Marketing | Environment | Culture
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter Drucker
Easily captivated by pithy quotes, I keep a running list (despite questionable attribution). If in print, I’ll keep it as a clipping.
Just a day after picking up the Drucker quote above, I picked up The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin at my neighborhood library.
Here’s a little intersection.
For a class I’m taking this semester in the MBA program at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I got to choose and review the online marketing book of my choice. The deliverables included a formal book review, a blog post, a video and an in-class presentation.
With my first two choices gone (David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing), I turned to Rework from the guys at 37 signals. Rework turned out to be a little too general business for the purposes of the class, but I did write it up here earlier.
Fortunately, a brand new, big idea book was recommended by Seth Godin as I was still in search mode. I ordered, read and reviewed The Mesh: Why The Future Of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky.
Cover: The Mesh
The Mesh was very obviously a labor of love for Gansky, whose personal and professional passions are evident in the book’s concept, premises, tone and style. The describes her vision, illustrates it with examples and backs into the broader driving and enabling trends making Mesh businesses and strategies possible and advantageous right now. It’s this drawing together of otherwise disparate observations that makes her book feel so fresh.
I’ve already written a review and collected several links for the class blog post. Here, I thought I’d take a minute to observe how it so nicely connects the themes and sub-heading of this blog – marketing, environment and culture.
Marketing The Mesh argues in favor of a business model that both threatens traditional companies and creates opportunities for new ones. A Mesh company or a Mesh strategy employs: a core offering that’s shared (access rather than ownership); web, social and mobile networks; increased customer interactions; increased layers of information and analysis of data; and offers that are more and more timely, relevant, personal and location-based.
Think Netflix versus Blockbuster. Both rent DVDs, but Netflix is, at its core, an information company dedicated to making it easier and easier for customers to find, watch and review movies and television shows. Meanwhile, Blockbuster is in bankruptcy protection.
Zipcar was another key example in the book. With your mobile device, you can locate, select, reserve and unlock one of dozens of individually-named Zipcars parked around your city. Each transaction provides data about who, when, where and how long the car is used. Zipcar’s partnered with all kinds of other businesses in complementary ways to provide more – and more personalized – value to each customer.
Environment One of the underlying themes behind the share concept is an increasing population and limited resources. The increasing population is also increasingly urban; this density is required for share platforms to scale properly. At the same time, it’s clear that our disposable consumer culture is unsustainable. Mesh companies need highly durable goods from their suppliers. Through frequent and repeat use of shared goods and real-time data collection, Mesh businesses will understand each product’s strengths and weaknesses, like when and how it’s likely to fail. While demanding greater durability from suppliers, they’ll be in a unique position to provide information to aid in that mission.
Culture There are many broad, cultural themes in The Mesh. For example, acceptance and adoption of share platforms requires a shift away from ownership toward access and sharing. Gansky also covers customers as communities within the same share platform. So many of the factors that permit the Mesh characteristics and driving and enabling factors to be observed and formally captured in a book are temporal and cultural.
All three themes – marketing, environment and culture – are ever-present in this quick and fun read. I recommend it to marketers, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, futurists and anyone broadly interested in what’s happening out there right now.
My blog post for class that’s loaded with links can be seen here.
My video review can be seen here:
Seven of the dozens of examples provided by Lisa Gansky to illustrate her concept of The Mesh.
16 employees in 8 different cities on 2 different continents serving more than 5 million customers, including some of the world’s biggest brands. How do 37signals do it?
They’re eager to tell you.
Before I take on their book, I’ll give you a sense of the company, which exists almost completely online. They design web-based software that helps you run your small group or business. The table below, including the names and images of each offering, is as stylish and clear as the book. This product/service line was developed for their own use; they run their company on their own applications.
Back to “eager to tell you” … from the 37signals perspective, teaching is marketing. That’s a perspective about which I want to learn more. Of course, they’re eager to teach me.
In addition to countless interviews, speeches, and presentations – many of which are available online (here or here) – founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, along with several other members of the crew, put together a couple books. I’ve read only one of them; this is my review.
Rework is their go at a “general business” book. In it, 37signals explain how they do what they do – how they built and how they run their business. I won’t belabor it in detail, since there are already several tons of love and press about this publication.
