Strategic Evolution

Looking back, being among the first of its type to bet on the Internet as a paradigm shift in marketing wasn’t the most emergent strategy giving Durham’s nascent marketing organization an edge.

Before two-thirds of Americans had heard of it and fewer than 14% were using it, the most emergent strategy was seizing on the website as the platform or repository for any and all information where not only staff had access.

From there it was also accessible or pushed out via content marketing to internal stakeholders such Durham residents, organizations and officials, but also to external stakeholders such as potential visitors, sports and meeting event organizers, real estate agents and developers, project feasibility consultants and financiers.

Somehow DCVB stumbled on to the realization way back then that not only was data and information the most sure-fire way to drive decision making, but holding it back as proprietary and then parceling out on demand was suddenly an extremely obsolete business strategy.

Of course, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a few years later in his book entitled, The Road Ahead:

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

Today, we rarely overestimate the change that occurs every two years but many still fail to heed the caution at the end of what Gates wrote.

Two years after he penned that caution in 1995, Phillip Evans, now managing director of the Boston Consulting Group and former Harvard professor, co-wrote an award-winning article in Harvard Business Review entitled Strategy and the New Economics of Information.

He signaled a transformation that we now know dropped communications costs much faster than transaction costs, collapsed and fragmented economies of scale and changed the strategic value of data proprietary to curation and sharing.  If you missed it, click here for his TED overview last month.

A related paper was published a few weeks ago by McKinsey & Company entitled Are You Ready for the Resource Revolution.  Written by Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers, it explores what they call the “biggest business opportunity in a century,” dramatically improving the use of resources such as water.

The future, according to Evans, is about cooperation and collaboration as much as competition, something community destination marketing organizations have long practiced and coined as “coopetition.”  It is now the business strategy of the future.

Although specific to Durham metrics, many communities have always borrowed data from the DCVB site just as a few here and there in Durham have attempted to pull the organization back into the past.

Strategy-making, though, can’t be copied, at least not without the vision to drive its execution.  It has been known for many decades that strategy is not about planning or analysis, it is about perpetual and real time synthesis.

It must be embedded in an organization’s culture.

Many communities settle for being “fast followers,” a term coined by Dr. Henry Mintzberg in the same paper and a subsequent book from which I learned the idea of “emergent strategy” nearly three decades ago.

Mintzberg was also an early adopter of data as curation and put links to his papers and books online including a new one entitled, Rebalancing Society – Radical Renewal, Beyond Left, Right, and Center.

It is a rant, but don’t expect to skim it for understanding.  He envisions ideology not as a spectrum with extremes but as a circle including the public sector, the private sector and the plural sector or what he calls “communityship,” and what DeTocqueville, at the dawn of this nation, called a uniquely American innovation.

Each, according to Mintzberg, has a “potentially fatal flaw.”  He notes, “Governments can be crude.  Markets can be crass.  And communities can be closed, at the limit xenophobic…Crudeness, crassness and closed-ness are countered when each sector takes its appropriate place in society with the other two while helping to keep them and their institutions in balance.”

Now re-read this with your organization in mind and balance as strategy-making.  Balance, Curation, Cooperation and Resource Optimization – it is a whole new world.

Sound too “out there?”  So was embracing the Internet in the early 1990s.

Betrayal And Resilience

During my long concluded, nearly four-decade career as a community destination marketing exec I made it a practice to organize strategic partnerships, especially during the latter half.

This was both as a means of sharing the experience of the organizations I led with others, but also to leverage synergy that was mutually beneficial to the partnerships and the three communities I represented.

Some were one-off projects with another organization, some involved as many as twenty different intra-community organizations which met monthly and worked to execute strategic initiatives.  Some involved peer organizations in other communities with common values.

But overall, the average partnership involved about four or five organizations.  In common was that all participants were involved with the community I represented as a place or among similar communities.

Also in common is that they were intended to be gatherings of equals, although often as the convener, my organization facilitated.  Frankly, an underlying objective was to preempt predatory organizational behavior.

Initially, the partnerships were organized as a tactical sideline to my job as a CEO, but seeing the results, during the final decade of my career my governing board incorporated it as one of my five weighted overarching performance objectives.

I recall many years ago, a friend and I walked to our cars after a particularly difficult meeting involving a handful of partner organizations.  We had been friends a long time but rarely shared anything as personal as he was about to tell me.

He started by giving me the compliment that I was the most resilient person he had ever known.  Then he said that he didn’t know how I stayed that way when it seemed so frequent that one or more partners who had agreed to align would then betray that agreement.

