… effrontery has made great strides as a key to success in life, and indeed quite ordinary people now employ it routinely. There are consultants in effrontery training who not only commit it themselves but teach others how to commit it, and charge large sums for doing so. There was a time when self-praise was regarded as no praise, rather the reverse; but now it is a prerequisite for advancement.
The other day I was sent a video of a young woman — elegant, attractive, and very self-confident — giving a seminar on how other young women, one of them the daughter of a friend, could and should change their lives for the better. In a way, I admired the leader of the seminar’s effrontery (just as I secretly admire Thomas Holloway’s). She spoke in pure, unadulterated clichés, practically contentless, but with such force of conviction that, if you discounted what she actually said, you might have thought that she was a person of profound insight with a vocation for imparting it to others. Her audience was as lambs to the slaughter, or at least to the fleece; they had paid a large sum of money to listen to mental pabulum that would make the recitation of a bus timetable seem intellectually stimulating.
On catching glimpses in the past of American television evangelists, it was always a cause of wonderment to me that anyone could look at or listen to them without immediately perceiving their fraudulence. This fraudulence was so obvious that it was like a physical characteristic, such as height or weight or color of hair, or alternatively like an emanation, such as body odor (incidentally, pictures of Guevara always suggest, to me at any rate, that he smelled). How could people fail to perceive it? Obviously, many did not, for the evangelists were very successful — financially, that is, the only criterion that counted for them.
But the attendees of the seminar of which I saw a video clip were well educated, and still they did not perceive the vacuity, and therefore the fraudulence, of the seminar that they attended at such great expense to themselves.
But was not my own surprise at their gullibility a manifestation of my own gullibility, in supposing that intelligence and education make a man wise, rather than more sophisticated in his foolishness?
But at least most of their victims were uneducated, relatively simple folk.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.
August 21, 2023
QotD: Effrontery, snake oil and TV preachers
August 20, 2023
How to decode book blurbs
In The Critic, “The Secret Author” provides a glossary for industry outsiders to understand what the apparently glowing words of a blurb on a book cover actually mean:
Like many other professions, the book trade is keen on jargon: lots of it, the more the merrier. As with those other professions, it tends to be of two kinds: outward-facing, when publishers communicate with their customers; and inward-facing, when they communicate with other publishers or the people who write the products they sell.
Its function — the function of all professional jargon, it might be said — is simultaneously to create an easily intelligible code for the benefit of insiders and (frankly) to mystify and impress those beyond the loop.
Publishers’ outward-facing jargon can be conveniently observed in the blurbs printed on book jackets. These are full of code words which, you may be surprised to learn, usually have very little to do with the contents.
A good place to start in any consideration of jacket copy might be the late Anthony Blond’s still invaluable The Publishing Game (1971), in which the one-time kingpin of Anthony Blond Ltd and various successor firms identifies the real meaning of several of the key publishers’ cliches of the late 1960s.
They include Kafkaesque (“obscure”), Saga (“the editor suggested cuts but the author was adamant”), Frank or outspoken (“obscene”) and Well-known, meaning “unknown”. To these may be added Rebellious (“the author uses bad language”), Savage (“the author revels in sadism”), Ingenious (“usually means unbelievable”) and Sensitive (“homosexual”). Blond also offers a list of OK writers (Kafka, J.D. Salinger) with whom promising newcomers may profitably be compared.
Naturally, Blond’s list is of its time: nobody these days would think of labelling a gay coming-of-age novel “sensitive”. On the other hand, if the content has been superannuated, here in 2023 very little has changed in the form — which is to say that the modern book blurb is still awash with genteel euphemism and downright obfuscation.
Sometimes a blurb-adjective means its exact opposite. Thus powerful can invariably be construed as “weak”, whilst audacious or bold generally means “deeply conventional”. Shocking, obviously, means “not shocking” and challenging “not at all challenging”.
Then there are the contemporary buzzwords: transgressive, used to describe anything even a degree or two north of the sexual or ideological status quo; or immersive, which is another way of saying “reasonably engrossing”.
July 9, 2023
“… corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve”
Elizabeth Nickson reminds us that the mass media corporate messaging is trailing edge, not leading edge:
Now everything is filtered through a warped looking glass, a Mad Hatter tea party of nonsense, run by the grimmest socialist operatives who ever lived, backed by buckets and wheelbarrows of stupid corporatist/fascist money. They are running a demoralization program on us.
It’s not working.
Never forget that corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve, which is to say the lifeless part, the raking-in-the-money-from-stupid-women part. Women too, as a class, are part of the late adopter curve, because as Jordan Peterson once pointed out, women instinctively see humans as helpless babies needing protection and SAFETY FIRST. We are easily manipulated by our compassion, as is clear from the fact that only women and those who want to be, support the left now. The left traffics faux compassion and it is a killer drug. Included of course are beta males, hornswoggled by mommy, the wet diaper babies of Antifa and BLM. And of course, the paid operatives of the stinking cabal, the truly horrid public sector unions, the vicious thugs at AFL-CIO and the humanity-hating environmental movement.
