Walking the Talk: Great Expectations
by: Jeff Einstein

I remember driving some years ago along the Olympic
Peninsula south of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest on a
cold and rainy winter day. I had expected to find solace
in miles and miles of verdant old growth rain forest,
but instead encountered acre after acre of clear-cut
desolation, replete with Orwellian signage that euphemized
the devastation as managed forests.

Fade out, fade in: Nowadays when I hear agencies talk about
managed expectations, I can’t help but think of the media
landscape as a gigantic managed forest, clear-cut and
desolate. Nowadays it seems that the phrase managed expect-
ations is little more than a euphemism for lowered expect-
ations.

In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that we don’t truly
manage our expectations as much as they manage us. In the
Brothers Einstein, my little boutique agency, my brother
Mike and I predicate our work and relationships partly on
what we call the Albert Keeler Principle, an amalgam
borrowed from the sage counsel of two 20th-century American
giants, Albert Einstein, and Hall of Fame baseball great,
Wee Willie Keeler.

According to Albert Einstein…

No problem can be solved from the same level of conscious-
ness that created it.

And according to Mr. Keeler, we should…

Hit ‘em where they ain’t.

Notably, Messrs. Einstein and Keeler made it a point to
approach their respective disciplines as perpetual out-
siders. They eschewed convention and looked for the
anomalies, for the exceptions, not the rules. They looked
for the mistakes of others, pounced on them and in between
them, and ascended to greatness. Indeed, they ascended to
greatness in no small measure because they expected great-
ness, from themselves not least.

In his wonderful essay, Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
wrote that “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds.” But a foolish consistency breeds more than
little minds. Fealty to convention and consistency promotes
scale and quantity at the expense of intimacy and quality,
converts relationships into commodities, and breeds lower
expectations. And nothing breeds little minds like lowered
expectations.

If we want less we need only expect less. Case in point:
George W. Bush. No one expected greatness from him, and
look what happened. Likewise, no one expects anyone in
Congress to do anything except pander and raise money
for re-election, so that’s pretty much all they do.
Performance, it seems, rises and falls with our expect-
ations. If we want more, we need to raise our expect-
ations. If we want more from the Obama administration,
we need to raise our expectations accordingly. Cultural
greatness emerges only from cultures of great expectations.

The same expectation-to-performance ratio exists across
the board in all of our relationships. The more we expect
of ourselves, the more we can expect from others in return.
My brother Mike and I learned some years ago not to manage
to our bottom line. We learned instead to manage to our
expectations, which — like our fees — only go up as a
result. Conversely, managing to the bottom line will almost
always reduce performance and breed little minds. Managing
to the bottom line will almost always lower our expect-
ations.

We have become so inured to failure as a consequence and
companion of digital scale that we have all but stopped
asking for more. Yet A Course in Miracles suggests that
the problem is not that we ask for too much, rather that
we don’t ask for nearly enough. The same is true of our
expectations. We fear raising them because we fear the
ensuing disappointment. But we demonstrate a natural
tendency to become our attention over time, and the more
we focus on diminished expectations because we fear
failure, the more failure we guarantee. In the end, our
expectations — like our fears — manage us.

We cannot continue to expect our digital communications
technologies to compensate for relationships that simply
don’t exist, because business describes much more than
commerce. Business describes relationships, and the
relationships in our lives describe how and where and
with whom we spend our time. Our relationships shape our
expectations, which then return to shape our relation-
ships. In recent years, however, our relationships with
others have been truncated by the sheer time and resources
we devote to our relationships with digital media
technologies. The quality of our relationships and the
level of our expectations suffer commensurately. It’s
time for agencies and advertisers to get real with them-
selves and walk their respective relationship talk.

The only real antidote to diminished expectations in the
digital age is to exchange the emotional desolation of
scale for the intimacy of human contact, one voice or one
face at a time. Don’t look for quick and easy ways to
expand your contact database; search instead for ways to
eliminate shallow, technology-driven relationships and the
massive overhead they incur. Accordingly, don’t manage
your relationships by email. Don’t manage them by text
message or tweet. Schedule some time to break bread with
your clients (or agency). Pick up the fucking phone before
you forget how to use it, before you forget the power of
your own voice, and before there is nothing left to manage
but managed forests.

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Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
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