Award

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Milestone Ideas Receives 2009 Best of Boston Award

U.S. Commerce Association?s Award Plaque Honors the Achievement

WASHINGTON D.C., June 8, 2009 -- Milestone Ideas has been selected for the 2009 Best of Boston Award in the Marketing Consultants category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2009 USCA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a Washington D.C. based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.

SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association

CONTACT:
U.S. Commerce Association
Email: PublicRelations@us-ca.org
URL: http://www.us-ca.org

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Dissonance

Why do we dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why are leaders unable to own up when they screw up? Why do we have endless marital squabbles over who is right? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell?

One reason is that we?re all hard wired for self-justification. Here?s why: All of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for an action that turns out to be harmful, immoral or just plain stupid. Most will never be in a position to make decisions affecting the lives and deaths of people, but whether the consequences of our mistakes are trivial or tragic, on a small scale or national canvas, most of us find it difficult, if not impossible, to say, ?I was wrong; I made a mistake.?

It goes further than that: Most people when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.

Politicians are the most visible self-justifiers, which is why they provide such juicy examples. They have refined the art of speaking the passive voice; when their backs are to the wall they will reluctantly acknowledge error, but not responsibility. Oh all right, mistakes were made, but not by me; by someone else, who shall remain nameless. When Republican Henry Kissinger said that ?the administration? may have made mistakes in Viet Nam, he was sidestepping the fact that as national security advisor and secretary of state (simultaneously) he, in effect, was the administration. This self-justification allowed him to accept the Nobel Peace Prize without hesitation, a small history fact that many Republican who scoffed the ?dumbing down? of the Prize that went to President Obama?s seem to forget.

We look at politicians, business and religious leaders with amusement or alarm or horror, but, psychologically, what they do is not different in kind, though certainly in consequence, from what most of us have done at one time or another in our private lives. We stay in an unhappy relationship because, after all, we?ve invested so much time making it work. We stay in a deadening job way too long because we look for all the reasons to justify staying and are unable to clearly assess the benefits of leaving. We self-righteously create a rift with a friend or relative over some real or imagined slight, yet see ourselves as the pursuers of peace, justice and balance ? if only the other side would make amends.

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions ? especially wrong ones ? is an unpleasant feeling called, ?cognitive dissonance.? It is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions or ideas, or attitudes, or beliefs or opinions that are psychologically inconsistent, such as ?smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me? and ?I smoke in the evening to relax me.? Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don?t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.

Dissonance is so disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is flirt with absurdity, and most humans spend most of their lives trying to be convinced that our existence is not absurd. So, people try to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful. Dissonance explains why Wall Street investors can justify receiving millions of dollars in bonuses after receiving trillions of dollars in citizen-funded bail outs while one out of every five mortgages in the country is in foreclosure.

Dissonance theory also explodes the self-flattering idea that people process information logically. On the contrary, if the new information is consistent with our beliefs, we think it is well founded and useful. But if it?s not, then it?s just stupid. So powerful is the need to consonance that when people are forced to look at dis-confirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing beliefs. This mental contortion is called the ?confirmation bias.? And it is on full display in Congress as members of the House and Senate confirm their biases in the healthcare debate, which when you think about it, really has nothing to do with patient health or care, but how insurance companies distribute money to hospitals and doctors.

Perhaps, in the end, Huxley was right when he said ?There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.?

Living Forever

Adam Hanft, wrote a thoughtful article on health care reform that focuses on the some of the common (non)sense the American public might want to consider. Without permission, I am presenting here so that you can learn and maybe follow some of his thinking before you make your final decision on health care reform.

" Neither President Obama, Congress nor the advocates of health care reform have made a compelling, practical and easily-digested case for how anyone can find enough savings in the system to extend coverage and reduce inflation, without sacrificing the level of care that many people are satisfied with.

They claim they can do it, but the argument against it -- rationing, delays, inadequate care, the worst of Canada and the U.K. -- is more poetic, fear-inducing and tangible than the argument for reform. Nobody thinks that our system is flawless, but there's a long cultural history, in movies and TV, that mocks stereotypical, clipboard-wielding efficiency experts.

