ben damiano 4/4/21 ben damiano 4/4/21

Juxtapositions

1. Digital silicon-based data driven solutions. Analog carbon-based emotional challenges

A machine computes. A human dreams.

The elegance of code is often thwarted by the messiness of people.

Algorithms find co-relations between present and historical data sets. Adventuresome people leave the beaten path and innovate by forging new connections between things that were unconnected before.

Software is written but T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) emphasized “nothing is written” in human progress.

It is imagined.

Silicon Valley believed AI could monitor and clean up the weaponized mess of social media. Lots of computing power and tens of thousands of people later the situation continues to sizzle.

People surprise and are illogical.

Machines are not yet mad.

Math has no meaning.

Meaning often has no math.

2. Diversity of people. The diversity of voices.

Diversity is critical.

Diversity ensures innovation as differences of perspectives, voices, and expertise find ways to connect, intersect, compete and intertwine.

The drive to diversity whether it be gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or background is important because it is fair, just and supports ideas, value, freedom and career growth.

Even more critical is that the diverse voices are heard, and diversity is not just diversity of faces or quotas to meet benchmarks.

3. Why we join. Why we stay.

We seek jobs and careers that will afford us money, power and fame.

And we measure our wealth, our span of control and our influence.

But we stay for connections, purpose and personal growth.

Do we feel connected to the people we work with, the purpose and values of the place we spend our lives, and do we feel we are growing as people with our skill and expertise?

We came for the numbers that we could measure on a spreadsheet.

We stayed for the stories that strengthened our heartbeat.

4. The potential of the old. The fixation on the young.

Over the past twenty years the 52-to-70-year age cohort has doubled its wealth to 1.2 million dollars a household while the 20 to 35 has declined by 10 percent to just over 100,000 a household.

Modern health care indicates that a healthy 52 will not only have money but over 30 years of a physically healthy life. Today the growth market for most businesses in the US and in most developed markets from Europe to Japan are 50+. They do not see themselves as seniors and Covid-19 has underlined that they are open to new behaviors and brands.

But look around at the marketing in most countries which aims decades below where the money is not only in depiction but also tone of voice. Survey the ages of folks in marketing departments and agencies. Millennial fixation did not help Buzzfeed, Vice or Group Nine.

Money and not “viral likes” makes the world go around.

5. You. The other you.

A person in two moods can be more different than any two people.

You are both what you were and what you are as what you will become.

Some things change and some things stay the same.

It is hard enough to understand yourself and really difficult to understand other people.

Thus, let us be careful in both life and in business to believe we have anybody pegged.

When you have someone segmented and boxed and x-rayed. You have measured their ROI and Lifetime value. When you have them tiered and graded and valued remind yourself that someone is doing the same thing to you.

How does it feel?

And don’t you sometimes just do strange things to make their calculations crackle and burn and go all wrong?

You are the marketer and the one marketed to be.

You are the archer, and you are the target.

6. Balance. Unite. Integrate.

In the digital world there are zeros and ones

In the real world there is a spectrum between zero and 1 including zero and ones.

In the fantasy world there is a yes and no for every answer.

In the real world there are yes, no, maybe, depends, later, avoidance of providing an answer.

The wise understand that one has to continuously manage a spectrum.

A spectrum of people, voices, opportunities, options and decisions.

The challenge is how to balance between the outcomes, unite what can be united and integrate the options.

And to remember humans are incomplete, imperfect and impermanent.

As are all the decisions we make and the positions we take.

And in the juxtapositions is where the meaning of life lies.

ben damiano 3/21/21 ben damiano 3/21/21

Mindset Architecture

While one may not agree with Hamlets’ statement that “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”, it is clear that our mindsets matter a lot in how we perceive life, how we are perceived and the degree of success we may have in our varied endeavors.

In rapidly changing and chaotic times an agile mindset can be critical to success. While there are many personal trainers to help sculpt our bodies into somewhat supple forms, there is a scarcity in those who can show us how to exercise our minds to be as flexible as they need to be.

The ability to change one’s mindset and see, feel and think differently about an issue is often the key differentiator between those who succeed and those who do not.

Here are some perspectives on how we can sculpt our minds to thrive in a transforming world:

1. Accept human reality:

Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning.