The people the left cultivated so carefully over several generations have all fled to populism and eventually their vicious operatives won’t even be able to steal the votes they need. How big is it? Imagine 2000 Trump rallies. And then ten times that. And then quadruple it. Double and double and double again. And they are having the best time, more fun than you can imagine, working away in obscurity, asserting their human right to determine their own future.
[…]
Normals have turned, all of them. They are not available to the Trudeaus, Macrons and Rishi Sunaks of the world. They are wised up. Some of them know more than me about the filth at the heart of “environmentalism” and I know a lot. They are not Russian serfs or Chinese peasants. There is no way they are going to be corralled in 15 minute cities. They are going to bring the house down.
They/we are the people that Richard Haas, when resigning from the Council of Foreign Relations, a nest of nasty neo-liberal, neo-con oppressors if there ever was one, warned against when he said the greatest threat facing the world is American populists. Sure, buddy.
One of the those dreadful people (as they call us) is Kevin Fernandes82 on Instagram. Probably not his real name, but he is not aiming for public recognition. What he does, methodically, every day many times, is chronicle the slow crumbling of the old regime. I am using a lot of his reporting and as he shows, we are beating the pants off them every single day.
Their jobs are untenable. People are resigning from every safe berth in the world or being fired from plush jobs because the world the neo-liberal hegemon has created is counter-rational, so chaotic, it is unstable. It is unstable because we know it is stupid. We are opposed. And our opposition is slowly slowly bringing it down.
This is long. You don’t have to read it all to get the point, but give it to the despairing, keep it for when you despair. All these wins happened in the last two weeks. People, judges and administrators and politicians within the system, are starting to dance to the populist tune. Many of the worst are running as fast as they can.
We are the future.
Time to start thinking about what we want the new world to look like.
Herewith:
The Sound of Freedom has outsold the new Indiana Jones film, on 2,000 fewer screens and with no PR, against the full force of the Hollywood machine.
The Dutch government has reportedly fallen over asylum policy. Farms confiscation is wildly unpopular. Mark Rutte, architect of the prosecution of farmers has resigned.
The decoupling of the BRICS from the dollar means the death of the neo-liberal hegemon. Mark Wauk and Tom Luongo do a neat job of wrapping up this particular mess. As they say: there are no neo-liberals in a multi-polar, decoupled world.
The BRICS are set to introduce a new currency backed by gold, against the US backed dollar which depreciates in value every day because of inflation caused by choking energy supply and crazed overspending by governments.
EU laws that let banks shut accounts over political views to be scrapped.
Federal judge in Louisiana prohibits DHS, FBI and DOJ from working with Big Tech to censor posts.
The list goes on for quite a lot longer…
June 4, 2023
The peasant consumers are threatening to storm the ESG castle
Jon Militmore on the threat to the corporate world of ESG-guided action posed by mere “consumers” with their “choices”:
The Wall Street Journal ran a deep dive article last month exploring “how Bud Light blew it”, but it somehow missed the most important part of the story.
As most people already know, the world’s most popular light lager has seen a collapse in sales following a boycott prompted by a March Madness ad campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The Journal‘s chart depicting the fall in Bud Light sales speaks for itself, and the company’s delayed and tepid response to the uproar only seemed to make matters worse.
This isn’t Anheuser-Busch’s first foray into controversial social issues.
The Journal‘s Jennifer Maloney points out that the company has been engaging in social equity-themed advertising for years, including a 2021 Michelob Ultra ad featuring transgender track star Cecé Telfer and a 2022 Bud Light Canada campaign for Pride Month displaying various pronouns.
What Maloney fails to mention in her article is why beer companies — not just Bud Light — are suddenly courting controversial social issues such as nonbinary gender, transgenderism, and third-wave feminism.
The answer is simple: The rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as the dominant strain of “stakeholder capitalism” has incentivized corporations to curry favor with ESG rating firms, even if it means alienating their consumers.
Unlike traditional capitalism, which seeks to maximize profits by serving consumers, the ESG model seeks to “improve” capitalism by considering other stakeholders besides investors and consumers. Publicly traded corporations are graded on how well they achieve socially desirable metrics, such as combating climate change, advancing diversity and inclusion, and creating a more “equitable” society.
What was intended to be a kinder, gentler form of capitalism has morphed into a kind of economic fascism that places the arbitrary interests of a small cabal of people — asset managers, bureaucrats, global financiers — ahead of consumers.
As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, consumers are the true bosses in a capitalist system. They ultimately decide what products are created and purchased, who becomes wealthy, and who becomes poor.
