Re:Focus

Success Takes Help

There is something to be said for being the smartest or the most talented one in the room...too bad it doesn't help much in reality.

Success, by any definition, is a team sport. I learned this little detail the hard way. There was a time in my life that I thought that if I wanted to make anything out of myself, I'd be responsible for all of it by myself. I thought I could do everything primarily because I thought I should do everything.  I needed to know how to be the boss, the accountant, the creative director, the marketing manager, the HR director, set the strategy and do the work with my clients.  Even if I hired or worked with others, I wanted to be the final say on everything. This was a brilliant strategy until three things happened.  

1. I learned I wasn't good at everything

2. I didn't have the energy to do everything

3. I failed

The human animal is a social animal and our survival and success depend on our ability to find communities of people who share our values and beliefs. When these communities form, trust emerges. It is then that the human animal will adapt from a survival instinct by self-preservation to one of working for the good of the community.  Both are designed to help the individual survive, but it is the community that has the greater chance of not only survival but success.

The book Wisdom of Crowds delves into this. Groups of people make more accurate decisions than individuals, for example.  In other words, asking for help is scientifically proven to enhance the quality of the decisions we make.

Once I hit a point where I had no choice but to ask for help, things started to dramatically change.  For one, I let go of the belief that I should do everything which meant I finally accepted that there was no way I could do everything.  The more honest I was to myself and out loud about my strengths and my weaknesses, the more people who showed up to help do the things I was not good at.

There is not a single thing I'm doing these days that is not as a direct result of someone helping me. Some showed up to do specific tasks that I'm no good at - like accounting.  Some take specific responsibility for things that I don't excel at - like developing systems. But the vast majority of the help that I've been given comes from people who have introduced me to someone they think could benefit from my message and from whom I could benefit from their platform.  In other words, mutually beneficial introductions...introductions that are good for the community.

The more willing I am to ask for help, the more I am able to help others.  I've transformed from working for myself to working for others which, ironically, has helped me grow as an individual more than I ever imagined.

Offer your strengths to others and you'll be amazed how many people offer their strengths to you.

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What Will You Sacrifice?

Someone recently sent me an email asking about what he needs to sacrifice to succeed. 

"Success," he wrote, "is said to come with great sacrifice. I'm personally trying to figure out what I can sacrifice, while identifying and pursuing specific goals.  Are there identifiable sacrifices that you attribute to your success? Or, more broadly, is there a generic schema for personal sacrifice that is consistent among leaders?"

Though it is true that life is always balanced and if you attain one thing it often comes at the sacrifice of another, the trick is not to focus on the thing you have to give up, but rather the thing you gain.

In my case, money was a sacrifice for a while - but I was happy to give up the money to be my own boss. These days it's social life - I'm not in New York much because I'm on the road a lot. Though some may perceive that I am sacrificing a lot by being away, the balance is, I get to meet so many amazing people that I otherwise would never have met.  Not to mention, the work I do is so rewarding.

In both cases, I focused on where I was going without concern to what I would have to give up.

Success comes not by trying to find something you're willing to sacrifice, but by being inspired by the thing you're pursuing.  When you are in pursuit, sacrifice doesn't feel like sacrifice...it feels like balance.

This is different from working long hours and sacrificing seeing your family or friends, for example, in hope of what will come as a result of the sacrifice. In this case, the hard work is in pursuit of a goal not yet realized. The work itself is not rewarding and the stress is high, but the rationalization is that it is all worth it for the promise (real or false) of what it will bring.  What if the promise is never realized?  Was it all worth it, then?  This really is sacrifice. When you give up something for something that does not bring immediate joy.

There is no sacrifice when the pursuit, the journey, is as rewarding if not more rewarding than the end result. And when you can wake up in the morning and feel successful whether some end goal is realized or not...THAT is true success.

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I Hate You: A Tale About Advertising, Adendum

As an addendum to the post, I Hate You: A Tale About Advertising, here is a perfect example what advertising should be like.  It is an ad produced with the consumer in mind and not the client.  It even makes fun of advertising.   It's engaging and entertaining and is not just line after line of product benefits. The best part is, it works.

