Honda’s “Failure: The Secret To Success” project

In case you missed it last week, Gary Vaynerchuck, LearnVest CEO Alexa Von Tobel, “4-hour workweek” author Tim Ferriss, fellow triathlete Mitch Thrower and I participated in Honda’s “Failure: The Secret To Success” project, which basically consisted of shining a light on the (necessary) role that failure plays in success. The concept was simple enough: Shoot short videos in which we talked about our own experience with failure. Read more about it here (Facebook link).

For Mitch’s video, click here.

For Tim’s video, click here.

For Alexa’s crowdsourced contribution, click here.

For Gary’s video, click here.

And for mine (in case the embedded vid doesn’t work for you), click here.

And yes, my office is full of art, weapons and booze. Long story.

Disclosure: I have no affiliation or material connection with Honda. My participation in this project was entirely voluntary.

 

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The Psychology of Failure – Part 3: The Success Fallacy

We have heard it a thousand times in meetings, political speeches, at conferences and corporate feel-good events: “Failure is not an option.” Rah-rah!

It’s a lie. Don’t believe a word of it. Failure is always an option. In fact, statistically speaking, it is the most likely option. (Probably more so if you have to remind people that it shouldn’t be.)

Believe me, I know a thing or two about failure: The failure to get an A+ on every test and in every class during my school years. The failure to score goal after goal for my team. The failure to break school records. The failure to convince Rachel Gray to go out with me in eleventh grade, or for that matter, the failure to get up the nerve to even ask her. The failure to completely master a generic American accent before I was 18. The failure to win first prize at competition after competition where I came in second or third. The failure to finish my first Ironman in under 12 hours. Professionally, I have spent the last 16 years dealing with failure as well, occasionally my own and others’. I deal with it on a daily basis. In fact, one could argue that dealing with failure is pretty much all we do:

My phone battery’s failure to give me 24 hours of juice, for example, or my Volkswagen Passat’s failure to keep rain out when its little drainage tubes get plugged with spontaneous generations of microscopic dust. The failure of Wall Street banks to remain solvent in 2008, and the US government’s failure to prevent things from getting so bad in the first place. BP’s failure to prevent one of the world’s most devastating ecological disasters, then its failure to both stop its catastrophic oil leak for months, then clean up its mess before it destroyed vast ecosystems. The failure of civility and citizenship several months ago, when Muslims looking to build a place of worship near Wall Street found out that not only did many Americans no longer care to see the distinction between “Muslim” and “Islamic Terrorist,” but also decided that Constitutional First Amendment rights no longer applied to foreigners and non-Christians. President Obama’s failure to sell to a hefty portion of Americans that something as basic as affordable and reliable healthcare is a better option than the completely ineffective “insurance” based model that barely-covered Americans overpaid for until now.

Failure is always an option, and it bears embracing that fact. Unless you work your ass off and get lucky, failure may even be your only option. What then? How will you react? How will you adapt? How will you bounce back?

The spray valve faucet story. (Short version.)

Note: If you don’t have time, skip ahead to the next section. No, really. This story adds very little to this post. It’s a personal story thrown in for the fans. you won’t miss anything if you skip it.

Years ago, I helped develop the world’s first effective water conserving spray valve for commercial kitchens. I was working for a faucet company whose luster had faded a bit over the years, and I had been hired to help restore it. It was clear from the start that “marketing” wasn’t the problem. The problem was this: Chinese manufacturers had copied our products so well that their imports were almost as good, and their prices were significantly better than ours. They were eroding our market share faster than a hurricane chews up a Florida sand bar.

We were faced with a choice: Lower our prices and become a commodity product, or improve our product’s value and continue to be the category’s premium product. Indecision for well over a decade had left the company somewhere in a falsely safe middle. We decided to go with the latter option: Improve value. First, the company created a commodity line of products to compete against the cheap imports and create a clear separation between commodity (throw-away) products and the high-end stuff that would last the life of the restaurant. Then we set our attention on the “premium” products themselves. How could we further distance their quality and performance from the cheap stuff? Almost overnight, I went from being a marketing guy to a weird blend of product designer, field anthropologist, and community listening post.

I went out to restaurant kitchens and watched how dish-rinsing spray valve were being used. I watched how they were being abused. I watched how they were being installed and repaired. I analyzed how spray valves were being specified, how they were being bought, and how resellers made money on their replacement parts. I observed. I listened. I asked questions. I took notes. I learned. Soon enough, the company’s design engineers and I started working on ideas. The project took on epic proportions. We were going to completely re-invent the category from the ground up. And over the course of a year, we that is precisely what we did.

The first thing we did was reduce the flow of water to about 1/3 of what it used to be while actually increasing rinsing performance. The impact of this particular focus for a restaurant was that they would save a significant amount of water and electricity (that water had to be heated), which meant considerable savings in utility costs over time. In fact, the valve paid for itself in under a month just in utility costs alone. (We did cost analysis studies and planned to use them in our marketing, the numbers were so good.) The impact of this feature on a larger scale was what made me truly proud: Millions of gallons of water could be saved every day in California alone. A significant amount of the energy demand of that state would also be impacted, either lowering pollution or freeing that energy to be used elsewhere on the grid (hello Nevada).

Multiply the water conservation and energy conservation impact of this product by introducing it across the United States, and it could have resulted in a pretty incredible story of how industrial ingenuity not only made restaurants kitchens more efficient and turned a fading brand back into an industry leader, but actually helped preserve the environment as well.

This wasn’t entirely an environmentally motivated project. Around that time, California had enacted strict water conservation standards for such spray valves, and the federal government was moving towards requiring these standards across all 50 states. At the time, none of our competitors had a spray valve that actually worked in water conservation mode: Sure, they could meet the flow restriction requirements, but they took 3x longer to rinse a plate than before. (Kind of like new toilets that don’t quite… you know… work the first time.) We were the only ones with a functioning low-flow spray valve that truly worked. In fact, it worked better than the normal flow sprays.

Imagine being the company in your industry that has the best product on the market. The one that cracked the code first, a full year ahead of everyone else: The battery manufacturer with the first 48-hour smart phone battery. The car company with the first $15,000 family vehicle capable of going 1,200 miles at 65mph on a single charge. That’s what we had with this spray valve.

As a bonus, we made it completely anti-bacterial. We equipped it with a built-in back-flow preventer (to stop dirty water from getting sucked into the pipes). We made it mostly out of recyclable materials. It didn’t conduct heat like its predecessors, which meant no more burns for its operators. It didn’t crack or break on impact – you could drive over it with a truck, and it simply popped back into shape. Because it was made mostly of soft materials, it could not dent pots or crack dishes. It was ergonomic and pretty fly looking. It was so cool looking that it legitimately opened up high-end residential kitchen markets to the company for the first time. And here’s the kicker: It was cheaper to manufacture than the original. This meant two things: a) The company would save money every time they manufactured this product instead of its current one, and b) those manufacturing jobs would get to stay in the US where they belonged.

So let’s recap: We built the fastest, strongest, most ergonomic, coolest looking spray valve in the world. We built into it every functional feature our market asked for. We created for it accessories and repair kits that brought all of our distributors and retailers onboard. We made it so easy to install and work on that every plumber and spec engineer we talked to in the US was enthusiastic about it. It worked better than anything on the market, was cheaper to manufacture than our existing one, exceeded government requirements, and was already creating quite a buzz months before we introduced it to the world. Its impact on the environment alone would have earned it story after story, perhaps even a few honorable mentions in product design reviews here and there. Oh, and the patents were solid, meaning the product would be difficult to copy or emulate by our pesky competitors.

We had a win on our hands. I was psyched. We tested the things for over 8 months, and they were holding up the way we thought they would.

But the product never went to market. At the eleventh hour, after almost two years of work, just weeks from beginning production, the company’s CEO decided to kill the project. We never knew why. “I just don’t like it,” was the only answer he gave us. He said it felt flimsy to him. He wanted it made out of brass. He wanted it to be heavy and strong. What we had built just wasn’t what his company was known for. In spite of all of our research, all of our testing, all of the evidence to the contrary that we had painstakingly accumulated, he didn’t think the market would go for it. He got cold feet. He killed the project.

It was one of those times when I genuinely thought I was on candid camera.

We had the holy grail of our industry: The self-sealing undersea oil pipe. The Eurostar rail system that operates in the snow. The self-correcting accelerator in a Toyota. The variable seating device that doesn’t prompt Southwest Airlines to boot Kevin Smith off one of their planes. That’s what we had, and still we failed. I failed. Because I assumed that basic common sense would prevail. I assumed that the CEO of a company, given a sure win of epic proportions, a carefully engineered once-in-a-lifetime chance to not only regain its place in the market but capture significant parts of it that it had never held, would seize on that moment and run with it. I assumed that objections like this might have surfaced earlier in the process.

What I failed to anticipate was that logic, reason, business sense and even a hint of the entrepreneurial spirit might not always prevail in the face of an unknown quantity.

If this story makes no sense to you, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. It took me years to come to terms with it. My design engineers quit the company almost immediately after the project was tabled. They were furious that their work – truly the chef d’oeuvre of their careers, a slam dunk – could be so easily cast aside against all logic and good sense. Me, I wasn’t furious. I was devastated. Crushed. Obliterated.

Imagine Steve Jobs canning iPod a month before going into mass production claiming that “Apple makes computers, not media players.” Imagine Starbucks’ CEO deciding not to expand, claiming that “takeaway coffee cheapens the coffee drinkers’ experience.” I had just handed Pfizer the cure for cancer, and they had tossed it away saying “we’re in the erection business, not the cancer-curing business.” It was madness. I couldn’t fathom it. To this day, I shake my head every time I think about it.

I held on for a few more months, my brilliant design team gone, my other product improvement projects (equally ambitious) surely destined for the same fate, and slipped into a very well concealed state of depression. Though I resented the CEO for his bizarre decision, I didn’t blame him. Somewhere inside, I knew that the fault was my own: I had failed to spot clear signs that he might feel threatened by the project’s success, that change on the whole made him uncomfortable, that he perhaps cared more about the aura of success within his familiar, comfortable world than driving major market shifts and exploring dangerous new horizons. More than anything, I had failed to recognize that the job I had been hired to do was someone else’s idea of where the company should go, not his. I should have seen the signs. In hindsight, they were obvious. I should have turned down the job to begin with. Failure was always the option. The only option. Why? Because a strong aversion to change had been engineered into the company culture for decades. In spite of all the “failure is not an option” rhetoric that made its way into quarterly meetings, it was, in fact the most likely option of all. In my youthful exuberance and eagerness to accomplish the impossible, I thought I could fix it, but I couldn’t.

I failed.

Failure isn’t what you think.

“The country is full of good coaches. What it takes to win is a bunch of interested players.”
-Don Coryell, ex-San Diego Chargers Coach

When I watch Lindsey Lohan’s battle with drug abuse and the legal system, I don’t see a troubled Hollywood starlet. I see a human being with the same degree of dysfunction in her life (albeit expressed differently) that I see in some business professionals: Though hers is focused on partying and substance abuse, then amplified by the media, it is really not that different from the mechanism that causes millions of people outside of Hollywood to fail on a daily basis as well.

I could tell you that fear is at the root of failure. The fear of failure itself, the fear of being laughed at, the fear of being fired, the fear of being punished, the fear of not making VP, the fear of not being the smartest guy in the room, the fear of being alone… Fear is an easy culprit, and I can make a solid case against it in the court of personal opinion. But fear is only part of the problem. There is another culprit at work here, and its name is denial.