We seek meaning within the constraints of reality.

The potential of who we want to be and where we want to go constrained by what is and what will be.

When you live your life are there some underlying beliefs and truths that drive you or you measure yourself against? If we are to grow, where are we trying to go?

Competition it is not with other people but to get better every day and to get closer to what you believe or your ideals. Your success is not housed in other people’s minds (what they think of you) but in their hearts (what they feel about you) and in your mind (what you think of yourself).

At its essence life is about loss, love and learning,

Loss is central to the human experience in three ways. The first is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose pitches, Clients, jobs and opportunities. Many times, we win. Some people win little, and others win a lot. But we all lose. But these losses are not the big ones. The second bigger losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end, or death comes, and our final loss is that of our lives.

How we live amidst this loss defines a large part of life.

The joy we make is because time is precious, and this moment of victory may not last forever. Given that loss is part of human existence it pays to be kind and to think about how to help those in loss for do not ask for whom the bell tolls since it tolls for us.

A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is the hope of love and joy of learning. Love of people, of work, of art, of culture. Love may not compute but computers do not love. There is a great deal of progress made over generations on who one can love, the ability to do things one loves and because of modern technology to be exposed to new worlds, horizons and things to love.

And learning is particularly joyous. Learning in its first form is building knowledge. With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship. Learning to see things from other perspectives gives us understanding. Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.

2. Align with the force

Yoda wishes that the force be with us. But what is this force that we need to align with? Tangible reality would be a great place to start. Besides human reality that we will all die (but others will be born), there will be loss (but there will also be gains) and life cares about the species and not the individual (sorry but that is how evolution works). Science matters. Gravity does not care whether you accept it. Jump out of a tall building and you will die. Gravity did not care and did not know you existed. In addition to science there are some harsh business realities. Three in particular: Globalization. Digitization. Markets.

One can fantasize as much as one wants but these three forces are unstoppable and now the Internet (“Connection Engine”) acts like Viagra on them, where each force connects to and rejuvenates the other.

If you wish to thrive and make a living accept and prepare yourself for increased digitization, globalization and market forces (markets are why China and India have risen more than anything else over the past two decades). They will be impacting every single industry and crevice of life.

All the fretting, complaining and hoping that these three realities go away is a complete and total waste of time. They just are and they will be. Let us use our energy to learn new digital skills, find ways to expose ourselves to different global experiences and learn a little economics.

3. Optimism matters

In the novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon a character is described as one whose “mood collapsed the room”.

While misery may love company, nobody likes being in the company of miserable people. Optimism is not just an essential component of innovators but a trait that you must have if you wish to inspire folks to follow you. “Woe is me, doomed are us” works for a few drinks in a bar, but at the workplace it saps energy, hurts culture and is just a plain downer. Pessimism is something we all wallow in, but it fails to show the way out. If you cannot get yourself positive about what you do or where you do it for a majority of your working days (there will always be days from hell where you feel crushed and beaten), then do yourself and your company a favor. Quit!

A way to get optimistic is to forget all the legacy nonsense you may have to grapple with and ask that if you had a fresh sheet of paper, a subset of the talent in your firm and its assets (brands, network, money), what would you do? You likely will find you actually are looking forward to what you and your company can do. Every day is a new career beginning. Tomorrow is where you will spend the rest of your life. So, buck up!

4. Recognize the opposite is also true

To sell a point of view or a recommendation it is critical to know its weaknesses and the information that you may not know. since you are aware of the variables that went into your recommendation.

I suspect folks who only see one side of a story or position. Their minds and positions are not subtle but brittle. Brittle cracks at first true opposition.

Look at the world through a different lens. We can have blind corners in the areas where we are most competent since we often stop needing to look out in those areas. Practice building the strongest opposing case. The stronger you can build it the more likely your recommendation may be correct if you still choose to make it.

5. Constant iteration & compound improvement

Inside our hard skulls is the most beautiful software. But like all software if it is not constantly updated and enhanced it will be irrelevant to the applications and tasks that the modern world requires.

We all need to be students again. Apprentices this time since only by doing can we enhance our craft. Iteration happens by doing, testing, incorporating, rejecting, and being active! Do not over think. Every day try to learn one new thing or one new feature or try one new experiment of some sort. Incorporate what works, learn from what does not.

