August 2023

Will AI Replace Consultants?

by Alan Culler | Aug 27, 2023 | Consulting

The Ancient Late Adopter speaks

Let us be clear, I am old. I started as a consultant in 1980; I retired as a consultant five years ago. Most of what I write about consulting comes from those thirty-seven years. I look back over my career and try to extract lessons from my mistakes to pass on to newbies, yeomen and old hands in the field to help them avoid my most boneheaded moves:

Newbies – understand the kinds of consulting, content and process, and which you might be a better fit for, Oh and start planning for up or out on Day One.
Yeomen – learn to sell -it is the criterion for promotion and decide how you’ll bring in clients direct selling or thought leadership -yeah, I mean writing books that sell and doing speaking engagements and podcasts.
Old Hands – If you still want to “do the work” rather than just sell it, you’ll probably have to start a firm or “go independent.” Both are tough roads. And forget about fantasies like “bringing the clients to us” conference centers are hotel and meeting space businesses; your brilliant content is irrelevant compared to sheets, water pressure and cookies.

Interesting as I might think my acerbic self-career-analysis is, I concede it isn’t very forward thinking. As one millennial reader of my upcoming book, Traveling the Consulting Road, said,

“A lot has changed in the consulting world over the years and the way millennials make career decisions has changed too. They are much more aware / well-read / well-connected than folks their age 1-2 generations back. Some of Alan’s learnings are a given now and his advice is not key insights.”

Ouch.

Also, I make no secret of the fact that I am a technology laggard. I use a computer and own a smart phone, but I definitely don’t have the latest apps or social media profiles. I still own a turntable and am encouraged that in some circles vinyl is coming back. (My thanks to Neil Young and Jack White.)

So it is fair to say that maybe I’m the last person who ought to be talking about the future of consulting. But some clients hire consultants for their “intelligence,” whether problem-solving ability, or specific knowledge of industry or competitive dynamics, or “emotional intelligence,’” unique insight into the mysteries of human behavior inside organizations. Now comes “Artificial Intelligence.” What does that mean for consultants?

Artificial Intelligence

I already established my complete lack of bona fides to talk about this subject. My mother was a computer programmer in 1956, but I have been dragged painfully slowly into the twentieth century and am still coming up to speed in this millennium.

But I read a book. (“Isn’t that just like a consultant? He read a book and now he wants to talk like an expert?”) The book is “The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology by Juliette Powers and Art Kleiner and I’d recommend it, but it isn’t really a technical book. It is more of an ethical or philosophical treatise on how to avoid the dangers of AI and use it for the benefit of human society. It did get me thinking in a more future focused way than is my habitual wont.

In the book Powers and Kleiner focus on what they call Triple-A systems, algorithmic, autonomous, automatic systems.

Algorithms

As I understand this, my online searches and transactions fit into a model (algorithm), which is a set of rules, if / then statements for example, that predicts what I might do in the future. Amazon sees that I bought a book on AI and offers me many other books on AI. This happened, and might be a good model for books, interest in a topic begets more interest. It doesn’t work so well for eyeglass screwdrivers because how many do you really need? Tell that to Amazon which keeps offering me eyeglass screwdrivers because I bought one last year.

The algorithms update when they get more information and they have a search function to take in more data. This may be relevant to me on Amazon, but it is really relevant to all aggregated customers on Amazon or if we are talking about government or political campaign systems, it is very powerful and a little scary.

Autonomous and Automatic

After some initial programming, these systems operate on their own. They go looking for new data and build the model further, make decisions and take prescribed actions. The problem is AI sometimes takes proscribed actions, actions that should be limited by law, common sense or just plain good manners. AI just doesn’t know any better. This is why the news media currently has its “hair-on-fire” about AI technology. There are huge data ownership, privacy, and efficacy issues. There are stories of ChatGPT being used to write a legal brief and when ChatGPT didn’t find case law to match the brief, the software simply made it up. It doesn’t take much imagination to apply my Amazon eyeglass screwdriver anecdote to decision making around nuclear weapons launch monitoring and response systems being run without human oversight and judgement. As I said, scary.

