Welcome to The Puritan Tyranny

An amoral and self-indulgent elite is peacefully ousted by a new gang of autocrats who are devoted to "schooling the world with considerable austerity."

Welcome to The Puritan Tyranny―how 2017 looked to H.G. Wells when he published his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come.

"The Tyranny," as Wells named it, "tidied up the world" and "altered the human face forever."

Under the Tyrants' rule, reprobates and oddballs of every kind disappear.

So do introverts.

But, wait, there's more.

"History becomes a record of increasingly vast engineering undertakings and cultivations, of the pursuit of minerals and of the first deep borings into the planet," Wells says.

"New mechanisms appeared, multiplied, and were swept away by better mechanisms. The face of the earth changed. The scientific redistribution of population began."

In the name of progress―they prefer the term "business"―the Tyrants also "invent work," Wells says.

"Earth became an ant-hill under their dominion, clean and orderly, but needlessly 'busy."

The Tyrants tear down everything in sight.

They destroy "the huts, hovels, creeper-clad cottages and houses, old decaying stone and brick town halls, market houses, churches, mosques, factories and railway stations," replacing them with stark and sterile buildings.

And the Tyrants censor books, known as "fever rags" for their ability to incite people to doubt, complain, laugh and have sex.

"You may call it a tyranny," Wells says, "but it was in fact a release; it did not suppress men, but obsessions."

Size Matters Not

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?

― Yoda

Content marketers, make a New Year's resolution to ignore the idiots who tell you content length matters.

The thousands of snake-oil salesmen like James Scherer who promise, "Scientific research tells us how to write the perfect blog article," leaning on vendor data that "proves" long (1,600-word) posts yield higher rankings, greater sharing, and larger readership.

Baloney.

It's quality alone that counts.

A Little Mystery Goes a Long Way

The statue on the altar is never reverenced by him
who knew it as a trunk in the garden.

― Balthasar Gracian

Transparency's in vogue, but a little mystery goes a long way.

Sometimes you have to leave home for your talents to be appreciated; sometimes you have to appear foreign.

You're respected in a new place when you come from afar, because you're seen as ready-made and perfect; and respected by the folks back home, because you're seen only from a distance.

Cashing in on Events

Bloomberg is doubling down on events, according to Politico.

The business media giant has hired veteran exec Stephen Colvin to expand its two-year-old global events division.

"As with many media companies striving to develop new revenue streams, events are becoming a more prominent component of Bloomberg's journalism lineup," says Politico's Joe Pompeo.

A spokesman for Bloomberg says the company is "well positioned to be the leading convener of business and financial events around the world."

Sponsorship revenue from Bloomberg's five events is up 30% from 2015.

When will associations cash in on events?

Failure to Communicate

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion
that it has taken place.

― George Bernard Shaw

Clarity is king is my tagline, because communication and comprehension are different things.

In Harvard Business Review, business professor Donald Sull tells the story of a CEO who held monthly meetings to communicate strategy.

The CEO was pleased with herself after an employee survey showed 84% of her managers agreed with the statement, “I am clear on our organization’s top priorities.”

But when a follow-up survey asked the managers to list the top five strategies, fewer than 33% could name even two.

When the same survey is conducted at other companies, results show, on average, only 55% of middle managers can name even one company strategy.

That figure plummets to 16%, when frontline managers take the survey.

Why does communication so often fail?

Sull gives three reasons. CEOs:

• Dilute the message. One company he studied has not only a long list of corporate strategies and objectives, but a list of corporate priorities, a list of corporate values, a list of core competencies, and a dictionary of strategic terms.
  
  
• Change the message constantly.
  
  
• Measure communication of the message by inputs—documents, e-mails and meetings—instead of understanding, "the only metric that actually counts."