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5 Things to Avoid When Pitching to a Marketing Leader

In various marketing leadership roles over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a broad range of service providers, from market research firms, public relations and advertising agencies, to reimbursement and regulatory specialists (and everything in-between).  Many of the initial meetings that I and team members had with these prospective service providers were awkward attempts to sell their services to our business.

Here are some of the most problematic issues to avoid when pitching your services to a VP of Marketing or CMO:

  1. The firm didn’t do their homework on our business.  While they may have spent enough time on our public website to understand what our products and services were, they hadn’t dug deep enough to understand what challenges our business might be facing and how their services might help us deal with those challenges.
  2. The agency had a standard pitch and they stuck with it.  Okay, so you have our logo in your pitch and maybe you’ve even included some industry specific examples that are relevant but the whole time your presenting I’m listening for how is this going to help my business.  Ideally, prior to the in-person you’ve had a conversation with someone in the organization to understand what keeps us up at night, how we are defining success, what kinds of help we’re looking for…why we said yes to meeting with you.  If that kind of pre-meeting discussion isn’t possible, and it often isn’t, start the meeting by getting the VP of Marketing or CMO to talk about his or her business and what’s working well or what’s not working well enough.  Then tailor what you speak to, the examples you use, the points you emphasize according to what you’ve heard (This may require a bit of forethought on how to structure a pitch that allows for this kind of real-time customization.  But it’s better to jump around in a deck than to have a perfect polished off-pitch presentation.).  The worst possible thing to do is ask for the input in a perfunctory way and then give the same pitch you were going to give anyway (active not-listening is a killer).
  3. It wasn’t clear what kind of engagement the agency had in mind or how they would execute it.  Sometimes the agency offering is vague or too complex for me to have a  clear sense of what an initial engagement would look like.  Do I have a clear sense of what an initial engagement would look like, from kick-off to project recap?  And if the VP of Marketing/CMOs initial thinking centers around are you addressing my compelling needs, the next phase focuses on credibility and confidence:  Can you and your agency reliably execute the program your pitching?  If I don’t have a crystal clear sense of the ways in which your firm works, that your thinking is logical and uncluttered and that your processes are effective and streamlined, it’s a killer.
  4. The agency didn’t convey compelling competitive differentiation.  A VP of Marketing or CMO worth his or her salt has a clear sense of why their customers buy from them vs. the competition.  Differentiation is fundamental to how the company and it’s products and services are positioned.  By constitution and training they are listening for compelling value propositions as you speak.  They are trying to answer the question, “I don’t have a track record with your agency.  Why should I take a chance with you?”.  Your crisp articulation of why your agency is uniquely qualified to deliver value to your potential client is the counter-weight to the uncertainty of working with a new agency.  I have had the odd experience of bringing in an agency that I have worked with in the past to a new company or client and listened to their pitch and thought to myself, that’s not why these guys are worth working with…they don’t know their own strategic value.  I’ve have had to chime in to anchor the agency’s value proposition in terms that are relevant to the audience.  That the agency then cheerfully stated that I sold them better than they did is cold comfort.
  5. I was looking for a strategic partner and they wanted to be told what to do.  I believe that a really good agency becomes an extension of the marketing staff, by understanding the company’s strategy, goals and stresses.  If they are grounded in that understanding, bring their expertise to the table, and can offer insight and advice, even if it challenges convention, that is immeasurably valuable.  I’m not talking about getting free consulting;  I’m talking about having a strategic underpinning to the services you offer.  Whether it’s PR or media mix decisions, if the agency is solely soliciting input and then feeding back an aligned programmatic response, then the agency is dwelling at a certain level of value.  If on the other hand, the agency has an understanding of the company’s strategy, strengths and challenges, and provides not what was asked for but what is needed, with clear thinking on why the program will deliver on the CMOs objectives, then your agency value will rise to a new, higher standing.  Your value will be measure not simply on program execution but your contribution to evolution of the marketing organization and its ability to advance the company’s strategy.
I recommend circling back with customers you win and customers your don’t win to get a sense of what’s resonating and what’s falling flat.  Your clients are doing that all the time with their customers (Net Promoter Score (NPS) has gained traction, though I’m not a huge fan of this technique).  Nothing pleases a marketing leader more than being treated with the same care they are showing to their own customers.

