First, the email was written in Courier. I’m not a typography snob, but if you want to be taken seriously, don’t go with Courier. You might as well use Comic Sans. Or whatever font they used in those old 8-bit video games. Gimme a break. Get yourself an email client that A) is capable of generating HTML emails, and B) defaults the font to something like Arial or Tahoma. Come on, folks. Let’s put on our big boy pants, ‘kay?

But I digress. You know why I was receiving this particular email? The email announced the launch of the firm’s first website. Let me repeat that. The law firm, which had been in business for roughly 15 years prior to this brief and terribly user-unfriendly communication, announced the launch of their first website.

Yup. The first one.

"I come to burn the looms, m'lord!"

So I consulted with someone who knows a whole helluva lot about the technical limitations of law firms — someone who runs a company that sells software to them. And he wasn’t surprised at all. Not in the least. He said that law firms suck at technology. They have terrible websites, they don’t participate in social media, they don’t effectively manage their databases, and often the best they can do is compile a list of physical addresses and send direct mail pieces once a year, if they remember to do so.

This is the legal industry we’re talking about, here. One of the oldest and most revered occupations in the history of the world. Lawyers make buckets of money. Law firms rake in dough hand over fist. A lawyer’s bill can eclipse my gross annual income in less time than it takes to hotwire a Gremlin. And these people can’t figure out how to hire someone to work the Interwebs.

So I did some digging. I visited a number of websites for area lawyers. And I have to tell you that not one of them — not a single site out of the two dozen or so I surveyed before forehead started steaming — had any information on it that was less than a year old. With the exception of the site referenced in the email, of course — which was really only half-complete, so I’m not going to count it.

A guy could make a fortune selling sexy web design services to law firms door-to-door. I’m just sayin’.

My point:

These people really do exist. I had heard about them in myths and fairy tales, those old-world Luddites whose congenitally misshapen brains prevent them from being able to understand the internet. But they’re real. And they’re using up all our internet sending poorly formatted emails. They’re clogging up the Tubes, guys. They’re clogging the TUBES!

It is our job to root these people out and enlighten them. And by “enlighten” I mean “lock in a small padded cell until they commit to reform, or die sad and alone, whichever comes first.”

Why? Because people aren’t allowed to act like this stuff doesn’t matter. Not anymore. It used to be okay. It used to be that we’d give old fogies a pass because, hey, they created the conditions that made the creation of the Internet possible. But to sit around and pretend like the world wide web isn’t the greatest invention of this or any generation is simply inexcusable.

A Call to Arms!

Here’s what I want you to do. If you’re a designer, donate some of your time to a company that sorely needs a new website. Introduce them to WordPress. Show them how to fix things. Make the web a little bit better than you found it. The same goes for marketers, and IT savants, and developers, and digital strategists. Donate your services where they need to be donated. Make the web better.

Please. For everyone’s sake.

More specifically, this part of the page:

There. Now that we’ve covered that bit, let’s talk about the rest of it.

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is testing a feature that will let users — not brands or organizations, but ordinary Joe Facebookers — pay money to increase the visibility of their posts.

Yeah, I know.

So if I pay a dollar or two, I can make sure that my friends see the crazy super awesome stuff that I write. Because I write things that are so freaking important, and I care so much about how many of my friends read the really important things that I write, that I would pay money to save my friends, family, and casual acquaintances from the lives of ignorance and misery that they surely would have suffered as a result of not having had the opportunity to read the really important thing that I wrote on Facebook.

Let’s be plain. If you use Highlight, you’re a narcissist. You’re a stark raving egomaniac, and I hate you. I hate you because you paid to do this:

But What About Facebook?

You know why we love Facebook? Because it lets us decide the content that’s important to us, and it gives us tools to see only that content. It learns about the things we like, and it serves up content that aligns with our interests. It figures out which of our friends’ posts we most likely want to read, and pushes all the crap down our News Feed. It’s the closest thing to a truly semantic social network that we have.

Except that it’s not. Because now your friends can circumvent the filters and algorithms you have come to know and love. Now it doesn’t matter if I’m going to like the content you publish or not; for a measly couple of bucks, I’m going to be subjected to it.

Here’s an idea. You want people to see your posts? Be more interesting. Write the kind of posts that people will want to share and Like and comment on. Don’t force me to read your stuff — entice me to read it.

Let’s Make a Deal, Okay?

Let’s all agree not to use Highlight. Because if we start doing that, our News Feeds are going to become overcrowded with posts from people with more money than brains. Facebook will become dumber. It will start to read like an eBay search page circa 2005. “LQQK! New Blog Post! Mint!!!! Must See!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Nobody wants that. Not even this guy.

But guess what? You need powder kegs. You need to learn how to deal with them. And if you don’t have a single powder keg in your place of employment, you need to become one.

I talk a lot in this blog about the things that drive innovation. I don’t think I talk enough about the things that stall it. The biggest stalling agent to innovation might surprise you. It’s not our fear of the unknown, or organizational inefficiencies, or even ridiculously stupid legislative action. It’s our aversion to people we consider to be “unknown quantities.”

