When people ask about the kind of consulting work I do, I often describe it as business, brand, and marketing strategy.

These three kinds of strategy are separate but related. Doing any one in isolation produces an inferior result.

Business strategy, without thought about how it comes to life in people’s hearts and minds, tends to be a PowerPoint deck that sits in a drawer.

Marketing strategy that doesn’t accurately synch with the underlying business and brand is like putting lipstick on a pig.

If you’re researching one or more of these disciplines for the first time, you’ll quickly uncover a lot of complex jargon, interesting frameworks, and experts who disagree profoundly about basic terms.

If you’re a typical leader, you don’t want the deep dive or—particularly when it comes to brand strategy—a magic carpet ride. You want definitions you can use… ones that are simple, contemporary and immediately practical.

Here are mine.

Business strategy

Business strategy is essentially about opportunity.

Its language is that of mechanical physics and geography: opportunity spaces, blue oceans, leverage, positioning, power.

It involves seeing what’s not there, and applying physical and financial capital thoughtfully to make it happen.

Good business strategists excel at effectual reasoning. They see the world around them in terms of deeper systems and patterns. Steve Jobs of course is a perfect example.

Brand strategy

Brand strategy is essentially about relationships.

It involves cultivating ideas, aligning group efforts, executing powerfully, and building trust with diverse stakeholders.

It includes internal relationships (“culture”) and external ones (“brand”). As any good VC will tell you, this soft stuff is actually the hard stuff.

The technical term for the soft stuff is human capital, and according to at least one recent study of the S&P 500 it accounts on average for 80% of a business’s value.

That’s a striking finding and worth repeating: human capital—not starting conditions, financial reserves, or technical expertise—accounts for the vast majority of a business’s value.

A strong and intuitive understanding of how to optimize human relationships is vital to any organization’s long-term success.

Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy is essentially about communication.

It includes what an organization says and how it listens. Who it speaks with and where.

Good marketers, like any good strategist, focus on negative space—in this case, on what’s unsaid.

Marketing includes many sub-specialties: inbound marketing, outbound marketing, analytics, general storytelling, communications design, advertising, PR, etc.

But in each permutation it’s always about deliberate and effective communication.

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The framework above is a simple one, but I find it works well for small organizations and youngish ones trying to put a dent in the universe.

I find it particularly helpful for reframing brand strategy, which too often is lumped in with marketing, or dismissed as something mystical and fluffy.

More on that in my next post…

Many people wonder about the trade-offs between coaching in person versus over the phone.

Most assume that in-person sessions are better, but that isn’t necessarily true.

In-person sessions can be uniquely powerful, but as a coach and coachee I’ve been iteratively surprised over the years at how effective phone-based coaching can be.

If you’re looking for a coach, but are skeptical about whether phone-based sessions are right for you, here are some thoughts to consider.

Coaching in person: the pros

As we often hear, over 70% of communication is non-verbal. And the bulk of that is neither fully conscious nor fully visual.

In an in-person session, coaches can demonstrate support, acceptance, and engagement through their physical presence and body language.

They can model deep presence and equanimity.

They can observe the coachee’s body language moment to moment.

Nothing fully replaces the immediacy, the richness of in-person communication. Hence the expression: “I need to speak with you in person.”

Coaching in person feels more real… and gives both the coach and the coachee more data to work with.

Coaching in person: the cons

That said, more isn’t necessarily better, and just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s more effective.

Coaching is designed to transform a person’s mental maps into patterns that are more effectively in line with their goals.

Only the coachee can do this, one insight and one action at a time. The coach can create context, but is as best a guide.

A principle of good coaching is that the coachee does most of the work.

Some coachees will consciously or unconsciously seek the familiarity of in-person communication to push responsibility onto the coach.

This can manifest in many ways, such as extra time spent on pleasantries at the start of sessions, or showing up less than fully present.

Coachees are also often traveling or dealing with work communications up until the very last minute before in-person sessions, and so their brains are abuzz with information. Settling the mind and deeply engaging are then more difficult.

The coach also has challenges to manage to that are unique to in-person sessions.