This way your software keeps improving and you signal that you are willing to learn new things and see things in new ways and are not some ossified, stuck in the mud slug of a carbon life form. Computers that cannot run new software are junked regardless of how pioneering, famous and awesome they once were.

Three ways on how you might start this very minute begin to embrace Compounding Improvement

a) Discipline equals freedom: This is the title of a book by Jocko Willink, a Navy Seal. Basically, if you want to get a grip on the world get a grip on yourself.

b) Expose your mind to new and different stimuli: Innovation and change is often about connecting the dots in new ways. To do so, one must be aware and familiar with a lot of dots and not just the dots at work.

The world is changing so fast that many of our skills and expertise and mindsets need continuous upgrading. While many of us set aside time to exercise to maintain our physical operating system we need to also feed and exercise our minds. The power of this habit is that at the end of a year you will have spent 365 hours learning new things by just doing one hour a day. You will gain compound returns to thought!

c) Deliberate practice: Professor Anders Ericcson who died a few month ago wrote a book called “Peak” which is the best study of deliberate practice which entails immediate feedback, clear goals and focus on technique. According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime or profession, without ever attaining elite status. A great resource for deliberate practice is here.

6. Improvisation and fluidity.

We are living in a jazz age and not a classical one.

In classical music —particularly orchestral music—there is a conductor that musicians follow, sheet music one sticks too and a hushed auditorium one sits in.

Jazz on the other hand is a mix of classical, swing, blues and much more but at its heart it’s about improvisation. It is about playing off each other. There is no conductor. Rare is there a hushed auditorium but more likely a noisy club or the anguish of a lonely saxophone in a subway station.

Today we are living in a diverse, global and connected world where we have to work together, we have to fuse our different cultures and beliefs and constantly adapt and improvise.

We need to shape shift; we need to flow, and we need to adjust.

Water over rock.

Rock against rock leads to small pieces of rock.

Flow.

Water flows above and below and around rock and moves onward.

Soon the rock erodes.

Water over rock.

In the end it is important to understand the difference between internal barriers and external barriers. Most of us complain about external barriers that are often impossible to change but we shirk from attacking our internal barriers which we have much greater control of.

Improve your mindset.

After all, as the famous public service announcement says.” a mind is a terrible thing to waste” …

ben damiano 3/14/21 ben damiano 3/14/21

Strategy

What is strategy?

Strategy is Future Competitive Advantage.

What will the future look like? What will people need and expect? How will demographics, technology and other global shifts create new competitors or recharge current competitors and how will categories blur, blend and maybe even disappear?

Amidst these new expectations and changing competitive dynamics what advantage will your company offer? A differentiated or better product? A competitive moat of network effects, scale or some other dynamic? A better experience? Speed and value?

While Strategy firms can be amazingly helpful in guiding companies through these questions, most leaders already have a gut instinct on what needs to be done. The deep dive documents, the chanting strategists and the long march of meetings are to bring others along and to provide an intellectual and analytical framework for a decision that clearly had to be made.

If you work for a firm and you have an idea of where the future is going and how changing people’s expectations and emerging technology are going to create challenges or opportunities, you should go to your management and share your thinking.

All you need to talk about is future competitive advantage.

Some key future trends to help build new strategies or interrogate existing strategies.

William Shakespeare has great advice to anyone who aims to be a strategist. In his play Julius Caesar, he writes:

We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Simply stated pay close attention to shifting trends and tides and make sure you align your venture with where the tide is going.

There are three unstoppable trends that every company and individual must align with wherever they are in the world regardless of the industry in which they compete: 1) Globalization with a new flavor, 2) The Three Demographic Divides and 3) The Third Connected Age of Technology.

1) Globalization with a new flavor.

Globalization will continue to thrive despite the hand wringing of Western institutions and periodicals. However, it will no longer be a unipolar form of Globalization driven by the West, but a multi-polar mix significantly impacted by Asia, primarily China and India, who between them account for a third of global population and possibly half of future growth.

By the end of 2018 only 2 of the busiest container shipping ports in the world were in the West (Rotterdam in the Netherlands at Number 12 and Los Angles at Number 18).

