Steve Yastrow

They Don’t Sell Shakespeare At Wal-Mart

They don’t sell Shakespeare at Wal-Mart. They don’t sell Beethoven either, although I could imagine Fur Elise or the 9th Symphony’s Ode to Joy appearing, almost by accident, in a seasonal collection sold at a discount in the Wal-Mart music department.

I’m not criticizing Wal-Mart for this, anymore than I would criticize a road-side convenience store for not selling health food, in the midst of their potato chips, pork rinds and industrial-sized boxes of Skittles. What our largest retailer carries is a reflection not of what they want to sell, but of what their customers want to buy. Selling Shakespeare or Beethoven would be big money losers for Wal-Mart.

So why does it matter that Wal-Mart, the store that sells just about anything we could need for our homes, can’t sell some of the most important examples of our cultural legacy?  (Lest you think I’m only considering dead, white, western males as part of our cultural legacy, I don’t believe they carry anything by Lao-Tzu or Emily Dickinson either.)

Here’s why this matters: We live in a society where intellectual discourse has become too much hassle. Too few people are willing to explore subjects deeply, use “big” words, or familiarize themselves with the historical or cultural context of issues. Shakespeare?  Beethoven? Plato? Thoreau? Ugh.That’s too much work. And it doesn’t stop here. Listen to any cable news show, or reality TV show, or talk radio show. The level of argument and polemic is usually not high enough to get a C+ in a first-year college course. In some sense, Wal-Mart is a bellwether of our national zeitgeist, and, when it comes to intellectually-charged thinking and conversation, the state of things is pretty depressing.

By way of example, just look at the health care debate. On one side people cry “Death Panels!” while on the other side people boycott Whole Foods because of a Wall Street Journal Op Ed piece on health care reform written by their CEO. The only fault of John Mackey of Whole Foods was not that he wrote the piece (which, although I didn’t agree with everything in it, seemed to me to be thoughtful, well-reasoned and well-written), but that he expected people to actually read what he wrote and think about it before reacting to it. The primary fault of the crafters of the proposed health care reform’s policies toward seniors was not that they created their policies, but that they expected the public to actually check, for themselves, what was written before reflexively agreeing with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity’s comments on the policy. Lazy thinking is a bipartisan issue.

(I asked my cousin, economist Peter Yastrow, how many people he thought had actually read the health care reform bill. He answered, “Two.The guy who wrote it and his mom. His girlfriend said she read it, but she was lying.”)

I am tired of people being too lazy to think. We live in a golden age of knowledge, where our reserves of knowledge are expanding exponentially every few years. I get very encouraged when I read or listen to people like Ray Kurzweil on the subject of our expanding knowledge base, but then I get depressed when I think about how little most people care about this new knowledge.

I spend my work life interacting with business people, helping them improve the state of their companies. This is my unequivocal, air-tight, passionately-held belief, based on my own empirical evidence: The executives who are willing to think are the executives whose companies are most successful. This disinterest in thinking and intellectual exploration translates, directly, to sub-standard business results. Don’t agree? Please debate me on this one.

So, I’m not just making a social commentary. I’m offering my opinion on the connection between lazy thinking and business performance. It is a very strong connection.

I don’t really care if Wal-Mart sells Shakespeare. I’d just like to know that, once in a while, someone walks through the Wal-Mart book section and stops at “S” to see if their immediate craving to re-read a favorite passage in King Lear can be satisfied.

Posted in Observations | 22 Comments »

Frozen Decision Making: Nietzsche Explains

Frustrated that your customers, and prospects can’t make decisions?

Just about everyone I talk to who has customers shares this frustration. Economic uncertainty has translated itself into decision-making paralysis.  People should buy, but they just can’t make the leap to do it.

Check out what Friedrich Nietzsche had to say in The Birth of Tragedy, written in 1872:

“For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed.  This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.”

Wow. For years we’ve lived in an unreal, Dionysian world. (Dionysian can be defined as being “of an ecstatic, orgiastic or irrational nature; frenzied or undisciplined.)  Now that “everyday reality re-enters consciousness,” people feel a “will-negating” nausea, that prevents them from acting.

Recognize that it is this nausea, borne of the shell-shock of learning that our recent world is one of make-believe, that has paralyzed your customers and prospective customers.  To unfreeze your customers, you need to be the Pepto-Bismol that quiets their nausea; confidence and certainty are the best antidotes to stomach-churning uncertainty.  Help your customers get comfortable with the new reality, and help them jettison their emotional connections with the old order.

As I have written lately, this is not a recession, it is a recalibration.  Resetting your world is nauseating and discomforting.  It freezes people.  Help your customers recognize that the new order is the real order, and help them avoid the disappointments of the lost past.  It really never existed. (e.g., the lost money in your 401K never really existed.)

