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Some Nerve . "The nerve of that boy. To think he can just walk in here and do whatever he has a mind to do." That opinion has haunted me every step of the way. From the streets of Newark, New Jersey to the boardrooms of Madison Avenue and even now in the studios of Hollywood. "The nerve of that kid. To charge me a hundred bucks to letter my truck." "The nerve of that little snot. To think he can ride our locomotives and treat our railroad like his own private playground." "The nerve of that rookie. To walk into Motown and tell us how to package our acts. What is he, 19?"

VOLUME
TWENTY-TWO
WEDNESDAY
FEBRUARY 2,
2005

"The nerve of him. A black guy who thinks he can just walk into Young & Rubicam and start doing TV Commercials." "The nerve of that Harry Webber. Now that he's won all of these awards he thinks he should be a Creative Director. "He says he wants a 100 grand a year or he'll walk. Of all the nerve.

"You got some balls nigga. Come down here to Watts sayin' that the only ones who can stop this war between us Crips and Bloods is us Crips and Bloods."

"This guy has some nerve. He's charging us a thousand dollars a day to build our web site and he wants warrants for 25,000 shares." "No agent. No track record. He wants to direct and produce or we can't option his script. Lotta nerve. I told him to take a hike."

The nerve I got from my mother. She had more than enough to go around. My brains came from my father. He inspired me to write the line, "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste."

Congratulations, you are the first person I've heard speak frankly and honestly to these kids about the quality of their art education. Some of them are producing good stuff, but at nowhere near the quality, or quantity, they are going to need for a kick-ass portfolio right out of CSUCI.

I heard a few gasps when you said it, but you were right on the money with that comment. I've seen too many professors here glad-handing and patting these kids on the back for work that would never make out the door of my graphics department. It's a shame, but you nailed it. I must say, your class is really the first class that I have taken at CSUCI that didn't make me feel like I was still at a JC somewhere. For the first time I feel like I may receive some benefit for attending a University. Your class is what it is all about for me; you raised the bar for the whole place, thank you. Now I have hope that my "education" might be worth something. And no, I'm not trying to kiss your ass right now, I mean every word. Student, "Fight Club"

You are too trying to kiss my ass. Which is as it should be.-HW"

Before it was a famous ad campaign, it was a memo to Alex Kroll the head of Young & Rubicam asking him why every other person in the creative department had work to do but me. I had some nerve. It wasn't enough that I embarrassed them into hiring me.

Now I actually expected them to do more then stick me in an office at the end of the hall, a living, breathing example of their claim to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. I actually wanted my equal opportunity. In fact, I demanded it.

As a result, I got the opportunity to create some of the most famous advertising campaigns in America, in partnership with some of the greatest minds in advertising.

"I'm stuck On Band-Aid (Brand)" created with my friend and mentor Mike Becker went on to become the longest running TV campaign in history and made me the first ( and probably last) black person in the Clio Hall of Fame.

"Thanks, I Needed That", "Chow, Chow, Chow", "Diet Coke, Just for The Taste Of It", "Quality Is Job 1" and "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" all helped to win me a wall full of awards and a bank book full of bucks. Those I worked with went on to be famous. I went on to be infamous.

"That crazy Harry Webber. He had some nerve thinking he could integrate Madison Avenue. Why couldn't he just leave well enough alone?" and I was crazy to think that I could change the last bastion of WASP power in America. I guess I figured if I could do it, other folks like me could do it. So I set out to find them. And when I found them, I got the American Association of Advertising Agencies to help me train them. And once they were trained, I got the agencies to hire them. And soon I wasn't the only black guy on Madison Avenue any more. I was the only "crazy" black guy on Madison Avenue.

All the other black folk played it smart. They didn't make any waves. And when the equal opportunity fad was over, so were their careers. But I had bigger fish to fry.

While the establishment was lamenting, "That black guy has a lot of nerve, bringing his kind into our private preserve," I was busy focusing on the complexion of America's TV Commercials. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, I cast them all in my award winning TV spots. It was fun to put the color in color TV.