That’s a silly phrase, isn’t it? As if the sum total of any of a person’s traits – even only those related to her business acumen – could ever be known or quantified. As if a person’s predictability somehow correlates to the caliber of work that person is capable of producing. A known quantity? Forget desirable; is that even feasible?

A meeting filled with known quantities is likely to be a very boring meeting. And I’ll take it one step further: every memorable meeting that you’ve ever had was memorable because something unexpected happened. And that unexpected thing was likely facilitated by someone you consider to be an “unknown quantity” – a powder keg.

Powder kegs are disruptive. They approach logical issues with emotion. They become frustrated when they don’t understand what’s going on – and they will kill off procedural inefficiencies until they get what they need. They are blunt and brusque, and put things in a language that everyone can understand. And until their work satisfies their expectations, they’ll let everyone in a five mile radius know that they think the work they’re doing sucks.

Yes, they’re over the top sometimes. But here’s what you need to imagine. Your business is a sculptor. It has a whole lot of tools for carving stone – chisels, hammers, and awls of various descriptions, and so on – but none of them help free a chunk of marble from a quarry. The thing that makes a 9-foot marble statue possible is a strategically placed stick of dynamite that liberates a 10-foot hunk of rock from the ground. Is a stick of dynamite over the top sometimes? If you’re trying to carve fine details into your sculpture, yes. If you’re trying to get a 4-ton rock out of the ground, it’s the right tool for the job.

So you want to execute a great concept? You need to liberate a great concept from the brains of your so-called “known quantities,” who would otherwise hack at it with chisels. Your powder kegs will help with that.

Dealing with powder kegs is hardly an enviable task. But it’s manageable if you think about the nature of a powder keg:

• Generally, a powder keg sees things through a highly polarized lens. Things are right or wrong, good or bad, easy or impossible. Anything that falls in the middle of this spectrum must be broken down to its fundamental elements, which can each be evaluated as a binary value.
• If a powder keg senses something is wrong, they will not stop being upset about it until it is made right. Even if the work goes on to win awards, the powder keg will always speak derisively about it if at any point it failed to meet her standards. If the work is taking a different tack than what the powder keg demands, don’t try to get the powder keg to “suck it up” – she never will. Instead, try to use her logic to arrive at the conclusion that this direction is the right one.
• Powder kegs tend to have sizeable egos. Anything you can do to make them feel like the best ideas are their ideas, do it. The more influential the powder keg perceives herself to be, the happier and more manageable she will be.

That’s all well and good. But what if you don’t have a powder keg? How do you become one?

That, I’m afraid, is a question with no good answer. Not to pat myself on the back, but reading this blog is probably a good start. I also recommend finding people who are disruptive and asking what they read. Learn what disruption looks like. Then, when you see an opportunity for innovation, emulate the disruptors. Think to yourself, “What would Steve Jobs do in this situation?” That’s really the best advice I can give you (though perhaps some of my loyal readers will help me out with some tips on being disruptive? I’ll be your best friend forever).

As for me, I’m proud to be a powder keg. And I fully intend to keep on exploding big ol’ rocks from the ground.

Kablammingly yours,

–MS

And so that little Idea started to put out its little anthropomorphic feelers to discover ways to be bigger. It started latching itself on to new information as it passed through the young woman’s brain, looking for that one perfect little speck of data – a trend, a statistic, an innovation, anything – that would give the little Idea purpose; a sense of direction. And because it was a steadfast little Idea, it wasn’t long before it had found a perfect piece of new information that it could latch onto and begin down the road to becoming a really big Idea.

That road wasn’t easy, of course. The little Idea had direction, but now it needed to scour the brain for as much relevant information as it could find to justify itself. Every new piece of information was carefully analyzed as it entered the brain, some of it added to the cause and some of it simply discarded. After a while, the little Idea began to notice that many of the items it had discarded were being tucked into the dark nether-regions of the brain, and the ones the Idea had deemed worthy were constantly active, combining with other pieces of information to spark new Ideas. These new micro Ideas all joined the little Idea’s cause. The brain was consumed with the little Idea, and little Idea was growing bigger every day!

The young woman who happened to own the brain that the little Idea called home eventually worked up the courage to present the Idea to her boss. Her boss, being somewhat older and a good bit more experienced, helped her to reshape her Idea, making it stronger. After a few months of collaboration, the Idea had changed significantly – it was more worldly, better informed, and extremely well informed. It had the support of her colleagues, who all loved the Idea and wanted to know how they could help. The little Idea had become a very big Idea indeed!

Now to put it to action. The young woman took her big Idea and turned it into a persuasive pitch. She thought her client would be crazy not to fall in love with the big Idea, and that they would want to throw scads of money at it for the privilege of calling it theirs. The whole thing made perfect sense, after all: the client hired the young woman’s agency to be innovative, and the big Idea was certainly that. Innovative and creative and never-been-done-before. It was a clear winner.

