Perception is not Reality

When business is separated from the realities of the material world it becomes more politics than business. What makes this possible is the development of multinational corporate monopolies that derive their profits by squeezing labor and cutting costs. The corporate world itself is populated by an army of marketing types that have the business world convinced their physical assets are of no value, that their employees are meaningless, that the very goods and services they produce are but air. The real value of any organization is the position they own in a customer’s mind—their brand. And worse, employees have come to believe they are their own brand and that the perception they create is of a higher value than the actual contributions they make. The elevation of the MBA to positions of leadership within both the private and the public sector has led to a decline of actual performance in favor of perceived performance. It is no longer what you actually do that matters; it’s how what you do is perceived that matters. How you market. We are all familiar with the expression: perception is reality. But, perception is perception and reality is reality. Being convinced that something is true doesn’t make it true regardless of the massive amounts of money put at the disposal of PR and marketing agencies. This idea has muddled the world of business and the world of government. Think back to Katrina when FEMA and the government were trying to manage perceptions more than they were trying to manage the reality on the ground. The same is true in Iraq. Rather than the US government focusing 100% of its energy on making the situation better, it was putting a vast amount of energy into trying to make us believe it was better. Showing the coffins of dead soldiers returning is bad image management. Dead soldiers are bad PR. A good part of this is a result of MBAs taking over positions of power. You don't market a war by focusing on death and destruction. Just like you don't market a drug by revealing facts that might cut into sales. (A side story here is pharmaceutical companies hiring large numbers of former female, college cheerleaders to be their sales representatives. For some reason, doctors are more likely to meet with them to discuss their patients' needs for better treatments than a less "spirited" representative from another company.) The problem comes from the idea that everything can be managed; that reality is open to manipulation and that the truth is this malleable thing that can be twisted into anything we desire. We can fix most any problem by simply tweaking the marketing, by changing perceptions. Not so.

I say all of this because I work in marketing and my corporate masters are letting me go. My brand has lost mind-share and the low perception of my work is, unfortunately, too closely aligned with reality.