B2B Marketer
Issue No. 45 - Feb/March 2009
Beware of the “smartest guy in the room”
by Kimon Lycos
Everyone loves an expert. I certainly do. When I’m taking my car in for repairs, getting a job done around the house or using an accountant to do the tax thing every year, I rejoice in the fact that there is someone smarter and better than I am in a special field of knowledge that leaves me to crack on with the stuff I’m good at. It’s a comfort to know there are people dedicated singlemindedly to a task because naturally if you spend all your time in one special area of expertise you would have to be pretty damn good.
This is true for all experts, in all fields except for volcanologists. I’m thinking of that earth burp, known as Mount St Helens back in 1980. The experts said not to worry, let’s evacuate people to a distance of 13 kilometres into a “safe” zone. There was just the small issue that the experts’ only knowledge base was Hawaiian volcanoes, which have open craters to erupt in a violently controlled manner.
Mount St Helens was a completely different kettle of fish: no open vent, and even when a massive bulge appeared on the northern flank no one except for a chap called Jack Hyde pointed out how nasty it could be. Jack was not a part of the “expert” panel, so his voice was not heard at the time. What came next was the world’s greatest landslide, which screamed at 250km/h down the mountain, carrying enough material to bury Manhattan to a depth of 120 metres. Then came the main show: an explosion equivalent to 500 atomic bombs which burst from that bulge the experts considered “insignificant”. It killed people up to 30km away.
There are experts in other fields who also get it wrong, such as (pause for effect), digital media people.
In fact some are so far off the pace they don’t even have a proper title; at least volcanologists have that much going for them.
The real issue is, when a digital media expert talks about B2B, are they expert about B2B? They could be a genius with digital media in B2C, ...