I hadn’t thought about it, but as I drove away his comment caused me to reflect on how often I had experienced betrayal over the course of my career representing three different cities.  Inside, I felt anything but stoic during those occasions.

Each betrayal marked a momentary low but I realized that by resilient, he meant that I not only bounced back quickly but never retaliated.  Working on mutually beneficial solutions I suppose requires a suspension of disbelief similar to anything reliant on trust.

But I also believe my resilience steadily grew more muscular over the arc of my career.  At least in part, it is a learned trait and I got a lot of practice.

I realized during my reflection that day and periodically since then, that in nearly every instance of betrayal from a strategic partner during my four-decade career, I liked and often admired the people involved.  In some instances they were friends.

In fact, perhaps due to my resilience, after the betrayal they often continued to act as though we were still friends, at least to my face, although rarely did we ever actually clear the air.

A condition of betrayal requires a good dose of denial.

Over the years, I came to learn not to take offense.  In the larger sense, partnership betrayal by others isn’t in any way about you.  It is about them.  More on how later.

Maybe experiencing betrayal is common for anyone trying to achieve objectives through coalitions or partnerships, but this aspect sure wasn’t a topic ever raised that I can recall in management courses, books, conferences or workshops I attended.

Even in studies, euphemisms such as “defection” are used.  Maybe it should be taught and discussed more overtly, and not just in the context of ethics.

Below I’ll get into some things I wish I had known or better understood earlier in my career.

But first, here are some traits of proven and loyal collaborators that I gleaned early in my career from the classic book by noted ethologist Dr. Richard Dawkins entitled The Selfish Gene, followed in 1986 by the related documentary entitled from the last chapter as Nice Guys Finish First:

• They are never the first to defect, if ever.
• They are not envious.
• They are forgiving, not retaliating.
• They have a clear cut understanding of win-win.

I would add after re-reading the book recently, that reliable partners are also able to dissent openly and resolve conflict not only with other partners but with people in their respective organizations who may push them to defect on partners.

Now, in no particular order, based on my reflection and a handful of other studies, here are ten ways to detect those prone to betray alignments and collaborations.

I never became very good as using these observations strategically or to preempt defection.  In my field, you didn’t get to be very selective about strategic partners.

• People who defect see the world through a lens where everything is either their way or your way. To make things happen they believe someone else always has to lose.  They despise tables of equals unless they can dominate.
• Defectors are easily bored, in the negative sense of that term.  They agree to alignments when the stakes are low and only when things are certain.
• They are deeply discomforted by uncertainty about the future.  To relieve this, their goals become their identity which blinds them to any new information or a better or even third way
• They are generalists, prone to perpetual mission creep.  Success at one thing makes them feel entitled to feel expert at everything and to dabble where others do have expertise, again as a means to avoid uncertainty.
• They are narcissistic, not just at the place on the continuum where nearly all leaders emerge but to the extreme, beyond any link to effectiveness leaving a need to constantly self report their own.  
• They have trouble listening unless they are seeking something. They have trouble maintaining eye contact unless they are talking or there is an agenda.
• Uncomfortable with the uncertainty of exchange, they respond to questions with a monologue and often limit social interaction for its own sake unless they can dominate.
• They are prone to cronyism and cabals and often make decisions based on “who’s asking.”  They thrive on the push and shove of lobbying.
• They are prone to “goalodicy,” a type of obsessive groupthink where individuals and groups become so wedded to a goal that they succumb to zero sum, and pursue any means to reach the end as long it is not at their expense.
• In general, this means they are restless, dislike informing discussion with ideas and concepts, because they are obsessed with having certainty or avoiding uncertainly at any cost to others.

During my career, I often used the true story of the Christmas Truce between two opposing units in 1915 during World War I to illustrate that even under extreme conditions, people can work together to mutual benefit.

Small area truces such as this occurred throughout the war when opposing soldiers learned to send and interpret unofficial signals.

But it is unrealistic to assume the same of strategic partners.  During those moments during World War I, many other units intensified the carnage even at the expense of their own troops.

There are definitely parts of my career that I don’t miss.

Nothing’s Really New

A friend of mine from my Alaska days in the 1980’s, having read this blog, emailed recently that I haven’t changed a bit.

He reminded me that on an airplane trip we took together over the North Pole to harvest potential business from Europe early in that decade, I did something I often do today in this blog.

He had watched me go through a huge brief case of reading materials, tearing pages from periodicals and using a handheld Epson device (regarded as the first laptop) to create notes and then print them out on ticker tape to staple to clippings for routing or mailing after I got home.

Running a community destination marketing organization requires gathering marketing intelligence wherever possible but my friend observed that in most cases, I was routing the clippings to other people in community, most unrelated to my former visitor-centric career.