As the Bud Light fiasco shows, ESG places consumers in the back seat. The social equity campaigns are not designed to appeal to Bud Light consumers, but to the ESG rating agencies, which have the power to downgrade companies that fail to dance to their tune.
May 9, 2023
How to destroy an industry with one simple trick
Ted Gioia on the precipitous rise and calamitous decline of the clickbait journalism model:
I was going to call this story the “tragedy of American journalism”. But when you dig into the details, it’s more a farce.
Let’s start with act one of this comedy. I could almost begin anywhere, but I picked an especially ridiculous case study — just wait until you learn the reason why.
Did that catch your attention?
It was supposed to. And I learned that from a now (mostly) forgotten website called Upworthy.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, Upworthy was “the fastest growing media site of all time”, according to Fast Company. They had turned news into a science. Upworthy was the future of journalism.
“Upworthy is known for its use of data to drive growth, testing up to 16 different headlines for a single story,” enthused that bright-eyed reporter for Fast Company. The end result was headlines so irresistible, millions of people clicked on them.
Here are some examples:
- A Gorgeous Waitress Gets Harassed By Some Jerk. Watch What Happens Next.
- A Teacher Ran to a Classroom to Break Up a Fight, but What She Found Was the Complete Opposite.
- It’s Twice The Size Of Alaska And Might Hold The Cure For Cancer. So Why Are We Destroying It?
- If You Could Press A Button And Murder Every Mosquito, Would You? Because That’s Kinda Possible.
You get the idea. The headline is in two parts — and it’s just a come-on. You have no idea what the article is about until you click on the link.
That was the whole point. But just wait until you learn the problem with this.
Facebook and other social media sites eventually discovered that people clicked on these links, but didn’t spent much time with the Upworthy articles — and rarely gave them likes and shares.
The stories just weren’t very good — and certainly not as interesting as the headlines. So the algorithms started to punish clickbait articles of this sort.
The Upworthy empire collapsed as quickly as it had risen.
In retrospect, the problem with this gimmicky strategy is obvious. If you trick people into clicking on garbage, your metrics are impressive for a few months. But eventually people can smell the garbage without even clicking on it.
There’s also a deeper reason for this collapse — which I’ll get to in a moment. And it helps us understand the current problems with journalism. But first we need to look at a couple more case studies.
April 23, 2023
Dylan Mulvaney’s “triumph of performance and marketing”
Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon:
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
I’ve largely ignored the entire Bud Light tempest in a toxic teacup because social media outrages and brand boycotts come and go and tend to leave little trace behind. But the fuss over the beer brand’s brief commercial dalliance with trans newbie Dylan Mulvaney — with her 10.8 million TikTok followers — nonetheless fascinates. It shows, it seems to me, just how much everyone is projecting, and how (almost) everyone is getting it wrong.
There are, it seems, many layers to Dylan. To countless straight people, left and right, Dylan is a transgender star — because she is biologically male, and yet has been saying she is a girl now for more than a year, wears women’s clothes and is pretty and charming and full of manic energy. (I’m mostly using her preferred pronouns here, the least clumsy option). The woke left therefore loves her, and the Matt Walsh right has had a collective aneurysm. But for many gay men, including yours truly, Dylan’s latest, year-long performance as a “girl” looks and sounds like something much more familiar.
Dylan, to us at least, is a pretty classic, child-actor, musical theater queen — an effeminate gay man who finds great joy and relief in Broadway camp and drama, and is liable to burst into song at any moment. (I used to wonder if this very specific manifestation would die out as gays integrated more. But no! It seems to be in our collective DNA. Every generation mints a new variety.) And she’s managed to bait both the woke left and the anti-woke right into making her very famous and a lot richer than a year ago.
It’s a triumph of performance and marketing. It can be frustrating for a young actor among so many. You can do your best, become a finalist in Campus Superstar in 2018, wear only briefs for a performance at Joe’s Pub, perform, however well, in the cast of Book Of Mormon, camp it up for Ellen, or do the exact same ditzy-girl act on The Price Is Right as a man (Dylan’s previous attempts at fame). But become a parody of a “girl” and provide breathless, daily updates on your transition — and nearly 11 million people on TikTok will follow. At the same time brand yourself as a pioneer for greater understanding, love, and civil rights … and you can get an extended interview on The Today Show and an audience at the White House.
The gimmick was simple: a TikTok clip for every day of “becoming a girl.” As Dylan explained:
When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids’ app. … [R]ight before I started creating content with “Days of Girlhood”, I thought, “What am I going to do to afford my rent this month?”
Well, she no longer has to worry about that. Dylan has brand partnerships with Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Crest, Instacart, Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and many more. And here is what Dylan means by “becoming a girl” in his/her own words. Trigger warning for feminists:
Day One of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, uh, when someone asked me how I was, I said I’m fine — when I wasn’t fine [applies lip gloss]. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!
