Mastery

I love watching opera master classes online. If you’re not familiar with this genre, here’s what it involves: Young singers perform in front of an audience, while well-known opera stars critique their performances in real time. The singer may start out as solid, or even exquisite, but the teacher finds subtle and blunt ways to coach them to new heights. Singing difficult material in front of a live audience—and a global online audience—with a famous expert standing right beside you, telling you what you’re doing wrong, requires a level of vulnerability that most of us don’t risk in our daily…

Product and Marketing

In 2017, Brad Feld wrote an article in which he proposed that any startup can be viewed as essentially three machines: “(1) the Product machine, (2) the Customer machine, and (3) the Company machine.” I love this model. For me, it captures what day-to-day strategy and execution feels like at a typical startup and many other kinds of organizations, too. The three machines must be high-functioning, and they must be aligned. Feld adapted this framework from one of his investees, and when he first saw it, the machines had different names. I similarly want to tinker with his labels just…

Aligning Marketing and Sales

For years, I’ve been writing about how businesses can optimize human relationships inside and outside their organizations. I’ve fleshed out this idea over many blog posts, with a core visual denoting three kinds of strategy that should always be tightly linked. I love the purity of this diagram, but some kinds of businesses merit an expanded framework. In my last post, I complicated this model slightly, by adding a fourth circle for corporate strategy: For B2B companies, however, there is at least one more circle that’s conspicuously missing, and I want to address it now: Sales. I have avoided talking…

Corporate strategy and board optimization

Organizations excel when they connect their business, brand, and marketing strategies. Doing so increases internal efficiency and creates a scalable foundation for future growth. I’ve been fleshing out this idea for several years as a series of concepts and practical exercises, starting with my original post “Three kinds of strategy” (2012), up to the most recent one “Brand marketing vs. performance marketing” (2017). I’ve explored each of these three circles from left to right—from business vision to full-funnel marketing analytics. But this simple picture I’ve been painting is incomplete. Today, I want to complicate it slightly, by adding a new…

One Hundred Years

One of my favorite books about history is Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: From 1500 to the Present: Five Hundred Years of Western Culture Life. It’s an impressive career summation, published in 2001 when Barzun was in his nineties. I love how he looks telescopically at broad historical trends, while also zooming into the messy details of specific times and places along the way. In the past two years, the long decline that Barzun observed has accelerated into a great unraveling of Western institutions—a breakdown marked by destructive monetary policy, increasing class conflict and geopolitical tension, rapid technological change,…

Brand marketing vs. performance marketing

There’s a simple procedure I use for creating or evaluating an organization’s marketing strategy. It starts with: Clarifying the opportunity we’re going afterArticulating and segmenting the specific stakeholder relationships we must foster to capture that opportunityDesigning and managing clear, custom funnels for each of those relationships These last two steps lend themselves to an easy-to-remember progression of images, where we could first depict an organization’s relationships with the outside world using a Venn diagram: And then pour each of those external circles into the top of a traditional marketing funnel, as if they were gumballs: And then, over time, we…

What is positioning?

Positioning is important for every organization. Yet there is no consensus on what the term means. Among positioning experts, Michael Porter talks about strategic advantage, Seth Godin talks about purple cows, and Clotaire Rapaille talks about tapping into enduring cultural archetypes. Are we really all discussing the same thing? Here is a simple description that I use to align teams and viewpoints: Positioning defines how external audiences see a company or product relative to its competitors. In practice, positioning answers three questions: Where are we in the competitive landscape?What is the nature of our offering?How are we situated in stakeholders’…

Becoming #1

Long ago a colleague recommended that I read the book Eating the Big Fish by Adam Morgan. I did. At the time, I thought it was interesting, if simplistic. And then I continued to use it as a key tool in my professional work for the next dozen years. The core idea in Eating the Big Fish is that there are large incumbents in every market space, but “little fish” can come to dominate the ecosystem through effective brand-building and communication. The book came out at a time when “brand” was the buzziest of buzzwords, one that could smother any…

The future of consulting

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of consulting lately. This is a bit of an occupational hazard… I’ve been a consultant for almost 20 years, based in San Francisco, and I’ve run my own practice for eight years and counting. A long time ago I remember telling a colleague: “The consulting space is massive: multi-billions of dollars globally. Even if it were to shrink by 50%, there’d still be money on the table for those who know how to find it.” That remark, though not particularly insightful, is still correct and evergreen. There will always be money to…

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