At current fertility rates Africa’s population will increase from 1.2 billion to 2 billion in 2050 and 4 billion in 2100 becoming home to almost half of the world’s population.

Just as Earth is not the center of the Universe, the West while being critically important is unlikely to be the center of globalization that the world revolves around with less than 10% of the population and a third of the global GDP soon declining to less than 25%.

2) The Three Demographic Divides: a)The Divide of Race/Ethnicity, b) The Divide of Urban and Rural and c) The Divide of Generations

These “Divides” in the US were most recently seen during the presidential election. Look carefully and it was not “Red State” or “Blue State” but rather Urban/Rural, Caucasian/Non-Caucasian and Young/Old.

The population of the United States next year under 18 years old will be multi-ethnic and the country whose population growth has slowed to a crawl of less than .35% in 2020 will continue to become a multi-racial mongrel mix of beliefs and dreams that walls and nationalistic rage may seek to make more difficult but cannot truly impede. This blend of talents and cultures will be seen not only a key to innovation but a way to remain a leader as a 1.3 billion plus China continues to accelerate.

The most significant and not as well understood of these divides is the worldview differences between those younger than 30 and those older than 55. These differences are replicated in almost every nation as new generations brought up with mobile and social Internet, a lack of assets and lower expectations plus a dramatic difference in values and goals from climate change to capitalism come to express themselves and enter the workplace and politics. In the US this generation will in the next 10 years inherit 30 trillion or 30% of all US Wealth( most of it going to a fifth of them) and this will add fuel to their burning belief of the need to change.

From financial products (Lemonade, Robin Hood, Square, Bitcoin) to fashion (Virgil Abloh, Kylie Jenner) to media usage (Twitch, TikTok), a new language and infrastructure is being forged which will be turbo-charged like never before due to the disproportionate and long-term impact of Covid-19 on these younger generations. (Not since the Great Depression have so many young adults lived with their parents. In July, 52% of young adults ages 18 to 29 years old resided with one or both of their parents, surpassing the previous peak in 1940, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. )

Their voices do not ring today in boardrooms or councils of power (almost all of whom are much older) but make no mistake the drumbeats of their reality will soon throb in the bloodstream of every business and political discussion.

But in the US, it is not just the young but the older to whom not enough attention is being paid.

Every day 10,000 people turn 65 years old and due to modern medicine will live active lives for 15 to 25 years. A segment of them controls most of the wealth in the US while a larger group has no significant assets to retire on. Ageism, Medical Rationing, and many more issues will likely create some intriguing inter-generational dynamics.

These divides occur in every nation. Watch Japan as its population declines by over 25% in the next 30 years unless they allow Immigration or Fertility rates change, or China grappling with the aging population due to the one Child Policy, or countries like India and Egypt challenged to find jobs for their youth.

3) The Third Connected Age

In 1993/1994 we entered the First Connected Age where we were connected to information via what would eventually be Search (Google/Baidu) and connected to transaction via what would grow to become E-Commerce (Amazon/Alibaba).

Around 2007/2008 we entered the Second Connected Age where due to smart phones (Apple/Samsung) we were connected all the time and due to Social Media (Facebook/We Chat) we were connected to everybody.

These first two “Connected Ages” have impacted everything from Elections to a re-ranking of the Fortune 500. It has created great wealth and benefits to people and also brought about the destruction of many livelihoods and the middle-class jobs. It has enabled Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club. Remember when Facebook paid just 1.5 billion dollars for Instagram with its handful of employees? That was worth more than the Eastman Kodak market cap on that day when Kodak had tens of thousands of Employees. Kodak is now worth half a billion while Instagram is probably the most valuable part of the 800 billion market capitalization of Facebook.

But we have not seen anything yet as we enter the Third Connected Age where we will enjoy four new types of connections as data connects to data and writes software (AI), and all our devices are connected to Supercomputers (Cloud), with much faster connections (5G) and new interfaces to connect (Voice today and AR/VR tomorrow).

Why strategies often fail in implementation

Companies often allocate large swaths of senior management time and budgets for outside specialists to help them sculpt and then move the strategy forward.

A cavalcade of consultants convey and communicate with countless charts creative choices to the C-Suite.