If you think this has to be a joke, a parody making fun of sexist ideas about women, you’re not the only one. (Trans YouTuber Blaire White also assumed it was a spoof at first, and her video on Dylan’s “womanface” is well worth a watch.) But no! Here’s more:
“Hangin with the girlieeees, woohoo! [The camera pans across a series of dolls sitting in chairs] … I almost bought this Audrey [Hepburn] portrait. I just love her, she’s everything I want to be.”
“Day Three of being a girl and I’ve already become a bimbo. … I think it’s a good fit for me. What do you think, ladies?”
“Day Four of being a girl and I’m exhausted — the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels. It’s a lot to keep up with!”
“Day 12 of being a girl and I just picked up some tampons.”She never subsequently seems to put them down. At one point, we see Dylan hiking in high heels, and running hysterically away from a flying bug. In another clip, she dresses up in a skimpy evening gown and fantasizes about her future husband:
I want them to know I’ll be their cheerleader on and off the field. So they can picture me walking down the aisle to be their trophy bride, or trophy wife. I would totally be good at that, don’t you think? “Dinner’s ready! Yoo-hoo!”
Call me a transphobe, but I just don’t think that someone who has been struggling with gender identity her whole life and found a pathway to womanhood … would ever celebrate it quite like that. Yet this firehose of misogynistic tropes was one of a handful of people who were invited to the White House to interview Biden personally.
The only thing more absurd than this was the far right falling for the whole schtick as well. After the Bud Light ad, Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of beer with a semi-automatic rifle; a businessman opted for a baseball bat in an ad to promote his new “Ultra Right” beer; bomb threats rattled some Bud factories; countless tweets popped up alleging a collapse in sales of Bud Light; then the Trumps went to war with Matt Walsh because Anheuser-Busch is a major GOP donor; then the former cover-girl, current Fox News star Caitlyn Jenner called Dylan’s act an “absurdity“; and so on. Good times.
March 18, 2023
QotD: Experts outside their field of expertise
The first time I really encountered this phenomenon (outside of obvious examples such as the political and economic opinions of Hollywood celebrities) was related to climate change. I don’t see them as often today, but for a while it used to be very common for letters to circulate in support of climate change science signed by hundreds or thousands of scientists.
The list of signatures was always impressive, but when you looked into it, there was a problem: few if any of the folks who signed had spent any time really looking at the details of climate science — they were busy happily studying subatomic particles or looking for dark energy in space. It turned out most of them had fallen for the climate alarmist marketing ploy that opposition to catastrophic man-made global warming theory was by people who were anti-science. And thus by signing the letter they weren’t saying they had looked into it all and confirmed the science looked good to them, they were merely saying they supported science.
When some of them looked into the details of climate science later, they were appalled. Many have reached the same general conclusions that I have, that CO2 is certainly causing some warming but the magnitude of that warming or in particular the magnitude and direction of its knock on effects like floods or droughts or tornadoes, is far from settled science.
So it is often the case that people who show strong support for ideas or people outside of their domain do so for reasons other than having made use of their expertise and experience to take a deep dive into the issues. Theranos is a great example from the business world. Elizabeth Holmes convinced a bunch of men (and they were mostly all men — women seemed to have more immunity to her BS) who were extraordinarily successful in their own domains (George Schultz, the Murdochs, Henry Kissinger, Larry Ellison) to become passionate believers in her vision. Which is fine, it was a lovely vision. But they spent zero time testing whether she could really do it, and worse, refused to countenance any reality checks about problems Theranos was facing because Holmes convinced them that critics were just bad-intentioned people representing nefarious interests who wanted her vision to fail.
Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.
March 6, 2023
The Rise and Fall of Fast Food Architecture
Stewart Hicks
Published 3 Nov 2022What happened to McDonald’s? Their restaurants used to be so iconic. It was impossible to mistake one, for say, a Wendy’s. Distinguished architecture used to be an important part of a brand’s identity. But today, fast food restaurant’s all look the same. Bland grey boxes. The great convergence toward this standard has been called “Chipotle-ification”. In this video, we trace the changing restaurant designs of McDonald’s, from the iconic golden arch era to the soulless boxes of today. We break down the architecture and the forces at play in the great homogenization of fast food architecture.
(more…)
February 10, 2023
QotD: Before Star Wars or the MCU there was … the Arthurian Narrative Universe
The situation is almost exactly the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have a major character named King Arthur, but he was linked to numerous spinoffs and sequels. The other heroes connected to him soon established their own brands — including Lancelot, Merlin, Gawain, Tristan, Percival, and many others. Readers who enjoyed one of the heroes, often became fans of others.
If you make a list, the Arthurian Narrative Universe (ANU) has more than fifty protagonists. Not all of them became major brands, but that’s no different from the movie business, where even Disney can’t keep every superhero on the payroll.
