Each day, it seems, that I continue the self-taught business education that I'm going through right now, is another day I learn about yet another useless bullshit buzzword in the world of business, invented by shysters and embraced by millions of incompetent middle-management fucks, all as a way of pretending to their bosses that they're doing their jobs, without having to actually do their jobs. I mean, just take two of the hottest business buzzwords these days, CRM and SEO, for concrete examples of what I'm talking about.

CRM stands for "customer relationship management," and is a relatively new topic in business, spurred by what you and I can both see going on in the world around us - namely, that more and more customers are getting more and more pissed off at companies, and that companies are losing more and more money by not addressing this anger. The idea itself is sound, and is one of the principles off which my own business plan is based, for this arts center here in Chicago I'm trying to open these days; that our society is rapidly moving out of the Industrial Age, which inspired the business practices most companies currently have, and that we are moving into an Information Age (or Service Age, or Customer Age, or whatever you want to call it). In this new age of ours, customers aren't satisfied simply by having access to inexpensive crap that they can buy anytime they want, like they were a hundred years ago. In an age like we live in now, where virtually everything is for sale to every customer on the planet, 24 hours a day, all of it at least of decent quality and at a decent price, what customers now cherish is the relationship they have with a company. Is that company addressing that customer's needs? Is it acknowledging customer gripes, and resolving them in a timely manner? Is it offering customized deals and sales to customers, based on their past buying habits, tailoring the advertising exactly to what that customer might exactly be looking for the most?

Like I said, I think this is a solid theory about the world in which we currently live, and even my own arts center is going to be unusually focused on topics like these - on what our customers are saying, what they're bitching about, how we can change the things they're bitching about, how we can bother them with advertising as little as possible, while making those advertisements as useful as possible to that individual person. And I in particular believe in what such smarties as Suzanna Ruboff, Douglas Atkin, Seth Godin and others say about the subject - that it starts with a fundamental shift at the base level of the company itself. For a company to truly shift into an entire new paradigm, these people argue, the company itself needs to be built from the ground-up in a new way: marketing suddenly becomes the responsibility of every employee, not just the marketing department; as much time needs to be devoted to customer calls and emails as any other in-house administrative duty; the head of the company himself has to come down to the level of the "common people," not accept salaries that are 1,000 percent higher than the lowest-paid employee, not ensconce himself in an untouchable ivory conference table.

But with the business world being what it is, of course, this is not how most companies are implementing such measures; instead, most of them are simply creating a new department called "Customer Relationship Management" (or the aforementioned CRM), setting up a new wing of cubicles, and slapping the whole thing onto the top of the Industrial-Age business model that is still driving their company. Instead of actually listening to their customers, instead of actually changing their practices to reflect this new paradigm shift, most companies are instead getting obsessed with CRM software systems - automated, regulated programs that are supposed to keep you in better touch with who your customers are and what they want.

I mean, Jesus, talk about missing the point about as severely as one can. (Which, by the way, reminds me of the joke we always use to say in college when making fun of a clueless person - "What? Freddy Mercury's gay?") The entire point of CRM theory is that things have to be done differently, in a profound and fundamental way, for companies to survive and thrive in this new Age we're moving into; instead of corporate workers getting trapped in this insular cubicle environment, spending all their time back-biting their co-workers and shoring up their job security with fake accomplishments, they should instead actually be getting out there in the trenches - reading blogs, taking turns on the help line, calling pissed-off customers personally, doing actual concrete things to resolve the problems their customers are having. Instead, though, you're just seeing more of the same from most companies, even when trying to implement something like CRM - an obsession with buying the exact right $2,000 piece of software to actually track customers, an obsession with being the first employee in your cubicle group to find that exact right $2,000 piece of software. None of these companies are actually doing the thing that customer-relationship management calls for; you know, creating a relationship with your customers. Instead we simply see more of the siege mentality that marked the Industrial Age, and the thing that is making these companies have more and more problems in the first place - this idea that the main point of your corporate job is to protect your corporate job, by being the one with the most completed action items on your to-do list, so that your ignorant supervisor will assume that you're the most valuable employee he has.

And then of course there's SEO, which may be even more ridiculous than CRM - it stands for "Search Engine Optimization," and is solely the struggle to get your company's name to appear nearer the top of the page during a Google search. Do you have any idea how many billions of dollars companies are spending these days on SEO? Did you know that an entire new job class has appeared in the last few years for SEO? That there are now corporate executives getting paid $100,000, $200,000 a year, to do nothing but figure out how to get their company's name listed a little higher on the page during Google searches?

Now, don't get me wrong - SEO is certainly a valid thing for a company to be thinking about, and certainly can be the cause of increased revenue for a company. But man, talk about proof that most companies didn't learn a single fucking lesson from the Dot-Com Years, and are more than happy to just throw insane amounts of money at things that really don't matter that much in the overall scheme of things. Remember when companies were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy specific URLs for their websites? Remember when all these companies thought that having a website address like 'Pets.com' was going to be the single thing to make them a huge success?

Granted, something like SEO obsession might not seem that important to you as a customer at first. "Why not let those idiots obsess over Google searches?" you might ask. But see, you need to ask yourself a follow-up question - where do you think these companies are getting this insane amount of money? That's right, they're getting it from you - they're getting it by increasing the prices of their products, by cutting back on customer support, by laying off employees, by basically fucking you over as much as possible, in the hopes that you'll just sit there and keep taking it without complaint, just like you've been doing for the last hundred years.