A flurry of futurists frame, focus, and filter the way forward with the finesse of fortune tellers.

Masters of the Universe market M&A moves that might make multiples move upwards and mean many more millions in market-cap.

PR professionals produce and promote points of view that provoke the press to perceive with pristine perspectives.

These efforts when successful result in the first three key steps to strategy implementation

1) A simple and differentiated strategic blueprint.

2) An M&A plan to acquire skills, markets and technology.

3) A re-organization since the future does not fit in the containers of the past.

These are essential ingredients to a recipe of change and growth none of these will work without helping grow and change the people in the organization.

Because while firms are a collection of ideas, technologies, patents, brands, ecosystems and people, it is people who are the key since they create the ideas, technologies, patents, brands and eco-systems!

Michael Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”.

Boards and leadership of firms come quickly to the realization that everything is easy until people get in the way.

Telling people that change is good, threatening them with job loss if they do not change or creating communication materials and slogans to goad them into a cult like devotion to the new dear leader or the way forward rarely works in the short run and will likely fail after the threat of flagellation fades.

Because if there is nothing in it for them, people will out-wit, out-wait, out-pretend, and out-maneuver “management”. Until then they will fill the time genuflecting and bowing and going through the monitored motions of attending the right meetings, muttering the motivational mantras and stating the slogans required.

The keys to implementing strategy.

If a strategy is to be leveraged in ways that transform an organization, it is key to remember that the only true transformation happens is when the mindsets and behaviors of the people working for the firm transform.

If you want your organization or team to grow and change you will need to ask your team to initiate a) a three-question exercise while leadership b) delivers three clear answers to employees.

The Three Question Exercise every team should consider doing so they can both understand, get aligned with and contribute to strategy.

1) How do you expect our customers/consumers/members needs and expectations to change in the future?

2) What are our key strengths and weaknesses in meeting and aligning with these shifts?

3) If we had no constraints except, we had to ensure that what we did was legal, that it was technologically possible and financially broke even in 3 years or less what products and services would we design?

This exercise makes people look up from their day to day and understand risks and opportunities and helps them realize the need for doing things differently. As importantly it gets them to contribute and activate the strategy in their areas of competence and expertise.

The Three Clear Answers management needs to deliver to company staff in order for them to align with and implement the strategy:

1) Why are the recommended changes good for their personal career growth?

2) What are the monetary or other incentives to change?

3) When and where will training be provided to help them learn the new skills needed?

Change does not happen because of M&A, press releases, re-organizations or a new leader, all of which undoubtedly play a role.

An organization changes and grows when the people in the organization change and grow.

ben damiano 3/7/21 ben damiano 3/7/21

The Turd on the Table

Most successful companies and individuals defeat themselves.

This comes from some combination of hubris, incestuous thinking and improperly aligned incentives.

Intel was so deluded by its success around Windows computing and 86 architecture that they missed mobile computing and were late to the needs of Cloud computing. It has been superseded by Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor and AMD. And yet another CEO has come and gone.

Wells Fargo was so crazed and incentivized to drive revenue by opening new accounts that they started accounts for dead people and established multiple accounts for customers who did not need them. Billions of dollars of fines and 4 CEO changes in less than 6 years is a result of this besotted behavior.

Soon a trail of emails will show that Boeing for years was aware of the software problems with the 737Max but a zeal to ship, a disconnected or badly informed Board of Directors, and miscommunication deeply damaged this world class firm.

Massive growth leading to a dilution of talent and difficulties in maintaining standards, a lust for lucre combined with deep divides between values of senior partners and a new generation of purpose driven talent as well as wedge between US and European and Asian leadership has badly impacted the reputation of McKinsey as one scandal after another engulfs the firm. Economist magazine rightly identifies the issue as one where the partners may be suffering from collective self-delusion!

All these world class firms with superb talent and brands will most likely recover strongly and remain leaders but many of these problems could have been avoided or lessened if only someone had called out or leaders had paid attention to the turd on the table.

A. What is the turd on the table?

It is something that is brown and moist, and people know it is a piece of poisonous waste, but they pretend it is a brownie. They are aware of the stink but perfume over the aroma. Here are some flavors of turd:

Mismanagement. For instance, management (particular leaders or leadership teams) is disconnected from reality and refusing to acknowledge the facts—or they’re guilty of bullying, discrimination, or harassment.

