I would never want to stand in the way of someone buying a franchise.

Everyone’s got to learn.

Because if I told you about franchising, you would not believe me.

A boat picked me up –exhausted from fatigue –and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and dally companions –but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story –they did not believe it. I now tell it to you –and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden. A Descent Into the Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe, 1841

But that’s okay, it’s only your money.

And your mind.

Happy faces promising success, equality and brotherhood

Everything in advertising is chosen very, very carefully but the messenger’s true intentions leak out over time.

I wonder where Floyd Bond is now? I wonder if he still has his 2 stores? His marriage to Geanie?

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?

Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980

If I told you this full page ad was placed in Ebony magazine, would that surprise you?

[circa 1978: Jumping Frog]

WikidFranchise is an inventory of franchise effects

I saw the power of manually adding up franchisee investor case studies in 1999.

McLuhan explained the explosive nature of doing that digitally (electrically).

When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns.

In a sense, WikidFranchise is creative: a masterpiece rooted in thousands of peoples’ lives/experiences.

Tony Martin and the Ontario Wishart Act

Tony Martin isn’t much to look at.

He’s is the kind of person you pass in the street without noticing: a real no body.

Except for the franchise industry.

He is, in my opinion,  the most feared man in franchising.

Here he is listening to Susan Kezios in Toronto, Canada at the public hearings on March 6, 2000. Ms. Kezios was an expert witness brought in from the American Franchisee Association in Chicago, USA. Her testimony is here.

Martin got the Ontario government to pay to bring Susan in.

And here is Martin with Gillian Hadfield (expert witness testimony). Again, he got the government to bring her in from USC. How he got Bob Runciman to schedule 4 days of public hearings in the first place…well, that’s a great story!

Kezios, Hadfield, Martin: all three are the most successful and the 3 most feared people in franchising.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

– Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

My full name is Leslie James Stewart.

I understand a bit of what Elvis is saying (quote by Herbert Marshall McLuhan).

I had a lot of problems with my name … my first name Declan is really not very well known outside of Ireland, MacManus is a name they could never spell … if you think about the names of ’76, ’77 … I got of kind of lightly — with a name you could live with, you know, in time. … I kind of liked the dare of it. Of course we weren’t to know that within a month of my first album actually being issued Elvis Presley would die, and it would actually be a talking point. … Let me put it this way — people don’t forget you with that name. It’s sort of receded as — and this may sound terribly disrespectful and heretical — but as Elvis Presley has receded as a musical force, people make much less of a case about it. Elvis is a sort of cultural figure but there is no direct line between the music of Elvis Presley and the music of today. There is none whatsoever, he’s no influence whatsoever, that I can detect, on music made today. Other than people who consciously retro in styling themselves after his ideas. There is no direct impact in the way that you can hear the influence of The Beatles or Stevie Wonder or numerous other people.

Elvis Costello (Declan Patrick MacManus)

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Who can possibly understand a technology that moves too quickly?

This diagram shows the processes in a 4 stroke engine.

By slowing it down, we can understand it. (1. intake, 2. compression, 3. power and 4. exhaust)

This is precisely what I have tried to do with franchising’s technology at WikidFranchise.org.

The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

Marshall McLuhan 1911-1980

Canada is a Distant Warning System for the American experience.

Franchising is a technology that changes people and things.

Any technology tends to create a new human environment… Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Innis of Canada and Empire and Communications

In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, international social science scholars called him simply:

Innis of Canada.

If you mattered, you knew him. And vice versa.

The real deal: perhaps Canada’s brightest guy in any classroom….ever.

“Harold Adams Innis was a man of vast learning whose mind ranged freely over wide areas of knowledge. He combined an unsurpassed gift for the striking phrase and the brilliant generalizations with a dedication to conscientious and original research.

Here he develops his theory that the history of empires is determined to a large extent by their means of communication. He examines the civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Europe (before and after the printing press) supporting his thesis with a rich array of historical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological data. Innis was one of the first to recognize the powerful influence technology exerted over culture, and he pioneered investigations into the effects of the communications media on society.

Empire and Communications, first published in 1950, was reissued in 1972 for a new generation of students, scholars, and all those interested in our society and its history. It incorporates the notes Innis made in his copy of the first edition – new ideas, quotations, and references – and it includes a foreword by Marshall McLuhan which assesses Innis’ contribution to our understanding of history.

HAROLD ADAMS INNIS was born in Ontario in 1894. He was educated at McMaster University and the University of Chicago, and joined the staff of the University of Toronto in 1920. At the time of his death in 1952 he was professor and head of the Department of Political Economy and Dean of the School of Graduate Studies. He had an international reputation equalled by no other Canadian scholar. Among his other books are The Bias of Communications, The Cod Fisheries, Essays in Canadian Economic History, The Fur Trade in Canada and A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway.”

University of Toronto Press

- back cover

The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.

Changing Concepts of Time (1952)

Pattern recognition: Franchising as a powerful new technology

I have observed many things in business.

The consequences of franchising are profound.

On the individual, group.

There are, however, Rules of Franchising.

Canada is a Distant Warning System for the American experience.

Franchising is as much of an American export as is Microsoft software or the next Hollywood blockbuster movie.

Business format franchising, in a very real sense, promulgates U.S. culture worldwide.

The Distant Warning System (DEW line) was a creation of the Cold War as a North American defense against U.S.S.R. missile attack. There were 3 radar lines: DEW, Mid-Canada and Pinetree.

I was born on RCAF Station Senneterre, PQ which was in the Pinetree radar line from 1950 to 1988.

McLuhan believed that Canada had a useful role to play internationally in looking at the effects of American culture because we observe without attracting too much attention.

Another one of his quotes:

But Canada as an entity still has value as the DEW Line for the rest of the world, we have the situation of relatively small involvement in the big headaches. The Canadian has freedom of comment, a kind of playful awareness of issues, that is unknown in, say, Paris or London or New York. They take themselves too damn seriously; they have no choice.

Here you have a little time to breathe, to think and to feel. It’s because Canadians are protected from encountering themselves by layers of colonialism.

The Electric Oracle, for a 3rd time:

I don’t know who discovered water but it certainly wasn’t a fish.

To recognize patterns and effects from changing technology requires distance and a degree of playfulness that a “professional”  with their “career” precludes in our hyper-expert driven society. Only an amateur from the margins can perceive clearly enough and have the freedom to report back with less bias.

After all, it was an “innocent” (a child) who alerted the adults to the swindlers’ illusion of the emperor’s new clothes.