The Turd on the Table
Earlier this week, I participated in a meeting with the CEO of a very well regarded large company to discuss ways our two companies might partner.
After sharing visions and perspectives on the future, it was time to get down to figure out how our companies might work together.
So I suggested we begin by addressing “the turd on the table”, which was the fact that on the fringes we were competitors and both of us saw the same path to growth which could make us bigger competitors in the future. Was this a “lets learn about the potential competitor meeting” or a “lets find a way to partner so we can both grow recognizing the potential of friction meeting”?
The CEO said, “I am so glad you brought up what I was thinking about but you brought it up so “elegantly” ”
We had a very positive meeting and dinner for the next few hours since the CEO and his team and our team addressed “the turd on the table” and because of this our conversations moving forward were “bull shit “free!
Many years ago a boss of mine identified leadership as the ability to understand, face, adapt and align with reality.
Too often, particularly in meetings, we hide reality within layers of protocol, diplomacy, and dazzling multi-media shows. We are so afraid of the truth breaking out that we hold meetings to prepare meetings to get ready for a meeting.
Time passes. Opportunities come and go. The world spins.
And all the while instead of addressing the “turd on the table”, we talk about being sensitive, being politically correct and we all think we are in some psychological thriller or dramatic play where every move and word can make the difference. Meetings are thick with intrigue, back room dramas, meaningful silences, and side bar “bathroom break”conversations.
The joke is on all the participants because everybody knows what needs to be addressed. We all know what is the” turd on the table” and after the meetings we speak about how no one went near it.
So instead I suggest calling out the turd.
Call it out. Shine a bright light on it. Place it on a pedestal. Address the damn thing !
Here are some suggestions for you to become a “turd slayer”, even though you may have been have been indoctrinated not to do much of this advice.
a) Say what you think. In business we care what is between your ears. If you cannot say what you think (hey if its wrong you will be told so, in fact even if you are right you will be told you are wrong….). Truth eventually has a habit of breaking in. Why not open the door and save time and damage ?
b) Assume the person you are trying to be diplomatic to about an issue knows what the issue is. If you bring it up you will be more respected by them. If they did not know, you will earn an ally.
c) Do not go with the crowd if your instinct says no. Often group and crowd dynamics take over in much decision making. People think about what their boss wants to hear rather than what they should say. People worry about the impact of their career rather than what is right. Sooner or later too many people are dodging their own shadow and playing mind games that lead to slow and bad decisions.
d) Do not work for a boss who you cannot bear the truth or whom you fear. We are living in a time of change and most of the time senior folks need to be told that their core beliefs may no longer be true. I have seen too many companies from newspaper to magazines to many other companies hasten their decline because their leadership did not face reality, in part because their staff was scared of them.
e) Tell all the truth but tell it slant: Once you have decided to address the turd on the table, you might want to do so in a way so the message gets through. Ideally it is in a way that does not make the person receiving the news “lose face” so much of this is best done person to person. In other times some humility, self awareness, metaphors or humor will be called for. Emily Dickinson says it best in her poem, too much of shock and you will have blinded someone to the turd!
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --So lets address the “turd on the table” wherever it might be.
For instance this post might be a turd in itself.
We would then call it a “meta-turd”
The Third Connected Era: From Confusion to Fusion at CES 2019
Two years ago, at CES 2017 it became clear that we were entering the Dawn of the Third Connected Era where AI, IoT and Voice would be the key drivers building on the First Connected Era of Search and E-Commerce and the Second connected era of Smart Phones and Social Networks.
Last Year at CES 2018 we began to notice the rise of Sensing devices that anticipate your needs with AI, Expansion of voice into all kinds of devices and the drive to Accelerate connection speeds and battery life described as a Sea of Change in The Third Connected Era.
Walking the floors of CES one can be overpowered with stimuli given 4500 exhibitors and 180,000 attendees. It is easy to become confused, disoriented and overwhelmed but if one takes a step back the big trend is the incorporation of technology into every device, the increasing use of voice as an interface and machine learning to anticipate and augment experience and performance.
The theme for CES 2019 was the Fusion of The Third Connected Era as at CES 2019 we continued to see AI, IoT and Voice proliferating and fusing with each other and into everything.