Even more to the point, these stories were business initiatives, expected to enrich their owners. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most influential collection of stories about King Arthur in English, Le Morte d’Arthur published in 1485, originated as a profit-making venture by the earliest commercial publisher in Britain.
William Caxton was not only the first person to set up a printing press in England, but also the first retailer of printed books in the country. He acquired the manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur from Thomas Malory, the Stan Lee of his day, and turned it into the single most influential secular British book between the time of Chaucer and the rise of Shakespeare.
He didn’t do it because he loved English history. (The painful truth is that very little — in fact next to nothing — in the Arthurian tales comes from documented historical events.) He didn’t even publish the book because he loved a good story. Caxton wanted to make a buck — or a pound sterling, I ought to say. He had identified the right brand franchise, much like the Walt Disney Company in the current day, and would milk it for all it was worth.
But here’s the most amazing thing about his brand franchise: Arthurian stories had been circulating in manuscript for more than 300 years at this point. And many of the details in these narratives are much older than that, reaching back to accounts of knights who fought in the Crusades, if not earlier.
We can trace the story of Lancelot and his adulterous romance with Queen Guinevere at least back to 1180. The story of the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail dates at least back to 1190. The first mention of King Arthur is no later than 828 AD.
Stop and consider the implications. King Arthur was the most popular brand franchise in secular narratives when he was 650 years old!
Of course, it was absurd. Nobody undertook knightly adventures of this sort during the Renaissance, but storytellers pretended otherwise. Everything about these narratives was outdated, unrealistic, and repetitive — the people who read these tales didn’t own suits of armor or compete in jousting tournaments. Those things had disappeared from society. But the audience still wanted these stories, so the same plots and characters got recycled again and again.
Ted Gioia, “Don Quixote Tells Us How the Star Wars Franchise Ends”, The Honest Broker, 2022-11-09.
January 16, 2023
The music industry fails to capitalize on the vinyl revival
It’s kind of hard to believe, but the companies that control the pressing of music into vinyl appear to have no clue about the business they’re in:
“Framed Vinyl Album Art: America ‘Homecoming’; Nick Gilder (Studio Copy of Singles From ‘City Lights’ Chosen for AOR); Climax Blues Band ‘FM Live’)” by JoeInSouthernCA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter — the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.
In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels — who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.
I have some experience in these matters — in my alternative career I worked with CEOs chasing after fast growth product categories. I know how they handle these situations. But, really, it’s no mystery. The strategies you use in this kind of business are very straightforward:
- You add manufacturing capacity aggressively — to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth.
- You bring down costs by getting scale advantages. But this only happens because unit costs drop as volume increases. So the single biggest goal is to grow sales as hard and fast as possible.
- You constantly reduce prices to keep demand building. In some cases, you even set prices below your costs to accelerate growth rates. When I originally saw companies do this I was skeptical — how can you make profits if you sell below your costs? But I soon learned that you eventually got a huge payback.
- You keep expanding the product line, so that you constantly have something new and exciting to sell to every potential buyer.
- You invest in R&D so that you eventually have a next generation technology to keep the growth going over the long haul.
None of this is easy to do, but it isn’t impossible. It just takes investment, focus, management commitment, and hard work. And later you reap the benefits. You turn a small business into a huge one, and enjoy a big payday.
The record labels could have done that with vinyl. It was taking off — unit sales doubled in just 5 years. And these sales were insanely profitable, because much of the demand was for old music. So labels didn’t even have to pay to sign artists, and cover the costs of recording sessions. The music was already there, with the fixed costs amortized long ago.
They just had to press the bloody album and ship it to the store. How hard is that?
But what did the music industry do?
- They hate running factories — which is hard work. So they tried to outsource manufacturing instead of building it themselves. Chronic shortages resulted.
- They refuse to spend money on R&D, so they stayed with the same vinyl technology from the 1950s. In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation. In the year 2023, even bowling alleys, bordellos, and bookies are more tech savvy than the major record labels.
- They want easy money, so they kept prices extremely high. That was bizarre because their R&D and catalog acquisition costs were essentially zero, and they could have priced vinyl aggressively. Instead they treated vinyl as a luxury product, even as they dreamed of it also becoming a mass market option. But you can’t do both without a careful market segmentation strategy — which the labels never even started thinking about.
- They love hype, so they focused on high visibility vinyl reissues, which look good in press releases, but couldn’t be bothered to make back catalog albums available. After a decade of the vinyl revival, they still hadn’t taken even basic steps in offering a wide product line.
This is a lazy strategy — and the exact opposite of what they should have done. And the results are, of course, predictable.
