Thoughtful leadership and marketing

How to develop "swagger" in your organization.

Leading an ad agency for 30-plus years you have multiple opportunities to demonstrate to other businesses what you can do for them.  It is a challenging life, as you must demonstrate in less than an hour how you can add value. 

If they like you and the value you bring to the party, you are hired.  If you don't click that day, you lose.  Big money is often at stake.  Win an account that spends $500,000 to $1,000,000 a year, keep them for seven years, and you are talking some serious money.

 

Just before the team was about to enter the presentation "arena" I would invariably ask them, "How much are these guys spending with us now?"  I of course knew the answer was zero.  Newer members of the team, who hadn't heard my routine, occasionally looked at me like "Geez, this guy is leading us into the battle and he's babbling incoherently."  Then I explained that my question was to illustrate we had nothing to lose, as we were surviving just fine, thank you, without them.

 

It was my way of trying to bring some confidence and swagger to our side of the playing field, which needed some confidence and swagger because it wasn't like "we" were interviewing five breweries to see which brewery we were going to bless with our marketing wisdom.  It never worked that way.  Generally they were interviewing 5 to 10 agencies to determine the chosen one.

 

My message was that we could lose and life will go on pretty much like it is now.  I had a dear friend who was fond of saying, "An agency is the only job in the world where you can be fired and come to work the next day."

 

Why does swagger matter?  Because people like to do business with confident people.  Surround yourself with confident people and you will become more confident.  Believe that you can accomplish something great and your chances of success increase dramatically.

 

And how does a great leader develop long-term swagger in his or her organization?  By celebrating your failures as a positive step in the learning process and telling similar company stories where your greatest successes almost always followed your biggest failures.  It eliminates fear and emboldens your team to think big and take action.

 

I refined my confidence and swagger as a younger, single man.  I observed, through diligent and frequent testing, that women were attracted to confident men and generally ran from anyone who resembled a drooling, hungry dog, even if it were true on that particular day (or year) in your life.  I maintain it is the same in the business world.  Walk and talk like you've got the world by the cojones and sure enough you will.  It's oftentimes about swagger.

How to beat office politics

One of my biggest annoyances is internal office politics. 

My number one goal as a leader is:  "To create a friendly, supportive, relaxed, comfortable, laughter-filled environment, where people aren't afraid to take risks and make mistakes, and office politics are as absent as it can be in a human enterprise."

Office politics are a complete waste of valuable time of both the leader and the troops.  It is most often disruptive and hurtful to what you are attempting to accomplish.  Office politics causes you to take your eye off of the leadership ball and focus on some petty disturbance that is usually being caused by small minded people.  Harsh, but true.

Fortunately, there is a way to beat most forms of office politics and the cure is relatively painless.  At the root of office politics is information.  One group has it, or most often pretends to have it, and they hold this information over those who don't have it.  Thus, the best way to beat office politics is for the leader to release all information, just as soon as absolutely possible, to everyone in the company. 

E-mail has made it far easier for the leader to keep office politics at a low level by simply addressing the company on a regular basis, or as decisions happen with special announcements.  But e-mail shouldn't replace face to face communication.

Increased communication is the enemy of office politics.  If rumors are circulating about cutbacks or layoffs, or software changes, there are those who will spread these stories by positioning themselves as the keepers of inside information.  And you can literally cut their legs off by keeping the lines of communication open and the information flowing.

Employees can sense when change is in the air.  Attempting to keep impending changes a secret is counter productive. Raise the level of communication and watch office politics drop, perhaps even disappear.

The Top 10 close-minded thoughts I'm glad I didn't say

1. “The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued to a screen:  the average American family hasn’t time for it. 

 --New York Times, 1939

2. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”

--Editor of the San Francisco Examiner, rejecting Rudyard Kipling, 1889

3. “With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.”

--Business Week, Aug 2, 1968

4. “A period novel!  About the Civil War!  Who needs the Civil War now—who cares?”

            --Herbert Mayes, editor of the Pictorial Review, rejecting the prepublication offer to serialize Gone With the Wind

5. “I am strongly opposed to Charles going on this Beagle voyage.  He is moving away from the Church, drifting irretrievably into a life of sport and idleness.”

--Robert Darwin, on his son Charles

6. “You’d better learn secretarial work or else get married.”

--Director of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, to Marilyn Monroe, 1944

7. “Ours had been the first, and will doubtless be the last, to visit this profitless locality.”

--Lt. Joseph Ives, in an official report, on the Grand Canyon, 1861

8. “The singer will have to go.”

            --Eric Easton, new manager of the Rolling Stones, commenting on Mick Jagger in 1963

9. “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45.”

--Mick Jagger

10. “We don’t like their sound.  Groups of guitars are on the way out.”

--Dick Rowe, a manager at Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles, 1962. (When Rowe later told George Harrison that he’d gotten his ass kicked for “turning you lot down,” Harrison suggested he sign the Rolling Stones – whom Rowe had never heard of – and he did.)

My favorites are the last two as both men realized their mistakes, learned from their failures, and shamelessly went on to make a lot of money.  I also feel a bit guilty about reprinting this now famous tribute to closed mindedness.  As a daydreamer of considerable skill I am aware just how easy it is to place the brain on autopilot and miss the next train leaving the station.  I worry about not being open-minded so I probably over-compensate by listening intently with an accepting and open mind to all things new.  Plus, it’s not bad work if you can get it.

As leaders of companies or people, you’ve got to keep following trends that may impact your workplace or make your company or your job obsolete.  The world is changing rapidly.  Floppy disk makers are toast.  Zip disks are dead.  A certain percentage of people reading this have never heard of a Sony Walkman and I just threw one away the other day. 

Take your mind off the ball for a second and someone will replace you or your company.  It does keep things exciting.  Imagine having a safe and secure job for the rest of your life.  It would be a tad boring.  Keep those minds open. 

Insist that numbers tell a visual story.

In Jim Collins book, How the Mighty Fall, he points out that had Challenger shuttle engineers plotted a "visual" graph of the O ring temperature problem, they might have determined visually that it was too cold to launch on that fateful day in 1987.  Done right, graphs and pie charts should tell an instant visual story, without needing to read or understand the numbers.  I know that sounds difficult to many numbers people, but it can and should be done.

Left brain people are often times so comfortable with the numbers they keep in their head that they see no advantage to look at numbers visually.  In our PowerPoint presentation work, if I see a graph that doesn't immediately tell some kind of visual story, I work with the presenter to change and present the graph in such a way, so that even someone with little or no left brain activity, like me, can know visually at a glance, what story the "numbers person" is attempting to tell.

It is one of those leadership issues that need to be repeated often, as many on the left are weak at understanding the need or reason behind looking at things visually.  And having a leader tell them so will not immediately change years of perception.  

Those on the right often become exasperated and intimidated by complex numbers they can't keep straight in their head, and should work closely with numbers people to present in a more visual story telling approach. Together, using each others strengths, we can tell a great story