Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

You must attempt the ridiculous to accomplish the miraculous.David sees a giantand says, “I will defeat him.”Everyone else sees a giant, as well.David walks toward the giant with his slingand BANG, David is king.That’s a favorite story everywhere. Here’s another.Don Quixote sees a giantand says, “I will defeat him.”His companion sees only a windmill.Quixote charges the giant with his lance,is lifted high into the air on its revolving arms,and slammed into the ground.“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”Wizard Academy alumni refer to David and Don as “our brand of crazy.” Unafraid. Purpose-driven. Willing to try.So why does only David get a trophy?What about Quixote, who fought his giant hand-to-hand and ended up in a heap on the ground?Wizard Academy announces a $10,000 cash prize for him.Is he/she you?The purpose of the Quixote’s Windmill Prizeis to encourage the takers of chances, the facers of giants, the riders on the arms of windmills. We are a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.Are you our brand of crazy?Tell us about it in a YouTube videobefore March 23, 2014 and you could win $10,000 in cash, plus a free ride at Wizard Academy for one full year; a revolving scholarship for as many classes as you choose to attend.These are the rules of engagement:1. Anyone can enter. You do not have to be an alumnus of Wizard Academy.2. Your story must be true and verifiable.3. You can’t enter an idea you did not pursue. You must have taken dramatic action, spent money, time and energy in the pursuit of your idea.4. You must have learned a lesson that has value.5. Your video cannot exceed 2 minutes and 30 seconds. If the YouTube time bar on your video says 2:31 or more, your entry will not be considered.6. The winner will be named on April 23, 2014.7. A contestant can enter no more than 2 videos each year.You will lose if you make us pity you.In fact, you have already lost. Quixote makes us cheer for his courage and he leads us in laughter at his defeats because Quixote knows that failure, like success, is a very temporary condition.There will be 5 areas of scoring. Each of the 7 directors of Wizard Academy can award up to 100 points in each of the following 5 categories.A perfect score would be 3,500 points.1. How good was the idea?Tell us why it made sense at the time. 7 x 100 points2. How aggressively did you pursue it?Make us feel your courage, your creativity, your determination. 7 x 100 points3. How bad was the outcome?Did you merely shrug your shoulders and walk away, or did paramedics drag your unconscious body from a smoking crater? 7 x 100 points4. What did you learn?How valuable will your advice be to the rest of us? 7 x 100 points5. How well do you tell your story?This is where you get style points for lighting, color, sound quality, graphics, special effects, humor… 7 x 100 pointsHave you tried and failed? Have you battled and lost?Watch the videos of the other Quixotes who enter and you won’t feel stupid anymore. You’ll say, “Wow. I’m part of a family, a tribe, a fraternity that doesn’t sit and watch from the sidelines.” And no matter how much your misadventure may have cost you, no matter how badly it hurt, you’ll be able to laugh and say, “Well, at least I’m not THAT guy.”When you have posted your video on YouTube,send the link to Daniel@WizardAcademy.org and, if accepted, Daniel will post it on the YouTube channel for Quixote’s Windmill Prize, also known as The Smoking Crater Award, The Business Bloopers Award, The Our Brand of Crazy Award.Here’s why you want to enter your video as soon as possible:The accepted video that receives the highest number of YouTube “thumbs up” votes will win no cash, but will receive a scholarship to as many classes as you choose to attend at Wizard Academy for 1 full year. The “thumbs up” winner will be determined at precisely noon on April 22, 2014. The earlier you enter, the more time you have to gather your “thumbs up” votes. If the $10,000 winner also happens to be the “thumbs up” winner, the second 1-year scholarship can be given to a friend. Both scholarships will run concurrently from April 23, 2014 through April 22, 2015.“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.“Those you see there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”“Look, your worship,” said Sancho. “What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turn by the wind and make the millstone go.”“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that you are not used to this business of adventures.– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605If I don’t see you here or there,I’ll assume you’re in the airon the arms of a windmill.Roy H. WilliamsChancellor, Wizard Academya 501c3 Educational Organization 