This is good advertising.  In fact, I've already watched it a few times because it's entertaining...and now I'm sharing it with a larger audience. 

Think the client is happy?

I Hate You: A Tale About Advertising

What do you do if nearly every consumer hates nearly every product you produce?

This is exactly what has happened with advertising today.

Think about the lengths people go to to avoid watching ads on TV.  As soon as they come on, we lunge for the remote to change the channel.  We buy expensive DVRs that advertise the ability to skip ads AS A BENEFIT. And we willingly pay a premium for some websites or iPhone apps for which the only additional value is that the paid version is free of advertising.  How embarrassing is that? That people are paying NOT to consume your product.

The irony is, the advertising industry knows everyone hates what they produce. This is why they keep looking for new ways to force people to stay tuned. There are now ads at the beginning of online news clips or other online video content that are impossible to skip. It's infuriating.  There are ads on BlueRay DVDs now that we can't fast-forward or skip to the main menu until we've endured the pitch.

But here's a more interesting question - how did it come to pass that modern day advertising is so painful?

The reason is simple, and it has nothing to do with the rise of the internet and other technologies. The reason we hate advertising is because the ad industry has no idea who its customer is; it is we - the general public who are the final consumer of their product.  Ironic that an industry devoted to telling others who to focus on doesn't know who to focus on. Probably not so ironically, it's the same issue that stymies the music industry, the publishing industry and every other industry that seems to be struggling "to define itself" in this internet generation. They are all looking for an internet strategy when its their customer they are ignoring.

Steve Jobs recently shared his thoughts about how the entire music industry failed to innovate something like iTunes. His answer was as profound as it was simple (fancy that). The music industry, he expounds, thought their customer was Tower Records or Virgin MegaStore...but it never was.  Those were their distribution channels. The actual customer is the person who consumes the music. And it is the end user, not the intermediaries, whom Apple focuses on in all they do.

The ad industry thinks their clients are their customers. They think the companies who pay for the production are the ones they are supposed to serve.  So the ads they produce make their clients happy...but infuriate the rest of us.  So much so, that the only innovations in the industry are the new ways they find to force us to watch what we are actively trying to avoid watching. Like the music industry, the corporate marketers are the distribution channel. They pay for the production and the media to distribute the creative product. But it is the buying customer who consumes the media.

Like any other industry on the planet that has a problem with selling their product (and in the case of advertising, selling doesn't mean pay for - it means pay attention to), the first thing they do is improve the quality of their product.  In this case, that means making something people like, something people will watch without being forced.

Leave America and you'll find that the consumers in many other countries enjoy watching advertising. Not because the products are better, but because the ads are produced to be entertaining.  Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are dramatic.  Sometimes they are just beautiful.  But they are, on balance, produced to be more appealing for the people watching them.

Here's what I propose: the ad industry should work to improve the quality of their product to a point where people want to watch it. American companies do this once a year on the Super Bowl - the only time of the year Americans enjoy watching advertising. Why is that quality of entertainment not being produced the other 364 days? Simple - because what gets measured gets done. And the Super Bowl is the only day of the year that the quality of ads is measured based on its entertainment value.

The quality of advertising should always be measured based on how entertaining or engaging it is. They should stop measuring how many people are forced to watch (reach and frequency) and start measuring how many people choose to watch. Count how many people skip an ad versus how many opt to keep watching it. The more people that watch means you have produced better, more compelling advertising.

Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too.  Clients would be able to spend less on media because the work would be more memorable.  Plus, if people CHOOSE to watch the ads, they are more likely to like the brands, products and companies featured in those ads.  In other words, if advertising was made for consumers and not clients the ultimate benefactor would actually be the client...and isn't that supposed to be the job of good advertising?

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Blinded By Your Own Product

Starbucks was founded with a clear sense of Why - that purpose, cause or belief that goes beyond the products we make or the services we offer. At its founding, it was all about the "third space," that space between work and home. When Americans chose to hang-out outside of home or work, Starbucks wanted to be that place where they hang-out.  And for many years, they were.

