The most urgent jobs tend to be line jobs. Profit and loss. Schedules to be drawn and honored. Projects to deliver.
The line manager initiates. The line manager delivers.
Staff jobs are important, no doubt about it. The staff keeps the lights on, provides resources on demand and is standing by ready to help the line manager. But the staff person doesn't get to say yes and doesn't get to say go.
In fact, the best staff people get that way by acting like they're on the line.
When you can, take responsibility. Say go.
October 13, 2014
It's tragic but not surprising to watch the marketing of another epidemic unfold.
It starts with, "We" don't have Ebola, "they" do. They live somewhere else, or look different or speak another language. Our kneejerk reaction is that "they" need to be isolated from us (more than 55% of Americans favor a travel ban for everyone, not just the sick). Even fifty years ago, a travel ban was difficult, now it's impossible. The world is porous, there are more connections than ever, and we've seen this before.
Tuberculosis. Polio. AIDS. Fear runs rampant, amplified by the media, a rising cycle of misinformation, demonization and panic. Fear of the other. Pushing us apart and paralyzing us.
The thing is:
We are they.
They are us.
Education—clear, fact-based and actionable education—is the single most effective thing we can do during the early stages of a contagion. Diseases (and ideas) spread because of the social structures we have created, and we can re-engineer those interactions to dramatically change the R0 of a virus. Ebola doesn't 'know' that large funerals are traditional, but it certainly takes advantage of them to spread. Ideas don't 'know' that bad news travels fast, and that the internet makes ideas travel faster, but they take advantage of this to spread.
Cable TV voices that induce panic to make their ratings go up are directly complicit in amplifying the very reactions that magnify the impact of the virus. Attention-seeking media voices take us down. All of us.
It's tempting to panic, or to turn away, or to lock up or isolate everyone who makes us nervous. But we can (and must) do better than that. Panic, like terror, is also a virus, one that spreads.
We have an urgent and tragic medical problem, no doubt, but we also have a marketing problem.
October 12, 2014
It's possible to bend language to your will, to invest extraordinary amounts of effort and care to make words do what you want them to do.
Our culture celebrates athletes that shape their bodies, and chieftains who build organizations. Lesser known, but more available, is the ability to work on our words until they succeed in transmitting our ideas and causing action.
Here's the thing: you may not have the resources or the physique or the connections that people who do other sorts of work have. But you do have precisely the same keyboard as everyone else. It's the most level playing field we've got.
The first step is to say it poorly. And then say it again and again and again until you're able to edit your words into something that works.
But mostly, you need to decide that it matters.[HT: Shawn]
October 11, 2014
One list highlights the lucky breaks, the advantages, the good feedback, your trusted network. It talks about the accident of being born in the right time and the right place, your health, your freedom. It features your education, your connection to the marketplace and just about every nice thing someone has said about you in the last week or month.
The other list is the flipside. It contains the obstacles you've got to deal with regularly, the defects in your family situation, the criticisms your work has received lately. It is a list of people who have better luck than you and moments you've been shafted and misunderstood.
The thing is, at every juncture, during every crisis, in every moment of doubt, you have a choice. You will pull out one (virtual) list or the other. You'll read and reread it, and rely on it to decide how to proceed.
Up to you.
October 10, 2014
We see the same four steps, over and over:
Struggle: At the beginning, no one knows what you make or why they need it. They are unaware and distrustful too. Sometimes the struggle never ends, other times the story is so compelling and the value created so in demand that it appears to go by quickly. But the struggle is always there. Most marketing (as opposed to advertising) lives in this stage, because you're starting from zero.
Servant: As a soon-to-be-successful organization gains traction, it has a choice. It can move to servant mode, delighting and connecting customers, exceeding expectations and performing what seems like miracles. Or it can take profits as soon as it can. The former leads to scale, the short-term approach usually results in more struggle.
Bully: As the organization gains power (and constituents) it is under pressure to increase profits and market share and lock in. The market power leads to more market power and the ability to cause customers or partners to shift their strategy in deference. (To be clear, I define a bully as an individual or organization that uses physical or other power to cause someone less powerful to act against their enlightened long-term self interest to satisfy their demands.) "We make the rules now."
Utility: No organization stays in bully mode forever. The step after this is utility, the organization that serves a function, makes a profit, and is often taken for granted.
Bitcoin is still in the struggle stage. Microsoft clearly went through all four of these stages a decade ago. Federal Express skipped the bully step, as far as I can tell, and moved straight to utility. AT&T also followed the four steps. So did Standard Oil. Religions that last more than a few generations go through these steps too. During their hyper-growth period, AOL had the chance to become a generations-long utility, but probably worked too hard to exercise their power to gain scale before moving to the utility stage.
While the easy examples to find are the famous, international ones, this can happen on the micro level, within industries or locations or sects as well.
I'd like to believe that the goal is to figure out how to live a life in the servant stage, to create an organization that doesn't become a bureaucratic haven or an avarice-focused engine of profit. As markets shift faster (networks grow faster now than ever before in human history) there's more opportunity to find a sweet spot that dances between servant and utility.