The book goes on to promote ways to design and use this new technology in responsible ways,

Integrate four logics in design
- Engineers – we can
- Social justice – we should
- Government – protect and serve
- Corporate -serve stakeholders (make money)
Abide by principles -Intentionality and open discussion in areas of risk, transparency, privacy, bias, accountability, etc.

AI and the future of Consulting

This book got me thinking. Writers are worried that no one will hire them because they can just plug “give me a script for ‘Two and a Half Men’” into ChatGPT and zip-zipidee it’s done. Actors are worried that the ability to program facial and body movement recognition data will mean that their carefully produced image will show up on screen with no paycheck. These are perhaps valid concerns, but what about consultants?

Some companies have huge databases of customer and customer and competitive data; what will that mean for strategy consultants? Some social networks (LinkedIn) have databases of jobs and job seekers; might this inhibit headhunters and human resource consultants? Maybe.

When I was at Gemini Consulting there were repeated attempts to package various service offerings, “Process Improvement in a Box,” “Balanced Scorecard in a Box.” These offerings combined some written and some digital tools, packaged with some Gemini training in their use. These were attempts to “productize’ a service offering that was “commoditizing “ and being brought in-house by clients. McKinsey Solutions founded in 2013 seems a subscription model of the same concept and other consulting firms may have followed with their own offerings. Some worry this is “giving away the store.” Others say it is extending the firm’s reach to people who would be unlikely to be mainstream clients.

If we regard consulting as providing information and expertise only, then perhaps Algorithmic, Autonomous, Automatic systems may change the way consultants do business. Generative AI, with natural language processors like ChatGPT, Amazon’s GPT3,5, Google’s BARD, Microsoft’s Bing AI, might simplify proposal and report writing, but at this point will still require substantial human editing.

But if we define consulting as helping leaders change their companies, we probably have a long time before consultants will be replaced.

Business is about people. Whether you call them customers, suppliers, staff, competitors, shareholders, or community, they’re all people. People are messy, complex, and a bit unpredictable. So the interface with technology to make it do what works (vs multiple eyeglass screwdriver purchases), the creativity that sparks innovation, the commitment that leads to change will require people-savvy consultants.

Will consultants need to understand how AI tools can save time? Yes. Will they need to be sensible how these tools are used? Yes.

Will AI replace consultants in helping companies change? I don’t think that will happen for long time.

* (This post was written entirely with ChatGPT.) 😉 No. It wasn’t. 😊 Really, it wasn’t. No, I mean it. It wasn’t 😊 I have a special offer of eleven eyeglass screwdrivers for $7.99 – delivered tomorrow – free shipping – click here. (just kidding)😊 Can AI make a joke? Or take one?

Flow and the Grand Opening Extravaganza

by Alan Culler | Aug 20, 2023 | Living

Acme Grand Opening

It was a sunny spring Saturday and I was on a roll. When I worked, Saturdays were all about errands and it was only ten-fifteen and, man, I was checking things off the old index card to-do list to beat the band. I’d dropped and picked up shirts and taken shoes off to be soled and then headed to Upper Montclair pick up some flipchart markers and stop at that CVS with parking to buy ibuprofen and, while I was there, scored some great birthday cards for my kids upcoming birthdays. I bought wine at the wine shop and some brie at the cheese shop next door, and I was “cookin’ with gas.” I was being so productive I decided to skip the obligatory coffee at Starbuck’s.

I swung the car the car right out of the lot and headed for home when I was shocked. There was a new sign on our closed-down grocery store. “ACME,” it said, GRAND OPENING.”

Weeks before, we had been so disappointed when the old A&P closed. It wasn’t all that close to home, but way cheaper than King’s or certainly either Whole Foods close to us. Now there was a new grocery store, ACME. Even though my only association with the name ACME was the company where Wiley Coyote bought his anvils and bombs to kill the Road Runner, I tuned into the half-full parking lot. We were getting low on some staples; I couldn’t believe my luck.

