I got a chuckle from this recent tweet that called out a malapropism in another tweet clearly intended to comment on employee sentiment analysis. It’s an important type of text analytics (and a focus of my employer, Attivio) to analyze and discover “business signals” buried within online reviews, surveys, and other text-based opinion.
But, just as ‘many a truth is said in jest,’ many a truth can also be said by mistake as well: companies should monitor – and avoid – employee “sediment.” Doing so will help ensure an environment of innovation and free-flow of new ideas.
Somehow that ‘sediment’ gaffe triggered a memory (from ‘sediment’ to ‘dirt’ … ‘soil’ … plants) of an article I read some time ago about “potted plant syndrome” in the workplace. I couldn’t find the article I had in mind, but this article hits on the same idea:
There was a boss who complained that everyone around him was a “potted plant.” He couldn’t understand why his managers wouldn’t take charge of an idea or come up with solutions. In his management meetings, if a manager suggested how to handle a problem or come up with solution, he would tell them how they could do it better or differently. Or, he would argue that they were wrong. He didn’t realize he was killing commitment and innovation.
The boss was a one-person idea prevention department. People were tired of standing out with an idea only to get it shot down, so they stopped offering them, becoming “potted plants” – hence my employee ‘sediment’ line of thought.
I recently read a great Ad Age article by Chris Kuenne, Four [Marketing] Talent Categories You Need to Win in a Connected World. Recognizing that many marketing organizations still cling to discredited, “old school” marketing and PR, Chris Kuenne provided a timely description of the new talents, skills and attitudes found in today’s “new rules” marketing organizations that are actively contributing to company growth and success.
Chris Kuenne listed four skill categories vital for today’s successful marketing organization – Strategic, Analytic, Program Design and Technological – which, combined with talent-building marketing leadership, will yield well-orchestrated “personally relevant experiences” that “translate the brand promise into relevant and entertaining interactions that always seem fresh and new.”
To support his spot-on core point that “the old set of skills and conventional deployment will not work,” Chris Kuenne offered a sports analogy:
In [American] football, everyone is a specialist with a distinct position and responsibility. Each player goes one-on-one against his opponent, helping the team advance the ball in a linear fashion down the field. Marketing over the past 50 years reflected this linear approach, in which a brand’s marketing plan specified a highly planned, seldom altered, set of initiatives…Today marketing is closer to rugby. All players handle multiple roles, using many different skills…
I agree with Chris Kuenne’s historical and current assessment of the marketing function. However, Chris’ description of football is outdated: today’s game of football is actually brimming with innovative tactics. Perhaps I underappreciate the tactics in rugby, but I see a lot of parallels between the practices of winning “new rules” marketing organizations and winning football teams:
Transformation through Innovation. Both football and today’s marketing function have benefited dramatically from innovation. The one-on-one, seldom-altered, linear genre of football described by Chris Kuenne is an accurate description of the “smashmouth” version of the sport as it was played over a century ago, as exemplified by the feared Army football team and its predictable but brutal, physically punishing running game.
And so it went, until Notre Dame, in 1913, under new coach Jess Harper, unveiled an innovation that would thankfully transform the game: Notre Dame took unprecedented full advantage of the forward pass (!), recently legalized but widely ignored. Practiced that summer by quarterback Gus Dorais and offensive end and legend-to-be Knute Rockne, Notre Dame’s passing plays bewildered the Army defense for a lopsided 35-13 upset victory. (Of course, clever, daring plays unimaginable even a decade ago continue an ever-accelerating trend of innovation on the football field.)
It is amazing in hindsight that marketing has not experienced such dramatic transformation until recently. At roughly the same time as Notre Dame’s game-transforming forward pass innovation, John Wanamaker, the pioneer of the department store, made his famous remark, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Similar frustrations by marketers have continued on right up to present day! Thankfully, marketing innovations today are replacing decades of plodding, seldom-altered, and maddeningly difficult to measure interruption marketing with a still-evolving paradigm of content marketing, permission marketing and marketing automation technologies. The marketing function is finally undergoing its own game-changing, “forward pass” of innovation and transformation. More >>
In a recent thought-provoking TDWI article, David Champagne informed readers of The Rise of Data Science: a discipline of emulating the scientific method when analyzing data, in a conscious and laudable effort to ensure objectivity and avoid poor analytical practices. Having just recently blogged on the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, a type of flawed analytical logic business intelligence users might fall into, David Champagne’s article caught my attention.
