joshuakelly.com

A letter I wrote but was afraid to send. No courage. Sad. Little matters of domestic surveillance and incarceration without due process and all that. Special thanks to Josh Brolin for nailing the pronunciation in the otherwise lackluster movie W. Triple special thanks to the new President for pronouncing it correctly, perhaps an indication of addressing the entire issue correctly. Seemed like the right day to trot it out again.

Mr. President George W. Bush
43^rd President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Hello, Sir!

I don’t know how you feel, but I am a big proponent of continuous improvement. Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better! And so are you! Right?

Knowing that you are a like-minded individual (or perhaps I’m just ASSUMING you are, but I feel like I know you!) I have been racking my brain to come up with one – just one! – suggestion for how you might improve yourself, your administration…perhaps even the whole blessed country (or at least just the world). However, either because I’m not that smart or you’re just THAT good, for 6 years I’ve come up dry. But last week I was watching your last State of the Union address and I think I may have finally come up with something! At first I thought it was a small thing. But the more I thought about it, the more I think that instead of a small thing, it’s a big thing!

I know you’re a busy man (and if you did have some free time you’d want to spend it on that cool ranch-themed property you set up down in Texas where you can take pictures clearing brush and wearing cowboy stuff), so let’s not beat around the bush (no pun!) any further. Ready? Read this word aloud: nuclear.

Did you hear that? Do it again! See? That happened three times in your State of the Union!

If you can fix that pronunciation thing you probably just noticed (i.e., the way you say “new-KEW-lur” instead of “new-KLEE-er”), it will send a message to the world that a) you care a lot about that particular topic, and b) you are highly competent. I say these are important messages for a President to deliver!

I know. Words are just words. And normally I’d just say “let ‘er rip!” But this just happens to be one of the most critical words in the history of the human race. Plus, I figure that if you spend the big bucks on speechwriters (like that Frum guy, how much did he make? Heck, I’d do it for half that!), then words must be at least a little important. I find that words make a certain impression. Remember when Kennedy wore makeup on TV and Nixon didn’t? Same idea! And who won that debate? Need I say more?

I myself am full-time employed right now, though there’s probably a scenario where I’d come aboard to pitch in on the wordsmithing. “Answer the call,” if you will.

I considered that one drawback to fixing this pronunciation is that it does have a certain folksy appeal. It’s something somebody’s Uncle Clem might say after a few Blue Ribbons, if you know my meaning. But then I realized that doesn’t help you anymore because you don’t need to get reelected! According to my calculations and thorough review of The Constitution, you’ve gotta vacate White House premises in a couple years anyway (much to my chagrin)! You can totally focus on delivering the dual impression of caring and competence mentioned above. What a relief!

The other thing is, maybe you just don’t want people to worry. You know when your wife asks you the name of that TOTALLY hot new intern at work and you pause for a second and furrow your brow and answer, “Sicily, Cecilia, Sybill…somethin’ like ‘at.” But you know darn well her name is Serena and you’re just trying to pretend like she’s no big deal and you can’t even remember her name. Maybe you’re doing the same thing with nuclear. And I have to say, I appreciate the effort to make the whole topic seem too trivial to merit proper pronunciation!

But I think the real answer is this: you just ain’t sayin’ it right. And with a small adjustment in palette deployment, you can easily change all that. It might in some small measure help with our country’s worldwide approval ratings, which are at an all-time low. Even the Guamanians hate us. Or your domestic approval rating, which is down there in the dumper too. So, aside from getting another good speechwriter on staff, this may be just the ticket. People would talk about this, I know they would. Especially, and here’s the clincher, if you admitted your mistake. That’s the rap on you – never admits his mistakes. So this one you can admit and it’s not that big a deal and you look good and every time you say the word people will say, that Dubya, he owned up to his faults and just listen to the mellifluous tones now! Plus, that sure was one heckuva speech!

Anyway, them’s my thoughts.

Signed,

[Name Withheld Pending Future Rulings On Validity of FISA and Guantanamo]

Josh Kelley

Los Angeles, CA

Hello Josh Kelley:

You’re intergalactically famous, with scads of talent and a superstar wife. Your biggest problem is where to relocate the cascading piles of cash that festoon every surface of your multi-million dollar home every time you need to clear a space to perch upon the otherwise spotless surface of your mid-century modern seating.

