So, perhaps it’s through kismet that I received a message this week from an individual who says she represents the Loblaw organization, and – hark! – she cries out plaintively for Nino’s legendary assistance in bringing renewed zing, pep and moxie to the tired old retailer. And I would love to help, not just out of nostalgia, or because I smell a robust payday, but because Loblaw is a storied name in Canadian merchandizing that could surely use a healing touch. Why, then, does it occur to me that I’d be smart to take a pass on this kind invitation?

I have my reasons. One is that this is a family-controlled business, run by a bright-eyed heir, name of Skippy Dauphin, Jnr., or something like that. I understand from mutual friends that Skip is a keenly well-intentioned laddie-buck, who inevitably would have found success on his own, even sans silver spoon: say, if he had been raised by a single-mum crack-addict in an Etobicoke housing project and his driver’s licence read plain old Hooper J. Needleman. Could be. Fate is fate, but, facts are facts, and instincts tell me that “induced change” never rhymes with “dynastic organization.”

Which is exactly not what consultants are supposed to do and say in these situations, when the HR emissaries show up pleading. You’re intended to ink the pact, pocket the mazuma, make tracks to the off-site, spin the yarns raconteur-style, give the Skipmeister and his entourage plenty of propers and a big wide-berth, sip the yoghurt smoothies and guffaw winningly, avoiding any impulse to bray. Always remember, you consultants: Guffaw, don’t bray.

Yet on this occasion, some invisible dread is holding me back. Perhaps it’s that innocuous comment buried in the invitation, where it explains, “We have a roadmap in place, we’ve committed the resources and we’re hiring the best to make it happen. It’s more than just talk.” Why say that? Doesn’t everyone know that whenever the phrase “It’s more than just talk” is dropped, the instant assumption is that whatever is being discussed is always less than mere idle chatter, and more than a fragrant accumulation of hyperbole? (And as for “hiring the best,” let us not operate under unsustainable illusions. When they say “best,” they of course mean, in Toronto idiom, “borderline adequate.” They don’t want the best. The best are all out making actual money in growth industries down in Contra Costa county. The grocer-dudes can’t even come within proximity of affording the best — and if they could, the experience would unnerve them to the core, causing them to question the very existence of man, god and reality.)

Former groceteria pitchman Dave Nichol

Or, possibly, my new friends at Loblaw are just shy, awkward senior executives uncertain of the language and protocol one uses when reaching out to an accomplished change-agent. Who is to judge? I’ve already witnessed, from a safe distance, various epochs in the Loblaw Saga, including the rise and collapse of Dave Nichol, the telegenic ex-CEO who swiped the Trader Joe’s business plan, and used it to promote his own fleshy punim on television. Trader Joe, a once-obscure chain of quirky upscale convenience stores, has now broken out of its regional base and is now one of the hottest brands in retail. The Trader, owned by Germany’s Aldi, is ferociously duking it out against Fresh & Easy, a start-up just launched in the US southwest by the UK’s Tesco. Loblaw’s management must be watching these developments with much confusion, because both the Trader and F&E represent everything the Canadian colossus can’t provide: a customer-centric experience that shoppers don’t merely endure, but love. Whole Foods Market attempts to provide consumers with the same fillip, but fails, by dint of their high prices and systemic elitism. In contrast, shopping at Trader Joe’s is almost akin to spending some time at a block party in a funky neighbourhood, right down to the proffered cheap wine and tiny snack crackers. Shopping at Whole Foods, on the other hand, is like agreeing to show up for services at your girlfriend’s parents’ evangelical mega-church: okay for some, I can see, but get me out of here now.

At the opposite pole-end is the act of purchasing provisions from a big-box retailer, such as Wal-Mart or Costco, which can only serve to remind you that you’re poor, and the world hates you. What else to read from the expressions on the faces of the beaten-down dads pushing their carts through the gray Costco bunker? “If we didn’t have all you kids, I wouldn’t be here buying crates of off-brand macaroni. I’d be spending my cash on golf, nookie, and a decent car.” Costco members pay fifty bucks a year to belong to this brotherhood of the punched-out and puzzled, and to share the wafting scent of roasting poultry and dashed dreams.

