Brands and Black LIves Matter Examples

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19d2SDI4yEbkSyPnFqHNwcc7TAb_4PaVEza3FprS_2Nk/preview?fbclid=IwAR0m_wjdoPKRYQXtqJljgZ7AKEdN9o4icpb7h3gLCKhv-W8qzAyi0c2LduU&pru=AAABcqndpA8*88E9UyvH9sXUlHZO8nSrGg&slide=id.g80a9e497ed_0_94

Book Content - Creativity Inc.

THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE



Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding—and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you. The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.

• When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.

• Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.

• If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.

• It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.

• There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.

• Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.

• Further, if there is fear in an organization, there is a reason for it—our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and (c) to try to root it out.

• There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.

• In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self-assessment that seek to uncover what’s real.

• If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

• Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.

• Careful “messaging” to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.

• The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.

• Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.

• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

• Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

• Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

• Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.

• The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line.

• The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.

• Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.

• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

• Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.

• Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.

• Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.

• An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

• The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose.

• Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.

• New crises are not always lamentable—they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present.

• Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

• Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.

• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

• Brad has told me that he thinks of directing the way he thinks about skiing. In either pursuit, he says, if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes. There are moments, as a director, where there is so much work to do and so little time to do it that he can’t help but feel fear. But he also knows that if he lingers too long in that frightened place, he will freak out. “So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t. As in, ‘Okay, I’m going to proceed as if I have time—I’m going to sit back and muse rather than looking at the clock—because if I sit back and muse, I’m more likely to solve the problem.’ ” This is where directing is a lot like skiing. “I like to go fast,” Brad says, before launching into a story about a trip he took to Vail when, “in the course of a week, I cracked the lens of my goggles four times. Four times I had to go to the ski store and say, ‘I need a new piece of plastic,’ because I had shattered it crashing into something. And at some point, I realized that I was crashing because I was trying so hard not to crash. So I relaxed and told myself, ‘It’s going to be scary when I make the turns really fast, but I’m going to push that mountain away and enjoy it.’ When I adopted this positive attitude, I stopped crashing. In some ways, it’s probably like an Olympic athlete who’s spent years training for one moment when they can’t make a mistake. If they start thinking too much about that, they’ll be unable to do what they know how to do.”
• Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone”—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west—its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination—the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them

• As John often says, “Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.” 

Culture

• In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.
• While the idea of balance always sounds good, it doesn’t capture the dynamic nature of what it means to actually achieve balance. Our mental image of balance is somewhat distorted because we tend to equate it with stillness—the calm repose of a yogi balancing on one leg, a state without apparent motion. To my mind, the more accurate examples of balance come from sports, such as when a basketball player spins around a defender, a running back bursts through the line of scrimmage, or a surfer catches a wave. All of these are extremely dynamic responses to rapidly changing environments. In the context of animation, directors have told me that they see their engagement when making a film as extremely active. “It seems like it’s good psychologically to expect these movies to be troublesome,” Byron Howard, one of our directors at Disney, told me. “It’s like someone saying, ‘Here, take care of this tiger, but watch your butt, they’re tricky.’ I feel like my butt is safer when I 

Problems

• While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle, underlying issues elsewhere in the story. Think of it like a patient complaining of knee pain that stems from his fallen arches. If you operated on the knee, it wouldn’t just fail to alleviate the pain, it could easily compound it. To alleviate the pain, you have to identify and deal with the root of the problem. The Braintrust’s notes, then, are intended to bring the true causes of problems to the surface—not to demand a specific remedy.

Toyotal - Leadership

It would be decades before Deming’s ideas took hold here. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1980s when a few companies in Silicon Valley, such as Hewlett Packard and Apple, began to incorporate them. But Deming’s work would make a huge impression on me and help frame my approach to managing Pixar going forward. While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled—initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment—I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.

Digital Media Still Isn’t Very Good at Connecting People

We can’t relate to people online in a way that the brain recognizes as real
Douglas Rushkoff



Safer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

As neuroscientists have now established, human beings require input from organic, three-dimensional space in order to establish trusting relationships or maintain peace of mind. We remember things better when we can relate them to their physical locations, such as when we study from a book instead of a digital file.

The human nervous system calibrates itself over time based on the input we receive from the real world. A baby learns how to fall asleep by lying next to its mother and mirroring her nervous system. An anxious person gets calm after a walk in the woods. We come to trust another person by looking into their eyes and establishing rapport. We feel connected to a group when we breathe in unison.

