Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q4-24Q2
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or corporate speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast - and I will be raising my prices at the end of the year.
More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
As previously mentioned, I will be attending WPP Stream in Athens, Greece, in October. If you are also going, do say hi.
James and I were recently invited onto the Sleeping Barber podcast. The episode is now available via Spotify.
My available speaking dates are nearing zero, but I still have a few slots open in late Q4 and early Q2. If you want to book me, now is the time.
World wide webinars v2
Last week, I asked whether you preferred your webinars in the morning or evening. Well, the votes are in, and a clear majority of you wanted the AM slot CET. This means that the upcoming sessions featuring yours truly and Steve McCrone will be taking place between 9am-10am CET. If you want to attend but cannot, please tell us. If there are enough people to justify second webinars in the evening, we may yet host them. But you must let us know.
Our first session will take place in early October, during which we will reveal the name of our new book, discuss its setup, and introduce a number of controversial findings. More information will follow.
Moving on.
Shared understandings of success
A continuation on last week’s topic
To recap our previous conversation, every firm has to have a reason for existing. Without one, no company may exist (be it for legal or otherwise practical reasons).
If it sounds entirely basic, it is because, well, it is. In fact, it is so basic that we rarely give it much thought. This presents a potential issue; if we do not know why a company exists, merely that it does, our cognitive capabilities are wired in such a way as to make up the rest through a process known as conceptual blending. And what we come up with will be a first fit pattern match, not a best fit pattern match. That is to say, we will interpret the business through a lens of our most recent (other) experiences.
In fairness, that is always how we make sense of the world, but our filling in of the proverbial blanks can be more or less educated. To illustrate, whenever you read an article, column, or LinkedIn post, written by an outsider arguing that Company A did Thing B because of Reason C (typically because of Positioning D), you can safely assume that it is shoddy guesswork at best. Few actually take the time to study the action taken in detail. Fewer still have access to the crucial pieces of information that enabled it in the first place. There are exceptions, of course, but the baseline is ankle level.
I digress.
The point I am trying to make is that the farther we get from the company aspiration - its shared understanding of success - in either physical, temporal, or metaphorical terms, the more we have to fill in ourselves, and the fuzzier the strategy becomes. Our understanding of success becomes individual; we lose track of the why of movement.
So how does one define an aspiration that lasts? Well, unfortunately, I will not be able to tell you in detail here and now. The reason, as I am sure you have guessed already, is that it will be in the book. Aspirations also need to be qualified by later letters in the framework. Any example that I provide consequently runs the risk of appearing significantly fluffier than it would actually be in practical application.
Having said that, I shall give it a try.
There are two questions that you will want to start with:
Why, in pragmatic terms, are we in business?
Why would anyone care?
To paraphrase Steve, the answers should collectively provide you with a statement that is amorphous enough that it does not overly constrain what you may do, but clear enough to inform a direction of travel. It should also be ambitious enough to inspire action.
Take, for instance, Starbucks. Last week, we highlighted how their “inspire and nurture the human spirit” made sense to neither man nor beast. But to make things even worse, the line they used before it was actually rather good: “Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world”. No matter where in the organization you sat, it directed your work. Any decisions that you made could also be measured against it.
Do note that measuring against the aspiration is not the same thing as creating explicit, time-bound goals. If required for practical reasons (such as shareholder demands), one can certainly set some, but the crucial factor is whether we are moving in the right direction at the right pace. That can be tracked through vectors, i.e., compound measurements. In fact, one of the main benefits of a strong aspiration is precisely that it does not require a time frame; the addition of one limits potential.
Further, it is important to emphasize that a shared understanding of success is not the same thing as a shared definition of success. Definitions can be shared but still misunderstood; people may know the words but not what they mean. A less obvious example of an aspiration is thus the following quote by Satoru Iwata, the late former CEO of Nintendo:
Unless we can win people over, improving products so much that people pick them up and smile, we’ve failed. It’s not enough to make a big splash and move units. Unless you can...make customers say “Wow, before I knew it, I was playing all the time,” you’re done.
This is not an explicit definition, nor a success statement in the form that it would take in ABCDE, but it provides an aspiration nonetheless. The key phrase is “before I knew it, I was playing all the time”. Just as Starbucks’ line made sense to everyone there, all Nintendo employees, whether they worked in software, hardware or elsewhere, knew precisely what it meant and how their work contributed towards it.
(For an in-depth analysis of Nintendo’s approach, I highly recommend Doug Garnett’s upcoming book, soon to be available in fine bookstores everywhere. I have been fortunate to get an early look and, to be blunt, it is fucking brilliant.)
Crucially, however, the first step is but a first step. Aspirations are not synonymous with strategy even at their best - though one occasionally sees the argument made - simply for the reason that they do not provide any instruction.
While one needs to be very careful not to limit what one can do under the assumption that it is possible to know what will be needed in the future, there will always be boundaries to what is strategically permissible (not least due to the fact that resources are finite). In ABCDE, these are provided by the letter B.
But more on that next week.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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