TZ wrote to me today. Here’s his story about quitting and then becoming the best in the world:
I rose up the ranks in [name of bank] Bank Financial Group to become a Program Manager in Operations…specifically Change Management.
According to how my parents used to define success: I was a superstar. A 29 year old with a senior level position at a huge company with a safe salary, crazy benefits and a religious adherence to a 9-5 order.
The first 2 years were fueled with idealistic notions of changing the world: I entered my cubicle with enthusiasm every morning and left every day, hoping that next day would be different.
In the beginning, it didn’t even bother me that I wasn’t following my passion (music!), because I had a business card with my name, a fancy title (which was longer than the list of my accomplishments) and the beautiful logo of a major corporation.
I could sit at Starbucks with other bankers on company time and we could laugh about "fooling the man".
As time went on, I began to realize that I’m the one being fooled. With every promise of a longer title and bigger salary, I would salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs and automatically go along with whatever needed to be done to get that bigger office.
I realized that advancement was less about changing for better and more about maintaining the status quo. In big corporations, senior management always seeks out ideas from idealistic middle managers to give them a sense of hope and a promise of a better tomorrow that keeps the drones at least half alive.
So I continued to create fancy power point slides with generic expressions like:
"well positioned for growth" – translation: we’re not saying we WILL grow…we’re just sayin….we might.
"adding value" – question: WTF did everyone think they were getting paid for? Not adding value? Why does it have to be on every slide?!
"leveraging" , – comment: i asked everyone on my team not to use those words. the frequency of use of words like "leverage" is inversely proportionate to the amount of original thought. the more you say "leverage", the less you’ve probably thought about what you’re saying.
Because I used the language of my audience, my presentations were always a big smash! As much as a presentations that "encourage change with minimal change" can be.
In short, I became resentful toward the corporation for setting up a hampster wheel and resentful toward myself for staying in that very wheel, in exchange for cash, titles and security.
So I left.
My wife and I moved to a cheaper place, I got rid of my BMW and we began to try to live on 30K a year.
From a huge corporation, I went to a music production house with 10 people.
I started at less than half my bank salary and I worked the longest hours I’ve ever worked. Good thing all the stores were closed when I’d leave the studio, that way I wouldn’t spend the money.
This was 6 months ago.
Today my salary has jumped, in direct proportion to my contributions, to almost what I made at the bank.
I have no clearly defined responsibilities….my title is whatever I want it to be….the only mandate is: do the things that make us the top production house in the city.
I’m having the time of my life and in less than 6 months, I have accomplished more in a small business with minimal budgets than I have in 5 years in a huge bank with billion dollar revenues.
April 13, 2007
I got more mail about this story in the Washington Post than any other non-blog topic ever. I saw it when it first came out, but didn’t blog it because I thought the lesson was pretty obvious to my readers. [World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station, almost no one stops to listen]. The experiment just proved what we already know about context, permission and worldview. If your worldview is that music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is invisible.
But why all the mail? (And the Post got plenty too). Answer: I think it’s because people realized that if they had been there, they would have done the same thing. And it bothers us.
It bothers us that we’re so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that we’ve created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world, most of the time, even when we suffer because of it. It made me feel a little smaller, knowing that something so beautiful was ignored because the marketers among us have created so much noise and so little trust.
I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.
I’m trying to assemble a list of a dozen or so people who have achieved the status of ‘best in the world,’ but quit something else in order to get there. Example: Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, was a mid-level cubicle-dwelling drone at PacBell, and would be to this day if he hadn’t quit. Suze Orman was a broker at Prudential-Bache before she quit and created an empire.
If you know some great examples of people who have quit and been glad they did, I’d love to hear them (unfamous examples welcome). My top 10 favorite submissions get a free signed copy of the Dip, which I’ll mail out next week. Send your idea by email, don’t forget your mailing address.
[I got a TON of great entries. I’m processing them now. You can send more if you like, but chances of winning are close to zero. Thanks, guys.]
April 12, 2007
It’s common knowledge among marketers that marketing to seniors is largely a waste of time. All you need to do is look at the ads in Modern Maturity magazine compared to, say, Rolling Stone, to see what marketers believe.