The following press release will soon be received by the media in Midland, Texas.Diamonds to be Cut in Midland(MIDLAND, TEXAS – October 29, 2013)[Name of Diamond Cutter] is coming to Midland to cut diamonds on Saturday, November 16th and the public is invited. “It’s one of the Christmas gifts we’re giving the city,” says Cathy Fleck of Occasions Fine Jewelry.“Diamond crystals aren’t very impressive when they come out of the ground. But then, when they’re cut, they explode with light. It’s like watching the sun come up over the horizon.”“We’re going to let our guests see and touch and hold a $1,500 natural diamond crystal before it is cut. Then, we’re going to have a drawing to see who gets that diamond for free. That person will then tell the diamond cutter the shape they want him to cut their diamond. And then everyone who’s there will see the birth of a new diamond. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”The event will be displayed on an LCD screen for those who can’t get close enough to the diamond cutter.“I asked myself, ‘How can a jeweler honor the birth of Christ?’ And then it hit me; the manger, the star, and Jesus coming into the world. The only thing a jeweler could do is let people watch the birth of a sparkling new diamond. And then that diamond must be given for free. Maybe you think the whole thing is silly, but I’m really looking forward to it.”Witness the birth of a diamond from XX – XX on Saturday, November 16.Occasions Fine Jewelry was born in the back of a local drug store in Midland 20 years ago. Today, they stand on the corner of Loop 250 and Garfield with more than 4,000 square feet and are known throughout the world.# # # # That press release was written by one of the Wizards of Ads. It features frame shifting, dimensional shifting, and a trio of reality hooks. Here’s the original press release that was given to us by our friend, Cathy Fleck, who asked, “Is there a better way to tell this story?” The writing is slightly better than average. But is better-than-average really good enough in today’s overcommunicated society?# # # # OCCASIONS FINE JEWELRY EXPLAINSDIAMOND CUTTING PROCESS TO THE COMMUNITY(MIDLAND, TEXAS – October 29, 2013)Occasions Fine Jewelry is bringing a Diamond Cutting Show to Midland on Saturday, November 16th. As a part of the show, Occasions is flying in equipment and cutters to do a demonstration for the public. They will show all stages of the process on site. “We are very excited about this new event,” said owner Cathy Fleck. “Very rarely do you get to experience something like this in Midland. We will also be drawing for a diamond that the customer can pick their own shape and cut to create their own diamond.”The event will discuss the different shapes and yields in person as well as display on an LCD screen. Customers will be able to walk through each step of the process.The event will be held at Occasions in Midland (2308 W. Loop 250) from XX – XX on Saturday, November 16.Occasions Fine Jewelry opened for business in the back of a local drug store in Midland over 20 years ago. Today, their Midland location on the corner of Loop 250 and Garfield is over 4,000 square feet.Occasions offers a number of lines exclusively in the West Texas area including Lorenzo, Orbis, Soho, Diamond Cushette, Cyma, Natalie Kay and Paul Winston.####The cost of hosting the diamond-cutting event remains the same for Mike and Cathy Fleck regardless of which press release they send.That, right there, that, is why you should learn to write.The Wizards of Ads are writers of persuasion. “Find a better story and deliver it with greater impact.” Two of the wizards who can teach you how to do this for yourself – Chris Maddock and Jeff Sexton – hold a writer’s workshop once a year at Wizard Academy, a 501c3 educational organization in Austin, Texas, a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.According to the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, “Wizard” derives from “wise-ard, wise man.” Soon you’ll soon be hearing about three of the most famous who followed a star to Bethlehem.I’m giving Mike and Cathy Fleck scholarships to the November 13 writing class at Wizard Academy; we teach big things fast; things not taught in college.You can come, too, if you like. But brace yourself.“Big things fast” arrive with impact.Merry Christmas.I really mean that.But you still have to pay for the class A Roy H. Williams

One of the books I’ll write someday is a collection of true stories gathered from extremely successful people.My business as an advertising consultant and seminar speaker has put me face-to-face with many of the brightest stars in the entrepreneurial sky. And rarely do I miss the opportunity to ask them,“Can you recall that fateful moment when you chose the fork in the road that led you to where you are today? How did you first get into this business?”Never – not once – has a successful person said to me, “I followed my passion.”But this is the answer you will hear again and again from people who are serving time in prison.The world is full of rich people who are not, and never were, successful. People who stole the money, inherited the money, married the money, won the money in the stock market or in the lottery, cheated others out of the money or were awarded the money in court, do not qualify as “successful” in my admittedly subjective opinion.The “Follow-Your-Passion” myth is pervasive because successful people are usually passionate. But those people would have been passionate about whatever they chose to do.Their jobs don’t give them passion.They give passion to their jobs.The same is true in successful marriages.Moon-eyed dreamers who say, “I just can’t find my passion” always act like I kicked their puppy when I tell them that passion is not a magical ether that can be located and tapped into. Passion is the shrapnel that flies from a three-way collision of determination, commitment and action.While we’re at it, let’s pull the mask off a couple of other myths:(1.) Passion doesn’t always manifest itself as happiness. Passion is also behind deep grief. (2.) Passion isn’t always confident. Worry is misguided passion, fearful passion, but it is passion nonetheless.Don’t do what you’re passionate about.Be passionate about what you do.Don’t follow your passion.Let your passion follow you. Passion is created when determination and commitment are joined by the nitroglycerin of action. Leonardo da Vinci said it 480 years ago and he said it in Italian. Here is the clearest translation:“People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”Listen to Leonardo.Go out and happen to something.When we hear the laughter and the dancing,the crying and the grief, we will know the shrapnel is flying.Roy H. Williams

