Strategy is a Practice Not a Plan

You should either work within systems and get what they give you, or you should change the system. But what you shouldn’t do is work within the system and expect to get something different. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Morning, evening, afternoon. Whatever time it is. I don’t have a time it is. Well, because we’ve been traveling this week. We just came back from big trade show. It was so much fun spending time with you, but let’s get to the task at hand. When we started this thing, we started this podcast almost a year and a half ago. If I asked you back then, and I did ask you by the way back then, you know, who are some folks that we would love to eventually have on this thing and have conversations with, there was a name that did come up. It was a name, and it was like, no. That’s not gonna happen. Like, come on. And yet it did. We’ve had some great guests, and we had we had Guy Kawasaki on, which was a pretty remarkable interview. But, Seth Godin? Like, what? What? Who are you, and who am I? And I’m just so proud for this conversation today. It has to be a two parter because we went in so many directions. But it all stemmed from Seth’s book, This is Strategy. It’s his latest book. Yes. He talks about strategy, but he talks about so much more in it. The way he sort of pulls things back to, like, think about it this way and just makes it so tangible. You know, again, like you could think about something like him who creates, you know, these incredible ideas. I don’t even know how to describe it. But, like, he’s so down to earth and practical about thinking about these approaches and thinking about strategy. It’s just like, I’m gonna go back and listen to it ten times because there was just so much great insight to to pull from it. I just learned a lot and it was just cool cool guy. Just cool. Yeah. We’re clearly fangirling over here, but he spoke to what CMOs need to be thinking about and how we need to be thinking about it and how we need to be ruthlessly prioritizing it. It is our job to be leading everything related to the market. And so it’s a two parter. Let’s jump into the first part of it because there’s a lot of takeaways and learnings. Yeah. Let’s do it. Thanks so much for joining us, Seth. We’re so excited to have you on the podcast. We have spent the last couple of weeks reading This Is Strategy, a fantastic book. Before we even go into the content, it is uniquely sort of pulls together book. There’s no page numbers, and I wanted to ask if that’s by design. It really is sort of these sections almost. And maybe it’s from your blog, but I just thought that that immediately, you know, when you start to read the book, it kind of puts you at dis ease, but in a good way, if that makes sense. And so talk a little bit about the structure of the book. Great place to start. So I’m a teacher, and pedagogy is the science of how we learn. And if you think about how you learn the vegetables, your mom did not sit you down and start with avocados and work her way all the way to zucchini. There’s a couple of vegetables in your bed, and it’s elliptical. You go around and around. In fact, almost everything we learn this 6AI, we self teach based on the surroundings. So when I was sitting down to write the book, and none of it is from my blog, it’s all new, I would start writing about systems, but then I’d realize I need to talk about games for you to understand systems. And if I was gonna force it into a linear order, then I just confused people. So I wanted to teach the way people learn. As for the page numbers, turns out these days, about half of all my book sales and most people’s book sales are either audiobook or Kindle, neither one of which has page numbers. So I decided to number the sections. So that 6AI, you could just say, let’s talk about eighty two, and no one would say, well, I don’t know what page that is because you don’t need to know what page that is. One of the things that I really took from the book that I like was and right off the top of the bat was the strategy of the, you know, philosophy of becoming. Right? And I think, like, people think we need to be strategic, and it’s like, oh, like, put on your strategic hat. And it’s like, today we’re being strategic, and sometimes we’re not. But can you talk about that, that whole concept of the philosophy becoming and kind of how it’s different than how so many people view strategy? People usually view strategy mistakenly as one of two things. Either plans, hence the idea of strategic planning. And it’s been pointed out that corporations love strategic planning because what’s implied by that is if you just follow the steps, it’s gonna work. That’s not what strategy is. That’s one of the byproducts of strategy, but it’s not strategy. And the other thing that is, it’s a fancy word for tactics. It’s a fancy word for what am I supposed to do today? Where’s the quick win? We have to get more strategic because today didn’t work out. And that’s not what strategy is. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re going in the wrong direction. Strategy is a response and a dance with the systems that are around us and the change we seek to make. And if you show me any industry that’s struggling, it’s because they’re really good at tactics and they’re doing the wrong strategy. A vivid example, Western Union had the chance to buy all the patents and take over AT and T. But instead they decided to make better telegrams. Because better telegrams is a good tactic if you buy into the past, But owning the phone company would be a strategic decision. Who do we want to become? People like us. We do things like this. Who are people like us? Where are we actually headed? And so one of the challenges to be a CMO, to be someone who’s at the coalface of the way the organization engages with the market, is to understand that marketing tactics should be done by someone who works for you, but your job is to do marketing strategy. There was a a line in the book that really resonated with me is strategy is easy to skip because we’ve trained our whole life for the tactics. And even in the way we work today, right, I lead marketing at a company called Sixense. In all our roles, and Adam’s been the CMO, it’s like, alright. Can I have the, strategic plan for the year by next week? Like, it’s very sort of time bound and almost counterintuitive to what you’re saying. Right? To me, the strategy is almost like the purpose of what we’re going to be doing and why we’re gonna be doing it and what approaches we’re gonna be taking. And so in a world where everything is so time bound and fixed and short term, how do we balance that, and how do we create room for it? Let’s go through a couple famous companies and what their strategy is because I think it will help people see what we’re talking about. Starbucks begins by understanding that a large portion of the world’s population wakes up in a precaffeinated state. And so every day the clock starts again that they need to solve that problem. And what Howard figured out is if he can offer a small luxury that allows middle class and upper middle class knowledge workers to find a place where they can solve their precaffeinated problem in a way that elevates their status. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. Everything that they do is for that, and it works. And if it’s not for that, they struggle. But that’s what they do for a living. Microsoft’s strategy is stolen from IBM. IBM strategy, which lasted twenty golden years, was no one ever got fired for buying IBM. They didn’t have the fastest computers. They didn’t have the best priced computers. They didn’t have the sexiest computers, but they had the support and the the heft. You weren’t gonna get fired if you bought IBM. So Microsoft from the very early days was our software is for companies where you buy this at your job, you’re not gonna get fired for buying it. Steve Ballmer forgot this completely, and that’s why he was one of the worst performing CEOs of all time. But every time they go back to that, that’s what Microsoft strategy is, and they let their team come up with new tactics all the time. The tactics keep changing. Their strategy hasn’t changed at all in fifty years. One of the things that, again, like reading a book that speaks to me, and this is something that speaks to me a lot, right. Is, you know, you’re talking about people and bad decisions, but also like empathy. Right. And you could go back to, even if you think about leadership at Microsoft now versus the example you used before, There is clearly an approach there that encompasses empathy. And I think, you know, that is I think in the past has probably been seen as maybe even a weakness or showing weakness, but something that and I personally just am a big believer in. Can you talk a little bit about, like, how do you create that culture? How do you actually bring empathy and make it a strength? Make it something that’s not considered, oh, it’s your your weak. Love love to talk about that. Yeah. So this is so easy to misunderstand. I’m really glad you brought it up, Adam. Empathy is at in some uses, like in kindergarten, about kindness, and I’m in favor of that. But the empathy I’m talking about is a very powerful tool, and it begins with this. I don’t know what you know. I don’t see what you see. I don’t want what you want. I don’t believe what you believe, and that’s okay. And if I can’t 6AI, and that’s okay, then I’ve pushed us apart. I’ve basically said, go away. You’re wrong. I have to have power over you. But if I have the humility to realize that everyone who disagrees with me is correct based on who they are, what they believe, the system they’re in, now I can do the work to change the system. That when a leader creates the conditions for their customers or their employees to seek to follow them, everything gets easier than if you just have to insist and demand. So empathy becomes one of the pillars of strategy because we have to say, you know what? I’ve already read my book, but all these people out there haven’t read it. So I can’t talk to them as if they’ve already read the book because they’re not my potential customer. For the people who haven’t read the book, what do they believe? What do they see? What do they seek? And if I can’t create the conditions where my book is solution to their problem, they’re not gonna buy it, and I can’t make them. Part of that empathy is obviously understanding your customer, how you can solve for their pain points. But you really emphasize in the book the importance of recognizing and working within the existing systems that are there. There’s this line in the book that you’re not sitting in traffic. You are traffic. Talk to us a little bit about that and how we should be thinking about working within systems. You should either work within systems and get what they give you, or you should change the system. What you shouldn’t do is work within the system and expect to get something different. So there are systems all around us. There’s a military industrial complex, the wedding industrial complex, the college industrial complex. How much should a wedding in New York cost? Well, the answer is exactly as much as your best friend, but a little more. And that’s how we ended up with a hundred thousand dollar wedding. Not because there’s anything that says having engraved matchbooks makes your marriage better. It’s there is a system in place. And along the way, you keep making smaller and smaller decisions, and you end up where everybody else ended up. That if you think about having a teenage kid in the house, from the time that kid was six, you’ve been asking how they did on the test. What difference does it make how a second grader did on a test? It