The reason most believe this is because of a simple distinction: open and closed.
Open people are seeking out things that they believe will make their lives better. Experiences and products and styles that will open doors, cause growth, save time and money and increase status. All of these things are ‘go up’ events. Find people who are open and you find people you can talk to.
Closed people are trying to maintain the status quo. They are very focused on keeping things from getting worse, but they’re not particularly concerned about joining the in crowd or starting something.
For a long time, the easy way out was to believe that 18 to 34 year olds were open and seniors were closed. Web surfers are open, National Enquirer readers are closed. etc. etc.
Then the baby boom happened.
Baby boomers have been open their whole lives. And now they are seniors. So all the conventional wisdom goes out the window. Senior travel, senior fashion, senior experiences… it’s all fair game, because there’s a different demographic inhabiting that age group now.
Psychographics (open vs. closed) are way more important than demographics.
A few months ago, I heard an interview with one of the leading metal baseball bat manufacturers. They were lobbying hard against regulations that would require little league players to use wood bats.
Today, Chris point us to this story about emissions. The car makers continue to lobby hard, or even sue, over emission rules. Wendy’s, as previously discussed, is working hard against a rule in New York requiring they post calorie counts. It’s common wisdom that government regulation is bad for business, and especially bad is regulation that requires change.
I don’t get it.
A few years ago, the FTC changed the law about how wide apart the bars in cribs for children had to be. Wide spaces between bars end up strangling kids and breaking arms. The law only applied to home cribs, which meant that hospital cribs weren’t covered. Hard Manufacturing, my favorite hospital crib company, took the regulation to heart and alerted every hospital in the country that the cribs they were using weren’t deemed safe for home use… so why use them in a hospital? What do you think happened to crib sales? It was a huge few years as the cribs were replaced (and the kids ended up safer).
Wendy’s did the best when they were growing with the launch of salads. Not when they were copying McDonald’s over burgers. Change is their friend.
If I were a leading bat company, I’d formulate a ‘slower’ metal bat that would be just as safe as wood… and unbreakable too. What a marketing coup! Then I’d lobby like crazy for change.
If I were Ford Motor, I’d lobby as hard as possible for the strictest emissions regime in the world. If you’re losing the game, change the rules. Start over. Be the only major car company to produce 100% zpev or hybrid cars.
Business as usual is almost always lousy marketing, because there isn’t a lot of room for growth. The opportunities kick in when an external force requires a brand new story, when consumers are choosing to pay attention because they’ve got no other choice.
It’s easy to argue against change. It disheartens shareholders and even employees. But external change is the most likely lever of growth, because it puts you back on the agenda of attention.
Ken sends us to this video.
There are more honor students (top quartile) currently in school in China than there are students (total) in the US. If you’re ‘one in a million’ in China, then there are a thousand other people just like you.
Best in the World gets more challenging all the time.
April 11, 2007
Last weekend, I saw The Hoax, with Richard Gere. It’s a fantastic movie, one of the best I’ve seen in a while. As soon as it ended, I had a compulsion to tell you about it. So I sat down and had a long talk with myself about why.
Why was it so important to me to tell other people? It’s not a movie that will make the world a better place. It won’t increase my reputation or give me a sense of power to be able to tell people about it. So why?
I don’t know. It’s just a really good movie.
Sometimes, we worry so much about tracking and selfish actions and mechanics that we ignore the biggest factor: people like to talk about stuff.
Which leads to this terrific commentary about the #1 song in America. Irony alert: it’s tongue in cheek. My guess is that listeners on the radio today didn’t get it. I’m glad to say I did.
Often, something is popular just because it’s popular.
Chris points us to this "auction." Like the Chicago Cubs play baseball…
[update: removed by eBay. Sorry.]
That’s the killer clause.
"We did everything within reason and we still lost."
Your competition beats you when they do things that are unreasonable. In large markets, the unreasonable competitor always establishes the new benchmark, always ends up as best in the world, always redefines what ‘within reason’ means.
I guess the only choice is to be unreasonable.
April 10, 2007
Send this post to your tech team. Tell them to find and destroy any error messages that might be shown to a user that bear any resemblance to this one from the NY EZ Pass site.
Take the rest of the day off. Nice work!