Not wanting to admit that you are wrong, not wanting to admit that your company’s 2% YoY growth is the embodiment of mediocrity, not questioning the validity of the curious metrics that your agency gauge success with even though you that little voice in your head tells you that you should, not admitting that the economy isn’t the real reason why business is bad this year, sticking to the same marketing tactics year after year even if they hardly yield any results: This is denial, and denial, while perhaps not the progenitor of failure, is at the very least its cradle.

Failure also isn’t just an option; it is a choice. It lives in the decision to do nothing, in the decision to wait and see, in the decision to repeat the same mistake over and over again because that is easier than making a change, and in the decision to lie down rather than fight for victory at all cost.

“Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.”
-Lou Brock

Failure is always an option. Ask every losing team coming out of the World Cup, the Superbowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup how much of an option it turned out to be. Ask every tennis player but two as they come out of Wimbledon or Roland Garros. Stand at the finish line of the Tour de France in Paris every year, and ask every rider there but one, whether or not failure was indeed an option. Ask the Xi-Xia when Genghis Khan showed up at their doorstep. Ask the German war machine in 1945. Ask Enron, Circuit City and Blockbuster. Ask BP. Ask the brands still struggling to understand how to incorporate social media into their activities, who in spite of enormous budgets spent with agencies and consultants in the last year, are still no closer to seeing any concrete results.

There is a point where someone like Lindsay Lohan has to stop, look in the mirror, say “this is stupid,” and go where Robert Downey Junior went with his life and career: Stop making excuses for yourself, stop living in denial, stop paying lip service to ridiculous rhetoric and clichés like “failure is not an option,” and stop playing at finding solutions. Instead look reality in the eye every morning, stop playing games, get yourself ready for battle, and fight for every inch of win, especially on days when you don’t feel like it.

Why do you think most people don’t make it in their careers? Is it for lack of talent? Is it for lack of opportunity? No. It is for lack of endurance in fighting failure. Sooner or later, they give up. They settle. They stop fighting.

“Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks.”
-Joe Paterno

Success, just like failure, is a choice we make daily, at every moment: Should I lie down and die today, or should I make a stand and fight? Should I crack open that bottle of gin, or go for a run and stick to water instead? Should I work on my 3-point shot another hour, or go hang out with my friends because that would be more fun? Should I spend my day trying to figure out how to make this program kick ass, or should I just let my staff find random social media metrics to report on to buy us an extra couple of months? Should I write about the truth today, or feed my readers 5 carefully crafted paragraphs of easily digestible, SEO-friendly bullshit? Should I give the appearance of winning today instead of working on winning for real in five years?

Here’s the reality of failure: It is the result of taking the easy way out, of cutting corners, of living in denial. Failure is the story born out of excuses. Humans are naturally flawed, weak, petty and lazy. If we weren’t, “discipline” wouldn’t need to be a virtue. The odds are stacked against us: Out of tens of thousands of hopefuls, only a few actors ever become movie stars. Out of hundreds of thousands of managers in corporate jobs, only a few ever become CEOs. Out of millions of young athletes, only a few ever get to win Olympic gold, Superbowl rings, or whatever prize is their sport of choice’s holy grail. Failure is always, always, always the default option. It is what happens of you don’t study, if you don’t run the ball, if you don’t take out that bunker, if you don’t make sure that your methodology is sound. It is what happens when you settle for the comfort of false security.

Failure is all around us. It is a virus we are all infected with. It eats at us a little every day until eventually, it kills us: Your health can fail you, your courage, your will, your spirit, your liver and eventually your heart. All things end in failure, and failure ends all things: No winning streak can last forever. The dinosaurs had their time. So did the steam engine, the telegraph and the cassette tape. Someday, long after humanity has moved on, even our sun will fail. Wait long enough, and failure is mathematically inevitable. But you can win for a time – Not only win, but win with style and panache. If you want to. If you care to. If you are willing to work for it and fight against your own flawed nature.

By recognizing this, by accepting the nature of failure, embracing it even, you can give yourself a gift: That “this is stupid” moment of clarity I mentioned above. That moment when you decide to stop living in denial, pretending that your life, your career, your project, your campaign, your company are doing just fine. That moment when your social media director’s latest diversionary metrics and subsequent daily dose of spin stop making sense. That moment when you realize that your agency hasn’t been selling you “social” at all – that instead, they have been selling you the same marketing campaigns that weren’t working ten years ago, only repackaged to include Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. That moment when you might even realize that you would much rather be playing golf all day than playing at being the CEO of the company daddy built.

Once you realize that failure is the most likely option of the course you are currently on, you can start to look for ways of avoiding it. You can start to look for an edge, for a way to beat the odds, for a way to actually engineer success. Not mediocrity dressed up as success, mind you. Not another brilliant version of “the emperor’s new clothes” to add to your portfolio. Not spin. A real win, with real metrics to back it up, not just the convenient ones. Real metrics like the fastest time at the finish, the most touchdowns, the most ground covered, the most products sold, the highest revenue increase in the history of the company, the highest jumps in customer loyalty, customer satisfaction (even love) and word-of-mouth recommendations. The kind of win supported by actual business performance rather than your PR department.

If your goal should be 20% YoY growth and your company is crawling along at 2%, guess what: That positive arc in your trending is still failure, no matter how it looks come review time. Your competitor beating you on price is actually your company losing on value. Price has nothing to do with it. The guy who sold you on the notion that changing your logo would refresh your “brand” should have instead suggested you refresh your relationship with customers. (Gap, I am talking to you.) The reason why you only got a 3% raise this past year while your insurance premiums went up 30% wasn’t because the economy is bad, no matter what you tell yourself and no matter how much you want to believe your boss.

The truth is that failure lives in the little lies we tell ourselves to feel better. It lives in every little compromise we make in the face of what we know is the right path. It lives in every choice to promote a sycophantic weasel rather than a true champion.  Simply put: A man who cannot face the truth of his condition cannot but fail. By association, a company whose leaders cannot face the truth of their condition cannot succeed either.

Failure and the Social Media tsunami of incompetence.

If you have ever wondered why I put so much emphasis on measurement, it is because properly measuring performance is the cure for bullshit. It’s that simple: As a triathlete, I can’t cheat the clock. As a military officer, I couldn’t cheat my unit’s  tactical situation. As a business manager, I can’t cheat my P&L. Well… not without cheating. Without lying. Without putting a spin on failure and making it sound like success. What Enron did with its books, many Social Media “professionals” are doing with their reporting, and no one seems particularly eager to call them out on it. Unfortunately, denial and lies hold us back. All of us. They hurt and weaken us as a community, as an economy, as a culture, even as a species. They too easily creep into our daily diet. They too quickly become the norm, and sooner or later, the house of cards collapses. The bubble bursts. And those who trusted in the promise of success are the ones left holding the bag.

When it is easier to be in denial than to face the truth, to spin failure into success, and when we collectively turn bullshit into an industry norm, we all pay the price. All of us.

How much money is being spent on social media integration and “strategy” right now?  How many social media “experts” advise companies today? How many big name agencies, marketing firms and consulting groups are billing major brands for their expertise?

Yet with so much “knowledge” and “insight” and “expertise,” how many major brands “do” Social well? A month ago, McDonald’s Social Media director confused foot traffic with Foursquare check-ins. Last week, I heard a member of Pepsi’s Social Media team claim to have seen significant lift in sales revenue from Social Media, yet strangely refused to provide proof. Earlier this year, global giant BP allowed its social media presence on Twitter to be usurped during its most public PR crisis ever, and Nestle discovered that its Social Media team was completely unprepared to respond when Greenpeace flooded its Facebook wall with a carefully orchestrated anti palm oil campaign. Ask Skittles where its social media “strategy” went. Closer to home, Wachovia Bank (now Wells Fargo) continues to operate a Facebook page and Twitter account while completely ignoring what is actually going on around their own brand in these same channels. See for yourselves:

Screenshot of ignored customer complaints

Screenshot of the painfully empty "information" page

Screenshot of Wachovia’s unmanaged discussion topics

Screenshot of actual comments about Wachovia

Screenshot of responses only to selected (positive) comments

Yet, in spite of the fact that the bank seems woefully unaware of the questionable management of its accounts, the bank shows up in a Mashable article titled “40 of the best twitter brands,” in which Wachovia (among other painfully horrendous social media programs mixed in with a few good ones) is featured as an example of success. Sorry, but the above screenshots (not a month old) tell a different story: Selective responses on Twitter that seem to favor positive comments while ignoring negative ones (rather than treating them as customer service opportunities), a Facebook page devoid of information like… oh, I don’t know… a company description, an address for the headquarters, some phone numbers, a website url maybe? A wall filled with angry customer comments yet no responses, a discussion page endowed with “Why Wachovia screws customers in the butt” as its most popular topic of conversation…

Forget understanding how to tie social media activity to business objectives or measure success properly… Some social media directors evidently can’t even figure out how to respond to customers on the world’s most simple social media platforms, or possibly even go as far as to give visibility to real online conversation topics to upper management. Yet, somehow, abject failures like this (not to pick on Wachovia – it is far from alone when it comes to this sort of pitiful mismanagement) are still what pass for success in this space.

Starbucks, Ford, Best Buy, Zappos, Virgin Airlines, and less than a dozen more: That is the tally of companies that didn’t settle for repackaged marketing campaign tactics, imaginary metrics, Wachovia-like account management fog, and outright spin. This is the painfully narrow minority of large businesses actually trying to figure it out with an eye towards success rather than… make-believe and unapologetic incompetence.

“Failure is not an option.” Really? Look around.

But what breaks my heart is the extent to which I have failed and continue to fail still: In spite of all my blog posts, my tweets, my appearances at conferences and other events, my interviews, my contribution to reports and articles, my presentations and even my upcoming book on how to actually develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs (out in Q1 of 2011), I am not reaching enough companies nor reaching the ones I do reach fast enough.  I am not reaching enough executives, CMOs and CEOs. Heck, I am not reaching enough agencies and marketing firms and consultancies either. My impact is piecemeal at best, and that simply isn’t good enough.

Will I fail again? I sure as hell hope not, but I have to be honest with you… It isn’t looking good yet. Let’s wait and see what happens next. I might have to up my game considerably in 2011.

*          *          *

Afterthought:

This brilliant note from John Heaney (pulled from today’s comments) –

Olivier,

As an enthusiastic and energetic product manager, you simply discovered the corporate truism that culture trumps strategy. Every time. Apple could turn over their precise product plans for their next 4 transformative products to Dell and I could guarantee that those products would not emerge successfully from Dell’s clumsy and inept design and development process. Dell, like virtually every large tech company, simply doesn’t have the corporate culture that pursues magic and celebrates delightful failure.

To a large degree, I think the restrictive corporate cultures are ego driven. Executives strive for control, and the design and innovation process – when done well – borders on anarchy. And if the resulting product incorporates materials they don’t understand, science they’ve never grasped and aesthetics that challenge their assumptions then their ego is threatened and innovation is stifled.

And I believe that’s why we see so many mindless product extensions (mini M&M’s? really? the originals were too big?) instead of revolutionary new products.

Free the culture and you free the unlimited potential and imagination of every creative mind.

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Because we all need a little more win.

My last three posts have outlined problems and failures. I don’t know about you, but all that #fail is starting to bum me out, so I need to break the cycle right here, right now. I’m in need of a little win today, if only to finish out the week with some pep. No need for a dissertation about this or that today. Instead, just watch this video and let it do its thing. It’s short, it’s brilliant, it’s beautiful. (Just ignore the fact that it’s an HBO promo.)