The Silent Rifle as a 3rd Gravitating Body“Dangling like this from his leg, his upside-down perspective made him giddy. If this were to be his last moment he would die happy, but it would not. Instead, he’d soon be singing karaoke with a group of Korean tourists. But first, the roller coaster.”?– Christina Gressianu, opening lines of an unwritten novelAnton Chekhov wrote a letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev dated November 1, 1889, in which he said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”Tragically, this casual advice became the sacred and unbreakable rule of scriptwriting known as “Chekhov’s Gun” in which every element in a story must be necessary and irreplaceable.Obey the rule of Chekhov’s Gun and your stories will be predictable to all but the youngest of children.Movies are predictable, TV shows are predictable and Advertising is predictable because some fool decided Chekhov was a messenger sent from God.No, let us be fair to Chekhov: his advice was given in 1889 when less than 1 percent of the public had ever read a novel or seen a play. Motion pictures were an inventor’s experiment in a laboratory. Television wasn’t even a fantasy. His audience was, in effect, young children.Would Chekhov offer the same advice today? Let me assure you he would not.Surprise and delight are strangled by the cruel hands of Predictability.If you will write an interesting story, wallpaper the room with guns that are never used and never explained. An unfired gun is a curious distraction, a potential disaster or delight that hovers beautiful like a hummingbird just out of view.I use “gun” only as the metaphor for a literary device, just as Chekhov did. Can an oversized bottle of champagne be a silent rifle, a hovering gun hanging beautifully on the wall?Of course it can.One of my favorite passages in literature flagrantly violates the rule of Chekhov’s Gun. It is an inexplicable paragraph inserted into the middle of Cryptonomicon, an extraordinary adventure/mystery novel written by Neal Stephenson. The gun on the wall is a bowl of breakfast cereal.The cereal, the milk, the eating of the cereal, indeed breakfast itself is utterly unnecessary in the story of Cryptonomicon. But there it is:“World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. The best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds… He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap’n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other’s essential natures.”Chekhov, I believe, would approve.Welcome, Anton, to 2013.Roy H. Williams

My friend Jeffrey and I were talking one day about this and that when he said, as much to himself as to me, I think, “What is it that separates confidence from hubris?”I replied, “The outcome.”“That’s it!” Jeff gasped through his laughter, his head thrown back as tears began to inch toward his ears. “If you succeed, it was confidence. Fail, and it was hubris.”I’ve never been sure why my answer gave Jeff such pleasure, but isn’t it great to see a friend laugh uncontrollably?For the past 30 years I’ve livedwith my finger on the pulse of business owners.I know the rhythm of their heartbeats.I know what raises their blood pressure.I know what puts them to sleep.I feel the thump, thump, thump of their hunger for success.I know the storms that rise above them.I know the rains that fall.And I know what keeps them moving.Time and Chance are variables beyond our control.Money and Love are fuel.Time and Chance affect the flow of Money and Love.But Money and Love have no effect on Time and Chance.I’ve always been simpatico with the writer of Ecclesiastes.I think I understand him. He said,I have seen something else under the sun:The race is not to the swift?or the battle to the strong,?nor does food come to the wise?or wealth to the brilliant?or favor to the learned;?but time and chance happen to them all.Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:As fish are caught in a cruel net,or birds are taken in a snare,so people are trapped by evil timesthat fall unexpectedly upon them.It is not my goal to bring you down or give you melancholy. I hope only to broaden your perspective. I want you to enjoy this adventure called Life, regardless of the scenery that surrounds you. You made it here. You exist. You’re alive. How cool is THAT!We choose our destiny with every choice we make.We create our reality with every action we take.And Time and Chance happen to us all.Roy H. Williams

