The Challenge Dividend

DUI Checkpoints - Who's Challenging Them?

A few weekends ago my wife and I encountered a police sobriety checkpoint on the way back from a party.  My wife was driving after having two drinks over the span of 6 hours.  We passed the checkpoint, but the experience left me a with very mixed feelings.  Let me share...

At about 11:30 on a Saturday night we were returning home from the party, as we turned the corner onto a 4-lane road about 10 minutes from our home we saw a long line of cars and many police lights in the distance.  We thought there might have been an accident and slowed down to join the traffic line.  As we got closer we noticed at least a dozen police vehicles in the median between the 4 lanes and saw that they were doing a DUI checkpoint.  No problem, we thought.  My wife was driving, she was fine, and we inched along awaiting our turn.  I've been through such checkpoints before.  Usually they ask to see your license, take a quick glance to make sure the driver isn't bombed, and send you on your way.

But this was different.  We got to our turn and two policemen asked my wife if she had a drank anything that night.  She answered honestly (2 over 6 hours), then one officer asked her to follow his pen with her eyes back and forth one time.  He evidently didn't like what he saw, so he asked her to step out of the vehicle and stand with a group of other suspicious folks leaning against the guardrail on the side of the road.  The other officer hopped into my driver's seat and drove my car around to the side of the road in the opposite direction.  He turned off the engine, took my keys and told me to sit tight.

So for at least 15 minutes I sat in the car craning my neck to see how my wife was doing back there.  My mind ran through scenarios: Am I going to have to bail her out? How would I get home? What will the babysitter (and her parents) think?  But my main feeling was anger.  Anger that my wife was perfectly fine but now subject to risk of an officer's judgment or a Breathalyzer's technology.

Finally she walked back to the car and got the keys from the policeman.  She passed.  Sure enough, though, she had to go through the full battery of tests: walk the line, backwards alphabet, etc., and then a full breathalyser test.  She was a bit unnerved by the experience and I was even more angry.  It basically ruined the end of our night out - and those nights out alone are pretty rare due to my travel and our difficulties in finding a regular babysitter.

Does this challenge lead to improvement?

In some ways, I think these random DUI checkpoints are a good idea for society.  They offer the immediate benefit of pulling dangerous drunks off the roads.  And they sure can be a memorable deterrent; I know I'll be thinking about this vividly the next time I'm on the borderline of being safe to drive home.  Overall, drunk driving is still a main cause of traffic accidents and deaths.

On the other hand, I really worry about the lack of challenge to the government organizations and police officers who conduct these checkpoints.  For example:

• I believe the sobriety tests (except the breathalyzer) are engineered to provide officers with reasonable cause.  In other words, everyone fails these tricks.  Who challenges this?
• There is no cost to the police for wasting people's time or putting them through unnecessary tests
• Police departments receive big budgets for these checkpoints, it pays their salaries.  They are rewarded for testing and arresting people - not for how many accidents they prevent (what we really want).
• The legal blood alcohol limit itself (.08 in most states) is unchallenged by debate or science
• There is an imbalance in the debate.  Special interest like MADD fight for more regulation.  Politicians see tougher DUI laws as an "easy win" to make them look like they are tough on crime.  And average people (who may fall victim later) have no immediate pressure to protest.  Who's going to prevent the BAC limit to fall to .06% or lower?

Thankfully, we have at least one ultimate check and balance in this country, as the Supreme Court weighed in this a few years ago.  After Michigan found checkpoints illegal, the U.S. court overturned this decision 6-3.  Some general guidelines were issued, but details were left to the states.  (Below you can see the document we got from Hamilton County, Ohio, which tries to explain its process.)  Since then, 11 states have found these checkpoints to violate their own state constitutions.  So there's no consensus here.

At the end of the day, I think checkpoints can be a net positive.  But I would like to see some push back in the system to drive improvement and accountability.  Frankly, I'd rather the police pull out the obvious drunks (who cause the real wrecks), and let the rest of us get home.

What's your take? What's your experience?

(UPDATE: I find it interesting that since this post went up, I receive about 5-10 visitors on Fridays and Saturdays for people plugging in "DUI checkpoints Cincinnati".  It goes to show a potential web 2.0 business, and that there is no end to how people will use the Internet to seek information!)

Challenge Cannes Improve Advertising

Over on my other, company-sponsored blog, Marketing With Meaning, I shared perspective from my trip to Cannes, France last week for the largest and most important awards festival in the advertising business - The Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.  Check out my posts here, here, here and here.

