And the Question Is....

What question are you trying to answer?

When you ask a question a natural vacuum forms. Questions beg answers. Questions inspire thought, but questions can ruin resolve. Questions bring clarity, but questions can easily distract. Questions spark understanding, but questions can just as easily frustrate.

As a leader, you get to ask the questions. Your questions set the agenda for the work of your team, of your organization, of yourself. Be very careful with questions.

First, don't ask too many questions of your team.

The fastest way to paralyze an organization and turn it inward is for leadership to ask too many questions. 20 questions is a game - not leadership. Show some insight. Show some discipline. Show some pacing. It's your right to ask questions, exercise in moderation.

Second, direct questions to the right person.

Ask the wrong person, get the wrong answer. Ask the wrong person, generate a lot of unnecessary effort. If you don't have enough insight into your organization to know who to ask, perhaps you should start by asking who is in the best position to answer the question. I've had bosses who think it's clever to ask several different people to answer the same list of questions. I'm sure this occasionally generates a novel idea, but at what cost?

Finally, ask insightful questions.

Any hack management consultant can ask big broad questions of the organization. How can we reduce costs? How can we generate more revenues? Ask a big vague question, get a big vague answer. Ask a big vague question, send everyone on a wild goose chase. Show some insight into the business and keep your team on strategy by asking insightful, directed questions. How do we reduce Asian sourcing costs for the outer shell of the XJ product line? As an employee, this tells me you have a grip on cost components for the XJ line and an informed opinion that we are either overpaying in Asia, or that the parts from Asia are the lever for improving line profitability.

Most teams face two or three critical questions that, if answered correctly, could lift them to the next level. As a leader, one of your most important roles is getting those questions framed appropriately and answered.

So what questions are you (and your team) trying to answer in 2012?

Ideas are the Water Supply of Business

If the water supply is contaminated, we all die of thirst or worse. Without safe water, the land becomes barren and eventually we all must move on.

Ideas are the water supply of business.

Businesses without new ideas stagnate, stop growing, and are surpassed by competition. Creative industries and occupations seem to get this more than others. If you create advertising or write songs for a living, you understand that the idea is everything. It's not enough to be ABLE to do the work, you need inspiration, an idea, that animates your skill. It's true in most every occupation. A supply chain that doesn't evolve and improve is soon uncompetitive. A salesperson that never alters their pitch, finds it less effective over time. New ways of doing things.... start with the idea. It's common ground for every function in a business. Enough, I get it, so what?

Let's start with the idea management. As a leader, do you treat ideas with the respect they deserve? Do you have a process to identify, capture and nurture them? Do you place the responsibility on the employee to bring them out, or do you seek out ideas, pulling them out of the organization as if they were buried treasure? Perhaps you just relegate them to the Idea Box, where they can be handily stored on a shelf and avoided?

Now about your "Idea Generators". As a leader, you soon come to learn that while everyone adds value, not everyone adds ideas. Ideas can come from anywhere, but in my experience, they don't. They usually come from a small, consistent minority. This presents two opportunities. First you need to act to get more people creating ideas. There are myriad reasons why they don't, you need to understand and address those reasons. (There are some people who will never generate ideas for you, but lets assume a lot more could.) Second, you need to understand who your key "idea generators" are and make sure they are adequately paid, resourced, energized, and appreciated. Create the mental and physical environment that is conducive to idea creation. These people make up the water supply from which everyone will drink, shouldn't they be treated a bit differently?

Finally, on culture. Let's face it, most organizations resist change. There seems to be some unintended conspiracy in every organization between policy, folklore and fact to thwart ideas, slow progress, and frustrate idea generators. Left unchecked, the resistance wins, the ideas die, the idea generators leave. Death by committee, death by review, death by policy. The opportunity as a leader is to be proactive in creating an idea culture. A meritocracy where ideas and idea generators are cherished and status quo is treated with a healthy disrespect.

Ideas are the water supply of business. Protect them, nurture them, multiply them...then drink deeply.

Innovation & Culture

I have been reading and discussing innovation a lot lately. Most writers seem to feel that innovation is a skill, like typing or swimming, that can be taught to anyone. I find parallels in this discussion and ones on leadership. There are those that think leadership can be taught too. I don't.

