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The "I can help you not die" school of brand growth

The story of Austrian physician Ignaz Semmelweis could be read as a cautionary tale about self-anointed experts who say they can help you grow.

But not in the way you might except.

In the 19th century, Semmelweis was working at Vienna General Hospital when he deduced that doctors were fatally spreading puerperal fever to mothers. When his famous recommendation that doctors wash their hands was ignored (but later validated by Louis Pasteur), he suffered a nervous breakdown and died in an asylum.

In hindsight, it's easy to treat the medical establishment as the villains of the story. But if I worked alongside Semmelweis in the wards of Vienna General Hospital, the odds are overwhelming that I'd be one of the doctors who rejected him and genuinely believed that I did the right thing.

If we're willing to listen, history tells us that the ego will retroactively casts itself as the hero, but when we're forced to pick sides that same aspirational voice will slip into the background and disappear completely. In his analysis of a German police unit (published as the book Ordinary Men) Historian Christopher Browning showed that many Nazis were working class Germans. Obedience, not ideology, underpinned their genocidal crimes.

It's a dark perspective that might not seem relevant to marketing professionals.

Yet my work improves when I work backwards from the assumption that I would been the guy who pushed Semmelweis to the brink. It's easier to spot your mistakes, and then correct them, and then add more value, when you feel a moral obligation to do so.

I admit that this sounds like a tough sell.

The guy who stops the murderer gets the medal, not the guy who considers how, under different historical circumstances, he’d definitely be the murderer. “I can help you grow and innovate” works better than “I can help you not decline and stay in your lane."

Yet in practice businesses survive by not dying, much like a satellite stays in orbit by not falling back into the atmosphere. As the co-founder of Y Combinator Paul Graham put it, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich."

So what do you do: hire the self-casted hero selling glory or his less flashy counterpart talking about how not to die? (As you think about each option, remember that bad circumstances will almost certainly break the former.)

Semmelweis was on a 2008 commemorative gold coin in Austria. For the next edition, the Ministry of Finance should imprint the faces of the doctors who locked him in that asylum. The coins will be put into circulation and Austrians will come face-to-face with ordinary men.