Monday, June 04, 2007

Scorpions and Frogs

You all know about the scorpion that wanted to cross the river.  He can’t swim so he asks the frog to take him across by carrying him on his back. The frog, of course, is reluctant. 

He says “you will sting me and I will die!” The scorpion calms his fears and asks “what sense does that make?  If I sting you we both die”. So the frog, against his better judgement agrees.  He takes the scorpion on his back and begins to swim across the river.  Half way across the scorpion’s tail flashes down stings the Frog and they both die in the middle of the river.

Had the frog only understood, really understood, the scorpion’s nature — had the frog only had some serious insight into the scorpion’s behaviour and used that insight to predict probable future actions — had the frog only hired us…

Justin Thomas-Copeland (UK/Team Microsoft) shared a great piece written by Maurice Saatchi in the Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9c40e788-0e08-11dc-8219-000b5df10621.html titled “Google data versus human nature.”

Lord Saatchi quotes the scorpion story and goes onto say that “Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere. They are the people that are needed to help advertisers navigate the Internet...”

If it was as easy as mere search, i.e., directing the searcher to the information they need without distraction, the Yellow Pages would have put us out of business years ago!

I have written about this before but found Saatchi to be refreshing.  Clearly, he is not discounting the power of Google.  To the contrary, he simply points out where the exponential power is.  Without the human connection all the algorithm in the world remains just that—cold math.

I was further inspired to this thought by reading and watching some political commentary over the weekend. France has just gone through an interesting shift and the US is in the first throes of its next presidential election.

Scandal and searching for dirt is as old as the human race.  The Web did not create it.  Yet, the deciding factors in all the races have been and will be the human connection— face to face meetings, hand shaking, and debates, and town hall meetings, and the baby kissing—you get the idea.

If elections were only about record and info, we would never see or hear the candidate.  We would only sit at our computers and search…

This leads me to this final thought:

“Great leaders understand human behavior rather than the cybernetics of any function.” ~James Schorr

And there you have it.  Great marketers understand human behavior…

What do you think! And do share ideas for future writing too!

Posted by David on 06/04 at 07:33 AM
(2) Comments • Permalink