Somewhere in between these extremes is Loblaw, along with their cookie-cutter competition, which goes by the names of Metro, or Sobey’s (or Safeway, in western Canada.) Loblaw is the sector leader, which means they are always the first to install a section of bulk pet foods, Taiwanese-sourced ladies’ fashions, and last season’s video rentals, and first to remove the untouched displays a few months later. The company is driven by fickle investors and indifferent customers, and staffed by unionized employees who are quite understandably only thinking about the coming weekend.

The corporate vision? That would be to send someone into Wegman’s in Rochester a couple of times a year (or anywhere else where they appear to know what they’re doing), have them take some clandestine mobile-phone pix, and pass them over to the creative team, with no degree of urgency.

Did I mention Fresh & Easy? Stale and Mediocre are plenty good enough for Canada’s corporate heroes, just as long as you remember to pronounce those words as “Innovative and Excellent” — and provided that the share price stays north of 40.

It’s a lot to take in, but finally we’re faced with the question we’d hoped to avoid: What can Nino offer to alter the DNA of these sad-sacks? Well, we would first need to instruct them regarding that crazy new thing called Fun — a double-edged concept that, placed in the wrong hands, can become extremely dreary and dangerous. But assuming that this highly irregular idea of Fun sinks in, we’d need to move quickly through other notions that enhance the service function, such as civility, passion, imagination, modishness, and communality. I’m practically worn out already, just contemplating all the required explaining.

I see myself standing before the management team, blue in the face, yapping about the “groovy loos” on Virgin Atlantic Airlines, and articulating the need for non-disgusting toilet facilities. I picture the blank stares as I describe my idea of getting customers and employees together to pay $20 each for the opportunity to take a sledgehammer to the despised self-service checkout counters (under supervision, in an isolated area of the parking lot, for benefit of the nightly TV news, all proceeds contributed to Habitat for Humanity.) I envision the nervous chin-rubbing around the boardroom table, when I begin to talk about hiring “Culinary Champions” for each store, to toil alongside the stockroom drones, butchers, and bag-boys.

And then I find myself getting all itchy and scratchy, having become bored with the entire project before it has even begun. Just the momentary thought of Loblaw’s, and the attendant stuck-in-the-’80s color-scheme, sounds and aromas, is dull enough to make anyone think they’ve reverted to bored-out-of-gourd childhood. Thanks and good luck, but this gig’s not for Nino.

Any amount for vanity, but nothing for the poor. That ain't beautiful

I took a meeting last week with the operator of a regional chain of medical spas, who was all het up over the proposed five per cent tax on cosmetic procedures Obama wants to use to pay for treating the poor. The spa guy caught me at a bad time, I fear.

Up in Canada, where Nino is currently billeted, we pay an unlucky 13 per cent sales tax on practically everything — except the bottle of house wine with lunch, which is taxed at 15 per cent. Come next July, the tariff will extend, for the first time, to all manner of everyday necessities including the roof over your head, to personal sanitation items (don’t make me list them), and even to other government-established tariffs, such as postage stamps. It’s outrageous, and polls make clear that 75 per cent of the population is opposed to broadening the tax, but because it’s Canada, and everyone is distracted by the hockey season, the government feels free, as ever, to ignore the citizens’ wishes.

So, did I want to hear this smug provider of wrinkle treatments kvetch because his clientele of wealthy Sybarites don’t want to toss in a lousy couple of hundred bucks on top of the cost of their twice-annual liposuction? Plainly, I did not. But I summoned up tsking noises at the appropriate times, and performed a pantomime approximation of an able young consultant who truly gives a hoot.

“Tax cosmetic medical procedures?,” my spa man railed on and on. “Why negatively impact something that helps so many Americans’ self-esteem, confidence, and health — especially during this recession?”

I shook my head sympathetically, exactly the way you’d want your trusted advisor to do. However, the honest answer was on the very tip of my tongue. You would tax cosmetic procedures to recover a portion of the public funds used to subsidize the education of the greedy quacks who attended state-run medical schools, and then abandoned treating sick people to concentrate their efforts on a bunch of rich, vain, selfish fucks. That would be one reason.

Another might be that if you aren’t prepared to give healthcare coverage to the nice woman who cleans your office each day, and her children, she’s liable to come down with some pretty nasty infections, and one of those pathologies might decide one day to take a shine to you. Cheaper in the long run just to look after your less-healthy neighbors, rather than run the risk of inadvertently swallowing their germs. Why is that so hard to fathom?

