Q: You went about promoting this book in a different way, by bypassing the one hundred or so people in the media “who matter” as you said, and offered the book to the first 3,000 people who donated thirty dollars to the Acumen Fund, a non-profit that uses an entrepreneurial approach to solving global poverty. By doing this, I feel like you redefined the reviewing process. What prompted this strategic social marketing plan, and would you do it again?
A: Well, the second half is: In an instant, I would do it again.
Q: And you raised $108,000 in 48 hours?
A: That was pretty cool.
Q: That’s amazing.
A: I didn’t redefine the reviewing process. It had already been redefined. What happened was, over the last five years, it started with Zagat’s restaurant guide, and then working our way into [/column] [column]blogs and now into Twitter and Facebook, we have given a megaphone to millions of people; and that megaphone is getting used more and more, which is why mainstream media is falling apart. The people who used to be important reviewers have either lost their jobs or become less important in terms of their influence on the market. When they like a movie, it doesn’t matter as much; when they like a book, it doesn’t matter as much. What matters is what influential people in the community think about it.
And what I felt we had the opportunity to do was spend the time and resources we might have spent chasing after the few remaining professional reviewers and instead embrace and respect the amateur reviewers out there by giving them a review copy. And the results have been really heartwarming and exciting. We’ve had very generous feedback from literally thousands of people already, almost 100 blog posts filled with reviews. It had the desired effect. [/column]
A: Well, you know, they’re pretty good at ignoring people like me, which is just fine. So the answer is no; I think that the people who do that for a living are secure enough to believe that one author abandoning them is not really going to have an impact. I think what they’re going to discover, though, is that it will tip at some point soon, where if I am a movie studio, I am way more likely now to do a multi-city preview tour for the biggest fans of the genre than I am to do a junket to Cannes to talk to a dozen movie reviewers.
Q: Have you heard of anyone who is sort of following in your footsteps, specifically going the donation to a non-profit route or something along those lines?
A: I’ll give you one example that doesn’t have to do with a non-profit. The people at Ford are giving cars to bloggers and other [/column] [column]influencers for months at a time, and in exchange, all they’re asking the person to do is tell the truth about what they thought of it. That’s really different than waiting in line for Automobile magazine to write about you.
You know, the charity thing is tricky. Lots of big companies pretend to be supporting charities. They’ll say “a portion of the proceeds go to this,” or they’ll pay to put a logo on things, but I think people are pretty smart about what’s genuine and what’s not. They don’t really think that Hostess Twinkies cares about this charity or that charity.
What I was able to do, I think partly because I have been transparent about my desires and pretty public about my support is the fact that I was getting nothing out of it, made it really a gift, that I was saying to my readers, “Don’t even give the money to me, and I’ll give it to charity. Give it straight to charity. I don’t touch it. And that book I’m sending you, it’s at my expense. I’m not taking part of the money to pay for sending you the book.”
Going all the way to 100 percent, I think, is important when you’re working with a non-profit because, otherwise, people are going to sniff out that maybe you’re not supporting it as much as you seem. [/column]
A: I’ve been pitching journalists since I got my first marketing job in 1984, and the idea that journalists are this privileged class that cannot be influenced by extraneous factors is completely bogus.
I learned the hard way that the right PR firm gets you written up, and the wrong one doesn’t. Being in the right place at the right time, with the right junket or story, gets you far more attention. All you have to do is open the pages of national newspapers and discover they’re all writing about the same thing. Well, that’s not an accident.
There’s 175,000 books published in America every year; why do the same few get reviewed over and over again? Well, it’s because of who published them and how they’re promoted. So, if we’re believing that journalists are somehow this magic Fourth Estate, I think we’re naïve. [/column] [column]
“If you want a job where it’s okay to follow the rules, don’t be surprised if you get a job where following the rules is all you get to do.”
Q: So let’s talk a little bit about the book. In Linchpin, you argue that there used to be two teams in the workforce—management and labor—and now we’re seeing a third team emerge, the linchpins. To quote a passage from your book, “These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rulebook. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it and turn each day into a kind of art. They’re the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous, but they’re indispensable.”
And throughout the book you challenge readers to stop complying with the system we’ve had in place for hundreds of years—going to work, putting your head down, following the rules—and instead you’d like them to draw their own map. [/column]
A: Well, I’ve met a lot of CMOs, and I can tell you that they fall into two categories. One category is a cog in the machinery of Marketing. They take a good job and get paid a fair amount of money to do two things: one, to take the product that the factory, the system, has produced, and two, take the money from the CEO and spend it to advertise and spam the world about the product. When I talk to those people, they say, “I’m just doing my job, and I’m doing my best.”