But, like so many companies that make it big, Starbucks forgot the reason it was founded and started to think it was their product that made them successful. Put simply, Starbucks has lost its Why.

This is significant, because it is the Why that is the source of great innovation in a company.  It is that founding purpose that gives a company a filter -  clarity about the things they should do and the things they shouldn't do.  If the filter gets fuzzy, then the ability to see clearly goes away.  And if the ability to see clearly goes away, then how will a company know if they are traveling in the right direction? Without a clear sense of direction, there is increased focus on product tactics and product strategy and the blinding effect takes hold. Unable to see beyond product will cause the results to falter.  As the results falter, the focus on the the product becomes more intense...and so the vicious cycle begins.

Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental.

With that clear filter, it's easy to see the things Starbucks should and shouldn't do. It's easy to see opportunities to enhance the experience that have nothing to do with coffee. With a clear sense of Why, it makes perfect sense that Starbucks should offer free WiFi to their "guests." But the haze over Starbuck's filter has created product blindness and, these days, Starbucks misses the obvious; they didn't offer their guests free WiFi...McDonald's did.

In January of 2010 McDonald's, just one of the many companies that has capitalized on Starbucks fuzzy Why, started offering free WiFi in their all their stores. Feeling the pressure, Starbucks was forced to follow suit six months later.

That a burger joint credited with pioneering the fast-food industry -- an industry focused on getting customers in and out as quickly as possible -- forced Starbucks to adjust their store experience is a big deal. Just as Apple doesn't compete with any other computer companies or Harley-Davidson isn't just another motorcycle, Starbucks shouldn't be lumped in with everyone that sells coffee. But these days they are, and they have themselves to blame for it.

Starbucks has forgotten about the third space.  It has become obsessed with coffee and brushed aside Why they were selling coffee in the first place. Blinded by their own product and distracted from their founding purpose, it was Starbucks who invited lots of other players to the table and reduced their own value in the lives of Americans. We can get coffee anywhere, but not everywhere makes a good third space.  If Starbucks wants to make it about the product and not the experience, then they open themselves up to even more competition and even more attacks. At the end of the day, coffee isn't worth $4...but an experience and a comfortable environment is.

Product blindness and missing the obvious is just one symptom of a fuzzy Why. Another is when a company gets distracted by the actions of the competition. Though I haven't talked to anyone from Starbucks about this, I'll bet good money that they have become increasingly interested in what McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts is doing these days.  Obsessing about what everyone else is doing over what you are doing is like driving down the highway watching the drivers to the left and right of you. Sure you'll be able to see how fast they are driving and in what direction...the problem is you won't see where you're going.

Companies with a clear sense of Why set the tone and direction in their respective industries. They lead and others look to follow them.  Suffering severe product blindness, however, these days Starbucks is looking for others to follow.

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Misplaced Energy

"It exploits women, it stereotypes poor people, it has gratuitous sex in it and very anti-family attitudes," said  Terry Rakolta about the FOX sitcom Married With Children. The housewife from Michigan, was so outraged by an episode of the show that mentioned lingerie and vibrators that she started a campaign in 1989 to urge advertisers to boycott the show. The national attention she received certainly put pressure on many companies.  So much pressure, in fact, that multiple CEOs of some of America's biggest companies made public statements expressing embarrassment with being associated with the program.

This is a classic case of misplaced energy. Rakolta invested so much time and effort going after Married With Children, the network and its advertisers that she missed one vital detail: TV stations and corporate brands don't raise children, parents do.  All that energy could have gone into promoting a national campaign to help parents properly raise their children; all that energy could have been invested in encouraging more parental involvement in their local PTAs. But instead, she wasted all that energy to go after something that has little to no impact on the thing she cared about: her family.

This variation of "kill the messenger" is so common. And in this day and age, the internet makes it even easier for people to mount attacks in the wrong place.