Outstanding.

Whatever it is you want in life, how badly do you really want it? How hard are you really trying? The spirit of victory is alive. And if it isn’t stoking your fire, you can be sure that it is toking someone else gunning for your customers, your market, your job or your belt. If you aren’t the guy in the room who wants it the most, you’ve already lost to the guy who does. You just don’t know it yet.

Just like we manufacture our own failures (see my previous three posts) we manufacture our own wins. It’s a question of perspective. Of will. Of fire. It’s a question of choice.

Have a great weekend.

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The Psychology of Failure – Part 2: Leadership

“I will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.”

– Xeones, speaking about Leonidas, king of Sparta, after the battle of Thermopylae – From “Gates of Fire,” by Steven Pressfield

All of the precepts of leadership are listed above. Embrace this ethos, and your organization will be on its way to doing great things. Reject it, and the road ahead will be strewn with disappointment and strife. Before we tackle this specific point, let’s take a step back and get our bearings.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how and why organizations fail. We talked about myths of success and cultures of failure. We talked a bit about troubled leadership and “fisher kings,” who poison their organizations from the top down by infusing their culture with their own dysfunctions.

Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about what motivates people to excel, and in the absence of motivation or drive, what sets them up to fail.

I am so full of proverbs and sayings and clichés, right now, I don’t even know where to begin.

Alexander, Richard Branson and your boss: A tale of love and leadership

“There are no bad boat crews. Only bad leaders.” – Navy SEAL saying

I just started reading the The Virtues of War, by Steven Pressfield. (Yes, the guy who wrote Gates of Fire, which I quoted at the beginning of this post.) It tells the story of Alexander the Great, from his childhood to the end of his campaigns, a man who conquered most of the known world before his thirty-third birthday. I am only forty pages into it, but already, it’s fascinating to consider that at only 16, he led 1/3 of his father’s army into battle, his squadron facing Greece’s fiercest warriors (who crushed even the Spartans), and won the day against men better equipped, better trained and just as valorous as Leonidas’ famous 300.

At 16, I couldn’t have led a street gang, much less generals and an army. So aside from being the son of a king, how did he do it? How did he get these men to trust him, to have faith in him, to surge into battle with him and fight until the day was won, instead of simply letting him ride along and take credit for his generals’ work?

One of the answers the book explores is the fact that – aside from being charismatic, clever as hell and already a master tactician before hitting puberty – his men loved him. From his generals to the rank and file, they just loved him. They respected him. Had faith in him. They followed him into battle because they trusted his genius, admired his courage, and felt elevated to be at his back.

Think about your favorite person in the world. Someone you admire above all. A politician, a military commander, an artist, a CEO, an agency principal… Whatever. Whomever. Think about the person you would kill to work for or serve under.

Apple’s Steve Jobs?

Virgin’s Richard Branson?

President Obama?

Ford’s Scott Monty?

Steven Spielberg?

Insert blank here.

Imagine your first day. How it would feel waking up that morning. How it would feel at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, when things suddenly quieted down for a few minutes and you had time to reflect on where you are, living the dream, actually BEING there. How it would feel that evening, sitting at home, thinking back on your day. The smile on your face. The excitement pulling at every fiber in your body.

Now imagine your hundredth day. Your 500th. Your 1000th, still working for the one person you admire the most in the world. Someone whose trust and respect you’ve earned by now. Someone who seeks your advice and opinion, who puts your ideas and insights forward. Someone who inspires you to be the best that you can be, and makes you feel like your work is important and valuable. Every day.

Imagine waking up every morning filled with a sense of purpose as warm to the soul as a sunny spring afternoon.

An organization filled with people who feel that way cannot fail. Morale, not technology, not tools, not training, wins the day. Morale is everything.

Morale creates the difference between good boat crews and bad boat crews during BUDs (a weeks-long grueling SEAL selection process), and as we now know, “there are no bad boat crews. Only bad leaders.”

Now imagine working for someone you dislike. Someone who doesn’t inspire you. Someone who wouldn’t miss you if you were laid off tomorrow. I am not even talking about being forced to work for a sociopath, here. Just someone who doesn’t really care about his or her staff all that much. Someone who would be hard-pressed to inspire loyalty from anyone under their authority.

Imagine your 1000th day working for this person. Imagine the quality of work you and the rest of the staff would be in the habit of producing.

If there’s a clue in this discussion, it is this: You are the same person regardless of your boss. Same personality. Same upbringing. Same skills and wants and needs. It could even be the exact same job in the same office at the same desk. The only thing that changes is the boat leader. Your boss. Your captain. Consider the difference in both motivation and effect between the leader who inspires you, and the one who does not. The one you could be loyal to, and the other.

Consider then, the importance of love in the equation, and furthermore, the importance of certain key human qualities – of human virtues – in leadership. I’m not kidding. Pause. Sit back. Take a few minutes.

Now consider the reasons why you selected your hypothetical dream boss at the beginning of this discussion. What qualities do you admire in them? What draws you to their legend? What makes you love them enough to name them as your ideal boss?

The virtues of leadership, mind you, don’t always include kindness.

The young officer and the veterans

I “earned” my lieutenant’s bars at 21, and on the first day of my very first command, standing before an assembly of curious petty officers, I swiftly arrived at the conclusion that didn’t know shit. This was my first practical management experience: Being the new acting XO for a company of Fusiliers Marins (French Navy Marines), whose rank and file all knew their jobs much better than I did.

Which wasn’t hard, since I was fresh out of OCS.

So here I was, my bags yet unpacked and still in my dress uniform, addressing a group of grizzled, rotten bastards who were there at least as much out of sordid curiosity as professional courtesy. To them, I was new meat. Nothing more. They stood there, sizing me up, wondering who among them would do the honors of explaining how things really worked. The “No offence, Lieutenant, but…”

I knew the score.

It occurred to me, as I was about to address this assembly of cutthroats, that nothing in my training had prepared me for this. Nothing. Crawling in the mud, sure. Shooting at paper targets, definitely. Driving attack boats at high speed, boarding ships in the dark, fast-roping out of helicopters, blowing up tank carcasses and storming fake towns, absolutely. But I had no idea how to get these guys to respect me, to trust me, to work for me for any other reason than that they had to. They weren’t going to make it easy for me. These men were mostly there because they were head cases. Discipline flunkies. All decorated veterans, brave men with more guts than sense, but too clever and independent and difficult to manage even for a corps like the FUSCOS. This was the assignment I had requested, out of misplaced bravado and contempt for some of my glory-chasing classmates, and the full reality of it now stood before me, smirking like two dozen hungry hyenas in on a private joke. I was, as they say, fuckered.

So here’s what I did. I sat down and invited them to sit too. I introduced myself, and asked them to introduce themselves as well. We went around the room, and then I told them something very close to this:

“J’ai tout a apprendre…” Oh, hang on. Let’s do this in English.

“I have everything to learn, and I came here specifically to learn it from you.” I pointed to my beautiful new épaulettes adorned with my brand new gold bars. Some scoffed. I nodded. “I’ve been an officer for less than a day. The reality of the thing is that I won’t truly be an officer until you’ve made me one.  All of you.” I paused and looked around the room. “I won’t be an officer until you, to a man, have made me your Lieutenant. I came here because you’re the biggest assholes in the Navy, and if I can’t get you lot to make me into a half way decent officer, then I’m beyond help.” I looked around the room to see their reactions.  “Any questions?”

They were stunned. Many of them laughed. I even saw in the eyes of a few of them a glimmer of what might have been acknowledgment and respect. I only won over a few of them that day, but that was more than I needed. It was a start.

Without getting too far into my little war stories, here’s what I learned during my time as a young officer: The men who loved me went the extra mile. They excelled because they wanted to. Those who didn’t went nowhere. This was a lesson well learned, and one we will revisit before we’re done here today.

Beyond this, the facts of my service as an officer were this: Reenlistments doubled. Aptitude scores skyrocketed. We began to be invited to train with elements of the Foreign Legion’s 4th Regiment, which was no small feat. I was reprimanded by my superiors both within the FUSCO and the larger base itself more often than I can recall for all sorts of shenanigans. I constantly broke the rules – or at least stretched them. My direct superior’s assessment was that I was too close to my men. The base commander’s general assessment was that I was a pain his ass… but that I had the virtue of being interesting. In spite of our difference of rank, we became good friends. Even with all this turmoil, I managed to find myself decorated in the summer of 1993, less than a year into my military service for what the Navy called “exceptional service,” though to this day, I have no idea what I did to deserve that medal except cause trouble.

Case in point: I had a petty officer under my command quietly removed from my unit. A guy with twenty years of service. A veteran of Lebanon and countless campaigns in Africa. A war hero, once. But (there’s always a “but”) he had a temper and abused his men. My men. Whatever kind of man he had been in the past had been replaced by something else altogether. I suppose peace can be hard on a man who lives only for war. Good warriors don’t always make good leaders. There is more to the business of soldiering than courage under fire and a propensity for violence. For months, I tried to steer him in a different direction. I failed. We had an altercation. He moved on. There’s a lesson in this too, one of humility and resignation, and we’ll also revisit this story before the end of this post.

But the story I want to tell you now, is how on a sunny summer day, because I hadn’t yet done enough to distinguish myself as complete screw-up, I told off a full-bird colonel, because  like my troubled petty officer, he was taking a dump on my men. And that, my friends, was not okay with me. The honor of being a pain in their rumps fell to me and me alone. (Don’t worry, there’s a lesson in this too. A big one.) Here’s what happened:

The barracks incident

The colonel wanted to move his reservists into our barracks and make my men sleep in tents. We were about to begin two weeks of maneuvers with a reserve unit from the Army, guys who in time of war would be called upon to put on a uniform, gather around the base to defend it, and then surrender at the first sign of the enemy.

Let me clarify a few things before I go on, so you don’t think I was being insolent for the sake of being difficult. My men could have slept in tents for a week without trouble, (they were all used to far worse) but it was the principle of the thing: The colonel didn’t understand how territorial men in a military unit can be. He came in on their turf (our turf) and treated very well trained men like rabble. What he did showed a dangerous and insulting absence of respect for men who were not even under his command. Although his rank far exceeded mine and his operational authority overlapped my own chain of command, his “insult” couldn’t go unanswered. I set him straight. It was as simple as that. But the consequences of this act, as witnessed by my men, proved to be of some importance.

Back to our story.

The reservists – there by law, mostly against their will – were a problem. They clearly didn’t want to be there, did not enjoy military life, and had a vicious disposition towards my men, other naval personnel on base, and especially women in uniform. My men were under strict orders from me to avoid any and all confrontations. To ignore insults and taunts, to back away from challenges, and to be as cordial to each and every reservist as if they were foreign dignitaries. It was difficult given that my men were proud and intolerant of disrespect, but this, they did. For me.

The reservists, actually, were more than just “a problem”. They were hooligans of the worst sort: Weak of mind and body, petty, rude and completely undisciplined. Those among them who might have been okay fell in pace with the agitators among them: The loud-mouthed jokers who know how to seize the attention of impressionable men looking to be included in a pack. It didn’t help that the Army officers in charge of managing them were afraid of inciting a mutiny by enforcing proper discipline. We treated the reservists like brothers, in spite of everything. We trained and drilled with them all day. We took them on night patrols to teach them the ropes. We slowly but surely started to make them into soldiers again. As much as we could anyway. By the end of the two weeks, we had started to form bonds with them. The animosity, the negativity, the lack of respect… All of it had been replaced with the seeds of camaraderie, professionalism and what the Greeks called dynamis: The will to fight, or the fighting spirit. We might have made warriors out of them yet. (A few months with us, and who knows?)