A best practices consultant who interviewed several hundred community leaders hypothesized that this habit of circulating information was one of the reasons our organization was considered so much more relevant than peer organizations were in other communities.

I do enjoy it so I guess it is no surprise that I do something similar in retirement now with these essays.

Marketers for any enterprise should be on the forefront of trends and changes but far too many lag behind even within their own organization.  This is clear in the USA report from the “Annual Global CEO Survey” by PwC.

CEOs were the only members of the C-suite to cite technological advances as the trend that will be most disruptive in the future.  In the US, only 36% of CEOs believed that those responsible for their marketing and brand management were prepared to make the changes necessary.

I suspect this is why you often see marketing departments so out of touch with their organization’s sustainability efforts, such as when they use roadside billboards which require huge amounts of deforestation, ultimately reducing carbon sequestration and fostering pollution.

Of even more concern to CEOs may be that only 20% believed their R&D divisions were prepared for the coming changes that will be wrought by technology.

Looking at the verbatims, those surveyed have very large concerns. These are the ones pursued by those I refer to as “big game hunters” on the supply-driven side of economic development (as opposed to those working on the demand-side such as tourism) which they hope to land in their communities of states.

Even though small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) were hit much harder during the recession, they remain where the action is.  The 23 million SMBs in America (fewer than 100 employees) generate 54% of the sales, provide 55% of the jobs and fill up 30-50% of all commercial space.

Since the 1970s, SMBs have accounted for 66% of all net new jobs.  About 98% or 22.5 million are independent, locally owned concerns that account for 54% of all U.S. sales.

They are under threat from chains for which 600,000-plus franchised small businesses in the U.S. account for 40% of all retail sales and provide 8 million jobs.

It isn’t just technological trends where big business marketers are unprepared.  Studies show big business often doesn’t understand small and medium-size businesses which for 70% are their customers.

The battle ground for this misunderstanding is on Main Street.  Part of the solution is better exchange and sharing of marketing intelligence and data.

Many local organizations that represent small businesses eschew strategy plans in favor of frenetically running around in an attempt to find a “parade” and then desperately seeking to be at the head or at least be the convener.

They have no patience for being at a table of equals if they can’t dominate the conversation.  They fail to see that a strategic plan is merely a pathway to make it easier to spot and react to trends as they arise.

They especially fail to grasp that today’s new breed of strategic thinkers see into the future by analyzing the past, sometimes referred to as “temporal planning,” something I stumbled onto decades ago by virtue of fusing my college major into my eventual four-decade career in community marketing.

But the aversion to strategic thinking among many organizations portending to represent business is why businesses of all sizes - but especially small businesses - have lost patience with and increasingly find these organizations irrelevant, leaving them to devolve into places where only “whiners” congregate.

Identifying and responding to trends is best done when organizations share and treat each other not only as equals but with a deeply respected division of effort and expertise.

Strategic partnering such as this works best when all eyes are trying to spot trends regardless of relevance to one partner or another but then quickly to shuttle them to the partner for which they are most relevant.

I realize this is annoying for generalists, who having been successful at one thing assume they are now expert at everything, dismissing organizations with expertise specifically suited.

In parting, I’ll forward 2014 trends by Sparks & Honey which takes an ecosystem approach to 80 areas of trend and culture.  If you find this amazing, you should see one of their custom reports.

Share them with strategic partners at a table of equals and assign which organizations will take point based on expertise and focus.

My favorite?  I’m retired.  My expertise now is narrowed to sharing.

Call it “content marketing.”  Just don’t refer to it as part of the new “sharing/collaborative economy.”

That isn’t new.  Nothing really is.

Listening Past My “B.S.– O–Meter”

Forming strategic partnerships was something at which I became pretty good during the latter half of my now-concluded 40-year career in community-destination marketing, or so I was told.

But I had to try very hard to compensate for a blind spot.  Like most deficits that people have, it was due, in part, to a strength.  I have always had what I like to call a very well-calibrated “B.S.-O- Meter.”

I remember trying to collaborate with two colleagues many years ago.  They would meet before hand and come up proposals for my cooperation and then present them to me as though they were “up for discussion.”  They weren’t.

Unfortunately, many of these proposals undermined the mission of the organization I led, but I still tried to sift through them for alternative ways to make things work.

One of these individuals would frequently interrupt me as I raised questions or concerns.  Thinking they were open to free-flowing discussion, I would begin to do the same, only to be lectured by the other person for “interrupting.”

It was frustrating that my best win-win counter-proposals would come to me only later as I turned these exchanges over in my mind looking for something that would work.

The problem, other than being offended at the double standard and being put on the spot by requests they knew were antithetical, was that I needed to be a much better listener.

