alex j. mann (.com)

A Shift In Networks

alexjmann — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:02 +0000

People attend conferences primarily to network. Networking usually includes engaging in a quick, superficial conversation, marked by the exchange of a flimsy, awkwardly moist business card, with both eyes darting in circles to spot the best person to approach next. While this activity is encouraged and even sworn upon by executives, I’ve found it generally worthless without discipline and transactional goals in mind.

As someone comparatively younger in business, I realize the deck isn’t stacked in my favor when my target clientele are generally older-school personas. In their eyes, age is still a deal breaker. Realizing this, I temporarily remove myself out of scrappy startup mode if I’m faced with networking. While startups are where my heart is, I’m determined to not let my company become another washed up blog post reminiscing my top ten mistakes. This means actively seeking transactional relationships, not new buddies.

My pleasant experiences in startup land during the idea phase of my business included smart, generous people willing to help and introduce me around, but few willing to put money down on the table. While I never expected more, I still appreciate the hospitality and return the favor to this day. My point is that this is a different strategy compared to what I’m seeking now. Ruthlessly, to the benefit of a real money-making business, I’ve changed my priorities.

Where I’ll comply in agreement with the networking mantra is that it’s a helpful first step in making an initial face-to-face connection with someone. The humble realization I’ve made is that you’ll inevitably gain someone’s graces by engaging in a business or social transaction with them. If you want to be noticed, sell someone something. If you want to be respected, help someone’s pockets get fatter. If you’re not in the position to do either one, introduce them to someone who can. That’s what matters in the end.

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Welcome Hypebot Readers

alexjmann — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:31:16 +0000

If you are visiting after reading my piece on Hypebot, thank you for coming by. You may want to:

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Culture’s War of Authenticity: Art vs. Marketing

alexjmann — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:44:24 +0000

Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. We the people, affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art. – Banksy

Creativity falls into a category of traits often claimed but rarely defined. My observations tell me this happens for three reasons:

One, the word has sex appeal. Similar to “entrepreneur,” it’s become marketable and desirable for someone to claim he is a “creative,” even if he’s not. The second, most authentically, is communicated by someone who creates things while lacking the acuteness to articulate what he is creating. The third is communicated by someone who claims a creative philosophy, but is ignorant to communicating his reasoning.

The distinctions play a role in the unique war occurring between the opposing poles of popular culture: art and marketing. I categorize art as original work derived from the hands and minds of the second and third distinctions. Historically, art has generated new cultural movements. The subsequent mass marketing is a collection of messages recycled from the original art, often developed by individuals in the first distinction.

Both art and marketing can, and do, stand on their own, but are more effective when combined. For instance, for a painting to reach mass appeal and commercial success, it needs to be created by the artist, while most effectively marketed by a second party, such as a museum. Likewise, a marketing campaign will prove influential when its guts have been created by the unique work of an artist.

Today’s original art is reflective of today’s mass marketing and media, rather than the other way around. Consider the following two examples:

The Banksy-influenced street artist Mr. Brainwash currently has an exhibit displaying colorful pop portraits in a spacious New York warehouse reminiscent in style of Andy Warhol, including quirky prints of Obama, Kate Moss, Keith Haring, a taxi cab in a toy box and broken record outlines of pop figures Slash, Jay-Z, David Bowie and Sid Vicious. Mr. Brainwash leveraged existing, pre-marketed trends, repackaged them and resold his art to an existing culture and new audience.

Or, take the Significant Objects project, where writers develop original stories around insignificant objects, crowning them significant, subsequently selling the items on eBay for more then they are “worth.” The objects, often just everyday items, increase in value because of the original narrative wrapped around them. Similar to the Mr. Brainwash exhibit, an existing culture has been repackaged, redesigned and recycled for a likely new audience.

Art has become so recycled and repetitive that one meme’s high quickly fades until the next hit. Today’s artist isn’t an individual; he’s been reduced to another, for lack of a better word, remixer.

Present culture is faced with a cyclical dilemma: Artists aren’t starting trends, they are repackaging them. Mass marketing, to its benefit, has become so relevant that it’s viewed as inspiration by today’s creatives. With any period of inflection–a loophole exists. There is a rare opportunity to lead a wave of artists that create the culture, rather than simply reflect it.

Who will be part of it?

