lower than the penalties for making a movie viewable for free on the web.That just doesn't seem right, right?

As writers and designers and otherwise creators of content, do you make this same distinction between copying as just a part of healthy, human cultural exchange and copying as unmitigated rip-off? What about that old truism: Poor artists borrow, great artists steal?

T'other day Amber over at Altitude wrote a post called, "5 Things Good Agencies Do (And one they don't)." She is talking here about any kind of agency - PR, Web, Marketing, etc. - but it struck me that the behaviors/attitudes she describes would also distinguish good consulting firms from bad and even represent standards to which any company could hold their vendors (or to which customers could hold a company). For example, the "good" care about you and your business, can readily point to the results of their work, and, interestingly enough, will tell you when they can't help you.

How would your organization, or you personally, fare if held to these standards?

In other words, how "good" are you?

Image Courtesy of TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³.

About twenty years ago, after I had stopped out of grad school, quit my job at SuperShuttle, and was so broke that I made all my family members collages as Christmas presents, my father sat me down for a fireside chat. The gist was: Dude, you got to get it together, figure out what you want to do with your life, and just do it. The problem was, as he put it, "You don't seem to do anything."

Was I a lost soul at that point? I suppose I was. My band (Spanking Machine) wasn't going anywhere, I was unemployed, and, frankly, very depressed. When I returned to San Francisco from my demoralizing holiday in Los Angeles, I got a temp job (thus launching my current career, oddly enough) and wrote my father a letter.

Aside from the fact that the main point of the letter was to ask him for money so I could fix my car (yes, I did that), I also took issue with his criticism of my do-nothing lifestyle. On the one hand, as I pointed out, I did actually do stuff like write poetry and surrealized beatnik musings, play music, and hang out with my friends. I also reminded him that there were quite a few cultural and spiritual traditions that emphasized doing nothing over doing something as the true goal of life and enlightenment and that I was not unsympathetic to their views. Moreover, the idea that our lives and the world at large were there as a resource for us to do something with was symptomatic of our metaphysical age, as Martin Heidegger explained in his essay concerning the question of technology.

Here's where it gets deep (so watch out). To this very day I bristle at the existential imperative, whether in secular or religious garb, that says you have to do something with your life. There are so many things that are wrong-headed about this notion that I don't know where to start (or finish), so I'll just highlight two logical inconsistencies that dog this everyday ethical commonplace.

Talking with a friend yesterday, he noted that my wife was a writer and then asked if I was a writer as well. I said I was, but explained I was in marketing. "So, you write lies," he said with a smile.

As every hip marketer knows, thanks to the ever-wise words of the all-knowing Godin-one, all marketers are liars. With his semi-snide snarkiness, my friend was merely echoing the folk wisdom that that holds marketers and marketing more generally in contempt, a subject about which I've written before.

Godin playfully invokes this contempt in his "provocative" title, though he was careful to avoid the the liar paradox through use of the modifier "all." To whit: If Godin is a marketer (albeit one who has achieved "guru" status), then, if his statement is true, we must assume that he may be a liar, in which case his statement may also be a lie. If it's a lie, however, then it is not true that all marketers are liars. If I remember anything from the "Intro to Logic" course I took as a freshman, the negation of "all marketers are liars" is not "no marketers are liars," but, "some marketers are liars."

Proclaiming the undeniable truth that "some marketers are liars," of course, would not have gotten Godin much attention. Instead, he fans the flames of virulent anti-marketing-ism and tars "all" marketers with the same mendacious brush. Although I wouldn't accuse Godin of lying with his claim that "all marketers are liars," I would say that he was "willfully misrepresenting the truth," and not just about the marketing profession.

If you read the book, or at least the five free pages I linked to above, you discover that he is primarily accusing marketers of "telling stories," a common parenting euphemism for "lying," as we all know. Though I agree with him that the goal of marketing is to tell stories, I resist his equation of "stories" with "lies." Stories may be fabrications and fictions, but that doesn't make them "lies." That being said, the problem with Godin's title isn't that it's a lie, the problem is that it's false (remember that a lie is not simply or necessarily "incorrect").

But would the book have been so popular if he had called it, "All Marketers Are Wrong"? Is the one thing going for this alternate title the possibility that it could actually be true?