These are incredibly touchy issues, since the former means confronting powerful people in denial and the latter means addressing an individual’s unethical or immoral behaviors.

Toxic cultures. Organizations are highly defensive about their cultures, even when they become cult-like and inflexible or fear-driven. Telling a leader that the culture has become poisoned requires courage.

Financial improprieties. Here, the problem may be a company over-inflating revenue, such as Enron, or one that takes short-term measures to goose the numbers, such as Wells Fargo. Confronting these improprieties that have major short-term benefits and may involve illegal or unethical actions is a challenge.

Major industry shifts. A leader may refuse to address big changes in customer behavior, or the competitive landscape, or mammoth technology changes requiring tough decisions (such as Kodak and digital emergence). It’s easier to rationalize or deny shifts than articulate the business-altering trend and the need for rethinking everything.

People problems. The boss or some person with influence is acting like a jerk, or is playing favorites, or is blind to internal or external developments. In many ways, this is the biggest turd on the table, in that it requires confronting a powerful individual about his or her issues.

B. Why is it hard to call out the turd on the table?

Being punished. You’ve heard the phrase “Don’t kill the messenger”? In many cultures, people who bring up messy, problematic subjects tend to draw the ire of others in the room. If it can’t be dealt with logically and analytically—if it causes people to feel upset, embarrassed, or confused—then raising these issues creates consternation. And sometimes it creates condemnation.

People are afraid of being punished—verbally reprimanded or worse—for talking about difficult subjects. For instance, they don’t want to address how the CEO intimidates everyone or how the CIO’s tendency to play favorites is lowering morale.

Being wrong. In a data-driven world, people like accuracy and correct decisions. The reasoning goes, if you follow the data, you’ll get it right. Of course, that’s not always true. In these cultures, employees are often plagued by self-doubt:

Am I reading the situation correctly? Is there a subject flaw in my thinking? Have I analyzed the situation incorrectly? Self-doubt is a highly effective censor.

Being asked to do more work. Or, as they warn you in some stores, “If you break it, you buy it.” People fear that if they raise problems or difficult issues, they will be asked to deal with them.

Being Disliked. Truth tellers aren’t popular in companies, especially when they’re telling hard truths. Most employees want to be liked by their colleagues and bosses. Articulating troubling issues will get them branded as troublemakers. This is especially true if they don’t have facts and figures to back up their insights and opinions.

C. Why do talented people miss the turd?

Narrow Obsessive Focus. When you’re viewing the data constantly and thinking about it endlessly, you’re viewing the turd through distorting, rose-colored glasses. We have all worked with managers like this, people who are insulated by all their software and systems and benchmark developments in a formulaic manner—i.e., they always compare their performance with traditional competitors or use other established measures. As a result, they miss untraditional competitors or unmeasured innovations. They see only what their screens show them. Thus, they fail to raise problematic issues because they can’t see them clearly. At first the music industry did not see—and then did not understand—the impact of the iPod and iTunes on wresting away control of the industry; what did a technology company understand about music? GM and Ford focused on each other and VW and Toyota and not Uber and Tesla till these “outsider” companies eclipsed them.

Accepting Data Without Questions. We take refuge in the data, believing it to be holy. We accept whatever the machine spits out and forget to ask how the data was collected and compiled, or what biases were in the algorithm.

Even if our instincts are prompting us to call a turd a turd, we don’t because the data says it’s actually a brownie. Today many marketers celebrate how well their online campaigns are doing and how they wish to allocate more money to these programs, despite limited overall gain and often a decline in their total business. It is like a patient who is getting sicker and sicker but believes the vital signs on the monitor, which seem to be glowing healthily. Could it be that they are not measuring the right thing, or the measurement is wrong?

Myth Making and Hero Cultures. Magical thinking prevents people from stating unpleasant truths because many companies cultures’ have religious fervor, and one does not want to be ex-communicated!