An Unbalanced Skewering of the Medical Device Industry in the NYT

While I think this article may help sell papers, I am surprised with how unbalanced the reporting is. The article advances the notion that venture capital firms are politicizing the repeal of the device tax and that medical devices are potentially harmful, with no balancing data (which is broadly available) that FDA uncertainty has had a crushing impact on medical device innovation as measured by seed capital invested, medical device IPOs, and the flight of medtech to foreign shores. Nor does the article discuss that while any medical device has the potential to do harm, healthcare has been transformed over the last 50 years, where we live with disease (chronic care) instead of dying from acute events (heart attacks being the number one killer), and that medical devices have played a critical role in that transformation.

The medical device industry has partnered with the clinical community, pharma/biotech and patient groups in this transformation and brought heart/lung bypass, implantable and external defibrillators, sophisticated monitoring technology, etc. that work to preserve and extend life.

By not speaking about the impact of regulatory uncertainty and the positive impact of medical innovation on this vital U.S. industry to my home state (MA) and others, the article is as tilted and unbalanced as the author suggests of the VC community.

Wes Leonard Dies: High School Basketball Player Collapses After Game-Winning Shot


Incredibly sad tragedy. Given the reports that his death was due to cardiac arrest, it’s possible that his life could have been saved if there had been an Automated External Defibrilla­tor (AED) at the gym. Cardiac Arrest is different than a heart attack. It’s an electrical problem with the heart and the only way to revive someone is with a defibrilla­tion shock. Automated devices cost less than $2000 and have voice commands which can walk a bystander through the procedure of delivering a lifesaving shock. CPR won’t revive a SCA (Sudden Cardiac Arrest) victim…C­PR is like treading water. Some day every high school gym will have an AED, just like they have a fire extinguish­er.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Effective Marketing: What’s Sushi Got To Do With It?

When I was at Hewlett-Packard in the late 80s there was an interesting tension between two conflicting aspects of the company:

  1. It’s pride in developing bench to bench, as in engineers making products for folks just like them (where’s the marketers?)
  2. The self-deprecating characterization of marketing, best typified in the now famous quip “that if HP were marketing sushi, they’d call it cold, dead fish”, a reference to its marketing via objective, conservative benchmarks and specifications.

Which leads me to my question:  Effective Marketing:  What’s sushi got to do with it? As a lover of both sushi and marketing I think there some interesting observations to be made.

History:

Sushi has been around a very long time, starting in 4th century BC in Asia as a method to preserve fish, an important source of protein.  Salted fish was kept in rice, stored for months, allowing the rice to ferment the fish.  With this type of sushi, called nare-zushi, the fish was later consumed but the rice was thrown away.

Early in the 8th century, after having spread throughout China, the Japanese began to adopt their own form of sushi in which both the fish and the rice were consumed.  The fish was allowed less time to ferment with the rice and was therefore still partially raw.  Seisei-zushi represented a fundamental shift from food preservation to cuisine.

Later in the 19th century mobile food stalls began selling sushi in Tokyo Bay, combining fresh fish and select seaweed and calling it nigiri-zushi.  As a result of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 there was enormous dislocation in the Tokyo area, which couldn’t sustain the city’s concentration of sushi chefs.  They spread out across Japan, helping to spread the new variety of sushi, which later gained popularity in the United States in the early 80s not only for taste considerations but as a healthy dining alternative.

As for the history of marketing, it has a shorter timeline.   Some attribute Gutenberg’s invention of metal, movable type in 1450 as the beginning of marketing as that technology eventually led to the first “mass” production of flyers, notices and brochures.  Magazines followed in the early 1700s, paid advertising in newspapers in the early 1800s, and spam (via the telegraph), billboards and brand trademarks followed shortly thereafter.