Digital is just not good enough to fool the brain and body into these same states. Sure, it’s close. Digital recordings have no “noise floor” — meaning no background hiss at all. But that’s not the same as organic fidelity. A record album was an object in itself. We may have heard the clicks and scratches of an LP, but that allowed the brain and body to calibrate itself to the event occurring in the room — the vinyl record being played. The playback of a digital recording is less a real-world event than the projection of a symbolic event — a mathematical one — into the air. We have no reference for this.

Nor do we have an organic reference for a cellphone call or video conversation. We may look into the eyes of our conversation partner on a screen, but we can’t see if their pupils are getting larger or smaller. Perhaps we can just make out their breathing rate and subconsciously pace ourselves to establish rapport — but it doesn’t quite work. We’re not getting much more information than we do from text, even though we’re seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice. This confuses us.

All the methods technologists use to increase the apparent fidelity of these exchanges are, themselves, fake — more noise than signal. The MP3 algorithm used for compressing music files, to take just one example, is not designed to represent the music accurately; it’s designed to fool the brain into believing it is hearing music accurately. It creates some of the sensations we associate with bass or treble without using up valuable bandwidth to re-create the actual sounds. Through earbuds, the simulation is convincing. When played through stereo speakers, the missing information becomes apparent — less to the ears than to the whole body, which is expecting to absorb vibrations consistent with the music tones being simulated. But they’re just not there. When we communicate through algorithmic compression, we are seeing what looks like a clearer image, or listening to what sounds like a more accurate voice — when they are anything but.

Audio engineers who care about fidelity try to restore it in other ways. The most common tactic to establish a wider dynamic range is to slow things down. One person says something, and the computer records it and stores it in a buffer before sending it to the receiver. The digital transmissions are paused for a fraction of a second so that the computer can catch up and put it all together. But that means you hear something a perceptible moment after I’ve said it. This addition of “latency” necessarily changes the timing of a conversation, making it impossible to establish a normal or reassuring rhythm of responses.

Human beings rely on the organic world to maintain our prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Online relationships are to real ones like internet pornography is to making love. The artificial experience not only pales in comparison to the organic one, but degrades our understanding of human connection. Our relationships become about metrics, judgments, and power — the likes and follows of a digital economy, not the resonance and cohesion of a social ecology.

All those painstakingly evolved mechanisms for social connection — for playing as a team — fail in the digital environment. But because mediated exchanges are new on the evolutionary timescale, we don’t have a way to understand what is going on. We know that the communication is false, but we don’t have a species experience of inaccurate, lifeless, or delayed media transmissions through which to comprehend the loss of organic signal.

Instead of blaming the medium, we blame the other party. We read the situation as a social failure, and become distrustful of the person instead of the platform. Team Human breaks down.

This is section 35 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here.

Brand Strategy - Links

• https://marketingland.com/building-a-brand-strategy-essentials-for-long-term-success-240712
• https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31739/7-components-that-comprise-a-comprehensive-brand-strategy.aspx

Leadership

Two big challenges characterize leadership today. One is the need to juggle a growing series of paradoxical demands (do more with less; cut costs but innovate; think globally, act locally). The other is the unprecedented pace of “disruptive change,” which speeds up the interaction of these demands and simultaneously increases the pressure on organizations to adapt.

These challenges have significantly amplified the need for versatile leaders who have the ability to cope with a variety of changes and the wherewithal to resolve competing priorities. It is not an overstatement to say that versatility is the most important component of leading effectively today. Versatile leaders have more engaged employees and higher performing teams. Their business units are more adaptable and innovative. Their organizations are more capable of gaining a competitive advantage because they know how to disrupt before being disrupted.

For almost 25 years, my colleagues and I have worked to help leaders improve their versatility, and we have found the above to be true in a range of industries across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Throughout our work, we have coached hundreds of senior executives and systematically studied their development, as well as assessed more than 30,000 upper-level managers in mostly large, global corporations as varied as Google, The Walt Disney Company, Allianz, Schneider Electric, and more.

Our practice and research have helped us create a framework that defines what versatility is and how it can be developed.

What Is Versatility?

In short, versatility is the capacity to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary skills and behaviors. Leaders are typically better at reading change than they are at responding to it, largely because developing a broad range of behaviors requires a systematic effort that often pushes them out of their comfort zones.

To help leaders understand how to expand their behavioral repertoire, we devised a practical modelthat synthesizes the work on leadership behavior from the last 100 years of research in both psychology and management. Because of the paradoxical demands versatile leaders face, our model emphasizes opposing but complementary behaviors: It makes the distinction between, on the one hand, how you lead (in terms of interpersonal behaviors for influencing and interacting with other people) and, on the other hand, what you lead (in terms of the organizational issues you focus them on).

