of cars racing around a noisy track in the expectation that a fiery, bloody catastrophe is just around the next bend. Harry Houdini drew crowd after crowd because the exhilarating pleasure of vicarious escape and transcendence was always counterbalanced by the possibility that this time—this time—Houdini would fail, fall to his death while escaping from the bonds that suspended him from the skyscraper or drown when he just couldn’t hold his breath long enough to get out of a locked trunk submerged in the murky, icy river. Or maybe Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers will finally trip and fall and break their necks tap dancing on some fantastically polished floor. Or the man on the flying trapeze—maybe he’ll fly off and end up in a broken and bloody heap. Or Blockbuster, or Tower Records, or Radio Shack, or the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, maybe these venerable institutions will take their eyes off the prize just long enough to be mowed down by new technology, new markets, new interests, or even animal rights activists. The brilliant singer-songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer—“Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell”—walked away from a successful career at the height of his popularity at the end of the 1960s. When asked why, he reportedly replied: “What good are laurels if you can’t rest on them?”
Tom Lehrer, who is a spectacular eighty-nine in 2017, may be quite happy today, and he may have been perfectly pleased for the last forty-seven or so years in which he was out of the public eye. As he put it on the liner notes of a retrospective album released in 1997, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”23 But most people, most business owners, CEOs, and shareholders cannot content themselves with such rewards. The harsh reality is that in business or magic or any reasonably high-stakes endeavor, you are either on the attack as an insurgent, or on the defensive as an incumbent—you are either rebooting your aspirations, or you are not. The truth is incumbents who rest on their laurels typically end in obscurity. (When is the last time you even thought about the once-ubiquitous Circuit City?)
It’s no accident that history’s greatest magicians—Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Howard Thurston, Harry Houdini, Max Malini, Harry Blackstone, Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Jeff McBride, David Blaine, Criss Angel—never stopped acting like underdogs, and never stopped rebooting their own aspirations. They performed as insurgents, even after they were universally acclaimed as “forever” among the greats. They continued or continue to cut new paradigms by carving out their own territory, often playing by their own rules, and by doing so, continually fulfilling their audiences’ highest aspirations.
As for brands and businesses, God help you if you are playing by incumbent rules without the incumbent’s balance sheet. For the harshest of harsh reality is that for every Netflix or Uber, there are eight start-up flameouts. While there is magic in insurgency, there are no miracles.
That 8-to-1 failure rate has held true for many years. Eight out of ten start-ups fail. Period. Council on Foreign Relations military historian Max Boot, in his incredible book Invisible Armies, delivers a scorecard for global political and military insurgencies since 1775. The stats? Sixty-three percent failed. As with escaping from a Water Torture Cell for a living, revolution is risky business.
Failure, by the way, need not be abject, let alone final. Even in failure, insurgent brands can change markets and fulfill aspirations. They often lead or empower others to more successful developments. For example, David Morey’s and Scott Miller’s company was advising board members and top executives of Deja.com, a promising newsgroup and product review service in 2000—the year that saw the tech bubble burst. Time ran out for the terrific CEO Tom Phillips, who the Internet Capital Group had sent in to rescue the company—unfortunately, a few months too late. We found ourselves helping Tom with the mundane but morose details of renting out the company’s office space and selling off its used furniture and supplies. One day, Tom called with a final, brighter note: “I was able to sell the software,” he told us.
“That’s terrific. Who bought it?”
“A little company called Google.”
Silly name! Hard as it is to believe, Google was pretty much a start-up in 2000. In his classic 1782 eyewitness commentary on America at the close of the American Revolution, Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur describes the first frontier settlers, the backwoods pioneers, as “a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years the most respectable army of veterans which came after them.”24 “Forlorn hope” is eighteenth-century military jargon for the advance guard or shock troops, who are calculatedly sacrificed to secure a position for the main body of soldiers in a major attack or invasion. Crèvecoeur uses the term to define the semi-barbaric state of the first pioneers, who chose to live far from established civilization and were therefore lost to civilization in the very process of securing the frontier for the expansion of civilization. The sacrifice of such pioneers is real and maybe even tragic, yet it makes possible the spread of civilization into the unknown. It makes possible the growth of a revolutionary nation. Think of the Internet flameouts like Deja.com, Napster, or Netscape, all of which faded or failed entirely, as the “forlorn hope” whose sacrifice enables the transformation of a revolutionary wilderness into a viable marketplace for even more revolutionary and insurgent businesses. Those flameouts light the fires of change.
It used to be that the big market leaders competed only with other big market leaders. It was incumbents versus incumbents; superpowers versus superpowers. And they played by clearly understood rules. Sure, there was competition, and there were the occasional Pepsi Challenges or guerilla campaigns, but even those were played according to the well-understood rules of incumbent engagement. The campaigns may have been insurgent, but the war itself was strictly conventional. Today, to believe that insurgent brands will play by traditional market rules is to believe that ISIS will adhere to international law and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules to boot. Insurgent brands hold the cards today, and they shuffle the deck.
Magic Lessons From the “Founder/Performer” CEOs
Magic legends such as Robert-Houdin, Thurston, Houdini, Malini, Blackstone, Henning, Copperfield, Burton, McBride, Blaine, and Angel call to mind the recent and current crop of Founder CEOs, such as Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, all of whom have literally invented new industries. The success of these magicians as well as the Founder CEOs is based on five strategic drivers:
1.Discovery: Allowing early fans—early adopters—to find your brand themselves, on their own aspirational terms, and then
to harness the most powerful marketing force on earth: word
of mouth.
2.Craft: Today, millennials are leading U.S. business trends, both in the B2C and the B2B marketplace. Millennial consumers expect products to be as simple and as natural as possible. They demand what you might call “Honest Farmer” quality, just as they expect their favorite performers to be totally real, honest, and genuine.
3.Authenticity: Truth is the best propaganda. Brands must be transparent and aligned in terms of message throughout their development, packaging, distribution, placement, promotion, and pricing. Similarly, great performers show their true colors in every small detail on stage. Any deviation dilutes the brand’s power and meaning, and any differentiation must be relatable, credible, and simple.
4.Founder/Visionary Narrative: Consumers these days
associate new products with individual entrepreneurs and passionate visionaries. They want to know their “story,” especially the parts that explain why they developed their product, for whom they developed their product, and what marketplace “pain” it is designed to relieve. Today’s audiences are looking for the story that explains who the performer or the product is, what it (she/he) does, and how it (she/he) is different, special,