In short, they set ablaze conventional wisdom about how business “needs to” or “should” be done. Instead, common sense is put on its proper pedestal …
Though the hardcover contains 270+ pages, the layout and style make for a very quick read and begs for a re-read. There are loads of wonderful illustrations accompanying each “verse,” which vary in length from three or four paragraphs to a page or two. Each verse is one of maybe a half dozen pieces that make up a chapter.
It makes sense that Seth Godin‘s endorsement stripes the top of the cover. Rework is a collection of short essays as efficient as Godin’s blog posts. An idea is introduced, supported by an example or two, then wrapped up. The lessons are communicated so cleanly that they seem overwhelmingly obvious. The writing is so straightforward and clear that these essays read in sequence as a series of punches.
As a sample, here’s the lead from the “Speed Changes Everything” verse from the “Damage Control” chapter:
‘Your call is very important to us. We appreciate your patience. The average hold time right now is sixteen minutes.’ Give me a fucking break.
As you might expect of a book that torches conventional wisdom about hiring, PR and marketing, growth, culture, management, venture capital and so much more, Rework is irreverent and refreshing.
Needless to say, I recommend the book highly – especially for those with an entrepreneurial bent. Really, though, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the structure and running of an organization. For no other reason, you should read it for the gentle but meaningful open-hand slap to the face it’ll give you about what’s happening in your day-to-day work life.
I may write a couple of follow-up posts about how the book functions as marketing and manifesto for the 37signals community and about the other companies 37signals name checks as illustrations of their points.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this interview of Jason Fried from O’Reilly Media:
Also, here’s a link to the 37signals “about us” page with company history, executive team profiles, statement of beliefs, and more.
So, BP gets called out for Photoshopping an image of their Command Center for use on their website.
Here’s a straight take from CBS News.
Here’s a more colorful approach from Treehugger.
Here are the before and after images (actually arranged as after and before):
Before and After Photoshop: BP Command Center
I’ve seen two primary, polar reactions to this story:
I’ll take a minute to stand more toward the middle, but clearly on one side.
Altering an image is directly opposed to fundamental principles of management and public relations. For the past 5 years, you couldn’t spend 5 minutes with any Harvard Business Review publication without feeling the movement toward transparency and authenticity.
Social media, in particular, has really brought these concepts in practice to the fore. Fold in some Seth Godin-style storytelling-as-marketing and the picture is even more clear: every individual and organization has the opportunity to tell the world who they are, what they’re about, where they’re from, why they’re here. Beyond that, they can always share what they know, when they know it, directly with people who care.
If, however, these efforts are not received as honest and forthright from a good corporate citizen, this may be done for you (witness: BPGlobalPR on Twitter). Regardless, companies of all sizes have embraced this opportunity and grown as a result.
As small an infraction as filling in a few Command Center monitors with some action shots may seem, it’s not honest. When your every move is under the most extreme scrutiny you’ll ever enjoy, why doctor the images that are helping tell your story of response and recovery? Apparently, trucking in workers for a Presidential photo op isn’t enough.
The BP spokesperson’s response to this story wasn’t awful: “Normally, we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping.” Transparency, authenticity and honesty should be employed constantly, not “normally.” Yes, it’s asking a lot, but truth is ultimately easier and best.
Among many the issues:
The list goes on and the point remains: the PR response to the worst oil spill in U.S. history has been neither excellent nor honest. The scope of this disaster is unprecedented. It could have happened to any oil company working off shore. Some PR blunders and gaffes can be reasonably expected. Active obfuscation, however, is beyond “blunder.”
Bottom line: I find the Photoshopped image to be a micro-representation of an attitude, philosophy and practice completely opposed to the best path forward: transparency and authenticity.
Related Video
CNN’s Anderson Cooper has been very aggressive in covering this story. A couple videos are linked in the body of this post and here’s a link to another specifically about transparency. Plus, one embed:
BP CEO Tony Hayward fronts a friendly message with clean birds, clean beaches and colorfully suited workers (kin to the Intel Inside Pentium MMX dancers):
Thoughts? Feel free to share them.
NYT: Media Decoder© 2024 ethanbeute
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