Of course I didn't stop at the color line. I was an equal opportunity employer, so I also gave John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone their first national exposure.

But to really make an impact on the color scheme of network television commercials, I had to do a lot of network television commercials. To do that I had to work on a lot of different accounts at a lot of different agencies in a lot of different cities. I had to have enough nerve to say I will never work longer than a year in any one agency or three years in any one city.

I figured it would be hard to hit a moving target. So off I went. Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, San Francisco, San Juan and back to New York.

"The nerve of this guy. Our clients love him, We offer him a fortune, He says adios and he's outta here." My mother always told me "To thine own self be true." And so I was; a true mercenary.

You got a marketing problem, you bring me in. I get the lay of the land. I choose my weapons. I pinpoint the problem. I terminate with extreme prejudice. You wire the money to my New York account. One day the staff comes in and the pro from Dover is gone. I was never there. It never happened. Joe ( or Jane) was given credit for the kill.

George Orwell said it best. "Ignorance Is Strength" I made the ignorance of an industry who insisted on judging me by the color of my skin my strength. They would never make me an Executive Creative Director. There are no black Executive Creative Directors. None. Not then, not now, not ever. So when you can't move up, you move out. And every time you move, you don't move up, your price moves up. And while the noble samurai loyally serve at the pleasure of their masters. You roam the land as an invisible ronin. Serving only at the pleasure of your sword and your price. Until you run out of luck, or out of nerve.

I ran out of luck in Pittsburgh, PA. The home of my father and Ketchum Communications. Their Executive Creative Director had seen past my complexion and offered me a place to hang up my shield and bury my sword. Their largest client, the H.J. Heinz Company had welcomed me with open arms and given the agency $8 million in new business to express their confidence. I came in as an Associate Creative Director with a team of bright young art directors and writers to back my play. I had found a home.

Until they beheaded my liege Lord and brought in a despot. His first move was to make everybody Associate Creative Directors effectively neutralizing my hard won status overnight. His next move was to take over the Heinz business and decimate my creative group. That's when I lost my nerve.

A wiser head would have said, "This too shall pass" and wait it out. But that would have taken nerves of steel, not napalm. One morning I got up, packed my bags headed for Penn station and took the first thing smoking back to New York. At the station I phoned in four telegrams resigning my position. I had decided the only company I would ever work for again would be the company I owned. That was in 1984.

"You showed up in Los Angeles with $38 to your name and pitched the California Lottery from a my pay phone. The nerve.",Said my landlady in the Wilshire- Orange Hotel. Then the pay phone rang. My one room agency had gotten the California Lottery. And for the next 16 years I was going to need all the nerve I could muster.

So here it is 16 years later. 16 years without a "real job." Millions in the bank. Global 50 consulting clients, Television and studio development deals, books published, wonderful family, rich and famous cronies, and agencies that would never hire me, reading my column every week.

But I no longer have the cornered market on nerve. No my friends, I proudly pass my laurels to The Coca-Cola Company for nervyous move of the year thus far.

You remember our globally publicized DoubleThink ad-hoc campaign for Coca-Cola entitled "Cool American?" The same campaign Coke management claims they were "unaware of" in the New York Times a month ago. Well, this just in from Adrants.

" A current Sprite campaign running in Hong Kong gleefully aligns itself with individual lifestyles in a campaign that is oddly similar to a campaign proposed a few months ago to Coke called " A Cool American." Both campaigns celebrate individual traits and lifestyles and align that with the choice to drink a particular beverage. Sprite, of course, is a Coke company and we wonder if the "A Cool American" layouts somehow found their way to Sprite's Hong Kong ad agency. The "A Cool American" campaign can be seen here. The Sprite campaign can be seen here. You decide.

What can I say? Some nerve, huh?

FINDING THE FATAL FLAW. Eight out of ten new businesses wind up going out of business. Two out of ten survive. Why the high mortality rate? There are many, many theories. Some say undercapitalization is to blame. Others cite lack of focus on core business issues. The latest theory is that those companies that focus on acquiring technology rather than capturing consumer value are doomed to fail.

