Following Process vs. Doing What's Right

Image by laverrue via Flickr

It seems counter-intuitive to contrast the idea of "following process" with "doing the right thing". After all, process is established in order to make sure a team of people does the right thing. So how come we end up having to choose?

(Note: This post is about start-ups vs. older companies and a little about project management/getting things done. The dilemma definitely applies to both. )

On one end of the spectrum are start-ups...
At this level, there's little process, but everyone on the team is fueled by the idea of doing the right thing. And it works. The catch? It doesn't scale. Adding more people without having any sort of process only increases chaos instead of relieving those who are burned out. It's the same concept with managing a small team. You'll get things done without process, but not in a pleasant way, and certainly not very efficiently.

At the other end of the spectrum are large, mainly bureaucratic companies.
I think the downfall of many bureaucratic organizations is that process is meant to get a few (typical) things accomplished. As soon as the rules switch or the input varies outside the foreseen parameters, the process doesn't work. It's like writing a computer program that expects the user to enter positive integers. When a user happens to enter a negative number or a fraction, the program will try to run, but it'll either break or spew out nonsense.

I haven't stumbled upon any golden nuggets here. All I know is that getting to a step where teams follow a process is hard work. Getting a team to then stray from the process in order to do the right thing in edge situations is even harder work, of a different kind.

Build Your Own Yardstick

Image by h.koppdelaney via Flickr

I don't know why, but it seems to me that the biggest wisdom you could ever find in business is to stay grounded. As for me, I have a very good friend in Slovakia who acts as a very solid filter for me when I get carried away. It's also interesting to see his reactions to my marketing experience from an engineer/developer/highly pragmatic person point of view. For example, I was explaining some business situation the other day and saying something along the lines of "it's my fault, i should have done X or Y". His reply? "you're in marketing, shouldn't you be blaming it on someone else?"

I find it painful to see how many misconceptions people have of marketing. On the other hand though, it really doesn't matter. I aim to produce results for our sales team and for the business at large, so it defeats the purpose to worry about misconceptions. I will keep doing what I do best, bringing projects to life, making good things happen. I firmly believe in making your own yardstick instead of trying to measure up to something other people imagine.

I also believe that my own yardstick is pretty tall. So if I can reach it, I'm sure other people will be happy too. It doesn't matter how many reference frames you have, some truths are absolute. Especially when those truths are measurable.

Integrated Marketing - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Image by Pensiero via Flickr

Integrated marketing isn't just a hot concept, it is the holy grail of marketing in many ways. And in reality, it's what makes the most common sense - you should want one story, one message - weaved across multiple media. The message is the message is the message (for once).

These days, I see the challenges of integrated marketing efforts play out every day at work, but on a micro level, in my company's small marketing team. I've been doing a lot of thinking on what would make integrated marketing campaigns run smoothly at every scale, so these are some of the ideas I came up with. If anyone has particular learnings they found useful, please chime in :)

1. Integrated marketing isn't powered by magic (or good will)

Pretty basic, but still needs to be said in order to frame the conversation: no one should expect integrated marketing to happen naturally, as part of a normal team process, regardless of how high-functioning that team is. Things can be done that way, painfully, but it's not how you get the best, most efficient results. If you have a team of 3+ people, the integration itself needs to be managed as a process/project.

2. Start designing the integration workflow/process by designing the experience you want your audience to have.

If you want integrated marketing, start thinking about how your users/audience will be entering it from different points and make sure that this experience you're building reflects your brand, not just the individual pieces (the banner ad, the coupon at the store, etc.).

3. QA a lot. When you're done, QA some more.

It's not just about QA-ing each individual deliverable/piece, but QA-ing the integration as a whole. On a lot of the projects I've been a part of throughout my agency experience, the QA time always got scrunched very badly if things went wrong early on. It's very important to keep this task as sacred. Make it a show-stopper if you don't have a minimum amount of time to do this step right.

4. Actively seek out partners/team members who can both implement, but are bought into integrated marketing at a visceral level.

