What Kanye Can Teach You About Business

On occasion, being a father can dictate your creative direction. As I sat down to write my Ghostwriter Dad post, I felt a slight pause keeping me from the usual tone of this page. Sure, I knew what I was going to write about ahead of time. It isn’t as though we have too many subjects around these parts. Direct response copy, marketing, social media, or ghostwriting, that’s pretty much it, though on the best of days I’m able to weave them all together.

Don’t worry, I’ll still try to get as many of those in here as I can.

Last week, when I saw the clip of Kanye at the MTV awards stealing Taylor Swift’s moment like a bank robber with a mic rather than a Tommy Gun, it rattled the writer inside me something fierce. Turns out, this is the fourth post I’m going to write about Kanye today.

I wrote about the Kanye West fiasco from a father’s perspective over at Writer Dad, asked young writers to share their opinion at Children Write the Future, then took the same two songs I’m about to compare here and set them toe to toe in a creative cage match across the way at the Inkwell.

At Ghostwriter Dad, I would like to ask, “What can Kanye teach us about delivering our best business?” I don’t care to vent on Kanye anymore as it’s pretty much out of my system. Instead I’d like to ask, “Now what can we learn?”

Earlier this year the Fray covered Kanye’s forgettable synth vocal single, “Heartless” with their own version of the song that managed to bring heart and soul to the surface where it never existed before. I found this remarkable, not only in the context of one artist breathing life into the carcass of another, but as a parallel to how each of us can implement the same principles when it comes to running our own businesses.

There’s no arguing, Kanye is obviously a great businessman. Though I consider him to be a perfectly lousy rapper, he is a genius in the studio and, I imagine an expert when discussing marketing and strategy with his team. He understands his target market and hits the bulls-eye most every time. Kanye clearly understands there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Of course, Kanye can afford it. He’s no longer trying to make a name for himself, merely trying to fan the flames of his infamy. Your business is probably not in the same situation. In my estimation, Kanye is just a few years from burn out. His fans will grow up and away from him, gradually losing interest in what he has to offer. The Fray fans on the other hand will continue to mature, remembering where they were when they first felt the shudders of that cover, or the many other original songs which strike a similar chord.

Maybe the Fray isn’t for you, and perhaps that cover of Heartless doesn’t give you the chills, but there’s no denying there is something real inside it. Does your business spend all its time in the studio, polishing product into the perfect looking package, but missing the soul, or a room filled with a few spare instruments, wearing its heart clearly on its sleeve?

More and more people are competing for our ever diminishing attention. Those businesses that are not real will have zero chance of getting heard.

Ask yourself, is your business more like Kanye or the Fray?