Think yin and yang, where both types of behaviors are good and necessary, and each is completed by the other.

Complementary Skills Versatile Leaders Have

	How you lead		What you lead
	Forceful	Enabling	Strategic	Operational
Behavior	Asserting personal and position power	Involving others and bringing out their best	Positioning the organization for long-term success	Focusing the organization on implementation
Attributes	Take charge, decisive, demanding	Empowering, participative, supportive	Direction, growth, innovation	Execution, focus, process discipline
Source: Kaiser, R. B. (2019). Leadership Versatility Index report interpretation: A user’s guide to version 5. Greensboro, NC: Kaiser Leadership Solutions.				© HBR.org

“How you lead” makes the distinction between forceful and enabling leadership. Forceful leadership is about asserting personal and positional power. Enabling leadership is about involving others and bringing out their best. Both include specific pairs of behaviors: taking charge versus empowering, being decisive versus being participative, and being demanding versus being supportive.

Similarly, “what you lead” makes the distinction between strategic and operational leadership. Strategic leadership is about positioning the organization to be competitive in the long run. Operational leadership is about implementation and getting things done. Both also include specific pairs of behaviors: setting direction versus driving execution, growing the business versus focusing resources, and introducing innovation versus providing order and stability.

The first step toward helping leaders develop versatility is assessing their current ability to use an effective mix of the above behaviors. In our work, we use a 360 feedback instrument that asks coworkers (and the leaders themselves) to rate their use of forceful, enabling, strategic, and operational behaviors using a unique scale ranging from “too little” to the “right amount” to “too much.” This approach shows leaders which behaviors they need to emphasize more and which behaviors they need to emphasize less.

Our research quantifies what we often see in our coaching practice: Only a small number of leaders (fewer than one in 10) have fully mastered the range of skills in our practical model. Most tend to have a bias. They favor leading in ways that are based on their strengths — the behaviors and skills they have comfortably developed, or perhaps even overdeveloped, because they come most naturally to them. In fact, we find that leaders are five times more likely to use behaviors related to their strengths when other behaviors would be more effective. As a result, their strengths become their weakness. (As the saying goes, the bigger your hammer, the more every problem looks like a nail.)

The goal for most leaders, then, is to develop the ability to consider opposing needs and avoid maximizing one at the expense of the other simply because their current skill set makes them more attuned to it. While diving deep into the details of execution on a project, for example, can the leader also keep one eye on the big picture? Or while involving the team in a decision, can the leader also synthesize their input and make the call? It’s a tall order. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

How Do You Develop Versatility?

If versatility is central to effective leadership but is also rare, how can managers become more versatile leaders? Over the years, extensive work and research — not just by us but also many leadership experts — have demonstrated three broad strategies.

The first is learning from a variety of different and challenging work experiences that can broaden their perspective, promote a wider range of skills, and provide a network of colleagues with different expertise and points of view. Versatile leaders tend to have more diverse career paths and work experiences than others, as well as the learning agility to absorb lessons and incorporate them in their leadership tool kits. We encourage managers to compare their current skills and experiences to those needed in jobs they aspire to and seek out roles that can stretch them. For instance, being a part of the strategic planning process — even as “gopher” or notetaker — can provide exposure to new skills that are practiced less in tactical jobs. Seeking commercial experience in different businesses is also a great way to prepare yourself for enterprise leadership.

The second is ongoing feedback and development. It’s crucial to get input about the impact and effectiveness of your behavior. Versatile leaders not only respond well to change, they also change their behavior in response to constructive criticism. With everything in constant flux it’s helpful to hear from coworkers about what adjustments you can make to strike a better balance. A simple way to get this feedback is to ask respected colleagues the questions recommended by the late Peter Drucker: “What should I stop, start, and continue doing to be more effective?” A more involved, and systematic, approach would be to complete a personality or strengths assessment, and follow up with others by asking, “How do you see me using these specific strengths? Do I ever tend to overdo them?”

The third strategy for developing versatility is personal development: becoming a more well-rounded person. This involves being aware and open to opposing skills and behaviors and not being blinded by your strengths. Versatile leaders show a pattern of stepping beyond the familiar and comfortable, often intentionally, to stretch themselves. Their less versatile counterparts, on the other hand, often have a rigid and narrow view of themselves as a particular type of person, and think opposing perspectives and behaviors should be avoided rather than experimented with and learned from. The challenge is again paradoxical: Can you maintain a strong, coherent sense of self while also allowing for the possibility of becoming an expanded and more capable version of yourself? One useful strategy is to periodically invite colleagues with skills and perspectives different from your own out to coffee or lunch. With an open mind, try to see things from their point of view and understand their ways of thinking. You might even ask what they are reading, how they learn, and sprinkle some of those examples into your regular routine.

