The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

The message of the campaign was Texans don’t litter. Notice that the celebrities are valuable only insofar as they can quickly establish the schema of “Texas”—or, more specifically, of “ideal, masculine Texans.” Even people who dislike Willie Nelson’s music can appreciate his quality of Texan-ness.

The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.

We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.

Although dramatized by grim humour, the KLM squirrel debacle illustrates a few potentially important things about the underlying reality of management and information. A decision with no real owner had been created because it was the outcome of a process. The process worked well, until something that hadn’t been anticipated (the pet squirrel craze) showed up, and then it delivered disastrous results. There was no effective way in which information could be fed back to the people who could change the policy, so the decisions continued to get worse. And then, when something so outrageous happened that it couldn’t be kept out of newspapers, there was nobody to blame.