I, on the other hand, am just “some guy”.

But I’m a guy who’s signed up for Google Alerts, and what Google Alerts is telling me is that the volume of online information circulating around the name Josh Kelly is largely now focused on you, despite the fact that your name is spelled differently, and less correctly, than mine. If anyone finds me online, it’s probably because they’re looking for you. I’m getting nothing so much as your sloppy e-seconds.

Sure, there are many instances of online name redundancy for folks with names like Jennifer Smith or Dave Brown. But the name we share is just rare enough in its unique combo of Old Testament meets Irish, as though we’re named for the leader of a lost tribe of Gaelic Jews, that I think people can be genuinely confused.

So what can be done about this?

For starters, the ball is really in your court for three reasons:

1. I am older and I had the name first and this is my idea so there
2. Anything I do to attract attention to the issue will be like a popcorn fart into a roaring jet engine compared to the transcendent impact of your celebrity stellar-ness
3. The spelling of your name is plainly in error
4. You wouldn’t want it to seem like you were picking on “the little guy” – what a PR nightmare! Can you say “publicist overtime?”

Now that we’ve established you’ll need to personally do something drastic, there appear to be three feasible courses of action:

1. You correct the typo in Kelly to remove the superfluous E in your name. At first glance, this may seem counter-productive, but my theory is that at least in this scenario I will get the benefit of some substantial widespread confusion, rather than simply the annoyance of a visit to my blog from the occasional slacker who doesn’t even know that your name was misspelled. Here are some other reasons:
   • It’s a tragic waste of a perfectly good vowel
   • If you were going to add another letter to your last name, it should be something WAY more interesting than E.
   • Baby, You’re Amazing(ly bad at spelling Kelly)
   • I’d sooner spell it Kellee
   • Guys with extras E’s in their last name are weeenies
2. You change your first name to something non-conflicting. Elmo or Phineas are my immediate ideas, but there are others to consider and you are super creative. I trust you – as long as it’s not Josh, Joshua, J, or Hoshua we’ll be fine.
3. You engage in a protracted, well-funded media campaign to clarify that there is an extra E in your last name, that you’re totally comfortable with it, and that people shouldn’t confuse you with other people of the same name, especially the certain Josh Kelly found at joshuakelly.com or twitter.com/jmkelly (NOTE: include the http part and it’ll be a live link to my pages).

Of the 3, I like 3 best. It’s time for you to own your name, not just answer to it. You have to take the negative and twist it to your own ends. You know, when life hands you lemons…

I don’t know how you ended up with the extra E in your last name — I have a running theory with friends that you got the same intoxicated maternity ward nurse that gummed up the name of DeForest “Bones” Kelley and made Star Trek credits a painful experience for me — but it’s not too late to turn this thing around.

Meantime, you should start to really ROCKIN with the music. I want to hear some oomph out of the JK name. A little grittiness, some rebel music. See what you can do.

Anyhoo. Let me know.

Sincerely,

Josh “The Real Deal” Kelly

San Francisco Bay Area, USA

I used to send these letters on nice paper to ensure a response, but now I think I’ll post it and it’ll probably get there quicker via Google Alerts. Check here for the response, if any…

September 14, 2009

Steve Jobs
CEO
Apple Computer
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Hey Steve:

Here’s the idea: “All You Can Eat Apple”

That’s it. It’s beautiful in its simplicity – exactly what the Apple brand is all about. Blow it up to 48pt and put it on an all-white page next to a graceful hand clicking on a cinema screen. It works!

I should probably just stop there and let you stew on that for awhile, connect all the dots. But no, lacking the minimalist discipline of even the most junior Apple product developer, I’m about to lay a bunch of expository prose on you instead. Also, I have other ideas for tier naming, based loosely on the poetry of W.B. Yeats, before customers get to the All You Can Eat level.

That aside, the core of the idea is that instead of buying discrete Apple products at random confluences of innovation and morbid insecurity, customers pay a subscription fee and get regular auto-refreshes of the latest Apple wares. This will accomplish certain business ends, the exact nature of which you can hire certain business people to determine – I see flatter, smoother upward lines going across a tasteful blue-gray chart, instead of those spiky lines you see on charts that look more like Richter scales and have lame color palettes. And on the flip side it will keep folks like me from wanting to write letters like this.