My spa man’s venting against what he kept calling the Bo-tax (clever wordplay involving the Botox trademark, geddit?) was merely a break from the bid’ned at hand, which was him briefing me on a potential project. He desired Nino’s insights into the psychology of his core demographic. How long will the Boomers continue to want their folds and creases ironed out, their peaks and valleys flattened, some unconvincing semblance of artificial vitality injected into their eyeballs? How long, o wise Nino?

After Nathaneal, every day is the day of the locusts

FACT: Some assignments are bound to be more interesting than others, and if you hope to keep jogging in place as a consultant you’d better learn some tact at a respectable finishing school. I know that. But, to paraphrase Nathaneal West, how do you countenance the truly hideous? In my imagination, I saw a yappy Republican mom shaking her jowls in complaint over the pittance of a Bo-tax added to her tab, even as the swarm of white-coated technicians were pumping last month’s cheesecake out of her tush. Naturally, I caught myself wincing. Spa man wondered what was wrong.

Does the name Hilarió Cudeña Simon ring a bell?, I asked.

“Can’t say that it does.”

I think he’s someone you’re going to want to talk to, I said. Worldwide expert. I think your project may be more up his alley than mine. Top man. Works out of Peru. Someone worth getting to know, maybe worth going down to see.

“How do you spell that name?” And lickety-split I was back in the airport lounge, waiting for Air Canada to show up and take me home, fretting over my St. Pauli Girl. It had been stupid of me to recommend Señor Simon, on more than one count. First of all, I’d never met the man, and was aware of him only from a recent article in the London Guardian. Second, and more serious, the cops were after El Simon, according to the newspaper. Heading the investigation is Eusebio Felix Murga, police chief in the Dirincri prefecture. Chief Murga believes Señor Simon is the kingpin of a local enterprise — and here I will quote directly from the news account, which I had earlier torn out and placed in the pocket of my suit jacket — “that allegedly killed people and drained fat from their corpses for use in cosmetics.”

I’m a consultant, and I’ve been successful in this gig for a long time now. The first three rules in my trade are, in reverse order of importance: don’t judge your clients; don’t screw up your reputation; don’t ever leave your fee on the table. Here, I had gone and broken all three rules. This makes me look very bad, and I shouldn’t even be telling you about it. However, there is an important point I’m attempting to convey, although in doing so I already regret having shared this particular example to illustrate my point.

The point is this: Having principles will become increasingly important in the future. I don’t care that my spa man engages in activities that some might not appreciate or understand. He recognized the value in what I have to offer, and that’s always been good enough for me. This time it wasn’t, because part of his raison d’être (which is the claim that he makes people feel good about themselves), happened to cross the line into something I could not accept (which was his tacit insistence that the less-fortunate have no worth, and don’t require any crumbs of consideration.)

I know that what I would describe as my principles can and will be interpreted by others as eccentric behavior. This could surely become the case if my almost-client should decide to hop on the Avianca jet, and somehow ends up trussed and upside-down while Señor Simon and his associates relieve him of his lipids, but hear me out. In an age when stupid, self-deluding opinions are regarded for categorization purposes as “information,” you can’t simply respond to every incoming byte of data. You need a moral compass. You’ve got to have a center. It can be poorly calibrated, or even faulty in its functioning, but it can’t not be there.

You need a tiny inner voice that says, “OK, one buck out of every seven (or every 20, if you’re especially lucky) I spend is being taken as sales tax by government thieves, but I guess it’s probably worth it not to have to live in a country where you can be grabbed off the streets, and slaughtered so that your fat can be used to make a premium line of cosmetics.” Look out, mama, should that internal interlocutor turn mute. Take heed of this possibility, fellow citizens, lest one day a hard-hearted entrepreneur, whilst literally rendering you into a pail, might admonish you that you’re interfering with the self-esteem, confidence, and health of your wealthier countrymen — especially during this recession.

—

(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”

Never mind the Bonos

If contemporary life was the same as the old Sonny and Cher TV show, which it isn’t, Cher would respond to this news by looking the audience in the eye, and growling, “Well, at least she doesn’t want to follow in her father’s high-heels,” while Sonny pretended to look mortified. It was that kind of show, sniggeringly written by Toronto’s own Frank Peppiat and John Aylesworth, and it was originally broadcast during those kinds of times, the smarmy kind. The Benny Hill kind.