In many companies, cultural success myths are powerful, and they often relate to formulas or other numerical concepts that helped the company achieve success. Obviously, there’s validity in these cultural stories, but at times the stories become sacrosanct and that’s when they become a problem (e.g., it’s heresy to speak against the company ethos or its leaders and founders). Data-centric or founder worshipping companies that have been highly successful are especially vulnerable to drinking the Kool-Aid, since people who work in these companies often have fierce beliefs in their technology or their heritage, and they have trouble violating these sacred beliefs.

D. How to encourage the calling out of the turd if you are part of leadership.

1. Anonymous tip lines or suggestion boxes. This is like training wheels for turd table talk. Yes, it’s old-fashioned, and employees may be skeptical at first about whether their suggestions will be read or acted upon, but it provides a starting point for people to voice their truths. Some companies use up and down voting of questions to address key issues at All Hands Meetings.

2. Leadership modeling of truth talking. This is a simple but effective way to integrate truth-telling into the culture. At the end of every important meeting, meeting leaders should ask the following two questions:

(a) Is there something that has not been said that should have been said?

(b) Can someone please say why what we discussed or agreed on today might be wrong?

The Navy SEALs have a practice that after every operation, they have a debrief where everybody leaves their titles at the door. It does not matter if you are a newbie or a commander; everyone is asked to talk about what they and everybody else in the team could have done better.

3. Truth-telling incentives. Nothing aligns values and behaviors like incentives. Rewarding rather than punishing people who challenge the status quo with financial benefits, promotions, and verbal approval sends a powerful message. If you want people to take risks and challenge the status quo, you need to reward such people and such behavior.

4. Admitting wrong. Bosses hate to say, “I made a mistake,” or “That was a dumb decision.” When bosses admit they were wrong, especially when they do so with humor and vulnerability, they convey it’s okay to admit mistakes and point out what didn’t work. Sometimes the turd on the table is a bad leadership choice, and when the leader points it out, it signals to others that it’s okay not only to admit mistakes but to note when bosses do something wrong. Every CEO has overcome significant boo-boos.

They survived and thrived because they realized they were wrong and rectified their mistakes.

5. Storytelling. Dramatize the positives of identifying the turd on the table. Bring in outside speakers who can lay out scenarios in which organizations benefited when people started telling the truth.

6. External middle and senior level hires. One way to ensure new mindsets and thinking is to ensure that a certain percentage of talent is hired externally including from outside the industry or the country the company is strong in. These new folks can bring not only new skills but often question the status quo.

E. Becoming a Turd Slayer!

Do not fear 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”

a) Say what you think. In business we care what is between your ears. If you cannot say what you think (hey if it is 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 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 must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind

So, let’s 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”.

ben damiano 2/28/21 ben damiano 2/28/21

Scale!

Illustration by Yukai Du — Illustration by Yukai Du

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.

Challenges to Legacy Scale

Over the past decade however the benefits of scale have diminished and in some cases are proving to be 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. Clearly distribution matters but there are ways to route around the big stores by going direct and creating demand that forces buyers to stock your product.
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. Platforms like Facebook enable millions of small businesses with personalization and targeting capabilities to discover customers and be discovered. As content supported by advertising declines to less than a third from nearly two thirds ( hello Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime) scale of spending while still being important is losing its potency.
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 the post Covid world as we move to unbundled workplaces there will be far more ways to build teams both globally and in real time than every before.

Legacy scale still matters in most industries and is critical in quite a few like semi-conductors. In fabricating advanced chips, a new fabrication plant can cost over 4 billion dollars and there is no way around scale. Today TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) dominates due to its scale.

However while we can never underestimate legacy scale, there are new forms of scale that every smart company recognizes and is expanding into.

The Rise of New Scale

While there is a diminishment of legacy scale , 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. Data enables a new form of scale which is that of mass personalization.
Scale of Networks: On the Internet network effects play a dominant role in creating winners. Dominant platforms such as Facebook, Netflix, and Tencent (WeChat) 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. People are seen as authentic and certain folks like Elon Musk can move markets.
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 when married with great talent a company enjoy major scale effects.