It has to be in your agency's blood to create something that's part of a bigger, better experience, especially if they are highly specialized in a small area of marketing. The sincere and true partnership can be challenging to achieve in the agency world where every organization also has very selfish reasons for working on projects, but it should be more than do-able at the micro level. Hiring people who are just worried about the tasks on their plate and don't question how their work will impact co-workers/the business, is a quick way to hinder success.

I've been trying to come up with an example of a great integrated marketing campaign success story. Can anyone think of any, other the Obama campaign or anything Apple does?

Note: Just read this somewhat related article on Harvard Business Review. The Three Cs of Simplicity.

Agents of Change

Artwork from DannyDraws.

If you're not producing, inspiring, helping spur change, then what are you doing?

I had a brief conversation with my friend from Romania last week. Among other things, she confided in me that she was shocked at how people in her office put in their 9 to 5 every day, taking their sweet time to fulfill their tasks or not, while she does things fast, efficiently, and tries to feel some sense of accomplishment/pride in everything she does. She couldn't understand how her co-workers lived so many hours of their days like that. Granted, this was her first real job in the real world, outside of academia (which may explain the stark contrast), but it made me realize that her discovery wasn't shocking me as much.

I think the average person tends to have a job/jobs, with the goal of making enough income to live comfortably. It's very rare that the job performed is something one feels passionate about or has much intellectual connection with, outside of the paycheck. Fewer people still take personal responsibility or show initiative in a context of something that is ultimately produced by a team, or even for the product of their own work, whether it's part of a larger project or stands on its own.

And it's probably this cultural, social reality that makes it hard for companies to foster innovation, or foster change in any shape or form. In any average corporation, there are a handful of agents of change, and huge number of people who oppose the disturbance of the status quo - for fear of losing the jobs, for fear of needing to learn a new process, for fear of the unknown, etc.

You can have endless innovation groups and spark change every now and then, but sustained innovation is only achieved through teams that are highly motivated and passionate about what they do. It starts with the lowest man on the totem pole and it goes all the way up to managers & company leaders. Any decent manager out there can get a team to produce to a deadline and a budget. However, it takes a true leader to inspire a wide variety of individuals into action/into making things happen.

Portland Clouds

I had some fun with post-processing old images this weekend and this is one of the outcomes, it's actually the view from a conference room at work.

I can't wait for my night digital photography class at the Oregon College of Arts & Crafts. :) There's lots to learn!

From Hood to Coast

Van 1, EthicsPoint EOTR team (from left to right): Bill Piwonka, Brett Arnold, Rodica, Tom McNamara, David Barker, Tom O'Keefe.

I spent my birthday in a fairly unorthodox way this year - I ran the Nike Hood to Coast relay challenge (H2C) with my co-workers at EthicsPoint. I think I learned a lot more than I can put into words right now, but let me see if I can briefly summarize:

1. A little bit of pain never hurt anyone. I realize exactly how silly that sentence sounds to a native English speaker, and yet...there is an amazing bonding experience that stems from having a group of people experience the same hardship together, conquering their limits together. There was a lot of fun in our van, but through it all, it was a great life lesson to go through it all with the team.

2. True leaders inspire people around them to try new things, to test their limits. Bill, our director of marketing, wasn't even training when he was recruited to replace an injured team mate...the day before H2C. Mac, our Sales VP, who wasn't much of a runner before, had been training very hard for this event and actually accomplished sub 10 min miles throughout the relay (without ever walking!). Tom, our EVP, almost reached the speeds of David Barker's, our star athlete from IT, who had been training for his 2nd H2C event this year. Brett, recently promoted in our Sales department, powered through the race with a fever, after being sick the entire week. And the stories go on. We're all passionate about our work every day, often at the expense of our own health, so seeing people pull through their physical limits, stepping up, and shining at this event was incredibly motivating.


Tom giving Mac a fist bump!


