Category: Uncategorized

Mahna Mahna

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I love the Muppets.  As someone who has grown up with Jim Henson’s creations, from Sesame Street to today, I have seen this song performed many times. Every time it gets stuck in my head. Mahna Mahna has its own place in pop culture. Slate Magazine even profiled its origins, history and is influence.

The lesson…

The magic of the Muppets is the ability to capture moments of human nature and make us laugh.

There is a lesson in this little performance for any leader or person pushing change. When Mahna Mahna collaborates, others follow along.  When Mahna Mahna becomes absorbed in his own scat singing, he gradually loses the interest of his followers. The Snowths stop singing and wait for him to finish. When he returns to the collaboration, they engage again.

We have all seen leaders pushing change who get overly excited by their message. They end up talking to themselves about change.  

Never forget the goal is to take others along. This can require frustratingly small steps of collaboration and a focus on engagement, so that others don’t get lost or you don’t appear self absorbed.

And like Mahna Mahna, never give up and keep having fun!

Communications or Engagement

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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. – George Bernard Shaw

The traditional mindsets in corporate communications come from the historical use of traditional media. Without return channels, the focus of communication is around reach and frequency of the messages to influence an audience. There is little if any discussion in traditional media unless you make it happen. The speaker has control. The mindset focuses on perfecting a message and deploying it at the right time and channel with minimal distraction.

Increasingly, you see discussion of tips and tricks on how social media can be used in this broadcast way. The mindset of traditional media is being carried across to social. In a related point, we still see debate on whether individuals or organisations should use this channel for their outbound messages.  Many senior executives see social as another optional channel for their outbound messages.

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However, social media is not a one-way medium. It is more than a two-way medium too. Conversations move in all directions in the network at the choice of the recipient. That’s more than an extra or useful feature. It changes the game.

Suddenly real engagement of your audience matters. Social media is not just another way to get a message out. Your audience’s actions to reply comment and share are critical to how your message spreads in a network. Messages without engagement die quickly.  Engagement can dramatically change the meaning of the message.  

We need an engagement mindset in a social media communication strategy, internally or externally. Social media is most valuable as a way to connect, engage, collaborate and build on ideas with the feedback and input of others. Social media enables community building, advocacy and creating real movements. Asking for input shows respect, deepens relationships and builds connection.

Importantly, that engagement goes on whether you choose to participate or not. The network of customers, employees and community does not require your presence or your message to discuss you or what they want to discuss. They are in control and you need to respect that.

To get the most out of social media remember to focus on the engagement to create real communication between the members in your community. 

Don’t Burn Platforms

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized
The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
Shone round him o’er the dead. 
– Casabianca by Felicia Dorothea Hermans

That boy didn’t jump ship. Never again use the phrase ‘burning platform’ to describe motivation for change. 

A Bad Metaphor

Spend much time creating change and someone will ask ‘but is there a burning platform?’  This question is usually asked:

(a) to demonstrate their knowledge of change management jargon and

(b) to insinuate there is no compelling rationale for the change.

The burning platform metaphor comes from a story of oil workers in the North Sea who confronted with certain death by fire, jumped to a likely death by freezing water. It is often attributed to the fire on the Piper Alpha.  That specific burning platform was made much worse by a belief that employees on another platform had that they were not allowed to stop the flow of oils and gas into a fire that was killing their colleagues. They lacked the discretion to do the obvious.

Need I go on. It is a really bad metaphor. Now never use it again.

The Wrong Mindset

The mindset behind the burning platform metaphor is no way to view real change.  The assumption is nobody will change without something akin to threat to their life and the best anyone need offer is a slight improvement.

Burning platform is embedded in a view of the world where smart management needs to get dumb employees to do something they don’t want to do. Like the boy in the poem above, employees loyally await orders before acting (& need prodding even then).  The same logic drives many performance management and incentive schemes.

Real Urgency Comes from Choice

A burning platform is often described as the first of Kotter’s 8 steps of change. It is not. The first step is ‘Create a sense of urgency’. A change imperative matters.  However, there are far better and more constructive senses of urgency than a risk appetite bending fear of certain death. Constructive urgency comes from choice and requires an active and creative engagement. Examples of constructive imperatives include:

  • Fulfilling a personal purpose
  • Realising one’s potential
  • Benefiting others
  • Collaborating with others
  • Collectively agreeing a path forward as a group
  • Autonomy & Accountability for achieving personal or collective goals, and even
  • A well reasoned request from a colleague who respects them and whom they respect

Start with a Conversation

However, to advance a change using any of these motivations you will need to engage people in conversation, to address their views, questions and concerns and connect them personally & collectively to change. You need to respect that people agree to change.  You don’t get to change them.  That’s hard work and it respects their intelligence, effort and contribution. Unfortunately, that’s how change usually works.

