THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’LL EVER READ! WE DON’T KNOW IF IT’S GOOD OR BAD! BUT IT’S REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT! THAT’S WHY IT’S IN BOLD-FACED CAPITAL LETTERS SO YOU’LL KNOW IT’S IMPORTANT! SEE ALL THE EXCLAMATION POINTS? NO?! THEN YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION! COME ON! WAKE UP! THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!

I made up a word. Then I made up a phenomenon to go with it. The word and the phenomenon are hyperinformationalism. They’re illustrated by the paragraph above. They refer to the fact that we’ve become of a race of knee-jerk artists — constantly and reflexively twitching under the relentless onslaught of information with which we’re constantly bombarded. And they confirm this truism: When everything’s important, nothing’s important.

I made up a theory, too. We spend so much time inflicting so much information on ourselves from so many electronic sources, we’ve mistaken ourselves for computers. We think we’re the same sort of objective, dispassionate, unemotional accessing mechanisms as those amalgams of  chips, processors, transducers, capacitors, and wires. But we’re not. And we’re suffering for it.

This is why, from the youngest age — I grew up at a time in which the dissemination of information were the exclusive provinces of newspapers, radio, and television — I never paid attention to the news. The reason? It’s too new.

We can react to news, but we can only know its ramifications in time. The news can soothe or panic, but it can’t reveal which reaction is warranted. The news can tell us what happened, but it can’t tell us what will happen. And knowing what’ll happen as a result of any news item was always more important to me than what someone else said happened.

The Cost

In the age of hyperinformationalism, have we lost our ability to ponder and to ask critical, analytical, discerning questions? Or have we lost time? Just when we engage in discriminating contemplation, we’re overwhelmed by the next wave of brute information. Awash in that wave with its potential to stimulate beyond reason, we have a choice: Ignore it all until the items of any import roll forth in another wave — or react to all of it instantaneously: Good. Bad. Hopeful. Fearful. Important. Trivial.

A twitching knee has no reason. It reacts on impulse. In the manic, agitated trance of hyperinformationalism, so do we.

What, then, does hyperinformationalism do to our businesses? It compels us to say everything we can think to say in every place we can think to say it. Collateral systems become exhaustive, de facto technical manuals. Websites warehouse unseen content. Direct email campaigns blitz spam. Blogs, articles, and white papers become the virtual, verbal equivalents of drinking from fire hoses. And our target audiences are dazed, confused, probably annoyed, and not likely to be buying — at least not from us.

Thanks to hyperinformationalism, we’ve forgotten (how) to relax. We’ve forgotten to take our time and communicate substantively. We’ve raised our expectations beyond sense and sanity. One man’s deluge is not another man’s call to action. So, why not take it easy?

The Remedy

Buck the trend. Turn down the volume. Create a real message. Let it differentiate you. Give people a chance to absorb it. Make it good enough that they want (to learn) more. Don’t sell, instruct. Don’t flood, trickle. Don’t scream, talk quietly and directly.

No one will ever think what we’re doing or selling is as important as we think it is. Ever. But that doesn’t mean our prospects won’t care. They just need to be allowed to care in their own ways, in their own time. If we want our marketing efforts to be effectively fulfilled with sales, we need to gently and calmly help our prospects understand why they need what we’re selling.

IT’S THE ONLY WAY THEY’LL DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES WHAT’S REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT!!!

I have a theory. It goes like this: If I remain naïve enough, I’ll never get old. If that’s so, then I just found the Fountain of Youth.

The German writer, Thomas Mann, once said: “It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.” Given that he lived from 1875 to 1955, I don’t imagine it ever occurred to him to question the sources — or the very definition — of ideas. But question we must.

It seems, much to my naïve surprise, the sources and the definition of ideas have changed. So has the presumption of originality. It appears we now live in the age of PLR content, in which PLR stands for private label rights. You’re probably way ahead of me on this. But the implications are profoundly unsettling.

Case in point: Take a few moments to absorb and comprehend the sentence in bold type below, the emphasis on which, by the way, originates from the source:

Quality website content extends beyond rewriting or “spinning” PLR articles for uniqueness. In order to shine, online content should be useful, well written, and relevant to readers. Professional sounding Web content and articles impress readers while original content impresses Google. Writing content for readers first, search engines second is a SEO content strategy that works over the long run.

That’s right. We no longer require native, substantively meaningful, or original content that accurately and genuinely reflects the differentiating singularity of our brands. Uh uh. We don’t even need professional content. All we need now is professional sounding language — counterfeit content that impresses our readers. That’s as cynical a concept as I’ve ever come across. And it’s at least as insulting to the readers with whom we desire to share our ideas as it is cynical.

