Monday, April 03, 2006
Wax on, wax off
Now all you aspiring gurus, listen up. This being a guru is not some cheap trick. It doesn't come like a toy with your Happy Meal. It takes years of hard work.... and luck. David Ogilvy told me, one rainy afternoon in paris in his office at Ogilvy Defrenois, "The harder I worked, the luckier I got." We'll talk about luck later. Right now let's talk about hard work.
Step 4: Hard Guru Work
Work can only be described as 'hard' when it is not interesting. If what you are doing is interesting and stimulating, and you haved enthusiasm for it, time flies. The work generates energy inside you. You have to be dragged away from it. This can only happen when you have chosen the right path, when you are 'in Dharma', as the Vedic scholars would say.
Choose well your field of gurudom.
So before we get stuck into Hard Work, let's talk about Dharma.
Step 5: Choose Dharma
Dharma means “right action”. It is both a Hindu and a Buddhist concept. (The Buddha started life as a Hindu.)
“Right action” has many meanings – the black letter theologians would say it is to live in accordance with the strict principles of their religion.
But “Dharma” has a wider universal meaning. It means to act in harmony with the forces of the universe and nature – especially your own nature. The promise is that when you act within dharma, everything action becomes effortless and wildly successful. Wow! I’ll have some of that! Finding your dharma is therefore a very valuable achievement. It means finding your true path to spiritual realisation – be it as a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or marketing professional.
If the path in life that conforms with your duty and true nature is marketing, what does that mean? And how should you conduct yourself?
Step 6: Being honest with yourself
Gurus spend more time that the average Joe staring inwardly, hoping to find a clue.
The question of dharma comes up when you ask: “Is marketing my bag?” There are so many roles and job descriptions in the field, there is a big range of bags. But there are some general issues that unite them all. When you sign on for marketing, you find them in the bag:
Marketing is the engine room of consumer culture which is the latest version of the capitalist system which emerged when the old medieval agrarian society was transformed. Economic surpluses from agriculture were invested in new manufacturing processes which emerged at the time when steam engines and such arrived (19th century). Karl Marx complained that this process “alienated” man from his work as a productive actor in the business of getting a living from nature, and turned him into a factory cog or an unemployed rural worker. (But his alternative – or Lenin’s madcap version – was the Orwellian nightmare of the Soviets.) There’s not a lot of dharma in being a cog, but it’s at least a job.
Capitalist society – in which labour is a commodity to be purchased at the lowest price – relies on a pool of unemployed to be continually filled with recently retrenched bank or phone company workers so there will be competition for jobs and wages will be kept low, enabling fat profits for shareholders (the capitalists). This also involves moving jobs offshore to places like India where labour conditions and wages are (shall we say) more in tune with corporate greed than the trade union-dominated systems which protects the featherbedded, flabby worker. Capitalist society also finds trades union offensive to economic rationalist thought – people are lucky to have jobs. How dare they ask for a pay increase.
Some capitalists are smarter than others – like Henry Ford, who paid his worked 20% more than the average for his industry (so they’d be able to afford to buy his cars – old Hank knew he needed a mass market to match his mass production system).
If your dharma is marketing, it involves furthering the impact of consumerism in our society, including massive destruction of the natural environment to provide raw materials for factory production of goods and packaging. (Where did the forests go?) It also includes the burning of oil products to power automobiles and coal to provide energy for Game Boys and flat screen television sets. Both energy sources damage the ozone layer. Oil companies take turns leaving trillions of gallons of oil washing up on beaches and killing seabirds and fish in exotic places.
Most companies have an environmental policy, but recycling is as far as many go. The planet’s future as a home for humans is such that secret plans are being made for an American colony on the moon. (Sorry – the capitalism stuff will have to stop. We’re evacuating Earth at 5pm Tuesday.)
Dharma also requires that you be honest. How can an advertising copywriter (or anyone in advertising for that matter) claim to be strictly honest with consumers? They (we) deal with illusions and dreams, because consumers demand them. It’s all in the bag. Honest ads? (Death Cigarettes in the UK used a skull and crossbones as its logo and used government warnings as headlines for its ads. Clever, and dharma-tically correct. But selling the stuff?)
Marketing in a competitive economy means taking food off the table of the workers for competing companies. Marketing is warfare – and in wars, people get hurt on the other side when you win market share. So dharma-wise, there’s no room for the merciful.
It sounds pretty dismal for the karmic bank balance of marketing professionals. However, marketing is a skill set, not an ideology. Like Superman’s mighty powers, it can be used for good or evil (as I am sure the cause-related marketers, fundraisers and other do-gooders have been thinking, if they read this far.) Dharma or damned? You decide. See you on the plane (astral, that is).