I once received an email (just was one of dozens of people cced on the email) telling me about some holocaust revisionist website.  The email urged me to pass the email on to everyone I knew to help have the site shut down. All that energy to go after the wrong thing. If they cared about revisionist history so much, why not mount a campaign to school boards? I replied to all on the email asking if they realized that the only people visiting the website were all the people receiving the email who were curious to see what all the hubbub was about. What a waste of energy.

We usually misplace our energy to avoid having to take accountability for something. It's much easier to point a finger at someone else than at ourselves. THAT takes A LOT of energy. Married With Children was on TV for 30 minutes once a week on a Sunday evening. If Rakolta was worried about how her kids were turning out, she could have used all that energy to turn off her TV once a week for half-an-hour to play a board game or something with her kids. Isn't that what good parents are supposed to do?

There is misplaced energy in all our organizations as well. When something goes wrong, we react quickly and attack a symptom instead of the cause of the symptom. It's astounding how many companies, for example, have one group that can't hold on to employees. The manager is always able to find something wrong with the last person who was fired or quit, but no one thinks to question the capability of the one who can't hold on to employees. With our economy in a shambles, we attack politicians and bankers instead of reevaluating how we spend money. Let's not forget, the housing crisis happened because most of America's home buyers were buying houses they couldn't afford. The money lenders fed off all that misplaced energy. Immoral? For sure. Did they exaggerate the problem? Absolutely! But we, the money spenders, bear some responsibility in the equation.

Like so much misplaced energy, Rakolta's campaign completely backfired. All the added publicity helped lift Married With Children's ratings high enough to keep it on air for many more seasons than originally expected.  It also allowed the network to double the price they charged to advertise on the popular program.  And only one of the original advertisers, and none of companies of the CEOs who made public statements supporting Rakolta, actually pulled their advertising from the show.  The rest took advantage of all that new found energy.

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Include The People

“Ladies and gentleman, please turn off your cell phones,” said the flight attendant. “ I can still see some that are on.  If you don’t turn them off, then we can’t leave.”

Like a defiant teenager, when we’re spoken to like that, it actually makes us want to NOT turn off our electronics.

On a plane they want to enforce the rules.  The way those in charge do it is by justifying their heavy handedness as “being good for the majority.”

If I yell at people to turn off their cell phones so that the rest of the plane can leave on time, so the thinking goes, then the rest of the passengers will appreciate it.  Sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t work.  Instead, it creates an “us and them” dynamic – the ones in the charge and the ones who do as they are told. Like prisoners and guards. 

In truth, the best way to influence people is not to push them to follow the rules, even if it is good for the majority, but to let the responsibility lie with the group.

Here’s an alternative to the original announcement:  “Ladies and gentlemen, look to the person next to you, if you see they are still using an electronic device ask them nicely to turn it off so we can get this flight underway.  Until they do, we can’t leave.”

What happened here is not just a cute way of obeying FAA regulations.  It is a very sophisticated piece of communication that takes advantage of how people decide.  Firstly, it shifts accountability to the population to look after their own well being.  In this case, the flight attendant becomes an effective leader instead of an effective enforcer.  The flight attendant leads us to take responsibility for leaving on time instead of taking responsibility for getting us to leave on time.

Now lets take that one step higher.  Airport security.

“Ladies and gentleman, take out your liquids and gels,” we’re told. “It’s for your own safety.” If it’s for my own safety then include me in the process. Here’s the alternative:

“Ladies and gentlemen, as you remove your liquids and gels from your own bag, please watch the person to the left and to the right of you to make sure they do the same.  We wish we could watch over everyone, but we can’t, so we need your help.  If you help us, not only will we get you through here quicker, it will also help improve the quality of the security we aim to provide.”

Telling someone “it’s for your own good” does no good.  That is a rational assessment of what should be an emotional engagement.  We want people vested in their own security.  We want people vested in their own well being.  People don’t want to be managed, they want to be involved.

This is the difference between leading and enforcing.  In both scenarios, obeying the rules will be good for the group.  But only when someone in authority leads will they find the people on their side.  And when the health of the group is at stake, you always want the people on your side.  This is true on an airplane, at the airport and in an organization.

