May 4th 1970. 43 years ago.Kent State University, Ohio.

 

Jeffrey Glenn Miller (March 28 1950-May 4 1970)

Allison Krause (April 4 1951- May 4 1970)

Sandra Lee Scheuer (August 11 1949-May 4 1970)

William Knox Schroeder (July 20 1950-May 4 1970)

Many of us know the words to the Neil Young song, immortalising the tragic events of May 4 1970. Four young students, killed in their prime. At least two of them apparently on their way to class and not actively involved in the antiwar protests taking place on campus.

Today.

43 years ago.

I was not yet 13 when it happened, but I still remember seeing the photographs in LIFE magazine a week later. Yes, in Calcutta. There was life before the internet. We had things called newspapers and magazines. They made it across prodigious distances at remarkable speeds.

I was nearly 16 when I first heard the song. And I remember it affected me, particularly because I could remember the incident but couldn’t recall even one of the names of the students whose lives had been lost. I felt grieved and aggrieved.

I’ve learnt a lot more about the incident since, and about the song as well. About how people were affected by both.

So take a minute today and dedicate that time to the memory of Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder. May their souls rest in peace.

And when you do, think about what they faced that summer.

And then think about what the youth of today face this summer.

The youth of today. Our children.

….this summer I hear the drumming….

What do our children hear? Who are their Nixons, their National Guards, their Kent State Universities?

….this summer I hear the drumming….

Coda: Reader David Eastman points out that some readers may not know anything about the event I refer to. So here’s a link to what happened, and also as seen through the eyes of a Guardian columnist forty years later.

It started with a tweet. Mark O’Neill, someone I’ve known for years, got in touch with me, to alert me about something. I trust Mark, I trust that when he sends me something to look at, it is usually worth looking at. Whatever it turned out to be.

So I went and took a look. It was a conversation on metafilter relating to a concert by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, at Wembley in 1974. Mark knew I was a fan of the group; he’d seen fit to spend time filtering the firehose for me, the least I could do was delve into the conversation. So I did. And that led to my finding this delightful gem:

A performance by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And a fifth, somewhat unusual, member. Tom Jones. Initially I was a bit suspicious, not wanting to believe my eyes. I watched it, heard it, loved it. A fabulous version of Long Time Gone, one of my favourite CSN songs; I say this, bearing in mind that David Crosby songs are usually best when David’s doing the vocals. It seemed a bit odd that every copy of the video I could find had what appeared to be a Turkish incantation slathered all over it: Burc Arda GUL, with the original uploaded to a Youtube channel bearing that name. But he turned out kosher as well, tweeting as @arda1989, with a background that looked suspiciously like a photo of Tom Jones with Elvis. There is some reason to suspect that our man Arda is a Tom Jones fan.

But I was still not satisfied, so I cross-checked with Sugar Mountain and found the performance listed:

And there it was. 1969. 6th September. ABC Studios, Los Angeles. This is Tom Jones. With Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Setlist You Don’t Have To Cry/Long Time Gone.

It’s a great song, sung by a great singer, accompanied by some fabulous musicians, one of whom wrote the song. But that’s not what this post is about.

What I wanted to share was the environment that made my finding it possible. The relationship with Mark. His knowledge of my interest in music. His choosing to share something with me. How simply and conveniently I could check out what he was sharing. The context that all this came wrapped in. And the availability of tools to be able to dig deep into that context, partly for curation, partly out of curiosity.

Serendipitously, I’d been thinking about music and its “wrappings” for a completely different reason. Stephen Bayley had written in the Times yesterday about the death (and life) of Storm Thorgerson.

Sadly that article’s paywalled. The part that you can see “free to air” starts with a humdinger of a quote: No one has ever loved a download.

Now that was something that’s been on my mind for some time now. Those of you who follow this blog regularly will know I tend to listen to my music on vinyl. I’m convinced the music sounds truer and “better”, that there’s more depth and clarity to the sound of music on vinyl when compared to digital music, even the so-called “lossless” stuff. [That may change: I am eagerly waiting to find out more about Neil Young’s Pono initiative; I had the privilege of meeting him personally, and it became clear that he was passionate about finding a way to make digital music sound a whole lot better than it does now.]

