According to the 2005 California Occupational Guide for “Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners”: “Housekeeping jobs have a high turnover rate due to the low rate pay.” This suggests that in housekeeping, as well as similar job categories, turnover might not be a controllable cost. Large corporations have responded by trying to make their jobs turnover proof – in my MBA economics class it was called “de-skilling”: the art of fragmenting and regimenting a production process so that the human roles require minimal training or decision making – often by supplementing with automation. Turnover costs are reduced by reducing investment in people.

From a cooperative perspective, this solution is unacceptable; developing people is part of the business. I don’t know how these housekeepers will decide to move forward– and in a democratic organization it will be up to them– though of course I anticipate providing them with as much fodder as possible for good decision making. But I feel confident predicting it will be a path that creates a longer career ladder supported by additional training so that members don’t have to leave. But even if they still left, we would consider it a success if they left for a better job.

It struck me that if we could measure it, how turnover occurs would be a good measure of corporate social responsibility – or perhaps better called corporate contribution to the community. How much of turnover is because people are moving up, and how much of turnover is simply churn? This is not a wholly new idea, critics before me have raised that complaint that one way risk has been transferred from organizations to individuals over the last several decades is decreasing investment in training – instead you’re expected to already have the skills for the job and it’s up to you to fund their acquisition. That shift directly decreases access to “opportunity to get ahead” and takes us further from our national ideals. But perhaps tracking turnover is an opportunity for companies who want to demonstrate their value to the community to do so.

This whole incident serves to illustrate for me what I see as a key difference between the candidates, and indeed the party lines. Barack Obama talks in his book, The Audacity Of Hope, about how government policies can have huge impacts on citizens that the governors themselves rarely feel. Notice that it was McCain that introduced Joe into the conversation, not Obama. To me that is symbolic of how Right-Wing administrations will make decisions that work for the leaders with little attention to the impact on the rest of us. If we are negatively impacted in some way, it must be because we’re screw-ups and our failure to get the same result is our own fault; our inability to negotiate a slice of the pie reflects a lack of desert. (And dessert!).

Obama, in my mind, would never drag someone into the spotlight like that. My spouse mentioned the Keating connection and suggested that McCain likely got Joe’s permission. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It’s callous at the least if he didn’t, but I found myself arguing very paternalistically that Joe could not possibly have understood the potential ramifications of agreeing to become a symbol as well as the McCain campaign should have, otherwise why would he have agreed? Why didn’t the McCain campaign give him a little helpful advice? Well, because the decision was the best one for the campaign, and if it didn’t work out for Joe, well, we all can see it’s because oops, Joe is a screw-up. So let’s leave him to burn in his own bed (hey, he agreed, let’s hope the radical righty’s can at least cover their heads with that one) and move on.

But isn’t it paternalistic to suggest the McCain campaign should have “known better” than Joe, and made a decision on his behalf to not invite him? Heck, people choose to make fools out of themselves on national TV every day, Jerry Springer built a career on it. Perhaps the existence of that show could count as evidence that Joe had ample opportunity to understand the decision he was making. I think it’s this paternalism that is particularly galling to those who would have our next Left be into a pit. Still, it’s not like he applied. He was provided with an opportunity crafted by folks who may or may not have been forthcoming about all the potential risks and rewards, and maybe, may not have even known themselves.

That’s been a big transition in my thinking during business school: I used to believe it was not ok to offer someone an opportunity you could not fully scope, to invite someone to take a risk. Now, at some level, I understand that’s what business is often about! But I still see an ethical line around disclosing what you know, a line that I believe too many businesses and community leaders fudge in the name of “well let them judge for themselves (and it’s their problem if they’re judging on different data than I am, who am I to speak for them?)”. People deserve to make informed decisions. It’s appropriate for them to decide to do something you wouldn’t do, but only when they make that decision armed with the same information. No you can’t fully download your experience and perspective and you shouldn’t, but too many people, I believe our nation’s recent leadership especially, use the fuzzyness of that line to huddle where it benefits themselves at the expense of others.

So long, Joe!