I got a PhD in German Studies which means, among other things, that I had to make a living as a corporate trainer, writer, and more recently, marketer. It also means that I spent a lot of time studying fascism, communism, and the dynamics of power.

In the course of my studies I came to view both individualism and collectivism with ambivalence and skepticism for much the same reasons: Individualism tends to deny the collective backdrop from which it provisionally emerges and upon which it depends for meaning and survival; collectivism tends to overwhelm and erase the individuals it is supposedly there to nurture and protect and from whom it draws its sustenance.

In the new world of total social mediation, as Theodor Adorno might say, this dynamic plays itself out in a novel way: Online, while a username gives the appearance of individuality, the "user" speaking may actually be a collective, and vice versa.

In this way, the power imbalances that reign in society at large, are simultaneously recreated and obscured. When you confront someone, you don't know if you are confronting a person, an institution, or an entire complex of social relations. At the same time, when an individual responds to this confrontation, he may forget that he is not necessarily speaking as himself, but, instead, as an extension of a larger corporate entity or a particular group of people united by a common interest.

When evaluating online conversations, or participating in them, we err when we reduce them to their literal content. We have to continually weigh and reweigh this content in terms of real, off-line power differentials. For example, based on this differential, a participant may be right in a logical or rational sense, but wrong in a political, social or ethical sense.

Ya get me?

We're in the process of rethinking our on-line presence/strategy and redesigning our website. We've already changed the homepage fairly drastically and continue to experiment with it, even as we reconsider our whole approach.

As part of the experimentation, I started a contest at 99Designs offering $500 for a "redesign" of our homepage. We asked contestants to keep all the elements, the colors, and the top navigation, and submit their ideas. In doing so, I semi-wittingly unleashed a boat-load of ire.

I say "semi" because I knew there was some controversy in the design world about the "ethics" of contests or crowd-sourcing more generally. I just didn't realize how much designers hated them. The comments posted on this thread on QBN have been, um, unflattering. People have also been commenting, critically though more civilly, on our Facebook page.

One Facebook commenter suggested that we take a poll of designers to see what they think about design contests. So here it is:

Though I can spin things and beat around the bush with the best of them, I tend to prefer "straight talk" (sometimes called "honesty" or "frankness" or "no BS"). For example, while working recently on a survey of our clients, I came across the question, "Are you currently looking for marketing or creative staff?" and I didn't like it.

Since we weren't undertaking a socio-economic study to determine the percentage of businesses currently hiring, it struck me as a disingenuous way of fishing for business. With that in mind, I suggested posing the question this way, "Would you like an Aquent representative to call you right now?" My colleagues passed on that recommendation, but also removed the offending question (as I recall, anyway).

Which brings me to this blog. My "strategy," such as it is, has been to comment on a wide variety of topics in hopes that potential talent and/or clients would find this site, become curious about Aquent, and eventually work with us (or whatever).

Aside from the "wishful thinking" aspect of this approach, am I actually practicing a kind of deception? Is this base, marketing trickery? Dishonesty? Bullshit? Would Aquent, and you, frankly, be better served if the crux of every post here was, "Please work with Aquent. Please tell your friends about Aquent. Please sign up. Please request a client visit. Please, please, please (as James Brown used to say)"?

My gut feeling is that this blog would quickly lose it's value, entertainment or otherwise, if I just dished up the marketing message uncut. It would quickly become boring, kind of annoying, and not a little pathetic (no one likes a beggar, right?).

I'm starting to think that the Godin-one was correct and all marketers ARE liars. But, we're liars because that's what everyone wants - lilies with plenty of gilding.

After all, the truth hurts. Or so I'm told.

Image Courtesy of Cyril Plapied.

The other day, a colleague turned me on to this video:

It was created by the very talented illustrator, Kyle T. Webster, and somehow I missed it when it was posted on about a million blogs and other sites.

Look, the interweb is really big and my time is limited, people!

Anyway, while trying to find out more about Mr. Webster and is non-stop funniosity, I came across this gem, apparently created for the ADDY Awards by The Meyocks Group a coupla years ago:

What I appreciate most about this video is the way that it makes fun of an entire industry AND every individual contributor! Thank GOD I don't work in advertising! Marketing is a whole different ball of wax....