Vy Blog

Touchstone

I keep running into that word in various marketingspeak I've seen.  It feels like one of those words that is sort of airily used without really saying much: "Our positioning will be the touchstone of our strategy and messaging."

I admit I didn't exactly know what a touchstone actually is.  If you want to know, according to the actual definition, in the root, literal sense:

a black siliceous stone formerly used to test the puruity of gold and silver by the color of the streak produced on it by rubbing it with either metal.

In the modern, the correct usage would be with this concept at the fore:

a test or criterion for the qualities of a thing

As an example, Henry Kissinger said once that "the qualities of courage and vision that are the touchstones of leadership."

He means if you don't have courage and vision, you're not a leader.  To meld the figurative and the literal, you test for leadership by rubbing someone on a touchstone -- if courage and vision don't show up on the streak you leave on the rock, you don't have a leader.  According to Henry, that is.

So, I'm pretty sure this is used incorrectly more often than not.  I think people who use it are trying to allude to something that is a foundation element, or the nucleus, or some kind of non-negotiable standard-bearer.

Am I right?

More pretentious names at my kids' basketball games

The latest batch:

• Dagny (female)
• Sebastian
• And one dozen Tristans

More on pitching

Mostly I don't like anything that has to do with "how to pitch like a pro!" because usually it's pretty superficial advice.  But some of what's here is pretty good, because the common thread is "have something real," which is my own personal cardinal rule.

Like this one:

Damon Darlin, New York Times
Damon wants PR pros to say, "Look, here's the background, here's the problem we're facing...I'll put you in touch with these executives and they'll tell you how they're going to solve the problem." It's brave, we know, but weekly we hear from journalists looking for this level of honesty.

Manifestos continue

All of these are good.

This one is for attorneys, but could well apply to PR firms.

Schwarzenegger calls for 'a new creative center'

Here's a snip of a CNN story about California Gov. Schwarzenegger asking for an end to D vs. R politics.  He wants to make California a test bed for a "creative center" -- presumably meaning governing less with party affiliation and more with practicality.

Schwarzenegger said California could serve as a model to the rest of the country and larger world.

"At one time, the greatest public policy innovations came from liberals, such as during the New Deal," the Republican celebrity said. "Then the most innovative ideas came from conservatives, such as Ronald Reagan.

"It is time we combined the best of both ideologies into a new creative center. This is a dynamic center that is not held captive by either the left or the right or the past," he said.

I'm all for it if this is real.  Both parties are being held hostage by their extreme wings, so much to the point neither party is appealing.

Into the weekend

Leave your heart, lay down your art
You're here for the party
Smile and wave, try to behave
Be happy that they've made you a celebrity

More on (moron) fame

There's a review here of a new book titled (not entitled) Fame Junkies, about our endless obsession with celebrity.

I don't know why I continue to be nonplussed, but I do.  I am always amazed at how much attention is devoted to the superficial lives of celebrities.  It's so ingrained in our daily culture that the books author found that:

• Given a choice of becoming the CEO of a major corporation, the president of Yale or Harvard, a Navy SEAL, a U.S. senator or "the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star," almost half of the girls -- 43.4% -- chose the assistant role.
• When given an option to become stronger, smarter, famous or beautiful, boys in the survey chose fame almost as often as intelligence, and girls chose it more often.

When you look at how this kind of BS is influencing teens' decision making, it crosses from amazement into anger, at least for me, because it leaves the arena of amusing and goes directly into damaging.  The more obsessed we are with the trivial, the more we live in that bubble, the less prepared we are to deal with the real world and, equally, its opportunities and problems.  The less we're prepared, the more the problems will hurt and the opportunities will slip.  I guess at some point we'll all wonder why cheerleading camp and video game playing aren't equipping us with the value you can exchange in the market for a good living.  But frankly, I'm not sure our capability for self-realization will be developed enough to make the connection or do anything beyond complain.

Wow, there you have the rant for today.  Should have had a grande instead of a venti.

Notoriety and fame

John Wagner has a good post here about his interpretation of a 20/20 episode last weekend.  Thanks to the constant glare of media, we've had a number of curious changes in our behavior.  Like:

• Notoriety and celebrity -- once considered different animals -- are now interchangeable.
• Young people would rather be embarrassed publicly than ignored privately.

Wow.  Are we really that far down the line?

I guess we have been for some time.  It was 1994 when Don Henly said: "This year notoriety got all confused with fame, and the devil is downhearted because there's nothing left for him to claim."

President Ford

Gerald Ford is the first President I can actively remember.  I recall a bit of Nixon, but I was six when he resigned, and most of my memory of him involved Watergate.

I do remember President Ford, though, pretty well.  The 1976 presidential campaign was the first one I paid any attention to at any level.  Of course, after he lost that election, he pretty well kept out of the public eye -- and for a long time, too.  He was out of office for 30 years.

I had no realization of this earlier, of course, but what strikes me now about him is the fact that he was pretty well the last regular human being we've had in the White House.  Think about who we've had since.

• Carter:  Smart but not competent in the office
• Reagan:  Highly effective, oddly detached
• Bush I:  Probably close to regular guy status, but didn't keep it together politically
• Clinton:  Unbelievably intelligent, unbelievably preoccupied with himself in so many ways
• Bush II:  Well-intentioned but stubborn, too many blind spots

Ford was a smart, strong person who never sought the office.  He just stepped in and rose to the occasion by being simply decent. 

Maybe I have an odd affinity for him because he reminds me of my grandfather, who was a fairly successful small-town business owner.  I never saw him lose his temper.  He had a rock-solid understanding of what was important and what wasn't, and he tended to the former and ignored the latter, even if he knew there was a cost to either action.  He was amused at how people twist knots in their ropes, and sort of chuckled as he watched it all go by.  When it was time to step up, he stepped up.  When it was time to go home, he went home and paid attention to his family.  Everything was in balance and he knew it would all work out in the end, as it always does.

I got the same sort of feeling from Ford.  He made decisions the right way, despite the personal cost that might be associated.  Everyone else was losing their heads (like about the Nixon pardon) about what was at stake, but he was fine with just doing the right thing.  If it cost him the Presidency, OK.  Life would go on, and the country would be better for what he did.  That was better reward than the office itself.

My feeling is he had a very good sense of perspective.  I heard a commentator say over the weekend that people of Ford's generation that served in Congress had such a collegial working relationship because so many were World War II veterans, and they knew what a real enemy was.  No one got in a snit over a simple difference of opinion -- life was much bigger than that, and snits were somehow dishonorable to what they'd already accomplished and what they were in public service to do.  What a thought, huh?

I'm afraid men and women of this kind are becoming fewer, and that's a problem for our country.  Without healthy perspective and balance, and a devotion to something greater than ourselves, we'll continue to become a nation of the trivial.

My grandfather (like many of his generation, he went by his first two initials: C.A.) had a saying that I like to remind myself of as often as I might need to -- he called it C.A.'s Law:

It is utterly impossible to underestimate the relative unimportance of practically everything.

That of course is not literal about what truly is important.  It was more the way he oriented his own thinking, away from the noise of the trivial and toward the calm and lasting benefits of the real.  I keep having to re-learn the lesson, but maybe one day I'll get it right myself.

Happy New Year!

That's it.  Just Happy New Year.

I wish you the best for 2007.