It’s a really thoughtful study of why people vlog (video blog, essentially) a history of major social events in the development of YouTube, and itself a pretty impressive remix by the author/presenter. I literally felt chills watching a video section of internet lawyer Larry Lessig talking about how everything people do on YouTube is at some level illegal due to copyright law (yes there’s fair use, but media companies have gotten the act of acquiring material itself by “ripping” DVDs made illegal). Larry’s voice is speaking, his key words are appearing on the screen as digital text, and this is overlaid onto dramatic music and an artistic video made from copyrighted movie content that has been beautifully re-rendered. We looked for the source and it seems Professor Wesch and his research group (as participant anthropologists) blended two videos themselves: one is a Larry Lessig’s talk, I think it’s the TED talk on how “the law is strangling creativity” .
The other is a video called “Us” by a user called “blimvisible”. On YouTube this user actually has her (Professor Wesch also excerpted some online dialog that suggested blimvisible is female) own “channel” and you can find the video there as well as see a channel view of YouTube. This video itself is a remix of lots of copyrighted movie clips placed to a copyrighted and not-re-recorded song with a chorus about how we are all living “in a den of thieves”.

Professor Wesch talks about the YouTube “community” and the dialogs that happen there, but I wonder if those communities are a little threatening for folks on the fringe. With all these “communities” if you don’t stay in the conversation, it gets away from you. Perhaps for some the thought that a conversation could be occurring about themselves or issues important to them in a forum that is overwhelming for them to monitor, is itself overwhelming. I seem to have some resignation to it, possibly because I’ve been in tech for a while. Perhaps here’s where I benefit from growing up reading the Washington Post, where the lesson I drew from its coverage of federal politics is that there are no secrets and you bet somebody is going to publicly skewer you with yours sooner or later. As a kid always wanting to minimize closed doors, I ended up a bit of a goody two-shoes. Little did most of us know we’d all be public, in this disconcerting and difficult-to-manage way where the distance between obscurity and global scrutiny can be a matter of hours and a few seconds of video.

There are tools to help. I asked Darrin what he uses to keep abreast of Picnik news and he has used blogsearch.google.com, Google alerts and Technorati over time, though now Picnik gets sufficient mainstream coverage and the company has enough employees internally sharing news that he doesn’t use those so much anymore. He also mentioned search.twitter.com, where I can see that people have “twittered” about Picnik: 44 minutes ago, an hour ago and 17 hours ago (to which Darrin responds “wow, that’s a dry spell!”, but it is also Sunday morning). Comparatively, the most recent “tweet”s about ‘Socially Responsible Investing’ were 1 day ago, 3 days ago and 11 days ago.

While there’s value in figuring out which info streams are the ones for you (Professor Wesch says that most videos are seen by 100 or fewer people) and how to stay up to date, my best suggestion comes from Pema Chodron: clear seeing, calm abiding and letting go.

There are many clever aspects that make this really fun. First, as long as I play my assigned beats, which are clearly a subset of the real song, all the drumming plays and so the resulting sound is the full song which is enjoyable to listen to. It’s the same with the guitar and bass. They do seem to have especially recorded these songs for Rockband – we found a music book at Barnes & Noble that had the “Rockband arrangements”. Second, there’s a meter that tracks how you’re doing as a band when you play tours, and there are crowd noises. I rarely can tear my eyes off my note-track to look at the meter, but I can totally hear when the crowd is restless and booing, vs when the crowd starts cheering, or on slower songs singing along. It actually gives me chills. On some of the songs with beats that are complicated (for me) I start to feel like I’m a real drummer! It totally creates Csikszentmihalyi’s flow: challenging enough to keep me focused, but not so challenging that I’m overwhelmed (usually!). It really is amazing.

As a fun bonus, a friend forwarded this video of the famous band Rush playing one of their own songs on the videogame. What really strikes me is the look of absorption on their faces. However, playing a music videogame is not the same as playing the real music - most especially for the guitar which has 5 buttons instead of 5 strings, and the show staff started them out on “expert”, so whaddya expect?

