Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S1E21 - Books, Books, Books

Episode Date: May 26, 2012

This is my annual look at some of my favourite books. We'll look at a new book, titled, "Mad Women," written by an original Mad Woman from the 60s era Madison Avenue. Next, we flip through the pages of another new book by one of the most outspoken and notorious Mad Men of all time - George Lois - whose no-holds barred book of advice will certainly ruffle some feathers. Simon Sinek's book, titled, "Start With Why" argues that most companies don't know WHY their in business, and will not succeed as a result. Lastly, we discuss a book by Steven Johnson that looks at where good ideas come from. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan. You just have to love storytelling. Subscribe now and don't miss a single beat. new year new me season is here and honestly we're already over it enter felix the health care company helping canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year weight loss is more than just diet and exercise it can be about tackling genetics hormones metabolism felix

gets it they connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X.ca. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 1, 2012. you're not you when you're hungry you're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. I love books. I've got at least five books on the go at any one time in my house, spread around in all different rooms, all with bookmarks in different places.

My bookshelves overfloweth. My wife is not happiest. But I've always been on the hunt for interesting books, on interesting topics, preferably hardcover. One of my favorite places to search for books is abebooks.com. The name originally stood for Advanced Book Exchange. The site was launched in 1996 in Victoria, British Columbia. When Abe Books began, it represented four independent bookstores. Today, it is owned by Amazon and lists more than 100 million books for sale

from nearly 13,000 booksellers in 57 countries. Most of the books on the site are used and hard to find. The interesting thing about used books is that they have been handled by many other people. Some books have been in a family or a household for generations, which means that booksellers find a lot of interesting things stuck inside the pages. abooks.com recently published a blog

about what they found in books over the years, and what people apparently use as bookmarks is fascinating. Money is a constant theme. Many books are found to contain legal tender as bookmarks, usually $20 bills. People also used credit cards, debit cards, and social security cards to mark their night's reading. A bookseller in New Mexico tells the story

of a wealthy elderly woman who died in his town and left a large book collection. One of those books was a microwave cookbook. It was purchased by a tourist who was killing time waiting for a bus. When she opened the book, she found 40 $1,000 bills tucked inside. That wasn't only a profitable discovery,

but an interesting one. American $1,000 bills were last printed in 1945 and are worth much more than their face value. Train and plane tickets are familiar bookmarks, but interestingly, many of them are unused, which

suggests something either happened to the owner before the trip's date or they completely forgot where they left their tickets. Another seller found an old Christmas card in a book signed by author Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. It later sold for $2,500 to a Baum collector.

One item I would have loved to have found was recently discovered. A letter, written by Paul McCartney to an unknown drummer to audition for the Beatles, was found folded inside a book sold at a Liverpool yard sale last year. The letter was written on August 12, 1960, two years before Ringo joined the band. It was later sold at auction for approximately $56,000. One bookseller found 40 pressed four-leaf clovers in a book. But she wasn't as lucky as a bookstore in Mississauga that found an original 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card tucked in a book.

A mint version of that card sold for $72,000 in 2006. It's astonishing to learn what people will use to mark their places in books. Several booksellers have found unrolled, unused condoms as bookmarks. Others have found used Q-tips, unused sanitary napkins, bullets, drugs, and baby teeth. One even found a strip of bacon. But there's one more tasty thing you can always find in books. Wisdom.

There is just something about the wisdom found in the pages of a book. Writing a book is a journey, a painstaking one that can take a year or more to complete. It passes through the hands of the writer, their publisher, their editor, the fact-checkers, and the layout artists. Therefore, it is rarely taken lightly.

The permanence of books is another factor. They are simply items that have, well, a shelf life. I own books from the late 1800s that look as good as any new book I own. Except they smell better. This is my annual look at the books I love. I've chosen a handful that I hope you may find interesting.

