I’ve just spent 16 hours on various airplanes, so the mental processes are not the clearest, but I promised myself I’d do a blog post before succumbing to the pharmacological effects of mixing Ambien and German beer.
Over the next several posts, I’ll be focusing specifically on the challenges facing B2B marketers. While the previous posts this week weren’t specific to B2B, the issues of “Wow” service and returning to the Core are certainly relevant in the B2B world, perhaps more so now than ever.
The past few months have been interesting for me. Perhaps because of the release of my book, perhaps because of a resetting of strategies, perhaps just because we’ve hit the tipping point on the adoption curve – whatever the reason, I’m having a lot of conversations with a lot of people about “getting it”. Something fundamental is shifting, and I think the message has finally seeped into the C suite. Not only is the message being heard, but it’s being acted upon.
Next week, I want to explore a theory by Brazilian economist Carlota Perez – Regime Transition Theory. According to Perez, there is a massive changing of the guard in business at pretty regular intervals, driven by significant changes in the market environment. These changes are often sparked by technological innovation. And it seems we’re in the middle of one of these shifts right now.
I’ll also pick up some of the threads laid down in the original BuyerSphere and see how it might tie into this shift. In the past 3 months, I’ve been talking more and more about the business buyer of tomorrow. I’ll be taking a deeper diver there as well.
But for tonight, (because it is tonight here in Germany) I really don’t want to do too much in the way of deep thinking, because the deepest I plan to go is to the bottom of the glass of Bitburger currently sitting beside me, then it’s off to bed. Auf weidersehen!
P.S. – bummed that Canada self destructed in the World’s hockey championship. Ian (Everdell, from Enquiro) and I had bought tickets to the Gold Medal game this weekend in Cologne, hoping that Canada would be there. Oh well, it will still be good hockey!
First published May 20, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider
What the hell is happening? Everything is changing, and it’s changing much too quickly. We keep hearing that the game has changed, that nothing we knew before is still applicable. Ironically, I’m seeing a different trend. I’m seeing a need to return to our roots. But it’s hard to see the truth of that through the technological maze we’re currently stumbling through.
There is a reason companies exist. Somewhere at their core, there is something that sets them apart. There was a reason, back in the misty recesses of their corporate history, why the founders thought they could actually make a buck at this. The older the company, the further it is from the original spark that gave birth to a new entity, but it still lies somewhere.
To Look Forward, Look Back
As companies struggle to adapt to the digital marketplace, they tend to look forward, which is a really scary view of things. Everything is uncharted, unknowable and uncertain. There is a sense that we don’t know what lurks around the next corner. This also makes it seem that it’s imperative to figure out what’s changed. “What,” I hear repeatedly, “is the thing I need to know about how the world is changing?” The answer, I suspect, is not so much what you need to know, but what you may have forgotten because you were distracted by the onslaught of change.
Let me get less cryptic. There is a company that sells technical innovation. It has been doing this for over a century. That original spark, way back when, was to take its understanding of its core technologies and apply them in new ways to solve customer problems. The entire company was built around that core.
Bigger was Better…
Today, the company is struggling with change. The marketplace is shifting. It seems that it must be time to grasp onto something new. At the very least, the company must be open to trying many new things, and trying them quickly. Like many manufacturers, over time those direct ties to the ultimate consumer of their products have had more and more links forcefully jammed into the supply chain, leaving the manufacturer several steps removed. Size and success used to dictate the creation of a distribution network, because physical proximity to the customer was required. Technology is sending that requirement into oblivion, industry by industry. At a minimum, it’s severely altering the importance of the middle links in the chain. Technology is allowing customers to get closer to manufacturers, and vice versa.
This is certainly a change in the way the company has done business over the past few decades, but if we look further back, the company gets back on familiar ground. Technology is bringing it closer to that original founding spark, and I have to believe that’s a good thing. This company became successful by having discussions on the shop floor with the people that were doing the job and struggling with a problem. They identified the need because they could see it. It was right in front of their nose. Innovation came from observation. The spark of success was alive and well and could be found in that small gap between the company and the customer. The 20th century need for infrastructural support stretched the gap, forcing the spark of innovation to become systemic and scalable. And in that, something important was lost.