I jumped out of the car. And picked a cart from the full rack outside and walked through the propped-open double doors. I was “cruising.” Down the cereal aisle I got some Grape nuts and Quaker Oatmeal squares, then over to condiments for Grey Poupon and on to the next aisle for eight cans of Green Giant canned green beans (no salt) to mix with Pip’s food. I swung to the dairy cases swerving around some guys on a ladder fixing a florescent light (“Shouldn’t they have done that yesterday?’) I got some of the little Dannon Stay-Fit yoghurts that Billie likes. (“Wow they have all the flavors. This store’s stocking is great.”)

Then I went to the meat case, oops no thick sliced bacon, (“Damn. Oh wait there’s a manager.”)

I saw a fortyish man in gray chinos and a white shirt and tie talking to a couple of men in jeans.

“Excuse me. Do you have any thick-sliced bacon? Preferably Oscar Meyer or Smithfield but whatever?”

“Ah no it’s not out yet. . Wait. . .Are you SHOPPING?”

‘Well, ye-ah.”

“We’re not OPEN yet. Didn’t you see the sign GRAND OPENING SUNDAY?! And you picked up all that stuff?”

“Ah. . . yeah.”

“We’re not open yet!

“Ah. . .OK. But do you think you could check me out?”

“NOOOOO! WE’RE NOT OPEN YET! The cash registers aren’t even hooked up.”

I looked around. What I’d taken for other customers were contractors, electricians, painters and other workmen. There really were no cash registers or scanners at the front; they were all stacked at the side of the store. The manager was talking to a work crew who were installing a refrigerated chest next to the one where I was looking for thick-sliced bacon. The guys were all smiling. One was shaking his head.

“Oh. . . sorry.”

“Now put all that stuff back and come back tomorrow.”

As I left I noticed that the front doors were propped open with saw-horses. The half-full parking lot was all workmen’s trucks and the sign, fully six feet high, said GRAND OPENING …SUNDAY!

I drove home.

My wife still thinks this is the funniest story she has ever heard. She often has me tell it at dinner parties. She thinks it is the perfect example of how completely oblivious I can get when I’m “on a roll,” focused, “zoned out.”

Guilty. An elementary school teacher once described me “Alan is either really doing something, or he isn’t.” That has carried into adulthood and, yes, into my seniority.

I see this same behavior in my grandson, who at four can get so into what he is doing that he has to be reminded to stop to go to the bathroom. I sometimes catch myself doing that, too.

Flow

A lot has been written about “flow,” the mythical state of intense focus where time floats away, stretches out, when everything you do is easy, natural. In is sometimes referred to as “being in the zone.”

I have personally experienced flow several times in my life. There was a bluebird powder day skiing where my often tentative intermediate skiing was somehow in tune with the mountain, my turns just happened naturally and I floated down the hill. Also once or twice when I was running in my forties the road literally rose to meet me for miles. In woodcarving, I saw the object in the wood and the extraneous material fell rapidly away beneath my chisel for a while. And yes working, there was a great training design session with Ric and Reina, and a well facilitated leadership offsite and more. Even in my new “career,” writing ,sometimes the words just waterfall effortlessly through my fingers and keyboard to screen.

Some, um, time, er, it no happen too like that kind of thing, y’know..

Flow, being “in the zone,” is different from being “zoned out,” obsessively focused to the point of obliviousness. My experience of flow contains a sense of being tapped into something beyond my personal capacity, being in-tune with the Universe.

For me, flow happens after lots of practice and often after many failures, staring at a piece of wood, cutting it badly, with tools that weren’t sharp enough, When I was in the theatre there was a superstition, “disastrous dress rehearsal, spectacular opening night.” Actors often felt so strongly about this that directors used to mess up something at dress rehearsal to put us on our toes for the opening.

Flow and Mindfulness

My occasional obsessive concentration lacks intentional awareness, mindfulness.

In fact, people can speak to me when I am zoned out and I don’t hear them. The ACME GRAND OPENING EXTRAVAGAZA described above came from my errand completion euphoria and my expectation that the Universe was helping with my to-do check marks, but I was just oblivious, I wasn’t in flow.