Overall, this annual competition of advertising was further evidence that challenge drives improvement.  The most entertaining and thought-provoking advertising in the world was weeded down from something like 28,000 entries to a few thousand short-listers, and then to a couple hundred bronze, silver, and gold winners.  There were a few controversies, but I can say that some truly great work was honored.  And the winners not only entertained consumers, they seemed to sell product at the same time.

The Cannes Lions competition is clearly one where the challenge is opportunity.  Winners get the most important trophy in the business - something to put front-and-center on their resumes for life and likely the starting point for a lot of promotion and bonus conversations.

But at their hearts, advertising creatives are artists who wish to see people fall in love with their work.  So a Lion also gives them deep personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment.  These things are much more important than money.

So now I'm off the beach and back in the real world.  But I'll take the lessons from Cannes back to my own agency, in hopes for us to step onto the stage next year - yet another challenge that I hope will lead to improvement and success.

Guest Post: American Dreams

(While I'm overseas for business this week, my Dad, Robert D. Gilbreath, Sr., offered to guest post this week for the second time this year.  Thanks, Dad, good stuff below...)

Ever notice how many trucks and workers swarm a new subdivision under construction? And after it's built-out, only a few return. A carpet cleaner here, a pizza delivery car there. That's because once dreams are achieved, once something new and bold has been established, it takes so many fewer people with so lesser talents to operate the result. America's economy works the same way. A dream-build economy creates many more and much better jobs than an operate-defend version. And it’s the latter version we're mired in.

Offshoring and outsourcing are minor villains in today's anemic job market. There is a much larger specter stealing jobs and crushing our national business spirit. It's the death of dreams, and the commensurate courage to build upon them. When we built the Interstate Highway system hundreds of thousands of jobs were created and sustained for years--high-paying, imaginative jobs. But once completed, how many architects, engineers, urban planners, and environmentalists does it take to maintain these same roads? Answer: none. Just a few folks in orange vests to pick up the trash and repair the occasional guardrail. And a good number of those are prisoners.

The same is true for other great, ennobling national endeavors like the Alaska pipeline, space exploration and the internet. We have nothing like these now. Our great national goals have shrunk to the defeat of a band of murderous, Third-World thugs. Not very ennobling.

We are asleep, but not dreaming. We are using, but not building. This is why we get more inspiration from Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe sword and sorcerer movies than from our national political and business leaders. Timidity, protection, defense, and fear drive out the great in us. They stymie investment, shut down innovation, and seize up the job-creation machine.

The reason for the job bonanza of the nineties was three-fold: 1) Reengineering our business processes, 2) Mergers and acquisitions, and 3) the Internet. Each of these required tremendous amounts of planning, analysis, expert design and skillful, bold execution to pull off. When a company changes its strategy or embarks on the release of a new product, a streamlined process, or a new organization it takes an initial burst of highly talented people working excitedly, in great faith that their efforts will bear fruit. However, every reengineered process uses fewer people, every merger results in net reductions, and every up and running web site requires virtually no one to run it.

Dream and build economies trump operating ones when it comes to job creation--every time, no matter what.  It took an army of geniuses together with battalions of talented, highly skilled men and women to create Microsoft's Windows operating system and their Office application suite--more and more varied talent than required by the Manhattan Project of World War II. But once done, this software can be run by a schoolchild. Operating is easier, duller and uninspiring. Operating is dumbing down, not dreaming up. We need dreams to build on, otherwise we'll have nothing but decayed infrastructure and defeatist businesses to operate in the future.

We cannot grow jobs, advance our standard of living, or provide the tax base to lessen our social and cultural ills when we are cowering in fear. When boardroom talk is dominated by "business continuity" (read: "surviving an attack"), "focus" (read: "contraction, staying and thinking in the box") and "contingency management" (read: "being afraid to stand for anything or commit to any principles"), we're living in the land of fear. When the business leader is hazed and body searched at the airport on the way to a meeting, it's unlikely he or she will be in the mood for innovation, risk-taking or exploration upon arrival.

Fear is not prudence--it is reckless prudence--the great destroyer of the future. We need to trump it with creativity and courage.

Robert Gilbreath is an Alpharetta-based author of six business texts and a frequent commentator on national work trends.

