Last week, I introduced you to the 5 M’s of Mentoring, Motivation, Meaning, Model, Meme and Mindset; and if you’ve been following us on Twitter since, you will have spotted that I also introduced seven of the best (in my humble opinion) internet meme’s around. The purpose of the Twitter campaign was to give you a good idea about what a meme is and why they are important to Mentors and entrepreneurs.
As I explained in overall blog post last week, a meme is a concept based on that of a ‘gene’, except that it pertains to a unit of cultural difference, rather than a unit of racial difference (genes). In the case of the Meme, they are those things that capture a social mood, imagination or moment in time (fads) or impart useful information (such as health information) and spread through society rapidly without seeming to be guided by any outside force or influence. Excellent examples of meme’s are adverts, catch phrases, myths, common sense knowledge and stories that are repeated. The reason I used some of the Internet memes in my Twitter campaign was to show the power that something so simple can have even though the thing it represents has no meaning in, and of, itself – although this isn’t the case with all memes as we shall see.
Meme’s and Mentors
Having a basic understanding of Memes is essential both for entrepreneurs and for business mentors – although not necessarily for the same reasons. For mentors, understanding another persons memes is important because these underlying assumptions and pieces of learning are the things that drive your mentee to act in particular and very specific ways. It has been suggested that the business of psychotherapy is concerned with removing ‘bad’ memes (assumptions or knowledge about the world) and substituting ‘good’ memes instead and might be analogous to reinstalling faulty software perhaps.
However, it is important to note that Meme’s themselves have no identify, nor can they replicate at will, nor do they have free will – they are simply a piece of information that is replicated (passed on) between people. They are not good or bad, they simply ‘are’.
A mentor also needs to be aware when their own Meme’s clash with the person they are working with and then recognise that just because the Meme’s are different, doesn’t mean that either set is ‘bad’ or negative – just that there is a point of difference that possibly needs to be negotiated in some way.
Meme’s and Business
The idea of the Meme has to a large extent been hijacked by marketeers, they hope to use the power of a meme to create what are termed ‘viral marketing campaigns’, that is a marketing campaign, either in the form of a video, picture, tune or a catch-phrase with the intention of influencing someone’s buying decision.
But this limited idea of the Meme as a marketing tool vastly underrates their power and influence to help build a business. For example, the culture of a business or organisation can largely be understood through it’s corporate Meme’s, that is the underlying assumptions about both the business, it’s clients, code of ethics, values and it’s perception of the world around it. In other words, if you wish to change the culture of an organisation then you simply change the Meme. For instance, if you wish to improve your customers perception of the quality of service, you promote people who hold strong customer focus and ethics to positions of influence and allow their ideology to ‘infect’ their teams.
This though is all very well for large companies and organisations, but what about the entrepreneur that is starting out? In many ways it’s a simpler process to control how your burgeoning business is perceived, because the organisation is much smaller and flatter and often a single person is the figurehead. Deciding what values your business needs to be known by could largely be determined by observing what your customers want and need and ensuring that the people you put in positions of influence are able to demonstrate meme’s around these areas.
However, it is worth bearing in mind that just because you want to change the meme, you may not have a choice as they are not universally transferable. For instance setting objectives for businesses and rewarding achievement when the objectives are met is a deeply embedded meme in the Western world. Yet, in societies where the ‘collective society’ is honoured then this could be highly destructive. Remember in the same way that not everyone ‘get’s’ the joke – they have to understand it’s cultural and social context first!
