by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & PhD-Program Conscientious Objector

Lots of dirt being dished about Ph.D. programs these days. Take this amusing quicky critique: “The Illustrated Guide To a Ph.D.”

For a more elaborate evisceration, read “The Ph.D. Problem” by Prof. Louis Menand in the November-December 2009 issue of Harvard Magazine. Here’s a quote from that diatribe that bullseyes some of my professors at Harvard and in business school:

“Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable… and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy.”

Now, I work with a few great Ph.D.’s. And as a professor who loves teaching but wishes he got paid more for it, I’m often tempted to enter a doctoral program. But articles like the above innoculate me from catching the Ph.D. bug. That and the thought of spending nine years in captivity so that I may get a piece of paper that lets me do pretty much what I’m doing now but with more academic politics.

Hmm, maybe I’ll try being the CEO of a Silicon Valley tech company instead. It pays a whole lot better, and it seems like they’ll hire any clown for the gig. So forget the Ph.D. — HP here I come!

***

Related article: Why I Won’t Get a PhD: Exhibit 1A

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Freelance Dreamer

"My dead wife is haunting me, evil thugs are chasing me, and I have a final exam tomorrow for a math class I forgot to attend..."

So “Inception” is this action-packed, visually stunning film that appears real. Too real. Indeed, although the premise is based on dreams, it isn’t very… well, dreamlike. Who has linear dreams that are essentially action films? Whose dreams appear shot from a third-person perspective with scenes that don’t involve them?

Dreams are usually visualized from a first-person P.O.V., with the person dreaming involved in all the action. But forget the technical side — I don’t have to tell you that most dreams are bizarre, as if you’ve been doing mushrooms with David Lynch and Bugs Bunny while going backwards on a Disneyland ride during an electrical storm. Plus, they often contain a few good dream clichés. For example, if “Inception” were truly dreamlike, it would contain the following…

1. Leonardo DiCaprio finds himself in public wearing only pajamas, his underwear, or nothing at all, and tries to be cool about it around other people.

2. As bad guys chase him, he finds himself suddenly trapped in slow motion. He tries to scream for help, but no words come out of his mouth.

3. Speaking of mouth, his teeth feel loose in their sockets, and some fall out.

4. He finally manages to talk to his wife, but she changes before his eyes. She becomes Ellen Page and then his mother who in turn becomes his junior high school crush and then some woman from an insurance commercial before becoming his wife again.

5. In mid-conversation, he suddenly realizes that he had signed up for a math class at school, but had failed to attend class all semester long, and the final exam is tomorrow. And where the hell is the classroom?

6. He finds the class, but it becomes a theatrical stage from when he was a younger actor. The play is about to begin, and he realizes he doesn’t know any of his lines and will have to improvise the whole thing.

7. A cat feeds him his lines and becomes a wild beast that starts to stalk him. He runs into his childhood home and slams the door. He thinks he’s safe, then turns around and realizes he left the back door wide open.

8. Freaked out, he hops in his car, but can’t control it. He crashes into things and at one point finds himself hanging out the window, barely holding onto the steering wheel.

9. The car flies off a cliff and he loses his grip on it, but he can suddenly fly over the trees — as long as he concentrates on it. His concentration slips and he starts to fall back to earth.

10. Before he can hit bottom, he wakes to find that he is actually Joseph Gordon-Levitt busting moves to “You Make My Dreams” in a dance sequence in the middle of L.A.

Now THAT is a dream movie. And it’s easy to see: two burritos, some melatonin and I’m there. Who needs Hollywood?

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Incorrigible BACN Addict

I have few addictions, but I confess to loving me some bacon. I’ve tempered my addiction somewhat by subbing in turkey bacon, but that’s like seeking a buzz off light beer. It’s possible but hardly as satisfying.

Same thing goes for most e-newsletters. I think they’re going to be great, so I subscribe to a whole slew of them. Yet every morning the first thing I do when I check my email is delete almost every single one.