Chastity Bono’s gender dysphoria, or any other aspect of her personal life, should interest none but the prurient. Ask around and most people will tell you they are great proponents of the philosophy of ‘To each his own’ — although that song was not recorded by Sonny and Cher, but, rather, the Ink Spots — and others will say they adhere to the principle of ‘Whatever floats your boat,’ which really should have been a Sonny and Cher tune, but instead is more probably a piece of dialog from one of Dutch Leonard’s novels.

Elmore: Still smoking

Leonard would have attributed the comment to one of his world-weary hookers-with-a-heart-o’-gold, someone who sees night-school accounting classes as a ticket out of the street life, and Hollywood, seeking a bankable old bawd for the part in the film version, would demand a Cher-type, although Cher herself would be unlikely to read for the role, not needing the exposure and currently lacking the audience Q factor, and Renee Russo is probably sick to death of those characters by now, so that leaves this entire project in exhausted limbo, which ultimately is where this long sentence has led.

All of which has little to do with Chastity Bono, the one-time moppet who was named for a failed movie that starred her parents, and now, tabloid reports would have us believe, prefers to be called Chaz. Whatever flips your bippy, observes Dan Rowan, another deadpan sarcastic TV star of the 1970s, and thus possibly the original role model for Cher.

A future written by Peppiat and Aylesworth

No, my surprise stems from the discovery that anyone who is more than 40 years old, as is Chastity Bono, would think there might be anything great about being a male over 40.

I think of someone in that demographic, and the first face that pops to mind is that of Senator John Ensign, the just-disgraced Nevada Republican, who combines the sort of extreme conservative morality one would associate with his party and his state, with the appearance of the actor who played J. Peterman on the Seinfeld show, and a soupcon, but not the full measure, of testosterone, which is to say that he appears to be a fairly typical middle-aged buffoon.

To hear the Ensign’s televised admission that he has been a ba-a-a-a-d boy with one of his office’s clerical girls is to shake your head at what it means these days to be a 40-plus man. And that is: Fearful denial of fading verve and desire; rage against the closing of all life’s possibilities, expressed through desperate, drunken impulse; followed by shame and remorse; then, begin again. Tragic, really. I hang my head to see what fools these mature menfolk have become.

I’ve been a feller for a good many years now, and I’ve determined that nearly all the laughs stop a few days after your 40th summer. To be a male aged over 40 is to be regarded with open pity or barely-tolerated amusement by younger women, and unbridled contempt or open mockery by females one’s own age and older, notably one’s spouse, if one is lucky enough to be so accompanied. You learn to accept, with attempted grace, being nothing more than an object of strained tolerance, but no one who has a choice should really choose to put himself (or herself) through this.

Of course, Chastity — Chaz, as now — needn’t listen to my warnings. I’d instead steer him toward the sound counsel of another former moppet making his way in the new world, Mason Reese.

Mr. Reese, at a recent fan expo

Mr. Reese will be recalled as the odd-looking, gravel-voiced small boy of early-1970s television commercials, who later became a juvenile fixture on the Mike Douglas chat show. As a kiddo, young Master Reese’s claim to fame was that he looked like a scaled down middle-aged man: like a shrunken version of Lou Jacobi, without moustache, but wearing his mother’s go-to-church wig.

We used to speculate on what the future might hold for such a unique specimen. Exploited from birth for commercial gain, it seemed reasonable to think that the pitiable soul would one day want to make himself into something else. And who would have held it against him if he’d reinvented himself as a surgically redone pole-dancer at Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing club, or as yet another Utah-based serial-killer, or, as in the case of his somewhat better-remembered TV confrère Gary Coleman, as a professionally managed invitation for suburban hipsters to begin giggling now.

None of those obvious denouements for our Mason Reese. He has chosen to remain exactly the same as he ever was, against any and all reasonable odds. This one-in-a-million birth, who came squirming into the world with the appearance of a 40-year-old man, is evidently comfortable in his weird skin, having a hoot, and wishes to remain as same. Chaz, who we imagine would say she was born in the wrong body, wants to pay a team of doctors to transform her into… Mason Reese!

This stunning revelation calls for an examination of the available facts.