(There is a story within the story about the final exercise in which a small detachment of my men and I fought against these two companies of reservists and half of my Marines, in which I got in pretty serious trouble for kidnapping the base commander in the middle of the night and scaring his wife half to death. I won the exercise and received the biggest arse chewing of my career, but that is a tale for another day.)

A week before the exercise, half way through the reservists’ training, arrived a colonel who oversaw the deployment and command of every reserve unit in the Army’s Mediterranean theater. This was the man I would offend.

Half way through the afternoon of his arrival, I noticed my men moving all of their gear from our barracks and into the reservists’ field tents. Confused, I asked one of my squad leaders to tell me what was going on. He explained that he and the other petty-officers had been ordered by the colonel himself to swap bunks with the reservists. They were to take over the tents and surrender their barracks to the colonel’s pet monkeys. No one was particularly happy about it, but orders were orders. I told him to order the men to grab their gear and put it back where it belonged: In their barracks. There would be an inspection before shift change. He stared at me in silence, not daring to say anything. I knew what he was thinking. I repeated my order. He nodded and relayed the order to the rest of the men, who stopped and stared at him, then me. I called to one of my men, a K9 specialist who was on duty that day to fetch the colonel.

Moments later, the man emerged from the officers’ mess and greeted me with all the contempt he could muster: Me, a mere lieutenant. What could I possibly want? I saluted him and nodded towards the tents of the reservists, where my men were now busy removing their belongings and his were busy moving back in. I let him take in the sight, and asked him what he saw. He answered that he could see my men disobeying his orders. He was furious. I calmly watched my men and his, busy setting things right, and told him he was wrong.

“What you are seeing is my men obeying my orders,” I explained.

He turned beet red with rage.

I calmly explained that my men, unlike his, had a mission to perform, that our unit and the base itself were operational (one of only two naval bases in France, in fact, with such a high level of security and strategic priority), and that under no circumstances would their mission be jeopardized by his reservists because they were too soft to sleep in tents. I went on to remind him that, charged as I was with this mission, that because it superseded all else and we were not under his authority, with all due respect to his rank, my men, under my orders, would not sleep in his piece of crap army tents while his miscreants slept in comfortable beds they hadn’t yet earned.

Sensing that something was happening, my men edged towards us to try and hear what we were talking about, but a stern look in their direction made them keep their distance.

The colonel started yelling. He gave me very mean looks and flailed his arms about while he went on about ending my career and having me dragged before the President himself. I crossed my arms and listened until he was done. I then told him that if he wanted to discuss it further, he could take it up with the base commander whose authority I was actually under.

He did.

Within the hour, I was summoned. Phone calls had been made to Headquarters. Someone at the Ministry of Defense had even called from Paris to find out what was going on. You think old women spread gossip fast? You haven’t seen anything until you’ve been in the Navy. Our little tent and barracks incident was the talk of the fleet.

The dressing-down that followed was epic. The base commander, shadowed by his XO – the Marine Company commander, my boss – spent a good fifteen minutes yelling at me in his office. I stood there and took it, as was expected. Fifteen minutes was somewhat of a record for him. I started rooting for him after about ten or eleven. I am sure his clerks outside were keeping track of the time as I was, only grinning ear to ear from the safety of their offices.

Finally, he couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and broke into laughter. He told me he thought the colonel was a prick too. So did half the Navy. I wasn’t in trouble at all. He just wanted to see me sweat it out.

The colonel was gone by the time I returned to my men. Back to his headquarters he returned, no doubt bent on having my head delivered to him on a platter. (It remained, to his chagrin, very much attached.) The reservists were quiet. My men, smirking, saluted me with a little more zest than usual. I told them to cut it out. It didn’t help. The damage was done. To mark the occasion and ensure there wouldn’t be too much resentment over the incident, I took them all on a night march, Marines and reservists, explaining that this whole adventure had all been for naught since no one would be sleeping in barracks or a tent that night anyway. They didn’t seem to mind.

Things changed after that day. Not because I was a great officer (I was actually a pretty lackluster officer), not because I was a badass warrior (I was a wuss) or the best shot or the fastest runner or the most charismatic guy on base. I was none of these things. All I had done was stand up for them in a way that perhaps no one ever had, and that I had done so for something as insignificant as beds and a roof over their heads didn’t hurt.

Imagine your boss standing up for you the way I stood up for them. Imagine how you would feel about him the next day, when he smiled at you and asked you how you were doing. Imagine how much you would be willing to give when he next asked something of you.

Now imagine that to top it all off, your father, assuming you had even grown up knowing him, had never stood up for you either. (Most of my men were under the age of 20, and at least half came from broken homes.)

But this isn’t the lesson yet. This story isn’t about me. I am just the one telling it. There’s more.

The wisdom of old warriors, and the secret of leadership

A month and a half later, the commander of the naval special forces (COFUSMA), during a surprise inspection of our unit, took me aside and asked me how I had managed to turn the unit around. I told him I hadn’t done anything except train the men as ordered.

He grinned and told me I was full of shit.

His right hand man, a guy who without his uniform and his rows of decorations would have looked more like a Belgian antiques dealer than the badass super soldier he was, later invited me to walk with him. For once, I didn’t disobey a direct order, he noted. I was making progress. There may be hope for me yet. All of those commando old-timers were smartasses.

We chatted for a while. He asked me where I was from, what I wanted to do with my life, the countries I wanted to visit… It went on for a while. At one point, when he was satisfied that we were well beyond the need for small talk, he stopped and turned to me, and asked me the same question COFUSMA had asked me before: How had I managed to turn the unit around? A year before, it had been a dump for discipline cases. It had the lowest morale scores in the Navy. The least amount of reenlistments. Interventions and readiness scores were mediocre. Yet on this day, before COFUSMA and his staff, the unit had been tested and retested, and our scores exceeded those of the top Marine units in the country. Morale was higher than in any other unit he had visited so far that year. More of my men were returning to commando units than from any other Marine unit unit in the Navy. How had I managed to turn things around? A rookie. A 21-year-old kid with a cracker-jack bar on his shoulder, no command experience whatsoever and a knack for getting in trouble.

What I wanted to say – and what I still firmly believe – was “luck?”

He stared at me for a long time and smiled. As it turns out, he knew the answer to the question even if I didn’t. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Every other guy who comes here to do this job, for as long as I can remember, he goes to Lorient, he gets his bars, he comes here, he leaves, another one comes and takes his place. That’s it. You too. But the difference is this: You care about them more than you care about you. And about these.” He gestured to my bars.

I protested. I told him that wasn’t the case. He put his hand on my shoulder to quiet me and continued. “Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But when it matters. When it matters, you put yourself last. And they notice.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt like a fraud. The reason why I wasn’t afraid for my job was because I knew I wasn’t in for good. This wasn’t going to be my career. I didn’t care if I never got promoted. Besides, I still had my share of enemies on base, people rooting against me, hoping to see me fail. He told me he knew all that. That all of my predecessors had been in the same boat (forgive the pun).

“Your men aren’t indifferent to you, Olivier. They don’t mock or resent you, the way they mock and resent other officers from the EOR program. They love you. Not all of them and not all of the time, you aren’t that good, but enough of them and when it matters. That’s the bond you have with them. They’ll always be loyal to you because you’re loyal to them. And just like you only show them that loyalty when it counts, so do they only show you theirs when it counts. They know they can depend on you, and that’s rare. That’s how it works. Leadership is a handshake. It’s a quid pro quo of respect, empathy and honesty. You give and they give back in kind. That‘s the secret of leadership.”

Then he said this: “What you probably don’t see, however, and something you should be careful about, is that you crave their approval the same way they crave yours. It’s a double-edged sword.” With this, he taught me temperance. He reminded me that there is a line between leadership and friendship. That seeking the approval of your men, of your staff, can be dangerous.

I thought back to my first day with the petty officers.  The speech I gave them. He knew where my mind was at that moment. He had come up in the ranks with several of them. They stayed in touch. Some of my closest allies on base had turned out to be lifelong friends of his. He knew everything I had done since taking my command.

I asked then what I should do. He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. He told me to keep doing what I was doing. And that was that.

I left military life behind at the end of my tour some months later. Part of me always regretted it, and it’s fair to say that I still miss it every day, but I don’t think I was meant for military life. Not in France, anyway. Too many generals and not enough action. Never a good combination.

At any rate, 18 years later, here I am, finding the same lessons spelled out in Steven Pressfield’s books about Leonidas and Alexander, and suddenly compelled  to write these long ass posts.

The lessons then, and what this has to do with the psychology of failure

And now, the lessons:

(I know. You could have just scrolled down to this paragraph. Sorry. I forgot to mention that.)

Leadership is love.

That’s it.

Okay, but seriously?

Yes. Seriously. And here’s what’s else:

The way you engineer a culture of failure is by doing the exact opposite of everything I wrote about in this post. Here’s how it’s done. This is how it starts (Sorry, SP, I took the liberty of turning one of your paragraphs into the opposite of what it actually states):

I will tell His Majesty what a fool is. A fool abides within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A fool dines while his men go hungry and sleeps when they stand at watch upon the wall. A fool commands his men’s loyalty through fear and purchases it with gold; he never earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a fool assigns others to lift in his stead. A fool requires service of those he leads without ever providing it to them. They serve him, not he them.

– (What Xeones might have said if asked to speak about the exact opposite of a good leader.)

Leadership is not an entitlement. Cultures of failure, the psychology of failure in organization begins with the opposite of love: It begins with fear and selfishness. It begins with the word my.

My bonus.

My promotion.

My project.

My office.

My job, and no, you can’t have it.

What is mine, I can lose. It can be taken away from me. This puts me at odds with everyone else because it puts my self interest above everyone else’s. My brothers now become a threat. I begin to regard everyone with suspicion. Silos emerge. Whips appear.  The illusion of control replaces dynamism. Before you know it, the organization begins to turn against itself from within.

I am reminded of a group VP I once worked for, who before every quarter-end would fire staff if her P&L showed she came shy of her bonus.

This is poison.

When leadership ceases to be about entitlement and perks, about bigger salaries and nicer offices, when it becomes service instead of power, it returns to its pure and effective form. Not that any of these things need to be removed from the equation, mind you. It’s just that they don’t matter. They’re the surface, not the substance.

Another thing I learned during my time in uniform, and what was later confirmed in every position I’ve held since is this: People will shine if you give them a reason to. And everyone, yes everyone can shine.

In the same way, people will fail if you give them a reason to. It goes both ways.

There are no bad boat crews. Only bad leaders.

Two last little bits, and I’ll let you go.

1. The first is this: If I sometimes shone as an officer – and not everyone was of the opinion that I did – it wasn’t because I was wise enough to be popular with my men, whether by accident or design. The truth is that I looked up to several of the petty officers I met on that first day. How could I not? I was 21 and they were in their late thirties. They were badasses: Confident, experienced, great at their jobs, they were everything I wanted to be. After my little speech, a group of them took me under their wing. They mentored me. They blessed me with the courtesy of their respect and exemplary behavior before their men, putting aside pride and personal feelings of scorn for an officer so young, and treated me as if I were worthy of their best salutes… which I wasn’t.

There are lazy salutes and there are snappy ones. You learn to know the difference. These guys snapped to as if I had been Charles De Gaulle himself. That, more than any other thing, inspired me to be the officer they thought I could be. It set the tone for the rest of the unit to give me a chance to serve them with the gratitude and awe they deserved.

It was them. It was always them.