December 30, 2022
Barnes & Noble used to be like an even more boring Indigo … but they’ve been turned around
Back when my job required more travel, one of the things I used to look forward to was visiting US bookstores, as they always had a wider and more interesting stock than our staid Canadian equivalents. Over time, the interesting local bookstores got harder and harder to find as the big box stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble took over much of their customer base. Of the two, I much preferred going into a Borders store, as they had better stock than B&N and the staff seemed friendlier and (generally) more helpful to clueless foreigners like me. Borders went under around the same time my business travels to the US tapered off and it looked like it was only a matter of time for B&N to follow it into bankruptcy. Even if it struggled on, surely the pandemic killed off what Amazon left behind? Ted Gioia says not so fast:
“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
But Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again — and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.
Amazon seems invincible. So the idea that Barnes & Noble can succeed where its much larger competitor failed is hard to believe. But the turnaround at B&N is real. In many instances they have already re-opened in locations where they previously shut down.
Barnes & Noble tried exactly the same sort of “re-imagining” of their stores that Canada’s Indigo chain is currently floundering with: cutting back on the floorspace devoted to books in favour of throw cushions, candles, decorations, bath salts, scarfs and towels. It worked just as badly for B&N as it is working for Indigo: it chases out the primary customer base (book-buyers) in favour of bored people looking to waste away an hour or two just browsing tchotchkes. (And if you can find an Indigo staff member to ask about a particular book, they almost always assure you that you can find it on their website, which I’m sure helps bring more people into the store …) In desperation, B&N looked to expand into a very different market:
… in a bizarre strategic move, the company decided to launch freestanding restaurants under the name Barnes & Noble Kitchen — no books, just meals. But this was another disaster.
The company chairman Leonard Riggio eventually admitted, in September 2018, that running a restaurant is “a lot harder than you think it is … The bottom line is awful.”
Given the incredibly short and profitless life of most start-up restaurants, that really does qualify as a “No shit, Sherlock” moment. So how did Barnes & Noble turn things around?
It’s amazing how much difference a new boss can make.
I’ve seen that firsthand so many times. I now have a rule of thumb: “There is no substitute for good decisions at the top — and no remedy for stupid ones.”
It’s really that simple. When the CEO makes foolish blunders, all the wisdom and hard work of everyone else in the company is insufficient to compensate. You only fix these problems by starting at the top.
In the case of Barnes & Noble, the new boss was named James Daunt. And he had already turned around Waterstones, a struggling book retailing chain in Britain.
Bringing in fresh blood can be a life-saver for a business, but we also have that expression about deck chairs on the Titanic in common business parlance, so just being “new” isn’t enough … new leaders must also bring new approaches and fresh ideas:
But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.
This seemed stark raving mad. But Daunt had a reason. Publishers give you promotional money in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement — but once you take the cash, you’ve made your deal with the devil. You now must put stacks of the promoted books in the most visible parts of the store, and sell them like they’re the holy script of some new cure-all creed.
Those promoted books are the first things you see when you walk by the window. They welcome you when you step inside the front door. They wink at you again next to the checkout counter.
Leaked emails show ridiculous deals. Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies — even if the book sucks and demand is weak — and push them as aggressively as possible.
Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.
Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.
Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.
“Staff are now in control of their own shops”, he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”
This crazy strategy proved so successful at Waterstones, that returns fell almost to zero — 97% of the books placed on the shelves were purchased by customers. That’s an amazing figure in the book business.
On the basis of this success, Daunt was put in charge of Barnes & Noble in August 2019. But could he really bring that dinosaur, on the brink of extinction, back to life?
December 9, 2022
Canada’s “historic” shift toward the Indo-Pacific is … more marketing than strategy
In The Line, retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day distills down all the airy phrases to see just what the Canadian government is actually going to do in the Indo-Pacific as opposed to merely talking about it:
“Red circle/oval roughly depicts the Indian Ocean region. Blue circle/oval covers the Pacific region. Green oval covers ASEAN. Yellow overlay covers the Indo Pacific.”
Map annotation by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.
A formal public-policy statement from the Government of Canada is a rare thing. It is even rarer when it is not just a speech but a published written document. The rarest of these is undoubtedly when such a document focuses on foreign policy. When Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly recently pitched her “once-in-a-generation shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, much was made of why Canada was doing it and what it would achieve. No fewer than four cabinet ministers took part in the announcement. Canada will, they announced, step up naval patrols of the region, continue to expand trade with China while also tightening our protections of intellectual property and ownership rules for strategic industries, and use “Team Canada” trade missions to boost commercial links with other growing regional economic powers, including India. We seek also to expand our intelligence and cybersecurity links with allies and partners in the region.
Now that the dust on the rhetoric has settled, closer examination reveals that this might simply be an exercise of branding separate activities into a marketing-friendly bundle, as opposed to a coherent plan focused on achieving specific outcomes.
In examining the document two approaches are equally useful in assessing value: whether the content has some substance and whether the policy framework is sufficiently robust to hang various activities and plans on its body.