On my bluebird powder day I was hyper-aware of the out-of-control teenaged snowboarder crossing my path and pulled up long enough to be sure he got up unhurt after his splendiferous crash. My work flow experiences always included interactions and collaborations with others.

My writing flow experiences may include single-minded focus, but they usually follow periods of thought and planning what I am writing about. I am also a new enough writer that I may not have many true flow experiences yet.

Hemingway said “Write without holding back. The next day when you are feeling fresh add a little perfection with your editing.”

I definitely have no flow experiences self-editing.

What is flow and how to get more of it?

“That is the question,” said Hamlet as he weighed suicide vs action in the best example of over-thinking and equivocation ever written. The whole play is an immersion in Hamlet’s lack of flow.

I’m not a psychology researcher*, but here are my beginner-mind ruminations on the subject:

Flow means you are doing something, i.e., you are using your agency, taking action (unlike Hamlet) and acting by choice, doing something you love.
Focus and concentration are necessary, but not sufficient for flow.
The foundation of flow is enough practice, perhaps even failure that is learned from, that when the flow arrives and you “do without thinking,” you are doing something right.
There is focus, but also awareness. Mindfulness is required. Flow is the antithesis of obliviousness.
We can have more flow experiences, by doing what we love, practicing in a disciplined way focused on improvement, and being mindful of our surroundings.

Most of all, read the whole sign: GRAND OPENING . . . SUNDAY.

* For more true research on flow read the works of the late Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi

Voice of the Customer? Huh?

by Alan Culler | Aug 13, 2023 | Consulting

Improvement and Innovation

Over my thirty-seven years as a change consultant, I worked on a lot of improvement and innovation projects. These are similar but different methodologies.

The people who work on these methodologies tend to focus on the differences. Improvement often makes an existing product or process better, whereas innovation tends to invent new products and processes. Sometimes where there are both improvement and innovation teams in the same organization the competition can get a little nasty.

“You improvement people are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Oh yeah, innovation people? You focus on where the rubber meets the sky and have no results.”

Innovation and Improvement are both necessary for a healthy business and they are more similar than different.

Both improvement and innovation processes are disciplined problem solving processes. Both combine divergent thinking techniques (e.g., brainstorming) to generate ideas and detailed evaluation and planning to implement and integrate the changes.

One of the concepts both innovation and improvement are supposed to have in common is that they are designing or revising products and processes with the user or customer in mind.

In most continuous improvement methodologies this is called “Voice of the Customer.” In innovation circles there are whole methodologies built around this concept. “User-Centered Design,” which came from the software development industry was created to bring the user into the process earlier than what was traditional software “change management,” which was a half-day user training program.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) built on the functional needs of User-Centered Design or User Experience (UX) to add more psychological and emotional needs. HCD practitioners often use a wider lens and talk about benefits to society or humanity. HCD is often the innovation methodology of choice for lifestyle products and services including social services.

I saw several problems at clients trying to make change:

Innovate or improve? Indecision and conflict about whether to use innovation or improvement methodologies. This is a matter of the life-cycle of the product or process and the degree of change needed. At the beginning of the life-cycle improve it. At the end, or if major change is needed innovate.
Methodology bingo – regardless of the whether they chose to improve or innovate, when the going got tough someone would say “What we need to do is – Lean, or Agile of HCD. Because I worked with so many different clients over so many years, I became methodology agnostic. I used to tell clients just pick one and stick to it.
What Customer? One of the biggest problems I saw was internal focus caused by immersion in these methodologies, the lack of any disciplined focus on the customer, the end user or often even the internal recipient of the process.

Sometimes there would be a survey about previous products or services. Sometimes this would be treated reverently; sometimes not. I saw a project manager throw the marketing survey on a desk saying

“Yeah, yeah. The dogs don’t like the dog food. Funny how they keep eating it.”

Voice of the Customer Failures

Recently I had some experiences that drove home this lack of the voice of the customer in the design process.

