“And He Kicks Children in the Face,” and Other Insane Approaches to Competing
As business leaders, we make decisions every day about how our firms and our people compete.
Most of us choose to focus on creating value and solving problems. A few resort to “win at all” costs type behaviors. This latter group poses some vexing problems for those of us that prefer the high-road style of competing for business, but the problems are not insurmountable.
The current competition for political office offers an interesting learning opportunity for all of us. And just when you think that the negative attack ads cannot become any more blatant or vicious, this season’s crop of politicians have managed to outdo themselves.
Political Buffoonery is the New Competitive Strategy:
Political ads this season have in my observation managed to hit a new high in audacity and ridiculousness, correlating to a new low on my informal Fair Competition Meter.
Perhaps it’s the state that I live in: Illinois, where serving as Governor typically translates into indictment on several counts and some quality time in jail, but the attack ads are over the top this year. And darned funny in some cases.
I love (He says sarcastically) the ones that put some real heart into their production value. They typically start out with soft music, a soft voice and a pleasant scene, right before resolving into something that positions the hapless opponent as someone sent from the lowest tier of Dante’s Inferno on a mission to lure us back into the pit. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the production meetings for these ridiculous commercials. Sadly, they probably do sway some voters.
My favorite dumb political ad comes from our friends up north in Winnipeg. This video starts out with the expected claims about the incompetent incumbent mayor and resolves with what can only be described as an emmy-winning scene produced by complete morons. I’m sorry, but I laughed out loud at the ending of this commercial, because I cannot believe that someone actually thought to package this scene and use the words, “And he kicks children in the face,” in an ad. (Note: it’s not clear whether this ad is genuine or a spoof, but enjoy the chuckle, and frankly, it’s not far off of what we’re seeing and hearing ever day.)
Six Ideas on Forming the Right Competitive Culture:
1. Choose to compete with class and professionalism. We all choose our style of competing in business. We have the opportunity to attack and assassinate the character of our competitors, or, we can go about winning business with class and professionalism. Opting for the latter doesn’t mean that you don’t compete with ferocity, it just means that you do so in a manner that allows you to comfortably look in the mirror at yourself.
2. Use negative competition as rocket fuel for your team. Competition is inherent in business (and life). Recognize it as fuel that catalyzes action and drives improvement. Use it to motivate, energize and foster innovation.
3. Don’t flirt with character disaster. The philosophy of “Win at All Costs” is an invitation to flirt with and engage in unethical behavior. Resist the flirtation. The cost of your character should be higher than winning the next deal.
4. Negative attacks showcase hollow strategies. Attacking competitors in front of your customer shows how weak and unarmed you truly are. The negative attack is the last resort of the desperate and incompetent. If you have no way to truly create value for your customer, your last and best attempt is to discredit your opponent. This is not a sustainable strategy.
5. Recognize that some people buy the negative sell and you cannot control it. Don’t reduce yourself to your competitor’s level and start launching missiles in return. Focus on solving problems, creating value and resist being baited into a war of mutual destruction. You might lose once in awhile to your muck-raking competitor. That’s OK. The negative buyer is typically the worst kind of customer.
6. Don’t be baited into playing the game. It is good to understand your competitor’s style and tactics. However, resist the urge to build your messaging as a point-counter-point response. Instead, ensure that your process of engaging the client and building value for your offerings makes the negative attacks look like the childish, desperate attempts that they truly are.
The Bottom-Line for Now
Negative political ads are as old as this republic (and older), and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. That’s too bad. The same goes for negative tactics in business. As a leader, you set the tone for how your firm and your team members compete. I vote to focus on creating meaningful differentiation from my competitors and to putting all of our energy into solving customer problems. While the noise from the muck-raking competitors is annoying, it’s rarely fatal to anyone other than those raking the muck in the first place.
Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need
Filed under: Decision-Making, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy
The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone.
The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need.
“If entrepreneurs want to succeed…they’d better be selling aspirin rather than vitamins. Vitamins are nice; they’re healthy. But aspirin cures your pain; it’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.”
The article speaks to our tendency to become enamored with our own ideas and offerings, and to make the leap that because everyone can benefit from this (a vitamin), they will jump at the opportunity to buy. They provide a number of great examples from the publishing and technology arenas.