This morning Darrin blew my mind by grabbing his iPhone and holding it up to the radio which was playing some obscure song. A new program, Shazam , recorded a 10 second sample of what happened to be playing and shortly reported back the title and artist. Dang! To be able to fingerprint an arbitrary 10 seconds of song, and match it against who knows what kind of database successfully is simply amazing to me. This wasn’t a top 40 hit. Now the fact that recorded music can be reproduced identically helps, vs a birdcall recognizer I once saw that had a pretty impressive hit rate given the challenges. Somehow the speed at which it can do the lookup, and the amount of data it must be indexing against, well, makes me lose my chuckling confidence that of course the government isn’t filtering all our email. Because if there’s the data and processing power to do this song matching stuff for free, I’m not sure I can imagine what can be done with serious dollars and determination.

In our Creativity in Business class for BGI, we did some reading around how to create an atmosphere that supports innovation, and one aspect of an innovative company is that its budgeting process is “leaky” – there are opportunities for motivated individuals to cobble together resources within the company to run small demonstration projects prior to getting official approval needed for those projects to officially be part of the budget.

In March of this year I heard Phillip Palaveev of Moss Adams talk to the CFA society about the growth of the Advisory Firm industry. He noted that while there’s been growth overall, some firms have grown significantly more than others. He made the point that for a firm to be positioned for growth, people can’t be working at 95+% productivity because when opportunity knocks at their door, they’re too busy to answer it. If you want to position yourself for opportunity and growth, you have to have slack in the system.

My conclusion: Inefficiency Is Good!

I attended a lecture at Portland city hall, basically book tour for this book, Wed April 30th 6pm. It was great!

Matt is the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and has been a consultant to the CDC, the Study Circles Resource Center, the National League of Cities. He also wrote: The Seven Deadly Citizens: Moving From Civic Stereotypes to Well-Rounded Citizenship
The Good Society - Volume 13, Number 2, 2004, pp. 33-38

Matt started with the quote: “an expert = someone from out of town”. He started out working for a foundation on community engagement issues, began working across communities and sharing lessons across communities. He sees the same problems over and over again. One of those problems is the relationship between citizens and their government.

• Past to current: there’s a parent-child relationship (attitude?) between government and citizens
• Future: citizens want an adult-adult relationship

He sees that government representatives experience citizens as either absent or angry. Officials want to be respected & trusted, and citizens want to be heard. Citizens are also seeking social connection. Non-profits often work to fill the gap, but are many single-issue/focus groups competing for community involvement and attention, resulting in a very fragmented effort which is overwhelming to citizens. His phrase: we need “mixed-use public involvement” (like mixed-use land development). How he sees engagement happen now:

• Temporary projects - last 6-12 months, people get engaged and then disband.
• Permanant structures - neighborhood councils etc, but these can fail to provide true recruitment/engagement [enrollment is the word I'd use - SM]

Matt believes we need to combine the two.

He identifies 4 key principles for success:

• 1) recruitment [enrollment] - reach out and engage people where they are and through what they’re already involved in.
• 2) combine small-group (dialog, action planning, real work) with large-group (inspiration, amplification, reinforcement of collaboration) work.
• 3) build relationships: folks need time to compare values & experiences, and then need to consider a range of views & options for solutions to identified issues.
• 4) combine different levels of change - immediate volunteer participation, organizational change, policy change.

He then reviewed a few Mini Cases
problem: land use - people are looking for control over their surroundings, issues are contentious and difficult
solution: “neighbors building neighborhoods” in Rochester, NY.
NBN uses NeighborLink Online to let neighbors see benchmarks & current measurements, GRUB - greater rochester urban bounty is a urban farm project. Is it successful? rochester keeps losing tax base to neighboring areas and has had to cut funding so maybe not?

problem: race & segregation
solution: “Lee County Pulling Together”
Started from a church having community dialogues. Ended up identifying a need for more services in a low income neighborhood and getting a shopping center built. Key Lesson: sharing the responsibility of governance means sharing our differences.

problem: citizens becoming anti-vaccine and not trusting government
solution: “what to do about the flu?”
study circles of citizens examine vaccination challenges in pandemic situations and make recommendations to local government for emergency planning. gets people educated about the issues.

solution: “community chat” became “village foundation”
Neighbors coming together to talk about shared issues eventually began developing ways to meet those needs from within the neighborhood: neighborhood watch, got a neighborhood school established.