doesn’t measure anything useful, but the four hundred year old college industrial complex is a system, and it’s deeply ingrained in us, and it looks like normal. That’s what systems do is they hide behind culture to look normal. And so when a kid is growing up and if they have supportive parents and they decide early on that that path isn’t going to give them satisfaction, build a new system, a system that can sustain you that isn’t about making the admissions office at Harvard happy. So what we see happening in the tech world, and that’s everybody who’s listening to this is affected by that, is tech keeps changing systems so much faster than any time in history. So it’s normal to lay off two hundred people by email. That was inconceivable a generation ago. It’s normal to work from home, impossible to imagine ten years ago. So we look at these systems and we say, what part of normal is optional? And what would we need to do to begin to change systems to serve us? And I’ll give you a trivial little example that’s more tactical. A friend of mine, CEO of a ten thousand person company, he’s also a little bit of a programmer, and he spent the weekend writing a small script. And on Monday, everyone got an email, and it said, good news. I’ve canceled every recurring meeting that was all over your Google Calendars. So I’ve just given you back five to ten hours a week. If the recurring meeting was important, go ahead and reschedule it. If not, let’s go back to work. And to change meeting culture, a system, all in one fell swoop is shocking. But we have half hour meetings because that’s how long Microsoft Outlook says a meeting is supposed to last. Simon mentioned earlier too, we’d have a comment about, like, oh, we need your strategic plan by the end of the day or the by the end of the week and talking about, like, all the things that are happening right now. And, you know, think about long term. Right? And I think everyone’s sitting in any organization, like, is, like, now now now. We’re not gonna hit our number or we’re not doing this or we’re not doing now. And I think everyone even recognizes we’re sitting here and we’re not thinking about the big picture and we’re not thinking about Yeah. A mindset that’s gonna take us forward, that’s gonna lead to success, not this today or tomorrow, but the next week, the next month, the next year. How do you make that shift? And then this is like the million dollar question for anybody. Like, how do you stay in the now? Okay. Yes. We we have a problem right now. We have to, you know, bob and weave to make that adjustment. How do we 6AI long term? The challenge is actually surprisingly easy to describe and challenging to implement, but it works. And what it is is this. A false proxy is something that is easy to measure but not useful. So if you are hiring programmers, asking how many words per minute they can type is a waste of time. If you’re voting for president, asking how tall someone is is a waste of time. And yet, we keep voting for taller and taller presidents because it’s easy to measure and it’s subconscious built into the system. You know, when I was pioneering email marketing all those years ago, My first proxy that I would suggest to people is, on a whiteboard in the lobby, please put the number of people who, when you send an email, open it. And the first day is gonna be two hundred. If that number is written right there on the whiteboard, it’s gonna go up. The second part of it is as you’re growing the organization, what I wanna understand is show me every time I talk to you, tell me the number of our response rate. Because if you’re trying to make short term numbers go up, you’re gonna spam everybody, and your response rate’s gonna go down. But if every time I meet you in the hall, you say seven point two, and then tomorrow you say seven point eight, and then you say eight point three, guess what? The culture is gonna shift, and we’re gonna measure useful numbers. And so a key part of what it is to be the CMO, what it is to show up as someone who’s leading on revenue, is pick the right proxy and cause everybody to talk about it. Build it into your systems. That’s how you change a system. Not by just magically coming up with some elevator pitch, but by having these simple little status based metrics. People will shift their attention, and it truly works. My friend, Bina, wrote a book about culture and shifts like this, and she pointed out that there’s a investment fund that doesn’t tell its investors how their folks are doing on a weekly basis. It’s only every six months. And because you’re getting measured every six months, your day trading goes down to zero. On the other hand, if you’re playing with social media and cable news and all those other things you’re trying to lead, you’re just gonna be in a tizzy because every single day that you day trade is a day you’re not focused on your strategy. We have a a large audience of go to market leaders and and CMO in particular. The only C suite that is a verb. Right? Chief marketing officer. It’s not sales ing or financing or something else. Right? It it goes again back to the tactics, and and we talk about this a lot at Sixense, how the CMO needs to actually be the chief market officer and not the chief marketing officer. This wasn’t specifically in the book, but I I did read a quote of yours where you’re talking about talking to CMOs and said, the people in this room need to be in charge of everything that touches the market. Yeah. That’s what marketing is. If you could elaborate a bit on that. I mean, we’re believers. We feel it deeply. But for folks who are listening, if you could elaborate a little bit more. Okay. So far as what’s the systemic trap that has led CMOs to have a tenure of a year and a half? We are complicit. The trap is CEO thinks they know what marketing is. The CMO wants the good job. They show up and they do what the