Should We All Be Required To Go To Obama’s Ethics School?

Now that President Obama’s staff is required to take an Ethics class, I am thinking we should all go to Ethics School. As the media tells us 24/7, there is a barrage of bad business behavior out there, from acts deserving of an orange jumpsuit, to merely bad pool or bad karma (if you live in California).

Our kids go to Character Counts, Anti-Hate Days, Matthew Shepard plays and Tolerance field trips. Even if these attempts to teach respect and compassion don’t appear to work or seemingly only work on the ‘good’ kids, at least the discussion is firmly placed on the table.

But grown-ups? Whatever we once knew about the Golden Rule apparently disappears once we sprout hair and hormones. Turn on the news (Blago anyone?) (AIG’s spa trip?) (John Thain’s $68,000 credenza) and it is clear that it’s past time for a refresher course.

The explosion of social media on the Internet has given us new technologies with which to behave badly. From the cacophony of scammers to the unnecessarily nasty to the outright tragedies such as Lori Drew’s murderous masquerade on MySpace, we have swiftly turned these revolutionary tools into weapons.

So drumroll, please, here’s the Ethics School concept, stream-of-consciousness style:

Trainings, workshops, classes are modeled after the Obama version. Courses may be developed and facilitated by the private sector — giving small business a chance to profit.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if this course was mandatory? Because nobody is ever going to own up to needing an Ethics Class, particularly the biggest rogues among us.

How about:
Want your Stimulus Check?
Want your tax refund?
Want to renew your Passport?
Want to renew your drivers license?

Then you must Pass the Ethics Class. (Can you see the bumper sticker?)

Also a given: The Ethics course is free to the unemployed, underemployed, and anyone who once held an AIG policy, banked at Indy Mac, invested with Bernie Madoff or has not flown a corporate jet to D.C.

What is absolutely imperative to the success of the Obama Ethics School is the cooperation and enthusiasm of American business. Just as Community Service programs in high school started as the right thing to do –and eventually morphed into a golden ticket to our premiere colleges, businesses must view anyone who has taken the Obama Ethics Class as worthy of a leap up the short list when filling jobs. Savvy hiring managers would use keywords: Obama Ethics Graduate when searching online resumes.

Our business and professional organizations should make Ethics a priority topic this year. This is already underway at the new Hatch Network. The soon-to-launch entrepreneurial education network is building an Ethics class into their curriculum and is making it a pre-requisite for completion.

One of my favorite organizations, WOMMA, (the Word of Mouth Association) has made an Ethics Code a major priority.

How about when you pass the class with flying colors, you then paste your badge on Linkedin, Facebook and the social media of your choice?

On Inauguration Day, there were 1.5 million Obama-related Status Updates on Facebook. How about we ‘donate’ our Status to those who have just graduated from Ethics Class?

How about that uber-cool icon of success — the iPhone — featuring the new Ethics app, all download fees donated to the ‘ethical’ cause of your choice?

Viralize videos from the Ethics School (I like what Kaplan U has done with their timely new TV campaign) and ensure that Ethics becomes our national conversation.

Our new President must continue to shine a light on unethical behavior as he did last week when he labeled the payment of billions in bonuses from our tax money ‘shameful’ and ‘the height of irresponsibility.”

As part of a new national conversation about Ethics, we all need to speak up, refuse to put up, and overall, take back our own power. This is more apt to happen is if we’re all operating from a similar (USA) Owners’ Manual. Once upon a time, the Bible served this function but after being largely commandeered by political groups over the years, perhaps we need Jon Favreau to come up with something new while sitting in Starbucks.

Today’s HARO (entrepreneur Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out) has the announcement of a new book from the Stanford University Press by authors Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey called The Ethical Executive. It describes “45 ethical traps to which anyone can fall prey.”

This book sounds like required reading for Obama Ethics School.

So let’s get our (digital) pencils sharpened and get ourselves back to school. This time when we re-build our American Dream back into the Land of Opportunity, let’s do it right. Let’s make sure our foundation is not faulty but firm and true.

IMHO.

Your thoughts?

