You know you've made it when... You know you've made it when a woman walks into your boardroom and says, "I've wanted to meet you for a long time, just to see what you're like."
I am breathing heavily. She says, " I came to see the guru." I think 'This is getting outa hand...' She was a stunning brunette, tall, angular. Her eyes told of a million disappointments. I was disappointed.
"You're not getting any business out of me. I'm just curious to see what you're like."
That's when you know you've made it to guru status. When they show you no respect.
I had become a sideshow freak. But freak or no freak, I was going to do some business with that dame. somehow.
And that's how it turned out. We became good friends, and I forgave her the cheap shot when we met. She was simply marking her territory, declaring her need for defensive dominance.
She needed a hundred gurus in her life just then because it was splintering all apart. I was one of them.
Last time I saw her she was dancing with a cop. He promised me he'd be good to her. Her name means 'gold' in Croatian. She is gold. Pure gold.  ¶ 4:33 PM 2 comments

  Any pulpit will do Step 10. Any pulpit will do

Gurus need exposure like a flame needs oxygen. I said yes to every opportunity. Would I speak to this group. yes. Would I travel to this godforsaken place and spend a day with these relatively insignificant people. Yes. Would I step in at the last minute and make a speech at an event. Yes.
The day i was asked: Can you edit a magazine, I said Yes. Then went about finding out how to edit a magazine. I write articles for magazines. Sometimes I get paid for it.
Gaining the editorship of Australia's largest circulating marketing magazine was a stroke of luck. It was a challenge and I wrote nearly the entire issue for the first couple of years. But 20 years later my name is still on the masthead and my articles are still the most popular items that appear.
To become a guru you need a platform forf your pearls of wisdom.

I had a couple of would-be gurus try to muscle in on my patch, but I sent them packing. They had no substance and were more interested in becoming gurus than in helping people. (Oops! I let the secret out of the bag too early. Yes. A guru needs one furthe essential ingredient. A sincere desire to help people.)  ¶ 10:28 PM 0 comments

  The Land says I'm a guru
Here's proof that, when faced with a person who appears to know more than they do, the media immedioately reach for the word 'guru'. It is used twice in this article which appeared last week. Once in the caption and also in the opening sentence.
Nice article. Half a page, on page 33. Opposite a report which indicates that the current bosses of the wool industry do not understand marketing. I'm angling to take over the job. "Bring in the Guru!" they will shout.

  ¶ 3:11 PM 0 comments

  Create something out of air
Step 9. Smoke their mirrors.

To be a true guru, you have got to appear to add to the store of human knowledge.
I say "appear to" because some of my fellow (though uncertified) gurus get by with a bunch of stolen concepts that anyone could lift from anywhere. And, as an expert is someone who knows 5% more about a topic than the average person, they often get away with it. (The public is gullible.)
The easiest way to be seen to adding to knowledge is to re-label someone else's ideas. How many times has the Ladder of Loyalty been trotted out and messed with and called things like "The Ladder of Commitment"?
I hit a home run with the concept of "clutterbusters", dimensional mailpieces that broke through the clutter and disrupted the daily routine of the recipient and got great results. I lifted the idea from an old article in Industrial Marketing magazine. I added a psychological explanation for the reactions we were getting, spun right out of my head. And voila! Guru.
Another favourite of mine is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Very handy little model when talking marketing. In fact, liberal use of models denotes aspiring gurudom. Over use of them indicates tryhard.
On the path to gurudom, keep up with the manufacturers of models. They feed the punters' need for certainty.  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 comments

