HELSINQI CREATIVE

What’s your electric intersection?

Friday, 29 January 2010

Critical Path or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Integrity) Marketing

Published in 1981, Critical Path is one of R. Buckminster Fuller’s last and most urgent books. In it he likens the all-in effort needed to avert planetary catastrophe to the effort to put a man on the moon. (The “critical path method” is a scheduling algorithm which was used in mega-project-managing the Space Race.)

Bucky tells us in his foreword that he wrote the book for four reasons, including:

“Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly, right now.”

Well then. Might as well go back to bed.

I read Critical Path in 1989, not without dismay. For that was the terminal year of Bucky’s proposed path, the year by which, he argued, either we had to have gotten our utopia on, or we could kiss our asteroid goodbye. The idea that it all hinged on everyone suddenly embracing total honesty looked like the quixotic naïveté of a brilliant man who needed to get out of his Dymaxion house more often. But, try as I might, I never could shake the old man’s exhortation. It worked on me like a proper zen koan, for years.

The trouble is, Bucky’s right. If — indulge me in a big, blinding if here — if we are to create a sustainable life for ourselves on this planet, it won’t be by sidestepping the truth. It’s all hands on deck, and transparency is the prime directive.

Not gonna happen? Not the right question. Bucky’s mission was not to wring his hands about what the rest of us would or would not do. (There are plenty keeping that project going.) His mission was to offer a solution. So that’s what he did, to the best of his remarkable knowledge, experience, and ability. And that, compadres, is leadership. What the rest of us do with it is our responsibility.

Here’s the deal: If you want to make a difference, find the most electric intersection of:

(A) What you know and love and excel at.
(B) What the world needs.

And have at it.

For my part, part A is creativity and communication, and the zeal to champion things I’m passionate about. Which happens to be the soul of good marketing (B). And my electric intersection? Building an integrity marketing agency. Making the world unsafe for status quo marketing & advertising founded on deception, coercion, and manipulation. Proving that truthful, participatory, integrity-driven marketing is more than doable, and more than just better: it’s necessary.

Tilting at windmills? Not my concern.

So what’s your electric intersection? Are you on it? ¡Felicitaciones, compadre! Still looking? It’s close by, just waiting to be recognized. Of course, finding it is not a ticket to blisstopia. On the contrary. You have to be tough-minded. You have to be hard-nosed. Just don’t waste your energy worrying about windmills.

The question is not, Is it realistic? The question is:

Props to Bucky for planting the seeds. I like to think he would have approved of Helsinqi.
Megaprops to Lindsay Hill for watering the plant.
Apologies to Dr. Strangelove.