Guru’s Note: According to the Sun Sentinel in Florida, apparently some enterprising PR firm has already registered ethicscollege.com and the like. Well, at least, the conversation is heating up in a the traditional American way.

PPS: Like gazillions of other citizens, I just received an email from President Obama informing me of the upcoming Economic Recovery House Meeting and video. He talks of taking ‘steps to ensure an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability.” Sounds like the cornerstone of an Obama Ethics Class.

Image, many thanks to: lifesciences.byu.edu
(Love the exuberance!)

The Big Three That’s *Not* Asking for Money and Why They Should Go to Washington Instead.

All day long we’ve been hearing about two different sets of The Big Three.

There’s The Big Three from Detroit, now jetless and nibbling on humble pie as they carpool it to Washington armed with their freshly minted ‘strategic’ plans so they can continue to troll for trillions.

Then there’s The Big Three from California, who in heated competition, each released new technology that’s projected to generate some hefty revenue.

An excerpt from today’s Seeking Alpha:

The three horse race between Facebook, Google, and MySpace to achieve dominance in the internet identity space doesn’t appear to be letting up any. It isn’t a mere coincidence that both Facebook and Google have announced their public launches on the same day; both are struggling to establish themselves as the de facto standard for both developers and end users. MySpace managed to beat out both Facebook and Google months ago when it publicly launched its service.

Which is why I wholeheartedly agree with the mavericky (and oddly charged) Mark Cuban who declared mere days after the Election that Obama had made his 1st big mistake.

Unfortunately, the economic advisory team that he has put together looks more like a semester’s worth of great guest speakers for an MBA class than an economic advisory team that can truly help him.

There are a lot of great minds on the list.

“Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Laura Tyson, who served as Clinton’s top economic adviser; former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson; Time Warner Inc. Chairman Richard Parsons; former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William Donaldson and Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy.

Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Roel Campos, an ex-SEC commissioner, and Warren Buffett are also on the advisory board.”

Notice anything missing ?

Not a single entrepreneur. Yes Warren Buffett started a business, but he will be the first to tell you that he “doesn’t do start ups”. Which means there isn’t a single person advising PE Obama that we know of that knows that its like to start and run a business in this or any economic climate. That’s a huge problem.

So here we are in the midst of a (insert scary word), (insert scarier word) recession, with the media convincing us that we all should be cowed and question ‘the American way’, and yet these Big Three geeks are still scrapping in the schoolyard to beat each other to the punch. Silicon Valley and its neighbors to the South practice a quirky version of spiritual capitalism, worshipping gamesmanship and brainpower, and it’s this bootstrapping version of business that needs to be well represented in Washington as President Elect Obama assembles his economic team.

Certainly, the man who used social media to the max in his winning campaign has to include brainiacs beyond academics, politicians and big business, yes?

Guru’s Note: Thankfully, Eric Schmidt of Google is on board, although has reportedly turned down the first-ever office of CTO.

This Year’s Hottest Halloween Costume: Joe The Plumber

It’s a classic ‘Wag the Tail phenomenon. Joe the Plumber, the Toledo, Ohio plumber who asked Barack Obama a question, already has nearly 1550 fans on his Facebook page.

Adding to Joe Wurzelbacher’s iconic status, many plan to copy his Plumber-Chic look for Halloween, possibly beating out Sarah Palin for most popular costume. So avoid the run on gray T’s and Mach 3′s. Rush to your local Home Depot asap.

Guru’s Note: Here’s the entire context of the exchange, courtesy of MSNBC.

Just When You Thought It Was Eco-OK To Run That Online Media Campaign …

We calculated our carbon footprint for all those red-eyes we flew to London, the SUVs we rented, the hotel rooms where we showered for 20-minutes and requested extra Egyptian cotton towels.  We even tossed in the methane from the cheeseburgers we devoured after Brett was intercepted in overtime.

And while our eco-sins are piling up like so many plastic bottles imprinted with 7′s, it didn’t occur to us until this very moment that we marketers need to calculate the environmental impact of our online media campaigns.  We felt so virtuous switching from treeware to those flashing banners and Facebook fan pages.