Lefties (not political)

My wife does most of the cooking in our house. Oh, I cook a couple nights a week, sometimes I cook “enough for the Army” and we eat another night of my leftovers. Billie is one of the ten percent of all people in the world who is left-handed. Over the years she has acquired a saucepan with the spout on the right and a slotted spatula that slants in to the right. Sometimes I inadvertently pick one of these implements up.

“This [saucepan or spatula] is really awkward,” I whine.

“Welcome to my world,” Billie snipes back, “I have been cooking for over fifty years and I have very few left handed kitchen tools. You pick one of them up and complain.”

Ninety percent of the people in the world are right handed, either because they really are or they were “encouraged” to be. (They tied my father’s left hand behind his back until he was five.) Ten percent of the world or about eight hundred million people are left handed, thirty-three million in the United States. You’d think that would be a big enough market for someone to make a few left-handed kitchen tools.

A friend, a guitarist, complains about finding left-handed guitars. “Just restring it,” a sales clerk told him. Of course, that’s ridiculous because the nut and the saddle are cut for strings in the order of a right-handed guitar. Even if you did that the intonation would be wrong because the saddle is often slanted to make up for differential tension on the strings..

We righties are clueless about the difficulty of being a lefty living in a righty world.

I think product designers design products for themselves and assume that everyone else is like them.

“That’s a child-proof cap.”

Right, except when the arthritis in MY HANDS keeps me from opening the bottle of extra strength arthritis medicine, and I hand it to my four-year-old granddaughter to open as I have done more than once.

What really inspired this post:

I just purchased hearing aids. Rock-and-roll finally caught up to me. I have lost high registers in both ears. The right is worse than the left. It’s too late for my children, but I tell my grandchildren, “Don’t stand in front of speakers that are taller than you are.

Let me say I love this product. I can hear my granddaughters when they mumble, our TV is set at a significantly lower volume, and Bille tells me I say “What?” less when she holds a conversation with me from her office down the hall.

It took a while to learn the smart phone app and I still haven’t figured out how to have my Bluetooth car connection not be overridden by the hearing aid connection.

The manual says to “turn the hearing aids off when not wearing them and when they are not in the charger. Put them in the case to go swimming, for example, turn them off, but when you put them in the charger turn them on or they won’t charge. Turning them off a few hours a week will extend battery life.”

There is a rocker switch on the back of the piece that goes behind my ear.

My audiologist demonstrated.

“When you turn it off it plays this little electronic tune.. . . When you turn it back on it plays this tune. Hear the difference?”

“No. . . . in fact I can’t hear either tune.”

“Oh . . . of course you can’t. well maybe I can figure out how to lower the tone to the range you can hear unassisted.”

“OK, but If you were the genius who designed these, don’t you think a small LED bulb would have been a better off / on indicator than those high frequency tunes. I mean these are hearing aids, right?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

These are all tone-deaf product designs (pun intended). I’m sure it is easy to imagine service designs that fail just as completely, like calling when the Internet is down and being told by the phone tree to “visit our website for faster service.”

What to do?

It just isn’t that hard to get the voice of the customer into product or service design or into improvements or innovations.

First you have to believe that the customer’s opinion is important. So no more comments about the dogs and the dogfood.
Next ask them.
- If you have surveys already -read them. If not conduct surveys, or
- Focus groups, or
- Customer interviews.
Integrate the Voice of the Customer into design
Have some customers evaluate and test whether you got it right.

For clarity, I am talking about end users, and Internal customers who receive the output of the process you might be improving. There should be a straight through line from all inputs to the final customer.

Fine, but what if providing everything every customer asks for is too expensive? This is a real world concern. Make sure you have their highest priority needs and maybe tell those who gave you the feedback the reasons you won’t get to that right now.

The point is improvements and innovations are for the customer. Let’s make sure the customer’s voice is heard.