CEO thinks of as marketing. I’m gonna do a new logo design. We’re gonna, quote, rebrand, which has nothing to do with branding. We’re gonna go to all these meetings. And And then a year and a half later, nothing great has happened. So you get fired. And it’s everyone’s fault because you’ve been doing marketing in one sense. So I had a college professor named George Mayfarth. I got my two different job offers at a business school, and I called him up. And I said, George, I don’t know which one to take. I’m looking for a fast growing marketing driven company because I think that’ll be a good place for me. He said, marketing driven or market driven? And that one sentence completely changed my life. Marketing driven organizations say, what can the marketing department do today? And market driven companies say, do we have empathy for the people we’re trying to change? How do we touch everything in the institution to do that? So we have to take our own advice and market ourselves to our bosses and say, this is what we do around here. We do marketing that doesn’t involve spending money on media. We do all sorts of other things that change systems, that enhance our strategy, that make a difference. But I’m not here to interrupt people, and please don’t ask me about the logo because I don’t care. We had come across like, you had done an interview, I think it was just recently, with The Drum where you’re again, that kinda goes into everything that touches the market as you. You put a couple of examples in there that I think were were pretty interesting, like the admissions example from Volkswagen. And we were talking about crisis communications a couple weeks ago. And then in in reading that article make making you realize, like, why wouldn’t marketing be involved if engineering is gonna go make a decision that is either controversial or it’s gonna, you know, tarnish the market? Are there other areas, I think, that that maybe either a new CMO or just CMO out there is not thinking about that you think, like, you need to be here? Here’s another example. Which marketer generated the most equity market value in the last thirty years? I’m going to argue it’s Marissa Mayer. So she’s at Google. I was at Yahoo at the time. Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for fifteen million dollars, and we said no. I didn’t say no, but other people did. At the time, Yahoo had a hundred and eighty three links on their home page. And the reason is that the Internet was a wild and wooly place, so the promise was this is safe. Almost all the links on the Yahoo homepage went deeper into Yahoo. Yahoo Kids, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo this, Yahoo that. And when Marissa started showing up at Google, she wasn’t the best programmer they had, but she had enough influence that she relentlessly pushed over the course of a decade to make it so there would only be two links on the Google homepage. Why? Because that says, come here and leave. Yahoo was come here and stay. Google’s strategy was come here and leave. Now I would argue that most people who are listening to this do not instinctively think of that as a marketing choice. But that was exactly a marketing choice. That for that decade, Google, which has a stupid logo, didn’t spend a penny on media. What they did was with empathy showed up for millions and millions of people in a way that transformed their lives. And hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap later, yes, there needed to be brilliant programmers, but there were plenty of brilliant programmers around. What Marissa did is she had the guts to say no. We’re not at any more lengths. The guts, that bravery is important. Right? Especially in a world of things are moving so quickly. We’ve got AI. We are being beholden to short term KPIs, and it could be the wrong proxy to your point, but that is, let’s be honest, what we’re all beholden to. And strategy demands time to see it through. You have to be thinking of the longer term. I think one of the quotes was strategy is the hard work of doing today what will improve our tomorrow. And so, again, four CMOs beholden to short term pipeline driven business KPIs, which are critical and important, and we’ve gotta hit them. I think there’s a negotiation and something that we really need to be doing within the estaff or within the c suite to really allow ourselves that time. Any advice for us? So here’s a tactic, and maybe there’s a few investment banks where this isn’t true. But, generally, human beings act on stories. They don’t act on spreadsheets. If the spreadsheet tells a story, they’ll act on it, but there needs to be a story. So I found that bringing the market into the room makes all the difference. So if I was the CMO of a company, I have a bunch of people who I work with, take their phones and go interview right on their screen, happy customers and unhappy customers. Look right at me and tell me what’s the three things that Verizon’s doing wrong right now. Right? Tell me what do you dream we might be doing better here at Apple? And then I put it all into a two minute supercut. And at every meeting, I play a new one before the meeting started, bringing those voices into the room. Because if I can show that the changes that we are making are causing people to emotionally shift, and Google was so good at this for the first decade, I think Claude is one of my best friends. That is worth so much more than whatever metric they’re doing. Because if they can add more people like me who feel that way about Claude, their business problems are gonna take care of themselves. So we can do that, which is what actually most marketing people train to do, as opposed to burying stuff deep inside spreadsheets to let ourselves off the hook. Because it’s very hard to spreadsheet yourself into success in a world that’s changing. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.