Three hints are provided as to why the new plan might not be the cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy that it portends to be. Firstly, operating in the “National Interest”, a phrase used six separate times over the 26 pages, is given neither form nor function and lacks any definition. It is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat talking to Alice asking her “where do you want to get to”. When Alice replies that “I don’t much care …” the Cheshire Cat wisely suggests that “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” With no definition of national interests pretty much anything can be hand waved as to being necessary and required, or not, for its achievement.
This leads in turn to the second hint that the plan might be more posturing than substance. Lacking the single aimpoint of operating in the national interest, the “objectives” supposedly fill that gap by providing a set of specific achievements which in combination would be a sufficiently clear aimpoint. But normally objectives can, and should, be thought of as something specific and measurable, allowing plans to be developed to achieve them. “Save 100 dollars this month” or perhaps, in more relevant terms, “Increase our trade in the Indo-Pacific region by 100 per cent over the five years of this policy enactment.” Plans can then be developed to achieve those objectives. But reviewing those objectives reveals that they are themselves actions, not end-states. It appears that the policy is based on “doing, not achieving”. I am reminded of my sons many years ago. When asked if their rooms were clean, they would reply, “I’m cleaning it.” The process was enduring but we most certainly disagreed on the value of the activity as opposed to achieving a measurable result. Under this construct the government can claim that as long as Canada is doing stuff the policy should be considered a success.
December 5, 2022
“… when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing”
From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from this weekend’s dispatch from The Line:
A typical haul of weapons confiscated by Toronto Police Services in 2012. Most of these guns are in the “restricted” or “prohibited” category of Canadian firearms and would not be available for legal purchase by anyone who had not gone through a rigorous RCMP background check and passed multiple training courses. Almost certainly none of them came from a legal owner.
We hate this as much as you do, but we must discuss guns with you again. We think the Liberals have screwed up, and we aren’t sure yet they realize it. (But they’re probably clueing in.)
You know why we’re suspicious? The Liberals are extremely good at marketing. A depressing amount of the time, it’s all they’ve got. They can take the smallest morsel of accomplishment and make it the centrepiece of a coordinated nation-wide grassroots mobilization campaign and fundraising drive. They have memes and other social shareables ready to go. Cabinet ministers release cringe videos captured by staffers who probably realize, in the very moment of their filming, that they’ve wasted their God-given potential on … this.
Outcomes? The hell with those. Let’s talk about those inputs, baby! In both official languages.
But this time? When the Liberals have actually embarked on what would be the most significant overhaul of our firearms laws in a generation? Not only have they not said boo. They’re going out of their way to deny that they’ve done anything. Or, when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing.
So either they don’t know what they’re doing (very possible), regret what they’ve done (also very possible) or it’s a confused mix of both (our working theory).
But let us explain. And forgive us, but things will get a bit technical. (We’ll keep it as simple as possible, but guns are complicated.)
Canadian firearms policy has generally tried to classify firearms by their technical specifications. Three broad categories were created by the major reforms of the 1990s. “Prohibited” firearms essentially were machine guns, automatic assault rifles of the kind used by modern militaries, and easily concealed short-barrelled handguns; prohibited licences were issued in the 1990s to a relatively small number of individuals who already owned such firearms and their immediate descendants (to cover family heirlooms), but prohibited firearms otherwise are not available to the public. “Non-restricted” firearms were the very common rifles and shotguns suited (and frequently used) for hunting or target shooting sports, and require the least onerous level of licensing (but still, you do need a licence that involves background checks and vetting). In the middle we had “restricted” firearms — mostly handguns — that require a special licence beyond the normal licence, requiring extra training and conditions.
These broad categories do not always reflect the reality of how the laws actually shaped up. The prohibited and restricted categories were often stretched by meddling politicians to apply more broadly than they ought to have, so that politicians (mainly Liberals) could claim to be “tough on guns” in particular instances. But these three categories have been generally stable for a generation, and functioned well, more or less. Perfectly? No. But our gun-control laws worked for the public at large, which is why violent gun crime by licensed individuals is rare despite a relatively high rate of firearms ownership in Canada.
You wouldn’t think it given all the political controversy, but Canadian gun control has been a fundamentally successful public-policy program, for decades. The very real problem we have with gun violence in this country is overwhelmingly committed with illegal guns smuggled in from the United States, and fall outside the scope of our gun-control system, which works well doing what it is supposed to do: licensing lawful gun owners, regulating the legal uses of guns and regulating, as well, the lawful hunting and shooting sports industry.
For all its success as public policy, though, the system didn’t work for the Liberals politically. So they decided to get cute. And that’s where their problems began.
December 2, 2022
The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic
Ted Gioia explores the oddity of musical tastes on TikTok:
When I was a child, a band called Alvin and the Chipmunks enjoyed a brief taste of fame. Hot bands come and go, but this one had a bizarre back story.