And it didn’t hurt that the base commander himself, by granting me his affection and protecting me as he did, gave me license to be the officer my unit needed in order to get back on its feet.

The more I gave, the more it gave back. The more it gave back, the more I found myself compelled to dig even deeper and give more.

Leadership is a trust.

2. Here’s the last one, and it speaks directly to failure. My failure. It deals with the petty officer who left my command under what could best be described as unfortunate circumstances. He had been a good man once. Probably. At least a good soldier. As a section leader in my company though, he had become poison. It had begun long before my time, but as an officer, his officer, I failed him. There are no bad boat crews. Only bad leaders.

For months, I tried to reason with him. He scorned me. The man had no more respect for me than he did for his men. He wasn’t alone in his dislike for me, but he was the only one who expressed it openly. Nothing I tried worked. I simply couldn’t get through to him. I spoke to his peers and asked for their advice. They tried to settle things among themselves, which failed as well. He was a bully. He was angry with everything. He didn’t want to be there. As the entire unit fell into place, he made himself a wedge and pushed back. He taunted me. At every turn, he challenged me. My men didn’t have to say what they thought. I knew that I couldn’t let it go on: My authority was at stake. My very ability to command. If I allowed him to defy me any longer, I would lose their respect and loyalty, no matter how much they liked me. No matter how many colonels I stood up to. And there was the other issue: That it was my job to protect them, and if I couldn’t do that, what good was I?  At only 21, I didn’t know what to do. I eventually ran out of options and it came to a confrontation. It’s what he wanted and it’s what he got.

The outcome was this: He left. I stayed. By morning, workers had already patched up the walls of my office and repaired the broken glass of the windows. The desks and chairs were returned to their proper place. It was as if nothing had happened. No one spoke of it openly outside of the official inquiry, which was itself swift. He was transfered, then offered early retirement. I made sure his record wasn’t tarnished by his undistinguished final years in uniform. A man’s life work shouldn’t be invalidated by only a fraction of it.

The immediate problems of morale, abuse and my ability to command were solved that day, and his departure was as if a weight had been lifted from the entire unit’s shoulders. His friends did not become my enemies. I was told I had done the right thing. My mentors offered to buy me a round of drinks. But I never saw it as a win. Neither did my superiors, who expressed their disappointment in me. The culture of the Fusiliers was such, though, that in the absence of a better course of action, only this one remained: A good old duel. Two rams locking horns. The dumbest form of problem solving on the face of the earth. In the end, it came down to that, but I wish it hadn’t. This also is not a great way to resolve management problems in the civilian world, by the way (though there, transferring or firing people can be a bit easier).

Cultures of failure are resilient. They grab hold of the ground like a weed and don’t let go. If you allow them to take root inside an organization, they grow and eventually take over. In the best of worlds, you find the wisdom not to fight them, not to defeat them, not to allow them to brace themselves against you and become an enemy. In the best of worlds, you can inspire them to turn themselves around, you can win them over with reason and affection and virtue. Sometimes though, as I found out in this instance, no such luck. But you still have to do what you have to do. Leadership is also about having to make hard decisions in impossible conditions, about having to choose between two bad solutions when no good one is available. Sometimes, leadership is as much about minimizing failure as it is engineering wins. It isn’t for everybody. It’s tough on the nerves and hard on the soul, but for those who want it, it’s there, at once beautiful and terrible, elating and terrifying, infinitely rewarding yet relentlessly unforgiving. You never quite figure it all out, but as long as you press on, the wind tends to stay mostly at your back.

Thanks for sticking around to the end. I felt like telling stories today.

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UK Businesses: Two events you want to add to your calendar right away

Conferences are great. You learn stuff, you meet people, you go back to work all jazzed up and energized… But let’s be honest: There are some things you just can’t get from a conference, like real training and “how to” knowledge.

From my perspective no matter how much clarity I bring to topics like R.O.I. and social media measurement, building and managing social media programs, brand management in the era of the Social web, etc. at conferences, there is only so much I can teach you in an hour, or thirty minutes (and even 10 minutes, in some cases).

Based on feedback from a pretty big number of conference attendees over the last year, it became clear that something was missing from the picture: Think of it as a gap between the short conference format presentations and high-commitment 3-8-month long consulting engagements.

That’s when my mind flashed back to the courses I used to take from the American Management Association (AMA): Full day trainings on just about anything you might need to increase your value to your organization, from Best Practices in to “how to” courses. The format was simple: One day out of the office, learn everything you need to learn from an expert in the field, come back with copious notes, and get back to work with a valuable new skill.

Bonus: The playbook you bring back with you in the form of notes and course content. That’s yours to keep. Forever.

I loved those things. They made me smarter about the world, better at my job, and payed off in major ways – both for me and my employers… which is probably why they didn’t mind paying for them several times per year.

The single-day AMA trainings I was sent to typically used to cost my employers about $2,000 between registration, airfare, hotel and food (about the cost of going to a conference these days), which I always thought was a little steep. (Multi-day trainings went up from there.) Different value than attending a conference, sure, but in the back of my mind, I always knew the model could be streamlined and the costs made more accessible.

Long story short: It’s obvious that business managers increasingly need real social media operational training, not just neat case studies and presentations about social media tools, so I am launching a series of AMA-style trainings to address that need.  If you’re a business manager or social media practitioner and you need to learn how to better develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs, this is for you. Though the official launch will take place in early 2010, the very first of these trainings will take place in London on December 4th:

Event Number One: Red Chair London

The course I will teach in London is designed for C-level business executives, Marketing and PR directors, Agency honchos and Social Media managers wishing to deepen their operational understanding of Social Media.

The course is designed for decision-makers and managers looking for real training on how to actually plug social media into their organizations and make it work. Not just from a strategic angle, but also from operational, tactical, and analytical standpoint. (Yes, this is what you guys have been asking for. I am finally bringing it to you.)

The day will be divided into four sessions:

1. 9:00am – 10:30am           Social Media Program Development (Strategy)
2. 10:45am – noon                 Social Media Program Integration (Operations and Planning)
3. 12:45 pm – 2:45pm          Social Media Program Management (Execution)
4. 3:00pm – 4:30pm             Social Media Program Measurement (Data analysis, benchmarking, ROI, etc.)

We will break for morning tea/coffee, lunch, and again for afternoon tea/coffee. (All included with your registration.)

Red Chair London is being kept purposely small (20 seats)  to foster a roundtable-style atmosphere for participants in which all questions will be answered, no matter how technical or complicated. I can handle it.

Registration is only £650 per person (about $999 US), and we have created some pretty awesome group discounts to make it easier for companies to send more than one manager (or client) to the event. (My advice: Pool your resources and buy group tickets instead of just individual ones.)

The best part is that attendees don’t have to fly anywhere or book a hotel. If you work in and around London, you can swing by your office early that morning, spend the rest of the day with us, and go home when we adjourn.  No flying, no hotels, no extra expenses. Simple, painless, convenient.

Although seats should go fast (we’re limited to only 20 seats), I am all about treating my readers well, so here’s a treat for you. (This isn’t on the eventbrite registration page.) The first 6 people to register using the keyword “paddington” will enjoy a special BrandBuilder discount off their ticket price.

Red Chair London will be held at the posh One Alfred Place business Club, which is the perfect venue: centrally located, beautiful meeting rooms, awesome food, providing just the right mix of business focus and comfort. If you aren’t familiar with One Alfred yet, you’re in for a treat.

All that’s left for you to do now is either register or pass the information along to your peers, bosses, colleagues, friends and clients. (Or your marketing, PR and ad agency partners if they don’t seem to know how to take your social media presence to the next level.)

Seriously, if you know someone who should attend, be their hero and send them this post’s hyperlink. Red Chair may not come back to London for quite a while. We have a lot of cities to cover in the next 12 months. Get a jump on the competition.

While we’re still putting the finishing touches on the Red Chair website, you can go register for the London training here.

Event Number 2: Like Minds Immersive

If you can’t make it  to Red Chair London or prefer a lighter version of that type of training, check out December 3rds’ Like Minds Immersive instead. (Hey, not everyone wants or needs to get a Masters in Social Media Operational Management just yet. Baby steps, right?)

Some differences:

1. It’s in Exeter, not London.
2. It’s on Thursday December 3rd (the day before Red Chair London)
3. It only lasts 3 hours
4. It’s a little easier on the finances (Only £200)
5. The content is designed to be more accessible to junior managers and folks not yet fluent in Social Media management than Red Chair London.

Who should attend Like Minds Immersive?

• Devon area business people who can’t make it to London on the 4th.
• Anyone looking to advance their strategic and operational Social Media management skills but isn’t ready for a full day of advanced training yet.
• Managers and business owners looking for structured, step-by-step how-to social media training they will be able to apply to their business right away.

You can register for Like Minds Immersive here.

Now spread the world, ye of internet fame, and help me finally bring real Social Media wisdom, best practices and savoir-faire to the world.

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You are ALWAYS in Beta.

You’re always in beta. Always. If you think you aren’t, you’re already falling behind and bleeding relevance.

What does being in Beta mean? It means being in perpetual test mode. It means constantly asking “how could I do this better,” even when this worked just fine. How can I listen better? How could I improve customer service? How can I make my billing process smoother? How could we improve the UI/UX of our websites? How can I engage my user community even better? How could this brochure have been better?

I know what you’re thinking: Poor kid. He’s terminally obsessive-compulsive. 😀 (Actually, I’m just compulsive, not obsessive, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The point is this: The moment you start thinking that you have found the perfect model, the second you start adopting a “let’s not change anything” mentality, you’re screwed. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” saying I hear a lot in the South is may have been pretty good advice a hundred years ago, but it isn’t anymore. Not if you want your company to stay competitive. Not if you want to see your company grow. Not if you want to see chronic improvement in everything you do.

Check out today’s video if you haven’t already. And if it doesn’t launch for you, go watch it here. (Thanks, Viddler!)

Interestingly, the “you’re always in Beta” mindset that I am talking about today seriously reminds me of the mindset athletes and coaches get into when it comes to improving performance. Say you’re currently a 24:00 5K runner, and you want to relive your college glory days by running an 18:00 5K a year from now. How do you do it? Simple: By stressing your system one little bit at a time. By challenging your comfort zone with every run. Going from 24:00 to 23:55, then 23:50, then 23:45 for the same distance, and so on. Turning up the heat and the intensity for a few weeks, then giving your body a chance to adapt. To plateau. And then starting over with a new cycle of stress and adaptation followed by a rest period. During that time, you are constantly testing your boundaries, monitoring success and failure, learning what works and what doesn’t. (And yes, measuring your progress to know what works and what doesn’t.) Pretty basic stuff.

The alternative would be to keep running the same 5K route every day at the exact same speed, in the exact same way. What would happen? Well, you would become pretty good at running a 5K  in 24:00. Comfortable? Sure. But whatever happened to improvement? See where I am going with this?

Okay, now let’s complicate things a little bit:

As a triathlete, training and competing in what essentially amounts to three sports (swimming, cycling and running) adds some pretty substantial layers of complexity. Not only do I have to figure out how to train for three specific sports, but I have to figure out how to combine and integrate all three in a way that doesn’t lead to injury or burnout. I also have to fit all three in my already busy schedule. Then I have to consider how to time my training cycles to coincide with specific races. In addition, I have to incorporate changes in nutrition and hydration based on my workouts, my training mode, outside temperatures, etc. And if I get into my head that I am going to train for a marathon, half Ironman or full-on mac-daddy Ironman, all of these variables take on a level of complexity I can’t even begin to explain in one blog post. How much Gatorade should I drink per hour in 94 degree temperatures at 80% of my maximum heart rate? How many energy gels can I absorb per hour without getting sick to my stomach? What cadence should I adopt to sustain an average speed of 21mph for 112 miles? Only one way to find out: Test it.