In my own experience, technology businesses do this all of the time, often as they race to either out-feature competitors or to blindly reflect the input of customers. Not that beating competitors or listening to customers are bad ideas, but both can lead you down blind trails if you’re not careful.
I know better than to fall victim to “The Felt Need,” yet, I’ve produced a number of vitamins during the past few years. On several occasions, I’ve invested considerable time in creating programs that I would take a bullet for as offering career-critical content. While no one disagreed with me on the importance of the programs or the value of the content, they responded to them much like people respond to their gym membership in February.
4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need:
1. Measure and monitor the success of your new offerings. Are they selling like vitamins or, are they selling like aspirins. If you’re listening to your clients properly, they will tell you loud and clear what level of pain that you are addressing.
2. Evaluate new offerings and investment ideas with the filter of “The Felt Need.” It’s not difficult to assess if your marketer, developer or product manager can substantiate true audience pain. Ask tough questions. I love people that are passionate about their ideas, however, I still advocate a “trust but verify before investing” approach.
3. Quality-check your “Voice of the Customer” processes. Many a well-intentioned firm or product manager has listened carefully to customers only to find out that the requests, while valid, were not material. Too much blind followership leads to a bad case of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
4. Cultivate the practice of social anthropology. Ensure that your people are out in the market and in customers’ businesses observing. Ask someone a question and you will get an answer, but watch them in their own environment and you will learn something about them.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Read the article and spend some time looking at your own mix of current and planned offerings. While as the article indicates, you might end up with some vitamins, you better have a good number of aspirins to address burning pain points. Make certain that your primary strategy is not “follow the competitor” or, “the customer’s need is our command.” You need good systems and great people to observe, translate and mostly uncover true pain points that merit a cure. And remember the Heath’s warning about building a better mousetrap. Most people aren’t interested in a better mousetrap. They simply want a dead mouse.
Leadership Caffeine-Stuck in a Rut? Try These Ideas On for Size
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth
Note from Art: application of the ideas in this post has been known to stimulate creativity in some office environments. In a limited number of cases, use of these ideas or concepts has caused distress mostly due to failure to properly follow instructions or, because grumpy bosses just didn’t get it. Use at your own risk. Effects can be habit forming. Test on a small sample before applying to a larger area. And under penalty of law, do not tear the label off of your office furniture.
There’s a bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile.
Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
I spend a great deal of time talking with you about driving change. We’re forever prattling on about developing leaders, developing ourselves, developing strategies that hunt and generally living at the intersection of Noble and Pursuit. To heck with that (for today).
Let’s focus on where the rubber meets the road or our posteriors meet our desk chairs and contribute some ideas that will help us energize our teams, create a bit more personal energy and maybe, just maybe, send us back tomorrow towards Noble and Pursuit reinvigorated in pursuit of our journeys.
7 Ideas of Varying Quietly to Mix Things Up and Energize Yourself and Your Team:
1. Day filled with meetings? Show up early and remove the chairs from the conference room. Don’t spend anytime explaining why you did this. Conduct your meetings with a renewed sense of energy and enjoy the benefits of oxygen flowing freely to the brains in the room. And the looks on the faces of people as they enter the room are priceless.
2. Need a personal change. Take advice from one of my good friends and mix things up. Drive your spouse’s car to work (for the thrill seeker, do this without telling him/her), park somewhere far away from your usual spot and walk to your desk a different way. Continue your “day of different” by changing as many parts of your normal routine as possible. Remember to order something completely different for lunch.
3. Turn on your senses. Feeling like you’re just moving blindly through your days. When you get to work, try and remember and write down 10 items or landmarks that you pass every day during your commute. Add 2 items per day for a week to this list.
4. Turn on your senses, part 2. Without cheating, write down your company’s mission, vision and values statements. At last count, only 4 people in the western hemisphere were capable of completing this exercise accurately. Do this for several days and once you get them, start working them into office conversations. Observe how your co-workers react.
5. Cancel 50% of your meetings and try to fill the time with things you’ve been meaning to do. See if anything dire happens by not attending those meetings.
6. Plan ahead to become social anthropologists. Schedule customer visits and instead of a talking head trip, try to work it out with your customer where you will be able to see and hear from the people that use your offerings in their natural setting. Fire up those powers of observation and look/listen for problems and ideas. Compare notes with team members when you get back and vote on the top three items to pursue.