…But it’s a More Intimate World Now.
But technology is closing the gap once again. And, in the process, as it brings the potential to relight all those sparks, it’s also bringing the opportunity to have those shop-room-floor discussions in millions of locations simultaneously. If the company looks back to the core reason it exists, and understands why that’s important to customers, it will know what to do with technology. The answer isn’t in the sea of change that’s descending on it – but from remembering why the company’s founders decided this was something worthwhile, something that would make it worth coming to work each day, and turbo-charging that purpose with technology.
I started out this series by saying that Walt Disney is one of my heroes. This is not to say that Walt was perfect, or even consistently admirable. There are plentiful rumors and tales of Walt’s anti-semitism, despotic management style, mercurial temperament or politically insensitive transgressions. The Disney Studio was far from the happiest place on earth. Disney animators unionized after promises of profit sharing on the hugely profitable Snow White vaporized and Walt subsequently scooped up all the credit for the amazing artistic and technical achievement of the studio team. Even longtime friend Ub Iwerks had a trial separation from Walt for 4 years after being constantly shoved out of the spotlight (although he subsequently returned and spent most of his remaining career with Disney). Yes, Walt had a monumental ego. Yes, he was a glory-hound. And yes, he could be a tyrant to work for.
But that’s not how we remember Walt.
We remember his as a visionary, an artistic pioneer, a maker of magic and possibly the most powerful entertainment icon of the 20th Century. His presence was so powerful that the company foundered for years after his death, trying to guide themselves with the management mantra: What Would Walt Do?
You see, the way we remember things is substantially different that the way things actually are. The same is true for people. Eulogies never inventory the deceased’s many faults (because we all have many faults). They memorialize their strengths, their gifts and their accomplishments.
Leveling and Sharpening
In order to jam things into our long term memory, we take facts and distill them into an idealized version of reality. It’s called “Leveling” and “Sharpening”. We “level” out the mediocre, the mundane and details we just don’t agree with, basically eliminating them as unnecessary “noise” from our memory. Then, we “sharpen” the extraordinary, whether it be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad. Finally, we pick one or the other. We tend not store diametrically opposed opinions of things or people. It creates too much cognitive conflict. We either like things (or people) or dislike them. If we like them, we filter out the negatives and build up the positives. If we dislike them, we do the reverse.
It’s this human tendency that I talked about before in Daniel Kahnemann’s exploration of remembered happiness vs experiential happiness. We level and flatten our lives as well, forever storing an idealized (or demonized) version of what actually happened.
So, for me, although I’m aware of Walt’s faults, that’s not really part of my “image” of the man. I focus on his accomplishments and many gifts. And as I inventory them, I am comfortable in calling him one of my heroes. Walt’s achievements were, by any measure, extraordinary. Perhaps they would be beyond the reach of someone less driven, less egotistical or less tyrannical. Perhaps, perhaps not. But that’s not really for me to judge. What is important to me is that Walt achieved them.
And there is my final lesson from Disney. It’s the extraordinary that will be remembered. It’s when we reach beyond our limits that we determine what we’ll be remembered for. The mundane details of our lives will get lost in the retelling, along with our mistakes and faults, if we strive to achieve something remarkable.
Perhaps one of the greatest rewards for any company is when they can unleash the power of their customer’s imaginations. Our imagination is a supremely powerful human gift. Imagination drives everything that is wonderful about human culture. Every achievement we’ve made, every piece of art ever created, every book written, all comes from the same wellspring – our imagination. We are never more completely, uniquely, wonderfully human than when we are imagining.
When we imagine, we create an inner reality that lives apart from the world around us. It is a world of our making, envisioned in our minds eye. But we can also use our imaginations to share the vision of another, drawing it into our inner world and ensure that it resonates with our own beliefs and views. This sharing of a vision was the special gift that Disney shared with us. From the imaginations of the Walt Disney company came spectacular visions and make believe worlds, and the door was always open to welcome us inside. Like the sidewalk chalk drawings of Mary Poppin’s Bert, these were richly imagined worlds that we could share in. We could fly and stay young forever. We could find our Prince (or Princess) and live happily ever after. We could each have our own Fairy Godmother. If we were in a darker mood, we could experience the terror of a Night on Bald Mountain, or of being transformed into a donkey on Pleasure Island.