Imagine that a company you interact with suddenly was given an extra million dollars out of the blue. Where as a customer would you most want to see this money spent? Wouldn't it be great if they suddenly had an extra 100 support specialists? 100 more phone lines? A decrease by half of how much time you spend on hold? Employees who actually know what they're talking about?

Unfortunately you're not getting any of these things from most companies these days, even though an increasing amount of them are acknowledging that this is exactly what needs to happen. And that's unfortunately because of a problem that I don't think is ever going to go away - because the vast majority of human beings on this planet are complete morons, much more concerned with shoring up their own job security than actually helping customers. And so things are going to continue being the same at most of these places, as long as the people at the top of the pyramid are still basing job security on Industrial-Age criteria, as long as they're not literally forcing their employees to develop a new mindset about it all, a new way to judge how effectively they're doing their jobs. And as someone who knew almost nothing about business a year ago, and is rapidly learning new things with each new day, I'm simply amazed by how many companies manage to actually stay in business with such a group of incompetent fucks at the helm. It's astounding sometimes, I think, just how many companies out there are making money in spite of themselves, how many are just coasting along on the fumes of this outdated Industrial-Age business model. The revolution's coming, people (the customer revolution, that is), and the next twenty years of our lives are not going to be pretty ones - we're in store, in fact, for a change in the business world more profound than anything seen since the late 1700s, when our society switched from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age to begin with. There are millions upon millions of business executives who don't seem to understand this; and I'll be the first one, frankly, to be standing at that guillotine and laughing my ass off, when it comes time for heads to roll.

Of course, not every new buzzword in the business world is bullshit; for example, I've recently been reading up on this hot new topic called GTD, which stands for "Getting Things Done," which is looking so smart and intriguing to me that I think I'm actually going to try it out. (And yes, I can already hear the sound of my business readers rolling their eyes and saying, "Oh Lord, Pettus is going to turn into one of those GTD weirdos.") But I'm almost out of space today, so the full GTD explanation will have to wait until tomorrow.

Regular readers will of course know that I spent last week telling tales of GALLERIA, a student-run arts center I started and ran in college, and which inspired a lot of the lessons I'm now applying to this new big-budget center I'm trying to open in Chicago these days. (There are still more tales to tell, by the way; I'm sure I'll be getting around to these last stories later this week.) And look how smart my readers are! One of them actually added up the years I was talking about and the age I mentioned I was at the time, and wrote with what they thought was a mistake - that it seemed I was saying I was 20 years old when I started my senior year in college.

Well, it's no mistake - I actually was 20 when I started my senior year in college. And this gets into something that I barely ever mention in even my personal real-world life, and certainly never talk about here at my web journal, which is that I have a whole background as a "gifted" child - I was labeled a "prodigy" at a very, very young age, was skipped grades, was put into accelerated learning programs, and all the rest of the bullshit that comes with it all.

The reason I never talk about all this is that, for the most part, I've been spending my entire adult life trying to forget that I have this background, and have never really wanted others to know about it. The fact of the matter is that the entire concept of "gifted" children was a fairly new one in the early 1970s, when I myself went through the process, and there were a lot of theories back then about how to deal with such children that have turned out over time to have caused a lot more damage than they have good. It's my understanding that these theories have changed over the decades, and that such children are now dealt with in a much better way; but unfortunately these people didn't come to these new theories until trying out the old ones on me and others like me, and realizing that the theories were wrong after watching our lives go to complete shit.

It's all way too complicated to get into here, but let's just say that the entire process inspired me by the age of 14 or so to never want another person to know about this background of mine again; to just lead a normal life, in other words, one where I wasn't considered "special" by the people around me, or to deal with all the inflated expectations adults put on gifted children. All I wanted to do was just be like everyone else - to have a normal job, a normal spouse, a normal life. And so when it came time to head off to college, where no one actually knew that I had this background, I was determined that no one new would ever learn about this background either.

One of the things, though, that I was forced to confront last year, when first making the decision to change careers, is that I'm not a normal person, and I will never live the kind of normal life that most others do. I mean, shit, I'm 36 years old right now, and I still don't have anything even approaching the kind of life most 36-year-olds have, and the chances are looking likely that I never will.

So, for the first time in my life, I've decided to instead embrace this difference about me - to acknowledge that I'm smarter than 98 percent of all human beings out there, to acknowledge that I can come up with ideas and understand concepts in a way that most other humans never will. I have to do this, frankly, to pull off this idea I have for my arts center - it is admittedly a much more complicated thing than most arts centers in history have been, will require an insane amount of intelligence and patience to pull off, and directly relies on my ability to convince others that I'm an expert at what I do.

If I'm going to do this career change the right way, I need to do it from the ground up - and that includes finally acknowledging things about myself that I've never wanted to. So - I admit now that I'm a freak. I acknowledge that I will most likely never have a personal life that even remotely resembles the personal lives of most other humans - with the spouse and the kids and the mortgage and the normal job and all the rest, which are all things that I spent decades of my life pretending that I could have. I acknowledge that I will never have these things, and that I wouldn't actually be happy anyway even if I could achieve these things. And all of this is simply yet one more reason I have confidence that I'll be able to pull off this arts center of mine, actually get it financed and open and ready for business. It's not a particularly pretty thing to have to admit about yourself, that's for sure - but it's true nonetheless.