I've learned something from each of them. I've applied the learning in my life. And their stories never fail to amaze and entertain. You're under the influence. Jane Moss was one of the most famous ad women on Madison Avenue. And she has just written a terrific new book titled, appropriately, Mad Women. Moss was hired as a copywriter by Ogilvy & Mather in 1964. She managed to rise to the top in the male jungle that is New York advertising

based on smarts, creativity, and sheer bravado. She would go on to create many memorable commercials, including this legendary campaign. Her book is filled with stories right out of the Mad Men era. And if you're a fan of that series, her early copywriting days eerily parallel those of Peggy Olsen. I just saved this company. I signed the first new business since Lucky Strike left. But it's not as important as getting married.

Moss outlines the incredible struggles women endured in the ad biz back then, including unequal pay, rampant jaw-dropping sexism, lecherous bosses, offices filled with after-hours sex, and the almost impossible balancing act of motherhood and a high-pressure job. As Moss says, announcing a

baby shower was the death knell of a woman's career. She also tells many hilarious stories. One of my favorites involves United Airlines. United wanted a promotion to increase business travel. So they offered businessmen a discounted airfare and hotel room if they took their wives along with them. The commercials were elaborate musical numbers with a Broadway

chorus line-like feel with wives singing, Take Me Along With You If You Love Me. Can't you take me along? Honey, it's business. It's just a we. Get back before you know it! Take me

along if you love me. Take me along if you love me. Take me along with you love me Take me along if you love me Take me along with you I love you little cutie, but the office is my duty My heart will rise Sweet and glorious high above the throne If you will take me along with you If you take your wife along on United, we'll give you up to one-third off her fare.

Let you charge it with our credit card. And in most cities, you can even get reduced hotel rates on the weekend. My lips will sing something jubilant, sweet and clear and strong If you will take me along with you Why not friendly stars of United. The promotion was a huge success. As a matter of fact, United was so pleased with the results of the campaign that it followed up with a mailing to all the wives thanking them

and hoping they enjoyed the trip. But it turned out that a big percentage of the wives were surprised to receive the letters because they weren't the women their husbands took on the trips. United quietly folded the campaign soon after. One of the most notorious outspoken madmen from that era was art director George Lois. I hear he hates to be called a madman because he hates the TV show.

Maybe hates is too light a word. He takes madmen as a personal insult, insisting it bears absolutely no resemblance to the Madison Avenue of the 60s. He calls the characters on the show, quote, phony, gray flannel suit, male chauvinist, no talent, wasp, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic, Republican SOBs. Get off the fence, George.

What are you trying to say? Mr. Lois has a new book out, sweetly titled, Damn Good Advice. It's a terrific quick read book that sums up Lois' no holds barred philosophy

of what it takes to be a creative success in this world. His advice has titles like Don't Be a Cry Baby and Stop Tweeting Your Life Away and Do Something Productive

as well as If All Else Fails Threaten to Commit Suicide. As well as, if all else fails, threaten to commit suicide. In 1959, Lois was working at Doyle Dane Burnback, the agency that would start the creative revolution on Madison Avenue. They had a client called Goodman's Matzahs. Lois created a poster for the product, and an account man from the ad agency took it over to Goodman's for an approval.

When he came back with a resounding no from the client, Lois went off all four walls. So, Lois went to his boss, Bill Burnback, and insisted he be allowed to take the ad back to the client personally. The president at Goodman's Matzahs was, as Lois describes him, an Old Testament bushy-eyebrowed tyrant. As Lois went into his passionate pitch to resell his idea, the tyrant just yawned. When Lois unfurled the poster for the second time,

the bushy-eyebrowed honcho simply said, I don't like it. Undeterred, Lois ignored the turndown and just pitched louder. Finally, the client rapped his desk for silence and growled, I don't like it. So George Lois did what any passionate creative person would do in that moment. He walked over to the office window, opened it,

and climbed out onto the ledge overlooking the New York street far below. The client stood there in shock. Lois gripped the window with his left hand, waved the poster with his right hand, and screamed at the top of his lungs, You make the matzah, I'll make the ads. Stop, stop, yelled the old man.

We'll run it, we'll run it. Lois climbed back into the room, thanked the client in the nicest way for approving his work, and left. And by the way, the still passionate George Lois wrote this fantastic book at the tender age of 80. And we'll be right back.