1.Fusion via Assistants
The two dominant forces at CES were Google and Amazon via Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa which are the purest form of the fusion of AI, IoT and Voice. The two of them are spreading and colonizing everything from automobiles to television sets.
Amazon has sold over 100 million devices with Alexa inside and Google noted that its Assistant was “available” in over a billion devices. The two of them have over 80 percent of the share of voice enabled assistants (Amazon has half and Google a third) and you saw their logos everywhere.
Google is determined to catch up with Amazon and its exhibit was three times larger than last year including a theme park ride similar to “ A small small world” that you can experience for yourself here.
2. Fusion via Openness
Apple never comes to CES but is always looming. This year Apple was all over CES as it began to open up its Air Play and Home Kit technology which for very many years required Apple hardware or Apple chips. No longer.
Airplay 2 will be available across a plethora of devices including Samsung and LG televisions and Home Kit integration no longer requires Apple chips.
If Apple has any hope of becoming a service company of scale to offset its declining iPhone sales it has to open up.
Once upon a time iTunes was only available of Macs but what made iPods sales soar was porting over to Windows. Expect more and more inter-operability and openness from all players especially as software rather than hardware becomes increasingly the differentiating factor and consumers demand it.
3.Fusion via the Home.
Remember how for many years there was the fight among technologies to get into the living room? How quaint. The first real scaled technology into the home took place via the Kitchen which is where the voice enabled assistants first showed up before multiplying into other parts of the home particularly the bedroom and bathroom.
While Alexa and Google Assistant are embedding themselves into television sets and speakers across the home, Whirlpool and Samsung are planning to attack the kitchen while Kohler and others are staking out the bathroom and a gamut of other companies are hoping to dominate the front door and the porch with secure alarms, two way vision and devices where the post office could secure packages.
We saw Kitchen, bathroom and other operating systems. Whirlpools W Labs Connected Hub Wall Oven is a full-fledged cooking assistant and for 8000 dollars you can have a smart toilet that warms up, lights up, plays you the news and responds to Alexa voice commands. Now one can spend hours in the loo! And while you are there you may want to incorporate Care Os Health and Beauty platform which makes your bathroom mirror an intelligent friend and enabler.
4. Fusion via the Body.
The Third Connected Era is now bringing instrumentation and augmentation to our bodies. As we move to a quantified self, we see health and fitness apps enable personal dashboards that allow us and others to monitor our health and wellness. As devices get smaller, voice enabled, and AI intelligent they become health assistants, care givers and overseers. We begin to have relationships and emotions for the voices in our head and cuter and friendly robots are being developed to provide companionship to older people.
Teslasuit launched smart clothing which is apparel with haptic feedback, motion capture, climate control and biometric feedback systems. Technology and humans fuse as we slowly become cyborgs.
Implications and Considerations
Data and Privacy: Every fused device was listening, watching, and collecting. Data is being hoovered up now from all parts of your home, your automobile, and your life. It won’t just be Facebook and Google that we will have to worry about. Today many of these technologies are way ahead of legal structures. Will we be sovereign over our own data?
Amazon and Google Dominance: In the Fusion era the companies that have the most computing power, data and widespread presence will dominate. At this CES it became clear that Amazon and Google between their significant lead in voice enabled devices, cloud strength, proliferation across devices and industries maybe the operating systems of the future in the non-Chinese world. This CES made Apple, Facebook, Samsung and many others shrink as it became clear that they were battling with some combination of reputation, pricing, technology or presence limitations in this fusion age.
Societal Impact: In the course of the last ten years 4 billion of 5.5 billion adults have come to own a smart phone. While no doubt there have been challenges, overall the empowerment these devices have brought to society and people are overwhelmingly positive.
There was something not just cool but increasingly magical about what voice, AI and Iot fusion are bringing about. Increasingly like phones, these technologies will spread rapidly and change society in ways that we cannot imagine.
Technology itself is neither good or bad but how technology is used determines whether it is good or bad.
We are the cusp of some amazing times.
How Scale is being Re-invented.
One of the long-standing tenets of business are the advantages of scale.
Scale has provided companies with many benefits from higher margins due to lower costs, to insulation from competition due to moats of marketing spending and widespread distribution.