Nietzsche goes on to compare the Dionysian man to Hamlet, our most famous frozen decision maker who could not act. (I pulled this passage from Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, on page 393.  The orbit of the Hamlet-obsession comet has once again returned to me.)  Bloom’s and Nietzsche’s  point is not that Hamlet couldn’t decide because he was confused by the information that confronted him, but that he knew his situation too well. “An insight into the horrible truth outweighs any motive for action,” Nietzsche writes.  Your customer may not have just learned that his uncle killed his father, as Hamlet learned, but he certainly shares with Hamlet the knowledge that his world will for evermore be different.

Ok, so your customers are nauseated by this “insight into the horrible truth.”  Recognize it for what it is, and calm them down.  That’s how you’ll unfreeze them.

Yes, this means that selling has become a totally new thing.  If you’re not selling differently, you’re not helping your customers recalibrate their world, and you will find them staring back at you, mid-sales pitch, with the uncomfortable look of nausea.

Posted in Recalibration, Thrive in a tough economy | 1 Comment »

Mozart’s Brand Harmony Lesson

Last Sunday, after a weekend that included two trips to the theater, I wrote a post about how Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater inspired me to think about capturing the opportunity for personal encounters. In the post I said I also wanted to write about a passage from Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, also seen that weekend, but couldn’t find the text.  Thanks to Jeff Pasquale for sending the text, which teaches us lessons about Brand Harmony.

At one point, (I found a picture of the scene!) Mozart is talking about how he can create harmony in an opera in a way that can’t happen with spoken text in a play:

Sire, only opera can do this. In a play, if more than one person speaks at the same time, it’s just noise. No one can understand a word. But with music, with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at once, and it’s not noise – it’s a perfect harmony. Isn’t that marvelous? But it’s new, it’s entirely new. It’s so new, people will go mad for it. For example, I have a scene in the second act – it starts as a duet, just a man and wife quarreling. Suddenly the wife’s scheming little maid comes in unexpectedly – a very funny situation. Duet turns into trio. Then the husband’s equally screaming valet comes in. Trio turns into quartet. Then a stupid old gardener – quartet becomes quintet, and so on. On and on, sextet, septet, octet! How long do you think I can sustain that?

This passage teaches us a lesson about how customers listen to our businesses.  If we’re not careful, the different voices our customers hear will be “just noise.”  Or, if we craft it well, the different voices can blend “and it’s not noise – it’s a perfect harmony,” as Shaffer’s Mozart tells us.

As I wrote in a recent newsletter, Brand Harmony describes one of my most fundamental beliefs about branding, marketing and connecting with customers.  As customers interact with your business, they are listening for how all of the different interactions blend together, creating a story.  What would Mozart hear when listening to your story?

Posted in Brand Harmony | 1 Comment »

Our Daily Comedy of Errors

I’ve seen every Shakespeare production produced by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater since 1990. Over the years, as they choose plays from the repertory, I’ve had the treat of seeing new interpretations of plays I’ve attended at Chicago Shakespeare before. Last night, I saw the third version of Comedy of Errors they’ve done. It was a very creative, interesting production, setting the play on a 1940 British movie set, where a team is making a film of Comedy of Errors while the Nazis are dropping bombs. It really worked; click to read a Chicago Tribune review. (I think the review sells the play short)

Comedy of Errors, like Twelfth Night, starts out with a shipwreck that separates siblings and leads to cases of mistaken identity. In Comedy of Errors, two sets of identical twins are separated as infants. Shakespeare sets the stage for farce by giving identical brothers the same names: Antipholus of Ephesus grows up with his servant Dromio, and Antipholus of Syracuse grows up with his servant Dromio. When, as adults, the pair from Ephesus end up in Syracuse, chaos ensues. People think they are having conversations with the Antipholus they know or the Dromio they know, but they are not speaking with the person they think they are. Wife confuses husband, merchant confuses customer, master confuses servant, lover confuses beloved, etc.

The heart of the comedy in Comedy of Errors is that people often think they are having successful communication with another person, when, in fact, the other person is understanding the conversation in a completely different way. As the audience, we can see both sides of the misunderstanding, but each of the characters in the conversation can only hear the part of the conversation they are prepared to hear. As the audience we laugh. But what happens when we return to daily life?

Work life, especially the part that includes interactions with customers, is filled with misinterpreted conversations. We live a daily comedy of errors where sales claims and elevator pitches are misconstrued, where technical explanations are misunderstood, and where nods of understanding are really signals of disinterest. And, as in Comedy of Errors, when we advertise we really never know who we’re talking to. We may think we know, but we really don’t. And we certainly don’t know how we’ll they’ve understood us.

Communication isn’t about saying what you want to say. It’s about being understood. As Harold Bloom wrote, Shakespeare invents characters that are more human than real people. Even in a farce like Comedy of Errors, first performed 416 years ago, Shakespeare’s multiple Antipholuses and Dromios can teach us lessons about communicating in our modern work life. When you converse with a customer, don’t just assume you are understood, make sure you are. And, believe it or not, make sure you really understand who it is you are communicating with. It may be a different character.

Posted in Conversation | 5 Comments »