Tom and David synchronizing their Garmins (no, not really, but it sure looks that way :) )

3. We have a rockstar CEO. After two days of little to no sleep and some 197 miles, our CEO greeted both our EP running teams at the finish line and nursed us all back to life with an awesome home-cooked meal and a special selection of wine. I think gestures like these is what earns David the respect of everyone in the company. People look up to him both as a person and as a leader because they realize that he is genuine when he says he cares and supports the EP team in these activities. I'll have to start a David Childers fan club :)

My hat's off to all the runners who survived this year's Hood to Coast! I'll definitely be back next year :)

Can't Learn How to Be a Maverick

Image by davemc500hats via Flickr

There are a lot of things in life you can learn: you can learn how to read faster, how to be better at a particular task, how to drink coffee and walk at the same time (I still have to champion this one), etc., but I'm pretty sure that you CANNOT learn how to be a maverick: you either are or you aren't.

I'd love to be proven differently :)

During my recent trainings for Hood to Coast, I kept trying to find audio pieces that can occupy my mind during the longer runs. I stumbled upon Tim Ferriss' "The 4 Hour Work Week" audiobook. I actually agree with some of the ways of looking at work (productivity/efficiency vs. just clocking time in, and so on), but his idea that his type of lateral thinking about life is something people can learn to do themselves and can easily be applied by anyone is a bit ridiculous to me.

Story time: During my junior year of college, I took a higher level neurobiology course. A similar class was taught at the medical school quite successfully (by the same professor) and it turns out that undergrads really liked it too. The class was based on small student sessions with a professor who guided the conversation/investigation into the molecular underpinnings of a patient's problems. There were no lectures, the professor merely asked questions and students were supposed to use their knowledge/research to connect the dots. At the end of each case, we'd write a one page paper, formulating a clear hypothesis and backing it up. It sounds simple enough, but the key ingredient was the right coaching/guidance that we received from that professor.

I was later hired as teaching assistant for the medical school - they were trying to replicate the success they had with that class by copying the model and substituting other people for coaches. I don't have any hard numbers on how the experiment turned out, but I've seen the group interactions develop with the sessions not led by my professor and they never reached the depth his session acquired. Human interactions are, in many ways, like chemical reactions - people exhibit different parts of their personalities based on the catalyst/other people around them.

Western culture has this idea that anyone and anything is replaceable; that you can copy and paste people, actions, processes. For the most part, maybe you can indeed copy things, but there's a reason why people in positions like project/product management end up being great regardless where they go. Every once in a while, individuals are sometimes the secret to their own success. Much like good leaders, these people can motivate/excite everyone on a team, the super motivated and those who don't care/don't want to work that hard.

Going back to Tim Ferriss, I can see how people admire the concept of being a maverick. However, we can't all be mavericks, we simply aren't made up that way. You either have the rebellious spirit or you don't. You either see the lateral solutions to a puzzle or you don't. Even if you can learn tricks and tips for dealing with work, you can't teach someone how to "maverick their way out of life". For those who already see the world differently/have an inclination to taking the unbeaten path, the book can be a fun eye-opener. But I doubt that many of the average folk who read this book had the courage to venture into life the way he did - I think most people would think that his way just implies infinitely more energy & work :)

Yes, I'll bet 5 dollars on this.

You're in the Business of Dealing with People

Click the image to see larger detail. Image by Cappellmeister via Flickr

I had a spark of revelation this weekend: It doesn't matter what industry you're in, you're in the business of dealing with people.


It's almost an amusing concept: take interpersonal relations, things most humans aren't very good at, and try to make a profit from having graceful professional interactions...all under some of the most stressful conditions one can imagine...

And yet, this is what business boils down to. It's a seesaw of sorts: on one hand you have to keep your employees happy, motivated, etc. and on the other hand, you have to make sure your customers are happy (and that you keep acquiring new ones). Throw in some hard deadlines, people's livelihood, long nights, and you have an environment most psychologists would love to access for their stress-related experiments. :)

In my limited experience, there are 3 key things that make this whole concept of "business" work:

1. Self-Motivating Individuals
Without doubt, these people are the easiest to be around. They have boundless energy and don't get bogged-down easily. I'm not talking about the perpetually happy folks necessarily, I'm talking about those who are focused and don't take a lot of hand-holding to find their direction.

