Improvement comes with many costs.
It costs time and money to make something better. It's risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.
Which is why, unless there's an urgent reason to make something better right now, most organizations naturally don't volunteer to improve.
Operating systems, government programs, established non-profits, teachers with tenure, market leaders, businesses with long-standing customers–these organizations are all facing an uphill battle in creating a culture where there's an urgency to improve.
Just because it's uphill doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. One of the most essential tasks a leader faces is understanding just how much the team is afraid of making things better (because it usually means making things worse–for some people).
February 5, 2013
Live interaction still matters. Teachers, meetings, presentations, one on one brainstorms–they can lead to real change. The listener has nearly as big a responsibility as the speaker does, though. And yet, Google reports four times as many matches for "how to speak" as "how to listen." It's not a passive act, not if you want to do it right.
If listening better leads to better speaking, then it becomes a competitive advantage.
Ask an entrepreneur leaving the office of a great VC like Fred Wilson. She'll tell you that she gave the best pitch of her career–largely because of the audience. The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.
Don't worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.
Pay back the person who's speaking with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.
Play back what you hear but in your own words, using your own situation. Don't ask questions as much as make statements, building on what you just heard but making it your own. Take what you heard and make it the foundation for what you are trying on as your next idea.
If you disagree, wait a few beats, let the thought finish, and then explain why. Don't challenge the speaker, challenge the idea.
The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.
Good listeners get what they deserve–better speakers.
February 4, 2013
For someone outside the US, the visceral connection with football seems mysterious. You can understand a lot about the future (and past) of marketing once you understand how the sport turned into a cultural touchstone.
Tribes -> TV -> Money -> Mass -> TV -> Tribes
Football as we know it started in colleges. It was an epic muddy battle, pitting one alma mater against another, a war-like, non-balletic battle that united (at a pretty elemental level) the tribes on each side. As it grew as a college sport, it became as much of a social event as a sporting one, with alumni and students finding connection around a game.
But if that's all it was, today wouldn't be the biggest day of the year for several industries. If that's all it was, you wouldn't be able to pick a fight merely by challenging the hegemony of football or the local team. We'd be spending as much time and energy on soccer or lacrosse or basketball, but we don't.
No, it turns out that, quite accidentally, football, more than any other sport, is made for television. It's better on TV than it is live. The combination of the play clock, the angles, the repetition and the opportunity for analysis all make it perfect to watch on TV. And perfect to run commercials on. TV and football grew up together, side by side. Instant replay and the thirty-second commercial, supporting each other.
It's not an accident that the commercials are as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. The commercials represent both the cash component of football as well as the cultural souvenirs that go with our consumption of the game.
Fifty years ago, a coat salesman paid $4,000 for the rights to film a game, and NFL Films was born. The decisions Ed and Steve Sobol made over the years turned the sport cinematic, amplifying the tribal origins but taking them much further. They used sound editing and shot on film, all to transform a game into a spectacle.
Then, the second great accident occurred: As football became the official sport of television, it generated billions of dollars in revenue. This revenue led advertisers to push for more football, which led to more television, which led to colleges transforming football from a small sideline into a cash cow of some focus, despite the fact that it has very little to do with the core mission of the institution.
People justify the unpaid (and dangerous) labor of college football players by pointing to all the scholarships. But the scholarships aren't for playing football, they are for appearing on TV. That's what pays for the system.
The media-football complex drives deep into childhood, with many kids fast-tracked from a very young age into the game (not soccer, not baseball, not physics) at some level because of TV and because of money and because of tribes. If football is part of what we stand for, then of course we're happy to have our kid be part of that. But what does it mean for football to be part of what you stand for?
No one stands for movies, or ice cream or double-entry bookkeeping. No, a sport has become a pillar of our worldview, a tribal and economic connection to our past and our future. We don't want to understand the history and the money and the happy accidents. We just assume that this is as it was and as it will be.
Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can't be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over.
The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don't point everyone to one bit of content, don't trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.
The cultural touchstones we're building today are mostly not mass, mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact. Without the mass engine of TV, it's difficult to imagine it happening again. So instead we build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.
But for next season… Go Bills!
February 3, 2013
It's Groundhog Day, which means that January is over. January, of course, is official diet book month, the time of year that formerly young, formerly thin people buy books in the hopes that by osmosis, they will magically become post-holiday skinny.
Now that this madness is over, perhaps it's time to invest in something you can change: the way you think. Here are a bunch of books, ebooks and recordings that can help with that: Diet books for the mind.
Controlling what you eat is an interesting challenge, but not nearly as important as controlling how you think.