We also get nervous when we hear talk about "efficiency" because the truth is that we are quite fond of many of the inefficiencies in our health care system. They make us feel confident. Protected. Important. And comparing protocols based on some grading system activates everything we've learned to loathe about monsters of standardization, from the SATs to the IRS.

So if it's inefficient on a macro-economic level to give a 35 year old asymptomatic male with a family history of heart disease a nuclear stress test -- but his conservative doctor feels the need to do that -- most Americans would probably think that's just fine. Behavioral economists constantly tell us that our brains aren't built to understand mathematical concepts like percentages and fractions. But fear requires no processing; it sets off the amygdala , the most primitive part of the brain.

The president is fighting an amygdalic war with PowerPoint logic. That's a losing battle. He and the Democratic Congress are basing their central economic argument on abstract modeling and forecasting projections. The data may say that we can save billions by eliminating waste, inefficiency and redundancy, but we don't buy this theoretical exercise. (After all, wasn't it models and forecasting that got us into the subprime crisis?)

We have no cultural framework or anecdotal memes to support the argument that health care efficiency is anything but a brutal surgery without civic anesthetic. On the other hand, we have been programmed to believe that in the world of health care, cutting costs ends up hurting people when clinical standards are applied to human realities.

Right now, our health system is very much like our judicial system. The latter is based on the belief that it's okay for ten guilty men to go free so one innocent man doesn't go to jail. And our health system says that it's okay to spend money on screening healthy people to identify the small percentage that's sick.

So health care reform advocates need to drop the inefficiency language and re-frame the argument as "We're going to bring common sense to cost-savings." Offer examples everyone can relate to. Talk about how we wake up every patient in the hospital to take their temperature, even though less than ten percent of people need their temperatures to be monitored. Remind people about how they have to fill out the same form over and over again. Use language like "take money from the bureaucracy and reinvest it in tests and preventative medicine that actually help people -- rather than following outdated protocols and rules."

Health care advocates have made it easy for Sarah Palin and others on the right to convince too many people about death tribunals and other imaginary state interventions. But unless they understand why their plan is so vulnerable to distortion, they won't be able to fix the way they're trying to sell it."

Quiet on the set

Movies are an authoritarian medium. First, they make you vulnerable then they dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is allowing that to happen to you; part of the magic of making a movie is surrendering to it.

In this economic downturn I have been acting in movies to supplement my income. Working on a set is not unlike like working with a highly caffeinated innovation team on a short leash. The hours are long, the work intense, the primary task - the boundaries, the centers of authority, power and roles ? clearly defined. Abstract random creative artists, performers, designers, and writers work hand-in-hand with linear-sequential directors, camera people and production crews in highly charged dynamic environments.

The banter goes like this: ?Can you build a road here?? ?Yes.? ?Can you create a tall building there?? ?Yes.? ?Can you jump off that tall building and land in that thimble over there?? ?Absolutely.?

Most of the time, however, you are working in the dark. Sitting there immersed in your discipline, your people and your team ? a tranced distance from the final product. You?re able to see your portion of the work but not able to be seen by the people who will finally see your work. You trust the structure to hold the pieces together and you willingly surrender to it.

Corporate innovation is much like this. It?s also much like going to the movies. You sit your cubical or conference room often in the dark being able to see the people on the screen (you see them in reports who explain they are, what they do and why they do it) without being seen by the people, the people being so much different (you think) than you, and better, worse off, prettier and more compelling or not. Film?s overwhelming power isn?t news. Corporate innovations lack of real sustainable power is.
Different kinds of movies use their power in different ways. In an ?art? film, is essentially a teleological wonder: it tries various ways to wake us up or make us more conscious. This kind of an agenda is a slippery slope and can easily fall off the cliff into pretentiousness, self-righteousness and condescension, but for the most part, its agenda is large-hearted. Commercial films don?t really care much for the audience?s enlightenment. Their goals is to entertain which usually means enabling fantasies that allow the audience to pretend to be somebody else and that life if somehow bigger, more compelling, more coherent and in general more entertaining than a moviegoers life really is. You could say that a commercial movie doesn?t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it ? this seduction, fantasy-for-money is a commercial movies basic point. An art film?s point is usually more intellectual, or aesthetic, you usually have to do some interpretive work to get it, so that when you see an art film you?re actually paying to do work, where the only work you have to do to with a commercial film is the work you did to afford the ticket.