Disney never underestimated the power of imagination. It was a corporation fuelled by imagination. But even with all the imagination that could be found within Disney, it would have all been meaningless if we did not have the imagination to share in their vision. Works of imagination are like seeds..they need to land in fertile ground to germinate and bloom. Someone without imagination can find no magic in a Beethoven symphony, a tale by Dickens or a Disney movie.
Of course, you can package entertainment in easily digestible, bit sized pieces. And certainly Disney turned out their share of mindless entertainment. It took no prodigious intellectual effort to find the meaning in a Silly Symphony cartoon short, Herbie the Love Bug or The Shaggy D.A. But Disney also asked us to flex the muscles of our imagination with works like Fantasia, Mary Poppins or even Bambi. He believed animation could be high art and he didn’t offer mental short cuts as entry points.
The more important the work of art, the more the creator asks from the audience in terms of sheer imagining horsepower. Those that underestimate that power pander to the lowest common denominator. The easy path is to rely on our animal responses. But the path that challenges us as humans raises us to a different level. It requires us to appreciate with our minds. Imagination is one of those things that pay you back for the effort you put in. If you take the easy path, you’ll be rewarded with fleeting pleasure. But if you mine the depths of your imagination, you’ll discover entire new worlds as well as new ways of looking at the world around you. When Disney was at it’s best, it offered us rich imaginary offerings that resonated at a deep and fundamental level.
Lesson #9: If imagination is your stock and trade, don’t underestimate the imagination machinery of your audience. Push the limits and both you and they will be rewarded.
In a previous post, I cataloged the many challenges of Walt Disney’s career. It seemed to everyone, including his brother Roy, that just when things were going smoothly, Walt would find a way to court disaster yet again. Adversity became a way of life for Disney studio’s. It they weren’t struggling, they (and I use the collective team advisedly – I actually mean Walt) weren’t happy.
This is not exclusive to the Disney organization. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, used to say: “As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot”. Kroc also said, “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business”. And as any good Darwinist would tell you, there’s nothing like environmental adversity to speed up the pace of evolution. Adversity brokers no maybes. Almost good enough isn’t nearly good enough to succeed when the chips are down. You either win or you lose. You either succeed or you fail. Judgment is swift and ruthlessly accurate.
What this means, in the hands of a nimble and bold leader, is an incredible opportunity to hone the edge of a successful company. Employees can rally against a common challenge, and the bigger the challenge, the faster and more effectively they’ll rally. Great accomplishments come in the face of great adversity.
I suspect Walt knew this at a fundamental level. This is probably why he assiduously avoided comfort and complacency, seeking instead to lead his company balanced on the ragged edge of disaster. He embraced challenge and courted adversity. He thrived on it.
So Lesson # 8 is this – Don’t be afraid of adversity. Find the opportunities that lie within. And, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, never let a serious crisis go to waste. Those that live their entire lives in their comfort zones live very small lives indeed. Those that flaunt boundaries and incite challenge live big and leave huge footprints.
First published April 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider
I promised MediaPost a wrap-up (from the programming chair’s perspective) of last week’s Search Insider Summit. Honestly, from the moment that Brett Brewer from Microsoft first fired up Pivot to the final moments of day three, when Jen Milks and Michelle Prieb from Ball State gave us a glimpse into the minds of Gen Next, I couldn’t have asked for anything more from my presenters. I’ve programmed a lot of these shows now and have never had as much positive response as I have from this one. Well-done, each and every one of you.
A lot has been said about the new TED-style format. I actually had a few TEDsters reach out to send best wishes prior to the summit. They also wanted feedback about the success of the show. I think it’s fair to say that the adopted TED format was a hit. Attendees loved the pace of the presentations, the varying perspectives presented — and, most of all, the conversations that were catalyzed by the content.
Here are a few of the many highlights from three days of SIS:
Brett Brewer from Microsoft Labs – putting Pivot through its paces and giving us some jaw-dropping visualizations of data and how we can work with it. There’s some very cool stuff coming out of MS labs.
Mark Watkins from Goby – driving home the point that every search is launched from a relevant personal context, and if engines could somehow understand that, it would be a huge leap forward for Web search.