FACT: Gender dysphoria among North American females, also known as the desire to have a doctor get out the Krazy Glue and hang a schlong permanently between your legs, is an uncommon condition that often makes straight males just the tiniest bit queasy.
FACT: The rise of Internet-based ‘virtual communities’ continues to make gender and sexuality increasingly irrelevant in our culture and society, and if you believe that I’ve got some old stock in DrKoop.com that I’d like to sell you.
FACT: In just the time it has taken you to read the previous paragraph – ah, hell. That image of the doctor and the tube of Krazy Glue caused me to forget whatever it was I was just about to say.

The following is my recommendation to those of you gals aged 40 and over, who think that you may be suffering from gender dysphoria: Have a long afternoon nap, into the early evening. Go bowling, and order up a PBR during the third frame and then the seventh. Kill a little more time after the game by playing pinball. Get in the car, drive to Denny’s, sit at the counter and order up a bowl of chili and some toast. Try to get the waitress to refill your coffee cup by being nice to her — like that’s ever going to work! Scan the newspaper classified ads, looking for a clean used Triumph motorcycle. Wander down to the Goodwill store just before closing time, and check out the T-shirts, looking the ones with the funniest slogans. Go home and watch Keith Olbermann scream on television. Once you’ve completed this regimen several times, if you still think you may have symptoms of gender dysphoria, immediately contact a medical professional.

———
(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”

This made no sense to me, the real estate part, none whatsoever. Our pre-millennial hustle, the bright boys — and, yes, me too — was trying to extract large sums of money from shifty-eyed captains of bricks-and-mortar industry who justified handing over their shareholders’ wealth to guys like us, because these cap’ns convinced themselves they were buying the future.

Guys like us said, “Screw real estate, chief. We’re going to build a virtual money-making cyber-universe. Let’s you and me create a new paradigm together.” That’s what we said, alright.

We were audacious and then some, and the grey-haired men in the grey suits, the poor souls, wanted to be like us. We took their cash, kept it, and made them pose for grab-and-grin photos in the Wall Street Journal. That wasn’t even the worst of it. Just before the photographer arrived, we made them strip out of their Harry Rosen suits, two or three grand worth of fine tailoring at retail, and change into a ten-dollar blue denim workshirt — with the logo of our silly little dot-com stitched on the pocket. Some squawked more than others, but they all did it.

The adult always wears the tie. Remember this lesson; never forget it

The tight smiles of the old CEOs newly costumed for the revolution became a fixture on the front page of the all the newspaper business sections, that season. We allowed ourselves an entire evening of beers and peanuts to laugh about it, and the next morning we were back in the hunt for some more big game to bring down. I knew it had to be coming to an end when I saw a picture of lamentable Levin from tired-worn Time-Warner staring at the camera, wearing his just-out-of-the-package AOL shirt. The cutline should have read, “I have handed over tens of billions of dollars in cold, hard currency, and look what I got for it. This cool shirt. Ain’t I something?”

It had been barrels of yuks up to that point, but that was the uh-oh minute. It dredged up memories from the schoolyard, when your playground reign of terror against the smaller tots went one tot too far, and you messed with some little kid whose dad went bowling every weekend with the school principal. It was the nano-second of reckoning, and now there would be the devil to pay.

Among our crowd, many personal reinventions were to follow. Some dot-com billionaires became sports-team owners or full-time philantropists; others moved into their parents’ basement, or talked about entering divinity school. Most drifted into cubicles and assumed hum-drum lives, while others wrote exams and became licensed realtors in the Sunshine State. Hiya, Stan; hello, Jim. How are you guys liking this housing market meltdown? No, I didn’t think so.

A desirable neighborhood, 2009

Everyone remembers Will Rogers’ great line about the property market, but it usually gets attributed incorrectly to Kenny Rogers or Will Ferrell: “Buy real estate, ’cause they aren’t making any more.” Will Rogers was an inspired quipster, but when it came to the realty business, he was no Donald Trump. (You will add: And neither was Donald Trump. I won’t argue.) Just because Will Rogers didn’t foresee the consequences of the overdevelopment of the Florida condo market on a lunatic scale doesn’t mean he wasn’t good at other stuff, like being folksy and such. Meanwhile, there you had my Stanley and my Jimbo and too many others exactly like them, sinking their fortunes into disproving Rogers’ theory, all on borrowed money, naturally.

Did they slither out in time? Or are they trapped in Dade County Bankruptcy Court, with nary a six-year-old Kia Sorento to drive back to divorce court?