Dude! What the hell were you thinking?

By that logic, I’ve wasted every moment I spent writing this post and believing it reflects the personal convictions that inform my thinking and the EinSource brand. I could have cribbed the content for the post from any of the content available here. I could have bought it here. Or I could have randomly generated it here and here.

It’s ironic that I just re-read Animal Farm this past weekend. It’s ironic — or serendipitously synchronous — because George Orwell also wrote this (I’ve written marketing in place of political language):

[Marketing] … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. (Politics and the English Language)

That statement is cynical, too. But it’s no more cynical that it is prescient. Its prescience has been fulfilled now that PLR has erased the line between cynicism and truth.

PLR is the Walmart of content: It obliterates any value in or accruing to your brand. And the age of PLR is The Age of Cynicism.

Go ahead. Call me naïve. In addition to younger, I’ve just become proud of my naïveté.

I recently saw a LinkedIn post from a gentleman named Oscar L. Martin. In it, he compared the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Elon Musk’s SpaceX to NASA’s. Mr. Martin wrote:

Elon Musk proved the problem with space was not technological but institutional … NASA prefers to expend $40B after 15 years in known tech for a flawless first launch, to $4B for 10 de-risk launches in 5 years in evolving tech.

In the same post, Mr. Martin hyperlinked an article by one Brian Wang, in which Mr. Wang embedded a YouTube video by Dr. Robert Zubrin. Mr. Wang wrote:

Orbital SpaceX Starship working by 2024 will mean a Saturn V rocket capacity at 1% of the cost.

If you’re wondering how or why any of that could be true, wonder no more.

Name That Tune

There are three reasons for which the performance of a SpaceX will outpace the performance of a NASA every time:

1. Bureaucracy
2. Government
3. Lack of innovation.

Bureaucracies can be counted on to pursue three other things exclusively and without fail:

1. Control
2. Growth
3. The operational status quo.

Those three things are more prevalent in government and government-agency bureaucracies than they are in any other institutions because there’s no accountability. Consequently, there’s neither desire nor reason to innovate.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. (Thomas Sowell)

We have no such luxury in business, industry, the private sector, and the market. If we’re wrong — if we fail — the price we pay is high and inescapable.

We Don’t Have to Fail

One of the most common expressions in many business discussions is total cost of ownership (TCO). According to Wikipedia:

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.

Given the breadth of that definition, we might just well add opportunity cost (for unidentified ideas) and the cost of failure (that might result from long histories of unidentified ideas that might have led to new products, services, or business models).

But with purpose, discipline, transparency, and a commitment to making innovation systemic, systematic, and sustainable, the risks of lost opportunity and failure can be effectively mitigated and dramatically reduced.

Given the choice between TCO and TCF, take TCO.

If you take TCF, you won’t own anything.

Is most of your revenue from products, services, or business models more than three years old? If so, and even if your revenue is growing, that should be a warning signal that you’re not innovating effectively. All industries are competitive and, by not moving forward, you’re falling behind.

There are numerous examples of former market leaders that failed to innovate and eventually fell victim to their markets. Companies like Kodak, Digital Equipment Corp., and Blockbuster all share a sad story of allowing their past successes to prevent exploration for new ideas.

Kodak, as reported by Startup Talky:

The Eastman Kodak Company’. It was the most famous name in the world of photography and videography in the 20th century. Kodak brought about a revolution in the photography and videography industries. At the time when only huge companies could access the cameras used for recording movies, Kodak enabled the availability of cameras to every household by producing equipment that was portable and affordable.

Kodak was the most dominant company in its field for almost the entire 20th century, but a series of wrong decisions killed its success. The company declared itself bankrupt in 2012.

Kodak failed to understand that its strategy of banking on traditional film cameras (which was effective at one point) was now depriving the company of success. Rapidly changing technology and evolving market needs made the strategy obsolete.

• The ignorance of new technology and not adapting to changing market needs initiated Kodak’s downfall

• Kodak wasted time promoting the use of film cameras instead of emulating its competitors. It completely ignored the feedback from the media and the market

• When Kodak finally understood and started the sales and the production of digital cameras, it was too late. Many big companies had already established themselves in the market by then and Kodak couldn’t keep pace with the big shots

• Kodak invested its funds in acquiring many small companies, depleting the money it could have used to promote the sales of digital cameras.

Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), as reported by MIT Sloan Review:

The DEC story is one of a dramatic rise and fall: DEC was an entrepreneurial computer company that grew to $14 billion in sales and employed an estimated 130,000 people worldwide at one point, but Digital failed to adapt successfully after the personal computer eroded its minicomputer market.

Blockbuster, as reported by Indigo Digital:

Blockbuster was extremely popular. It was the largest video rental company in the world with over 9,000 stores and over 50 million members. So what happened? While most talk of Blockbuster’s demise centers on the rise of Netflix, Blockbuster made many strategic errors throughout its history that caused it to have such a stunning fall from grace.

• Walking away from the deal of the century. Blockbuster made a critical error when it walked away from a deal with Netflix. Netflix wanted to sell its company to Blockbuster for $50 million in 2000. At the time Blockbuster could have afforded the purchase price since it had raised $465 million in an IPO a year earlier.

• An inability to pivot quickly. Blockbuster was skeptical about the potential of renting DVDs online and sending them to customers via mail the way Netflix did. But customers enjoyed Netflix’s service because it was convenient. As Netflix continued to gain subscribers it took Blockbuster six years to launch a similar service of its own in 2004 called Blockbuster Online. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly,” said Reid Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and CEO.

• “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix…Netflix doesn’t really have or do anything that we can’t or don’t already do ourselves,” said Keyes in 2008. Two years later Blockbuster was bankrupt. A healthy degree of hubris ended up being the fatal thorn in Blockbuster’s side. Blockbuster couldn’t see pass its previous success to see the change on the horizon and then once it did it was too slow to react.

Each of these companies was in an enviable market position, but their leaders believed they knew what it took to be successful and continued doing what they’d always done. By being unwilling to look ahead, take the small risks required to innovate new products, services, or business models, they eventually took the biggest risk a company could take … and failed.

Look at the composition of your revenue. Is it the canary in the coal mine? If so, look at the way you innovate or whether you innovate at all. Is there discipline, mindset, process, exploration, a framework, and investment in innovation? If any of these elements are lacking, it will be difficult to effectively develop new products, services, or business models. If you’re seeing warning signs, EinSource can help you to avoid the demise of some other great companies.

Don’t let past success prevent future success.

I recently became aware of a consulting company that compels its clients to begin strategic business planning with a sales and marketing review. That’s the rough equivalent of compelling architects and contractors to build skyscrapers from their lightning rods down. And it invites five perennially perplexing questions, as intriguing as they are troubling and, as yet, unanswered:

1. Why do so many organizations create the position, VP of Sales and Marketing?
2. Why is the VP of Sales and Marketing typically a sales person?
3. Is the chief responsibility of the VP of Sales and Marketing sales or marketing?
4. Why do we persist in giving one person two sets of responsibilities?
5. Why do the people we saddle with those two sets of responsibilities always seem to struggle with both?

The answers are in the Strategic Hierarchy — or the lack thereof.

The relationship between sales and marketing is perennially misunderstood and consistently misaligned. That’s because the Strategic Hierarchy is equally misunderstood and misaligned. And it’s a wasteful shame because it should be this easy:

1. The organization strategy is the organization’s reason for being. It’s the dream. “We recognize that, and we can capitalize by creating this.” It’s the why.
2. The marketing strategy marketing program is the plan by which this does that. It’s the what. It’s the creation of the (realization of) the need.
3. The sales strategy is the plan by which the fulfillment of the need is delivered. It’s the how. (Remember: Marketing is not a sales-support function. Sales is a marketing-fulfillment function.)
4. Prospect qualification is the point at which prospects’ needs align with their desire to buy.
5. Conversion is the point at which qualified prospects become become customers.

Even if most companies get steps 1 through 3 right (many don’t), dysfunction sets in between steps 4 and 5, after which business-generating activities come unglued because the gap between strategic marketing and feet-on-the-street sales is never bridged. Confusion reigns. Finger-pointing begins. Circular firing squads are assembled. And lost opportunity multiplies.

With the Strategic Hierarchy established and employed — with the organization and its activities structured in accordance with it — the gap starts to close itself, one unmade mistake at a time. The organization doesn’t expect prospects to contact it because it don’t assume its outbound communications are irresistible. The organization doesn’t imagine marketing and sales are inbound activities. And it initiates contact with prospects because it realizes the odds of prospects initiating contact with it are against it.

With the Strategic Hierarchy in place, organizations also recognize the burdens they place on VPs of Sales and Marketing are unrealistic. It requires the position to serve two masters and master two disciplines. It lets sales drive marketing. It tries to establish momentum from the bottom up.

And it forces organizations to realize gravity can’t, after all, be defied.