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We stayed up all night, my friends and I ...

So begins the preamble to that ur-manifesto of the avant-garde, F. T. Marinetti's "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909). The manifesto appeared as a paid advertisement on the front page of Le Figaro; the next morning it was birdcage liner for most of its readers. Yet it has become more familiar than any single work of art the Futurists produced in the decades of activity that followed. More manifestos followed, too: hundreds of them, on subjects ranging from painting and sculpture to cinema and photography, from clothing and feminism to cooking and lust. Futurist manifestos were ephemeral, hurled off balconies and out of speeding automobiles, but they have since been carefully archived, translated, anthologized, and reproduced in textbooks of art history, literature, political science, and rhetoric.

While they were once the serious business of warmongering princes, party politicos and revolutionaries, over the last hundred years manifestos have become the elastic and unpredictable material of artists and writers. Part of the attraction of the manifesto is that it remains a surprisingly complex and often paradoxical genre: flippant and sincere, prickly and smooth, logical and absurd, material and immaterial, shallow and profound.

So what makes a good manifesto?
1. Manifestos usually include a list of numbered tenets.
The format has been de rigeur since at least as far back as The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). It conveys a sense of urgency and straight talk. This is also why manifestos feel so contemporary: their close resemblance to click-bait top 10 lists.
2. Manifestos exist to challenge and provoke.
Any manifesto worth reading demands the impossible. Surely the best first line since Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto (1848) is the breathless opener to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967), which reads: "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." It is dangerous and unpredictable, like the "thrill-seeking females" it imagines as its foot soldiers, and is nothing if not ambitious.
3. Manifestos are advertisements.
The Futurist Marinetti made this especially true, embracing and pioneering new techniques for advertising (one of Benjamin's "shocks" of modernity) to promote his international movement. Since Futurism, the manifesto has come into its own as something that advertises mainly itself. But it also, in most cases at least, advertises an "ism."

Marinetti's favorite lesson from advertising was the old adage "there's no such thing as bad press." He wrote about "The Pleasure of Being Booed" and picked fights with audiences across Europe. Soon other isms followed his lead, using shock and outrage as their chief mode. The Vorticist Wyndham Lewis described it as a game played by artists with the press and public before the rude intrusion of the First World War. It has been a popular technique ever since: the film director Lars von Trier, for example, who contributed to the genre with his "Dogme 95" manifesto, has in recent years elevated bad press to an art form.

4. Manifestos come in many forms.
During the "second-wave" avant-garde of the 1960s, the manifesto experienced a major rebirth, becoming again part of the general atmosphere as it was in Europe before and after the First World War. One anthology, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, 1965-70 (1971), described some of the situations in which the manifesto might have appeared and the forms it might have taken:

perhaps it caught your eye as a flyposter, nailed to a tree, published in a "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't" magazine or news-sheet. It could have been incanted at a wedding service, passed round as trading cards, posted as a chain letter, read on a menu. It may even have whizzed past your head while wrapped round a brick.

The BAMN anthology provides some good examples from the heady late-'60s, including the "Outlaws of Amerika" trading card series. Created for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the cards depict various members of the Black Panthers and "200,000 pot smokers" (a figure that sounds charmingly conservative today). Also from 1968 is a manifesto reportedly written by Salvador Dali and found "behind the barricades in Paris" -perhaps even wrapped around a brick and ready to be tossed at The Establishment.

Today the manifesto is experiencing a rebirth of a very different kind. With the proliferation of the Internet in the past decade, the manifesto has expanded into every corner of the arts (and crafts), as well as academia (e.g. "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0"). But the most startling change is that the manifesto, which has long borrowed from advertising, has itself been coopted as a business-friendly genre. It has of late become tame, even cute: an untroubling, unironic, fully digested meme for the attention deficient.

The new wave of "inspirational" self-help manifestos-as if the vast majority of manifestos weren't inspirational-demonstrates the malleability of the form. The recent boom shows no sign of ending. As one new guru of positivity and self-promotion, Alexandra Franzen, recently proclaimed: "It doesn't matter if you're a stay-at-home mama, a rising entrepreneur, an aspiring author, a CEO, or a preschool teacher-everyone needs a blow-your-mind manifesto. It's just . . . necessary. And sexy."
5. Manifestos are better very short than very long.
The longer a manifesto is, the exponentially crazier and duller it seems to get. If a manifesto is a type of advertisement, then ask yourself: Who would write a 35,000-word advertisement? The Unabomber, for one. Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future" (1995) is a classic of the extreme end of the genre. A too-long manifesto is, at the very least, something akin to an eight-hour speech by Fidel Castro. It is a marathon performance intended to impress by sheer excess. If you still need convincing, take a look at the endless cut-and-paste drivel of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik's "2083: A European Declaration of Independence" (2011) or, indeed, Adolf Hitler's 700-page Mein Kampf (1925). These are not the examples most of us want to follow.