Stop dreaming you can light a fire under your people. You can’t. They are smart enough to leave before you get the chance to play arsonist.

A simple conversation about change is far more powerful. People are fired by respect, accountability and opportunity.

Put down the matches.

Conserve Momentum

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Organisations are full of people who tell you to stop.

We are told to stop:

  • to wait for a meeting
  • to wait for clarity
  • to wait for approval
  • to wait for support
  • to wait for proof
  • to wait for another project
  • to wait for another business unit
  • to assess risks
  • to develop a better message, product, change, etc
  • to gain budget, resources, implementation windows, etc

Don’t stop. Momentum is a critical resource in a time of rapid change.

Change agents need to be more agile than their organisation. You can’t steer if you are not moving. Don’t let the organisational molasses slow you down. You can be sure that your opponents or competitors are not waiting for approval to proceed.

Momentum addresses support, proof and evidence.  Momentum builds clarity, inevitability and alignment.  Momentum surfaces and addresses risks. Momentum gets things done.

Waiting achieves none of these things.

Conserve momentum. Momentum will conserve you.

Career goals: A target or a compass

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Do you have a medium term career goal?

Many people I meet proudly declare that they don’t have medium term career goals. In some cases, they haven’t thought ahead. Others like to take their chances on the opportunities that come. Often the reluctance to set a goal because life is unpredictable and they are anxious that a five year goal might become irrelevant, a constraint or worse a measure of failure.

I believe in setting goals. Goals motivate. Goals can sustain you on the bumpy journey. Goals help you build a plan for the future. I know I am lost without a goal.

A Career is not Archery

My goals are not a target that I aim to hit exactly.  My goals are specific enough to guide action and ensure I can be satisfied of achievement but open ended, like a John Hagel’s concept of a narrative.

Over a five year timeframe too much changes. Great opportunities arise in related areas. Digital disruption can easily wipe away a specific target.

Careers are hard enough to manage without feeling like a failure for missing some specific three to five-year away point.

A Career is Way Finding 

However, a goal can still set a direction and sustain motivation for the journey. A medium term career goal acts as a compass you carry around to shape what you do now. The goal can describe a broad type of role you want to reach years ahead. The sense of direction helps you plan development and make career choices. This goal also helps you align your purpose and your work today.

No career path is a straight as an arrow’s flight.  Careers ramble.  There are setbacks.  Opportunities arise quickly.  Skills need to be built in a diverse range of roles and some times your needs and ambitions change.

A Career needs a Direction

My medium term career goals act as a compass that help me work out what skills, experiences and relationships that I need to build to get to my destination.  The compass keeps me on course and shows how to return to the course when the path leads elsewhere.

The same compass also helps me decide what jobs to chase and which offers to decline. If something is not heading in the right general direction or contributing to the right development, I say no, no matter how much status or money is on offer.

If you don’t have career goals or they feel like a burden, swap the distant target for a compass that you use today.

You need something to help you get where you want to go.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

It’s not the critic that counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better…The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and often comes up short again and again. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause. And who, if at best in the end, knows the triumph of higher treatment and high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his soul shall never be with those cold and timid ones, who know neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt

(via scpb)

Internalise Externalities

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Businesses must increasingly manage the impacts that they have on society. Social media creates new accountabilities for organisations externally. Social media offers a way to better manage these external impacts. Enterprise social technologies can help make the enterprise socially oriented.

Reputation matters

In a social and digital era, reputations of organisations are more important than ever. The days in which the organisation controlled the message are over.  Consumers and communities have access to every action and every message of an organisation.  They will consider far more than its marketing. Every impact that the organisation has can and will be found, discussed and assessed. Critically, consumers and communities have a much greater ability to research and organise around issues at digital speed.

More than ever we operate in a world where each business must negotiate a community licence to operate. Regulated, utility & trust based have faced this issue to date. However, many more organisations are increasingly finding that they need to explicitly engage segments of their consumers on issues like environmental impacts, diversity, social impacts, employee issues and any other area of community concern.  You don’t have to believe that we are consuming resources unsustainably, that global warming exists, that fairness or other social issues matter or that there is the importance of a diverse organisation.  

All that matters is that someone in your community does.

Reputations leak everywhere

The truth will out. We are no longer in an era where good marketing and public relations will shape a company’s reputation. Every conversation and every action is equally likely to leak, be discovered in legal or other proceedings and rapidly shared around the world. No secrets are secure. A business that relies on keeping secrets from its customers and community is doomed.