But when the client heard the pitch, their reaction wasn’t at all what the young woman had anticipated. They liked the idea, they said, but they didn’t think it was practical. In fact, they had a number of other pitches that maybe weren’t as big, but which were easier to put into motion. They were more familiar. They were safer Ideas. We’re sorry, the clients said, but this idea is too big for us.

The little Idea – which was not so little anymore – felt like the life had been sucked from it. It was angry and sad and confused. It kicked itself for being so big, or for not being big enough. It felt itself start to fade into the recesses of the young woman’s memory, replaced by disappointment and the sense that no idea would ever be as great, and no idea would ever be good enough to sell.

A year went by. The little Idea still hadn’t faded away entirely, but it had largely been forgotten. The young woman still worked at the same agency, and with the same client, though she hadn’t pitched another big Idea to them. But in that year, something had changed. The client took a good hard look at its competitors, and realized that its edict to enact only the practical ideas had given its competitors an edge. They called the agency in for a big meeting, and the young woman – though still relatively junior – was invited.

In the meeting, the company said that they had made a mistake. They hadn’t availed themselves of the young woman and her remarkable Idea, and now they were paying the price for it. They wanted to hear about the Idea again!

Of course, the Idea hadn’t remained sedentary this whole time. After all, it had been in the habit of scouring the brain for relevant bits of information, and old habits die hard. Having collected relevant data for a year, the Idea was in fact stronger than ever – and thankfully had not yet been thought up by a competitor already. The young woman presented her idea to the client a number of times over the course of the next month, each time to someone more senior than the last, until she was standing in front of the CEO himself, explaining the various intricacies and benefits the Idea had to offer.

This time, the company bought in. They threw money at the Idea by the handful. And when the Idea finally launched, it didn’t just change things for the company. It changed things for the whole world.

The moral: There is always a time for innovation, and that time is always right now. But if you are unable to innovate right now, for whatever reason, don’t let your idea die. Keep adding to it, growing it, distilling it, reshaping it, reframing it, and expanding it. You never know when you’re going to need it again.

That’s kind of a big deal. A brilliant analyst is brilliant because she sees things in numbers that no one else sees. A brilliant project planner is brilliant because she’s exceptionally good at making people adhere to a strict schedule. A brilliant developer is brilliant because her code makes computers do crazy awesome things. Almost every brilliant youth that I’ve had the exceptional pleasure of meeting has been brilliant because they do something brilliantly.

Almost all of them.

Now me, I’m a big-picture kind of guy. (Stop rolling your eyes.) I’m the kind of guy whose particular area of expertise is pushing people to think bigger than they’re already thinking. I say things like “what if” and “what else”. And at an agency like mine, that’s a very good skill to have. But it’s not a skill the agency is lacking – they expect everyone they hire to have that kind of ability. Fortunately for me, I also happen to know a lot about social media, which is what got me the job.

I think young people today are at a disadvantage. I think we’re encouraged throughout our lives to be big-picture thinkers, only to graduate and realize that you can’t put “I want to push the envelope” on your resume. If I interview a candidate and have to justify hiring her to my boss, the conversation can’t be about how willing she is to learn – it has to be about what she can do brilliantly.

That’s kind of sad, in a way. Obviously the agency has an interest in hiring people who do great work; but what about the people who push others to turn great work into legendary work? The people who can’t draw for the life of them, but who know great design when they see it? The ones who don’t know what a project plan is, but can intuitively root out and eliminate inefficiencies? The ones who don’t know how to code, but who have ideas about how to make web applications more awesome?

What do those people put on their resumes?

So I have two pieces of advice. One is for young people who have graduated recently (or who will graduate in the near future), and one is for companies looking to hire smart young people.

For Young People: You all need to find one practical thing that you’re really good at. If you can walk into an interview and say confidently, “I’m better than 90% of my peers at _______,” you’re off to a better start than 90% of your peers. I know a lot of you are graduating with Bachelor’s degrees in marketing and English and journalism and liberal arts (the “impractical sciences,” as I call them), so what I want you to do is find one of the skills you learned in your studies and become an expert in it. Become the most proficient person you know in that field. Then start writing your resume.

For Businesses: Look, young people are unknown quantities. They’re also the future of your business, so you have to get smarter about hiring them. What you should do is create environments where entry-level folk are encouraged to share their ideas without feeling the need to wow you with their undoubtedly inadequate experience. Don’t focus on what students have done in their previous internships, focus on what they’ve learned. Here’s what I’d do if I was looking for a new hire right now. I’d hold a job fair and instruct applicants to bring a handful of calling cards and a Big Idea, not a resume. Then I’d have employees sit down with each of the applicants and ask four non-standard questions:

• What are you passionate about?
• What do you do better than anyone else in this room?
• In the next twelve months, what new skills are you going to have that will make us want to give you a raise and a promotion?
• What’s your Big Idea?

And if the employee interviewing them likes their ideas, they’ll take their card. If not, they’ll give the same advice I gave above – go become an expert in something, and call us in six months.