Over the past decade however the legacy benefits of scale are diminishing and in many cases are a disadvantage:
Scale of Distribution: With direct to consumer marketing enabled by the Internet and platforms like Shopify, widespread retail distribution is no longer as effective an advantage.
Scale of Communication: New media behaviors by people particularly search and social are leading to communication channels where spending power is no longer a competitive edge as it was in television or print where marketers cornered key inventory at advantageous prices.
Scale of Manufacturing: The “Everything as a service” platforms from Amazon Web Services to Foxconn allow smaller companies to gain the edges of scaled manufacturing, distribution and technology without any of the legacy disadvantages of size.
Scale of People: From IBM to GE to Unilever to Walmart there are hundreds of thousands of employees and therefore ability to recruit and grow a range of talent and offer career advancement. Scale of people continue to be important to execute complex and large tasks but there are also new ways to re-aggregate talent. And a generation of talent wants to work in smaller and more entrepreneurial environments.
In addition to the diminishment of legacy scale which allows for new entrants, there is also a rise of new types of scale that are becoming increasingly important.
Scale of Data: Increasingly companies are realizing that collecting, refining and leveraging data is what is driving the modern fast growing and highly valued companies from Amazon to Google to Uber.
Scale of Networks: On the Internet network effects play a dominant role in creating winners. Dominant platforms such as Facebook, Netflix, we chat enjoy flywheel effects of more users attracting more users and therefore marketers and businesses.
Scale of Influence: Today individuals have tens of millions of Instagram followers or leverage Twitter to reach hundreds of millions of people with single posts and tweets. If you look at scaled entities on social media, they are individuals and not companies.
Scale of Talent and Ideas: One of the lessons of history is that every advance in technology places a premium on superior talent. Technology is a lever and great talent can have major scale effects.
A vivid example of how the new scale works is Kylie Cosmetics. Kylie cosmetics was launched just over two years ago by Kylie Jenner selling lip cosmetics. In the past 18 months Kylie Cosmetics has sold 900 million dollars of product making the 21-year-old the fast billionaire ever. Kylie cosmetics has five full time employees outsourcing manufacturing to Seed Beauty a contract manufacture and all e-commerce and fulfillment to Shopify. The single media channel besides PR that Kylie Cosmetics uses is Kylie Jenner’s Instagram account with 110 million followers (more than the ratings of the top 10 prime time television shows combined)
The New Scale took off beginning in the the year 2007 where the smart phone and social networks came to be. With mobile search, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, You Tube, Shopify, Amazon Web Services and lots more the ground was laid for massive disruption of business in marketing today.
If we look at how Dollar Shave Club and others took on Gillette it was through a combination of You Tube advertising, Contract Manufacturing, Direct to Consumer Selling, and leveraging word of mouth on social media. Procter and Gamble’s second to none expertise in brand building, distribution at Walmart and spending scale on television did not stop double digit share declines.
The scale that many of today’s successful marketers enjoyed were the old scale which are not only diminishing but are seen as disadvantaged because not only are they not agile due to size but less authentic as a zone of control world is being replaced by a zone of influence world, and less customized as they struggle to use modern data, communication and manufacturing techniques.
Most dangerously as they cut costs they are trying to find ways to buy cheap arrows versus talented archers. I worry about the ability of these companies to attract the best talent for themselves or from their partners when talent is rare but capital plenty.
Make no mistake that many established companies still enjoy significant strengths from strong brands, the ability to become truly omni-channel, deep financial heft and much more, but to continue to prosper we will all need to re-think and re-invent ourselves including recognizing that worshipping and ritualizing old scale might increasingly be following a false God.
Transforming Yourself & Your Organization for An Age of Re-Invented Marketing
Earlier today, I presented to 500 attendees at the P&G Alumni Conference in Cincinnati. Since I speak without slides or notes and there were several requests for a summary, here is a remembered version.
It is somewhat ironic that I am at the place where modern marketing was born and where working for one of Procter and Gamble’s agencies, I learned marketing in your former place of work, that I am here today to speak about re-invented marketing and what we have all have to do to transform ourselves and our organizations.
Has marketing been re-invented?
Absolutely ! And many of the things we were taught and guided us have shifted dramatically and have left us and our organizations less relevant.