And I haven’t even talked about gear. Will the improved aerodynamics gained from dropping my aerobars down 2 millimeters shave 20 seconds off my 40K time? Maybe… but as a result, will my upper body’s new angle offset my hip angle enough to reduce my power output or stress my hip flexors enough that I will start cramping up 5 miles into the run? How will I find out? There’s only one way: Getting out there and testing that theory. It’s clipboard and stopwatch time for the next six weeks.

Should I go with a disc wheel or a deep dish rim for my next race? How will I know which works better for me on a moderately hilly course in 15mph crosswinds? Only one way: I have to go test each wheel configuration on a variety of courses in completely different wind conditions. Then I’ll know what works best in specific course conditions.

Rear-mounted bottle-cages or frame-mounted? Aero helmet or regular helmet? Motion control shoes or racing flats? Test test test test test. You get the picture.

Call it an occupational benefit or a pre-existing condition, but being a triathlete kind of trains you to be in a perpetual Beta mindset. And it isn’t a stretch to jump from the world of competitive endurance sports to the world of business performance. Different application, but same principles and same basic methodology: Ask, test, observe, validate, learn, repeat.

But before you do all this – the testing, the experimentation, the analysis and learning and adaptation – you have to make a choice. You have to pick a camp. You have to decide whether you are satisfied with your business performance as it is today (“good enough” is good enough for you and your customers), or hungry for improvement.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. It doesn’t matter what camp you decide to align yourself with: The one happy with the way things are or the one looking to kick ass a little more each day. What matters is that your decision work for you. But let’s be clear about the impact that your choice will have on your business: Sticking with a “let’s not change anything” mindset will not earn you more customers, increase customer loyalty or generate more sales. Where you are today is exactly where you will be tomorrow. If you’re lucky. Eventually, perhaps not next week or next month or next year, but eventually, this mindset will seal your doom. A Beta mindset, however, will help you uncover ways to innovate, earn more customers, cut costs, increase customer and employee loyalty, improve product design and performance… You name it: Whatever the opportunity to improve, do do things better and smarter, may be, you will systematically uncover it in the same way that Apple, Nike, BMW, Cervelo, HBO, Michael Phelps, IDEO, Lance Armstrong, Comcast and Zappos have.

If you want your company to be best in class, to own a market or an industry, to be the trendsetter, the example to follow, the leader in a category, you must adopt a perpetual Beta mindset. You have to constantly stress your systems and processes. You have to turn every action into a test an look at every activity as an opportunity to experiment.You have to measure, analyze, learn, adapt and repeat the cycle over and over and over again.

Question everything.

Work harder than the next guy to build the best XYZ the world has ever seen, and then find ways to make it even better.

Perfection is a process, not a milestone.

Embrace a state of perpetual Beta.

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On the substance of success

From Tim Coote‘s always brilliant and enjoyable blog:

“When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them — And nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — But I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.”

–Steve Martin.

All of the strategies and marketing angles will be trumped by this one piece of advice everytime – “Be so good they can’t ignore you”. If you’re catching balls in the end zone week after week or motivating people to do their best and it works week after week you will be noticed. People want to notice you because it’s why the world spins. It’s why people are able to get out of bed and go to work. Aspiring to greatness is the honey in the lion.

Damn, Tim. Well put.

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Killing America’s brands, one lousy C.E.O. at a time.

How “Black Widow” C.E.O.s and Caretaker Managers are choking the life out of the world’s most profitable brands:

Fellow brand guy Rob Frankel and I don’t always agree on everything, but more often than not, he an I find ourselves on the same side of the fence, shaking our heads at corporate execs who somehow manage to choke the life out of an otherwise solid brand. They are the corporate world’s equivalent of the proverbial black widows – women who marry for money, kill their husband, and then move on to their next prey.

This isn’t to say that black-widow CEOs purposely kill the brands they are hired to manage, but it would be a stretch to pretend that they have any brand’s best interest in mind: By the time these guys leave – usually after just a few years – the size of their golden parachute seems to be in direct proportion to the damage they have caused.

The worst part about this is that in spite of their horrendous track record, they keep getting hired to run more companies and brands into the ground with the efficiency of an enraged elephant trying to muscle its way out of a porcelain store.

Rob Frankel has some pretty interesting things to say about this phenomenon, and looks at it through the cultural prism of the Three Generations of Wealth principle, in which the first generation creates the fortune, the second generation spends it and the third generation loses it. Pretty clever if you ask me.

Per Rob:

Many American brands are victims of third generation “caretaker” managers, who themselves never had to build the very brands they’ve been charged to manage. Living off the fat of the land, they’re complacent managers who fear innovation and risk, the type that figure their brand will always be there, because it was always there for their fathers and grandfathers.

The trouble is it doesn’t work that way. The grandfathers who built the brands knew the power of a brand. They knew how to constantly build and reinforce their value. Caretaker managers, however, spend more time on the golf course than they do building brand value. In fact, most CXOs don’t truly understand what a brand is, let alone how to build its value. And so while the caretaker managers might hold hands, close their eyes and wish real hard, their brands continue to wither from neglect, with market shares shrinking into a mere slivers of what they once were.

But it isn’t enough to just point a finger at ineffective CEOs without looking at exactly HOW they are destroying the brands they should be elevating. There is a method to the madness, and here it is (in its simplest form). Again from Rob:

Year One: Get hired by suckers whose company is hemorrhaging cash and market share to the point that their desperation clouds their good business sense. The Caretaker uses this first year to make promises and “assess the situation.”

Year Two: Caretaker begins sniffing out departments where he can “cut costs”, drastically slashes budgets and tosses out the very employees who built the company. By cutting costs, he hopes to “restore profitability.”

(And on paper, it works.)

Year Three: The costs are cut, but the Caretaker has done nothing to increase revenues. While profits have increased, overall revenue is down and company infrastructure is devastated to the point where any hope of a real financial recovery is gone. But the Caretaker Manager doesn’t care: His deal is done. And by the time the folks who hired him find out how much damage he’s caused, it’s too late. His recruiter has already landed him at another company where he can do the same damage all over again.

The key element of this process is obviously Year Three: a) The black widow CEO has done nothing to increase revenue, and b) the company infrastructure has been severely weakened.Not a good combination.

By then, customer support (one of a company’s most important brand-reinforcing touch-points) has been outsourced, most departments are stretched well beyond their operational limits, and most of the company’s true management talent has left. Meanwhile, because little or no work has been done to enhance or even maintain the brand’s relevance, customers have started to shift en masse to competitors more concerned with creating value than cutting corners… err… costs.

Rob goes on to cite Chrysler’s choice to hire controversial serial CEO Robert Nardelli to take the helm as an example of this process:

According to the Los Angeles Times:

In Nardelli, Chrysler is getting a former senior General Electric Co. executive, who was both credited with overhauling purchasing and technology systems at Home Depot and widely criticized for pay and severance packages seen as excessive.

“This is an interesting choice, and I’m somewhat perplexed by it,” said Erich Merkle, an auto industry analyst with IRN Inc. “There are still things that Chrysler needs long term and I’m not sure Nardelli can provide them.”

Right. Things like vision, direction, purpose or clarity, perhaps? Heck, anything that even closely resembles a strategy beyond growth through acquisitions and further rounds of cost-cutting?

Now we’re on to something.

It should be said that Nardelli’s current annual salary at Chrysler is exactly $1, so kudos to him for at least playing along with Washington theatrics surrounding the spectacular bailout his company is currently benefiting from (especially considering his past history with grossly excessive executive compensation.) That being said, given his history, how can board of directors look at a guy like Nardelli and think “wow, this guy can really turn around Chrysler and get us to the top again?” His track record and tactics are pretty clear.

Is there a forest vs. trees problem going in in the corporate world, or are the boards that appoint these black-widow CEOs that clueless? (The question is not rhetorical. I really want to know.

How to spot a caretaker manager posing as a leader: Look for short-term P&L mirages instead of actual growth:

Something to think about: Efficiency is nice when you’re a CFO or a COO. A CEO’s job is considerably more complex than just hacking off unprofitable divisions and cutting costs to the point of operational anemia, however. (See Year Two, above.) Would Nardelli make a great COO? With the right CEO looking over his shoulder, probably. But CEO? Not on your life. Yet here we are, watching Nardelli accelerate Chrysler’s nose-dive by favoring short term profitability through aggressive cost-cutting over actually rebuilding a limping company and the brand that once made it successful. Sure, efficiency and profitability may look great on paper, but the end result, when not tied to long term strategies is almost always disastrous.

And if you don’t believe that a CEO can resurrect a company by understanding and embracing the value of its brand, just look at Steve Jobs and Apple. Consider for a second what happened to Apple when he left, and how his return a) brought Apple back from the brink, and b) turned it into the powerhouse that it is today. Did Steve Jobs rebuild Apple by cost-cutting and focusing on short term profitability, or did he set out to rebuild Apple’s relevance and culture of innovation again? (No need to think about the answer. It’s a rhetorical question.)

Now compare a black widow CEO like Nardelli and a visionary CEO like Jobs. What kind of CEO builds powerhouse brands and what kind sinks them? (Last I checked, Apple wasn’t applying for bailout money.)

Why is this a relevant topic this week? I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions, but the main catalyst for this post was Rick Wagoner’s precipitous removal from the helm of General Motors over the weekend… and subsequent appointment of GM’s current COO (and former CFO) Fritz Henderson. Now… I don’t know Mr. Henderson personally and haven’t followed is 25 year career with GM, so my questions about this choice as a replacement are completely uneducated and skewed towards today’s argument, but hear me out for a second.

Given what we have discussed today and what we know of corporate America’s habit of rewarding CXOs for short-sighted performance rather than long term growth, ask yourselves for a moment if the best possible choice to lead an ailing company (like GM) is really its former CFO/COO.

Do cost cutting and operational efficiency REALLY impact revenue, or do they mostly help the company’s P&L look good while sales continue their downward trend?

Can a 25-year insider/veteran of GM who has contributed during his entire career to the downfall of a brand really bring new vision and infuse new life into a dying company?

As I was researching this topic for today’s post, I happened to zero-in on a comment Edmunds.com’s Chief exec. Jeremey Anwyl today in an AP story on GM’s move, which he called out as little more than “political theater.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The point here being: Sure, Wagoner being pushed out was a good move considering Chrysler’s horrendous performance and complete lack of direction, but Henderson’s appointment basically negates any kind of forward momentum or positive outcome for GM. He is just another GM exec with absolutely nothing new to bring to the table.

It doesn’t matter how deeply GM and Chrysler cut costs. If neither company focuses on rebuilding their brand(s), they will not be able to rebuild their revenue stream. Period.

More of the same breeds more of the same breeds more of the same, and so on:

Case in point: The AP story makes some good observations about Wagoner’s success in cutting costs and improving operational efficiency at GM, but looking at the big picture, what did the cost-cutting really accomplish?

$82 Billion (yes, with a “B”) in losses in the last four years. That’s what.

Let me say that again: $82,000,000,000 in losses in just four years. (Source)

Does this sound like GM was moving in the right direction with the cost cutting and “restructuring?” In that time period, did GM’s brand as a whole capture our attention the way BMW, VW or Lexus did?

