Sorry, Charlie, You were Ahead of Your Time

While Charlie Manson may soon depart us, his legacy won't.

It's woven into the fabric of American business, perhaps for decades to come.

The man whose name is nearly synonymous with cult, Charlie mashed Dale Carnegie, L. Ron Hubbard and The Beatles into a world-changing pseudo-philosophy that hypnotized the naïve suburban kids he recruited. He called his cohort "The Family," and their compound "The Cave," and kept his minions spellbound with large doses of LSD.

Today's cult leaders—tech-company CEOs—use names like "The Team" and "The Campus," and dispense chocolates instead of LSD.

Charlie, of course, was Charlie, not a CEO. He pimped girls, not software; lived in Death Valley, not Silicon Valley; and landed in prison, instead of a mansion.

Sorry, Charlie. You were ahead of your time.

Bookies

Americans still read books, according to a new Gallup poll.

In fact, they're reading books at the same pace they did 15 years ago, before the onrush of mobile gadgets.

Nearly half (48%) of Americans read from 1 to 10 books last year; 35% read over 11.

The findings suggest "book reading is a classic tradition that has remained a constant in a faster-paced world, especially in comparison to the slump of other printed media such as newspapers and magazines," Gallup's analysts say.

While young and old adults read slightly more of them, books are read by all age groups (kids were excluded from the poll).

The majority (73%) of Americans read printed books; only 20% read books on e-readers.

If you're at a loss for a title to select, consider one of David Bowie's Top 100 Books.

Post-Competence

Pundits call ours the post-truth era.

I think it's the post-competence era.

In fewer than 10 days, we've seen:

• Mariah Carey botch lip-synching before 11.6 million viewers on live TV
  
  
• Walt Disney recall 15,000 Minnie Mouse infant sweatshirts due to a choking hazard
  
  
• Express (published by The Washington Post) illustrate its cover story on the Women's March on Washington with the male symbol
  
  
• Yahoo Finance Tweet "Trump Wants a Much Bigger Navy" using the "N word"

Dan Lyons' 2016 memoir, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, provides a strong clue for why we're engulfed in post-competence.

Taking his cue from Steve Jobs, Lyons calls it "the bozo explosion."

Bozos explode in companies when "B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players."

Of course, there's another, more powerful force in effect: companies' drive to profit at their customers' expense.

That drive manifests itself every day in companies' ready willingness to subject customers to post-competent employees—and to the fiascos they create.

Both Sides Now

CMOs who hope to keep their jobs must use both the left and right sides of their brains, according to Forrester's 2017 Predictions.

Those who can't—the "analytics-only" and the "brand-only" CMOs—will be pink-slipped.

A CMO's right hemisphere "designs experiences to engage customers." Her left "masters technology and analytics to deliver personalized, contextually rich experiences."

“'Whole-brained' CMOs are in the minority—but they will soon be the competency standard for both B2C and B2B companies," the report says.

Release the Kraken!

Every new technology will bite back.
The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused.                                                          

― Kevin Kelly

Futurist Brian Solis warned us: the stuff in the cloud is mighty.

Every day, millions of people share experiences on line, recycling others' content and creating their own.

"This content doesn’t self-destruct like SnapChat images," Solis says. "Shared experiences build upon one another, forming a collective repository in the cloud that’s indexable, searchable, and influential."

All those millions of blustery pre-election blog posts, Tweets, videos and memes were shared among the mortals, darkening their minds and eclipsing traditional media.

Who of us knew the Russians were seeding the cloud? But that's beside the point.

Zeus, the cloud gatherer, has released the Kraken.