Source: Facebook

QUESTION: “How did you come up with your company and product names?”

– Jean.

Company name: Reality by Chanting.

Product name: Oversing.

BRAND VALUE

Music. Dancing. Rythm. Joy. Stuff we do together. Moving together in a coordinated way. This is fertile territory for a brand, because it gives us material to work with in a space that is overly financial and deprived of all of those positive values. Current logo work uses a sort of hyper enthusiastic conductor haling to the throng. That’s where we going with it.

We don’t want to look like a dot bomb era ‘efficiency’ snake oil salesman. Efficiency is a chimera. Technology is something you keep pace with, not an advantage. But your company culture can be the asset second only to your customer base. And we understand that in a business where employees often feel like street walkers, that creating a joyous and familial culture is a competitive advantage that ‘s hard to duplicate.

TERMINOLOGY

Reality by Chanting and Oversing.

Both terms are forms of self-deprecating humor.

In effect we’re saying:

…”If your job is leadership, try not to take yourself too seriously – we just have a job, that job is to lead, and to lead by storytelling. Storytelling creates a mythology. A mythology is necessary for any culture, from the very great scale of a civilization to the small scale of a business, to the smallest scale of a family – to the philosophy we tell ourselves as our rules to live by.”…

But in the end, they’re just stories. We need stories and myths to help us choose in the face of incomplete information, many seemingly equal choices, and risk and uncertainty. By giving a people a set of myths, we make it very easy for them to make a lot of very small decisions that are so similar that they need ‘tie breakers’ in favor of a collective end. In this way, we ‘fund’ our civilization, company, family and selves, toward long term goals, at very little cost to us, because those goals are accomplished as a byproduct of focus on very ordinary ends. This is why cultural values matter. It’s how we work together at low cost to make great things happen. 🙂

OVERSING

“OverSing” is a colloquial african-american term from the music industry which refers to a vocalist who is trying too hard, beyond his or her ability, and usually shouting rather than singing – and perhaps losing his or her voice as a result. I like this term because it means you’re trying too hard.

Our product ‘Oversing’ tries to accomplish the goals of the owners and leaders of advertising, marketing, and technology firms, which are to steer their organizations to serve customers and do so profitably without having them resort to shouting – often uselessly. 🙂 This steering is easiest if you have a mythology. Our software doesn’t so much tell a story as show people repeatedly what’s really going on, and therefore steering them to do what’s good for the business as a byproduct of doing whatever else that tehy are doing. Think of it as accomplishing goals by raindrops rather than tidal waves.

REALITY BY CHANTING

“Realty by Chanting” is from the advertising business, but it’s origins are in the Marxist, Socialist, Progressive, Postmodernist ideological principle that if you repeat something often enough people will believe it – even if it’s obviously false. I like this idea because it is what philosophers, politicians, public intellectuals, marketers, CEO’s , Coaches, teachers and parents must do: create a cultural reality – cultural ‘values’ by chanting them until they are so pervasive that they become real to the people who hear them.

This is somewhat different from ‘the big lie’ which was popularized by George Orwell’s book 1984. Orwell took it from the progressives the progressives from the Nazis, and the Nazis from the Communists, and the Communists possibly from Nietzsche, but most likely from monotheistic religions leading back to Abraham and Zoroaster.

The idea is that for any lie to be believable it must be ‘big’, and the bigger the better. Because very popular, very big lies, have an air of legitimacy that satisfies our cognitive biases sufficiently to make us desire them to be true.

THE PREVENTION OF LIES AND THE CHANTING OF TRUTH

With Oversing we prevent lies – even big ones, and make them unnecessary. Oversing is a very transparent way of running your business. We tell everyone in the company the truth, and do it transparently. By doing this we undermine the political structure of bureaucracies that makes people in companies, particularly middle management, become self-serving rather than serve the interest of their peers and their customers. And by accident, then, they serve the business and it’s owners.

Not the other way around. 🙂

So yes, I put a little of my own nerdy philosophical humor into my company. It’s better than just combining random syllables. 🙂 That’s what we did the last time. And it was boring. 🙂

Curt Doolittle, Keiv