There’s a second kind of CMO who understands that the entire company is in the Marketing business, who starts taking the posture that engineering and product development works for them and sees that the idea is to build an asset, not to yell at people. [/column] [column]These people are more artful about what they do and, understandably, take more responsibility for it because they are bringing a different self to work.
You asked me for two or three tips on how to get there. The first one is: Accept that there is no map; accept that if I told you what to do, it wouldn’t work because then I would have been the one doing it, not you; accept that artists don’t have a paint-by-numbers set. Artists figure out the way the world is and then work to change it to the way they want it to be. That’s not trivial to do. It takes practice and work, but it’s important; and that’s what we’re getting hired to do. That’s number one.
Number two is to establish a system where you can fail often. Good ideas come after you come up with bad ideas, and if you’re not willing to have bad ideas, you’re never going to have any good ideas.
And number three is do it on purpose. That this is an intentional act; it’s not something that happens accidentally. It’s something that you set out to do, and so many people who have positions of influence or authority are afraid to do it. [/column]
Q: On the flip side, if everyone took your advice, and we had a zillion linchpins now running around, how would the workforce be different?
A: Well, if everyone drove a Prius, and everyone switched to solar power, we wouldn’t have a global warming problem either. But I’m not going to hold my breath that that’s going to happen. Rather than wondering what would happen if everyone does this, we need to take a look right now and say, “What happens if I do this? What happens if I go first and lean into it and lead and connect and change the world around me?”
Well, what happens is your competition suffers; what happens is your day gets better; what happens is you attract better talent; what happens is your profits go up; what happens is you get more of what you were seeking. [/column] [column]And it seems to me that all those things are worth it, and if it turns out that everyone starts catching up, we can cross that bridge later.
Q: On page 29, you say: “If you want a job where it’s okay to follow the rules, don’t be surprised if you get a job where following the rules is all you get to do. If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing. But if you want a job where you take intellectual risks all day long, don’t be surprised if your insights get you promoted.”
This passage jumped out at me because, this weekend, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest _New Yorker_ essay on entrepreneurs, which basically illustrates that many of the most successful business people in the world aren’t really risk takers at all. Did you happen to read it?
A: I did.
Q: So I can’t help but feel a little bit schizophrenic after reading your book and then reading Malcolm’s essay. Play it safe and end up a replaceable cog in the machine, or play it safe and end up super successful. Do you have any insight? [/column]
If we look at the history of successful entrepreneurs, they do take bets, but these are not significant financial bets. However, and there’s a giant however here, Ted Turner made a bigger bet than a money bet. Ted Turner made a reputation bet, and what he did was bet the reputation of his family; he bet his reputation as someone who did things that worked by doing something that seemed insane to his partners – buying a nearly bankrupt TV station. I will argue that’s a bigger risk than betting all his money. You can always get more money, but restoring your reputation, at least at that point in his life, would have been tricky. And entrepreneurs take risks like that all the time.
If I look at something like Wednesday’s launch of the new tablet from Apple, what kind of risk is that? Well, Apple has more than [/column] [column]a billion dollars in cash in the bank. It is not a financial risk that will hurt them if it fails, but it is an artistic risk. It’s a professional risk, and that’s the sort of risk that people need to take.
The quote you read is one of my favorites from the book because people work hard to make their resume look like everybody else’s resume. They submit it to a company that’s like every other company that’s recruiting at the placement office. They get a job at an office that’s just like every other office building and walk in and say to the boss, “What should I do now?”
Well, then why is it that you’re surprised that the company doesn’t want you to do original and artistic work? This is what you signed up for. You took a job at a place that rewards you for being a cog. That was your first mistake.
“If you don’t ship, people don’t see your work, and then you fail.”
Q: You talk a lot about art in this book, and one thing you say is that art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter; the intent does. An example you give is saying that [/column]
A: Well, if I look at the typical company, the ones that lie the first time you talk to them because the recording says, “Your call is very important to us.” If my call is really important to you, then why aren’t you answering the damn phone? Um, no, those people aren’t doing art because they’re not getting rewarded to do so. In fact, they’re punished if they do. They’re timed on how long they spend on the phone, and they’re rewarded for churning through lots of calls. The CMO of that company is making a huge mistake because they are viewing interactions with customers as a cost, not a profit center. On the other hand, there are companies that I have dealt with where they answer the phone on the first ring; and you get to talk to an actual human being who wants to help you, and that human being understands that in that moment they are the most important person in the whole company. Rather than being at the bottom of the pyramid, the person that is only getting paid nine dollars [/column] [column]an hour, they are the top of the pyramid, the most important one. And the minute you start treating your people that way, they’re more likely to act that way.
