business Archives - Wendy Cholbi

While kids across the country are trick-or-treating, SoCal natives are waxing nostalgic for the annual Oingo Boingo Halloween concert, which was a much-anticipated event every year until the band’s farewell in 1995.

(I’m a fairly recent transplant to southern California, so I didn’t live here during the heyday of live Boingo shows — I’m just a fan who’s happy to be able to experience their recorded music.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Oingo Boingo while driving across the desert at night. I was on the way home from a 24-hour visit to Las Vegas to hang out with some of the super-cool people who attended BlogWorld, so I was thinking about business, and blogging, and networking.

Naturally, I began to hear hidden messages in the music.

And I realized that Oingo Boingo had a lot to say about business.

So, for those who enjoy making intuitive leaps and listening to ’80s music (especially simultaneously), I present to you the five lessons of Oingo Boingo Business School.

And for everyone else? Happy Halloween!

1. Go ahead, rock that xylophone.

Oingo Boingo used lots of weird (for a rock band) instruments. Not just a big brash brass section, but accordions! Pan-flutes! Bells! Xylophones! Their musical arrangements were complex and fascinating. Even calling them a “rock band” doesn’t do them justice (they’ve been characterized as New Wave, Ska, and Alternative Rock, so yeah, not so easy to categorize).

And they totally rocked. I love listening to the recordings, and apparently their live shows were incredibly high-energy and the band was unmistakably having a blast. How cool is that?

Business application: Rock out with the instruments you love, regardless of what everyone else is playing.

Poster child for this lesson: Why, Fabeku Fatunmise, of course! He not only geeks out on weird-and-cool musical instruments, but he uses them to help people through stuck spots. Go on, get his free download, Sound Shifts Stuff. You’re welcome.

Here’s the Oingo Boingo song “Gray Matter” (from their 1982 album Nothing to Fear) performed live. This clip is perfect for this business lesson because not only are the weird instruments (balaphones! Even weirder than xylophones!) front and center, but the whole song is about questioning authority and thinking for yourself.

2. Laugh in the face of certain death.

Okay, I don’t mean to be a big downer, but the truth is that eventually, we’re all going to die. There’s no getting around it.

So if we make our whole lives miserable while we’re waiting around for this to happen, then what exactly is the point of anything?

As a small business owner, if I spend every day hyperventilating with worry about Serious Business Decisions, and every night sleepless with fear of Dreadful Consequences, wouldn’t I be better off at a nice boring job where someone tells me what to do and signs my paycheck every month?

No, sorry, I’m going to enjoy this ride. And that includes my business.

Business application: You only have one life, so you might as well enjoy the work you’re doing.

Poster child for this lesson: Chris Anthony is a Delight Specialist. It doesn’t mean he’s always delighted (come on, no one could keep that up) — but it does mean that he’s chosen Delight as a thing worth cultivating, worth seeking, worth noticing. He helps businesses delight their customers, and the starting point for that is recognizing and acknowledging delight in daily life. I admire that tremendously.

Here’s the official video for “Dead Man’s Party,” from the 1985 album of the same name. This shortened version was used for the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School. You’ve gotta love the slightly dorky band choreography and the bonus key-tar (hey, it was the ’80s).

(although: The best lyrics on the subject come from the song “No one lives forever,” from the same album: “Celebrate while you still can/ Any second it may end. / And when it’s all been said and done, / Better that you had some fun!”)

3. If you peel away the armor, is there anybody there?

It’s easy to create a persona online. So easy, in fact, that we’re becoming automatically suspicious of things we see on the web. That’s prudent…and it also makes me sad.

The thing is, fakery always gets exposed. The truth always comes out. Eventually. Why use up a whole lot of energy trying to look like a big corporation when you’re a one-person shop? Why hide behind armor and layers of vague mission statements and cookie-cutter copy?

Business application: Be the real you. You’re the only one who can do it…and it’s far less work than being fake.

Poster child for this lesson: Naomi Dunford has a definite persona. And it’s 100% her, she really is the way she appears online. In addition to vast amounts of really good marketing advice, she’s written about how hard it is to run a business, with honesty and anger and fear. Although I happen to adore her, I’ll concede that not everyone feels this way. You don’t have to like her…but you can’t say she’s faking it.

Here’s Oingo Boingo performing the song “Skin” from their 1989 album Dark at the End of the Tunnel (this performance was from a Halloween concert). This song is all about hiding under layers and layers…and the title of this section is one of the lyrics.

4. Evolve.

Oingo Boingo’s lead singer (and composer and arranger of most of their music) was Danny Elfman. And although he’s a dynamic singer with a huge range and some serious pipes, he has moved on to composing movie and TV soundtracks, with great success. Other band members have continued to write and play music in various bands and solo projects. The end of Oingo Boingo was not the end of the band’s musical creativity.

Business application: Don’t be afraid to change your mind, your strategy, and your business plan.

Poster child for this lesson: I was thinking of Johnny B. Truant when I heard the song “Same man I was before” (also from 1985′s Dead Man’s Party) because multiple verses of the song begin with “I’m not the same man I was before…” and Johnny has gone through a serious evolution in the past two years. And it’s working.