A vivid example of how the new scale works is Kylie Cosmetics. Kylie cosmetics was launched by Kylie Jenner to sell lipstick. In less than two years Kylie Cosmetics sold 900 million dollars of product making the 21-year-old the fast billionaire ever. Kylie cosmetics had less than 50 full time employees, outsourced manufacturing to Seed Beauty a contract manufacture and all e-commerce and fulfillment to Shopify. The single media channel besides PR that Kylie Cosmetics used was Kylie Jenner’s Instagram account with 120 million followers+ (more than the ratings of the top 10 prime time television shows combined)

This era of New Scale began to emerge in 2007 when 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 which has further expanded via enabling technologies from Square to Stripe to Paypal to Etsy among many others.

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 when new approaches and mindsets were needed. Procter soon built and learned these skills but it did result in an 8 billion dollar write down for the Gillette acquisition.

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.

So now they are aggressively buying the new companies as much for their expertise and talent as for the revenue and brands they have spawned. Coty spent over a billion dollars for half of Kylie cosmetics. Now new and legacy scale merge.

But many companies that enjoy legacy scale and now incorporate data and network scale sometimes forget one other scalable element: Talent and the influence and ideas they beget.

Scaling Talent and Ideas.

Today we are living in a world where the best companies realize that a key differentiator is talent.

Google pays its best engineers 5X to 10X its good engineers because they can be 100X more productive. While the returns to talent in non-software businesses may not be as radical there is no doubt that one superior player is worth some multiple of an okay player.

But how many companies are set up for this reality that talent is the key differentiator?

Great talent offered the scale of networks and scale of data can and will impact outcomes and returns disproportionately.

Fixating on the silicon and spread sheet side of the equation (digital data and networks, measurable input costs) without also emphasizing the carbon and story side (human talent, creativity, culture) is unlikely to lead to optimal outcomes.

In today’s world most companies care about two things:

a) How to grow or re-ignite growth.

b) How to cut costs and expenses to remain competitive.

World class talent cares about two things :

a) How to grow their income, their skill set and their reputations.

b) The purpose, values, and culture of the place they work at and the people they work with.

The challenge for many companies is how to reduce costs (talent being a key cost) while ensuring they have world class people in a world where capital is plenty and talent scarce.

One way is to make sure to recognize the difference between arrows and archers.

Buying cheap arrows is one thing but buying cheap archers is another. A great archer will hit the bullseye with one or two arrows in very little time. An okay archer may need dozens of arrows and could waste a lot of time. Great archers cost more but use fewer arrows to hit the target. Cheap archers blow through a lot of arrows and can hit you in the butt!

Talent should not be weighed or bought by the pound or by some algorithmic driven FTE rate.

Where silicon (technology) can replace carbon(humans) it should, and it will in most cases.

But do not believe that all talent is substitutable with technology or some other talent. In today’s world technology allows leverage and therefore amazing network and scale effects can result from world class human capital.

There is a difference between a rump steak from a diseased cow and a few ounces of fine Kobe beef which buying by the pound cannot differentiate! (Apologies to the vegetarians…think ordinary mushrooms vs truffles)

Scaling Yourself

You are talent.

We are all gig workers with some of us having longer and better paid gigs as the work place becomes unbundled, companies work to manage variable cost (labor), half-lives of skills shorten and measurement increasingly become real time.

To thrive you need to play the scale game.

Here are some suggestions on how to scale your talent:

a) Plan your career over a long-time scale (most college graduates will work for fifty years till 70) and therefore work to remain relevant and reputable in the long run. (If you are 50 you have 20 years of work ahead of you and 3 to 4 significant shifts in the workspace so stop thinking “I will be retired soon and not have to deal with this new nonsense”

b). Scale up your skill set by setting aside to learn, investing in education and raising your hand to new opportunities and assignments. Change sucks but irrelevance is even worse.

c) Scale your reputation recognizing that truth will out and so do the right thing, be generous, do not take short cuts and only burn bridges that allow poisonous snakes to cross. Today you can only use PR and playing games to polish a rotten apple for a year or two before the rotten core thrusts through for all to see!

d) Scale through other people by helping, teaching and encouraging people. Nothing is as scalable as a unified team or people that believe in an idea. People are networks as much as any technology-based network. And when people you work with or you have helped grow you scale in ways you yourself would never have scaled alone.

In the end scale happens when you think beyond yourself, beyond your existing mindset and beyond the boundaries of your category!