There’s a term for e-newsletters that we subscribe to but never read: “bacn” — which is a step above that other four-letter word, spam.

So what separates e-newsletters we read from bacn we don’t?

The good ones pull a Don Corleone and make us an offer we can’t refuse.

Take the following e-newsletter I just got from The Jared Company, a Blackberry application developer. I just bought my first Blackberry a few weeks ago, because I love being electronically leashed to my clients 24/7. And nowadays, no smartphone is complete without a load of apps on it. So I bought a few. Over the ensuing weeks, other app developers sent me updates and plugs for their other products, but JaredCo did something different: they made me like them.

The e-newsletter arrived with the subject heading, “Tether Your Blackberry: How To Guide.” And, yes, thank you, I would like to know how to hook my Blackberry up to my laptop to get Internet access. So in the midst of one of my early morning bacn purges, I actually stopped and clicked on one to find the following:

So what’s to like? First, there’s no phony attempt to address me by name — as 21st century consumers, we all know such “personalization” is computer generated. However, the newsletter is personal: written in the first person and first-person plural, while signed by an actual human being. Who’s Michael? No idea. His real name could be Akash Ramachandran for all it matters. But the point is that JaredCo knows it’s invading my e-mailbox, so it’s at least making a nod toward being personal. To top that off, Michael solicits feeback. Nice touch.

But all that social hocus-pocus would mean nothing if the newsletter didn’t have value, and this one does: a free PDF full of advice I want. Sure, it’s not a free iPad or chance to win a trip to the Bahamas, but it’s still useful. Better yet, there’s no commitment on my part — I don’t have to sign up for anything, enter a contest, or recommend a friend. I just click. And that click helps JaredCo measure the effectiveness of their campaign beyond a mere “open.” Yes, Michael, you got the attention of your customer and the desired action for your post-campaign analytics.

The PDF guide is also branded, with links back to the JaredCo site — nice integration. My only beef* is that the tethering guide was about PC’s, and I’m a Mac user. I guess they assumed most Apple fanboys have iPhones, but I’m one of those strange consumers who wants a phone with good reception. Go figure.

So after all that, I got left out. Sigh. But I was still impressed enough to blog about this bit of promotion. There’s nothing dazzling about it — this e-newsletter likely won’t hit the cover of AdAge or the pages of Mashable — it’s just smart marketing by a small company. Keep that up, and they’ll soon be a big company bringing home lots of the real good kind of bacon.

Update 7/15/10: I forwarded this blog post to Michael as an fyi, and within a few hours he sent me a link to a third-party article on how to tether my Mac. Nice. (And, yes, Michael is his real name.)

•••

Shameless plug: Want to create a corporate e-newsletter that doesn’t become bacn? Contact us…

*Sorry about all the meat references — it’s almost dinner.

I don’t usually share comic strips, but this one hit too close to home…

Coincidentally, Wired magazine just published a related (albeit much more scientific) article about how “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.”

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + No Fan of Captain Ahab

image by McAuliflower, Brownie Points Blog (click image to see the full original)

How do you go from being one of the hottest restaurants in town to being completely out of business in just weeks? Simply follow the example of The Hump, a trendy sushi bar in Santa Monica, CA, that shut down after being busted for selling whale meat.

That’s right: someone there actually said, “Mmm, beautiful, intelligent and endangered species — let’s eat it.”

Two activists covertly filmed the staff of The Hump serving whale sushi. This happened in March 2010, and I’ve since been teaching it as a vivid example of how not to run a business — and why a complete stakeholders analysis is essential before launching any product or campaign.

In a stakeholders analysis, marketers evaluate their customers, competitors and own company. This helps shape strategy and gauge odds of success. Recently a fourth “C” — community — was added to factor in the relevance and influence of the government, labor unions, the news media and special interest groups. It’s the “C” that often gets left out of the equation, and it’s the “C” that factors most prominently in this case. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Customers: I’ve written several posts about customer worship in which I’ve noted that, yes, it’s essential to know your customers’ needs, but, no, you can’t afford to dismiss the following facts:

• customers don’t always know what they want
• customers disagree with each other
• customers are not always right
• certain customers can actually be bad for business.