From David Champagne’s article:
Back in the “good old days,” data was the stuff generated by scientific experiments. Remember the scientific method? First you ask a question, then you construct a hypothesis, and you design an experiment. You run your experiment, collect and analyze the data, and draw conclusions. Finally, you communicate your results and let other people throw rocks at them.
Nowadays, thanks largely to all of the newer tools and techniques available for handling ever-larger sets of data, we often start with the data, build models around the data, run the models, and see what happens. This is less like science and more like panning for gold…Perhaps the term “data scientist” reflects a desire to see data analysis return to its scientific roots…
Barry Devlin, in his business-focused commentary on David Champagne’s article, noted the worlds of science and business have rather different goals and visions, which I interpreted as data science might offer limited benefit to business managers. But perhaps the best practices of data scientists have a lot more in common with those of business managers after all, in light of some commentary I came across on effective business decision-making. That commentary gave high praise to the manager who utilizes the scientific method in the decision-making process. The author was not a technologist, but rather: Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management.
Revisiting Peter Drucker’s writings on effective decision-making process will show surprising similarities to the best practices of data science, and yield beneficial insights for business managers seeking to make more effective, data-informed decisions.
Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mark Suster recently shared an awesome pearl of business wisdom (via Kellblog): In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly – in his blog post of the same name.
This insight came from Mark Suster’s colleague Ameet Shah, a co-worker at Andersen Consulting in the late 90′s. Andersen Consulting was the largest independent consulting firm at the time, but amid scores of existing competitors and newly-funded Internet consulting startups…
…the market seemed crowded and our leadership position that had been built over many years seemed to not matter any more…[But] Ameet said to me, “Ah, I’ve seen this many times before. See, Mark, in a booming market you can never tell the winners from the losers. In a booming market buyers aren’t very discerning and companies that have weaknesses can mask them…Andersen Consulting always gains market share in down markets. That’s where the companies who are [only] good at marketing tend to crumble…Don’t worry, we’ll be fine, just wait for the next downturn.” That had never occurred to me. In other words, in a strong market, even turkeys can fly. (emphasis added)
A company that works to “gain market share in down markets” and seizes “the next downturn” as an opportunity is most certainly the opposite of a “flying turkey” business. I’d call it a “crow” business, referencing the amazing adaptability and intelligence of crows, as I have blogged previously.
Quick follow up: The photo taken by David Meerman Scott during his great Jan. 6 BPMA presentation (see next post) reminded me of a “Where’s Waldo?” picture, so congratulations to Dan McCarthy and Howie Lyhte who took me up on my challenge to find me in that photo. Since they both dropped me an email quite quickly (with my correct location), I declared them both winners.
For those of you playing at home, I am a couple of rows in front of the post holding my book with a thumbs-up.
Dan and Howie will receive David Meerman Scott’s new book we’re all holding up in the photo, Real-Time Marketing & PR, plus a great bonus book I will be reviewing here soon: How to be a Fierce Competitor by Jeffrey Fox. Enjoy, guys!
I hope you have a very happy, healthy and successful 2011! Thank you very much for reading this blog, whether this is your first visit or one of many.
Here are the three most popular blog entries of 2010, with a new year’s resolution to write many more in the new year! Please enjoy.
UPDATE: Moments after tweeting my resolution to blog more often in 2011, I see I am being held accountable (!) by WordPress’ PostADay / PostAWeek Challenge. OK, WordPress, count me in … for the PostAWeek, that is!
The most popular post overall during 2010 was actually a 2009 post:
The good old “800 pound gorilla” metaphor came up in a conversation this week, reminding me of a clever article I read a few years ago on the subject of animal metaphors, which are all too common in business-speak.
This company or that company is the “800 pound gorilla.” Another company might say it “strives to be an eagle in its industry.” Infamous ex-Sunbeam CEO “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, fitting his penchant for firing scores of people with impunity, adorned an entire office wall with an image of a mighty lion, honoring its predatory, eat-or-be-eaten, zero-sum game carnivorousness. And of course, one wants to be a “dog” company.
Source: jpmckenna (Flickr-CC)
Actually, companies should strive to be the crow of their industry.