Lessons from "What Sticks"

I'm taking a day-long trip to the advertising festival in Cannes today, which means I have a little time to catch up on my reading.  On the first leg of the trip I got several pages through What Sticks.  It's a marketing book that addresses the inefficiency of most marketing that is done today, and offers ways to use better research and scenario planning to improve results.  It is a must-read for anyone in marketing and advertising, but I bring it up in this blog to share two interesting stores of how challenge drives improvement.

The first example comes from a chapter that addresses the challenges within the culture of most marketing organizations.  As an industry, we fear failure because we know that failure often leads to getting fired.  Instead, the authors urge marketers to take a chapter from Japanese manufacturers:

"When the Japanese find a defect in the manufacturing process, they call it a treasure.  Finding it, dissecting it, and figuring out how to eliminate it is the path to improved productivity (translation: higher profits)."

This Japanese trait of embracing failure is interesting.  I doubt it pervades the entire culture, but makes sense in the manufacturing process.  While I'd love this to follow through to marketing, I think it is more difficult than manufacturing because marketing is a discipline of creativity and subjective decisions.  Manufacturing is a mechanical process that is far easier to judge as it is not really "yours."  Also note that Japanese advertising is not more efficient or effective than that of any other country or culture.

The second example comes from a story of the world of mountain climbing.  According to the authors:

"Each year, the American Alpine Journal delivers a thick volume chronicling the failures of mountaineers.  The point is to help others learn from those failures and to take specific action to avoid failure in the future."

Again, a great example of a sub-culture that recognizes how challenge drives improvement, and demands that lessons of failures be remembered long after successes are forgotten. 

From a marketing perspective, I remember being an Assistant Brand Manager on Tide and pushing my brand and agency team to test a value message in advertising.  Tide was at a 50% premium versus the category and I wanted to try and communicate a message such as: "3 times the stain-fighting power for 25-cents per load."  This idea of value re-framing was gaining traction in the market and we had this very good claim to share.  The way I sold this into my manager was to say, "Hey, let's test market this.  Several other brands are succeeding with this approach, and if it fails, at least we know what doesn't work and move on."  My manager and agency bought the idea, and it actually succeeded in test market.

Thanks to authors Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart for doing their share to remind marketers, and every other person, that failure is a challenged that should be embraced - if improvement is to be reached.

Another Lesson from the Barber Chair

My monthly visit with Tony, my barber, inspires me every time.  As I've written before, Tony Ramundo is an engaging guy who loves life.  He's a life-long barber, which has given him thousands of long-term relationships.  Tony spends 30 minutes of 1-on-1 time with more than a dozen people every day.  And people tend to use their 30 minutes to discuss life's mysteries - after with the usual chit-chat about why the Reds can't figure out a way to win.

Last week Tony was telling me about how he and his brothers took a big leap in the early 1990s to set up a new, larger barber shop.  There was a point where they were debating how much to spend and whether or not to get a sizable loan.  Tony said something that stuck with me:

"We were deciding whether to spend $10,000 on new equipment instead of using our old stuff.  $10,000 is a lot of haircuts."

Tony went on to describe how he and his brothers always thought in terms of "how many haircuts" it would take to make investments.  He even said that he uses this exercise to keep himself from spending money frivolously in his personal life.

Behavioral economists would say that "thinking in haircuts" is a psychological tool that people can use to outwit their material cravings.  A new car would be nice, and a loan is easy to get; but think about how many haircuts it will take to pay it off.  This ensures that the positive impression of driving that car around town is balanced by the negative impression of how many hours of hard work it will cost to pay for it.

The Haircut Analogy (got to get a trademark on this...) is a great example of how challenge can drive improvement.  By challenging ourselves to consider the cost of something in terms of hard work (rather than just money), we may make better choices. 

And you can use this in your own life pretty easily.  Just take whatever you do for a living, and put it into the dollars per hour you work, or the dollars per activity for your business.  At our interactive advertising agency, our President, Jay, likes to keep our minds on costs by backing out how much Revenue and Profit we would have to bring in to cover the cost of investments.  In other words, "Hey, that's a lot of banner ads to cover that cost!"

The idea here is not to simply prevent yourself from spending, but rather to better way the true cost and ensure it is worthy.  Tony and his brothers ended up taking the loan and bringing in new equipment, after all!

Exercise Slows Aging

In case you need another challenge to get you to improve your lifestyle, I offer an article from BBC News that shows people who don't exercise actually age faster at a genetic level. 