FACT: In just the time it has taken you to read the previous paragraphs — assuming you didn’t pause too frequently to cry out, “My lord, this fellow is filled with insights!” — property values in U.S. cities have fallen by $8,333,333.35, at the current rate of decline. That doesn’t sound too awful, until you consider that the cumulative figured added up to $1.46 trillion last year. Yes, that sounds much worse. Let’s try the next one.

FACT: In just the time it has taken you to read the previous paragraphs, including the one you just finished that also begins “FACT,” 139 American homes have been foreclosed. That’s 100,000 each month, or roughly the entire population of Gary, Indiana. Well, naturally “roughly.” This is Gary, Indiana, we’re talking about, a rough, tough berg — even if it did produce Michael Jackson, who got bamboozled in a property deal even before it became fashionable.

My point is that the real estate gold rush is kinda played out now, but Nino’s not here to tell you what you already know. That’s David Frum’s job, and he plans on keeping it for as long as there are media outlets to convey drivel, which should be another month, or six.

Well, screw newspapers, chief. Today, I’m going to give you something more valuable than a roof over your head and a dry place to keep your stuff, something greater even than Kenny Rogers’ wisdom of knowing when to fold ‘em and when to fluff ‘em. I’m going to give you… the future.

And here it is, in just four words. Engery Conservation Technology Consultant.

Call your printer, and tell him to put those four words on your new business card, make sure he’s spelled them properly, because he’s probably an uneducated former marketing executive who took his package upon being tossed out of P&G or Chrysler and bought an AlphaGraphics franchise — and you’ll sail through the Obama years without a care.

That’s not just my opinion. As a visionary accredited by the North American Council of Consultant Futurists, a body I have the honor of planning to create, it`s my prediction. Thank you, and we’ll see you in the future.
———
(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”

—

I’ve probably never told you about the time I was trapped for a week in a Marriott filled with management consultants, and there was nothing you could do to get rid of them. Jump into the sauna for a schvitz, and there you’d have two hairy old consultants wheezing about how saunas clear out all the toxins from your system and leave you better able to do your consulting. Sit around the lobby behind a potted palm, inobtrusively reading the Racing Form, and some comely red-haired lady-consultant is sure to interrupt and say, “Well, hello, there. I happen to do a little consulting for my client, the state racing commission, and who do you like in the third at Hialeah?” Go for a walk around the block to settle down, and you’ll see consultants leaning on every lamppost, swinging their purses or their keychains, calling you “sailor” and asking you if you’d like to go have a good time consulting someplace.

Cain, raising thoughts about the last Great Depression

It reminds me of the scene depicted in James M. Cain’s Depression-era noir yarn The Postman Always Rings Twice, where a character hears that his married lover’s husband is a Greek who operates a diner. Ain’t that something, the boyfriend says, because he also runs a diner. He observes, and I paraphrase: “The whole goddamn country is selling hot-dogs to each other.” That was during the last Great Depression. The one we’re just entering now will be marked by the whole goddamn country selling consulting services to each other.

But you won’t hear Nino complaining. That’s my bailiwick, consulting — and it’s said that I’m crackerjack.

If you’re looking to hire a top-notch fellow with sterling references and a stellar reputation, and you’ve got the dough-re-mi to cover my per diem and expenses, just e-mail me a briefing document and a flight number, and I’m your boy. The rap against those in my line of work, especially the glossily turned-out MBA doofuses from the big multinational consultancies, is that you pay them outlandish sums of money, and they tell you precisely what you want to hear. Nice work if you can get it, but that ain’t my bag. I’m one of those contrarians that you’ve read about. If I think you’re on the wrong track, I’ll say so. And, by the way, get rid of that piece of spinach hanging from your bottom incisor; no charge for the last recommendation.

Buy one of these ties and help cancer research, can'tcha?

It’s true that every once-in-a-blue-moon I’ll end up with a client that doesn’t like my message — or, on even more rare occasions, one that objects to my straight-shooting style, or perhaps my Jimmy Fund necktie (pictured right.) I recall one heavyset lad, a physician and medical industry executive, as it happens, who looked over his half-rim reading glasses and took exception to something I’d said, or written, or done, or appeared to be thinking. Being a healer and man of science, he was naturally the kind that threatens not to pay. Dr. Joe Something-or-other. Didn’t even give him the opportunity to stand outside his office sputtering. Got a cab to the airport, and haven’t been back to Louisville ever since.