Review: Inside the Mind of Timothy Leary by George H. Litwin PhD

by Alan Culler | Aug 8, 2023 | Leading

A fun and fascinating read on early psychedelic research

“My book about Tim is up on Amazon. I hope you’ll read it and if you like it tell some other people about it. He was an important person in my life and it was an important time. Psychedelics took on a different meaning later and I want people to know there was there was more to it than the party.” George said toward the end of our recent phone call.

George Litwin is my friend and a significant mentor in my life. So I was very excited to read this book about his friend and mentor Timothy Leary. As you might imagine, I had heard some of the stories before, but I was not prepared for the totality of the experience this book relates.

Inside the Mind of Timothy Leary is a personal history of the scientific and science-adjacent exploration of psychedelic drugs, psilocybin, mescalin, LSD and DMT. It is not an academic treatise, though there are many cited resources should you wish to continue reading. It is a memoir, the biographical stories of the high profile psychologists and their research into substances which could produce a mystical experience.

Dr. Leary was George Litwin’s advisor as he pursued his doctorate at Harvard. Leary was originally opposed to Litwin’s interest in continuing his Michigan research in the potential for mental healthcare uses of mescalin. However, after a sabbatical in Mexico where Dr. Leary experienced an indigenous healer’s work with mushrooms containing psilocybin, he changed his position on the mescalin research and began research on psilocybin himself.

Litwin carefully explains the turmoil of the early 1960s at Harvard where BF Skinner’s behaviorism was in conflict with the Human Potential Movement and the more social forms of psychology. He also paints the conflict in the 60s culture between those who wished for more openness and freedom and those who argued for greater control in society.

Into this milieux came Drs. Tomothy Leary, and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Das). They were joined by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz musicians Maynard Ferguson, Paul Desmond, and Charles Mingus and a host of other characters. Litwin was in the room experiencing these substances and relates his and others’ experience. It makes a fun and fascinating read.

Some of the experiments were more classically scientific than others, but all indicated that these substances could briefly expand consciousness in the same way that religious mystics of many cultures experienced after long meditative practices. What was different was that the religious mystics have cont9inuallly access to the transcendent experience (enlightenment) through their meditative practices. It is no surprise that many of these profiled researchers, Ram Das, Watts and Litwin himself went on to explore Easter meditative traditions.

Psychedelic drugs are being explored again for therapeutic uses helping to soften the ego such that destructive mindsets and behavior can be productively self-altered. This engaging history of the beginnings of research should be read by those considering therapy or those interested in this period of history.

I also think that this book together with the resources identified by Dr. Litwin would be an excellent reading course for those who aspire to transformational leadership. The transformational leader must transcend the bounds of ego and old culture and bring unity to the change they lead. Understanding the mystical experience these researchers pursued is a step along that path.

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Rich or Famous?

by Alan Culler | Aug 6, 2023 | Living

A conversation

It was a story I heard more than once. Different people told the story often making a slightly different point. Some told it to make the Great Gatsby point, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Some told the story as real success advice –“listen carefully and follow this”; some told it to show differences between people. Some were in the room for the conversation; some had heard it so many times that they repeated it as if they were there.

I wasn’t there. I am not sure of the setting. Was it New York or California? Was it late at night sipping whiskey in a hotel bar? Was it over an expensive dinner? Was the conversation in the morning in an office, in response to a pitch, asking someone for business or an investment? I don’t know. At least two of the participants have passed on and I’m not sure that I want to bring it up with one I know.

Sometime in the early 1970s, two men named George were in a small group of people who knew each other. One George, George 1, owned radio and TV stations and was quite wealthy. The other George, George 2, was a professor, an entrepreneur, and a consultant to a third man in the group, a friend and business partner of George 1.

There was a lull in the conversation and George 1 spoke to George 2.

“George, Let me ask you a question. Do you want to be rich or do you want to be famous?”

The question seemed to stop all conversation in the group. George 1 continued.

“Because these are different goals and you go about achieving them differently. If you want to be rich you acquire something that is undervalued and sell it for full value. You invent something that people need and don’t know they need. You run this business till you can hire someone else to run it and then you acquire or invent something else.