Gods not Consumers: We always were told that we needed to focus and listen to customers and find ways to enable and empower them. We planned media to reach them. But today with new digital technologies and social networks people are already empowered and enabled and in fact have God like power. They are media themselves and they start campaigns and we react to them. Marketing will be even more important in the future because marketing is understanding and meeting people’s requirements and as they get more powerful, marketing becomes more important.
Brands matter but the old ways we built Brands matter less: Brands are the ultimate navigation devices in a world of fragmentation and the value of Brands are increasing. However, the way brands are built is changing. Its less about communication and media and advertising, and much more about utilities, services and experiences. Advertising in the Western World is in long term secular decline as people do not just eliminate, skip and block ads but increasingly spend more and more time in ad-free environments like Netflix. Scott Galloway the NYU professor rightly has said that “advertising is a tax that poor people have to pay”. We now need to create great experiences, jaw dropping design, convenient utilities and satisfying services and let people talk about them. While we are in an age of secular decline of advertising we are in a renaissance of marketing.
Scale matters but not the scale we know: For many years scale was a moat. Media spending bought out key channels and created frequency and reach. Big budgets ensured slotting allowances. Huge factories allowed for reduced costs. But today, most of this bulk driven scale is not as advantageous as the scale of data and the scale of networks. It is this new scale that Facebook, Google and Amazon leverage and that enable a Dollar Shave Club to offset the old scale advantages of established firms by using search, social, compelling content that spreads, Amazon web services and other ways to build businesses.
Capital is cheap but Talent rare: Most successful companies attracted talent as the best people fought to work at the Procter and Gambles and GE’s of the world. This is still true in places like China and India but in many developed markets attracting and retaining talent, rather than access to capital is key obstacle. We seem to still be operating in yesterday’s model. Why find ways to reduce the cost of people just when you need great people and partners the most? Yes, one needs to be more productive but this means more with less and not necessarily more for less! The “way” we were all taught and the “dues we paid” are increasingly irrelevant and uninspiring for much of today’s top talent.
These changes in people’s behavior, the ways brands are built and what scale means and how talent is inspired in a new world, will shift even more profoundly as we enter the Third Connected Age.
The Third Connected Age
The first connected age emerged in the early 90s with the advent of the web browser. In this era the key connection point was a link and the company that best monetized the link was Google and it gave birth to the power of search.
The second connected age occurred ten years ago with the advent of the smart phone and social networks where we were connected to everyone and everything. Apple monetized the phone best and Facebook the social network.
Not surprisingly, 3 of the 5 most valuable companies today are Facebook, Google and Apple.
We are now at the dawn of the third connected age where there will be three new forms of connections besides the link, mobility, and social, which have already re-invented marketing since peoples’ behaviors and potential have already changed profoundly. These are:
AI: Artificial Intelligence is data connecting to data and writing algorithms. Today, a third of Amazon sales and two thirds of Netflix watching are based on their recommendation algorithms. Co-relation between data sets that allow machines to learn is a big part of our future.
IOT: Here things connect to things. Not just small things but consider your phone connecting to an automobile when you use Uber or Lyft. These things bring along some carbon-based objects, which is you connected to the phone and the driver connected to the car!
New ways to connect: Voice is a new way to connect and engage as are Augmented and Virtual and Mixed reality. There will be new ways to connect and tell stories.
Transforming our organizations
To succeed in this new marketing era, we must recognize that our companies have been optimized for the past. The future does not fit in the containers of the past and we must re-configure our organizations to succeed.
What do modern successful firms look like in this connected age?
People obsessed: These companies are obsessed about people. People who they sell and provide services to, as well as the talent in their organization. They do not just react and listen to people but they anticipate. They gain prescience by seeing patterns either via algorithms or just looking and connecting the dots. It was prescience that helped Apple and Facebook and Google become what they are.
Friction Free: Wherever there are people there is drama. Everything is easy but people come in the way. There is no need for the customer to see how the hot dog is made. Hide the complexity. How to ensure that the internal friction of a company is reduced? Align and incentivize the right behaviors ! If you understand someone’s incentives you can predict behaviors. No use talking about collaboration if you are incentivizing competition. Press releases about innovation without significant budgets backing them is nothing but bullshit and all your people ( and partners) know…
Modular: In a connected age, we can expect people to connect best of breed. No single company can do it all. We are living in an age where everything is first unbundled and then re-bundled (customized) around specific needs. We no longer buy CD’s or even songs but rather put together playlists on Spotify customized to our mood and occasion. We need to ensure we are ready for modularity.