Do not confuse pleasure with happiness.Unhappy people can have pleasure.And uninterrupted pleasures are not happiness.Happiness is the result of knowing who you are, why you are here, and what you should do.We need identity, purpose, and adventure.Identity – Who am I?Purpose – Why am I here?Adventure – What will I do now?Selling is theater and each customer is an actor in that play.The marketing person – an ad writer – creates the storyline.The salesperson is the director, the narrator, the master-of-ceremonies and the usher.The customers sit quietly in the audience until they realize the play is about them.Are your customers sitting quietly in the audience? Your job is to entice them out of their seats. You want them to stand up and take action. You need them to storm the stage, perform their parts, walk on clouds of laughter, dance in the rain of the spotlight, revel in the thunder of applause.This play called Life should always be about identity, purpose and adventure. Make it about something else and your play is certain to be a parody, a tragedy, a satire or a farce.These are the motivations of the characters:Identity: Who am I? We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. We even choose our service providers based on how closely they mirror the way we would run their company. We’re attracted to reflections of ourselves. A salesperson points out this reflection, “That’s you, isn’t it?” and then gives the intellect the facts it needs to justify the purchase. Win the heart and the mind will follow.Purpose: Why Am I Here?If you’re sitting alone in the darkness, it’s because you’re afraid. Stand up fearfully, but stand up anyway. Flip the switch of the spotlight with a trembling finger and walk wobbly-kneed to center stage. We measure ourselves by our intentions but others measure us by our actions. Let your intentions become your actions and you will have stumbled onto your purpose. Quit thinking. Start doing. And whatever you do, do it with set-jaw determination. Your purpose will reveal itself soon enough.Adventure: What Will I Do Now?It is not the victory, but the audacity of the attempt that makes us feel alive. Small plans do not enflame the hearts of men. If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough. Waiting is a kind of dying. Indecision is a decision. When you let enough time go by as you wring your hands and say, “Well, I just don’t know,” the opportunity will pass and your decision will have been made. Procrastination is the passive assassin of happiness.Opportunity has been knocking for a long time now. In fact, it’s pounding on your door as you read this. Get up and answer it.Do something that scares you.What’s the worst than can happen?Answer the door.It’s showtime.Roy H. Williams

I’m 21 years old but my thinning hair makes me look about 30. I consider this to be my greatest asset.I walk the retail sidewalks, looking in windows, deciding if I will go in. A peddler goes door to door unthinkingly, playing the odds, tossing his pitch to anyone who will catch it like the common cold. But I choose my doors carefully, walking past most, looking always for those little indicators that whisper, “The owner of this business has a brain.”I climb wooden stairs to the trailer house office of a mobile home dealer on Admiral Boulevard. Standing on the cedar deck outside the glass door I see myself looking back at me, the sport coat I bought for 3 dollars at the Goodwill store, the briefcase I carry to look educated. Behind me is the neighborhood of Ponyboy Curtis, an unfiltered assortment of bent automobiles, broken houses and discarded people.My footsteps drum the wooden deck. Behind the glass, two men drink scotch at a coffee table in a cloud of Winston and Lucky Strike. The heavier one looks up at me, then back to his scotch as I swing open the door and step inside.“Whatever you’re sellin’, we’re not buyin’.” His eyes never leave the scotch.“Probably advertising,” said the other, careful not to look my way.“I came in here because you guys appear from the road to be smarter than most. Don’t tell me I made a mistake.”Both men turn to look at me. They stare. I stare. The second one speaks again. “What makes you think we’re so smart?”“The sign, the flags, and the angle of presentation.”His eyes grow cold and hard. “Explain.”Holding a solitary finger in front of me, I give them the facts. “Five sheets of inch-and-an-eighth tongue-in-groove plywood gave you an 8 by 20 sign on which you painted ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ in exactly the same style and colors a government agency would use. You’re looking for that Veterans Administration ‘one-dollar-move-in’ money that you know every Viet Nam vet has available to them. You’re smart enough to paint the sign. I’m smart enough to know it’s working.”A second finger joins the first. “Every other dealer on mobile home row uses exactly the same strings of cheap vinyl flags to get attention. Red, yellow, blue, green and white. But you paid extra for unicolor strings of metallic silver and metallic gold. It makes your mobile homes look upscale.”Three fingers. “You have the least inventory of any dealer but your customers never realize it because while every other dealer places their homes parallel to the road, you’ve angled yours so that no home is ever blocked from view. This is visually more interesting, gets more attention, makes the homes seem distinctive AND you’re creating leading lines in a V-shape that guide the eyes of passers-by to your seemingly official ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ sign.”The second one stood up and shifted his scotch to his left hand. “I’m Jim