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[Alec asked his agent John Burnham at William Morris if he was being shunned by Hollywood execs] 'It's not that when they think of you they hate you. They don't think of you at all.

But if there's one thing to learn from corporate execs, it's this: even if they aren't about to claim Anonymous's imagery for their next advertising campaign, it doesn't mean they can't, or won't, find some way of appropriating *something* about Anonymous. If someone can find an uncapitalized, exploitable, futurescanned, innovative, disruptive idea that can flourish in corporate boardrooms, they will.

Don’t follow competition We are constantly amazed by how much business leaders obsess about their competition. When you get in a room with a bunch of senior execs from large companies, their attention can often wander as they check smartphones and think about the rest of their day, but bring up the topic of their competition and suddenly you’ll have everyone’s full attention. It’s as if, once you get to a particular level in an organization, you worry as much about what your competition is doing as how your own organization is performing. At the highest echelons of business, the default mentality is, too often, siege. This fixation leads to a never-ending spiral into mediocrity. Business leaders spend much of their time watching and copying the competition, and when they do finally break away and try something new, they are careful risk-takers, developing only incremental, low-impact changes. Being close to your competition offers comfort; it’s like covering tactics in match race sailing, when the lead boat tacks whenever the follower does, to ensure that the follower doesn’t go off in a different direction and find stronger wind. Incumbents clump together so that no one finds a fresher breeze elsewhere. But as Larry Page says, how exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?85 If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors

What works: Stories about undocumented immigrants killing Americans Stories about citizens standing up to the government bureaucracy Stories about college students disrespecting the flag Stories about hate crime hoaxes Stories about liberal media outlets suppressing the truth And, whenever possible, stories involving attractive women (They could be the hero or the villain, it didn’t matter, but they had to be attractive.) “Job one is to titillate the audience,” the former producer said. “For celebrity stories, I had to pick the sexiest photos. And then I’d still hear, ‘Can you find hotter photos of her?’ Sigh. Okay, we’ll spend another thousand bucks on three photos from Getty.” It got to the point where the producer knew, without being told, which specific photos of Angelina Jolie the execs would expect to see. This sexualized approach spilled over to other parts of the show. If it was a quiet news day and the producers needed to fill a spare block, “we would look and see, what are the locals doing?” Fox tapped into its network of stations in big cities all across the country. “Then we would Google around to find the hottest reporter.” Workers striking in Detroit or rush hour flooding in Houston? Sometimes that’s how the editorial call was made.