Methods, materials, primary purpose, location have all evolved for both sushi and marketing and having a sense of the history helps provide perspective on current trends and future directions.  And that despite great change, there’s continuity.

Specialized Skills:

In Japan it can take 15 years of apprenticeship before you are viewed as “ready” to be out on your own.  Pre-dawn selection of fish from the fish market, preparation of the special vinegar rice, cleaning and cutting the fish, perfecting making the rice ball and maki rolls, all require specialized skills, attention to detail, and great patience.

Having tried to making sushi at home I have had the dispiriting experience of my rice balls falling apart and the cut fish looking like a ham steak instead of an elegant piece of sushi.  I imagine that many people don’t want to “try this at home”, happy to trust their sushi experience (and their health) to the experts.

But have you noticed that folks from many functions believe themselves a marketing expert?  After all, research suggests we’re bombarded with marketing messages every day (Consumer Reports suggest American consumers are exposed to 247 messages each day.  To put that in perspective, each of us sees more ads in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime).  All that exposure makes us experts on some level with regard to a sense of what resonates and what appears to simply not work.

Nevertheless, like being a sushi chef, great marketing requires specialized skills.  Whether it’s customer and market research methodology, creative design and branding, strategy development, communications expertise…all combine to establish the art and science of cost-effective marketing programs that have impact.

Great sushi looks good, is free from parasites, and tastes great.

Great marketing moves markets, creates new categories, defines new business and product strategies that offer unique customer value, creates product intros that generate profitable sales, etc.

Beauty:  An End In Itself?:

Clearly the Japanese aesthetic is part of sushi’s attraction.  Glazed sushi plates, chopstick rests, soy sauce dishes, placement of the sushi on the plate, attractiveness of each piece, plate decorations (seaweed dividers, wasabi and ginger arrangements, etc.) all contribute to an attractive appearance.

But if the fish isn’t fresh and the maki doesn’t taste good, well all that beauty doesn’t add up to anything.

Similarly, artistry and creativity are certainly a part of great advertising, website and collateral design, and even brand naming.  There are a number of industry awards that recognize such creativity, innovation and artistry…but does the marketing work?

The products of marketing may be aesthetically beautiful (even art) but a few of the true tests of marketing lie in:

  • Are the messages and visuals credible and relevent to the audience?
  • Are your products, services and related communications different, so that they get noticed, provide unique value to the customer, and establish unique space vs. the competition
  • Does the marketing advance your company and brand image (awareness and preference)?
  • Does it move your audience to purchase consideration?

These are just a few of the litmus tests that can be applied to really good marketing.  Like sushi, great marketing must satisfy more than your visual appetite!

Timing Can Be Everything:

Did you know that the least popular days to go to a sushi restaurant are Monday and Thursday?  Fresh fish is at the heart of good tasting sushi.  In Japan fish markets are often closed on Sundays, which is why many sushi restaurants are closed on Mondays.  Many sushi restaurants buy their fish on Tuesdays (for the mid-week) and Fridays (for the weekend).  The best nights to get fresh fish are Tuesday and Friday night (very busy sushi restaurants may also buy fresh fish on Saturday as well).  Monday and Thursday, if the sushi restaurant is open on those days, may not provide the freshest sushi.