 

 

 

 

These were the covers of some of the albums that delighted me in my youth. And they weren’t just there to protect the vinyl. They were works of art to thumbtack on to a bedroom wall; they were repositories of learning, with encyclopaedic facts about the music, in terms of lyrics, line-up, instruments, credits, liner notes by vaunted critics, the lot; they represented experimentation in design: newspapers, knapsacks, 2D cuboids. When I bought an album for the first time, I would spend time savouring the packaging before allowing myself the sheer pleasure of placing the turntable arm on my Garrard gently on to the playing surface. [If you’ve ever been an Apple fanboy, you’ll understand the feeling. How taking the packaging apart is a time of reverence].

Serendipity surrounds so much of what I experience. So it should come as no surprise to you that I was going through all this at the same time as I was re-reading David Byrne’s fantastic new book How Music Works. [Another one to savour, in packaging and design as well as in content]. If you’re interested in music, go buy it now. It’s far more important than reading the rest of this post.

I’m not going to review the book here and now, other than to say I shall be buying many copies. And giving them away. And that’s something I do rarely, I’ve probably done it for a dozen books before. [They include The Little Prince; The Cluetrain Manifesto; The Social Life of Information; Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital; the list is not that long].

I’ll say this much: David Byrne provided me with a lot of insight into how context matters in music: context to do with performances and halls and acoustics, improvisation techniques, changing cultures and ways of listening, recording studios, technology, business models, and so much more.

Which brings me to what I really want to say:

For much of life, it has been difficult, sometimes impossible, to carry and preserve context alongside information.

Context matters.

The who, the when, the where and why. Identity. Location. Time.

The provision of context allows us to find out more about the information, to help us on our journeys to figure out meaning.

We live in an age where it has become easy to record an activity, to create a persistent record of that activity. Persisted as text, graphics, stills, audio, video. Persisted with metadata about source, time and place, with the tools to explore that context further.

Music just happens to be an easy place to draw analogies for all this, but the principles are becoming true for everything we do, in our personal lives as well as our professional lives.

We’re able to “quantify” ourselves, record so much of what we do, where we go, how we are. The quantified firm is upon us as well. With the ability to record so much, replay so much, analyse so much, understand the root causes of so much.

It’s easy to cavil and groan about 1984.

I live in 2013. I live in a world where past paradigms have managed to make social and economic divides worse, where the evil of povert, malnutrition and disease continues to affect billions; a world where challenges to do with health and nutrition and housing and hygeine don’t seem to be getting better; a world where over 9 million children of school-going age aren’t at school, and where the number of disaffected unemployed youth is measured in tens, if not hundreds, of millions; a world where resources like energy and water are getting scarcer, where our understanding of our interactions with our environment continues to be poor.

I live in 2013, a time when I am told that we may be at “peak longevity”, as diseases we’ve “conquered” return in powerful mutations, a world where obesity becomes the number one killer.

I live in 2013, a time when we have the technology to record and replay much of what we do, how we interact with the world around us; the ability to provide people with tools to make sense of that data by making the labels, the taxonomies, the low volatility categories and classifications, available to all at low cost; the ability to build platforms that make sensemaking easier, by connecting the reams of data, correctly classified, with platforms that make analysis and visualisation of the information easier for all.

I live in 2013. And I live in hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While at dinner yesterday, I heard about a particular scam that’s doing the rounds, and felt I should really share it as far and wide as possible.

A friend of a friend received a phone call. In the UK. On his home phone number. A landline.

The call was from the police. And the call was simple.

“Good evening. This is X calling from Police Station Y. We’ve apprehended some youths who had an inventory of cloned credit cards with them. Your details were amongst them. We recommend you call your card fraud unit immediately to report the clone and to cancel the cards.”

So this friend of a friend immediately took out his cards, looked up the fraud number, called them, and then went through the formal rigmarole of identifying everything possible about him, sharing confidential details.

All well and good.

Until that card was emptied of all value.

Because he hadn’t been speaking to the fraud department.

And he hadn’t been called by the police.

The call from the “police” was a scam. And when that call “finished”, they didn’t hang up, they just stayed on …. silent. So when he dialled out to the fraud department, he wasn’t dialling anyone. He was just pressing digits. And when he got through to the fraud department, he was talking to the fraudsters.

Who helped him divulge all the confidential information they would need.

And then helped themselves to his funds.

That’s all she wrote. I suspect this only works on landlines; I suspect the process described is very UK-centric. But it sounds too easy to fall for.

Hence this post.

It was my first-ever cricket match. India versus West Indies, 31 December 1966 – 5 January 1967. I was nine years old. And my life was complete.