McDuffie.” Pointing to his partner he said, “That’s Mac McKean.” Reaching toward me for a handshake, he said, “And you’re our new advertising guy. Tell me what I need to buy.”I like to tell that story because it makes me look smart. There are other stories I don’t like to tell.Jim McDuffie’s business is big enough to advertise in multiple ways. This means I have a safety net. If the ads on my tiny little radio station don’t produce results, the traffic generated by the other stations will cover me. I rarely have this luxury.The upside of working for the smallest radio station in the city is that I can make presentations to businesses with budgets too small for any station but mine. In other words, the salespeople who work for the larger stations are limited to just 1 of every 100 businesses. The other 99 can’t afford their rates, but every business in town can afford me.That’s the problem. People buy my station because it’s all they can afford. I mean it’s all they can afford. Nothing else. No safety net. If my ads don’t work, the electric bill doesn’t get paid, the kids don’t have money for school lunches and the ad man – me – becomes a con man.In The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost speaks of taking “the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” For me, the road less traveled by was to accept the weight and pain of my client’s failure. When my ads failed, I had nowhere to hide because my clients could afford no one but me. I was the guy.Pain is the teacher you never forget.When I lost my hair at an early age I knew it gave me an advantage. But only later did I realize that being the only salesperson for the number 23 station in a city of 22 stations gave me an even bigger advantage. No other salesperson had a private physics laboratory in which they could accurately measure the cause and effect of each of the variables in advertising. Salespeople asking for pieces of bigger budgets saw the results of their ads through a blurry lens. They had no clear way to see how their ads were working, no way to sift their own results from the results generated through all the other media their advertisers were buying.Thank you, Mr. Kitchell, for trusting me with your money 34 years ago. I learned some hard lessons at the expense of a lot of good people like yourself who couldn’t afford to lose what I cost them. I used the education you bought me to help a lot of people. Many of them became hugely successful.None of those happy people will ever know the debt they owe you but I’ve never forgotten what we learned, you and I. The parts that worked. The parts that didn’t. I think of you often, Mr. Kitchell, and I still regret that I was unable to take you where you deserved to go.Roy H. WilliamsA

A brief summary of this episode

Reverse Your Thoughts, Increase Your IncomeUnifying Principles are those guiding thoughts around which all your actions revolve. When you hold them in plain sight, you always know what to do next.Brilliant people stumble when they focus on the parts and neglect to see the webs of connections between those parts. This is what causes medical doctors to treat each symptom separately while failing to recognize the underlying disease.Such compartmentalization is an even bigger problem in business, causing owners and managers to wrestle with symptoms instead of solving the problem. Not enough customers, low profit margins, high employee turnover and negative online reviews are merely compartmentalized symptoms of a systemic malfunction.Unifying principles eliminate compartmentalization.Let’s develop some unifying principles for your business that will help you create your happiest possible future:1. Think of your perfect ending; leap forward in time and see the outcome you most desire. How does that future company behave? Who are its customers? What marvelous things does it do that cause its customers to recruit their friends? What do these happy customers say about you? Describe, right now, the perfect day in this business you’ll own in the future. See, feel, taste and smell all the details of that soon-coming day.2. Hold those thoughts clearly in your mind.3. You are now equipped to identify the constituent components of this happy future. You’re ready to create the steps that will take you there. You’re ready to draw the map you will follow.ONE: Where would such a company be located?TWO: How would such a workplace be decorated?THREE: How would such a company recruit its employees?FOUR: In what ways might such a company train its employees?FIVE: How would such a company compensate those employees?SIX: What hours would such a company be open?SEVEN: How would their ads make you feel?EIGHT: What would their written warranties and guarantees include?NINE: What would such a company NEVER do?TEN: What might such a company do for its customers that its competitors would be unwilling to do?Are you beginning to get the picture?A clear and stable vision of the End Goal is required to inform the small choices that will bring that goal into existence.You’ve previously heard of Gestalt Theory but now you’ve actually used it.AThis particular application of Gestalt Theory springs from TRIZ Principle 13: turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards. If you want to learn the other 39 Principles of TRIZ, check out Mark Fox’s book, Da Vinci and the 40 Answers or attend that class when Br’er Fox teaches it on Oct. 