The Hump perfectly met the needs of certain customers — the restaurant wouldn’t have offered whale sushi unless they had customers willing to pay hundreds of dollars for it. (Note: the activists who exposed The Hump weren’t customers — they were vegans on the prowl.)

Competitors: One principle of successful marketing is to be highly differentiated from your competition. And in this case, serving cetacean sushi certainly distanced The Hump from the thousands of other restaurants in the L.A. area (or so we whale lovers hope). Mission accomplished!

Company: Before doing anything, a company should know if it has the means and willpower to do so. Did The Hump have access to whale meat? Check. Were The Hump’s staff willing to serve it? Check. Was the chef willing and able to prepare it? Check. Indeed, in an earlier review, the L.A. Times wrote, “The chefs at The Hump are deadly serious about their sushi.” No kidding. So all systems go!

Community: And here’s where the happy whalers of The Hump met their Moby Dick. First of all, the restaurant was not located in some red state outpost where the residents regularly flip their fingers at environmentalists. This was Santa Monica — aka “Soviet Monica” — an extremely liberal city that’s home to the environmental group Heal the Bay and an office of the Natural Resources Defense Council. People here love whales — but not for dinner. Beyond residents, it was a collaborative effort between activists, federal agents and news-hungry reporters that served The Hump up on a plate.

In sum, The Hump adequately met the needs of customers, differentiated themselves from competitors, and leveraged the skills and motivation of company stakeholders. But after 12 years of business, they decided to neglect the interests and power of their community, and wound up sinking themselves.

Case — and doors — closed.

A too-late mea culpa from The Hump's website.

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Business Lit Connoisseur

Note: The following is meant to be satirical. The author has no affiliation with the Harvard Business Review or any idea what its editors could possibly be thinking.

HBR: Gettin' in touch with a new generation of business readers.

For 88 years, the Harvard Business Review has been the authoritative voice of critical business thinkers, featuring such legendary thought leaders as Peter Drucker, Theordore Levitt and Michael Porter, and popularizing such paradigm-shattering concepts as the glass ceiling, marketing myopia and the balanced scorecard.

Well, enough of that…

We, the new generation of editors at Harvard Business Review, have concluded that critical, cutting-edge business thinking is, like, so 20th century. Who’s got the attention span for that anymore? Imagine today’s business titans taking time to read groundbreaking articles that require thinking… Could billionaire entrepreneur and Harvard alum Mark Zuckerberg adequately explore privacy loopholes if he were contemplating long-term sustainable competitive advantage? Would the words “long-term sustainable competitive advantage” even fit in a Facebook update?

Or consider the bankers of Goldman Sachs, many of them Harvard MBAs. What’s the purpose of having them learn about the impact of corporate social responsibility on brand equity if there’s no way to short it?

As the self-proclaimed social media gurus say — and we’re big followers of self-proclaimed social media gurus — what’s most important is doing what your customers want because, according to the gurus, customers know everything. Customers are never wrong. Customers can see the future and determine what’s best for the world at large. Our customers are primarily business leader wannabes, and from our extensive studies (using Twitter search), we learned that what our customers want most is pith. Great pith. Pith that can fit into 140 characters or less.

So, after much deliberation involving multiple case studies (cases of Sam Adams Boston Lager, to be exact), we the new generation of HBR editors have decided to punt the in-depth, statistically substantiated studies written by PhD’s and veteran business executives. Hey, don’t blame us — we tried publishing those, and a bunch of know-it-all bloggers complained that they were too hard to read. True, we could have edited those articles to make them readable, but that would have required reading them, and they’re too hard to read. Plus, what editor does editing these days?