It was a glorious West Indian team in a glorious context. Conrad Hunte, Robin Bynoe, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, recent debutant Clive Lloyd, Seymour Nurse, the inimitable Gary Sobers (who captained the side), Jackie Hendriks, the formidable spin of Lance Gibbs and the then-brutal speed attack of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. Every one of them seemed ten feet tall and incredibly powerful.

And they were to meet an Indian team full of Eastern promise and magic. Led by Mansur Ali Khan, the one-eyed Nawab of Pataudi Jr (who would go on to marry local film star Sharmila Tagore), the team included the spin trio of Venkataraghavan, Bedi and Chandrasekhar for the first time; in fact Bedi was playing his first Test. Rusi Surti, ML Jaisimha and Abbas Ali Baig were all mystical heroes by then, but not quite in the class of the Nawab.

The West Indies won the toss, it was an engrossing day’s play, and it ended with the visitors clearly in control. So we went home and returned the next day.

As did a hundred thousand other people, maybe more. We went in early: my father wanted to try and avoid the crowds, for my sake. It appeared that everyone else had the same idea. We were National Cricket Club members, so we had seats in the pavilion, and our entry was relatively simple. It wasn’t going to stay simple. Soon it became apparent that there were many more people in the stadium than there were seats. Fraudulent tickets had been sold. And so a riot was had. In true riotous spirit seats were torn up and smashed until they resembled firewood. It was only going to be a matter of time before firewood and fire, fast friends normally, made their acquaintance again. In those days riots in Calcutta were relatively common, as were the “lathi charges” that followed, as police sought to quell the crowds using horses and batons.

Our only way of getting out of that place involved our going up the stadium, away from the fire and rioting, and then jumping down into the crowd milling below. My father told me he would jump down and then wait to catch me. He jumped. I jumped. He caught me. And that was that.

I have no idea what height I jumped from; when I visited the stadium a few years later, the place I think I jumped from seemed to be 40 feet up. I suspect it was half that.

The point of this story is not the cricket, nor the riot. But about my trusting my father. He said he would catch me, and he did. And I didn’t doubt him. I trusted him. In fact I trusted everyone I knew. I was nine years old.

Over the next five years I would learn about being let down, being betrayed, being lied to. I would learn about doing the lying myself, and how awful letting other people down felt. I would learn about the pain of loving and being loved, as only a teenager can. By the time I was 15, I was a full-fledged member of the angst club, moon-faced, moon-eyed, wallowing in the emotions I needed to write abysmally bad poetry. If you’ve ever been there, you know what I mean. And my generation had an advantage, many advantages. You get to a different class of wallow when your music tastes are heavily influenced by Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Now that was wallowing. Sublime.

Like many others of my generation, there were times when my mood was close to the philosophy contained in Paul Simon’s I Am A Rock. “I am a Rock/I am an Island/And a Rock feels no Pain/And an Island/Never/Cries”. The idea of detachment was not new to me, given its resonance with a culture that didn’t believe in things material.

What was new and hard for me was the idea of distrust. I wanted to be detached without having to distrust. I didn’t like the very idea of distrust; some part of me felt, innately, that if I distrusted someone then I would somehow restrict my ability to feel happy when that person was around.Now I’m talking about being a teenager at a time when being a teenager was like taking a roller-coaster ride through a New Age playground, whether you were into peace, love and revolution or sex, drugs and rock’n’roll or for that matter could even tell the difference. Pop philosophies were a dime a dozen, every one of us had our own personal way of viewing things.

When it came to trusting, the model I built for myself was based on (get ready for it) a guitar string. I was that string. The string could be pulled in two directions, one called happy and one called sad. Anyone who could make me happy could also make me sad. The more a person could make me happy, the more he/she could make me sad. People who were close to me could pull me in either direction without limit. And then there would be a gentle falling off, where I limited the person’s ability to make me feel happy or sad. Until finally there was a class of person who left me untouched, unmoved.

Childish? Possibly, even probably. I was fifteen.

And yet. Yet.

These past few weeks, as I think more about how customers and companies engage with each other, images of that guitar string kept flashing back.

Today, and for some time now, the world has been awash with terms like customer advocacy, net promoter scores, earned advertising.

At the same time, companies are fearful about “letting go”, about letting the customer have the power to say things about their company or product or brand.

I have some good news for such companies, those who find it hard to let go. Fear no more.