Q: I wanted to jump over to the resume example you mentioned earlier because it’s one of my personal favorites. You mentioned that we’ve been trained to avoid mistakes since first grade. And you use the resume as an example, saying you read someone’s resume and discover twenty years of extraordinary experience but one typo. Which one will you mention first? What will you mention first, the typo or the experience?
I empathize with this example, having submitted a resume to Time, Inc. back in 2001 with a big fat typo on it and the hiring manager gave me three calls back to give me a chance and I’ll never forget it. And today, when I’m hiring and looking at resumes, I often find myself focusing on someone else’s typo, then thinking back to Time, Inc. and try to let it slide.
But as an HR director—or even a manager—how do you instill a culture of “art,” where it’s okay to make mistakes, while also emphasizing how important it is to get the job done right?[/column]
People are glad to trade typos for inspiration.
Q: Imagination, where I work, is a deadline-driven environment that also has to be free-flowing to allow for creativity and client’s unexpected needs. My coworker and I sometimes joke that we are handling curveballs all day long, which keeps it exciting and unexpected but doesn’t allow for sitting around and wallowing. In the chapter about resistance, you talk about “shipping,” and how [/column] [column]shipping, i.e. getting things done, can literally mean hitting the publish button, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone. It’s getting something out the door without fear or creating a sense of emergency around it. In other words stop with the excuses, stop looking for perfection, and just execute. But I am wondering if you think certain generations or types of people are better shippers than others?
A: Well, the cool thing about Saturday Night Live, the TV show that has been on for 25 years, is not that it is on on Saturday night but the fact that it’s live and that no one ever sits down at 11:30 and watches the screen go black. It always ships. It’s always done. It might not be perfect, but it’s always done. Shipping is what artists do. If you don’t ship, people don’t see your work, and then you fail.
I haven’t seen any generational difference between whether someone ships or not; what I’ve seen are temperament differences. What I’ve seen is a willingness to challenge the resistance and say, “The most important thing I’m going to do today is hit the publish button; and if you can’t do that, you can’t work here.” And good for your organization that you’ve developed this [/column]
Q: You say successful people are successful because they think about failure differently. They are able to put those mistakes out there and learn from them.
In your opinion, which companies or brands are thinking about or have thought about failure differently—and succeeded because of it?
A: That’s a tricky one because as soon as you pick an organization, then they’re cursed, and they fall apart. When I look at what Howard Schultz has done in the last two years at Starbucks, he took over an organization that never failed—one that was totally by the book, that was about to become obsolete—and transformed it into one where [/column] [column]they are launching new concepts, falling again in love with the thing they make and doing work because they want to, not because they have to. And they just finished a really positive quarter because they’ve turned it around in that way.
There are countless other examples I could give you where, whether it’s the CEO or it’s a midlevel, you’ll find brand managers or CEOs who say, “You know what? We’re just going to skip launching a product this quarter because it’s just not good enough, and instead we’re going to make something truly great.”
Look at the fashion industry. People who are able to succeed year after year at places like Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani do it because they understand that fashions come and go but the process of launching is the business they’re in.
“[Marketers] take an ad or a gimmick or a promotion and say, “Let’s make this thing go viral.” The thing is, you don’t get to make it go viral; the market does.”
[/column]
A: I think it’s going to spiral. I think it’s going to get bigger and bigger and more and more powerful because once one competitor starts doing it, and it works, then the other ones have no choice but to turn around and do it; so you have this increasing rush to do this kind of work. My hope is that the generations coming up will be able to unlearn all the nonsense we taught them in school and stop obsessing about doing what they’re told and start instead on doing work that matters.
Q: You blog every day, I believe…
A: Yes, if I can. Sometimes I have to break down and do it twice a day, but never less than once. [/column] [column]
Q: What is your routine for doing that? How do you stay disciplined? Do you just find something to say even if you don’t necessarily know what it will be when you sit down?
A: Well, the first thing I need to say is that looking at other artists’ technique is not a useful way to find your technique because the way each person deals with the resistance is different; so I am hesitant to answer your question, but I will tell you that there is nobody you know who has trouble speaking every day. We wake up in the morning, and we talk. We talk, talk, talk until we go to sleep at night. I write like I talk, so the goal is not to write something interesting every day, but to say something interesting every day; and if I say something interesting every day, I write it down. And I think most people are capable of doing that.