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Spot The Northwest Flight Attendant

 I flew to London and back on Delta Airlines, which was great because I got to play my new favorite game: spot the old Northwest Flight Crew.  Northwest and Delta merged last year to form America’s largest airline. Though the planes are now painted the same and the crews all wear the same uniforms, they do not all act the same way. The cultures of the two companies, more specifically how management treated their people, significantly impacted how their people treat their customers.  So much so, you can tell from which company a flight crew came from simply by observing how they treat customers.

The rules are pretty basic; when you fly Delta Airlines, try to guess if your crew is native Delta or ex-Northwest. The game goes beyond just a couple of bad eggs – those employees who, no matter what the corporate environment is like, will always do the wrong thing.  This game is about identifying a common pattern or theme among a group of employees that provides clues as to how they have been managed or treated in the past.

I admit, it’s a pretty easy game. Northwest must have treated its people so badly for so many years for the difference between the two crews to be so stark. Here are some pointers to help you should you ever decide to play:

Impatience: Ex-Northwest employees have no patience for customers. They can regularly be seen rolling their eyes when passengers ask for anything or perform even the slightest infraction of any rule or command. The native Delta crews, in contrast, are more likely to smile if a passenger asks for anything and show a little more patience.

Hate Thy Customer: The ol’ Northwesters can often be heard in the galleys complaining about a passenger or two (this among other things they can find to complain about). If someone who has a customer-facing job seems to have such contempt for customers, think about how that will impact their behavior towards the customer. In contrast, you may stumble upon a conversation of Delta folks gossiping about their personal lives or figuring out how to solve some issue that was raised on the flight.

Short Fuse: The grumps from Northwest are all on short fuses. It takes barely a squeak from a passenger for a flight attendant to berate that customer. Public shaming of a passenger over the intercom is also a favorite. I find Delta natives to have much more patience for those with whom they are charged to look after and will often address specific customers directly should they need to.

Pass the Buck: Despite the ease of this game, you’ll be hard pressed to find a Northwest crew who accept accountability for how they act. Northwest employees, you see, don’t like to take any responsibility for anything that happens.  If they are abusive, impatient or generally unhappy, they will justify anything they have done by passing the buck.  “It’s not our fault. If we don’t do it that way,” they rationalize, “we’ll get in trouble.”

There is a side of me that feels sorry for the old Northwest people.  Like abused dogs who become unfit to have as pets, so too have many Northwest employees been so abused over the years, it is actually left many of them unfit for to work with people anymore. Like any person on the receiving end of an abusive relationship, they have completely lost trust in management to help them in anyway.  They hang all their hopes on their union to protect them even though, with their union, they received lower pay and poorer benefits than the non-unionized Delta flight attendants. The mistrust runs so deep, that they will work to preserve their unions for fear of what would happen if Delta management had direct influence over their jobs even though Delta crews like their jobs…and their management much better.  In this humble passenger’s opinion, if management has the option, axing some of the most abusive staff may not be such a bad thing for all involved.

The point is, corporate culture matters.  How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse. Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines, was able to transform Continental Airlines from the worst airline in the industry into the one of the highest rated without changing the equipment or the people. He did it by focusing not on the customer, but on the employees.  He managed the culture and worked to empower his employees.  He showed them that keeping a plane clean serves their interests more than the passengers.  The passengers leave the planes, the flight attendants often have to stay and fly one, two or more legs on the same aircraft.  The same goes for helping people or being nice to them.  It makes for a better day at work when you treat people well.  Well-treated customers are also nicer to be around.

On a recent cross-country trip, I met a Delta flight attendant who plays a similar game to me.  It’s called Spot the ex-Northwest Elite Passenger.  She told me she can tell if a passenger used to fly Northwest based on how the passenger treats the crew.  Apparently, the abused Northwest employees abused their customers for so long that the customers also became combative and mean. Sadly, they tell me, it’s a really easy game to play for them also.

The moral of the story: corporate culture matters. A sour corporate culture can actually make an entire society unhappy. This means that a strong corporate culture can have a positive impact on a society.  So for the good of the planet - treat your employees well.

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