She will have to invest in travel time and/or the overhead of maintaining a physical office.

She will have to watch more carefully for any tendencies to get caught up in the coachee’s emotional energy or stories.

She will have to manage more artfully taking good notes without breaking eye contact or seeming less than fully attentive.

A good coach is capable of all these things. But these extra efforts cost time, money, and energy.

This is why most coaches charge more for in-person sessions.

Coaching over the phone

Delivering quality coaching over the phone has some constraints, but those constraints create some unexpected positives.

Without visual information and embodied energy, coaches and coachees have less data to process. But there are still millions of pieces of data to attend to every second.

When I’m coaching someone via phone, I find myself paying extra attention to breathing, pauses, and what’s unsaid. The restricted data stream in some ways makes me more focused.

Without my own body language and presence to help communicate, I choose my words with extra care. Coachees frequently do the same, so communication is generally clearer, insights sharper.

For phone-based sessions, coachees must take responsibility for being fully present. They must create systems to eliminate work, environmental, and digital distractions beforehand. As a result, they tend to show up very focused.

Since our shared memory is built entirely out of words, over the course of multiple sessions we’re both more able to notice and examine patterns of language.

For the coach, phone sessions are efficient and convenient to schedule: coaches can be anywhere in the world, so long as they have systems in place to be fully present. Most coaches charge less for phone-based sessions.

Beyond the phone

Some coaches attempt to combine the benefits of in-person and phone coaching through video calls.

I use video calls extensively for consulting work, but personally I’m not yet a fan of them for coaching.

Compared to in-person sessions, I miss the non-visual, embodied energy in the room as a source of information. Compared to audio-only sessions, I miss the restricted data stream and the ability to isolate thoughts and words.

I used to do a fair bit of (non-coaching) work in Second Life, and imagine that virtual environments might become highly effective for coaching. For my business neither the need nor the technology is quite there, but I suspect that will change in the decade ahead.

Though phone coaching has many advantages, one pattern is consistent: the majority of my coaching relationships begin in some way in person.

Seeing and talking with someone in person gives coachees maximum information so they can build comfort and familiarity with a coach’s disposition, style and knowledge.

For this reason, I try to schedule in-person sessions at the start of a coaching series and whenever I am in the same city as my clients.

Once coaching is underway, many of my clients transition to the more flexible benefits offered by over-the-phone sessions, though some still prefer the convenience or challenge (as they experience it) of coaching face-to-face.

As always, I let coachees choose what’s best for them.

One of the questions I’ve been asked most frequently in the past year is whether I think Google+ will put Facebook out of business. Or vice versa.

Either way my answer is no.

Some context: I am an early adopter and daily user of both platforms. I’ve studied their businesses and believe they work very differently. I predict both companies will continue to thrive for a long time.

But there is one distinction I would make.

I think Facebook today, for all its current success and momentum, is in a trickier position than Google.

In the past year, Google has signaled its intentions on multiple fronts, and launched several major initiatives, Google+ included, that are just starting to bear fruit.

One could extrapolate from today’s evidence, even against a backdrop of incredible technology change, what Google’s business model and suite of resilient offerings will likely be in a year or two or three.

But Facebook’s future state is far less clear. After its IPO, what will its next move be?

My admittedly simple assessment is this:

Google today is facing execution risk. Facebook is facing strategy risk.

Everything that rises must leap, and leap again

Here’s what I mean.

The mathematician Geoffrey West has modeled impressively the trap that all successful global enterprises are in: they must continually reinvent their core strategies to avoid endgame.

See in particular his comments at the 14:52 minute mark in the talk below, and the graph entitled “Unbounded Growth Requires Accelerating Cycles of Innovation to Avoid Collapse.”

Hockey stick growth in other words is not just a blessing and an accomplishment: it’s a wake-up call that a reinvention is imminently needed.

My interpretation is that Google in the past year has jumped to a new curve, while Facebook has yet to do so. Facebook’s business will continue to evolve, but I would keep an eye out for a major leap, not ongoing linear advances.

Leading while leaping

Facebook and Google are just examples, of course. Anything written about them instantly becomes dated.