FACT: According the US Department of Labor, there were will be 827,000 management analysts in the year 2016, which represents a 22 per cent increase from 2006. To quote a government report, this growth is occurring “much faster than the average for all occupations, as industry and government increasingly rely on outside expertise to improve the performance of their organizations.” Yeesh. That’s more consultants than there are current residents of the nation of Fiji, which is an archipelago of more than 300 islands with a total area of 7,050 square miles. You will ask: Where are we going to put all these consultants? Forget Fiji, tempting though it would be to relocate all management analysts and others who fall under SOC code 13-1111 to that distant land (beginning, I suggest, with Malcolm Gladwell, who could don a ceremonial sarong before ruling his minions.) Yes, forget Fiji. It’s already occupied, reportedly with Fijians, and the explosive population growth among Yankee consultants would make annexation a temporary solution at best.

North America is played out; no sense running your consultancy here. The money’s all been transferred to the oil-producing regions — and it isn’t coming back, unless it’s to buy luxury boxes for the Super Bowl one weekend, and even that seems doubtful. You may wish to continue scrapping for crumbs with 826,999 other sharp-elbowed purveyors of business wisdom, but you’d carry around the same odds as a Mumbai rag-picker determined to find a certain style of pearl earrings.

What to do? The answer lies inside the very term consultant: go con the sultan.

My advice to Skip and to other ambitious young Americans with similar nicknames (that’s you, Chip and Biff, Rusty and Hap), is Go East. Go hustle some Arabian potentate who may be persuaded to spread a portion of his wealth in order to benefit from your can-do insights. Just add that one phrase “International” to your business card, and suddenly things will look a whole lot brighter: both for you, and for those of us who are stuck in long leases on our office space and can’t get any more credit from the printer to make up some new cards.

(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”

No, my friends, Nino is no tall-hatted soothsayer, no spoon-bending mentalist performing stunts for the amazement of your Kiwanis gathering. Quite the opposite. I’m about demystifying what’s next — about creating a seamless transition from Now to Then.

My clients, who are largely Fortune 500 companies and leading educational institutions, properly regard me as an Agent of Change. In that role, you might say I’m one part yellow-jacketed realtor, and one part shifty-eyed travel agency owner, and my job is to ease your relocation between two distant psychological locales, into an entirely new paradigm. To complete this metaphor, let’s call your destination “Paradigm Estates” or, even better, “Paradigm Meadows,” and think of it as a desirable gated community, with shopping, and parkland, and a nearby cineplex with an adjacent TGI Friday’s, and, most importantly, room for you to grow.

Be very glad your head doesn't weigh as much as this famous author's, and therefore doesn't require constant propping-up

As such, I decry the lack of professionalism displayed by several of my so-called peers in the change-consulting business. It is not merely that their methods are often unsound and their deportment unseemly. I can live with the egg-yoke stains on their black turtlenecks, but I object to their insultingly bad PowerPoint presentations. You’re charging important clients perfectly good money, and the best you can do is fill the screen with dollar-store clip art that would have wowed your kid’s fifth-grade class, back in 2003. It’s jolly jokers like that — yes, I’m talking about you, Malcolm Gladwell! — who threaten to give Agents of Change a bad reputation.

FACT: In the short time it has taken you to read the last three paragraphs (excluding the first paragraph, which journalists call the “lede”), our planet has rotated approximately 80 kilometers. That’s roughly the distance you’d travel on a journey from San Diego, Calif. to Tijuana, Mexico and back — and then back into Tijuana a second time. To put things in greater perspective, a man making repeated trips back and forth across the international border into Tijuana for no apparent purpose would quickly arouse suspicion. And yet, most of us in our usual routines can routinely spend three minutes waiting to make a left turn out of the Starbucks parking lot, or repeating our order a third time to the barista at Starbucks, or exchanging saucy remarks with the new hire in Starbucks — and we’re oblivious to the world’s fast-paced movement.

With the exception of newscaster Lou Dobbs, whose eyeballs have likely exploded after reading about those hypothetical border crossings, most of us are content to let others worry about the spinning of the globe. We reason that if we can’t see it repeated endlessly on HDTV monitors, it can’t be happening.

Sweet Lulu: The man, the gasbag, and now the Syndrome

I refer to this as the “My God, Lou Dobbs Is an Idiot” Syndrome, after the famed CNN anchorman. What recommendations might I offer to Mr. Dobbs, and others who may share his propensity for obsessing over tiny outrages, real and imagined, while ignoring the larger implications of change?