Better, obviously, is something like this: "A Short Manifesto" (1964) by the Dutch conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn. It ends with a vision of the future, in 4,000 AD:

NO MUSIC

NO THEATRE

NO ART

NO

THERE WILL BE SOUND

COLOR

LIGHT

SPACE

TIME

MOVEMENT

Or the "Laws of Sculptors" (1969), by the English artists Gilbert & George, written during the same decade of social upheaval but with a tone that rejected the surrounding chaos. In their manifesto, four concise, keep-calm-and-carry-on-style "laws" are laid out for fellow artists: "Always be smartly-dressed, well groomed relaxed and friendly polite and in complete control."
6. Manifestos are theatrical.
When I first encountered the manifesto as an undergraduate I was lucky enough to see it as a living thing and not a thing of the past. This was thanks to my professor, a charismatic Romanian woman in her 40s who also happened to be a Neoist performance artist and manifesto writer-a real-life avant-garde provocateuse. The summer course she taught traced the radical avant-garde that descended from Futurism through Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism to Situationism and post-punk movements like Neoism.

In our daily meetings she revealed a degree of permissiveness that we had not heretofore encountered, even in our most liberal research seminars. One student, a theater major named Peter, declaimed his manifesto in the nude, which was uncomfortable given the restrictive confines of our basement classroom. He had scrawled the main tenets of his manifesto in Sharpie across his chest and limbs. He even wrote something down there, though none of us got close enough to read what it said. When Peter finished, our professor complimented him on his "excellent provocation" and his "Olympian" physique. He got an A.

Performance is part of the manifesto's materiality, its existence in the world. Marinetti made art into a kind of Punch and Judy show, full of pantomime fisticuffs and bold, simple story lines: Destroy the past, embrace the future. From Dada manifestos in the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the radical street theater of the 1960s to Lars von Trier's scattering of red leaflets printed with his "Vow of Chastity" into the audience at a Paris cinema conference on the future of film in 1995, the manifesto-manu festus, "struck by hand"-has always been about striking gestures.
7. Manifestos are fiction dressed as fact.
Particularly in the preamble, manifestos are a kind of storytelling. The two most famous manifesto templates, The Communist Manifesto and "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," begin as stories. The first opens with a ghost story ("A specter is haunting Europe"), the second is a tale of how the manifesto was written ("blackening reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling") and how the movement was founded. The engaging origin narrative of Futurism includes a car chase (in 1909!) that ends with Marinetti crashing into a ditch and being hauled out by a group of fishermen. From that very spot, "faces smeared with factory muck," their incendiary manifesto was proclaimed to Italy and the world.
8. Manifestos embrace paradox.
Fleeting and permanent, serious and ridiculous, sincere and ironic, always undermining their own authority, manifestos are unstable texts in the extreme. The bluster and bravado of any Futurist manifesto is at once self-parody and serious polemic. Its roots are traceable to influences like Nietzsche, Sorel, and Whitman, but also to the paradoxes of late-Victorian dandies and aesthetes like James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. Wilde, so fabulously flippant and ironic in his art, gravely pursued his aesthetic and moral beliefs to his death.
9. Manifestos are always on the bleeding edge.
Make it new: In our age of ever-shortening texts, this dictum of Ezra Pound remains likely the shortest manifesto ever written, and its message is still vital. In 1909 the Futurists refused reverence and predicted, even begged for their overthrow by the next generation: "Younger and stronger men will throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts," they cried. "We want it to happen!" Like all good manifestos, they built in their own obsolescence, clearing the way for the next vision of the future.
10. Manifestos are magic (almost).
The last century is littered with manifestos full of failed dreams and dreams that turned into nightmares, but some manifestos mark the beginning of a path to realization. Most manifestos are written from the point of view of disillusionment struggling back to hope-"hope not being hope," as Marianne Moore's poem "The Hero" (1932) states, "until all ground from hope has vanished." Think of Shepard Fairey's Hope poster for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign: Whatever the reality, this poster's single-word manifesto brought magic back to politics after years of disillusionment. It summed up a platform and made a promise. It energized a voting public that wanted to believe that there was something more than business as usual.

Manifestos are repositories of a kind of magic and madness that does not exist in any other genre. Take for example the Zaoum poets who were an offshoot of Russian Futurism. If the Italian Futurists were bold and brash and stylish, the Russian Futurists (who cross-pollinated with Russian Formalists like Roman Jakobson) were mad geniuses and magicians with language. One Zaoum manifesto, "The Trumpet of the Martians" (1916) by Victor Khlebnikov, announces as if in the voice of a character from science fiction: "People of Earth, hear this!"