The Future
-We need to update legal frameworks, open meeting laws and advisory requirements have become barriers to meaningful commmunity involvement though their goals were open-ness and transparency. In the LA area in particular things have gotten problematic
-Engagement needs to combine the social and cultural with the political to be meaningful for people.
-Need to follow the 4 key principles

the goal: community engagement that is equitable, egalitarian, efficient, deliberate and decisive

There were a number of Q&As, most specific to Portland, but one answer he gave particularly caught my attention as matching a feeling I’ve had:
Q- youth engagement?
A - Sometimes youth projects have a flavor of passing the buck: “We can’t solve racism in our generation so let’s get the next generation to do it”. Cross-generational projects are great, but you’ve got to have youth leadership if you want to have youth engagement.

I also found this answer intriguing:

Q - what about government & race issues?
A - there’s an unintended legacy of the “I have a Dream” speech which is the idea that questions of difference can be resolved and there’s a promised land where we no longer have issues and we just all live happily together. The reality is that differences are always going to be there as both an opportunity and challenge; the role of government needs to be that of continually facilitating constructive engagement around differences and helping us move forward.

and these are all very sensible advice

Q - facilitation & meeting planning
A - definitely facilitation is a needed skill, people need training. the Rochester project has a training academy that trains citizens & civic servants together, so they build relationships as well as skills. Robert’s Rules are a pain, Robert can get lost. What matters: ground rules, safe space, experience & story sharing, ranges of options to choose from.

Q- how to engage the working class?
A - you need to reach out to them, be flexible on times & locations (church basements, hair salons). emphasize content that is meaningful and relevant, ensure their participation is genuine and not token, make sure they’re heard. Shorter meetings aren’t the answer, everyone is busy, it’s about making it worthwhile, so longer might be better.

Q - Donna Beagle, local expert on poverty, says to emphasize relational connections and avoid being place-based because populations are too mobile. how to deal?
A - Focus on what people belong to, what networks or groups. Have meeting structure but don’t be rigid - facilitate & follow what they want.

Q - meeting structure advice?
A - tie back again to “must include social & cultural with political”. Meet at local schools where people can see the kids school projects hung up, catch up with their neighbors and eat. Mix up the content, so have working monthly meetings but every 6 months its a big celebration with minor report-out, to have broader appeal. attach to a social event like the weekly football tailgate party - have 30 minutes of neighborhood meeting beforehand. Small group work, large group punctuation

Q - running government as a business
A - Runs government into the ground. simply can’t make everything into a fee-for-service. need to confer legitimacy on citizen participation. this is where open meeting laws get tricky, citizens don’t feel valued, but personal process isn’t super open & transparent. Challenge!

I definately recommend his book, there’s more there. He has an interesting chapter where he talks about Saul Alinsky and how classic community organizing focuses on building a power base outside of government and holding negotiations, very much a “government is them” approach as opposed to the participatory approach he believes we are capable of today, particularly supported by technology. It’s easy to dismiss that as unfair because of a “digital divide”, but I’ve seen interesting programs for serving the disadvantaged that used technology as infrastructure to support local human beings who provided the ultimate interface, and that struck me as a smart way to combine technology and touch.

The Seattle Public Library has The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, annotations by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Hollis Robbins. At times, the annotations get a little tedious, for example when they note that such and such behavior or phrase would “be racist to any modern reader.” Yes, thank you, I can see that it is, I’m sorry you were worried I might not. Sometimes the annotations are unwelcome foreshadowing when they say things like “this is the first indication that character such-and-such is going to die.” What? It wasn’t obvious to me! I didn’t want to know that! But overall the annotations are very valuable, particularly for those of us not well versed in quoting scripture. Many of the characters, particularly Tom himself, quote scripture, and the annotations help the reader along in knowing what the next, unquoted but clearly implied, line of scripture would be, or illuminating the larger biblical story that is being referenced for its parallels to the current situation.

The book was written to incite abolitionist passion in the heart of every legally white American, particularly women who comprised the bulk of the novel-reading public. Prior to writing for the anti-slavery National Era newspaper (where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally published as a serial), Stowe wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book. The book is alternately gripping, melodramatic, and a bit preachy, as one might expect from a novel with a political aim. During one particularly long character monologue I found myself briefly reminded of Robert Heinlein. Supposedly when Abraham Lincoln welcomed Harriet Stowe to the White House for a visit in 1862 he said “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”!