I’d recommend a program I’ve created, called C-O-W, which is an acronym for the following action-items:

C: Cut out the cheesecake. Your cholesterol count has got to be through the roof, dad.
O: Outside with you; try going for a walk once and awhile instead of sitting on your duff and shrieking into a microphone.
W: Why don’t you try thinking, just one time, before running your mouth?

I’ve dedicated this program to Bart Simpson, that prototypal agent of change, who popularized the phrase “Don’t have a cow.” In this case, it’s alright. When you feel Dobbs Syndrome about to strike, go ahead and have this C-O-W.

See you in the future.

—

(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”

“Dear Nino,
I would like to get into a job like yours, wanted to know where do I start. I am in India, and there is very little people with such qualifications here.”

—

I’ll respond by citing one of Nino’s Six Principles for Fomenting Change: “In scarcity, there is opportunity. Learn the skill of transmuting nothing into something.”

You will think: This is a mere bromide. Nino is foisting off stuff he probably picked up from a box-set of Kung Fu episodes, if not from a fortune cookie, and he’s passing it along in a rather pathetic effort to seem profound.

FACT: In the context of a world made flat by technology and social tranformation, the trite often can’t be discerned from the meaningful. Ask David Frum (pictured below) about this. Besides which, inarguably there was some great dialogue in Kung Fu, which the effective manager will quickly learn to appropriate as a tactic for inspiring leadership… Grasshopper.

Where did you say this cat was Frum? Forest Hill Village, actually

Let me take a moment to delve deeper into Soumya’s inquiry.

He — quite reasonably — aspires to attain a job like mine, by which I assume he wants to become an Agent of Change. Soumya will recognize that currently there is no professional accrediting body for Change Agents (until I line up a couple of fellow experts and launch one; watch for details), and he probably also senses that the environment in which people in our line of work operate can be fertile for charlatans, many of them seedy and unfashionably dressed, not that I’m going to name any names. I like to say that when you unwrap the gift-box of change, you’d better be prepared for something unexpected to emerge — sometimes, teeth first.

I call this the “Ouch, Something Just Nipped Me on the Finger” Conundrum. Many of us, as we rush bleeding to the bathroom, only to discover that mom forgot to buy bandages, draw the wrong conclusion from such an traumatic episode. As a result, some will become averse to change. Thus begins the path backward. Within a predictable time-frame, humankind will respond to adversity with fear, and this leads to growing gills and crawling back into a primordial tidal pool. You can look that up in Wikipedia.

Psychologists refer to this process as “negative conditioning.” In reality, it’s seldom that change will occur without discomfort, if not intense pain. The good news is that pain is often the best teacher. It is one of the most effective pedagogical tactics I use when I conduct my training sessions and seminars across North America, according to feedback.

What advice would I offer to the well-intentioned young person such as Soumya, who wishes to embark on a new career as an Agent of Change? I’ll keep it simple. It comes down to just a few factors.

1. Take personal inventory. Ask yourself, “Knowing that the process of change will require me to to become another person altogether from the one I am now while I’m making this decisions, do I still wish to follow through — with the knowledge that the person I’m about to become may develop anger and one day want to throttle the person who made the choice to create the new me?” How did you answer? If you are prepared to accept the risk that change may bring, go on to the next decision-point.

2. Perform a skills self-appraisal. Determine if you have the educational background, personal characteristics, and deep reservoir of confidence you will need in order to undertake the work of Change Agent. (If you wish, I can send you a tool I’ve devised to assist in this exercise, at a very modest cost.)

3. Make a Commitment to Change, as a philosophy, not as a transitional state. In this age of a knowledge-based economy, it’s all about lifetime learning. Remember that there’s both a “know” and an “edge” in knowledge. There’s also a “ledge,” and that’s a very good place to crawl out on and threaten to jump from — but not for you, or your clients. That can only lead to the kind of change no one needs.

4. Find your passion. Introduce it to your joy. Make certain you’ve provided a proper introduction, and that the two at least seem to hit it off. If that is the case, then you have proven your worth as a facilitator, and the rest of your career fomenting change will be a breeze.

These fundamental rules should apply as well in Mysore as they do in Your-sore. Stick to them, and you’ll be buying a magnificent future as a Futurist.

—

(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”