Timing is critical in strategic marketing and communications as well.  The right campaign at the wrong time could yield negligible results.  Some critical timing factors to think about:

  • Product development, particularly in regulated industries like medical products, invariably takes longer than anticipated.  Having been around that block a number of times, what contingencies do you have in place if your product functionality, portfolio completeness and timing shifts?
  • Are your messages linked effectively to the buying cycle?  If you don’t get invited to be part of the RFQ/RFP, spending a lot of resources on communicating about your differences vs. the competition may be a waste.  Gaining awareness, being considered in the purchase process, growing your positives with the installed base, each require linking critical messages to your audience at the right time in the customer lifecyle.
  • Have a disruptive innovation?  Many times enthusiasm for the attributes of the innovation cause marketers to communicate too close to the product instead of conditioning (educating) the market about the new category and then linking it to their company.  A great example of this now is the UPS logistics campaign, a fabulous example of category creation (we’re not in shipping, we’re in logistics) so that customers understand the new benefits and that those benefits are uniquely provided to UPS (which provides a far more detailed description of benefit than the prior campaign, “What can brown do for you?”…I don’t know, deliver my box?).

These are just a few examples of critical timing considerations for effective marketing.

Timing can be critical, whether you’re crafting a sushi roll or marketing message.  Ignore timing at your dining and business peril!

Convention and Protocol:

The first time I traveled to Japan I was excited to go to my first authentic Japanese meal.  I was honored by one of the business leaders to be taken to a nearby sushi restaurant.  With his help I ordered a few items.  We got caught up in conversation as the food arrived and I hungrily dug in…with my fingers.  I hadn’t yet mastered the art of chopsticks so I simply grasped a piece of sushi between finger and thumb, dipped it in the soy sauce, and popped it into my mouth.

When I looked over at my host he was staring at me in horror.  In a flush of embarrassment I asked what was wrong and he proceeded to lecture me that I must use chopsticks, turn the sushi over and dip only the fish side into the soy sauce, not to put additional wasabi on the sushi as the chef already put the right amount on when he made it, and not to put wasabi into the soy dish.  I begged forgiveness  and ate with difficulty and self-consciousness the rest of the meal.

A few decades later I have mastered chopsticks but when in the States I cater to my own sense of taste and propriety and can’t say I’ve noticed any shocked stares from the chef or other patrons.  And while I respect the tradition, I’m not sure any of those conventions change the quality of the experience in my mouth.

In marketing, we have a fair bit of convention and protocol as well.  It seems automatic in the B2B world that for every new product introduction a brochure, print ad and press release are what’s expected.  Besides there being so many more ways to engage your customers, raise awareness, and support sales efforts, fundamental questions should always be asked before jumping to conventional deliverables.  These questions center on who your target customer is, what’s important to them, how to build credibility and relevance, what are the barriers in the market to overcome, and what are the best vehicles to achieve your initial and downstream objectives.  Maybe your first resources will be spent on visual demonstrations, white papers and industry association engagement.  Or perhaps social media, web ads, and email.

In  both sushi and marketing, convention can get in the way of meeting your objectives (whether it’s an enjoyable meal or an effective campaign).

Finally…

Chop sticks, convention, cold, dead, raw fish…to the novice, sushi can be a little intimidating.  Perhaps you’ve heard of “beginner sushi”, which includes a California Roll (no raw fish in that), cucumber rolls, and if you’re daring, maybe a piece of tuna sushi.

Marketing can be a little daunting too.  I recommend starting with the end in mind:  What are you trying to achieve and work backwards to what is the strategy and tactics to reach your objectives.  And when in doubt, reach out to an experienced marketer to help you navigate the menu of marketing strategies and tactics best for your business.

Getting Great Marketing Talent in a Hiring ‘Buyers-Market’

In today’s economy a hiring manager has a tough job to sort through the deluge of resumes that result from a job posting and find the right pool of candidates for the screening and interview process.  LinkedIn, The Ladders and other numerous job boards and notification agents have turned the local employment listing viral.

That response deluge, unfortunately, may not translate into a simpler task of identifying that ideal marketing candidate.  Hiring managers and their respective HR partners need to winnow the candidate pool quickly and efficiently.  Further, given the current economic environment, many managers feel that the power has shifted from employees and candidates to hiring managers.  As a result, managers may feel that they can raise the hiring bar and be more demanding when it comes to getting the exact right fit for the position.