Instead, we turned to specialists in addressing high school business 101 students and members of the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce. We’re talking consultants, of course. You may have seen one of our recent posts, “Two Rules for a Successful Presentation,” which contained this earth-shattering insight: “know thy audience.” What pith! And note the cleverness of the word “thy,” which is the author’s way of acknowledging that this bit of wisdom is 2,000 years old, give or take a millennium.

In addition, we’re staying fresh with a new generation of business leaders — leaders raised on “Legally Blonde” and the lyrics of Justin Timberlake — by hiring columnists who speak their language. Consider the “Awesomeness Manifesto,” in which the author says innovation is dead, and that the only thing that matters is being “awesome.” See, no thinking required!

Along these lines, we’re publishing the following articles in coming issues:

• The Third Rule Of Public Speaking: Don’t Forget To Wear Pants
• Terrific Smelling Hair + Other Keys To Boardroom Success
• Today’s CEO: Bringing Sexy Back
• Effective Corporate Communication Is, Like, Whatever
• Money Lets You Buy Things
• and our favorite actual quote from the recent SXSW conference:
  We Spend Most Of Our Lives Living Among Other People

If you have any ideas for articles, please let us know on Twitter (@HarvardBiz), since, you know, we value customer input and don’t like to read anything longer than a tweet.

One final change: We, the new generation of HBR editors, realize that most of these articles aren’t really about business. Rather, they cover the kind of basic etiquette and concepts once taught on PBS children’s programming before all public broadcasting was sold to News Corp. Since authenticity is so du jour, we’ve decided to be totally authentic and rename our august publication the Harvard Obviousness Review, or HOR. Catchy, no? You’ll still find the name Harvard Business Review on our website and other media, since strategic rebranding is, like, the kind of smart practical advice we don’t do anymore.

Happy reading, dudes!

Related Articles:

• Enough With The Fluff! A Recession Is No Time For Management B.S.!
• Why I Won’t Get A PhD: Exhibit 1A
• The Young Professor: How To Get Published
• Marketing Mix-Up: Being Treated Like Lois Lane
• Ivory Towers Vs Empty Calories: The Best And Worst Of Business Publishing

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Practicing Metaphor Engineer

OK, sometimes it's a bit of a stretch...

Looks like it’s over for us marketing strategists.

No, I’m not saying that there’s no more need for marketing strategy. If you look at the anemic brands of most banks, airlines and Web 2.0 startups, you’ll see that the need for marketing is growing faster than Rush Limbaugh at a cheesecake bake-off.

But the opportunity to develop a revolutionary new marketing strategy may have passed. Sure, we marketers can still develop new tactics based on new mediums and new markets, but the big picture strategies have apparently all been done. Even worse, they’re now being recycled…

This dawned on me while teaching competitive strategies in my integrated marketing course at UCLA Extension. Although I’m quoting different marketing experts and their theories, I found myself repeating the same ideas disguised as different metaphors.

For example, in the 1976 classic “Marketing Warfare,” Jack Trout & Al Ries recommended that “a good flanking move must be made into an uncontested area.” Nineteen years later, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne recommended the exact same strategy, but opted for a nature metaphor with their “Blue Ocean Strategy.” A couple of years after that, Marty Neumeier in his book “Zag” tapped his design experience and recommended “look for the white space.” Three bestselling marketing books. Same basic idea. Different metaphors.

Then there’s the current reigning king of marketing metaphors, Seth Godin…

Godin’s a savvy marketer who’s cranked out an entire shelf of business bestsellers. His method? Devising wildly creative metaphors — sneezers, purple cows, meatball sundaes and big red fezzes — for basic marketing concepts. Three of his books extol the virtues of being “remarkable,” which is his way of saying “differentiation,” which is to marketing what “profit” is to financiers. Common sense stated in an uncommon way, resulting in millions of books sold. Godin is the Rachael Ray of business lit.