Next; Step 7: Hard Work Revisited... ¶ 1:08 AM
Step 4: Hard Guru Work
Work can only be described as 'hard' when it is not interesting. If what you are doing is interesting and stimulating, and you haved enthusiasm for it, time flies. The work generates energy inside you. You have to be dragged away from it. This can only happen when you have chosen the right path, when you are 'in Dharma', as the Vedic scholars would say.
Choose well your field of gurudom.
So before we get stuck into Hard Work, let's talk about Dharma.
Step 5: Choose Dharma
Dharma means “right action”. It is both a Hindu and a Buddhist concept. (The Buddha started life as a Hindu.)
“Right action” has many meanings – the black letter theologians would say it is to live in accordance with the strict principles of their religion.
But “Dharma” has a wider universal meaning. It means to act in harmony with the forces of the universe and nature – especially your own nature. The promise is that when you act within dharma, everything action becomes effortless and wildly successful. Wow! I’ll have some of that! Finding your dharma is therefore a very valuable achievement. It means finding your true path to spiritual realisation – be it as a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or marketing professional.
If the path in life that conforms with your duty and true nature is marketing, what does that mean? And how should you conduct yourself?
Step 6: Being honest with yourself
Gurus spend more time that the average Joe staring inwardly, hoping to find a clue.
The question of dharma comes up when you ask: “Is marketing my bag?” There are so many roles and job descriptions in the field, there is a big range of bags. But there are some general issues that unite them all. When you sign on for marketing, you find them in the bag:
Marketing is the engine room of consumer culture which is the latest version of the capitalist system which emerged when the old medieval agrarian society was transformed. Economic surpluses from agriculture were invested in new manufacturing processes which emerged at the time when steam engines and such arrived (19th century). Karl Marx complained that this process “alienated” man from his work as a productive actor in the business of getting a living from nature, and turned him into a factory cog or an unemployed rural worker. (But his alternative – or Lenin’s madcap version – was the Orwellian nightmare of the Soviets.) There’s not a lot of dharma in being a cog, but it’s at least a job.
Capitalist society – in which labour is a commodity to be purchased at the lowest price – relies on a pool of unemployed to be continually filled with recently retrenched bank or phone company workers so there will be competition for jobs and wages will be kept low, enabling fat profits for shareholders (the capitalists). This also involves moving jobs offshore to places like India where labour conditions and wages are (shall we say) more in tune with corporate greed than the trade union-dominated systems which protects the featherbedded, flabby worker. Capitalist society also finds trades union offensive to economic rationalist thought – people are lucky to have jobs. How dare they ask for a pay increase.
Some capitalists are smarter than others – like Henry Ford, who paid his worked 20% more than the average for his industry (so they’d be able to afford to buy his cars – old Hank knew he needed a mass market to match his mass production system).
If your dharma is marketing, it involves furthering the impact of consumerism in our society, including massive destruction of the natural environment to provide raw materials for factory production of goods and packaging. (Where did the forests go?) It also includes the burning of oil products to power automobiles and coal to provide energy for Game Boys and flat screen television sets. Both energy sources damage the ozone layer. Oil companies take turns leaving trillions of gallons of oil washing up on beaches and killing seabirds and fish in exotic places.
Most companies have an environmental policy, but recycling is as far as many go. The planet’s future as a home for humans is such that secret plans are being made for an American colony on the moon. (Sorry – the capitalism stuff will have to stop. We’re evacuating Earth at 5pm Tuesday.)
Dharma also requires that you be honest. How can an advertising copywriter (or anyone in advertising for that matter) claim to be strictly honest with consumers? They (we) deal with illusions and dreams, because consumers demand them. It’s all in the bag. Honest ads? (Death Cigarettes in the UK used a skull and crossbones as its logo and used government warnings as headlines for its ads. Clever, and dharma-tically correct. But selling the stuff?)
Marketing in a competitive economy means taking food off the table of the workers for competing companies. Marketing is warfare – and in wars, people get hurt on the other side when you win market share. So dharma-wise, there’s no room for the merciful.
It sounds pretty dismal for the karmic bank balance of marketing professionals. However, marketing is a skill set, not an ideology. Like Superman’s mighty powers, it can be used for good or evil (as I am sure the cause-related marketers, fundraisers and other do-gooders have been thinking, if they read this far.) Dharma or damned? You decide. See you on the plane (astral, that is).
Next; Step 7: Hard Work Revisited... ¶ 1:08 AM