One of the current ways hiring managers are quickly concentrating their candidate pools is to eliminate candidates who don’t have specific product or market experience.  Based on my own experience as a hiring manager of marketing talent over many years, I find this interesting and potentially a missed opportunity (that could be costly…see below).

If you have a hiring philosophy I suspect you’ve come to it from a mix of training and experience.  The best interview training I ever had focused on behavioral interviewing, and it’s a technique I still use.  I must admit, however, that my bad hires have been the most instructive; those times when I felt pressure to fill a position and selected someone who wasn’t a strong fit, or when I put a tactical (or downstream) marketer into a strategic position.  As a result, I’ve developed the following hiring criteria, in prioritized order:

  1. Intelligence
  2. Attitude
  3. Job specific skills
  4. Market/product knowledge

Here’s my thinking:

With regard to intelligence, is the person a lifetime learner?  Can they look across disparate pieces of data and synthesize it into meaningful insights?  Do they have the mental acuity, cycle time and processor to ask good questions, see patterns and think deeply and creatively about the business.

In summary, with regard to intelligence, they need to come with these skills and abilities and if they don’t bring it, in most instances (not including internships and the like), it’s hard to teach.

And the same can be said – perhaps even more so – of attitude.  A potential employee’s attitude has a huge impact on their cultural fit with the organization and whether they will ultimately have a positive impact on the business.  Attitude, that amorphous quality which I hope will substantiate itself as a can-do attitude, a sense of personal ownership and accountability, curiosity, pro-activeness when it comes to communication and the assembly of relevant information, and a commitment to being adaptable (especially when it comes to collaboration style)…I see attitude as critical to employee success and I try hard to assess this through behavioral interviewing.  And again, based on my experience, despite sustained effort, a person with a poor attitude or an attitude that doesn’t fit the company culture, is very tough to turn around or “teach”.

Job specific skills, the technical component of the applicant/position fit question, is fairly straightforward.  Resumes generally speak to the development of relevant market skills over time and probing questions centered on having the candidate speak to their specific role in a marketing program they participated in and are proud, can be very revealing.  I also like to probe about the chain of tasks, obstacles and impact of the specific program (increased sales, competitive wins, customer satisfaction, new product definition, marketing strategies, product launches, etc.).

Unlike attitude and intelligence, job specific skills can be taught as long as some building blocks are in place.  Functional excellence can be enhanced.  Your processes can be learned.  And while you want someone to hit the ground running, if you have someone with marketing skills and the right attitude and intelligence, great things can be accomplished.

Lastly, in my mind, comes product or market specific knowledge. While I admit knowledge about the market structure and dynamics, competitive and regulatory environment, technology, etc. are all extremely useful, it can all be learned.  If faced with selecting between Candidate A who is a strong marketer, seems very bright and has a great attitude but no similar product and/or market experience, and Candidate B, also bright, solid marketer, does have specific market and/or product experience but you have a small doubt in your gut about cultural fit, I’d always go with Candidate A.

There’s an additional reason to consider marketing talent outside of your specific product/market:  Marketers are tasked with developing business strategy, and by that I mean understanding customer, market and competitive dynamics and defining a sustainably differentiated path forward that only your company can uniquely fulfill.  At the heart of innovation is bringing forth “something new…a new idea, method or device” (per Merriam-Webster).  Seeing new opportunities can be fostered with the cross-fertilization that comes from bringing in fresh thinking and different market world view.

Further, disruptive innovation happens on a regular basis to folks within a market who fail to see new entrants with simpler, more attractive value propositions.  New eyes into your market may be your best defense for keeping your business focused on both the trees and the forest.  So while it’s tempting for hiring managers sitting in the cat-bird seat to hire only market insiders, I encourage keeping your options open.

What are your leadership personality traits? Pick only two.

Paul Maritz was recently interviewed for a regular column in Sunday editions of the New York Times called “Corner Office”, which regularly asks questions of prominent business leaders about their management style and thoughts on hiring.  It’s a fascinating column which I recommend (column RSS subscription link).