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Everyday Investing: Money, Time, Emotion

alexjmann — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:00:25 +0000

My neurotic strategy for efficiency is to approach endeavors as a hedge fund would approach a potential investment. I’m not investing others’ capital, but I am investing my own money, time, or emotion. As much as this sounds like a claim of self-importance, it’s as relevant to the people I’m interacting with as it is to me. If I don’t anticipate to get more out of an interaction than I put into it, it’s unlikely to be worthwhile for either party.

Being that we are actively selfish, treating actions as investments comes naturally. However, I’d argue that it’s not actively leveraged or thought about by the average person. Ignorance has its pros and cons: The pros allow you to avoid getting drowned in your own ideologies. The cons revolve around wasted inputs of money, time or emotion.

Everyday investments can be sorted based on the situation or occurrence. For simplicity, I’ll outline each with personal context:

The most frequent investment of time I make is allocated to meetings. I’m at a point in my career where meetings–business development, hiring, management–absorb the majority of my day. Is the projected outcome of a meeting, based on outcomes of similar previous¹ meetings, worth the investment of my time? I treat books, blogs, film, art and music the same way.

Disbursement of disposable income is an investment. I’m less hesitant spending money on useful experiences and items than I am with my time, simply because I’m confident I can make more² money, but not more time. What I attempt to calculate is if the net payoff of the experience or item purchased will be greater than the net effort involved in creating the original wealth.

Emotional investments are allocated to relationships. There isn’t much to say about this investment, except that I’ve found it beneficial to take note of how you feel after you’ve spent time with someone. As you might assume, it’s the hardest payoff to calculate: emotions often feel one way but mean something else.

The basis for any investment–time, money and emotion–like a hedge fund, is based on objective and risk. I live by the general rule that the younger one is the more risk they should take. While I’m aware of my investments, I tend to not let the neuroticism involved with quantification become counter-productive to my efforts for profitability.

I realize projections based solely on historical context go against Nassim Taleb’s investment philosophy, but I abide to it anyway. People aren’t stocks.
Time runs out. Money, technically, doesn’t have to.

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A Declaration for Capitalism

alexjmann — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:00:26 +0000

Part I

A bit of conventional wisdom echoed between traditionalists is “don’t do a job for the money.” This dictates that you shouldn’t chase a career for a paycheck that’s a means to short, material boosts of happiness facilitated by addictive consumerism. The advice implies you should only be pursuing a career for the intellectual stimulation, where the cash is merely a side effect.

The advice is misguiding. The goal of a job should be wealth creation, either for yourself or for your organization. I don’t think the “beware: money!” advice is bad in itself, but it’s taken too literally. The idealist philosophy gets in the way of building a profitable business, which is often a painful endeavor. Convincing yourself money doesn’t matter is the easiest way to justify a failure.

Part II

George Soros cringes when he’s called a hedge fund manager, financier, speculator, trader, banker, entrepreneur and probably even an investor. Soros, above all, is a philosopher who applies his world views to capitalistic endeavors.¹

This illustrates my bigger point: Soros prefers the title of a philosopher because he enjoys the implications of philosophizing more so than money managing. For example, take his view of credit default swaps, referred to as “buy[ing] insurance on someone else’s life and then hav[ing] a license to kill them.” If you talk to any trader on Wall Street, they call it a hedge, not a death certificate like Soros.

Soros does what he does–his craft–for wealth creation. His profit and loss statement is the major measure of success. He is, after all, a top-tier investor. However, he uses his interest in philosophy to make investing sound and feel, specifically to him, like a glorified hobby.

Part III

If you really would do a job for free, the job is either completely worthless or someone smarter than you is absorbing the value creation. Every time I hear someone say, specifically an eager young person, that “they aren’t doing it for the money,” I hear someone being foolishly naive about business and avoiding the ultimate judgment of a potential failure. Money is the market’s way of signaling value. If you aren’t making any, or slated to make any, you’re doing it wrong.²

I’d be willing to bet the most popular jobs are those most difficult to measure, simply because they make hiding behind failure easy. I blame the marketers, simply because they are the easiest target. They’ve convinced a whole class of aspiring creatives that you can base a career on building relationships, community evangelizing and blogging. These descriptions may sound productive in text, but they are skills people say they are good at because there is not an easy way to measure financial results. They aren’t quantifiable, measurable or testable. These skills are valuable if you can determine their ROI (and the talented, versatile marketers can), but if you can’t measure, you’re just overhead.³

Part IV

The more I dive into my career, craft, path, journey or whatever you want to call it, the more I realize that I’m absolutely doing it for the money. I love what I’m doing, no doubt, but I inevitably know that the measure of success will be judged by how much wealth I create for my organization and its stakeholders. Going into business without the intent to make money is like crossing a busy highway without looking both ways.