I draw a distinction between innovators and people with innovation skills. Same with leaders. I know lots of people that have been trained in leadership, but I know very few leaders. For me the distinction lies in predisposition. It's the why, not the how.

The innovative people I know have been innovative their entire lives. They seek to innovate because of some internal itch that is never content with status quo. Their motor seems to be fueled by the never ending search for better or different. They just look at the world from a different filter. Some do this in flashy, outlier modes while others just quietly go about making their piece of the world better. Innovative people and businesses mentally live out of a suitcase...because they know that they won't be staying at status quo for very long.

Think about your team. Hopefully you have some folks that are wired this way. Always chasing better, never quite satisfied. And they aren't driven by an innovation program or workshop or by you, they are driven this way because that's who they are.

Same is true for leaders. They start leading when they are young and never stop. They are most comfortable leading. Is it power or control? Who knows, but it is a given that when leaders face leadership voids....they step forward and lead. No hesitation, no fear, no indecision. You know why leaders have great leadership skills? Because they have been leading and learning since childhood.

I'd like to propose that business culture works this way too. Innovative businesses exist because it is part of the DNA of the organization. Innovation happens naturally in these organizations. Continuous improvement, higher risk profiles, trying and failing frequently, a healthy contempt for status quo are assumed. And guess what, these organizations attract and hold innovative people that feel right at home in the culture.

Unfortunately the opposite is true too. If your business lacks innovation, chances are your culture lacks innovation, even penalizes it. And guess what, it tends to thwart and frustrate innovative people.

This post isn't meant to attack innovation skills training, but to raise the issue of culture. As you chase innovation have you taken a hard look at your culture? Have you talked to your innovators? Perhaps the best thing you can do as a leader is not train, but get out of their way. Changing culture is hard. Have you identified the formal and informal cultural norms that are holding innovation back in your business?

PS: Going to innovation training doesn't make someone innovative, anymore than going to McDonald's makes them a hamburger (credit Keith Green).

Find Yourself in this Quote

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." President Theodore Roosevelt

Which will you be today? Critic? Fighter? Bystander?

B2B Buyers: Just Consumers at Work?

Most of us make dozens of seemingly irrational or illogical choices every day. Quiet acts of defiance or indulgence or indifference or laziness or just habitual behavior that cost us time and/or money. Why? Because the vast majority of our choices go unexamined or unchallenged. Many consumer brands live off this irrationality. The candy section at the checkout, infomercial weight loss plans, parking in the handicapped lane, a second cookie, another hour of TV, and on and on.

Now what if suddenly all those decisions were suddenly open for review or examination. What if your spouse reviewed all your little irrational decisions and gave you a grade.

"Lets see David, your choice to stop at Starbucks on the way to work vs drinking the free coffee at the office cost you 23 minutes and $3.49. How often do you do this? Twice a week? That's $350 and almost 4o hours a year (a work week!). Do you really think that's a good investment of our money and your time?"

If we came under this scrutiny, it's inevitable that we would start becoming much more rational in our choices. Examination, or the potential for examination, changes the dynamic of the purchase behavior.

I have recently transitioned into B2B marketing. While many of the B2C marketing precepts apply, I am finding the "threat of examination" as a major factor in buying decisions. The potential that you will have to justify your choice to your boss, makes people behave much more rationally. Facts and figures carry extra weight. Emotional appeals carry less. The insight here is not that people behave more rationally in a B2B context...but WHY they behave more rationally.

Does that mean there is no room for emotional benefits in B2B marketing? No. In fact, I would say that there is huge competitive opportunity in most every B2B category in more emotive branding. But it does mean that emotional appeals must be combined with solid functional benefits. And the easier it is for your buyer to "rationally justify" their decision to their boss, the greater your chances for success.

Yes B2B buyers are human, "just consumers at work" and susceptible to many B2C strategies, but don't make the mistake of thinking B2B buyer behavior is identical to B2C. We behave differently when someone is watching or when we fear they might be.

That's what I'm thinking... how about you?

Taking Creative Risk

I'm around a lot of average creative work. Everyday we are bombarded by it. Heavy handed, uninspired, unoriginal. Ineffective at inspiring anything other than maybe blunt awareness and boredom.

