As I read my brilliant friend and mentor (at least I like to think so) Magnus Lindkvist’s new book “Everything We Know is Wrong – The Trendspotter’s Handbook”, I’m showered with interesting insights about the world, but also about myself and what I do for a living.
On one level of course, I’m the hard working sweaty entrepreneur trying to get this ad agency to run and grow. This is hard work to be sure, which requires dedication and long term focus. But on another level I’m the public speaker, the guy who’s up on stage to inspire other people, not myself this time, to do big things. On a good day, I can humbly aspire to be like Al Pacino’s coach character in the clip from yesterday’s “Best Public Speaker in The World”-post. At best. In that role I’m not one of the players, but firmly planted on the sidelines.
This role is of course about trying to blast of massive amounts of energy on stage, but it’s also about having something to say. This second part, the incredible workload of which is mostly invisible to the audience, is not a job – it’s a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle of constantly looking, constantly questioning, constantly knowing that we really don’t know anything but one thing: that our current model is not refined enough and has to get better. It’s a lifestyle of connecting dots. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not a job at all, but some kind of syndrome that people who enjoy this line of work have inherited or developed. Something similar to autism or Asperger’s syndrome where there is an ever-present sketchpad overlaying reality, and a pencil constantly redrawing and redrawing relationships and correlations, systems and anomalies. All I know is that I can’t get away from it and that I love it.
When Magnus lectured at TED U in February, he ran around like a madman shaking hands with people to demonstrate how we only brush past information today. He also demonstrated the 7 second handshake and how this may actually be something that we should bring with us into the world of communication and marketing.
This also made me think. Because, yes, he’s right about this. I do believe that the millisecond handshake is a decease of our time. But meanwhile, we only have the time we have, and the flow of information is not exactly slowing down. So if you’re a brand, what should you do?
As I sat around thinking about this over a cup of hot chocolate in my apartment, I lazily millisecond-handshaked Seth Godin’s blog and came across a post about trust. Seth says something in that post which is perhaps for the millisecond handshake decease what a shot of vaccine is for the swineflu:
You can play along, or you can be so clean and so straightforward that people are stunned into loyalty. You know, as in, “do it for the user,” and “offer stuff that just works” and “this is what you get and that’s all you get and you won’t have to wonder about the fine print.”
Rare and refreshing. An opportunity, in fact.
Can it be that being “clean and straightforward”, “stuff that just works”, and “…you won’t have to worry about the fine print”, gives you more quality time with your customer instead of bullshit time, and that the millisecond handshake may actually turn into a couple of seconds if not a full seven?
Can it be, that this is the reason we love simple and easy to understand brands that just work? Can it be that this is precisely what we all love about brands like Apple, Google, 37 Signals, IKEA…
Can it be that in a world of complexity, simplicity and honesty is the ultimate refinement?
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