If you find my argument a little weak, ask David Cole (chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan) what he thinks:

“I don’t think you would see any shift or significant change at all with Rick’s leaving. I think the course that they’re on, they’re on.”

You don’t say. Yet Senator Charles Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on the change indicate how deeply rooted our general cluelessness about the value of true leadership and objective change really are:

“Given the history, a change in management could hardly hurt and might do some good.”

No, Senator. Change for the sake of change is just noise. Replacing a caretaker manager with another caretaker manager from the same management culture is not an improvement. It is nothing more than political gesticulation and pointless churn. What we do need, however, is fresh talent at GM. What we need are executives who want to rebuild the GM brand and will attack that task with the passion of a true believer.  We need people who understand GM’s importance to the automotive industry and their millions of fans – both in the US and around the world – and will map out a future for it rooted in clarity of purpose. That kind of leadership looks a lot more like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Yves St. laurent and John Mackey than Robert Nardelli, Rick Wagoner, Fritz Henderson or Edward Liddy.

Stop mistaking managers for leaders. Please, for the love of god, learn the difference between the two.

The proverbial fork in the road: How companies choose to either succeed or fail:

Ironically, GM currently owns some of the world’s most more recognizable automotive brands, with Cadillac, Saab, Hummer, Chevrolet and Saturn making the list… So it shouldn’t be all that hard for GM to make a comeback… But unless it learns to embrace the power of the brands it depends on to remain profitable, it doesn’t stand a chance.

(As a taxpayer,) what I would like to hear from Mr. Henderson is a statement affirming a new direction in GM’s strategy. Specifically, one that leverages what Cadillac, Saturn and Hummer have managed to accomplish all on their own: Create unique cultural niches for themselves and build loyal brand followings. Cadillac especially, having reinvented itself over the last decade, could help ailing brands like Buick, Chevrolet and GMC find renewed purpose in a market saturated with banality, derivative designs and watered-down identities. In short, what I would like to hear Mr. Henderson say is that the lesson Cadillac learned in the course of its own successful reinvention will be applied across all GM brands effective immediately. That GM, while continuing its commitment to reducing costs where it makes sense will shift its focus back to making cars that people actually want to drive. That GM as a whole has a plan to completely revamp its design and Q.A. departments (please hire some Germans already) in the next six months. That it will immediately end production of all models with notably low market share. And most importantly, that it will actively seek to bring fresh executives to the table. Not US automaker flunkies from the same stale pool that got GM and Chrysler to the brink (like himself), but professionals from other industries with a talent for actually developing culture-affecting products and building brands from the ground up. And that – to that end – he plans to voluntarily step down from his role as C.E.O. sometime in the next year to give them room to work their magic. I want deadlines, direction, purpose and unwavering commitment. What I don’t want is more hollow posturing and vague rehashes of already failed strategies.

Sadly, hollow posturing is probably all we can hope for at this stage in the game. Even the White House seems content to let heads roll at GM and Chrysler without demanding real change. As a result, what we are likely to hear from both auto giants over the next few months will be the same old song that got us here to begin with: More cost-cutting. More attempts to return to short-term “profitability” by hacking their companies into strategic and operational impotence. More bean-counter promotions to leadership positions. More lame duck partnerships. More requests for bailout money. In short, more of the same. Why? Because expecting true leadership from caretaker managers trying to hold on to their jobs in a tanking economy is about as realistic as expecting my chihuahuas to start quoting Buddha, Mohammad and Ghandi in their native Spanish. (Though sadly, the latter is actually more realistic.)

The most likely outcome of this ongoing corporate FAIL will be an endless circus of caretaker managers taking turns playing C.E.O. musical chairs while their once mighty companies burn to cinders around them.

Let’s face facts: Any idiot with a calculator and a spreadsheet can cut costs to make his P&L look good at the end of the month. You don’t need 25 years of executive experience at the Fortune 500 level to master that little trick. So what exactly qualifies executives like Nardelli, Wagoner and Henderson to run (heck, to rescue) companies like Chrysler and GM?

The question I would like to ask these guys is simple: When you run out of costs to cut, then what? (Besides jumping ship or asking for bailout money?)

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Repeat after me: No major brand ever rose to a position of market dominance by focusing on cutting costs.

Apple. BMW. Starbucks (in its heyday). Microsoft. Cartier. Disney. Newman’s Own. Michelin. Breitling. Cervelo. Oakley. Hermes. Pixar. Assos. The list goes on.

Is it really so hard to grasp these simple concepts? That P&L manipulation through chronic cost-cutting is no kind of strategy at all? That preserving the health of your revenue stream trumps all other business functions? That everything you do in a company should be done with one objective in mind: To create customers? That a C.E.O. can’t just focus on the dashboard or the rear-view mirror while he drives his company forward?

This really isn’t rocket science. Is it?

Is it?

Help me understand how we got here. Two ways you can do that:

1. Be sure to add to the already fantastic series of comments published below.

2. Continue the discussion anytime by engaging me an fellow commenters on Twitter. Use the hashtag #brandbuilder_CEO in your Twitter comment. (You can then follow the threads by clicking here.)

Thanks for bearing with a particularly long post today. You guys are good sports. 😉

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microventures and global microbrands

I was driving back from the veterinarian’s office with Chico a couple of years ago, when the term “microventure” popped up in my buzzing little head. I did a quick google search as soon as I got home, and of course, the term had already been coined. *sigh*

Now… my definition of a microventure may be a bit different from what an economist’s would be: In my little world, a microventure is just a small 1-2 person startup that requires virtually zero capital and probably won’t, by itself, make anyone rich anytime soon.

I am talking about ventures that start very, very small and are probably based on something that you are already doing for free.

Do you knit really cool sweaters for your family and friends? Are their friends asking you to make some for them too?

Are your pies winning local awards or state fair contests every year?

Do you grow the most amazing tulips anyone in the tri-county area has ever seen?

Are your pesticide-free vegetables turning heads at the local health food store?

See where I am going with this?

My point here is you might be sitting on some pretty amazing potential. Forget affiliate marketing and MLM schemes for a second. Forget other people’s “methods” and “programs.” What we’re talking about here is creating a micro-venture around something that only you can do. Something unique to you.

I remember eating the most fantastic cheesecake in New Orleans a few years ago. I mean… this thing was unlike any other cheesecake I had ever tasted. Culinary heaven. Seriously.  I asked the waiter if they were made in-house, and he told me that no, they were baked by this little old lady in Alabama who lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

I should have tried to find out how the little old lady and the restaurant came to form this wonderful relationship, but I didn’t think about it until much later. The question that haunted me on my flight home though was this: How do you get from creating a unique cheesecake recipe for your family or church, to supplying one of the best restaurants in the country?

With no advertising, no startup capital, no infrastructure or representation or technology?

How?

How did this happen? A national cheesecake contest? A chance encounter? A cheesecake scout traveling the country in search of the most unique recipes?

We’ll come back to that.

Microventures can be about anything. Growing the juiciest tomatoes. Writing inspiring children’s books. Breeding gorgeous cockatiels. Making really cool looking art. Designing even cooler furniture. Designing stunning websites. Making gorgeous cabinets. Whatever. Microventures are about doing something unique. Something you can be the best in the world at. Something that will help you change the world, even if it’s just a tiny little bit.

What separates microventures from other small businesses is the fact that they are completely unique. They don’t follow a model. They aren’t a copy of what someone else is already doing. You won’t find them in infomercials. There’s no kit. There’s no program. There’s nothing to buy into. There’s no pyramid. It’s just you and your own highly specialized contribution to the world.

At their core, they are about new ideas. Serious talent. Hard work. Patience.

And most importantly, not relying on them to pay the bills anytime soon. (This is key.) Microventures are not and cannot be “get rich quick” schemes. They rarely scale quickly. They are artisan-driven in nature, through and through.

You should dream big, but you kind of have to start small. Build your business, one brick at a time. Be happy with a positive cash flow, but don’t expect to quit your day job just yet.

Note the “micro” in microventure.

Note the emphasis on “yet”.

So, back to my irrelevant little story: The car ride with Chico. The lightbulb moment. The subsequent blog search to see what (if anything) had already been written about it. Fast forward to Hugh Macleod’s “The Global Microbrand” post on gapingvoid. Pause on the WOW moment when I realize that there must be some kind of weird eureka synergy to this blogging thing.

Hugh’s global microbrand theory is kind of like the third and fourth steps in my microventure concept. (Step 1: Start. Step 2: Make money. Step 3: Work out the kinks and get really, really good at it. Step 4: Reach far beyond your zipcode.)

Here’s some of what he has to say:

Since I first used the term here in December of last year, I have been totally besotted with the idea of “The Global Microbrand”.

A small, tiny brand, that “sells” all over the world.

With the internet, of course, a global microbrand is easier to create than ever before. But they’ve existed for a while. Imagine a well-known author or painter, selling his work all over the world. Or a small whisky distillery in Scotland. Or a small cheese maker in rural France, whose produce is exported to Paris, London, Tokyo etc. Ditto with a violin maker in Italy. A classical guitar maker in Spain. A commercial sign maker in New England. Or a sheet metal entrepreneur in the U.K.

And with the advent of blogs this was no longer just limited to people who made products. We saw that any service professional with a bit of talent and something to say could spread their message far and wide beyond their immediate client base and local market, without needing a high-profile name or the goodwill of the mainstream media.

The Global Microbrand is sustainable. With it, you are not beholden to one boss, one company, one customer, one local economy or even one industry. Your brand develops relationships in enough different places to where your permanent address becomes almost irrelevant. (…)

Of course, “The Global Microbrand” is not conceptual rocket science. You don’t need a Nobel Prize in order to understand the idea. What excites me about it is the fact that I now live in a small cottage in the English boonies, and careerwise I’m getting a lot more done than when I lived in a large apartment in New York or London, for a fifth of the overheads. For one fiftieth of the stress levels.

(Read the rest of his post here)

So anyway. Yep. Blogging and connecting with people are crucial elements of creating (or at least nurturing) your own global microbrand.

Global microbrands fit much better in the web 2.0 world of quality discussions, solid referrals and passionate clients than in the scatter-shot approach of traditional advertising’s high traffic/high exposure model.

The microbrand’s highly specialized nature is exactly what makes it so relevant… and successful.

The old lady in baking cheesecakes in Alabama. The blanquette maker in Languedoc. The cabinet maker in Antwerp. The Christmas ornament maker in Sri Lanka. The business consultant in Lima. All potential global microbrands. All potential really cool little stories.

All potential agents of change.

Building a whole new world economy, one little brick at a time.

In closing, I will leave you with Hugh’s parting words from his post:

“There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we’re all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don’t think it’s a bad one to aim for. (…) as long as we keep blogging, avoid high overheads and keep making the best suits in the world, nobody can take it away from us.”

In this economy more than ever, put your passion to work. It may very well be one of the most rewarding adventures you’ll ever go on… and in a few years, you may look back on it as one of the smartest business decisions you ever made.

Have a great Monday, everyone.

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The Functions of a Marketing department

Via BrandXpress –

Rob Engelman was recently asked what a Marketing Department should be responsible for. His answer came as a list:

1. Focus on the Customer
2. Monitor the Competition
3. Own the Brand.
4. Find & Direct Outside Vendors.
5. Create New Ideas.
6. Communicate Internally.
7. Manage a Budget.
8. Understand the ROI.
9. Set the Strategy, Plan the Attack, and Execute.

