The aftermath of the latest "brush with fame"
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 2005
I can always tell the left-handed compliment regarding PNM. It usually begins with, "Say Tom, let me congratulate you yet again on your latest brush with fame."
What the person really means is, "I can't believe you're still milking that! How come you get so much attention?"
The answer is, of course, you gotta feed the beast. That's why the articles matter. That's why all those profiles matter. That's why all the TV and radio appearances matter. That's why all the speeches matter. That's why the million and a half words in the blog matter. That's why always saying yes matters.
Scully asked me last night, "Has this become a career for you?" And the answer is, "Of course it has." But the career is determined by two factors: 1) the reproducibility of the strategic concepts (their essential utility); 2) the reach of the message. These are self-reinforcing in a network sense: the more I interact with the world at large, the better I tailor the concepts for their reproducibility (meaning the easier it is for a wide range of minds to instantly "get" what I'm talking about), and the better tailored the concepts, the wider the reach of the network. In short, I am constantly improving both reach and richness—the ultimate feat in marketing.
So I give talks to get more talks. I write to be offered more writing assignments. I travel to attract more travel. And so on and so on.
Here's a good example of why this networking is so important to me: almost every book I've read in preparation for writing the second book has been recommended to me by a blog reader, like TM Lutas telling me I need to read Wolfe's Why Globalization Works, an excellent book I finished today. How else would I know what to read without this network? I simply will not hear about these books in my day job, even as reading them is essential to me being who I am in my day job.
The lesser includeds have superseded the presumed greater inclusive.
That ultimate feat in marketing is essential for a horizontal thinker like myself, because sitting caged in the ivory tower working the most narrow of subjects is career death, which is why the recent offer by the college to have me focus all my work there on thinking about how the Navy must change in response to a SysAdmin role is . . . how shall I put this . . . not a great commitment of 40 of the best hours I have each week. Can that 40-hour block be structured in such a way as to make career sense for me? In many ways, only by creating such a broad team around me that calling me "director" of the project is a stretch, while simultaneously raising the question of whether or not the college would be better off simply outsourcing me as a function (i.e., moving me to a consultancy within the project rather that suffering the pretense that I will direct it effectively).
As for the immediate impact from yesterday, the Amazon rank is now 42, which is roughly the same territory I achieved in the first week of marketing after the book came out in April (I'm talking about 10 national media appearances in 3 days) and roughly the same height reached after Jaffe's WSJ front-page profile (still framed, still in my basement). So am I feeling good?
Yeah baby! YEAH!
And then I notice the roughly 600 emails in my various accounts, all beginning with "C-SPAN" . . .
So I pull the six-pack of Old Milwaukee out of the paper bag and get started, saving for Xmas the bottle of nice scotch whiskey (Glen somebody) my wife and Vonne Mei got me to celebrate the show.
Here's the catch of the day:
■ Intra-China dwarfs China-world■ When everyone's gaining on you, you're not slipping
■ The tertiary effects of China's rise