Published in 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the US in its first year, 2 million world-wide in its first two years and was translated into 37 languages. In more than one debate between characters, Stowe draws parallels between capitalists/laborers and slaveholders & slaves. This perhaps led to the book’s popularity in countries like Russia, where even Tolstoy read it. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a Christian martyr – hardworking, positive attitude and obedient – until ordered to do something more actively immoral than simply make the best of his role in the system of slavery, at which point he is clear that while his human master may own his body & its labors, God owns his soul and is to whom he is ultimately accountable. After two such occasions, he is whipped near to death, at which point he forgives his tormentors, has his wounds washed by caring supporters and at last he rests in a shed for two days and dies on the 3rd. Even I can recognize that biblical reference to the death of Christ. Tom of the book is no “Uncle Tom”.

So how did this character’s name become synonymous with sellout? It seems worth some pondering to me that Uncle Tom seems to have “sold out” by being co-opted. My first clue was a picture caption explaining that “By the turn of the twentieth century, Uncle Tom had become such an icon that he even appeared on whiskey bottles, like this one from the United Distilling Company of Cincinnati.” Seeking validation that this was the source of the sell-out, I did a little websurfing and discovered The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

The “why” of the museum is long, involved, and worth reading, and I will pull this excerpt: “The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is straightforward: use items of intolerance to teach tolerance. We examine the historical patterns of race relations and the origins and consequences of racist depictions. The aim is to engage visitors in open and honest dialogues about this country’s racial history. We are not afraid to talk about race and racism; we are afraid not to.” It is Dr. David Pilgrim’s thorough writing on The Tom Caricature that explains that the many derivative works, significantly stage performances and later film, quickly degraded Uncle Tom into variations of weak, old, passive, happy, childlike servants. These are the Uncle Toms that made it to the sixties and became the source of intra-racial taunts. Dr. Pilgrim breaks down some of the usage and documents examples. He also has some interesting analysis of “Tom” roles in films over the decades and their evolution.

The book still fresh in my mind, I went to see The Waters of Babylon at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. At one point the Cuban character, Arturo, tells the legend of the death of Chief Hatuey, leader of the indigenous peoples of Cuba. To my astonishment, it nearly mirrors the story of Prue from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There’s a version of Chief Hatuey’s death here. Another webpage traces the story to the “History of the Indies” written by Father Bartolomé de las Casas. Researching him leads me to the following :

“Historia apologética de las Indias”, for instance, has been only partly printed in the “Documentos para la Historia de España” (Madrid, 1876). The “Historia de las Indias”, the manuscript of which he completed in 1561, appeared in the same collection (1875 and 1876). His best-known work is the “Brevísima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias” (Seville, 1552). There are at least five Spanish editions of it. It circulated very quickly outside of Spain and in a number of European languages.

Fascinating. It makes sense to me that American abolitionists would have familiarized themselves with prior writings on the subject. So did Harriet Beecher Stowe copy the story from Father Bartolomé’s 1552 publication, or did the 1875 editors use Prue’s story from Uncle Tom to embellish the story of Chief Hatuey? Only going to the source will tell, but either way, anti-oppression movements have deep global roots.

Interestingly, the phrase of my own that first came to mind was: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. For me that touchphrase is a reminder that one can analyze forever, but to accomplish something you need to get out and do it well enough. On the face, that’s seems the opposite of what she is talking about – she’s out there doing it, and hanging onto some perfect even when she knows she’ll have to relinquish it eventually for good. So why do those two mantras connect for me? After some feeling about it, I think it’s because both are ultimately saying it’s about the journey, not about the end. That concept for me has been a big shift that BGI is helping me internalize rather than merely intellectualize. Who We Are and How We Work Together is more important that what we actually do.

In entrepreneurship we’re now reading Built To Last, and that seems to be what they’re saying as well. They talk about being clock-builders rather than time-tellers: To build a truly great company, your product goal has to be the company itself more than any particular product. The company can then stand on its own, independent of the founders.

Collins and Porras also talk about core values vs practices. In the ParlorGames blog, Jane mentions a friend questioning her commitment to handwritten notes when it’s something she won’t be able to continue. It’s not consistent with “start as you mean to go on”. When talking with Darrin that catches his attention – he particularly dislikes when people justify a decision primarily on consistency. Consistency, perhaps, is a practice, not a value. And so for Julep, “start as you mean to go on” may be a practice they work to follow,but the core value seems to be something deeper.