If you're enjoying this episode, why not dip into our archives, available wherever you download your pods. Go to terryoreilly.ca for a master episode list. I want to talk to people who run companies for a few minutes, if I may. There is a book I want you to buy. It's called Start With Why, and it's written by Simon Sinek. And I want you to buy it tomorrow. This book is all about why a company's cause is the most important thing.

In other words, why a company does what it does is the most important element it can communicate, not how it does those things or what it does. How and what are only tangible proof of the why. Sinek maintains that almost every company can tell you what they do and how they do it, but most can't tell you why. The problem is that loyal customers don't buy the what and the how.

They buy the why. Let me explain. Great companies are not about products. They are about a philosophy or a vision to which people want to belong. Cynic cites Southwest Airlines as a great example. Southwest was not built to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. Back in the early 70s, only 15% of the population flew.

Air travel was expensive, elitist, and complicated. That 15% market was so small it scared off most competitors. But Southwest wasn't interested in competing for the 15%. They cared about the other 85%. Their competition wasn't other airlines. It was cars and buses. In other words,

they championed the common man. That was their why. Southwest started an airline that was cheap, fun, and simple. On Southwest Airlines, we don't charge fees for stuff that should be free. Southwest, fees don't fly with us. You are now free to move about the country. Cynics cites Southwest as the most profitable airline in history. It has been profitable almost every single year of its existence, including the year of 9-11. Southwest is not always the cheapest option.

It isn't the best airline in the world. It offers fewer routes. It doesn't fly internationally. It only flies to 30 states. And most of its flights are under two hours, so it doesn't serve meals. But why they do it is crystal clear to the public, and everything they do proves it. Southwest exists to make airline travel affordable for everybody. That's why Southwest employees and customers are so loyal to them.

People actually sent checks to Southwest Airlines after 9-11, some even as big as $1,000, because they were loyal customers who wanted to help the airline they loved. Loyalty has nothing to do with price. It has to do with how attracted people are to the purpose of a company. Great companies give people something to believe in. Companies with a great sense of why also tend to ignore the competition. Companies with a fuzzy sense of why are obsessed with what others are doing.

Sinek points to Apple as a perfect example. It is only number three in PC sales behind HP and Dell, yet it is the most valuable company in the world. Apple's why is to challenge the status quo. It is creative rebellion. Other computer companies wanted to empower corporations. Apple wanted to empower everyday people. Apple inspires people because they aren't just about products. It represents an ideal that people want to be associated with.

As Cynic so rightfully asks, would anyone you know line up for six hours to buy a phone from Dell? Answer, not a chance, but they will for Apple. You can offer Apple employees more money and more vacation time, and they still won't go to work for HP. They are loyal. Loyalty is when people will turn down a more convenient product or a better price to do business with you. Other companies can copy your what and your how, but they can never copy your why. Every company has a why.

It just gets lost over time. The best articulation of the why was the day when the founder of your company pounded his fist on the table and said he was going to start a company because there was a better way to do something. It's just that nobody was rolling a tape recorder at that moment. Why is what makes customers stick with a company. Why is what makes employees stay loyal.

A company's why is a competitive advantage. Read Start With Why by Simon Sinek. And save your company. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a

challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Another book I found fascinating is called Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson. He explores the history of innovation. One of his theories is that the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are, because that chaos leads to random connections, and random connections lead to innovation. That's why Johnson notes that the rise of agriculture

made it possible for thousands of people to live together instead of being isolated tribes of hunters and gatherers. That gathering of people led to cities. And with that came a crucial increase in the number of possible random connections. There was a minimal number of innovations in history before the advent of cities, then an explosion afterwards.

As an example of innovation and random connections, he tells the remarkable story of the invention of the incubator. Sometime in the late 1870s, a Parisian obstetrician named Stéphane Tarnier took a day off from his work at a maternity hospital and paid a visit to the Paris Zoo. While there, he stumbled upon an exhibit of chicken incubators.