The correct fee structure gets complicated, I know. Maybe the only thing holding this whole idea back is the limited number of people who are both Apple fans and able to operate spreadsheet software. Ask the average Apple fan about multiple regression and they’ll think you’re talking about getting together with several of the old high school crew. So let’s just say there’s an entry-level subscription of $3,000 a year. For that you get an annual MacBook and iPhone upgrade, and a .me account. Or whatever – there’s some economics in there, I’m sure.

In this particular scenario, there’d be a special allowance of $3,000/year for folks who came up with the idea.

The genesis of this idea is that sometimes I get mad at Apple, Steve. I do get mad, and I’m not entirely sure why. I think it has to do with the way the maddening pace of both incremental and substantive product evolution is handled, which seems, of late, less designed to make me feel increasingly empowered as to keep me poised precariously on the verge of being outmoded, obsolete, possibly even ugly. That chubby PC guy in your TV ads looms like a threat – this could be you if your MacBook ages to ¼” too thick, or .2 GHz too slow.

Being an Apple fan is like being in love with a girl who you assume has been getting continuously more attractive since 1984 all because of you, while it slowly dawns on you that she doesn’t even know your name. It gets worse as you get older.

I had one of the first Macs, I’ve had several since, and now I have 2 iPods, an iPhone, an iMac, 2 MacBooks, iTunes and .me subscriptions, and a bus shelter size poster of Einstein with the Apple logo on it (mounted on masonite). And in all that time, the only reward for my loyalty comes annually when you don your mock turtleneck to mock my current gadgetry by releasing something that says, in essence, “think of that MacThing you bought 3 months ago as your grandma’s sofa wrapped in plastic and smelling of mothballs. Because now we offer iThis and MacThat!” And then the hand models come out and gesture effortlessly at touch screens and click mice while screens morph and shift and Twitter crashes under the weight of the Pavlovian RTs. My hands are puffy and unmanicured, is what you’re trying to tell me, and I have last year’s iWorks. You know what? My hands and iWorks worked just fine until you went and made me yearn.

In short, now more than ever, you’re in the fashion business. That anti-establishment idealism about Apple – back when it seemed like a movement fueled by a line of empowerment tools – has become something sustained by peer pressure or consumer yearning, more like clothes or music. You went all rockstar/fashion icon on us, and now we’re supposed to like Apple. To not like Apple is to be old, chubby, dim-witted, ugly. For now.

I know you’re super successful right now, but I do feel a little backlash coming. It feels like it did right before that dark period when the soda pop guy kicked you out and then came the march of the clones (I had a PowerPC myself, just to spite Apple). It’s the same vibe that’s starting to make the chubby PC guy in the TV ads more sympathetic than Justin Long. I mean, I kinda want that guy to backhand Justin Long lately, even though I like Justin Long. Justin Long is funny, he was great on Ed, and I think he’s probably nice in person. Why does Justin Long have to make the poor nerdy chubby guy feel like a poor nerdy chubby guy? It’s gone on too long, this constant, subtle berating. Try as you might to make him likable, the fact is that Justin Long keeps insinuating himself into the immediate proximity of this schlep and taking pains to kindly point out his flaws, wrap him in something silly, or just be present to witness his humiliations. Why can’t Justin Long just speak his piece and then stay away, only offering advice when asked? Every so often, Justin just shows up and reminds the guy of his inadequacies. Thanks! Why does he do that?

Is Justin Long secretly afraid that he’s not good enough in some way, like maybe Justin Long costs about twice as much?

Here’s the thing: at some point, it’s the chubby PC guy running down the aisle in those flimsy red Dolphin shorts hurling a hammer at a giant screen showing a close-up of Justin Long, and then the slack-jawed audience flees the building.