Because we like to focus on brand stuff, here’s what Rob has to say about #3:

“The perceptions and feelings formed about an organization, its products / services, and its performance is what is known as its “brand.” The Marketing Department is responsible for creating meaningful messages through words, ideas, images, and names that deliver upon the promises / benefits an organization wishes to make with its customers. Furthermore, the Marketing Department is responsible for ensuring that messages and images are delivered consistently, by every member of the organization.”

Not a bad start. And for the most part, yes, he is right.

Read the rest of Rob’s points here.

Rob’s list is a great first step for any marketing department that finds itself needing to define its functions clearly. Let’s take it one step further though, with this second list, which should best serve marketing departments that have already accomplished all nine of Rob’s recommendations and are looking for the next step in their evolution:

1. Befriend your customers.
2. Become your market. (Don’t just monitor the competition. Rewrite the rules. Set the pace. Lead. Outdistance your competition. Make them copy you. Force them to up their game.)
3. Breathe your brand.
4. Recruit and direct outside vendors.
5. Foster Innovation.
6. Simplify your internal communications. Then simplify them again. And again. And again.
7. Strategize as if your budget had been slashed in half. Deliver as if your budget had been twice what it actually is.
8. Make your ROI completely clear to your clients and everyone in your organization.
9. Observe, adapt, strategize, anticipate, plan, execute. … and be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice.

If you can truly make this your list for 2009, you will probably blow away your competition. (Recession? What recession? … Exactly.)

Now get to work!

Have a great Wednesday, everyone.

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Wagging the long tail: Gimmicks vs. Substance

(Corporate leaps of faith rock my world.) photo by toimaginetoo

I like to go back to the archives every once in a while – partly because I’m a little crunched for time these days, but mostly because the vault contains some pretty solid posts that you guys might never had the opportunity to read. I originally wrote this post for the Corante Marketing Hub, back when I was its online editor.

Back then, Grant McCracken had pointed us to Coca Cola’s apparent then-new shift to the long tail:

“Given its pending portfolio of coffee soda, gourmet teas and Godiva drinks, Coca-Cola is expected to expend more time and energy on low-volume, high-margin categories than ever. (…)

Rather than look at beverages on a category by category basis, Mary Minnick, head of marketing, innovation and strategic growth, has said Coke is looking at how beverages fit into consumers lives. She has described the need states as, “Enjoyment today,” “feel good today,” and “be well tomorrow.”

– Kenneth Hein, from Strategy: Coke Seeks Relief (Again) By Scratching The Niche. (Adweek. March 06, 2006.)

And that seemed fine and good and all, but… whatever happened to… just… great taste?

When I order a latte from my favorite coffee shop or buy a bottle of Orangina or and IBC cream soda, it isn’t because of “enjoyment today,” “feel good today,” and “be well tomorrow.” It isn’t because of clever packaging or image or transference or projection. It’s because I’m in the mood for a particular flavor. This is about mood and palates and lifestyles, not “feeling good” and “being well”.

Oh, I know… I don’t have TCCC’s millions of dollars of research at my fingertips… but you know what? I’m wired just like everyone else, and I know why I buy drinks. I know why my friends and colleagues buy drinks. They like the taste. They look for context. Catch-phrases have nothing to do with it.

You can make any study and any set of numbers and statistics and results say anything you want. Especially when you have a whole lot of time and money invested in new products whose development needs to be justified to a board of directors.

Could this be a case of the tail wagging the dog? (TCCC’s need for some kind of ROI from its product development programs?) Is TCCC’s real strategy just a numbers’ game? Is it to throw as many products at us and see if anything sticks? Where ten years ago, none of these new drinks might have ever seen the light of day, now they’ve found a chance at life in “the long tail.” Could this just be a front? I guess the question is worth asking, even though I’ll assume – for the sake of this discussion – that this isn’t the case.

TCCC, here’s a tip: Drop the gimmicks. Focus on taste. Whether you love wines, beers bubble teas or kefirs, it always comes down to flavor. Most people who choose to drink Coca Cola do so because they prefer it over the taste of Pepsi. It isn’t because the cans are red or because Coca Cola makes them feel happy or look cool. (The glass bottles might be the exception.) The taste, before anything else, is at the core of the Coca Cola experience.

Whether you’re The Coca Cola Company or a startup with a great idea for a product, before you spend millions overthinking your strategy, just focus on making a really great product. One that people will love to discover and use and talk about. If you love it, chances are that lots of people out there will love it too. If you really want to grab hold of the long tail, you have to start with you. The game isn’t about pleasing everyone – or the majority of “the market” (which has been TCCC’s strategy for decades). It’s about creating a product for a very specific core of rabid fans/customers.

The trick though, is this: You can’t do it by trying to fill a need based on market research (American women between the ages of 32 and 46 with a median annual income of $68-97K responded favorably to XYZ… yadayadaya…). It’s what TCCC has been doing for years, without much success. It’s what everybody’s been doing too. It’s what you do if you want to be an “also in”. Your only recourse once you’ve greenlighted a new product launch is to outspend your competitors in everything from advertising to POP displays to licensing rights, and then try to hang on as long as you can. It’s ridiculous.

The right way to do this is to do the work. The real work: Instead of quantifying a culture, penetrate it. The supertool here isn’t statistics, it’s anthropology. Here’s another tip: the moment you start quantifying tastes, you’ve lost your focus and drifted back to the lukewarm center, just like everyone else. This is the easiest mistake to make, and also the most common.

The way you develop a chocolate-flavored drink isn’t by talking to 10,000 people on the street. It’s by talking to 10,000 chocoholics. These might even be people who love chocolate but hate chocolate drinks. (How cool would it be to have 10,000 people with such specific tastes tell you why they love chocolate but hate chocolate drinks? Tell me you wouldn’t crack that code with that level of feedback.)

The point is: Do your research at the extreme edge of the bell curve.

The way you develop a new endurance drink is by talking to rabid cyclists and triathletes and marathoners. The way you develop a new game console is by talking to avid gamers (not casual gamers). The way you develop a new Pop Tart flavor is by talking to people for whom Pop Tarts is a major food group. This isn’t about talking to 0.3% of American shoppers who are representative of the 60% of shoppers who place Pop Tarts in their Top 10 likeliest breakfast foods. It’s about talking to the fraction of a percent of people who live and breathe the stuff that is at the core of your new product’s identity and raison d’etre and will buy your new flavor of Pop Tarts every other week.

Not just talking to them, but understanding what makes them tick and embracing them completely.

The long tail, after all, isn’t about markets. It’s about cultures. Subcultures, even. The more specific, the better. Think skateboarders. Think triathletes. Think online gamers. Think photography hobbyists. You either become a central part of those cultures, or you go home packing.

(Incidentally, the Pop Tart team absolutely gets it.)

If TCCC wants to grab hold of the long tail and make its new strategy work, it needs to un-Coke itself. It needs to shed the TCCC formula where these offshoot brands are concerned. It needs to create truly independent subsidiaries staffed by people who live inside the cultures they are trying to cater to, and completely outside the reach of the Coca Cola culture.

Think of it as United Artists trying to produce “independent” films with $100,000 budgets. The only way they could do it well would be to create a smaller studio managed and staffed by people who live, eat and breathe the indy culture… and let them do their thing without corporate interference, bureaucracy and big business politics. Anything short of that would result in total and utter failure.

Remember Coca Cola Blak? That was the type of product Mary Minnick was talking about: Low volume, high margin (wishful thinking if your product is perceived merely as water, natural and artificial flavoring, food coloring and high fructose corn syrup… and doesn’t taste so unbelievably good that it will make people want to trade their current favorite flavor for it). TCCC going after the Starbucks crowd with Blak may have seemed like a good idea on paper, and I guess it was worth the shot (no pun intended). It might even have worked had the price point matched the perceived value of a Coca Cola retail product.

Blak launched in 2006, when his piece was written… and finally died a few months ago after a long painful battle with dismal sales and lack of interest. (Most likely due to its very high pricepoint – holding true to Mary’s strategy – than its missing the boat on taste. Red Bull doesn’t exactly taste delicious, yet it has found its market. Draw your own conclusions.)

Beware business plans that look great on paper and are based on top-down (wishful) thinking. Successful entrepreneurs (and their projects) usually do a whole lot better when their ideas come from the bottom of the distribution tree: See a need, fill a need. (That includes understanding the pricepoint-value perception feedback loop.)

Truly understanding your customers, your users, your future fans (your market), heck, actually getting back to becoming one of them is the only way to discover your next great game changing idea. The rest, as they say, is up to you.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone.

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On being the best.

From Tim Coote‘s always brilliant and enjoyable blog:

“When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them — And nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — But I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.”

–Steve Martin.

All of the strategies and marketing angles will be trumped by this one piece of advice everytime – “Be so good they can’t ignore you”. If you’re catching balls in the end zone week after week or motivating people to do their best and it works week after week you will be noticed. People want to notice you because it’s why the world spins. It’s why people are able to get out of bed and go to work. Aspiring to greatness is the honey in the lion.

Damn, Tim. Well put.

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Success: the hallowed anomaly

http://wray-mccann.com

Excellent little opinion about success (among other things) over at Seen Creative:

“You don’t have the skeleton key. There are no rules, there are no templates, there are no secret ingredients. Everything is unique and everything is dependent on its own circumstance. You can write all the books, magazine articles, or blog posts you want, but someone will always be able to prove the exception. Something will always contradict.

One reason these businesses are successful is probably because their founders didn’t take advice from stupid articles in Wired, or try to ride the latest meme sweeping the blogosphere. They understood that every situation is unique, and they needed to approach it as such. What’s right is what works, not what previously worked.”

Go here for the full post. (It’s good.)

Right. In case you didn’t already know it, cookie-cutter solutions don’t generate true success. Companies that stifle innovation, rule-breaking, and re-imagining doom themselves to being indistinguishable from their competitors… or worse yet, barely relevant in increasingly competitive markets.

Don’t ever underestimate the role that visionary leadership plays in a company’s propensity to be a game changer (and by default a culture changer). If a company’s leadership doesn’t have a healthy mix of ambitious, obsessive and a clear vision, what is driving it, exactly? Where is it going? How will it get there?

If you haven’t already added Seen to yout blogroll, now might be a good time to correct that frightening oversight.

Have a great Thursday, everyone. 🙂

photo by Christopher Wray-McCann

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How routine kills brands.

“The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

– William Pollard.

That’s worth framing and hanging in every meeting room from Portland to Tahiti (via Paris).

Thanks to Tom Asacker for digging that one up for us, and for his fantastic post on the very topic I wanted to explore today: What traps should exciting new companies be on the lookout for? As you can imagine, this post was going to be long. (Or at least long-ish.) Thanks to Tom’s impeccable timing, you won’t have to suffer through another endless essay. (See? Your good deeds are already starting to pay off.)

Check this out (again, from Tom’s post):

“Over time, unchanging relationships can turn into shackles that limit an organization’s flexibility and lock it into active inertia. Established relationships with customers can prevent firms from responding effectively to changes in technology, regulations, or consumer preferences.”

– Donald Sull
(Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad an How Great Managers Remake Them.)

So… your new mission every day is to keep it fresh. That’s it. Whether you’re in the business of designing ads, repairing engines, selling shoes or answering calls from angry customers, don’t ever, ever, ever let routine set in. Try different things. Learn something new from every customer. From every sale. From every design challenge. From every product launch. From every commercial you hear on the radio. From every movie you catch on cable. From the games your kids play. From magazines you’ve never picked up.

Keep it fresh. Shake things up. Kill the routine before it starts killing you.

Ad go read Tom’s full post. It’s very good.

Have a great Monday, everyone. 🙂

photo by F360: Pita posing for the camera.

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