Matt Kain from The Search Agency – making us all realize just how important really-good hair is — and also how, more and more, we’re launching our searches through apps that offer fingertip functionality.
Mike Moran from Converseon – causing us to rethink our whole approach to search optimization. Imagine, optimizing our Web sites for people rather than algorithms!
Chris Copeland from GroupM Search – asking us to imagine what the online world (and our media plans) might look like if there were no Google, and also scattering oblique mentions of Tiger Woods, Jesse James and “Brokeback Mountain.” There’s not enough therapy in the world to drive out some of the images that Chris brought to my mind.
Scott Brinker from ion Interactive – giving us the job description for a brand-new role within organizations, that of the marketing technologist. Scott made us realize the time is ripe for an individual comfortable in the worlds of marketing and technology, one who can bridge the chasm between them.
Yvette Lui from Facebook – showing us how the landscape of information dissemination is forever altered, and why we search marketers have to understand the new reality.
And, in the last session of the Summit, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks from Ball State University, giving us a glimpse at what the ever-demanding Gen Next wants in their online search experience. Hint: everything, aimed just at me and available instantaneously! Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t be evil!
The bar was set high, with these talks being just a sample of the many presenters who took the stage. As always, though, the conversations that happened in the hallways, during the roundtable breakouts, on the golf course, beaches and during the sunset cruise somehow managed to exceed the formal presentations. This is a show about connections, community and conversations. The best part of the Summit is, was and always will be the attendees. It won’t be easy, but we will make this show even better next time. Mark it on your calendar, because you really don’t want to miss it.
If you set out to entertain families, you have an inherent challenge in front of you. Successful family entertainment has to appeal not just to one one person, but a group of distinct individuals. In the average family, you have several demographic and psychographic divides to bridge: males and females, age groups ranging from grandpas and grandmas (or great grandpas and great grandmas) to newborns, different education levels, different areas of interest, different levels of patience, different tastes in humor, different thresholds for motion sickness. The question, if you set out to keep a family happy, is how do you possibly keep everyone happy at the same time?
Everybody Laughs..Just at Different Jokes
Walt knew this. It was the challenge that led to the birth of Disneyland. Keeping both adults and children happy in a film or TV show is relatively simple. Early on, producers of successful family entertainment, including Disney, Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbera learned the importance of a multi-level story line. At one level, popular cartoons would entertain children with colors, actions, pratfalls and simple humor. But writers also weaved references into the storyline that would be picked up on by adult viewers. These included pop culture references, double entendres and more sophisticated verbal gags. The device worked well, endearing Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck not just to one generation at a time, but several. The fact that TV and film offered not just video but also an audio track allowed the creators to use the two to appeal to two audiences at once. When the kids were being entertained by the visuals, the adults could catch the more subtle references in the dialogue.
The Secret of Happy Families
But how do you maintain this multilevel appeal when you move beyond the two dimension world of TV or film to the fully immersive experience of a visit to a Disney park? Disney wanted to create an experience where both parents and children could be entertained simultaneously. First of all, the parks had to be immaculate. While children may be more tolerant of a little dirt and crease, nothing makes a parent’s stomach turn faster than the unsavory environment of the typical amusement park. Visions of weird infections, salmonella and just genera ickyness leap immediately to mind. If parent’s were to relax in a Disney amusement park, Walk knew it had to be spotless.
In the last post, I also talked about attention to detail. This becomes more important to the experience as you get older. Your appreciate the care that has gone into the engineering of your experience. It provides a sense of value for your admission price. Kids are plugged more viscerally into the thrill, the excitement and the magic of Disney. They suspend belief easier. We adults tend to be more skeptical, which makes us appreciate the lengths that Disney is willing to go to to maintain the illusion.
A Restroom around Every Corner
But perhaps the biggest reason is that it seems Disney has gone to great lengths to anticipate the needs of a family. It’s uncanny how, just when you start thinking you might need something, it magically appears around the next corner. Washrooms, food booths, sit down restaurants, benches for resting, stroller drop off areas – all these seem to be seamlessly and conveniently integrated into the experience. Yes, a day at Disneyland or Disneyworld can be gruelling for even the most diehard fans, with plenty of highs and lows, but it seems that just when frustration seems to mount to dangerous points, relief is close at hand.