But now, a company called imc2 has launched Clear Sky Digital Media, a free tool that allows marketers to calculate and then offset the carbon footprint of their online media campaigns. The tool converts an online media buy into a kilowatt hour measure of the energy necessary to support its delivery. This measure is translated into carbon emissions and then used to determine the cost of buying offset credits.

Initially, I tried to calculate the carbon footprint of this blog but was quickly disheartened by the quantity of 0.0′s that appeared. Then I fantasized I was Chief Media Buyer for The Plastic Bags of America account, deep into planning the launch of a major online campaign featuring user-generated videos showing off the many healthy uses of recycled plastic bags. I picked the dimensions, selected high traffic sites like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL, then added the number of expected impressions. In seconds, Clear Sky not only calculated the carbon cost of the proposed campaign but told me how much it would cost me in green credits to offset. In this case, my Healthy Plastics campaign would create about 10 metric tons of carbon — and cost around $127 to offset.

So why do we need this new tool? Isn’t switching from forest to server farm virtuous enough? After all, an average issue of Time magazine is responsible for a quarter-pound of greenhouse gas emissions, while newsprint consumption alone is some 9.2 million tons per year. Electronics have got to be greener, yes?

Apparently Clear Sky’s mission is to simply persuade us to re-think all of our energy consumption and to start an industry-wide conversation about sustainability. Although currently not as devastating as dead trees, electronic media is having a growing impact on the environment. It’s already running neck and neck with air travel, each accounting for an estimated 2% of the world’s carbon emissions.

imc2 has raised some interesting issues — and here’s another one: Should the candidates in this year’s Presidential Election be required to calculate (and offset) the carbon emitted as a result of their campaigns? Imagine what it might cost to offset only the $45 million the money-making machine known as Barack Obama raised in the month of February alone and then spent aggressively on TV ads, particularly in Texas. A Presidential campaign carbon offset could be a significant energy investment windfall.

“I’m A Focus Group Moderator and I Approved Obama’s New TV Commercial.

As a veteran market researcher and focus group moderator, I usually can spot Projective Exercises like Perceptual Mind Maps or ‘Design Your Ideal Product’ techniques.  Sometimes smart ad agency creatives, if they’re not too engrossed in either the Merlot or the M & Ms in the viewing room, pluck verbatims from the groups and sneak them into television commercials. There are countless anecdotes about this – like the classic McDonald’s theme “You deserve a break today”, which supposedly emerged during a focus group in Chicago.

One of the reasons to conduct focus groups is the off-chance that an expressive respondent in Cleveland will blurt out something so right on and real that it can quickly be transformed into a tagline or campaign that resonates authenticity. Another reason is to further understand what’s polarizing about potential products — in this case, fully figure out how Obama can satisfy the wants, needs and hopes of Hillary supporters who continued to passionately plead the case clear through to the bitter-end of Puerto Rico and South Dakota. And then there’s grokking to the likely toolkit of Karl Rove-style tricks that are already being emailed 24/7.

The minute I saw Barack Obama’s new television commercial “The Country I Love” now slated to appear in some 18 states starting this month, I knew that market researchers everywhere were nodding. The spot is so tightly targeted even a marketing newbie can’t miss the strategic genius in this commercial. Every sentence and shot, from the very visible flag pin to the neighborhoods ‘devastated when steel plants closed’ is perfectly calculated to resoundingly answer those persistent questions. Not only is the ghost of Hillary most decidedly flickering about but so are other symbols of white America — like Barack’s mother and grandparents. Carefully designed to be warmly reassuring with its message of Heartland working class character and values, this spot is a classic example of smoothly going from Me Media to We Media.

Much of this affecting and effective 60 seconds is subliminal.  While it’s all about heading off the negatives, it never feels anything but positive.

I only wish I’d been the Moderator facilitating those Perceptual Mind Maps.

Here’s the full transcript: (video link above)

OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama.

America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up – taking jobs and loans to make it through college.

It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.

That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.

I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as President, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.