There is no need to let go; because there is nothing to let go. Your reputation, your brand, is in the hands of your customers.

And yes, they can say bad things about you. If you do bad.

But much more importantly, they can say good things about you. As long as you do good.

Most importantly, you have a choice. As a company, you can make it easy for your customers to share their experiences of you, your products, your services. Or you can make it hard.

There is a difference, an important difference. Life is not always as symmetrical as my guitar-string metaphor.

If you do good, they can share, but only if you make it easy for them.

If you do bad, they will share, whether you make it easy for them or not.

It’s up to you.

Today people in the UK celebrated Mothering Sunday, what passes for Mother’s Day in these parts. Our children came home to see my wife; her mother visited as well. And a splendid family lunch was had.
My wife did all the preparations despite it being Mother’s Day; all I was asked to do was to weigh the leg of lamb, work out how long it needed to cook, and to lay the table.

When that was done, I was at a loose end; my wife was busy with the meal; everyone else was busy getting ready; and I’d already read the weekend papers. Idly I sat down in my favourite armchair, warmed by the fire my wife had lit earlier, I took a look at Twitter on my iPhone. And saw this:

 

The Dimes followed me. Hmmm. I had no idea who the Dimes were. And I’m not one to want my follower numbers to rise with bots and spam. So, sitting in the armchair, warmed by the burbling fire,  I took a look. And this is what I saw.

I like Fleetwood Mac. And my son had recommended Iron and Wine to me. So I thought to myself, definitely worth a listen. Still sitting in the armchair, by the warmth of the fire, I went over to their site. And this is what I saw:

I could try out their music, choose to pay what I wanted, even get myself the vinyl if I so felt like. And I’m a valve amps and vinyl kind of guy. I liked what I saw, liked what I heard, continued to explore this band. Still in armchair, still warmed by the fire.

I looked a little closer. I could listen to the entire album if I wanted. And even download some of the tracks for free. I liked their music; more importantly, I really liked the way they went about their business, how they engaged with customers. I wanted to know more about them.

Quentin Tarantino. Not my usual music critic, but I have enjoyed the soundtracks from many of his films. NPR. Allmusic. I liked the Dimes’ music, I liked the way they went about business, I liked the way the site worked on my phone, I even liked some of the people who liked them. I was now quite likely to buy. And then I saw this:

I’d “followed” them and they’d DMed me access to the track. I was still in my favourite armchair, still by the warmth of the fire. Lunch was a few minutes away. I resolved to do something about the Dimes soon after lunch.

Which turned out to be this:

And then I wrote this post.

In 15 minutes before lunch, a band had managed to connect with me, let me check them out, get me to the point where I went and bought their music in my preferred vinyl (along with a free copy in the more “shareable” digital format). Every step of the way they ensured I only did what I wanted to do. Nothing forced. First, I wanted to know who had started following me, I don’t like spam followers. When I found out they had 6K followers, they followed a similar number and that they hadn’t tweeted since December, they looked authentic enough to me. [I wondered how they chose the people they followed; at first glance everything looked real and normal. I haven’t figured out why they chose to follow me, but somewhere in my digital footprint Fleetwood Mac will figure, and that may have been enough].

Once I found out who they were, I could listen to them. As much as I wanted. Committing something far more valuable than the 99 cents of yore: my time and my attention. And I did listen. To quite a few songs. And then I could gather more about them, and have a simple and convenient way of signalling my interest. By following them back. And then, as I was musing over doing something more, they sent me a DM with another free track, pointing to their bandcamp site.

Simplicity and convenience. At my pace, in my time. Where and when I wanted to. Giving me the free right to listen and not pay. If I chose to buy, to pay what I felt like paying. Thank you The Dimes. [If you want to delight me even further, start taking a look at disruptions like Neil Young’s Pono format].

The music industry recently reported that overall music sales were up year-on-year for the first time since 1999. Apparently they’ve begun to work out that making music available digitally pays. It is even possible that, in decades to come, they might discover the lessons that the Dimes have discovered already:

Empower your customers. Give them the chance to try out your stuff. Let them share their experiences. Go where they are. Be part of their culture. Let them pay what they feel like. [I feel an Amanda Palmer TED Talk reprise coming on. Must-watch!]. Make their every interaction simple and convenient.

Yes, it is possible that in decades to come, they might discover all that. But in the meantime, people like me will have moved on, listening primarily to people like the Dimes.