Innovative Affordable Marketig Ideas

Posted On: 2007-01-29Length:

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You've tuned in to another installment of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Always chock full of simple, effective and affordable small business marketing tips, tactics, and strategies. And now here's your host, America's most practical small business marketing expert, John Jantsch.

Hello, welcome to another edition of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host John Jantsch, and my guest today is Doug Rushkoff. He's an author, teacher and documentarian whose commentary there on CBS Sunday morning on NPR's All Things Considered. He's also appeared in publications such as the New York Times and Time magazine, and today we're going to talk about one of his, I think 10th book, called "Get Back in the Box, Innovation from the Inside Out." So welcome Doug, thanks for joining me.

Hi, good to be with you.

Ok. Your publisher sent me some notes, and used repeatedly this word, renaissance in business, as though that's the maybe the single biggest idea in the book. So can you talk about what's going on in business that would be called a renaissance?

Well, it's at least what could be a renaissance. I mean you know I look at things in kind of broad, historical sweeps, and I kind of attribute the malaise of American business today, or at least big American business today, to the fact that the, some of the operating principles of business were forged back in the original renaissance, in the 14 and 1500s when we got the immense power of centralization, and the tools to really launch an industrial revolution. And we spent really four, five hundred years seeing how to maximize efficiency and the benefits of a highly centralized kind of spreadsheet-managed assembly line like way of doing business. And in its end state, what it led to was a whole bunch of outsourcing, and a whole bunch of companies that decided that it's cheaper to do what it is they do somewhere else, or actually it's cheaper even not to do what they do anymore, but pay someone else to do it and just sort of manage it, and maybe market it from over here in America. And that kind of rule, of almost generic management of companies, it led to a point of diminishing returns where it becomes really hard for anybody to innovate, because they don't actually do the thing they do. They have no expertise in their field. They run into trouble, they run into competition, they can't really retool or rejigger or go back to the drawing board because the drawing board is gone. So, I kind of, I looked at that and then I get all pessimistic. But then when I look at sort of the cultural innovations of our time, I realize we really are in the midst of another renaissance, you know our equivalent of the printing press may be you know, the computer and the Internet, our equivalent of calculus, which came up right after the renaissance is TS math and systems theory. Our equivalent of perspective might be the hologram or our equivalent of...