  Study with the Masters










Step 8. Find a Master

I found many. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi found one - Guru Dev, a nickname for the Universal Guru Shankaracharya Jyotirmath, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj. The Transcendental Meditation people make you kneel before a picture of the "Maharshi" (the correct pronounciation) standing surrounded by flowers looking up a hill toward Guru Dev and up above him were other hairy men in dresses, obviously gurus and gurus of gurus.
If you are to become a guru, ya gotta get a guru.
My first guru was Dale Carnegie, who wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People - a book given to me by a 'friend' as a kind of insult, as one would give another a bar of soap. By the time I read it, Dale was long dead, but his teaching lived on in the form of his courses. I did one. It transformed my life.
He taught me to expect ingratitude, that humans are self-conscious and self-obsessed, and that the way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.
The next guru I attached myself to was David Ogilvy. I joined his company and worked for it and no other except my own. I encountered DO while waiting for a bus during rush hour in Sydney's Pitt Street. He was in the window of a book shop in the form of a book called "On Advertising". He taught me that advertising could be a business for 'gentlemen with brains' and that it paid to have a 'well-furnished mind'. He taught me that if I worked twice as hard as the next person I would get ahead three times as fast. He taught me always to give my client's product a first class ticket. He taught me that a penniless copywriter could wind up living in a chateau in the Loire Valley and commanding the world's largest advertising agency and still be an interesting person . He taught me that real copywriters knew how to write direct response copy.
So I badgered the creative directors of the local office of Oiglvy & Mather Direct* until they gave me a job. It took 18 months.
After that I learned from giants like John Hancock (who called what we did for a living "flogging stuff" and who loved it when our work got 'down and dirty'). Giants like Brian Walker, recently deceased, who blue pencilled my copy until one day when I brought my copy to him, he told me "I don't want to see it. You're now flying solo." Giants like Mike Birmingham, who looked like a street person, spoke like an Oxford scholar, and wrote copy that sang; long copy ads for Mercedes Benz and long letters for the accursed American Express. When I was made Creative Director 18 months after joining the company as Trainee Copywriter, I inherited a bunch of young turks ready to wreck the joint and two 60-year-old getlemen writers who would spend time discussing with me the correct use of a semi-colon and the neccessity of the serial comma.
I was attracted to wisdom. As the editor of Marketing Magazine I put well-known industry personalities on the cover - taking my lead from the womens' magazines who know that people are interested in people and especially celebrities.
So I did this deal with the magazine - I'd put a marketing celeb on the cover and they would speak at our monthly luncheon to launch the issue. Celebs in an industry are usually celebs for a reason. They are either high achievers or self promoters. I learned something from all of them.
And a guru learns from ordinary people and children and nature, especially nature...  ¶ 8:58 PM 0 comments

  You know you've made it when... A woman walks into your boardroom and says, "I've wanted to meet you for a long time, just to see what you're like."
I am breathing heavily. She says, " I came to see the guru." I think 'This is getting outa hand...' She was a stunning brunette, tall, angular. Her eyes told of a million disappointments. I was disappointed.
"You're not getting any business out of me. I'm just curious to see what you're like."
That's when you know you've made it to guru status. When they show you no respect.
I had become a sideshow freak. But freak or no freak, I was going to do some business with that dame. somehow.
And that's how it turned out. We became good friends, and I forgave her the cheap shot when we met. She was simply marking her territory, declaring her need for defensive dominance.
She needed a hundred gurus in her life just then because it was splintering all apart. I was one of them.
Last time I saw her she was dancing with a cop. He promised me he'd be good to her. Her name means 'gold' in Croatian. She is gold. Pure gold.  ¶ 3:46 AM 0 comments

  Never say "No" Step 7. Never say "No"

Early in my journey towards gurudom I chose the path of "Yes". Yes to everything - the opportunity to speak at a conference, the chance to meet important people, the chance to help people who could help me in no specific way, then or later. It was always fun.
One day I received a call from a bloke I knew from college who was editing a trade mag. He was looking to find an editor for another trade mag, called Marketing World. He knew I had written some articles for other marketing mags and for the Financial Review. I was on his list of one.
Now I'd never edited anything. Didn't know the first thing about it. WHen he said, "Can you do it?" I said "Yes!" and hung up the phone. I then rang half a dozen editors I knew and asked them all the same question: "How do you do it?" Each one gave me one good point. Put them all together and I had a 6 point plan. I wrote a proposal for revamping the magazine (it was pretty shitty and the publisher didn't have a clue, as it turned out) and I had the job. I low-balled the money to get in, became indispensabled, and then ratcheted it up, but never too high as to be a problem.
Now gurus need a platform. My friend and fellow guru Deepak Chopra*, the guru's guru, travels to be with his followers (the mountain coming to the mountaineers) and keeps an endless stream of books which recycle and restate and reinterpret and renovate, reiterate, refresh and reignite revenue streams for his ideas which aren't really his ideas. He's an interpreter of realities, a spiritual tourist guide. He's the best.
I had my platform delivered to me. Marketing World became Marketing Magazine, then Marketing and eBusiness (when a couple of flips took over) then back to Marketing Magazine. Twenty years later my column still appears up front, dripping gravity and guruvity.
Never say "No".

*Notice how we New Age gurus leverage off each other, like geese flying in formation? Better than sled dogs, where it is only the lead dog who gets the best view.  ¶ 1:55 PM 1 comments