West has identified the real trend, which is that for global enterprises “always-leaping” has become the new norm.

Last year, Ram Charan and Michael Sisk wrote an excellent piece describing how Dow Chemical and other global enterprises had navigated these kinds of daring, bet-the-farm jumps.

What I loved best about the article is how the authors explore in detail the cross-sector conditions that make these leaps necessary, and also how our notions of leadership and culture must adapt to these new circumstances:

“The need to make strategic bets, and be prepared for them, will ultimately change the way many business leaders regard strategy. In addition to their existing concerns — their company’s functional strengths, arrangement of business units, and portfolio — there will now be the presumption of a more dynamic, ambiguous, and difficult business environment. The only way to manage this environment, in a collected and capable manner, is to think in terms of external strategy, to continually cultivate an outside-in view of the company in which strategic bets are not automatically resisted, but are instead dispassionately evaluated.”

For large enterprises, this is the new reality. For some, this new time will be very exciting, for some it will be too much. But there is no real alternative.

Rise of the indies

At least for enterprise.

Startups and SMBs, and new networked collaborations—what Bryce Roberts together calls “indie businesses” —are growing very differently.

Startups can have real exits, and SMBs can have gentler growth curves than what West describes.

Enterprise is still extremely important, given that it drives our economy and creates context for future innovation. But that is changing.

For a great thought piece on this, see Chris Devore’s recent post on the future of work, where in addition to quoting Roberts, he talks about the unique opportunity spaces that are opening for individuals.

So: it’s worth asking yourself regarding your current company direction or personal career path: are you facing execution risk or strategy risk?

And… is it time to take a leap?

I love strategic planning.

When done well, at the right time, it’s useful and clarifying.

When done poorly, or at the wrong time, it’s soul-sucking. Instead of accelerating your business, it can grind it to a halt.

A quick web search will turn up many strategic planning resources, all describing the same elephant. Thankfully there is a general consensus about what a strategic plan is and does.

Some of those readily-available frameworks are quite detailed, and in certain contexts, those details can be valuable. My tools however tend to be simple.

Here is a format and conceptual process for strategic planning that I’ve found works well for businesses of all kinds.

The why

A strategic plan helps an organization optimize its efficiency and impact.

The when

It’s usually created when:

1. You realize your business does not have a strategic plan.
2. You are reaching the end of the previous strategic plan.
3. You must react to major external or internal shifts.
4. You are choosing proactively to grow or change the business.

The what

Here is what a final strategic plan includes, and how the pieces knit together:

It can be shared on a wall, in a Google Doc, or via a sophisticated online dashboard or task management system. It might have deeper details, but the basic template is the same for all organizations, in any situation.

Step 1—Start with Vision

Vision is where most organizations lose the way.

Vision tells everybody internally where you’re headed.

Vision is not a lofty and vague aspiration or a pleasant fantasy about the future.

It is either:

• An ambitious, measurable, time-delimited goal
• A short description of the disruptive innovation you intend to create
• An honest answer to the question: “What do you want?”

If a vision is not articulated, then a secret one is at work. Examples: “Preserve the internal culture at all costs” or “Just get through the year.”

If your vision is primarily about your internal systems, not your external impact, then you have a hobby, not a business.

Step 2—Define Objectives

Choose 4-7 objectives—really, no more—that support your vision, capturing all the major functions of your organization: current services, operations, marketing, culture, experiments, etc.

Make sure each objective is measurable, meaningful, and doable. The time horizon will vary depending on your unique situation.

Then, assign a clear owner for each objective. This usually provokes some epiphanies regarding your organizational structure.

Step 3—Choose Strategies

Identify 1-5 strategies that you will use to accomplish each objective.

Strategies ideally are not simple tasks that can be accomplished in an afternoon. They should be complex initiatives that will last for at least a few months.

Examples: “Hire the agency Walk into Mordor to design and implement our PR campaign,” or “Launch a new app-based version of our proprietary content, targeted at golfers aged 45-65,” or “Overhaul our board and advisory board composition to match our new long-term vision.”

