Seth Godin, the wildly popular marketing guru and cultural cheerleader, penned a passionate blog entry today called "Voting, misunderstood."
He writes:
Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent's supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote ("they're all bums") then their strategy has succeeded.
The astonishing thing is that voters haven't figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we've largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.
Voting is free. It's fairly fast. It doesn't make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.
Even if you're disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.
Godin has also been known to draw marketing and leadership lessons from the Grateful Dead. Check out his "Tribes" presentation here. And in this blog post on the 10th anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death he opined: "More than Campbell's Soup or American Airlines or CAA or Cisco or McKinsey, the Grateful Dead is the template for how organizations are going to grow and succeed moving forward."
Hmmm. So Godin digs voting and the Grateful Dead. Cool guy.