You also feel it when you go into an Apple store and try to buy something, only to be confronted with the reality that Apple says “poo poo” to cash registers. Well, there was nothing ever wrong with the cash register, Steve, because you always used to know where to buy stuff and you didn’t have to find a roving consultant in a colored T-shirt and beg to give them your credit card. It’s double the affront that the good ol’ fashioned checkout counter’s been replaced by something called a “Genius Bar”. You might find some bright folk there at the Genius Bar, to be sure, but genius goes a bit far. And if it’s the customer you’re referring to as the Genius, well, perhaps you haven’t listened to questions like “so how do I make pictures in my camera go INTO the computer box?” for the 35 minutes right before you find out the Genius Bar lost your appointment. As an aside, a disturbing number of these colored T-shirt people want to engage in conversations about things like what bands you like – it happens enough that it seems like somewhere in a training manual it must say “remind customers that they’re THIS close to being that schleppy PC guy if they don’t play along”. I had a guy who wouldn’t LET me pay for a new MacBook until he showed me the new combinations of mouse fingerings, none of which I’ll ever use.

In short, a nice mail-order business would replace this brand touchpoint just fine, thank you.

What you’re getting from this letter, I hope, is something of a love/hate message. The product is strong, but there’s something about the whole brand experience, or the way you encounter certain enthusiasts of the brand, that sometimes makes me want to hate it anyway. And I think there has to be a way to “graduate” from some of the fashion trappings of the current Apple. What I want is a way to re-engage for the long haul on a basis that does not seem so darned persnickety. I’m not buying Macs to be fashion forward, Steve, but you can still save me from my chubby PC guy fate.

So let’s forget for a moment that in the entire time I’ve owned an Apple product I’ve never received early info on new products, a discount, or any sort of personal acknowledgment. Just treat me as the slobbering gadget-obsessed database entry that I am, and put me on a reasonable obsolescence schedule that neither makes me the object of derision, nor requires that I camp in front of a glowing retail store until the people with the colored shirts come and unlock the door to dole out iPhone porridge and MacBook gruel. Just figure out what it’s going to cost me per annum to stay relatively up to speed with this stuff and leave me be. Send me my updates in the mail, maybe, for fear that I involuntarily break wind in one of your heavily lacquered retail environments.

Again, there’d be a 1:1 corollation between any per annum fee and the discount afforded the originator of the idea that spawned the fee.

I hope this letter finds you well. Sincerely glad to see you back in action. Now let’s start a re-revolution, eh?

Best Regards,

Josh Kelly

San Anselmo, CA

What’s going on everywhere surrounding the Internet is something like a shift from flying by intuition to a an advanced flight simulation. You see it in marketing, where traditional advertising has lost so much ground to paid and organic search. We’ve always known that only half of advertising works, and now it’s possible to know exactly which half. And you see it permeating into lifestyles and career approaches – a book title like “The 4-Hour Work Week” seems to make sense all of a sudden because the metric of work hours is not connected to a metric of productivity the way it was on an assembly line when 40 hours became the norm.

Employers who deal in this new economy are searching for people who do more than furrow their brow and walk determinedly down the office aisles – they want folks that “Get things done with results to show for their effort” and “make order where others see confusion” to quote a job listing on http://www.dachisgroup.com/ and http://www.beingpeterkim.com/.

All this assumes a certain level of measurability that goes beyond the old accounting metrics – the word and idea of metrics, which may not have existed outside of labs 20 years ago, is weaving into our culture as never before. The connected world, by definition, is a measured world – all of those connections can be tracked and tallied. And the more that you dwell in the connected world, the more we know about what you say and do and who you say and do it with.

At the same time, digital branding forces a premium on right-brained, hare-brained ideas. Because it’s great to be able to track everything, but in the end, you have to arrive at something that actually moves the needle. And you have to be willing to change and iterate and take risks to do it.

Which leads us to our fool-proof Easier Said Than Done Process for surviving in the measured world:

1. Figure Out What You Want To Measure – This, You Will Call A “Measure Of Success” And Others Will Know It’s Name

2. Find What You Think Is The Most Powerful Way To Influence That Measurement. Here, You Will Think Crazy Thoughts And Talk Crazy Talk. Or Try A Sensible Approach If You Prefer – Just Start Thinking.

3. Measure #2. And Then Scrap It Outright If It Clearly Didn’t Work, Or At Least Try Something Else If There’s Any Sense That You Might Do Better.

The consolation? In this world, there are no mistakes, only hypotheses and iteration.