If you don’t know Paul Maritz, he is currently the President and CEO of vmware and previously was at Microsoft, ending his 14 career there as a member of the five-person Executive Committee and as VP of the Platform Strategy and Developer Group.

I found there were a number of nuggets in the interview worth passing on:

  • On leadership style: “I’ve learned that you only really get the best out of other people when you do things in a positive way. There are negative styles of leadership, where you do things by critiquing and criticizing and terrifying other people. But in the final analysis, it doesn’t get the best out of people and it doesn’t breed loyalty..We’re going to run into problems.  We’re going to make mistakes.  And when that happens, you have to ask people to help you and to overlook the fact that you’ve messed up.”
  • On hiring: “First of all, you want to make sure that people have the necessary intellectual skills to do the job. Second, you want to see if people have a track record of actually getting stuff done. Then, third, you want to look for people who are thoughtful, and that ties into learning and being self-aware.”
  • On successful groups: “At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four of those personalities in a single person.

    1. You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.
    2. You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.
    3. You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.
    4. Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”

Interestingly enough, Paul stated that he had rarely met anyone who embodied more than two of those personality traits “And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not.”

It requires self-knowledge and confidence to truly know which personality traits are part of your authentic leadership style and then surround yourself (or build teams with) with fellow leaders which build a complete set of competencies.  While you can get lost amidst the sea of self-assessment tools available on the web, I suspect if you think deeply about your successful team experiences, the key players, and your role on the team, your own personality strengths will become clear.  And despite the temptation, pick only two!

Inform Your Gut!

Interesting HBR guest blog post “Hire Great Guessers”, those folks able to make cognitive leaps from limited information.  Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, rightly advances the use of analytics to drive decision-making but also carves out space for intuitive reasoning and how it can support a smarter analytical approach.  More than just common sense, it is invaluable to have folks on your team capable of informing their gut and driving better business outcomes.

The Power of Observation in Innovation

A number of years ago when Hewlett-Packard still had a Medical Products Group (prior to the Agilent spin-off and later acquisition by Philips), I had a chance to be a product manager in the echocardiography business.  My first big assignment was to assume marketing responsibility for a  development project focused on bringing new functionality specifically designed for pediatric echocardiographers and their tiny patients.

The project was already defined and the engineering team was deep in the implementation phase.  I was not only new to being a product manager but also a novice when it came to the complexities of congenital abnormalities that my customers were tasked with assessing.  Hearts the size of a walnut and beating rapidly, pediatric cardiologists have the difficult task of plotting treatment plans for complex heart issues.

One of the things I did to gain an understanding of my customers’ needs, clinical environment and competitive dynamics was identify the top 15 thought leaders in the market and speak to them face to face in their labs about how our product was performing on their patients.  Armed with a questionnaire and QFD survey (a valuable tool which I highly recommend when trying to turn qualitative needs into actionable information), I was able to see side-by-side demonstrations of how our solutions performed compared to the competition.

In the midst of this humbling and illuminating process I learned many things, though some of the most valuable take-aways didn’t come as the result of my questions.  In preparation for one of the planned key opinion leader visits, I contacted the head of the echo department at a fabulous children’s hospital in Ohio and asked him if he minded my shadowing him for the day.  I told him I wanted to understand his needs, the context in which our products existed, and how he used information in his daily job.

“Are you sure you want to follow me around all day?” he asked.

“I really do”, I earnestly replied.

“Then meet me at 6:45am tomorrow morning in the lab, ready to go.”

We started the next day by visiting his patients in the NICU, checking charts, speaking with nurses, and examining the patients, hearing how his patients fared over the night and how they were recovering from surgery or other therapy.  I watched him wheel our imaging system over, select a transducer, fiddle with the imaging settings, and then open both port windows of the incubator, putting one hand into the left port and the hand holding the transducer through the other port window.