If you want to be famous, you have to get people’s attention. Then you have to get more peoples’ attention, and more, and more. And people are fickle; they either want all of you all the time or they lose interest. So you have to do more. You can’t have hire someone else to run your fame -it’s YOU.

You seem to be pursuing fame. Your classes, your books, your consulting are all heavily dependent on your time.

And don’t talk to me about being rich and famous because that is an order of magnitude more difficult.

Being rich and being famous are in conflict. If you are rich you don’t want people to know who you are because it raises the price you have to pay and you can’t make as much. If you are famous, you spend so much maintaining your fame that it limits how much you can make.”

At this point the storyteller makes the point that George 2 was stunned silent. I met George 1 only once, but George 2 told how the insight stopped him cold.

These men had different careers and they each earned money in their own way, but the I wonder how much we all conflate wealth and fame.

Sure Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are both rich and famous, but Reinhold Würth runs a screw business and Jorge Paolo Lemann hold controlling stakes in H.J. Heinz and Anheuser Busch Inbev.

Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes

“In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

It turns out that Andy Warhol never actually said this, but he did use his art to explore brand and he created his own brand in doing that. The Campbell’s Soup and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes paintings and prints, the Brillo box sculpture above showed the connection between art, image and meaning.

Whether the actual quote was said by curator Pontus Hultén, painter Larry Rivers or photographer Nat Finkelstein, is immaterial. The point stands. Celebrity may be available to everyone, but it is fleeting.

Was Warhol rich? Not Bezos-rich, but by artist standards, having a net worth of two hundred and twenty million in 1987 wasn’t too shabby.

Fame-on-the 2×4 inch screen

“MrBeast has 170 million subscribers,” explained my ten year-old granddaughter. “He can give away houses and cars because of the number of impressions he gets. See this post it has 34 million impressions and it has only been up for a week and a half. Sponsors are willing to pay a lot for that many eyeballs.”

This only one of several social media lectures I’ve received from this kid and I’m not complaining – I learn stuff.. Her father is the Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia.

I grew up before virality was a word and I’ve been a late adopter all my life, so don’t be fooled by the fact that I have a blog website and an author website. I’m still trying to figure this all out.

MrBeast and Kim Kardashian aside, is the average “influencer” rich? I suppose it depends on how many followers you have and how much your content attracts a specific target audience that sponsors want to reach.

I remember being shocked when I learned that radio and television weren’t art; they were audience-delivery mechanisms for advertising. “Well, duh,” my granddaughter would say accompanied by a well-perfected eyeroll. So if you target the right demographic, and produce “evergreen” content (not tied to current events so the recorded content can be watched forever) then you can get rich while getting famous. It is still, as George 1 said, an order of magnitude more difficult.

Rich, Famous, or Happy?

Realistic life and career planning is a life skill I’m not sure I ever had. I chased different careers, actor, agent, consultant, just taking jobs as they arrived or as I thought about them. I never thought about whether I wanted to be rich or famous.; I just wanted work and a life which made me happy. I accomplished that goal and made enough to live comfortably.

People whom I would describe as uber-successful are more focused than I was. Perhaps they had a clear-eyed vision of what they wanted to do. Steven Spielberg sneaked onto the Universal Studios lot in his late teens, setting up in an empty bungalow office until he could show off his movies and get a chance.

Some align themselves with a partner like the Steves – Jobs and Wozniak or Bill Gates and Paul Allen, but all are single minded.

I have known some famous people, authors and activists, comedians and politicians. Some are even rich and famous. Mostly these people are single minded too, but not singularly focused on becoming famous. They were focused on their art or their cause. The fame opened doors, but it wasn’t the focus.

Probably though, people who succeeded, including me, had some idea of what they wanted to do, and where they wanted to end up. Perhaps they were rigorous in self-evaluation and determined their strengths and weaknesses and whose help they might need. Some like me didn’t start out there, but adapted and evolved along the way.

Knowing your goals, knowing yourself, and what makes you happy is a tremendous advantage in life. It may come down to “Do you want to be rich or do you want to be famous?” But maybe not.