Seamless: Make your company easy to engage with. Make your systems API ( Application Protocol Interface…the only technical term in this paper) friendly. Make one person responsible for a relationship who can orchestrate a solution.
Data Driven Storytellers: Good stories will often beat good spreadsheets, but a great story and a great spread sheet combined are unbeatable. Modern organizations understand that data is critical as oil but the value is in the refining with insights and the extra additives that make the data truly move with stories and more. Spreadsheets themselves are a terrible window into the future.
Today, every firm should start with a blank sheet of paper and keep the above criteria in mind as filters, while limiting themselves with only two constraints. The first is to be lawful and second ,whatever is developed should show a path to breakeven within 3 years. Then go invent something that puts you out of business ! If you come up with something that frightens you make sure you do it , or you will have your “Dollar Shave Club “ reckoning the way Gillette had theirs.
Transforming Ourselves
Companies work hard to transform and many times these require significant M&A and organizational changes to ensure the company can be more efficient, work with greater agility and reflect reality. But while these are often necessary they are not sufficient because one has to address the big area of people and talent. Eventually companies only transform by changing the people or changing people’s mindsets. Since I myself, prefer remaining employed, as many of us do, we need to transform ourselves to remain relevant ( and employed).
Here are three suggestions on upgrading yourself.
1.Address the Fear of the 4Cs: Today we fear Change. We worry about our own Competence. We fear Cannibalization. And sometimes we work in fearful Cultures.
All of us are human. Change sucks. It requires us to learn new things and like all beginners we look stupid! As a result the more successful and senior we are, the more we resist. But, if we want things to stay the same for our career trajectory, the more we will have to change !
We wonder whether we are competent and our skills our relevant. Some of our skills remain valuable and others have to be unlearnt and some new ones added. If you do not invest in learning and training you will become obsolete.
All of us often know what the right thing to do is. But new products and service ideas are likely to cannibalize todays cash cows and cash flows. The choice is easy. Cannibalize yourself or let someone cannibalize you. While it is not pretty ( or tasty) if you cannibalize yourself, at least you will remain alive !
And finally, many of us work in cultures that sometimes do not allow one to speak up and challenge the status quo. Make sure it is the culture and not you who are afraid. If it is the culture go to management and ask them to address it. If they do not, you should plot your exit since fearful cultures are unlikely to succeed in todays connected and increasing transparent age in attracting talent.
2.Do less. Learn and Recognize more: One of the biggest challenges in today’s fast moving workplace is how to find the time to learn new skills and to think about the impact of changes that we all face. Senior management in particular is always busy.
Truth is most of this busy work is just motion. Motion and commotion that we initiate. Meetings we call. Emails we fire off as if we have ADD.
Learn to be still.
As a leader why not become an on demand or just in time service? Delegate everything you can and wait for people to call you when you are needed. You will find three things. First, your people will get better and grow and their people will also get better and grow. Second, you will be called into places where you add genuine value versus being the senior person who is needed for any meeting to proceed. Get over yourself. People are genuflecting to your title and not to you. Finally, you will free up time to learn and to observe and to see patterns. Get out of your in box and to do list. They are colonizing your mind and destroying your creativity and slowly corroding your relevance.
3.Recognize that while you are living in a digitally dominated, silicon based, constantly computing world, you are a carbon based, analog created, confused feeling person , as are the people who work for you and you sell to: Blaise Pascal said “we choose with our hearts and we use numbers to justify what we just did”. People follow emotions and stories and not just facts. In an age of machines, let this advanced math major assure you that we are no match for the computing and display and algorithm capabilities of machines. So, stop fetishizing just numbers and digital and technology. Joan Didion wrote “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”. Lead with your humanity and combine the math with meaning. The spreadsheets with the stories. The data with the insight.
And you will soar as you always have and write the new story of marketing.
What Art Has Got To Do With It
My initial answer was not much but that I loved reading, movies and going to museums.