“Begin as you intend to go on” (what it evolved to in my brain) also reminds me of another cherished guide-phrase: “Every step you take towards justice must have justice in it.”, I can still remember the visiting interim director of the Highlander Center saying it, with a smile. There is an end, but how we get there matters. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” And now I have Colins and Porras, saying we should be clock-builders, not time-tellers.

from Nonprofit Governance in the United States by Francie Ostrower for The Urban Institute.

Financial Transactions between Nonprofits and Board Members Under the law, board members owe the nonprofit a duty of loyalty, which requires them to act in the nonprofit’s best interest rather than in their own or anyone else’s interest (Brody 2006). The IRS Good Governance guidelines caution that “in particular, the duty of loyalty requires a director to avoid conflicts of interest that are detrimental to the charity.” 10 Against this background, the purchase of goods or services by nonprofits from board members or their companies raise special concerns about who such transactions really benefit. In a guide for board members, one state attorney general’s office warns that “caution should be exercised in entering into any business relationship between the organization and a board member, and should be avoided entirely unless the board determines
that the transaction is clearly in the charity’s best interest.”11
In 2004, a proposal to restrict nonprofits’ ability to engage in these transactions was included in the Senate Finance Committee’s draft white paper but met with considerable opposition from some nonprofit representatives. The president and CEO of Independent Sector, for instance, warned that prohibiting economic transactions “could be extremely detrimental to a number of charities. . . . Public charities, particularly smaller charities, frequently receive from board members and other disqualified parties goods, services, or the use of property at substantially below market rates.” A similar objection was voiced by the executive director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, which is composed primarily of smaller and mid-size nonprofits.12 There has also been concern over the impact on nonprofits in rural and smaller communities, where a trustee’s law firm or bank may be the only one in the area.13 Regardless of disagreement over whether public charities should be allowed to engage in financial transactions with board members, there is agreement on the fact that any such transactions should be transparent to the board, and that policies are in place to ensure that such transactions are in the nonprofit’s best interest. Recent IRS draft guidelines are emphatic on this point. They call on boards to require members to disclose annually any financial interest that they or a family member has in a business that transacts with the charity, and to “adopt and regularly evaluate an effective conflict of interest policy” that, among other things, includes “written procedures for determining whether a relationship, financial interest, or business affiliation results in a conflict of interest” and Nonprofit Governance in the United States 7 specifies what is to be done when it does.14 Furthermore, as noted earlier, the IRS has instituted a question on the Form 990 asking nonprofits whether they have a conflict of
interest policy in place.

In the January 2008 newsletter the PCC appropriately trumpets this accomplishment, but notes that one challenge is that some companies have simply switched from listing HFCS in their ingredient labels to instead calling it “glucose fructose syrup”. I have noticed previously that Gatorade is one such product, and I confess I was a bit suspicious when I saw it. A quick websurf reveals that “glucose fructose syurp” is what the UK calls HFCS. This is interesting to me. Clearly, the message has gotten through that customers don’t like to see HFCS on product labels because at least Gatorade, owned by PepsiCo since 2001, has made an effort to disguise it. That kind of deliberate deception is simply nauseating to me. If they know customers don’t like it, they should formulate away from it. To meet the market’s taste and cost considerations but dissemble about how (because customers might actually use that in their purchasing decisions, even if you disagree about their reasoning) is evil.

This reminds me of something that has long irritated me about business advertising. Look at any corporate TV advertising for business systems: Microsoft, HP, you name it. You’ll see a racial rainbow of shiny workers in whatever office they’re gleefully employing the product in. Obviously at least the marketing department has figured out that diversity and equity are values that mean something to their target audience. Human Resources probably knows it too, but damned if corporate leadership does because those TV ads are nothing like reality.

In B-school it was interesting to take marketing as someone who has always been outside the field – they almost convinced me that marketing really is the core of business. Unfortunately these examples show where marketing gets its bad reputation: the marketers seem to know what’s right - but apparently all they can do is talk about it. It’s a problem that they do, even though they can’t seem to make it happen.