7. If all else fails, take a lesson from George Castanza and mentally declare it opposite day. This famous character on the sitcom Seinfeld discovered that he had remarkable fortune only when he would do the exact opposite of what his gut told him was the right thing to do.
While this one may prove a bit risky, start small. Change up your lunch choice. When people ask for decisions, suggest that they make them on their own. If you would normally chair an ops meeting, delegate it to someone else. Skip the brainstorming session and let your team run through it. If you think that social media is a waste of time, ask a group to come up with ideas for using it to compete. If you are used to asking the boss for permission for everything, skip this a few times and just do the work.
(Dedicated Seinfeld viewers may recall that George also found another way to dramatically increase his IQ. He gave up amorous activities. I’m not ready to suggest that one for you at this time, but if you fail to find something creative from this listing, it’s next up in the batter’s box.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
One of my favorite signs in a great bakery in Mt. Prospect, IL reads, “Life is short, eat dessert first.” While we are all part of some form of regimen in our work and in our lives, there are ample opportunities to mix things up, get the oxygen and blood flowing and add some creativity and fun into our days. If you don’t like my ideas above, generate your own. Just make certain to share them here with our readers!
In Pursuit of Management Innovation in Marketing
Filed under: Leadership, Management Innovation, Marketing, Performance, Product Management
Note from Art: my view to marketing comes from 2+ decades in B2B technology firms large and small, foreign and domestic, as well as 4-years working with small to mid sized manufacturing and service businesses. While your own environment may be different than the one I still see in these firms, I‘ll wager lunch that there are more similarities than differences.
The practice of management has evolved at a snail’s pace over the past 50 years, and one of the core tools of management and a key issue for any organization, marketing, has lagged just slightly behind.
While the tools and technologies available to plan and promote are truly remarkable and changing daily, the treatment of the marketing function and the marketing processes remains in many organizations mired somewhere in a time when Darrin Stephens and Larry Tate were pitching advertising campaigns on Bewitched. (If you’re not familiar with this classic prime-time 60’s and 70’s show, a more current example of that era is Mad Men.)
9 Common Management Mistakes with Marketing:
1. Marketing is late to the game. Formalizing the marketing function and roles in start-ups often occurs once people recognize a problem with a the either engineering or sales-driven approaches that seem right one day and overwhelmingly wrong the next.
2. CEOs and top executives don’t know what to expect from marketing. Their view stops at the necessary but not the only marketing tasks of promotion (generating leads), managing events, creating sales tools and managing the web site and perhaps press releases. The executive view of Marketing is stuck in an “old rules” world.
3. No one knows how to measure marketing’s effectiveness, so the metrics are mostly created by marketers. This is much like a sales rep defining her own comp package and quota. The numbers will be very, very good, relatively speaking. They may not reflect anything to do with reality, but they will be good.
4. Marketing efforts are much more like World War II B52 Carpet Bombing than they are precision targeting. Too many marketers fail to understand buyer personas and the results resemble flailing with the outcomes failing.
5. Some marketers have a warped view of their role..sometimes bordering on elitist. Yes, marketing is important. In particular the firm’s responsibility for MARKETING (all caps) in supporting Drucker’s purpose of an enterprise: “To acquire and keep customers,” is huge. However, this is not owned by a function. MARKETING is an enterprise function, not a siloed issue carried out by the chosen few.
6. The marketing systems are discrete and separate from the enterprise system. The most obvious example is the lack of connectivity in most firms between the lead pipeline (and refinery) and the sales pipeline. I rarely find firms that connect the two. This would be like trying to produce gasoline from crude oil, without having any idea what your source and supply of crude was at any point in time.
7. The role of strategic marketing is often absent. While I don’t want to add more fuel to any “marketing is more important than…” arguments, there most definitely must be someone somewhere looking out for core issues of market strategy, voice of customer translation, competitor monitoring, strategies for achieving meaningful differentiation and so forth. The failure for anyone to clearly own these creates a great deal of strategic and operational drift in organizations.
8. Marketing is often run at the top by someone that came up through the pure marketing ranks…or, it is subservient to a sales professional. Both are wrong.