Michael Jackson wrote a manifesto, which 60 Minutes discovered and aired in 2013. In 1979 MJ laid out plans for his rebranding and subsequent world domination ("MJ will be my new name"). In its highest form, the manifesto acts as a magic spell incanted by the visionary artist. It is a performative speech/act that attempts to bring a new reality into existence. MJ's most significant line is, "I will be magic."

Manifesto writers over the past century have tried, above all-to paraphrase Marinetti (and Wilde)-to hurl their hopes at the stars while lying in the muddy water of modernity's ditch.

An ongoing series about the hidden lives of ordinary things

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The 10 traits of effective public declarations, an Object Lesson

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We first wrote these "10 things" when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does-and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don't have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know your time is valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on the web you want it right away-and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we've broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it's a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We're pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we're hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find-so it's possible that certain searches won't lead to any ads at all.

We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There's always more information out there.

Once we'd indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google's search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don't speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture-and that doesn't just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees-energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed-and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn't good enough.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can't reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious-but that's because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we're always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

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Learn about Google's "10 things we know to be true", a philosophy that has guided the company from the beginning to this very day. Keywords: google company philosophy, corporate philosophies, 10 things we know to be true, don't be evil

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The Holstee Manifesto | This is your life.

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This is your life. Do what you love and do it often. If you don't like your job; quit...Read the Holstee Manifesto and get the original letterpress poster today!

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Make sure to notice what's multimodel and website content included around the Nike Manifesto. Think about the connections.

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Make sure to notice what's multimodel and website content included around the Nike Manifesto. Think about the connections.

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Some companies call them core values. We call them our brand manifesto - the five key tenets that make up who we are and what we believe at 9 Clouds.

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Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do.

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Is there a difference between mission statements and manifestos? Yes and no. Their intentions may be the same but that's where the similarity ends. In practice, the outcomes of mission statements and manifestos are miles apart. Though manifestos and missions are crafted to bring people together behind a cause, manifesto's have a much better track record of igniting action. The best are so emotionally charged that their catalytic influence can endure for centuries. Such was the case for the Ten Commandments, and the Declaration of Independence. As recently as fifty years ago, an emotional speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial established a clear and convincing purpose for American Civil Rights. 'I Have a Dream' is arguably the most inspiring manifesto of our time.

Manifestos Can Work for Companies

Manifestos are best known for political movements, but the emotion of such texts can also motivate people to excel in the world of business. Apple is a good example. CEO Tim Cook stated the Apple Way six months before Steve Jobs passed away. That declaration left employees and investors believing that Apple could go on without Steve Jobs. Here was the gist of that text:

Apple is on the face of the earth to make great products. We're constantly focusing on innovating. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot. We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change. Regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

Apple is Thriving without Steve Jobs

Fast forward six years, and the proof is in the outcome. Apple is going on without Steve Jobs. The style of CEO leadership may have changed, but not the culture of the Apple choir that continues to hit the high notes of innovation, and financial performance.

Crafting a company manifesto is far more difficult than crafting a mission or vision statement. It takes plenty of thought, hours of collaboration, and a very good understanding of the business and the existing culture. Below are 6 critical components to a potent manifesto:

1. State Deep Emotional Principles. Apple's compelling purpose is about existing to make awesome products, and operating under emotional principles.

2. Capture Core Values. Tim Cook's manifesto is loaded with core values - admitting error, innovating, collaborating, and demanding excellence.

3. Be Truthful. Most mission statements are full of illusionary visions. Great manifestos touch the emotions when they are authentic.

4. Link Business Life to Personal Life. Apple's manifesto doesn't do this. It likely doesn't have to, because unlike most industries, tech life and home life are intertwined.

5. Be Inclusive. The manifesto must touch (and move) everybody. I don't know if Disney, Nike, Cirque du Soleil, or the New England Patriots have a manifesto. But, they sure act like they do.

6. Differentiate. There is nothing more powerful than differentiation in a competitive arena. When defining differentiation, do it in simple terms.

Manifestos, unlike the stereotypical mission statements, tell everyone who you are, what you believe in and why you are prepared to invest of yourself in the cause.
Is your company ready to enact a potent manifesto? If not, where are the constraints and what can be done about those constraints? Is it possible that a manifesto that meets the above criteria might do just that? Please share your thoughts by commenting on social media.

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Mission Statements vs. Manifestos | Human Synergistics

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Is there a difference between mission statements and manifestos? Yes and no. Their intentions may be the same but that's where the similarity ends. In practice, the outcomes of mission statements and manifestos are miles apart. Though manifestos and missions are crafted to bring people together behind a cause, manifesto's have a much better track record of igniting action.