Related to this third strategy, there is a great debate presently raging, not just among leadership professionals but also among sports coaches, teachers, and parents who want to prepare athletes, students, and children for an increasingly uncertain future. On the one hand, there are those who recommend maximizing strengths, which leads to people becoming narrow specialists. On the other hand, there are those who recommend trying a variety of things, which leads to people becoming broad generalists. David Epstein’s book, Range, provides an excellent analysis of this debate.

Our program of research and practice squares with Epstein’s conclusion: The wider a leader’s lens on the world, the larger their repertoire of skills, abilities, and behavior, and the broader they are as a person, the more likely they are to lead their people, teams, and organizations to success in a rapidly-changing world.

The two most important charts in marketing

The two most important charts in marketing—and why they’re more important than ever

FEBRUARY 27, 2020 BY CONTRIBUTOR
—A continued emphasis on activation at the expense of brand-building is endangering brand health, says MARK TOMBLIN—

There are two charts that every marketing and communications professional needs to know and take to heart. For me, they really are the north stars of our business.

The first was first published in 2013’s The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field’s game-changing book based on the renowned IPA Databank. This chart is remarkable because it gets as close as I have ever seen to summing up the essence of the entire marketing project in one slide.


It shows that the two main marketing mechanisms—brand building (red line) and sales activation (yellow line)—work in very different ways, and that this difference has profound implications for brands and the people who manage them.

Brand building is about developing emotionally compelling messaging that, over time, creates an increasingly resonant and consistent set of unconscious meanings for the brand among potential buyers.

This means it is more likely to come to mind in buying situations. For all of you planning nerds out there, this effect relies on our innate “System 1” fast-thinking mode, made famous by Nobel laureate and behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman. As he put it, “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort” using the many pathways in the brain that enable our unconscious mental processes.

Activation, on the other hand, is about rational, consciously processed messaging (typically offer-based), focused on current customers. This kind of communication engages Kahneman’s “System 2” slow-thinking “effortful” mode, and demands attention. It also creates little or no emotional resonance in the mind of potential buyers.

The crucial point is that, just as System 1 and 2 are in our brains, this is not an either/or proposition: successful brands need both types of activity to thrive. The issue is achieving the right balance between the two. Getting that balance right is a crucial (possibly the crucial) part of brand management when it comes to communications.

Which brings us to the second most important chart in marketing and communications.


This chart shows that, in the vast majority of cases, brands striving for long-term success should be spending well more than half of their budgets on brand-building activity—and in some cases a far greater proportion than that.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests this simply isn’t happening. Indeed, Binet & Field’s latest work shows that overall campaign effectiveness is declining both in terms of scale (effectiveness) and rate of return (efficiency).

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that we are simply not spending enough on paid-for communications—a subject for a future piece. The other is that we are concentrating more and more on the short-term “sugar high” of activation whilst ignoring the need to invest in the longer-term future of the brands we steward. Simply put, we are getting the balance wrong—and not just a little.

In my view, there are a number of factors behind this increasing and unhelpful obsession with activation. First, I think that we are increasingly confusing the nature of our media choices. Media channels best suited to activation (I’m looking at you, Facebook) are being sold hard as capable of building brands. The evidence for this claim is, to say the least, tenuous. After all, if Facebook is such a great brand-building tool, why does it—alongside other members of the digital “Big Four”—now spend so much on TV?

Second, too many agencies have learned to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Years of being yelled at by clients to develop “digital/social first” ideas mean that they often start creative projects with a built-in bias towards activation, whether they know it or not.

Third, the frankly shameless re-branding of dull old DM as “performance marketing” has led to the assumption that brands can now be built this way, despite the lack of any real evidence that this is possible.

What is clear is that this is simply not sustainable. If we continue on this path, within five years—and 10 at most—the brands we profess to care so much about will be but hollow simulacra of the brands we know today.

As 2020 starts to unfold, we should all ask ourselves—whether client or agency side—are we planning to spend enough this year on the kind of activities that will make a real difference to the long-term health of the brand? If the honest answer is “No,” what are we going to do about it?

Mark Tomblin is the founder of Thinking Unstuck.