There are great similarities between commercial and art films and Consumer Product Companies (CPG) and their corporate innovation projects. But when CPG innovation projects fall off the tracks it?s when they try to occupy the kind of middle ground between innovation as an art film, and innovation as a commercial film. The ideal state, of course is when the final product of a CPG innovation project is experienced rather than explained. And this may be why so many sophisticated commercial innovation projects fail: they are neither seductive in the commercial sense of being comfortable, or linear, or high-concept or ?feel-good.? Nor are they susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretation ? they just not that kind of movie. They don?t entertain you and they aren?t meaningful enough for serious interpretation, and so the customer never gets to the point where they fork over money to buy and experience it.

If you keep in mind the outrageous kinds of moral manipulations we have suffered at the hands of many contemporary corporate for-profit enterprises over the last two years, it will be easier to convince you that something in a new breed of detached corporate innovation would not only be refreshing but redemptive. It?s not that corporate innovation needs to be somehow ?above? being manipulative; it?s more like it being not interested. The meaningful corporate innovation projects today are those that explore images and stories in heads of consumers that innovators want to see made external and complexly real.

Oglers

People who watch focus groups tend to be oglers. I know something about this because I moderate focus groups and spend a lot of time moving between the front and back rooms, between the ogled and the oglers.

For the most part, oglers tend to lurk and to stare. They are watchers, viewers. They are the people you see standing in the caf? car on the Acela whose nonchalant stare is sometimes creepy. Almost predatory. Perhaps this is because human situations are food for oglers. Oglers watch other human beings the way automobile gazers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witness.

At the same time, oglers tend to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting a lot of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, they also spend a lot of less productive times wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail is hanging out of the back of their pants, whether their lipstick is on their teeth, whether the people they?re ogling can see through the one-way mirrors and maybe size them up as lurkers and starers.

The result is that a majority of focus group observers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people?s attention. I believe this is why they stand out so much in meetings with other people: they dislike being watched.

Most focus group oglers are in their mid-40?s and, I don?t know if this is true or not, but, if most average Americans watch television for six hours a day ? they may actually watch a lot more of television, although I don?t know any focus group oglers who live in average American households. Actually, I?ve never seen an average American anything. Watching television is potentially great training for focus group oglers.

First, television does a lot of predatory research for oglers. Americans are a slippery group in real life, hard as hell to get any universal handle on. But television gives you such a handle; it?s an incredible gauge of the generic. If you want to know what normal is, you can trust television, especially Law and Order, the quintessential ogler?s paradise. Its whole reason for being is to reflect what people want to see. It?s a mirror. And from the surface down television is about desire. And for focus group oglers, desire is the sugar in human food.

The second great thing about television for oglers is that oglers love to watch people but hate to be watched themselves. Television affords access only one-way. A psychic check valve. You see them; they can?t see you. Observers can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happened to believe that this is why television and focus groups also appeal so much to ogley people. To voluntary shut-ins.

Every ogley human I know watches way more than the average six hours of television, or they attend an equal number of focus groups without batting an eye. The ogley, like the fictive, enjoy one-way watching. For ogley people are usually ogling not because of some hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness. Ogley people are ogling because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them strongly and therefore choose to sit out the enormously stressful game of appearance poker.

Still, ogley people, at home, ogling by themselves still crave sights and sounds, company. Hence television, especially when there isn?t a focus group to attend. They can stare at them on the screen; and they remain blind to the ogler. It?s almost like voyeurism. I know some focus group oglers who regard television as a veritable dues ex machine for ogling.

I could go on but I gotta go.

Law and Order is on.