Since I found myself wading in metaphors before a score of marketing students, I decided to show them how they can contrive their own. I asked one student to pick an item, any object. He suggested a cheeseburger. (In these late night classes, food is always high on the mind.) And right there in class, the Cheeseburger POV (Proposition o’ Value) was born…

The Cheeseburger POV: The Exclusive Recipe…

Your basic American cheeseburger consists of a meat patty layered with cheese, an obligatory slice of lettuce, and a bun. And like a cheeseburger, a good value proposition is greater than the sum of its parts:

• The meat: This is the core product benefit, which is what the consumer primarily wants. In a car, that would be the drivetrain that takes them from point A to point B. But a drivetrain is not terribly exciting by itself, so…
• The cheese: You layer your core product with features like leather seats and a killer stereo and xenon headlights. The more cheese, the tastier the product, and the more you can skimp on the expensive meat.
• The lettuce: This is the token nod to nutrition that enables the consumer to say, hey, I’m eating healthy! In marketing, this is the corporate social responsibility element that’s the trend du jour. Think of the hybrid technology used to greenwash an SUV.
• The bun: Then there’s the styling, design and other fluffy branding elements that hold it all together.

Just apply this Cheeseburger POV, and you’ll have a product that satisfies the consumer and commands a tasty margin. (Ever see what a hybrid SUV costs?) If you crave even more profit, just ask your customer if they want “fries with that” (an extended warranty). The Cheeseburger POV can help you sketch out an idea for anything from an ecommerce site to a coffee shop to an MBA program.

Now it’s your turn to pull a Godin…

Anyone can coin a marketing metaphor — go ahead, give it a shot here. To help you get started, I’ve posted a list of suggested terms below. What do you think they represent?

Bacon Bits
Dodo Birds
Shrubbery
Tabernacle Choirs
Lederhosen
Duct Tape
Baba Ghanoush
Spackle

Just take one of those, apply it to some basic concepts from a marketing textbook, and expand it to 200 pages (large type, lots of leading). Voila! — you’ve got the basis of a business bestseller. Easy, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to concoct my own hit book — and find a late-night burger joint.

Related Articles:

• The Young Professor: How To Get Published
• Marketing Mix-Up: Being Treated Like Lois Lane
• Not Exactly “Metafore!”: Politicians and Poetic License

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + former Record Industry Adman

Funny to see all the young ones chattin’ away on the Twitter ’bout this year’s South-by-Southwest festival, aka SXSW.

What used to be just a good ol’ fashioned music fest in the unvarnished heart of Austin is now this slicked-up multimedia shindig known as much — or even more — for its interactive media than its music. Seems to me that the latte-sippers are now outnumbering the Shiner Bock drinkers. The times they sure have a’changed…

Back in ’95, when I was but a pup in the music industry, I got me an assignment to write an ad for MCA Records’ big concert in the middle of the street where no one could miss it. (Helps to have that big corporate concert budget, you know.) Now this ad was gonna run in the Austin Statesman, which would be filled with other ads from other record companies for other concerts all pretty much lookin’ the same, like the opposite sex in a bar after you’ve had one too many.

So I decided to be a little different by making my ad a Texas legend. Hell, I had the space to write all I wanted. And just like many legends and textbooks in Texas, this one was just made up. But I enjoyed writin’ it. And from what I hear, people enjoyed readin’ it.

And you’ll notice way at the bottom a plug for MCA Records’ website, which in 1995 was a new-fangled thing I also wrote. So I kinda like to think that we at MCA (R.I.P.) helped to sow all this multimedia business at SXSW that today’s kids are now reapin’.

So if you got the time and the inkling, give this piece o’ history a click and a read, and pour me another Shiner. I get enough lattes here in L.A.

The good ol' days - click to enlarge...

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Ink-Devouring Eco Junkie

I have a love-hate relationship with my Canon MP500 printer. Love because it prints out professional looking photos. Hate because its insatiable thirst for ink is robbing me dry, like NYPD cops in a perfume warehouse.

Indeed, according to one study, it would be significantly cheaper to refill my printer with Chanel No. 5.  And as the chart below notes, printer ink costs more than human blood, penicillin or vodka.