Do it all for the money. Not necessarily to spend it–but to make it and measure it. Long-term wealth creation proves economic tangibility. To pursue anything else besides money will put you out of business.

Like Soros, Charlie Munger was keen on “philosophizing,” rather than just “investing,” even though he did the latter. Many entrepreneurs, especially Marc Andreessen, live by his almanac.
An interview strategy relevant to this point would be to proclaim you will make an organization more money than they are slated to pay you. From the employer’s stand point, this is obviously their the goal.
Stock traders are a good example of the ultimately measurable career, although the majority of the ones I know hate their job. It’s possible that too close of an association between P&L and the job can be mentally counter-productive.

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The Fame Equation

alexjmann — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:00:30 +0000

Earlier this week, Mashable published an admittedly brief social media analysis piece I wrote on Lady Gaga relating online conversation to her music’s consumption. The question I keep asking myself, and the question I continue to be asked, is why Lady Gaga?

One reason is that I’m fascinated how this ordinary looking, but otherwise talented female from New York, became the most popular star on the planet simply by being outrageous. Sure, she (possibly) writes her own music and has the talent to sing, but that’s not a differentiator.

What I concluded is that above all, Lady Gaga is really good at being famous. As a culture, we are attracted to fame, and there is something about her that is especially enlightening for many people. What is it?

My original article sliced apart fame from this cultural perspective. However, my regular writing style is not in line with Mashable’s content or audience. Having said that, below is the original, pre-Mashable¹ edit fame analysis on this creature called Gaga.

–

Fame’s appeal lies within its mystique: what it is and why it occurs remain relatively unanswered questions, besides the necessity of rapid, surrounding conversation. Ten years ago, even the most shocking entertainer’s rise to stardom was missing the accelerating momentum of social media, a crucial factor in today’s fame equation.

Lady Gaga has played a hand in manipulating fame to her advantage, recently emerging as arguably the most famous pop star on the planet. She wove her way through the charts by treating her desire to be famous as an art. She’s developed an image of shock artistry, wearing futuristic attire, sculpted hair styles and glittery makeup, completing a socially disruptive persona.

Few stars’ early footage has shocked the public as much as Gaga’s, then known as Stefani Germanotta, performing in plain clothes in a Lower East Side club in New York City, circa 2007. While her current shtick is that of a fame monster, more than a musician, her vocal skills are humbling. Local students attend these clubs with the intention of seeing unique, often independent talent, secretly hoping they are receiving a glimpse of the next big thing. Viewers of Gaga slamming on the keys, singing to the tune of the piano, certainly did.

Fame, at its core, is fueled by the artist’s demand for attention. Take one of Gaga’s earliest stunts: fed up with her ignorant audience as she played in a crowded, NYU bar, she decided to strip to her underwear. Hardly high brow, but a magnetic step in attracting attention toward her character, rather than the music. The next day, you can bet the almost naked, talented female pianist was a popular conversation among the influential New York music crowd.

We live in a culture where the fame-less public are attracted to the idea of fame. And, this fame-seeking desire is what makes Gaga appealing. It’s less her provocative, often outrageous performance, but more her implicit advocacy for individualism driven by everyday conversation.

Ideally, I would have liked to have written an expanded version of the piece for a publication like the New Yorker or Vanity Fair.

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Welcome Mashable Readers…

alexjmann — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:56:53 +0000

If you are coming from Mashable, I suggest you:

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A Little on Less, Empty Space and What’s Not There

alexjmann — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:00:39 +0000

One of New York’s handful of Apple Stores is right across the street from my apartment. Given its location, I happen to walk by it every day during my city meanderings. The store design, like most of Apple’s offspring, is beautiful. Large, shimmering glass windows surround the edge of the building. An abrupt, spiral staircase snakes around the corner of the inside, where bright lit computer screens seem to be floating on each floor.

The most captivating aspect of the store is none of the above; it’s the little black sign hanging, flapping with the breeze, outside the front of the store. And, it’s barely a sign. It’s a metal cutout of the Apple logo. But, what makes it so appealing is what’s not there–the empty space. There is nothing appealing about it the sign, except the empty space. I can see through it. I find myself thinking about the sign more than anything else in the store, like right now.

Empty space is emotionally questionable.