2. Humane Managers, Great Mentors
or People don't work for companies, they work for people.
When you don't have enough from Column 1 above, your next best bet is to hire great managers, people who can relate to the folks they manage and who have a keen eye for developing talent in-house. Even when the company can't reward individual milestones, managers who know how to make the team's efforts feel genuinely valued are worth their weight in gold.

3. Awesome Culture
Culture isn't the nebulous thing we tend to picture when we say the word. It's a simple equation of trust and fun: how much trust do you have in your team, your management, and how much fun do you have doing (supposedly) what you do best. Bonus: a good dose of humor never hurts :)

Fine, maybe it's ~4 key things, because this one needs to be spelled out:
4*. Leverage People's Strengths
or Don't waste time making a square peg fit in a round hole.
This is a corollary to #2, having great managers - have the right people doing the right task. There's a reason why you want a creative director interacting with clients and not a graphic designer. There's also a very good reason why you wouldn't put just any engineer in a meeting with stakeholders/clients. Leveraging people for the right skill and giving them an opportunity to shine at it makes the team better, and in return, makes the company stronger. If you keep asking people to fill in the shoes of a job they're not good at, they will never be set up to succeed. Lots of precious resources will be lost trying to make a square peg fit through a round hole.

Good Animation, By Any Other Name...

Push (Mini Project 4) from Lainy Voom on Vimeo.

The above is a very cool machinima from Lainy Voom. The artistic treatment is so good I could hardly tell it was filmed in Second Life.

It makes me think...maybe with the exception of the rare comedy machinima, this technique is particularly suitable for artsy/metaphysical/abstract type of storytelling.

Communicating Passion

Marketing is about communicating passion
This is probably particularly true & subjective for the things each person finds interesting/appealing. Much like art. As a result, when you really love a product and marketing falls short of your ideal, the result is a very jarring experience. It doesn't always mean that you should market for that audience, but that's definitely the most faithful group. They should not be disappointed.

(Sidenote) The fact that marketing is about communicating passion is also the reason why I think smaller agencies tend to do a better job sometimes than larger ones - they have a more personal touch & get a different sense for the brand and the people they associate with a particular client. So be nice to your agencies. :) You need to inspire them because they are in charge of crafting your message.

Recent case in point: the Ducati Streetfighter bike.

As I was researching the bike, hoping to buy it sometime next year, I stumbled on the Streetfighter website. I liked the wallpapers and the little 360 demo, but I couldn't believe the ridiculous low production quality of the video (also embedded above). For those who are fans of BBC's Top Gear, you'll know that part of the reason that show has tremendous appeal (other than the characters who present it) is the amazingly high production quality of their episodes. Whoever those producers and art directors are, they GET IT. They are filming art and their know how to show passion for those cars. In turn, their footage gets people like me excited about cars they will never afford to drive. :)

Nonetheless, when I clicked the play button on the Ducati video, I was expecting Top Gear quality, Top Gear art treatment. I wanted to see the bike through an artist's eyes. Instead, I got a fumbling attempt at artsy, with no passion and no understanding of what this product means to the ones who would be tempted to watch the video.

Now, compare that with the photography (wallpaper section).



The photographer gets it - he/she shoots the bike in angles that show its beautiful design, the passion that went into creating this piece. It's either against a black background, shrouded in mystery, or complementing some architectural element. The design lines uncovered in these photos are why I'm fascinated by the Streetfighter.

Give the marketing job to someone who lives and dreams your product. Anyone else just doesn't cut it.
All I can conclude from looking at Ducati's site is that the photographer was not involved in the making of the movie. I can also tell that the movie director/producer has no personal attachment to the Ducati brand or to bikes in general. As a fan, I'm annoyed. I'd much rather not have seen that video, it interrupted my dream enough to make me angry. So what is Ducati thinking? Don't they know? You don't need to have a social media youtube component if that component alienates your potential customers.

Now, will that video dissuade me from buying? Probably not. But I'll think twice about sending that link to my friends when I talk about the bike I'll buy in a bit. I'll likely send them to the wallpaper section.