This video clip isn’t Oingo Boingo at all — it’s a scene from the ballet adaptation (talk about evolution!) of Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman composed the movie soundtrack, including the piece heard here, called “The Ice Dance.” This song (regardless of the visual accompaniment) chokes me up every single time I hear it. And it probably never would have been written if Danny had kept Oingo Boingo a working band. Clearly, he made the right decision.

5. Yoda isn’t always right.

There are lots of times that the Jedi advice to “Do or do not — there is no try” is helpful. But sometimes you don’t know if you can do it. Sometimes you can’t see the happy ending very clearly at all — you can only see one step ahead of where your (confused and frozen) feet are right now.

My favorite Oingo Boingo song of all time contains this chorus, which I like to sing at top volume when I’m alone in my car:

It’s so hard to find an answer
It’s so hard to stand alone
It’s so hard to find a feeling that was buried long ago
It’s so hard to trust another
When it’s easier to hide
It’s so hard to believe unless we try, baby, try.

Business application: Keep trying, even when it’s hard.

Poster child for this lesson: Sonia Simone calls herself a complete flake. Yet she’s the senior editor of Copyblogger, runs her own membership site and a whole separate blog, and still manages to have a life (she took her family on a vacation to Europe recently, so that’s an example worth following!). In a recent teleclass, she talked about the need to keep trying — even when things are hard, even when you feel you’ve let someone down. Yes.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this spooky tale of Halloween and business. I’ll note that none of the links above are affiliate links, and the videos are just ones I found on YouTube.

A good piece of business advice, that I’ve heard from several places and I can’t remember which was first, is to start hanging out with people at the level you want to reach. So instead of just frequenting the new-to-business forums and meetups and clubs, start reading and emailing the people you admire and want to emulate.

I’ve found this to be enormously helpful. I’ve also made good friends this way. And I recently had a real-life metaphorical experience that backs it up…in a backwards kind of way. Well, maybe. Bear with me while I tell a little story…

Necessity is the mother of experimentation

I needed a pickup truck.

Just for a day or two. See, one of the 4,032 things on my list of stuff to do before I head off to SOBCon was to pick up some furniture my brother was getting rid of. His old couch is going into my office, and his old loveseat is going into Genius Daughter’s room.

This furniture influx also required a corresponding outflux: We gave away our old couch, a dresser, and a rocking chair to a friend who’d recently moved into the area from across the country. Everybody wins!

So I called up my local car-rental place and reserved myself a Dodge Ram 1500.

The rigidity of self-description

To understand how ludicrous this seemed to me at first, you have to consider that I am really not a pickup-truck kind of person. In fact, I am annoyingly smug about my small, nimble, fuel-efficient, low-emission Honda Fit (her name is Bridget. As in Bridget Fonda the Honda. Ask nicely and I’ll tell you about my previous cars’ names…). It costs me about $30 to fill her tank, she can fit into squeezy parking spaces, and I don’t really care where she was made as long as she’s safe and reliable. Which she certainly has been so far.

So this beast of a truck is the opposite of my regular car in many ways. I didn’t go so far as to name him, as we were only acquainted for 48 hours, but he was definitely male. Climbing up into the driver’s seat was like scaling a ladder. He felt like he was twice as long as my little Bridget, and he was quite a bit wider as well (there was room for an entire pizza box on the seat between the driver and passenger! Astonishing!).

I was actually a bit concerned about driving something so large — would I underestimate my size and end up smashing into things? Would I be able to parallel park? What if I made some novice-pickup-driver error and, I don’t know, killed someone??

But I had to scramble up into that sky-high driver’s seat in order to get the furniture delivered. So, after adjusting the mirrors, reminding myself not to grope for the clutch whenever I slowed down (because this was an automatic transmission and I’m used to my stick-shift), and making sure I didn’t accidentally turn on the windshield wipers whenever I wanted to flick the turn signal, I shifted into D and we were off, my rental Dodge and I.

And you know what? I was fine.

I mean, at some level, driving is driving. And although I quintuple-checked before changing lanes, and I proceeded pretty gingerly when edging into a parking space or backing up, my supposedly non-pickup-person self managed to drive around in one for two days without any problems whatsoever.

A hatchback blog trying on a pickup-sized business

So naturally I was blown away by the metaphor I was living.

Here I was, actually enjoying being at the wheel of a behemoth I’d probably never consider buying (my 5-year-old son asked, with wide eyes, “Mom, is this a monster truck?” and wanted to ride with me all weekend). This was a vehicle that would not even fit into my garage.

Here I was, eye-to-eye with all the SUV- and pickup-driving environment-destroyers I’d previously zipped around in my earth-friendly hatchback. I was having fun looking down on all the little cars from my my gas-guzzling Ram.

I could get used to this, I thought.

This new perspective. This power. This having-room-to-carry-almost-anything. Yep, I could see myself someday owning, maybe not this particular truck, but maybe a midsized, good-safety-rating SUV. Huh. How about that.

And I thought, is my business acting like a low-horsepower hatchback when it wants to be a monster truck? Or even the reverse — what if my blog is trying to be a Hummer when really it’s got the heart of a Smart Car?

What if I tried something new on for awhile, like renting a car that you’re considering buying? What if I hung out with the pickup-driving crowd for a bit, or got friendly with my local Smart Car dealer, just to see what it was like?

What if?

Oingo Boingo business school