February 2, 2013
A paracosm is an ornate, richly detailed imaginary world. Whether you're a three-year old with imaginary playmates, or a passionate inventor imagining how your insight will change just about everything, a paracosm gives you the opportunity to hypothesize, to try out big ideas and see where they take you.
Managers at established organizations have a very hard time with this. Take book publishing as an example. Ten or fifteen years ago, I'd sit with publishing chiefs and say, "let's imagine how the world looks when there are no mass market books published on paper…" Before we could get any further, they'd stop the exercise. "It's impossible to imagine that. Paper is magical. Are you saying you don't believe in books?" (I heard variations on this from people as recently as a year ago.)
The emotional response is easy to understand. If one of the core principles of your business needs to be abandoned in order to act out the paracosm, it feels disloyal to even utter it. Sort of like asking your spouse if he's going to remarry after you die…
And yet.
The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn't include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.
It's not disloyal to imagine a future that doesn't include your founding precepts. It's disloyal not to.
The fabled comedian is killing it at a club that seats 400. One guy in the back, though, isn't laughing.
Miles Davis was shunned by a few people in the audience, even at his coolest.
The theater critic at the Times might not like this play, the one that made people cry and sold tickets for years.
And just about every blog post and book listing collects a trolling comment from someone who didn't like it, didn't read it or didn't agree with it (or all three) and isn't shy about speaking up with a sharp tongue.
For those people, the message from the creator of the work is clear: "It's not for you."
Unanimity is impossible unless you are willing to be invisible. We can be unanimous in our lack of feedback for the invisible one.
For everyone else, though, the ability to say, "It's not for you," is the foundation for creating something brave and important. You can't do your best work if you're always trying to touch the untouchable, or entertain those that refuse to be entertained.
"It's not for you."
This is easy to say and incredibly difficult to do. You don't have much choice, though, not if you want your work to matter.
February 1, 2013
2% of your customers don't get it. They won't read the instructions, they'll use the wrong handle, they'll ignore the warning about using IE6. They will blame you for giving them a virus or will change the recipe even though you ask them not to.
And not only that, they'll blame you when things go wrong.
If you do a very, very good job of design and UX and process analysis, you can lower this number to 1%.
But then what?
The thing is, blaming this group for getting it wrong helps no one. They don't want to be blamed, and they're not going to learn.
The other challenge, of course, is that the 1% keep changing. If they were always the same people, you could happily fire them. But there's no way to know in advance who's going to get it wrong.
If you're going to be in a mass market business, you have no choice to but to accept that this group exists. And to embrace them. Not to blame them, but to love them. Successful businesses have the resilience to make it easy for them to recover. To make it easy for these people to find you and to blame you and to get the help they need.
Sure, whittle down the number. But the ones who are left? They're part of the deal.
January 31, 2013
Talk shows, from Johnny Carson to Fresh Air, have always been about spectating. Comedy, TV, graphic arts, business leadership, politics–they've been sold to us as spectator sports.
Selling spectatorhood is pretty easy. It's safe and fun and easy. You hit the remote. You pretend you have power–the power to turn it off, to change the channel, to buy or not to buy. We've seduced the masses with a simple bargain, and even permitted the role of the spectator to move into the work world. Most people, most of the time, are told to watch, not to lead, to follow, not to create.
Waiting for breakfast in bed to be served is very different indeed than getting up early and serving breakfast in bed.
The spectators foolishly assert that if everyone was a doer, a leader and a maker of ruckuses, then there'd be no one left in the audience. As if those that do require an audience.
The alternative to being a spectator involves failure and apparent risk. It means that you will encounter people who accuse you of hubris and flying too high, people who are eager to point out the loose thread on your jacket or the flaw in your reasoning. The spectators in the stands are happy to boo, happy to walk out when the team is struggling in the third period, happy to switch if the bread or the circuses cease to delight.
Why on earth, they ask, would they want to be anything but a spectator?
And yet, those that have foolishly picked themselves, stood up, stood out and made a difference, can't help but ask, "and why would I ever want to be a spectator again?"
[More on this from fabled professor Jeffrey Pfeffer]
January 30, 2013
You don't own attention or trust or shelf space. You don't even own tomorrow's plans.
It's all for rent, with a cancellation clause that can kick in at any time.
The moment you start treating the rental like a right, it disappears.
January 29, 2013
You've probably got that part nailed. Butt in seat, smile on your face. We often run into people who understand their job to be showing up on time to do the work that's assigned.
We've moved way beyond that now. Showing up and taking notes isn't your job. Your job is to surprise and delight and to change the agenda. Your job is to escalate, reset expectations and make us delighted that you are part of the team.
Showing up is overrated. Necessary but not nearly sufficient.
January 28, 2013