Value Perception Management was conceived to help business decision makers to better understand the dynamic impact of profit-oriented business strategy, business design and technology on the economic landscape. It is the searchlight by which those conditions that can terminate a business can be identified and exorcised.

To my way of thinking, there are three basic reasons that a new business is either a success or a failure. These reasons are tied to fundamental flaws--fatal flaws--in the business process model, the front and/or back-office e-technology applications or their overall marketing strategy.

Customers are looking for the companies they do business with to continuously improve on instant, accurate and adaptive response to their wants, needs and ever-changing desires. They demand convenience and total, seamless integration along the supply chain. To not provide a means to meet these demands is to exhibit a Fatal Flaw.

The rules of doing business are in a revolutionary state of flux. Structural transformation is the norm rather than the exception. Streamlining the flow of information and innovation depends upon both the speed and the flexibility of every business application in the enterprise ecosystem. If technology is an after thought rather than a driver of change then the company is faced with a Fatal Flaw.

The challenge in building a successful Business Process Model is for management to align strategy, process and technology applications fast, right and all at once to meet the needs of the customer. The value in that business is in the needs being served, not the products being made or services being offered. The value chain of a successful enterprise begins and ends with its strategic positioning. Inability to overthrow outdated business strategy is the ultimate Fatal Flaw.

Certainly the first step is to determine what kind of company you are and then decide what kind of company you want to be. Generally, all companies can be grouped into four categories. Market Leaders, Visionaries, Pragmatists and Skeptics. The first step in uncovering The Fatal Flaw in the way companies operate is to determine which type of company they are and, if they are seeking change, which type of company they wish to be. If a company is not seeking change, then this in itself is The Fatal Flaw.

If a company is seeking to change itself to better serve its ever-changing customer landscape, then the first place to seek out the Fatal Flaw(s) is along the pathway it has chosen to effect that change. Value Perception Management helps organizations to better understand how their customer needs are evolving. It helps them by showing how to make the customer's priorities the company's priorities. Value Perception Management helps the Management Team create a business design that maximizes Customer Value.

This is accomplished through the evaluation of the firm's marketing strategy, business process model and e-business technology applications. It is through this process that we uncover the insidious stumbling blocks that hamper growth, stymie change and block the path of progress. Whether a company is a start-up or a household word, there is no time like the present to get ready for the future.

The new wave of technology innovation over the past decade has, and still is creating radical new ways of doing business and reevaluating management priorities even as you read this. Value Perception Management can be utilized to evaluate new and emerging technologies before, during and after they are implemented. If a company is not responsive to ever-changing customer expectations than this in itself is a Fatal Flaw.

Today, the dimensions of value that mean something to your customers are subject to change with the next thing they read or the next call they take. It is the Value Perceptions of Corporate Buyers and Consumers that are changing ways in which business is conducted in direct response to the increase in available purchase decision data and product usage information.

Companies can take advantage of emerging opportunities and still preserve their investment in people and process. But only if they are ready to seize the moment. However, if an enterprise is not lowering operating costs while adapting to the relentless pressure of time to market, then there is a Fatal Flaw ticking away the minutes until "out of time--game over". There are also ways in which Value Perception can be introduced into Consumer Research and Market Segmentation to increase the quality of the data retrieved. However, there are also many tough decisions required in shaping a new enterprise or reshaping an existing one.

In moving from where you are today towards where you want to be tomorrow, small details can ( and do) fall by the wayside. The Fatal Flaw is often found in those overlooked details. Managing for change may dictate the reallocation of resources and the abandonment of lines of business, just to ensure survival. It always seems as though priorities must change if a company is to keep ahead of the curve. One priority that cannot change is the customer's perception of your dedication to quality. And therein lies the challenge of managing constancy in the midst of radical change. To fail at this critical task is indeed a Fatal Flaw.