Assign an owner to each strategy. And then:

For each strategy you must define not only how you will know if the strategy was executed but also how you will know if it was successful.

If you skip this very important step, your strategic plan turns into an endless list of to-dos. Some strategies will fail, and those failures will be educational. If all of your strategies are sure to succeed, you are likely being too naive or too conservative about your business growth.

Step 4—Develop the Plan

Identify the key activities and milestones needed to accomplish and assess the strategies. The plan can be to whatever level of detail and in whatever format makes sense for your business. Typically, it’s a Gannt chart.

The how

The shell above is the one I would use and populate for all organizations. Larger organizations will require deeper and more sophisticated content—for example, calling out critical success factors for each objective—but the template is the same regardless.

Most of the important variations you see between different strategic planning approaches are not about the outline, but the process used to populate it. One reason for this is that many organizations use strategic planning as a mechanism to align people and generate insights.

Here it’s important not to a follow someone else’s methodology blindly. Enrolling and aligning people and coming up with great new ideas can take place as part of strategic planning, or separately. I’ve seen highly successful strategic plans that were imposed by a CEO with little input or collaboration, and ones built iteratively through complex, multi-stakeholder engagement models that completely failed.

Generally speaking, there is no process that will compensate for a weak leader, a shortage of good ideas, a lack of useful and actionable information, or a failure to implement usable management tools.

The “how” can vary not only based on organization’s size and maturity but also its type. The Wikimedia Foundation has modeled how to do strategic planning with large networks, with a resulting direction that’s both “bottom-up and outside-in.” The Transition Town movement has articulated a great process for strategic planning with communities. I’ve written about these different organization types before: they allocate and optimize power in ways that are very different from traditional, closed organizations. And a growing number of organizations these days are hybrids—e.g., a private company that is porous to a network that it incubates, or a public institution that is inter-dependent with a larger community.

Optimizing your strategic planning process for efficiency, inclusiveness, consensus, or emergence might make sense or it might not depending on your circumstances.

When in doubt, look for an experienced facilitator who is aware of multiple different methods who can make a custom and context-appropriate recommendation.

Daily meditation is part of my self-care and personal and professional development.

Several people have asked me recently about the particular tapes and programs I use. Below are some of my favorites, which I’ve also added to the Next Us resources page.

Meditating alone or with a group, guided or unguided, are all different experiences. Each one is worth trying.

Personally, I find for my daily morning meditation that recorded instruction usually helps deepen my practice, leading to more calm and better insights.

1. Meditations to Change your Brain

This is the companion audio CD to the excellent book Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, which I’ve written about before. Half of the tracks explain the neuroscience behind the various meditation techniques, and the rest are guided meditations of 5-20 minutes each. There are some references to Buddhism here and there, but in general the CD uses colloquial language and is meant to be practical for a broad audience.

2. Meditation for Beginners

Jack Kornfield is a teacher famous for bringing ancient insight and mindfulness meditation practices to the West. The frame for this CD is more explicitly Buddhist, with references to concepts like the Four Noble Truths. As with the recording above, half of the the tracks are background teachings; the rest are “listen-along” guided meditations.

3. Appropriate Response

Pamela Weiss is the founder of Appropriate Response, a mindfulness-based leadership development and coaching organization. On the AR website, she offers a number of free .mp3 guided meditations of varying lengths, all very good.

4. Stress-Proof Your Brain: Meditations To Rewire Neural Pathways for Stress Relief and Unconditional Happiness

This is another invaluable CD from Rick Hanson, with an apt title. These meditations are slightly longer, averaging around 15 minutes each.

5. Recover Your Center with Conscious Embodiment: Audio Practices That Develop Presence, Confidence, and Compassion

Tiphani Palmer of Conscious Embodiment spoke at a recent Next Us event and eloquently shared some of the history and benefits of these Aikido-based centering techniques.

6. Guided Mindfulness Meditation

These Jon Kabat-Zinn meditations follow the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program he pioneered. This program requires a more serious time investment, but has scientifically proven effectiveness helping people with chronic pain and several other medical conditions.