According to a study of identical twins conducted by King's Collge London, people who do not exercise lose key pieces of DNA, called telomeres, at a faster rate than those who workout regularly.  Telomeres are "repeat sequences of DNA that sit on the ends of chromosomes, protecting them from damage.  As people age, their telomeres become shorter, leaving cells more susceptible to damage and death."  The study showed that people who exercise regularly lose fewer telomeres over time.

It is unclear why this happens.  The researchers' current theory is that exercise somehow helps prevent damage caused by exposure to oxygen and inflammation.  I would guess that this could be an evolutionary driver.  In other words, nature would likely reward individuals who kept an active, productive lifestyle, while punishing those who were sedentary.  It's literally a case of survival of the fittest.  And those who challenge themselves physically improve in health and longevity.

Whatever the reason, I'm literally going to hit the treadmill right now.

Lester Wunderman: An Advertising Classic

This week I recalled a post from a few months ago about how some of the most successful people in history suffered challenges that actually drove their later success.  It triggered my memory of a story from Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world who started a multi-million-dollar business, coined the term "direct marketing" and remains a thought leader in our industry.

The story comes from a video used within our WPP network in which Lester Wunderman tells of his early days starting an agency.  To summarize:

• Lester and his brother, Irving, started an advertising agency in New York City during the height of The Great Depression "because no one would hire us."
• Lester had no clients and used to walk around from office to office selling himself.  At one point he saw a man about to jump out of a window and pulled him off the ledge.  The man thanked Lester and asked how he could repay the favor.  Lester asked for his advertising business, and thus won his first client.
• The pressure to win in this tough marketplace drove Lester Wunderman to "promise clients that their advertising would deliver results."
• According to Wunderman: "We couldn't sell on our experience or awards, and we didn't have an education in advertising.  All we could really say was that we got results."
• "No matter how much firepower other agencies had they couldn't win if we had results."

Obviously, in this case the pressure to survive as a business led Wunderman to innovate in a way that drove improvement for both his clients and his business.  The idea of results-based-marketing is seen today in marketers' focus on Return on Investment and, eventually, the idea of relationship and permission-based marketing. 

Today, the evolution of Wunderman's new thinking helped drive my agency's belief in Marketing with Meaning - the idea that to win in a world of consumer control we must create marketing that people actually choose to engage with.  Thus, the legacy of improvement doesn't stop with one man or one business, but can echo through the generations.  Thanks, Lester.

Book Review: Thomas Edison in West Orange

A few weeks ago I posted about how several of the most successful people in history were actually honed by their failures.  Thomas Edison was one example, and my mention of him led to an email from Arcadia Publishing asking that I review a new book called Thomas Edison in West Orange.  It is the first time I have gotten such a request via this blog, and I was happy to oblige.

Overall, Thomas Edison in West Orange was a pleasant read.  It is actually mainly a book of historic pictures, with thorough captions, which captures his mid-to-late years focused on inventing and manufacturing in West Orange, New Jersey.  Unlike a 400-page biography that would bog down into details that only obsessed historians could value, this book gives the reader a chance to understand the basics of the man and visually experience life in his time.

There are two main "key learnings" that I will takeaway from Thomas Edison in West Orange.  First, I was intrigued how the story of Edison and his companies mirrored what we see at Google today.  Like Google, Edison enjoyed fat profits from early inventions like the phonograph, but plowed the return into investments in new lab space and the search for further inventions.  He created mushrooming complexes of buildings and threw people at difficult problems.  Employees enjoyed free meals, and formed sports teams and social clubs.  Many left to launch their own inventions and companies over time.  And like Google is seeing now as it struggles to earn profits on anything other than search ads, Edison was never able to turn his later inventions into much more than modest successes.

The second interesting story comes from Edison's work to corner the market on motion pictures.  In 1908, Edison helped form The Motion Picture Patents Company, an organization meant to pool diverse patents on movie production in order to freeze out competitors and maximize profits.  The group failed, first because filmmakers escaped to Hollywood to avoid lawsuits, and, later, as the Supreme Court outlawed the group in 1915 on anti-trust charges.  In a way, one could argue that Edison's heavy-handed patent pressure led to improvement as the industry focused itself in Hollywood.  This concentration of filmmakers, producers and actors helped the industry get its start, and the rest is history.  Once again, challenge led to improvement.

So thanks to Arcadia Publishing for the chance to learn something new that contributes directly to this blog's mission.