Millions and millions spent to create and propel buckets of boring, predictable, quickly forgettable creative work. And it's not just advertising, it's true in music, theatre, film, food, apparel and on. It's mostly the same and it's mostly average. The output of an endless parade of C students copying from each other.

But once in a while I come across creative that stops me. Haunts me. Propels me. Inspires me. Touches me. Why is it so damn rare?

A large part can be forgiven by inexperience and ineptitude. We all start here. But do we have a national shortage in competent marketers, creatives and artists? No. What we have is a shortage of intestinal fortitude.

Every great creative work starts at a point of difference and in that difference lies risk. Risk for the creator, risk for the marketer, risk for the manager, risk for the organization. So we see great creative and rather than nurture it forward and share the risk, we seek to mitigate the risk, to hedge. Great creative is marginalized, muted, ultimately snuffed out...and in its place comes safe, predictable, average work with predictably average results.

When's the last time you saw great creative from a Fortune 500 company? They have the strategy and resources, it's their risk aversion that thwarts them. So rather than step out and try something creative and new, they opt for expected and safe. Rather than demand new ideas, they run to the safety of proven ones. And then they wonder why their brands fail to inspire.

Steve Jobs had equal parts guts to genius. The simplicity and elegance of his design ethic was not his own, but he alone was willing to take the risk to follow the ethic. He made hard choices. He relentlessly prioritized. He refused to straddle, to compromise. He stepped out while others stepped back.

As a marketer, you must embrace the creative risk. You must step forward, because no one else in your organization will. If you don't rally for the work, who will? And at the end of the day, which is the greater risk? Playing it safe or trying for something special?

Be brave.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

The Domestic Exchange Rate

As marketers and business leaders, we can't forget that our personal sense of value is typically NOT that of our customers.

Lots of ways to define middle class, here's a another one: One third of households make more than you, one third makes less than you. You're in the Middle Third.

In the US the middle third household makes between $27K and $69K annually. Typically these are the folks we serve. Business decision makers typically live in the upper third...which means they have household income above $69k.

Let's consider this. If you are smack dab in the middle of the middle class (50 percentile) you have household income of $43k annually. If you are in the middle of the upper third (83rd percentile) you have household income of $110k annually, more than double, almost triple the middle class example. Still with me?

In this example, if the upper class family buys an $11k car, it consumes 10% of their income. That's a large percent, but think about the middle class family. An $11k car consumes over 25% of their income. The price of the car is absolute, the "relative or perceived cost" of the car to the two families is significantly different.

In this manner, every purchase is relatively more costly to the middle class family.

So as we sit in the upper third and make pricing decisions for the middle third... we must do the "relative currency" translation. To understand the perception of the price increase by our customer, we must translate it into our value frame. In relative terms, adding $1 in price to a garment for the average middle class family has the relative cost effect (or perception) of increasing the price $2.50 for the average upper third family.

And the lower third? The middle of the lower third (17 percentile) has an average household income of $15k per year. That means the "middle of the upper third" identified above, makes over 7 times more per year. Adding $1 dollar in price to a garment for the average lower third family will feel like a $7 increase in upper class terms. Ouch.

As marketers and business leaders, we can't forget that our personal sense of value is typically NOT that of our customers. $1 is just not a $1.

Day Old News

What if you got your news twice a year? Four times? How about eight?
What if you hadn't heard the news in two years? What if you had never heard the news? How confident would you be about your knowledge of current events?

Then why do you think you can make intelligent business decisions if you rarely meet with distributors (customers) or consumers?

Go ahead, get out there. Recency matters in the news and in business.

If Not Us..

Below is a speech to Congress from then President Reagan.

All of us came here because we knew the country couldn’t go on the way it was going. So it falls to all of us to take action. We have to ask ourselves if we do nothing, where does all of this end. Can anyone here say that if we can’t do it, someone down the road can do it, and if no one does it, what happens to the country? All of us know the economy would face an eventual collapse. I know it’s a hell of a challenge, but ask yourselves if not us, who, if not now, when?