October 9, 2014
The bottom of the stack is essential, but it always gets easier to take for granted.
Of course electricity comes out of the little hole in the wall when you plug something in.
Of course the email engine works every day.
Of course the chipset returns the right calculations.
Of course the webpage loads quickly.
Of course the car starts the first time.
Of course the fax machine always works with other brands.
Of course you can call someone across the world for ten cents…
All of these things used to be really hard, random in their reliability, precious when they worked. Today, for most of us, they're a given (but still important).
Value is created as you work your way up to the newer, harder, scarcer parts of the value creation process. And then we'll figure those out and the stack will get taller still.
When the stack catches up, when the work you do is work that's taken for granted, climb up the stack.
PS I have to finalize the print run, so pre-press signups for my new book (www.yourturn.link) end tomorrow. Thanks!
October 8, 2014
It's tempting to fall into the trap of believing that being good at math is a genetic predisposition, as it lets us off the hook. The truth is, with few rare exceptions, all of us are capable of being good at math.
I'll grant you that it might take a gift to be great at math, but if you're not good at math, it's not because of your genes. It's because you haven't had a math teacher who cared enough to teach you math. They've probably been teaching you to memorize formulas and to be good at math tests instead.
Being good at standardized math tests is useless. These tests measure nothing of real value, and they amplify a broken system.
No, we need to get focused and demanding and relentless in getting good at math, at getting our kids good at math and not standing by when someone lets themselves (and thus us) off the hook. If you can read, you can do math. Math, like reading, isn't optional, it's our future and it helps free us from our fear of creation.
"Can an eight-inch square pizza fit on a nine-inch round plate without draping over the edge?" is a question that should make you smile, not one you should have to avoid.
October 7, 2014
Small businesses rule our economy, and each successful small businesses is expected to get bigger.
Many successful small businesses are easily scaled. The owner has created something that can be repeated, a product that can be mass produced, a process that can be franchised. Scaling up serves more customers and benefits the founder.
But some businesses, maybe yours, are built around new decisions and new work on a regular basis. Those businesses are also under pressure to scale, and that might be a mistake.
To get bigger, the small business that's based on the insight, energy and passion of a few people might have to dumb down. It has to standardize, itemize and rationalize, so that it can hire people who care a little less, know a little less and work a little less, because, after all, they just work here.
Which means that in order to get bigger, the small businessperson sacrifices the very thing that brought in business in the first place.
What if getting bigger isn't the point? What if you merely got better?
It's entirely possible that you're a special snowflake, that your unique point of view and understanding and care are precisely what the market wants from you… if that's true, then hiring people to be almost-as-good-as-you isn't going to lead to more of what we seek. It just means that you're working harder than ever to cover for people who can't quite figure out how to be you.
An alternative: acknowledge your special sauce and hire people only when they help you do what you do best and uniquely. Don't worry about replicating yourself, focus instead on leveraging yourself.
October 6, 2014
You will often hear from people who will announce that it's all over, that this is the crisis that ends it, once and for all. The Cassandra sees the end of the road for the project or the brand or the culture. It's the end, now.
Cassandra is countered by the Pollyanna, who thinks everything is fine, will be fine and always is fine.
[Update: I got the details of the mythological Cassandra wrong, sorry. In legend, she not only says the world is going to end, but she's right, because she has the ability to see the future. And her curse is that no one listens to her! My point below, though, still stands enough that I'll leave it here:]
The thing is: failure almost always arrives in a whimper. It is almost always the result of missed opportunities, a series of bad choices and the rust that comes from things gradually getting worse.
Things don't usually explode. They melt.
October 5, 2014
Ambassadors do two things that are really difficult for most people within organizations:
1. They listen and send the notes up the chain. They're at the front line, and they listen to what's happening and figure out how to get the right people back home to hear what's being said.
2. They apologize. Not for things they did wrong, but for things that others did wrong.
If you work for a company that you don't own, if you interact with customers, you're a brand ambassador. The person who runs the cash register or answers the phone or makes sales calls is a brand ambassador, in the world on behalf of the amorphous brand, whatever that is.
I recently bought a few shirts from a big chain. They left the anti-theft tags on the shirts, which of course meant a drive and a hassle to go back to a different store in the chain to get them taken off.
Challenge number one is that the disrespected, overworked cashier will never be asked about what she learned from her interaction with me. There's nothing in place for information to flow.
And challenge number two is that she steadfastly refused to apologize for the hassle. It wasn't her fault, she knew, so what was there to apologize for?
We invented ambassadors because nothing can replace face to face interaction, particularly when messages travel sometimes quite slowly through complex organizations. Just like now.
This seems obvious, and it is, until you realize that organizations make two huge mistakes:
A. They don't hire brand ambassadors, they hire clerks and bureaucrats, and treat them and pay them accordingly.
and
B. They don't manage and lead brand ambassadors, don't measure and reward and create a cadre of people who can listen for the brand and speak for the brand.
Would you send the clerk on aisle 7 to speak to a head of state or vital partner on behalf of your company? Because that's what he's doing right now.
October 4, 2014
