How much do you need to know? Probably more than you know currently. Take the time to get to know the dynamics of your clients business beyond just marketing and you'll develop insights that will add real substance to the work you suggest and present. Strangely enough the clients with whom I have taken the time to explain how we work, what goes into the process in order to arrive at the outcome, work better with us. Mutual respect and trust is developed through understanding, try it, after all we're supposed to be in communications aren't we.

Frankly, even if I felt I knew the client's products, competition, customers, and brand better than they did—and even if I thought they were doing everything back asswards—it would be downright rude act that way at a meeting. A while back I got a brief filled with proof points that I felt wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. But I gave the client the benefit of the doubt. "'We're trying to understand this." "Please explain." I repeated his own words back to him. "So you're saying...?" "And this is important to this audience because...?" When we got off the phone, I was prepared to work with the logic, even if though I didn't necessarily buy it. But the client later that day came to the conclusion himself that it would be a mistake, and killed the project. I believe that project would have been produced and blown up in the client's face, and ours, had we gotten on the phone with a "this is a mistake; you shouldn't be doing this" attitude.

The computer is, and will always be only as useful and smart as the people who use it, create on it and interact with it. In the end it is a spectacular facilitator, a group leader that brings together similar ideas and opens a forum for discussion and discovery around those ideas. To Peter’s comments on the hording of information at the leadership level – I would say that the computer becomes the new great equalizer. Much like the printing press became a liberation of the growing middle class against those who held the knowledge base, the computer allows the great masses of today to be an equal player in the cyber public square.

By Definition a moron is "A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive." Thus I must disagree. Not only is it wrong to define the computer by a term that is outdated and irrelevant in today’s blurred world of equal economic opportunities and blended social boundaries, but also to suggest a comparison to the human being with said definition. We are vastly superior to computers, but primitive in our abilities to fully grasp the capability of the human mind and the potential that lies within.