While President Reagan was addressing a separate issue, I suggest the logic holds for most businesses... everyday. We all face tough strategic choices that impact the history of our organizations ...everyday. It's just human nature to postpone those choices. To delay. To defer. To squeak by another quarter. To let someone else face the risk of an opinion; of making the wrong decision. Let someone else figure it out.

We act as if leadership is about "letting it ride" for another quarter without embarking on the journey of much needed change. You know what I'm talking about. Every business I have ever worked in was facing the need for significant change, yet delaying the inevitable. Delaying the future because they fear it will be worse than the present. I bet you can name one in your business. The elephant no one talks about.

Leaders lead, managers manage. Leaders take us somewhere, managers maintain.

Is your team dealing with one of those issues? Remember Reagan's challenge: If not us, who? If not now, when?

It's about courage, determination and faith. Ships are safe at harbor, but that's not what they are built for.

Getting off the soapbox now. Thanks for listening.

Things I Want To Learn About

This one's kind of random, but there is no cost of admission.

• Innovation. Not the why or what, but the how. How do I spur more innovation in my work, and across my organization. Focus on the skills, not the output.


• Design. Innovation is a tool of design, but design is the higher discipline. Design is the intersection of efficiency and desire. What's this all about? How can we leverage in our work?


• Sustainability. How do we turn the corner from idealism to realism in bringing sustainability into our workplace. Common sense, shareholder friendly sustainability at a corporate level.


• Economics. How can we use economic models and approaches to enhance strategy development. They get cause and effect, macro thinking.


• Insights. Beyond research and understanding. Consumer insights are the strategic nuggets, the intuitive leaps that enable us to step ahead. They are why we do research. Need innovation here, new approaches, techniques. Design thinking is an example, but I suspect it is no longer the edge.


• Collaboration. In highly specialized work environments it is essential. What do we know about current thinking on collaboration? What blocks it? What encourages it?


• Advocacy. Digital platforms are just that, platforms that enable new ways of interacting with current and potential consumers. Just like TV was in the 40's. I think we're past the "understand the platform stage"...we need to jump to the end game. What do we use them for? One key objective is to leverage the inherent viral nature of digital to drive brand advocacy. What do we know about advocacy in general, word of mouth theory, best in class examples. What can we learn from politics?


• Crowdsourcing. From product design to customer service to customer experience there are lots of applications, but how do we get there? Is this a tool for internal use also?


• Community Building. Building an authentic, brand-centric community is kind of the holy grail. Not talking about getting likes on facebook or follows on twitter. Talking about brand as the catalyst for user relationship, conversation, social interdependence, personal identity, brand as a movement. Apple, Starbucks, NFL, Tea Party. Can we bring any of this thinking to bear on our categories?

So what do you want to learn about?

Essential Work

Recently my boss asked me for my 2012 goals. I jotted down a long list and then set about some criteria for narrowing them down. Thought you might find helpful...

1. What Matters? Of all the things you could do to fill your calendar, what are the few things that truly matter. Things that will drive the business ahead when accomplished. (In my experience, these should be directly linked to growing revenue or profit.)


2. What Can Only I Do? What are the things that only I have sole responsibility for? If I don't do them, they won't get done. (Hey, do they matter?)


3. What Will Likely Not Happen Unless I Engage? What are the important initiatives in your organization that need leadership, need a champion, need someone to embrace and own. If you don't step up (or someone), they will likely still be stuck a year from now. (These will likely be a lot of work, I'd suggest you be passionate about them and don't take on too many)


4. What Can I Do That Will Make Me More Effective in 6 Months? A year from now is too far away, 90 days seems to short, but 6 months is enough time to make significant progress at some self improvement idea. (Time management skills? Digital competency? Education? Healthier lifestyle? Community involvement? Team building? Mentoring/coaching? Reading list?)


5. How Much Can I Reasonably Do and Still Find Some Balance? First, be realistic in what you can get done. Accomplishing things usually results from focus. That said, you also have to make time for a healthy life beyond work. Every study points to the reality that all work and no play leads to dull work and low pay. (In the long run, quality trumps quantity and you have to recharge to produce quality work. It's an age old trap for the ambitious.)

We all get distracted and pulled into non-essential work, but it's the essential work that defines our careers. What boss can argue with a focusing and accomplishing essential projects that move the business ahead in leaps?

What do you think?