Putting aside the ominous symbolism of crows in mythology and popular culture, business columnist Dale Dauten made a pretty good case for businesses to act like the crow. Given the particularly difficult economy today, calling for business to have the same kind of hardscrabble resourcefulness and adaptiveness of the crow is more on target now than when he wrote this a few years ago:
October 2010 marked the first annual customer User Conference I attended hosted by my employer at that time, iStrategy Solutions [since acquired by Blackboard]. It was a pleasure to meet so many smart, enthusiastic data warehousing customers I had been collaborating with for case studies, webinars and in-person testimonials.
Since I traveled to BWI at the end of September and returned in early October, I had a chance to read AirTran’s September and October issues of its Go magazine. I found it interesting that the business author profiled in each issue so thoroughly and diametrically opposed the other.
George Cloutier, the founder of American Management Services, with a long record of successful business turnarounds to his credit, is the author Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing, profiled in the Go September issue. Meanwhile, the October issue of Go profiles the book ESPN the Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports by longtime consultant to ESPN Anthony F. Smith (scroll about halfway down each of these links to read each book and author profile).
How is this for disagreement, not to mention two very different personal brands, as summarized by Go magazine:
Source: PicApp.com
On Leadership:
George Cloutier: I am Your Work God! You want your employees to do what you say, not what they think.
Anthony F. Smith: Avoid the myth of single-person leadership. “Leadership is really a shared phenomenon…(Each ESPN executive) needed to surround themselves with other effective people who could fill in areas where they were not as skilled.”
I just read a great blog entry entitled Critical Thinkers vs. Critics by Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg. (Quick aside: Any blog by a CEO/Chairman/Founder that is regularly updated and features plenty of wisdom, wit and insight is evidence that company has a competitive advantage in leadership. Good on you, Dave.)
Dave Kellogg raises the important difference between a “critic,” a person who criticizes everything, generally without proposed solutions” and a ”critical thinker,” a person who attacks ideas in the spirit of making them better, and who can hold both sides of an argument in their head at once.”
Point very well taken. I’d additionally define a critical thinker as someone who will also not allow herself/himself or others to fall victim to “paralysis by analysis.” Even more importantly, by virtue of being unafraid of taking a hard, unbiased look at issues and listening to others’ opinions, concerns and doubts, and in fact welcoming such open discussion, a critical thinker is also an optimist by nature.
I like how Dave assesses the level of critical thinking applied in the crafting of successful marketing positioning (emphasis added):
Critics “attack” other people’s ideas but not their own. Critical thinkers “attack” everyone’s ideas, especially their own. For certain disciplines (e.g., marketing positioning) one of my primary tests is not to examine the substance of a proposal, but instead to examine the critical thinking in the process that led to it [for example, reviewing a marketing proposal recommending a new company tag-line]:
How many other tag-lines did you think of?
Why didn’t you pick tag-line 3?
Did you consider tag-lines based on the higher-level notion of satisfaction?
What’s the argument against the tag-line you’re proposing?
What are the direct and indirect competitors tag-lines and their relative strengths and weaknesses?
As David Ogilvy once said: “good writing is slavery” (see page 33 of Ogilvy on Advertising). So is good positioning. And it comes from critical thinking and plenty of it.
I think delving into the multiple meanings of Dave’s word “attack” is important here, too. A critical thinker will indeed “attack” an idea much differently than a critic. There is a world of difference between “attack,” as in how a critical thinker will “earnestly initiate” a rigorous debate of an idea, in such a comment as, “The European sales team will have concerns about the time they will need to devote to the new product. Let’s work out how we can address that concern and ensure they will have time to complete their deals in the pipeline,” versus how a critic might truly “attack,” as in, “beat down,” an idea with a discussion-dampering remark: ”Oh, the European sales team always marches to their own drummer. Mark my words, they will ignore the new product. I’ve seen it before.”
How to effectively deal with the “critic” is addressed in author Bruna Martinuzzi’s article on optimism, which she kindly allowed me to republish on this blog. Bruna accurately identifies the behavior of the ”critic,” aka “devil’s advocate,” as symptomatic of general pessimism, which can discourage critical thinking:
Tim Cook: Apple "arguably only co. innovating in PC space." Flustered responses by Dell+HP only validated his point. http://t.co/TxiC0dEx Posted 14 hours ago
Posted by Mike Urbonas 
How to effectively deal with the “critic” is addressed in 
