“Gotta break your neck to see a star in this yard”. Arthur Miller, ‘Death of a Salesman’
I’m always impressed by the size of American Flags.
Being English - proud and the World Cup being on as I write and England having hi-jacked the red cross of St George. It’s reminded me. It’s always quite thrilling to see the US flag everywhere meaning pride in freedom to most. A noble thought. Also a little scary to hear the debate raging around all this. These days the ‘strange’ amongst us can cry foul. Nationalist. Racist. Secular. Separatist. Insular. Tribal. Macho and even Conditioning. Claptrap. These are symbols of us. It drives me nuts that people can become so myopic and then so wound up all at the same time. Our national flags – the single biggest icon of our being, our meaning, our message as individuals or nations - our self. Our flag.
After bouncing around the U.S. for most of June on client engagements, I finally came to rest in Baltimore. I liked it there. It had a peace. I guess it wasn’t always like that.
The IAF had asked me to demonstrate our approach at their worldwide conference in an afternoon session. I had the morning free. Taking the Inner Harbour boat tour, I wandered off at Ft. McHenry National Park. The U.S. government maintains historical sites very well: restored 18th century fort, green lawns above the somewhat impressive Chesapeake Bay. A video, I doubt a DVD, about the Battle of Baltimore in 1814. During this episode of the War of 1812 (Brits vs. Yanks, round 2), American Francis Scott Keys penned the lyrics that would become the U.S. national anthem while being detained on a ship by my side – the British.
The 30-minute film, a low-key and scrupulously matter-of-fact history, was presented in 1970’s ‘classroom’ type facility with ceiling to floor curtains along one wall. At the video’s end, the curtains pulled back automatically, revealing an enormous U.S. flag waving over the fort outside. The ‘Star Spangled Banner’ swelled up. As if to remind us all how that ‘power’ had in fact forced itself through the chaos of the battle to win having infected everyone with its incredible design all on its own.
All the Americans in the room leapt to their feet, and some of the older people held their hands over their hearts. A few were in tears. As a foreigner, I was startled by this response in a young country in which a 19th century battle is considered ‘ancient history’. But I can understand that more each time I visit the US of A. The ancestors of most of those present still lived in Poland or Italy or Germany in 1814. But icons – symbol and music – have the power to create a shared historical context even without a shared history.
To Americans, Old Glory and the anthem represent not facts or events but that single and magnetic definition of who they are.
“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory”. Arthur Miller ‘Death of a Salesman’
Sales people – another icon of American culture – too often rely on PowerPoint these days. I’ve always believed this was wrongheaded. You can’t dream in PowerPoint. As I like to say, PowerPoint is to presentations what boiling is to vegetables. Sales is about taking the prospect on a journey, about connecting the customer’s desires and vision with a product or service, about shaping a story and a relationship. PowerPoint is about three sentences on computer screen. If ‘creatively’ done, maybe the slide deck includes some clip art. Aargh!
I’m forever staggered that with so much of that kind of creativity, energy and style applied to so much around us that people are happy to insult the eyes and fry the brain with so much inelegance when presenting in business. Where has all that pride and passion gone? The ceremony. That bloody determination in getting that message out there in all the chaos of war.
I’m afraid this is a big thing for me. My sensibilities are readily offended.
To help enterprises improve their sales engagement process, we treat it as a campaign. We design the crusade, we make that flag by defining the soul, crafting the symbols and knowing how to tell the story.
Several months ago, for example, we designed an online system for a client who needed a flexible tool for both internal sales training and external prospect meetings. We made it sing. We worked with the client to build a narrative around their target vertical. We made it resonate, we wove symbols and meaning wherever we could. We visualized the end-to-end journey through their customer’s service delivery process. We wrote a compelling narrative. We contextualized a large amount of detail about the industry by associating the information with images rather than just dumping data into tables or graphs. We made the tool interactive. We separated but related the training and presentation material. We layered the presentation to reveal complexity as needed.
Better than PowerPoint? Well, our client saluted it.
“As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober”. Eugene O’Neill, ‘The Iceman Cometh’
About burning Washington D.C. in 1814, Yanks: sorry but if we hadn’t, the President’s residence would still be grey and not the White House. Another icon we Brits created for you. No need to thank us! Really, no trouble at all! Pity we didn’t trademark it, though.
Some thoughts on sales, marketing and flags:
“Customers don't want choice. They just want exactly what they want”. B. Joseph Pine, ‘Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value Through Mass Customization’
“Goodwill is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy”. Marshall Field, founder of Marshall Field and Company
“It's value that rules the world”. A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor and Gamble
“A web site typically holds attention for 2-5 minutes, while a typical television or print ad might get a few seconds. In the UK, the Internet is now the third most popular media form”. William Makower, CEO of Panlogic
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats”. H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore
From the Minds Eye...
First published on John's Contextual Frameworking blog, 26 June 2006. The text was recovered from the blog’s archived feed. See the copy in the Wayback Machine. Kept as John wrote it.
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