Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Reflections on My Visit to India

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

A little more than a week ago I returned from my first visit to India. I went for business—a chance to hook up with some brethren from our parent company, WPP—but I was fortunate enough to have some time away from the work that brought us there to absorb the people and places of this amazing country. Please bear with me going a little bit off-topic today, but I think it’s important once in a while to share something personal that does connect with what is at the heart of “marketing with meaning”: Understanding people, society, and life.

I’ve done a decent amount of travel in my life, and have visited developing nations including Vietnam, Argentina, and China. But none of these experiences is comparable to what I saw in India. Here are a few of the things that stood out from our handful of days in the country in and outside of Delhi:

  • There is humanity everywhere. This is a little difficult to describe, but India is a place where there are many people, and they live out in the open. Drive down the streets and within a block you will see people eating, drinking, buying, sleeping, changing, fighting, cooking, and washing clothes. While it is unusual and quaint to hear dishes clinking when you walk through a Western neighborhood, India is a continuous, rich display of human life in all of its triumphs, tragedies, and chores.
  • Infrastructure is far behind, but people don’t seem bothered. I was amazed to travel down one of the major highways outside of New Delhi and see only two lanes. This is a country of 1.2 billion people, and one of the growth miracles of the modern world, yet the interstate a few miles away from my home in Cincinnati is 10 times more developed and in better condition. I was also surprised that few people speak English even though this is a historic and secondary official language of the country and education is highly prized. Nevertheless, there is little concern or “hurry” to improve. Maybe this is a good thing, as it allows India to grow at a pace that allows it to adapt, rather than upending everything they hold dear.
  • There is poverty everywhere, but the people smile more than we do. I was blown away to see the amount of people living in small quarters in dirty streets strewn with mounds of trash. Cows, dogs, and people sorted through these trash piles. No vehicle looked less than 10 years old. There are many poor people sleeping on the road median at night. Yet there are no riots in the streets and the people seem to find a way to get by. I will never forget taking a camel-driven cart through a small village at the base of a castle-turned-hotel where our meeting was held. Adults and children smiled and used what little English they knew to say, “Hello, mister!” A little boy with no pants defecating in the gutter of the dirt road waved to me.

It was most interesting to me to see the very rich and very poor living side by side in this vast nation. Fancy cars with leather interiors vie for a driving lane along with dilapidated bicycles hauling propane tanks. And we visited a Sikh shrine and joined people of all classes in bathing our feet, washing our hands, and paying our respects.

I look forward to visiting India again and gauging the progress it makes. I just hope that this unique culture persists through the inevitable wave of development and Westernization that is already sweeping through.

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Posted in Leapfrom Media, Life | 2 Comments »

Linking Happiness and Meaning at Work and Home

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

happiness

For me, the start of a new year is a time to recharge the batteries with a few weeks off, and rethink about my personal work and home life. I usually try to unplug completely, and preferably take a few long-distance drives to see relatives to clear my mind. This gives me clarity to work through the past year and begin to think about what I want to work on in the year ahead. Over the holidays I had the good fortune to run across an article that aided my annual processing. In the December 21 edition of BusinessWeek, Marshall and Kelly Goldsmith share results of a study about happiness and meaning at work and at home, and they come away with some very interesting conclusions.

In a study that is at the heart of the appropriately titled forthcoming book, Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It, the Goldsmiths interviewed more than 3,000 professionals about what gives those people short-term satisfaction (happiness) and long-term benefit (meaning). The biggest finding from their survey is that there is a very high correlation between people’s happiness and meaning at work and home—”in other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.”

Because full-time workers spend the majority of their waking hours on the job, we might as well admit that happiness and meaning at work is the key to both in life overall. I have always felt this to be the case for myself, but I am surprised that so many others feel the same way. This idea lies in the epilogue of my book, where I describe how Marketing with Meaning not only helps improve sales and customers’ lives, but by doing the latter, we enjoy our work much more.

Another key insight in this study is that “since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are.” In other words, we are responsible for our own happiness and meaning—not passive beneficiaries or victims of our work or home environments. If we are unhappy, we must take control and make changes to get to a better place.

These two lessons are what I work to practice and improve upon every year. I accept that my work has a huge impact on my home and family life, and I work to shape my career to better tap into what makes me happy and what makes life meaningful. In 2009 I had the chance to progress very well on this in seeing my book published, in watching our company grow revenue and staff at a double-digit rate, and in providing opportunities for our employees to succeed with new clients and challenges.

On the other hand, there are a few other goals that I hoped to accomplish but fell short on. After reading this article I sat down to commit to some goals that will make me happier, accomplish more meaningful results, and help our company continue to grow and succeed. One big one is to see the “Marketing with Meaning” concept take on a life of its own beyond me. For me to accomplish my goals, the concept cannot just be a “Bob thing” or even a “Bridge Worldwide thing.” I can only succeed if you make the concept your own, and, as a result find happiness and meaning in your work/home life by creating marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that itself adds value.

Thank you for stopping by to read this blog or the book, and let me know how I can help myself succeed by helping you create more meaningful marketing.

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Posted in Achievement, Agency Marketing, Concept, Life | 3 Comments »

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back from the day to day of the marketing world and Twitter stream and step into a good book about life. A few weeks ago my friend Jay gave me just such a reminder by giving me his copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, a book by Viktor E. Frankl first published in 1959. Of course Jay knows my mission in this blog well, and while it was an enjoyable read for diversion, it also reinforced my belief in the mission of creating Marketing with Meaning.

Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl’s memoir of his survival of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Unlike other stories of holocaust suffering and survival that you may have read, Frankl’s perspective as a psychiatrist results in a unique examination of the meaning of suffering and of life. His years in tortuous conditions provided him with the opportunity to see how many of his fellow men and his own mind were affected.

Frankl discovered that the people who tended to survive 1-in-28 odds were those who had some purpose to live for—say, a wife and children, an unwritten novel, or, in Frankl’s case, to teach the lessons that he learned in the concentration camp. Interestingly, Frankl suggests that growing cases of drug abuse and depression are a result of too many people who feel they have no meaning in their lives.

Two specific quotes stood out for me in reading this book, and drive me to continuously positively impact the world. First, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

This was one of Frankl’s key discoveries in the concentration camps, but he expanded it in his psychotherapy research and practice in the years after the war. By choosing a “why” to live, suffering itself can be given meaning. While my personal suffering is tiny in comparison to Frankl’s, I find a personal connection to these words. This project and upcoming book around Marketing with Meaning has taken a toll on my personal and family life, and there have been setbacks and disappointments, but the possibility of changing the world for the better—and early feedback from you, dear readers—provides a powerful “why” to keep me going.

A second quote by Frankl is similarly powerful:

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who has not had the fantasy of going back to a time and place in your past, and, having the confidence and knowledge of today, acting much more confident and directed? That is the guidance of Frankl, a concept that confronts man with “life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.”

This concept is what gets me up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings to write this blog or work on the book. It’s my personal conviction to “not leave anything on the court” in the game of life goals. My biggest fear is not failure itself, but rather the failure to do some small thing that could have helped create success because I was lazy or over-confident.

I am glad to have something bigger than myself to live and struggle for, and I am proud that this work around Marketing with Meaning has already touched a handful of people around the world. I hope to not only create meaning for myself, but spark a new meaning of life for millions of other marketers around the world. Perhaps that is what Frankl meant when he said:

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actually realizes himself.”

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