I mean, how many words do we have to describe someone who spends too much time thinking and then pontificates about the most grinding minutiae? Like, what "guru" really means. The only other title I can think of that's equally vague on the professional value I provide to the world is "consultant". And who wants to introduce a consultant when you can introduce a guru?

A few hours after basking in the afterglow of misplaced flattery, I got schooled on how tenuous the domain of gurudom can be. I submitted an article to a friend's newsletter on Marketing ROI, in which I took my usual stance of flogging marketers for flaunting buzzwords and failing to grasp deeper meanings. That's kind of like an old baseball mitt for me. Fits nice, usually does the job. Except this time I got called on it. My draft came back with some very diplomatic editorial comments. Translated into the vernacular, he said "Dude. You're beating a straw man. Add some substance." That a useful conversation about the current state of Marketing ROI thought, and demonstrated how deeply many individual threads of marketing thought are being mined by people out of the spotlight of social media. How could I be a guru when there's such a vast amount of knowledge I don't know?

And that's when a light bulb went off in my head. Why do marketers focus so much on elevating gurus? And why don't we have more geeks? A guru is always supposed to have an answer, while a geek is just someone who's really really interested in finding out how to make things work. The irony, of course, is that one of the archetypal bits of Guru wisdom is that it's not having the answers that matters, but getting the questions right.

But gurus don't ask questions--at least not the kind they really want answers to. If I'm a guru, I can't let people know that I may need to be brought up to speed on the latest in Marketing ROI. I Must Know All. On the other hand, if I'm a geek, I can just say "Cool. Show me how you do that! What else do you know?"

In a business world that is changing so blindingly fast, with a constant flood of new technologies, new ideas and new opportunities how long can any one guru conceivably last before they're obsolete? And how long before we notice they're obsolete and stop listening to their pointless babble? You don't have that problem with geeks, because geeks are always focused on learning--well, at least as much as they like to show off--and are always interested in gathering with other geeks to learn. Everyone wins. Well, everyone except the marketer who thinks an answer from a guru will save him from getting his ass kicked at the next board meeting.

I know it will be really hard to shed this deeply engrained need for the certainty that comes with the spouting of pundits. But what marketing really needs today is more geeks, not gurus. Everyone can be a marketing geek, while marketing gurus, if there really are any, are bound to look stupid in the long run. Why run the risk of having them take you along for the ride?