A few days later thinking about his question, I decided art has everything to do with many aspects of work, particularly in spurring innovation.
I define innovation as “fresh insightful connections”. For more please check out…https://rishadt.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/becoming-innovative/
Art truly serves as a catalyst to innovation in at least four ways. Each of these feed fresh thinking, insights or the ability to see connections. First, artists transform beauty out of materials or words or a point of view by connecting things in new combinations to illustrate the reality of being human. Second, art particularly the written arts allows you to be in the mind of somebody else, allowing you to feel and understand from a different perspective and therefore gain insights. Third, art teaches you to see or shows you how to see in fresh new ways. And finally, the arts can be used to help communicate and make a point better than stating it directly.
To illustrate this I will use how I learned something new or had a thesis underlined by three “artistic incidents” over the past week.
1. Photos that ask you to see differently: This week Chicago had one of its pleasanter days and I decided to walk over to the Art Institute of Chicago at lunch time. The walk through Millenium park is beautiful and as a member of the Art Institute I try to get in a lunch visit monthly and spend time in a new exhibit or favorite gallery. On this day there was an exhibit of photography in the Modern Wing by a Los Angles artist named Uta Barth.
Ms Barth leverages photography in a novel way to get you to both see what you may not have seen but as importantly to make you forget what you are looking at but be aware of the resultant feeling.
Her work which can be simple as conveying the feeling of light on a curtain or a shadow on a kitchen wall is inspired by a line from Robert Irwin which goes…“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”.
My takeaway was to a heightened sense of awareness to everything we see or miss seeing around us. While this clarity may lead to a more sensitive life, it can also open us to the phrase or snippet or number that can be the seed of an idea. Often it is in the crevices and niches of a flow of data and verbiage that the pearl lies.And by seeing without putting things into containers and pre-concieved notions we see anew.
To enjoy more of Uta Barth’s here is a gallery: #mce_temp_url#
2. How Poetry helped inform me about what is personal and how to think about privacy and how people use social media :David Orr is a poetry critic for the New York Times who has recently published a book called “Beautiful and Pointless”. In the opening chapter titled “the personal” he seeks to show how “private” and “personal” are two very different things.
David provides a list of sentences:
Bob Smith was born on November 9, 1971.
Bob Smith’s favorite password is “nutmeg456”
Bob Smith’s Social Security number is 987-65-4320
Bob Smith has a foot fetish.
As a child, Bob Smith had an imaginary friend named Mr Pigwort.
Whenever Bob Smith hears the sound of a high wind, it makes him think of his wife, who died ten years earlier, and he hears her voice faintly calling, as if from a great distance.
He notes that the first three sentences contain deeply private information but they don’t seem personal like the last three.
Mr Orr then states:
“The point here is that our conception of “the personal” has to do more than the data of our lives, no matter how sensitive. It has to do with how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we imagine others see us, how they actually see us, and the potential embarrasment, joy, and shame that occur at the intersection of these different perspectives”
More insight and wisdom about how people may relate to social media in that sentence than all the conferences and privacy seminars that are filled with braying experts!
3. How a 50 year old French classic reminded me about leadership: This Memorial weekend it rained a great deal and I took advantage of being indoors by re-watching two of my favorite films by Francois Truffaut. One of these was “The 400 Blows” which gave birth to “new wave” film making and is a story about a young boy in a hostile world.
There are many amazing scenes in the movie including its classic ending freeze frame. One scene that is both hilarious and telling is one where students have to follow a gym teacher on a run along the streets of Paris. Furiously blowing a whistle, running ahead of all his students, and oblivious to them the teacher does not realize that all his followers are peeling away from him.How many times do leaders bark out orders and run ahead to storm the hill without bringing their teams along with them ? Either emotionally by “following but not really following” or physically by leaving and finding other jobs some of the most talented folks leave the pack. Do leaders recognize that in their urgency to move ahead and win at all costs they risk losing the people they most need? Check out the short segment…
via youtube.com
My original answer to my flight companion continues to be true. I watch movies, read books including poetry and go to musuems because i love doing so and find it fun and fullfilling. But while it makes life better, I also believe it makes my work life stronger.
I encourage folks to embrace the arts because not only does it remind us that it is life we are living but it can make work so much more meaningful.