Watching the baby chicks totter around in the warm enclosure triggered an association in his head. Before long, he hired the zoo's poultry raiser to construct an incubator for human newborns. Tarnier knew that temperature regulation was critical to keeping infants alive.

When his newborn incubators were installed at his hospital, which warmed babies by hot water bottles below wooden boxes, the results shocked the Parisian medical establishment. At that time,

infant mortality was staggeringly high. One in five babies died before they learned to crawl, and 66% of low-weight babies died within weeks of birth. But only 38% died in Tarnier's incubators. He effectively cut the mortality rate in half. Incubators became standard equipment in North American hospitals after World War II, triggering a spectacular 75% decline in infant mortality rates between 1950 and 1998. Think about that. Because incubators focus exclusively on the beginning of life, their benefit rivals almost any other medical advance of the 20th century.

Radiation therapy or a double bypass may give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime. And it was all inspired by the random connection between chicks and babies. Incubators are complex, expensive machines, costing more than $40,000 each. In developing countries, you need the budget to afford them, the replacement parts, as well as the expertise to fix them. As Johnson tells us, studies reveal that up to 95% of the medical equipment donated to developing countries breaks down within the first five years of use.

The problem was that hospitals couldn't count on a steady supply of spare parts. One day, a Boston doctor made a random observation that the one thing developing countries seemed to do very well was keep their automobiles in working order. They may not have air conditioning or laptops or cable television, but their Toyota 4Runners were still on the road. Which led them to wonder if an incubator could be made out of automobile parts.

So they built a device that looked like an incubator on the outside, but the guts were purely automotive. Sealed beam headlights supplied the warmth. Dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation. Door chimes sounded alarms. You could power the device via an adapted cigarette lighter or a standard motorcycle battery. The result was a brilliant solution.

It tapped the local supply of parts and you didn't need to be a trained professional to repair the incubators. You just needed to know how to replace a broken headlight. Innovations are interesting things. As Stephen Johnson says in his book, we tend to classify them as enormous feats of genius-level thinking that transcends mere mortals. But, more often than not,

great ideas are incubated in limitations, an absence of budget, and a lack of time. And even with all those limitations, the mortality rate of those good ideas drastically declines. Books are one of the great pleasures of my life. I have always believed creative thinking is a matter of connecting the dots in life. Writer Stephen Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From,

is a study of those dots. His book proves over and over again that moments of originality are always born of observation and random connections. Jane Moss's book, Mad Women, is both a delightful and bruising tale of a woman's fight for survival in the toughest business in the roughest city. Her keen eye for detail and irony makes for great learning. In a recent movie directed by Cameron Crowe, he maintains there are many times in our lives

when all we need is 20 seconds of courage. It reminded me of the legendary George Lois. He has no time for dull clients, compromise, or polite language. Forget 20 seconds of courage. Lois has demonstrated 50 years of it. And his book, Damn Good Advice, is the residue from his remarkable career. The reason why Jane Moss made it to the top of the advertising world

was because, at her core, she loved the puzzle of marketing. Why George Lois became a legend was because his big, outrageous ideas could put a company on the map. But it was his fearless heart that fueled his success. And that is what

Simon Sinek articulates so well in Start With Why. The why of any company or any person is the determining factor in success. It's the reason why courts of law always ask about intent, because the why explains everything.

And it's why I love books. Because along with $20 bills and strips of bacon, there is so much wisdom tucked inside those pages when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. Thank you. I'm Terry. Terry, this is your wife calling. A new advertising book arrived from Chapters this morning, and another one arrived from AbeBooks.com. And the Curiosity House bookstore called to say

the other two ad books you ordered are in, and I got a notice from the post office that another one is there for pickup. Pretty soon all these books are going to be spilling into the garage right next to your bed. Under the Influence was produced by Pirate Toronto and New York. Sound engineer, Keith Ullman. Download episodes on iTunes. Follow me on Twitter at Terry O'Influence.

See you next week. New year, new me. Season is here and honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company helping Canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year. Weight loss is more than just diet and exercise. It can be about tackling genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix gets it. They connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X dot C-A.