Source: Gizmodo

After burning through hundreds of dollars in ink, I now do most of my printing on a Dell laser printer — a move I should have made years ago — but I still use the Canon for photos and graphics. The other day while ordering some laser toner, I noticed something called Dell NextLife Ink. NextLife’s remanufactured cartridges supposedly last longer than regular cartridges and are more environmentally responsible. According to the Dell site, “if roughly 1% of the ink cartridges thrown into landfills every year were remanufactured by NextLife, the carbon savings over new cartridges would equate to planting almost 15,000 new trees.”

That’s a little convoluted, but OK, I’m a lifelong environmentalist, and I recycle my jokes regularly, so I was game for this. I’ve tried other off-brand ink cartridges made by child prison labor in China, and they just don’t work. Since this is Dell, and their laser printer has been problem-free so far, I decided to try their Canon-compatible cartridge.

The cartridge is smaller than a can of Altoids, so I expected it to arrive in a padded envelope. But as you can see in the following photo, it came in a 12″ x 9″ x 3″ box lined with foam. (The cartridge is the dark item wrapped in cellophane in the middle.)

EcoCat is not amused.

Inside was the cartridge’s own box and a Dell ad. Altogether, it wasn’t exactly Chernobyl, but it was still less eco-friendly than if I had driven alone in a Hummer at top speed to a Staples across town and bought a brand-new Canon cartridge along with a plastic store bag while drinking bottled water made from a genuine Antarctic glacier.

If this cartridge doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try blood next. It’s reportedly cheaper and less painful.

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango & “Bank Run” Consigliere

Full Disclosure: The following post is about one of my clients at Atomic Tango…

Imagine waking up and finding yourself strapped to a chair. Standing over you is a strange man swinging a large golf club. He keeps asking you menacing questions, but you have no idea what he’s talking about. Frustrated by your lack of answers, he decides to take a massive swing at a spot right between your eyes… How do you escape?

Well, there’s an App for that…

More exactly, there’s an iPhone App and an interactive movie. “Bank Run” is an Apple iPhone game with actual video footage — not CGI characters, but real humans in real locations. In addition, it’s integrated with a free interactive movie at BankRunGame.com.

In “Bank Run,” you play Evan, an office drone caught up in a conspiracy involving hot secret agents, crooked bankers and an army of armed thugs. You have to dodge cars and bullets while deciding whom to trust and whom to kill. Make the wrong choice or the wrong move and Evan eats it — but you can hone your skills and try again.

“Bank Run” is the creation of my client SilkTricky, a Portland, Oregon-based digital agency that launched its first live-action interactive film, “The Outbreak,” in September 2008. (Which I also helped promote.) “The Outbreak” featured rampaging zombies, bloodied characters and viewers in charge. Fueled by reviews on blogs and social media, “The Outbreak” attracted over one million views during its eight-month run online.

“The reaction to ‘The Outbreak’ inspired us to go even further,” said Chris Lund, SilkTricky’s founder and writer/editor/director/effects artist. “Bank Run” was filmed in Portland with local actors. Lund won’t reveal the budget, but noted that “it cost a little less than ‘Avatar.’” He added, “Our goal wasn’t to make a cinematic classic, but to create a fun fantasy experience. There are some cheesy one-liners and over-the-top scenarios, but who wants to play a boring movie?”

Just another day at the evil multinational bank...

SilkTricky is hosting the first part of “Bank Run” online where it can be sampled freely. The experience continues on the iPhone with a $1.99 App that includes the second half of the movie and a couple of arcade-style shooter games. Both the movie and the game contain graphic violence and adult language — or approximately what you’d find at your typical evil multinational bank. And like any bank loan officer, Lund hopes that interest runs high…

Update 3/15/10: “Bank Run” scores Site of the Day honors at the FWA.

Related Article: “The Outbreak”: New Zombie Flick Brings Interactive Films Back From The Dead