It is no longer enough for companies to add value. Now they must communicate that value to an ever-changing landscape of cynical consumers. Some think they can invent it. To accomplish such value creation is possible, but first they must reverse their traditional value-chain thinking. In such cases it is no longer enough for a company to define itself by the products it makes or the services it provides. They must completely rethink the way they do business.

Out of this controlled chaos will spring continuous innovation. On the way to this endless innovation Value Perception Management will help you see those potentially Fatal Flaws that are deeply embedded in keeping the status quo.

Many of my clients call upon me to help them reinvent themselves from the customer up. VPM is a critical component in the building of, or transformation to any business model. In working with companies who are dedicated to evolving from product/service based companies to Customer Focused Market Leaders,

I sometimes work with start-ups (and their Venture Capital Partners) who wish their business process model to be consistent with that of an business category leader. At one time new start-ups believed that first-mover advantage would allow them to turn traditional companies into dinosaurs by simply out-teching them. This naive prophesy never came to pass and many of these same start-ups are now extinct themselves. Fast-moving "intrapaneaural" product groups and divisions using start-up tactics to create new value perceptions for their firms have turned "dinosaurs" into agile market predators virtually, over night.

They understand that value creation and capture is a continuous process. Value migrates to the best business design. Customers are quick to follow. If a company stays ahead of the value perception curve, they create and capture customer value.

To stay ahead requires constant Value Perception Analysis. If your objective is to play catch up with your competition, the war has already been lost. If your objective is to outperform them by quantum leaps and bounds, VPM can give you a fighting chance. It can help each client transform each business process into a digital process. Digital information is more efficient to create, maintain and update. This type of data capture and mining demands that management analyze data creatively, access it quickly, update it easily and share it broadly, so as to create customer value in real world terms.

There are 20 Questions you can answer about your own company that will give you a clear picture as to whether your products or services are creating a perception of value in your customers or end users. Drop me a line and I'll show you the questions and how to apply the answers to evaluating your own enterprise...heh, heh, heh...for a fee.

Fight Club, First Round. Last week, I told you about the 18 students at Cal State University who enrolled in my class entitled "The Big Idea: How To Get It. How To Protect It. How to Sell It."

Because it is a class in idea generation, we dubbed the class "Fight Club" after the First Rule of Fight Club. Well nobody in the class obeyed the First Rule of Fight Club.

TYLER

The first rule of fight club is -- you don't talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is -- you don't talk about fight club.

And so, as a result of their "loose lips" there are now 32 students in the class including three professors who are auditing the class. I asked one of the students how much they expected to make once they graduated in June. She hemmed and hawed and finally came up with the number $40,000. I took that number and multiplied it by 32 ( the number of similar expectations in the class) and came up with $1,280,000 in expected earnings from the class.

Believe me when I tell you, these young people have as much chance of earning collective salaries of $1,280,000 next year as I do of getting hired to replace Bob Lutz as CEO of General Motors between now and next weeks edition. They are simply not equipped for the realities of today's job market.

So I figured the only way I could get them all hired ( including the three Professors as Consultants) was to hire them myself. To do that I would have to organize them into a business entity, capitalize the business entity for the amount of their salaries, their overhead and the working capital. I figure that to be about $5,120,000 for the first 18 months of operations.

To warrant such an investment, these 32 students would have to generate $10,240,000 worth of pre tax revenue for a reasonable return on investment. What are their assets, to warrant that $5,120,000 investment. Well, in a word...Me. I have 18 weeks to help them come up with enough big ideas to justify the risk.

If any of you think that I can pull it off and you have $5,120,000 for 50% of the enterprise, drop me a note*. Like I said at the top of the page. Some Nerve.

Stay Tuned.

* This is not a solicitation for investment. Solicitation for investment can only be made by prospectus, blah, blah, blah, blah, in accordance with the laws of the State of California, blah, blah, blah, etc.

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WELCOME

THE BRODER KURLAND WEBB UFFNAR AGENCY
AG TECHNOLOGIES
INTELLISPACE

And You.

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