Music, for me, works in a similar fashion. The songs I find most appealing, addictive and re-listenable have what’s called a “one drop,” a term coined originally for reggae music. In the one drop, the emphasis is entirely on the third beat of the bar while the first beat of the bar is completely empty. It’s the space between the notes that makes the rest of the song enjoyable.¹

Empty space forces anticipation.

There is a stigma that doing less of anything feels ineffective. In fact, I think less, even if it takes more time to design, leverages emotional effectiveness.

For other design anecdotes, I highly recommend seeing Objectified.

This was popularized by Bob Marley’s drummer, while probably not invented by him.

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White Light, White Heat: Another New York Morning

alexjmann — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:36:35 +0000

I grab the jet black jacket from the wall hook, jiggle the left pocket with my right hand to ensure my keys are there, throw my bag over my shoulder and walk swiftly out of the door into the brisk, encapsulating morning chill. The sun is bright, glowing the block and warming my face against the frigid breeze. The morning hustle, or whatever you want to call it, is apparent everywhere.

When my foot hits the solid pavement outside of the front doorway, I spend a few seconds absorbing the surroundings: the New York people, the New York air, the New York noise, the New York smell¹ –the entire New York pill swallowed at once is an inspiring drug.

The average person’s morning priority is to begin moving their legs into a walking pattern towards their destination. But for me, walking becomes secondary to my music fixation. With my legs locked into the ground, stiff and rigid, I pull out out my iPod and browse to the day’s first song. I usually pick something loud and soulful–the only way to compliment a New York morning. It’s the grease to my wheels.

Music: begin.

The bass kicks. The treble screams. The lyrics bring the sonics together. Like a sedative, my legs loosen, the buildings around me melt and the surrounding passersbys become lost, ghostly silhouettes. I begin walking, moving closer to my destination, which is different every day. I like this city. But, I love this city–on music.

I move quickly. No one is timing me, but I still attempt to arrive early, just to feel ahead of schedule.

Where am I going? The destination is completely meaningless. Sometimes I have no destination in mind; other times, I do. But, it’s always one foot in front of the other, knowing I want to be one step ahead, two steps from there and ten steps from there. Ad infinitum.

The beauty of the situation is trapped inside own narrative, expressed here, that means nothing to anyone but me.

I was going to add the New York dirt, but there is none. This city, especially on the west side, is immaculate.

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Humor: Because a Joke is a Serious Thing

alexjmann — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:36 +0000

“I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.” – Frank Howard Clark

One of those subtle jokes I’ve found myself at the end of over the years is being “the guy who takes himself too seriously.” In an attempt to lighten up, I’ve realized that humor is ignored as a skill¹ in business. There are crowds of buzzwords highlighted as necessary personality traits for interviewing, presenting and selling that include being: interpersonal, analytical, empathetic, etc., but what’s ignored is the value of a witty and tasteful² sense of humor. My conclusion is that by demonstrating tasteful wit you’ll have captured all of the above and beyond. This, of course, is easier said than done.

Wit proves mental agility and the ability to connect disparate and sometimes ridiculous ideas.³ It’s a character trait that proves you’re smart enough to get someone’s attention and humorous enough to make them smile. Wit is a derivative of charisma.

The following is a selection of benefits a strong wit can provide:

1. Wit distresses and lightens the mood of a situation. This allows people to relax and be themselves.

2. Wit is ironic. Irony gives you an easy way to say “no” to someone without sounding like a dick.

3. Wit is ambiguous and can play as a verbal hedge. If you say something witty, you can easily back out of it.

4. Wit can parody a third party. While not tasteful, bickering about someone behind their back is bonding.

5. Wit proves compatibility. If two people understand the same wit, it’s likely they’ll be compatible on other intellectual levels.

6. Wit is empathetic. By demonstrating wit, you are assuming another person’s understanding and feelings.

Being funny isn’t the same as being witty. I think of “being funny” as laugh out loud comedy, which in most cases, isn’t a method to close a deal. With wit, you might not cause a chuckle, but assuming the wit is understood, you’ll encourage people to think. It demonstrates an intelligence that not only challenges, but amuses.

Humor is usually referred to as a trait. However, I do believe humor can be “improved,” thus crowning it a skill.
The combination of “wit” and “taste” is important. With just “wit,” you may be offensive. With just “taste,” you’ll be boring
This ability is always what makes articles in the New Yorker entertaining. Ridiculous themes, but connected through a underlying witty relevance.