While reading a newly published book entitled Real Influence, co-authored by two doctors, Mark Goulston an M.D and John Ullman a Ph.D. who teaches at UCLA, I recognized myself in a part of the book that deals with getting past a “blind spot.”

When my “B.S-o-Meter” was on full alert due to somebody’s “self-serving tactics and techniques,” I would often listen “at” them with my “defense up and preparing counterpoints.”

If I was being asked to do something antithetical and the B.S. was running particularly deep, I might even listen “over” the person, which I now know is far more of an insult than interrupting.

The authors of Real Influence have been graciously republishing summaries from the book on the Harvard Business Review blog.  A few weeks ago, when I read the one on listening it dawned on me that the intent I often attributed to those two friends was really due to the fact that they also had difficulty with listening.

They often missed what I was trying to repeatedly explain because they were either “listening over” or using what the authors describe as “problem-solving” listening, where instead of trying to truly understand, they just wanted to check things off the list.

It was a testament to our collective perseverance that the three of us were able to pull off several strategic partnerships.  However, the process was far more exhausting and far less fulfilling than my involvement in many other collaborations over the years.

I like what the authors call “listening of the highest order.” This is described as listening to “other people to discover what’s going on inside them.  It’s listening on their terms, not yours.  It’s understanding where people are coming from to establish genuine rapport.”

Introspection is something that comes easy to me.  Thanks to insights I glean from books and posts such as those authored by Drs. Goulston and Ullmen, even though now-concluded, my career is still teaching me a little bit more every day.

Who knows, maybe even my two long-ago colleagues are listening.

The Role of Teaching and Creating Organizational Alignment

A study released a few weeks ago by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and conducted by researchers at Stanford and the University of Utah quantifies the value of good supervisors.

They found that replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team’s output by about the same as adding one worker to a nine member team.  As noted in an announcement of the findings in The Atlantic, the average supervisor is 1.75 as productive as the average worker.

The biggest difference the study found concerns “teaching” which is quantified as two-thirds of a supervisors impact.  In my experience over a 40 year career, teaching is right up there with critical thinking, problem-solving and strategic awareness.

Even in a high performance organization, about 10% of the employees each year become disengaged for one reason or another.  The annual average over a decade among all organizations is an incredible 70% according to Gallup surveys.  It isn’t possible to motivate people but it is possible to create an environment where they find their self motivation and that begins with supervisors who are good teachers.

For a chief exec of a community organization, as I was for most of my career, the importance of teaching extends to external audiences and governing boards as well.

Teaching is a form of communication but it begins first with listening.  A word I wore out over the last two decades of my career is ‘alignment.’  It means arranging all day to day effort, more than half of which in any job is project management, so that everything possible is consistent with the goals, objectives and mission of the organization.

Any misalignment means fragmentation, even if ever so slight and ultimately a loss of energy and productivity and higher costs.  In community-destination marketing, which was my profession, it is also important to achieve alignment with strategic partner organizations, local officials and residents which can sometimes be a bit like “herding cats.”

We definitely need our best teachers in our schools, but the ability to teach is a skill that also needs to be incorporated into organizational management by executives for anyone promoted into supervisory roles.

A promotion to supervisor based on one’s ability and willingness to be a good teacher is far more to success than is basing it solely on the merit of being a good individual contributor.

Durham Spawns Another Innovation for DMOs

Another “best practice” popped up last week on the Durham News Service.  Durham’s community/destination marketing organization (DMO) teamed with iApplicants to launch www.durhamhospitalityjobs.com .

There are more than 3,000 visitor-related organizations in Durham ranging from museums, theaters, sports clubs, retail stores, transportation companies, restaurants, lodging properties and many others.  Besides customers, these disparate organizations have something else in common, the need fill more than 10,000 jobs.

DCVB first teamed with iApplicants several years ago to develop a highly efficient and effective means of managing its screening and hiring process for jobs related to official community marketing agencies.  Now it is has collaborated on a process that will be rolled out to other DMO’s as a means to help their constituents.

DCVB forged the new tool in response to visitor-related organizations that wanted a centralized and destination-branded location to post openings.  But the new tool also makes it much easier to process and manage the application process.

Durham visitor-related organizations and businesses can also specifiy which, if any, other job boards (like Craigslist or Jobster) should post the listing on www.durhamhospitalityjobs.com.

DCVB continues to be widely recognized for innovations such as this. Obviously innovation is fully embedded in the organizational culture and representative of one of Durham’s distinct personality traits.

For more information on how the DMO for your community can partner with iApplicants, email DCVB at hr@durham-cvb.com .