I could clearly see that he was struggling to maneuver the transducer and asked him what the issue was.  Exacerbated, he told me that the cable of the transducer was heavy and stiff.  It was hard to get the transducer into the incubator and in the right position without letting the transducer put any of its weight on the tiny patient’s chest.  If he let that happen, he explained, the weight could cause an arrhythmia.

I nodded my head in acknowledgment, watched him struggle and eventually get the transducer in place, gently touching the baby’s chest, and get his assessment images.

I had arrived loaded with my questions and survey, ready to find out about image quality, frame rate, transducer frequencies and imaging depths….and came away with an unexpected gift, the opportunity to observe and let my customer’s needs reveal themselves. I didn’t know to ask about transducer cables.  It hadn’t come up previously and I might not have gotten to that insight in any number of surveys.  But fortunately I had the invaluable opportunity to simply observe.

It is a lesson I try never to forget.  While so much has become virtual and remote in this day and age…telephone survey, blog posts, internet panels and Twitter feeds…I encourage you to preserve time to be in your customer’s space, get a sense of what frustrates and motivates them, get a sense of how your solutions fit into their context, and find ways to add value that are meaningful to them.  Sometimes it’s the aggregation of little things which sum to significant, differentiable contributions.

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For more information on the power of observation, I recommend the book “Customer Centered Growth, Five Proven Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage” by Richard Whitely and Diane Hessan.

I also highly recommend Eric Von Hippel’s work at MIT that discusses lead user innovation.

Freeing Up Your Prefrontal Cortex For Better Strategy & Execution

The proof is in.  Excellence in both Strategy and Execution  can be achieved!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies indicated that while the prefrontal cortex is engaged during strategic thinking, those that are the “best strategic performers” engage other parts of their brain when embracing the tactical side of executing a sound strategy.

Emotional processing, planning based on conclusions from prior outcomes, as well as sensory stimuli processing and anticipation of organizational reactions to plans all come in to play.  See When Emotional Reasoning Trumps IQ in the September issue of HBR.  The authors state:

“People associate strategy with rational thinking and other high-level functions of the prefrontal cortex but the best strategic thinkers show more activity in parts of the brain linked with emotion and intuition.  Their nervous systems may even repress rational thought to free those areas up….

Of course, IQ-based reasoning is valuable in both strategic and tactical thinking – but it’s clear that managers integrate their brain processes as they become better strategists.  When companies realize that, they may approach strategy and execution more holistically.”

I may put that on my resume…integrated brain processing.

PR Crisis Management: “What Not To Do”

Recommended reading in today’s NYT regarding crisis management.  The article, “In Case of Emergency:  What Not To Do”, reviews three recent huge imbroglios impacting Toyota, BP and Goldman Sachs and how they mishandled their crisis communications.

It’s a lengthy article but worth the read.  A critical quotation by Howard Rubenstein (aka The Fixer) towards the end of the piece:

“These companies made the sames mistakes.  They broke the cardinal rule of crisis management:  They didn’t seem to have a crisis plan in hand.  They sought to minimize the extent of their problems, and they never seemed to display an understanding for the situation they were in.”

A crisis is complex and paving the way for a common response from legal, regulatory, management, marketing and sales can be extremely tough…especially if not done in advance.  In the heat of the moment, where response time counts, excessive caution may get in the way of saying what’s prudent and human to preserve your brand (and it’s corresponding contribution to stock value), retain customers, and maintain positives that will impact future purchase consideration and market entries.

Another relevant piece in the same section of the paper under the heading “Metrics”, “Three P.R. Nightmares” shows some interesting graphics related to brand health (Measured components of brand health:  impression, quality, value, reputation, satisfaction and recommend) before and after Toyota, BP and Goldman Sachs’ crisis compared to top competitors.  As you might anticipate, the crises has had an outsized impact on their brands’ health.  However, with advanced preparation, that impact can be mitigated and potentially garner positives (Ex. J & J Tylenol recall in 1982).