9. The deployment of product management often creates a separate, disconnected marketing role.
7 Suggestions for Strengthening Marketing In Your Firm:
1. Top management must broaden the view on the role of marketing and increase expectations and accountability. It’s much, much more than leads, tweets and shows.
2. Cultivate marketing talent carefully. It’s critical to have functional experts…relentless promoters, great communications and event management specialists, and it’s critical to have broad-thinkers and experienced business people guiding and leading them. Promoting from within is fine, but make certain that yesterday’s marcom superstars receive broad exposure to the firm through job rotation, mentoring and management development training before placing them in positions of marketing leadership.
3. Know thy personas! If the people driving promotions and visibility aren’t remarkably familiar with the hopes, dreams, problems, desires, issues and lives of the targeted customers, then money will be wasted.
4. Challenge sales and marketing to connect core systems and measures. Both roles and functions own the business pipeline at different stages. Make certain that systems, measures and accountabilities are clear and in some cases, shared.
5. Don’t relegate strategic marketing activities (as I described earlier) to committees or worse yet, to that growing list of “nice to get to when we have time.” Someone with strong business experience and presence outside of a functional silo must watch and act and engage in the core issues of strategic marketing.
6. Be careful with the implementation of product management. This powerful and critical role is easily and often misplaced and misdirected, creating islands or pockets of marketing expertise disconnected from the marketing system.
7. Don’t become enamored with the new tools. They are tools, not silver bullets. On the other hand, don’t ignore them either. They merit extensive experimentation.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I love everything about serving well understood customers, creating meaningful differentiation, building value and visibility for my firms and frankly, I love crushing competitors or at least rendering them irrelevant. An effective, talented and broad thinking group of business professionals effectively wielding the tools of marketing will make this good work happen a lot faster and a great deal more effectively than most traditional deployments of marketing.
Is it time for an organization-wide marketing tune-up?
Senior Leaders, It’s Time to Share Your Lessons Learned
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth
Have You Shared Your Expertise Today?
I’ve had the great privilege this past year to work with a Fortune 50 company that is methodically conquering the retail world. Specifically, I’m working with a group of high-potential mid-level professionals all focused on increasing their contributions and growing their careers.
During our recent time together, the program sponsors arranged for a good number of the senior executives of the corporation to sit down and share insights on how to develop as senior contributors; how to develop executive presence and in general, how to seize the opportunities being presented by the firm’s great growth. Over the course of 3 development days, we invested approximately 5 hours engaging with executives. The impact was priceless.
It is a testament to this firm and its mostly homegrown store-to-corporate leadership team that the executive-led dialogue was filled with practical, powerful lessons and examples, and the discussions were free of the ego and corporate-speak that we’ve all heard from those with lofty titles.
Without any scripting, the executives shared how they navigated the unknowns of growing up from store personnel to their current levels as senior leaders in one of the world’s exciting firms. They nailed the key messages and lessons that we were discussing in the workshop portion of the program. The executives were authentic, they cared, they provided encouragement for self-development and importantly, they provided priceless examples of lessons-learned and mistakes made during their journeys.
While our program content focused on those exact same issues, there’s something dramatically different about hearing the words and anecdotes come from the leaders versus seeing the words on a PowerPoint slide. In fact, there’s no comparison to the value and weight that the words of these executives presented. Their input brought the rest of the program to life and created a richer experience for all of us. The buzz from the executive involvement carried the program. And while I served as the program leader…I was very much the student during those sessions.
Senior Leaders: You’re Part of Your Firm’s Professional Development Solution…Get Involved!
Let’s face it, nature abhors a vacuum, and there’s no such thing as an empty executive calendar. It might take extraordinary effort to carve out that hour once a month to sit down and share and exchange ideas on professional development with your aspiring colleagues, but, aside from working with customers, is there anything more valuable that you can be doing? I sincerely doubt it.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Create opportunities to share, teach and exchange ideas on the key issues of developing as a senior contributor.
Need a starter topic list? What about: leading others, making better decisions, dealing with ambiguity, developing power and influence, leading to the values, building stronger teams and overcoming organizational hurdles? If you need some more ideas, let me know. I’ve got an endless list where your experience can help others recognize and avoid pitfalls and improve performance.
The best development support in your organization should not come from the training department or from external programs. It absolutely should start with you and your senior executive colleagues.
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