30-31. Wizard Academy cognoscenti Dr. Kary Mullis never heard of TRIZ Principle 13 but he instinctively used it to create Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR,) the invention that opened the door for DNA research and won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kary said, “Everyone was looking for a needle in a haystack, so I said, ‘Why not turn the haystack into needles?'” Turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards. That’s how PCR was born.More recently, Kary used Principle 13 to create Altermune, the invention that will probably win him a second Nobel Prize. Speaking of that portion of our immune system that attacks foreign tissue and of how it has been studied for decades so that it can be suppressed during organ transplants, Kary said, “Suppress it, hell, why not aim it?” And from that bit of backwards thinking Kary Mullis invented an antidote for anthrax. He will likely use this same technique to invent cures for dozens of other things for which our bodies have no defense.Watch the video at TED.comWizard Academy Cognoscenti rock the world.Rock on. Roy H. Williams

Agrees With Wizard AcademyHeadlines often tell the truth more powerfully than is completely accurate, a disturbing trend in this day of sound-bite news.The mental image conjured in the mind by the headline, “Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Agrees With Wizard Academy,” is one in which the Nobel Laureate (1.) is aware of Wizard Academy and (2.) makes a statement of affirmation regarding it.Neither of these things has happened. So how could the writer of that headline say such a thing? The Monday Morning Memo you received on July 29 was titled, Fortune’s 500 or America’s 5.91 Million? Perhaps you remember reading it.In that memo I stated,The Fortune 500 are the newsmakers but they are not the backbone of the American economy. According to the U.S. Census, America is home to nearly 17 million sole proprietorships, plus an additional 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These 5.91 million are the backbone of the economy since they create more new jobs than all the other companies combined. The press will cheer for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.If the Fortune 500 suddenly vanished from the earth, a new group of giants would arise. But if America’s 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees suddenly vanished from the earth, the fabric of our society would be shredded and democracy would be gone.Free enterprise doesn’t depend on democracy.Democracy depends on free enterprise.On August 17, 2013, more than 2 weeks after that MondayMorningMemo appeared, Jeffrey Eisenberg sent a story from the August 17th New York Times in which the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, Robert J. Shiller, contemplated the newly-published worries of Edmund Phelps, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.According to Shiller,“Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend… He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.”I’m not suggesting that Phelps or Shiller was influenced by what I wrote. In fact, I’m reasonably certain they’ve never heard of me. But I do feel I’m well within the mark to say both men agree with me.Phelps is worried about corporatism. Me? I’m worried about a disturbing trend toward overstated sound bites. I gave today’s memo a reckless headline to underscore my point, but better examples are all around us.A recent story boasted the headline, “Right Brain, Left Brain? Scientists Debunk Popular Theory.” Google it and you’ll find dozens of variations of that story reposted by online parrots who never pause to contemplate what they hear before squawking it to all the world.Invest 3 minutes to actually read that story and you’ll find the headline to be false and misleading to the point of absurdity. The discovery for which Dr. Roger Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology stands as tall and proud as ever. Here’s a direct quote from the story that supposedly ‘debunks’ Dr. Sperry’s findings:“‘It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain,’ explained Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study. ‘Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection.’”Dig into that study by Dr. Anderson and you’ll find he merely summarizes what we’ve always known: both sides of the brain are in constant use. There is never a moment in which thoughts and the associative memories triggered by those thoughts are contained entirely on one side.This is news?I believe this trend toward overstatement has its roots in the “corporatism” decried by Professors Schiller and Phelps. Listen to the most highly paid pundits on radio and television and you’ll hear sociopathic children who have learned to cry “wolf” louder and more frantically than their peers.Corporatism rewards any spokesperson who can control the thinking of others.A society that no longer has time for contemplation, scholarship, or independent research is at the mercy of little boys who have no conscience and who are desperate for attention.Time and attention are commodities more precious than diamonds and gold. We have only so many moments. It is a heartless thing to trick a person into giving them to you.False shouts of “Wolf!” should be cast into oblivion, along with those empty-headed parrots who reheat, repeat and retweet them. Just sayin’.Roy H. Williams