Q: The structure of this book is one like a reader is sitting at a roundtable with five of you and one of them, and they’re getting fired at from all of these really great directions. And I find myself, at every page, highlighting something and thinking about something and I don’t really have time to dwell on that because I’ve got to move on to something else. [/column]
A: I have no choice but to write the way I write, but I will tell you, when I meet people and ask them what they remember from the textbooks that they read in school, very few people have fond memories of textbooks. Textbooks are written in the most organized possible way, the most structured possible way, and they don’t touch us; they don’t resonate with us, and we don’t remember them.
On the other hand, if you ask someone about novels or movies or cartoons or a non-fiction books that changed them, that had an impact on them, they’re almost always things where it isn’t clearly linear, where it isn’t clearly laid out. The act of making the connections in our own head is where the learning comes in. So, what I’m trying to do is, if you’re kind enough to open up your mind and let me in there with my words which you’re reading with your own voice in your own head, I think my job is to use every trick [/column] [column]I can think of to insert ideas under the skin to get them to stick.
And I know one thing for sure, which is if I did it in a linear, A to Z, organized fashion, it wouldn’t work because you would see what I was trying to do, and you would defend against it. Instead, I’m bobbing and weaving, a little like Muhammad Ali, doing whatever I can to get in.
Q: In your latest e-book, What Matters Now, you asked several people like Arianna Huffington and Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, exactly that, to expound what matters to them. Did you have a favorite submission?
A: You know what happened for me with that book is, as I was editing it, putting it together, I was reading lots of them quickly, and I discovered that it was the sum total of these many insights that made a difference for me, not one that I would print out and put on the wall. That’s why I released it the way I did. Now, it didn’t cost anything; anyone who wants to read it for free can read it for free. You can read the whole thing in 25 minutes. But the sense is that when you’re done, you won’t remember who wrote what, but you will remember the way it made you feel to read it. [/column]
A: I’m assuming we’re talking about marketing, not the flu. I think it’s misused by big-time marketers who are still selfish. They take an ad or a gimmick or a promotion and say, “Let’s make this thing go viral.” The thing is, you don’t get to make it go viral; the market does. And the market cares about the market, not about you. So, the best viral stuff is genuine, authentic and transparent, and the worst are manipulations that are seeded in just the right way to trick a portion of the audience into thinking they’re something else. I wish they wouldn’t call that stuff viral because it’s not; it’s manipulation. But there’s not doubt in my mind that this … The difference between viral and word of mouth is that word of mouth fades; viral grows. This viral trend is just starting, and it’s not going away; and it’s going to elect presidents and decide the future of businesses and a lot of things in between because the mass of it is so powerful.
Q: Yeah, there’s nothing more annoying than the words “Let’s try to make this go viral.” What did you not expect to happen in the digital world over the last decade that has?
Have you personally experienced any pleasant surprises? [/column] [column]
A: That’s a good one. You know, I’m no expert. In 1995, I said the Internet was a joke, and it was never going to do very well and it was like prodigy but free and slow; so I’ve made a lot of really bad judgment calls about the future of the Internet. What I can say is I really expected that anonymity was going to completely drown out personality, and I expected that corporate was going to completely drown out individuality. I am very pleased to discover that I was wrong about both of those things.
Q: What are your thoughts on how agencies can position themselves in today’s market. It used to be easy as a corporation, you used to have your PR agency and your ad agency of record, etc. But now, as the marketplace shifts, we’re seeing overlap, competition and agencies vying for core capabilities in places where they can’t compete. How do you think this will shape up in the future?
A: OK, so there’s good news, and there’s bad news. The bad news is that if your job is to make a commission on spamming people—spamming them with TV ads, spamming them with junk mail, spamming them with anything—you are fighting a losing battle. [/column]
Q: One final question, who do you admire the most right now in terms of innovation and creative thinking?
A: Well, you, for sure, because these questions were terrific and showed a lot of insight and willingness to think about the world in a new way. [/column] [column]
And I guess I would say 80 million bloggers, people who are on Twitter doing things that aren’t standard, people who are starting things or fixing broken things. I’m seeing this not in a world where I could list five or ten or twelve people who are sort of interesting and should come to a conference, but one where five or ten or twelve million people who, each in their own way, are doing the kind of stuff that would have been inconceivable five years ago.
Q: Thanks for your time, Seth. _Linchpin_ comes out January 26; it was a very insightful book, I hope everyone will give it a read.
A: Thanks for your time. [/column]