First of all, it didn’t really exist. The band consisted of cartoon chipmunks. In this regard, Alvin and his rodent colleagues get credit for anticipating the anime pop stars of the current day.
Second, these singing chipmunks were more a brand than a band. Because these animals were make-believe, they couldn’t go on tour — but they could sell boatloads of merchandise, from lunch boxes to comic books. This, too, anticipated much of our current music industry — where the side deals often make more money than concerts and records.
But even stranger, this group aimed to imitate the sound of singing chipmunks by speeding up recordings of human vocalists. The end result was arguably the most annoying sound in 20th century music (a rare distinction, that). I can’t stand listening to these tracks, but they somehow won five Grammy Awards. Alvin and the Chipmunks actually enjoyed two number-one singles.
That’s two more than Bob Dylan can claim.
In all fairness, these same tracks sound even worse when slowed down. So maybe there’s something to be said for getting to the end of the song as fast as possible.
But here’s the most surprising part of the story. This sped-up sound also anticipated the contemporary music of our own time — it’s actually one of the hottest trends on TikTok.
The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic. This, to my way of thinking, is even more foreboding than all those people who want us to eat bugs and compost our deceased loved ones.
I’m starting to think that Alvin and the Chipmunks belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe I can’t stand listening to the stuff, but these cartoon critters clearly pointed the way to the future. A dark dystopian future, perhaps, but I guess that’s what happens when you treat rodents as role models.
November 17, 2022
“The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented – and he had a few, that bloke – is Thanatos, or the ‘death instinct'”
Ted Gioia on the apparent death wish of the academic publishing industry:
The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented — and he had a few, that bloke — is Thanatos, or the “death instinct”. This is an alleged drive among living organisms to destroy themselves.
Many have disputed that such a thing exists. Instincts preserve life — that’s their evolutionary purpose. The idea of a death instinct is impossible, so the critics claim. It’s like that Peacekeeper Missile or soft rock or marijuana initiative or any of those other two-word combinations of things that don’t belong together.
I’ve often criticized Freud, but I’ve come to accept this Thanatos notion, at least as a sociocultural concept. It explains so many otherwise inexplicable happenings in our society.
Take, for example, academic publishers. They are clearly imbued with a death instinct, no? How else can you explain their self-destructive behavior?
Universities have been publishing books for almost 500 years — dating back to 1534 A.D. when King Henry VIII allowed Cambridge University to set up a printing press. Running one of these publishing outfits is almost a requirement if a college wants to rise in the rankings, but I wonder how much longer this can last. After all, how can you succeed as a publisher if you put so little energy into selling books?
I know one academic publisher that previously sent out two hundred or more review copies of each new book — because they obviously wanted publicity for these titles. Those days are gone. Nowadays their preferred strategy is to send out zero physical copies to reviewers. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve heard it straight from their mouths: their goal is to distribute absolutely no hard copies to media outlets and book critics.
College students are spending 26% less on textbooks this year. That’s a bloodbath for the publishers. But this is the inevitable result whenever you assume the customer has no choice — because, sooner or later, they actually do.
Okay, I don’t blame the publishers entirely — just consider how rarely the New York Times reviews books from academic presses. You might think the cultural elites in New York would give some support to their fellow travelers in idea-mongering, but no dice. They treat those academic books like they’re toxic.
(By the way, I’m grateful to the Times Literary Supplement over in London, which still takes time to tell me about important scholarly works, most of them ignored in US media. But even that last holdout in Britain feels precarious — I fear they’ve been too contaminated by Yankee values.)
Yankee values? That’s up there with the Peacekeeper Missile.
But the lack of review copies is just one symptom among many. Let’s look at a few others.
Just consider the flurry of rebranding efforts in academic publishing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, successful organizations rarely redesign their logos or “refresh” their brands. They don’t have time for such nonsense. But even more to the point, when you’re thriving, your logo is part of that success — it’s a sign of your strength, and you just don’t mess with it.
But that’s clearly not the case in academia nowadays.
I could give you countless examples from college campuses — where “rebranding” is more popular than a hot high school football prospect on a recruiting visit. But I’ll settle for two instances:
My only disappointment is that these brand redesigns didn’t come packaged with a new slogan. May I suggest something along the lines of: Information Solutions for a Changing World.
Or maybe, if we can be a bit more boastful: The Ultimate in Handheld Data Storage.
Does anybody still believe in this rebranding malarkey? Surely any reasonable person can see it’s all smoke and mirrors? But that hardly matters, because the brand redesign has tremendous symbolic value.
That’s why they do it.
The road to hell was once paved with good intentions — but nowadays we settle for symbolic gestures. They’re much cheaper than good intentions. And there’s no shortage of symbolic gestures nowadays — more than enough to pave that whole damned highway to hell.
It’s a shame that symbolism doesn’t pay the bills. Or fix problems. And it certainly won’t sell books.