Importantly, your employees & customers bring issues inside and carry them out each day. Look on social media, whether external or internal, and you will see good and bad customer service moments, queries around environmental impacts and even debate around the social impacts of your products and services.  You may also find people querying how you treat your employees, the state of your workplaces, the tone of your leaders and the diversity of your organisation. You need to at a minimum monitor and reflect on these conversations.

If you don’t offer employees avenues to discuss their issues internally, there is a good chance they are discussing it on Facebook, Twitter or at least with their friends. People will raise issues with them every day. Do they know how to respond with facts? Uninformed by an open conversation internally, your employees can help spread rumours or inadvertently confirm them with awkward silence or ‘I can neither confirm no deny’ answers required by many communication policies. Leveraging enterprise social technology can help you to engage and inform your employees on social issues.

If you don’t engage, the issues don’t go away.  Instead, you run the risk that they grow into rumours, campaigns or even boycotts before you are even aware.

Social value can be created

The demands of customers and community don’t have to be a threat to the organisation’s reputation.  Every piece of feedback is a clue as to how your organisation can improve the value that it delivers.  You will not be able to make everyone happy.  However, seeing you move to respond to feedback and create additional value for everyone is a key step to building a leading reputation and benefiting from a social & networked economy.

Many organisations have found that addressing these wider issues also drives the bottom line by removing waste, engaging employees and fostering innovation.  Start to create more social value as you go about your business by engaging differently with your people, customers and community:

  • Listen to feedback and act where there is an opportunity.
  • Measure the value & waste you create and share the results
  • Engage openly in discussion internally and externally around the issues of creating greater value
  • Collaborate internally and externally on key issues
  • Make social impacts a criteria of decision making and innovation
  • Over time build a strategy that incorporates your social value and makes yours a more social enterprise

Ask new questions

If all we consider is old questions, nothing will change.  Creating a more social organisation that can profit from the networked economy requires us to consider:

  • What impacts are we having on our people, customers and our community? What could we do differently? What are they saying?
  • What do our people, suppliers and partners know?  What conversations are they having?  How can we engage them to create greater value?
  • What would we do differently if everything was public information?
  • What external impacts should we be considering as priorities?

Major League Baseball Can’t Talk to Me

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Allow customers to support and engage your brand at different levels in marketing communications. Not all customers are extreme fans. As much as you’d like all customers to be extreme fans engaging them that way is likely counterproductive.

Take Me Out to the Baseball

I’m a bit of a casual fan of baseball. I would happily be more engaged. I just happen to live in the wrong hemisphere to spend much time on the game.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to go AT&T Park to watch the Giants lose to the Dodgers in a great game in a great environment. It was an amazing day. I would happily repeat the experience.

Talking Baseball

So where’s the issue?

Buying my game ticket online there was an option to opt out of receiving an email of news & marketing from Major League Baseball and the San Francisco Giants. There’s not much baseball news in Australia.  Against my usual practice, I opted in to email marketing.

I was struck immediately by the passionate tone of the emails that flowed and their determination that I must be a diehard Giants fanatic. Apparently, I needed prompting several times a week to participate in club activities, to purchase MLB services from partners and to attend every game. I had invitations to vote for players in awards that I didn’t know existed. I was offered lots of products I can’t buy and discounts I can’t use.

Of course, I ended up unsubscribing because what was missing was any news or marketing relevant to a curious casual fan of the game living on the other side of the world. Even if I had been as passionate as they seemed to expect, I just couldn’t do anything they asked. There were no relevant calls to action and no content that wasn’t a call to action.

Passionate Fans Matter

Everyone should cater to the passionate fan. By all means cater to their every need. We all like to think that talking passionately about our brand will rub off. It might. If that all you do, it can be counterproductive.

Plan for the Less Passionate Too

I was left with the impression that the curious, casual or distant fan segment is missing from the Major League Baseball email marketing plan. Maybe baseball don’t need this segment in email or it is not profitable enough. Maybe growing the brands engagement with travellers or those with a casual interest is not on the agenda. The issue is that baseball will now never know what might have been possible.

Build Engagement with Segmented Calls to Action

Every brand needs to segment its calls to action in every channel. Always allow options for the less engaged or those building engagement with your brand. Given your customers and potential fans meaningful ways to build engagement.

If you don’t, the only option for a hard won prospect (and potential future hardcore fan) is to unsubscribe.

Post Script on Social Marketing

Interestingly, the strategy around @SFGiants twitter account is much more accessible to a fan who wants to build engagement. Then perhaps they know that many of the half million followers will never have bought a ticket.