I remember one summer visit during an exceptionally busy long weekend. We were heading out of the park and our nerves were frazzled. Yet, I was told we had to make one more stop on Main Street to pick up a souvenir in one of the shops. While not thrilled at the prospect (getting the hell of there was my primary goal) the day was redeemed by an exceptionally friendly Disney employee who managed to bring the smile back to our faces. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the Disney secret of simultaneous satisfaction. Rather than the bored, vacant expression that’s commonly found on staff faces at the competition (Universal is particularly notorious for this) it seems that everyone at Disneyland is genuinely happy you’re there. Disney people are awesome, but that’s actually one of the 10 Things I learned from Disney, so more on that in a future post.
We’re Only as Happy as the Group We’re In
To wrap up this post, let me touch on some reasons why simultaneous satisfaction is so important if you’re targeting customers in groups rather than as individuals. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with an example. Restaurants are another business that typically targets groups. Think about what happens if just one person in the group has a substandard experience. You talk about it. And suddenly, even if your experience was fine, you become dissatisfied. Our opinions about joint experiences are formed as part of the group. We defer to the decision of the majority, and typically, the consensus will sink to the level of the least satisfactory experience.
The other reason why group experiences are so important can be found in the way they’re recalled. Daniel Kahneman had an interesting presentation at the last TED conference about experiential vs remembered happiness. This is one of the little illogical quirks of humans. We make future decisions based not on how happy we were experiencing the actual event, but on how happy we remember being. This is critically important when we look at the group dynamic I just described in the restaurant. If we go to Disneyland as a group, we will also tend to remember our experiences when we’re with the same group. And, as we relive our remembered experience, our happiness level will sink to the lowest level of the group. If not everyone was happy, no one will be happy.
There’s a flip side to this as well. If we were all generally happy (the little annoyances tend to fade with time) the nostalgia effect tends to boost and sharpen the level of actual experience. We remember good things as great. I’m not sure Walt knew the psychology of simultaneous satisfaction when he insisted that Disneyland would be a place where both parents and children could all be happy at the same time, but it’s worked out pretty well for him.
There are a lot of theme parks in Southern California. The competition for Disneyland is tough. Yet, for over 50 years now, the pattern has been the same. People plan their vacation around Disneyland, spending 3 to 5 days at the park, and may add a day at one of the other parks – Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. If you looked at the size of the theme park pie and the slice that Disney carves off, the imbalance would be remarkable. Why does Disney suck up over 80 cents of every theme park dollar spent in the region?
It’s not the rides. Universal’s rides are probably more technically impressive. Magic Mountain and Knott’s certainly has more thrilling rides. Disney’s biggest coaster, California Screamin’, is a rather mild ride for a coaster fanatic (which I am).
I believe there are several reasons, and I’ll try to deal with them in individual posts. Today, I want to talk about attention to detail.
The Hotchkiss Detail Obsessive Guide to Disneyland
My family has been to Disneyland at least 6 times. People hate visiting the park with us because we have routines (others are less kind and call them rituals, or cult-like behavior) that have to be adhered to. It’s important which side of the train station you enter onto Main Street on. And you don’t rush past the circle at the top of the street. You spend a few minutes lingering and drinking in the atmosphere. You either stroll (never rush) down main street or take the horse drawn tram. You may stop at the Blue Ribbon Bakery for a coffee. You make your way to the Partners statue at the center of the park for a few minutes with Walt and Mickey and while you’re there, pay particular attention to the flowers planted around them. Take note, because they may be completely different tomorrow. From the center in front of the Castle, we then veer to the left, usually ambling through Adventureland and head towards New Orleans Square because the first ride has to be (this is non-negotiable) Pirates of the Caribbean.
Pirates is one of our favorite rides, earning it’s place as a Hotchkiss Tradition. And it’s not because it’s thrilling (it’s not) or technically amazing (although it may have been with the ride debuted in 1967). It’s because the attention to detail on this ride is simply amazing. It’s the last ride that Walt himself personally oversaw the design of. Everything has been thought through, down to the smallest scar, gold doubloon or cobweb. And that is the Disney difference. You won’t find that fanatic attention to detail in Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. It’s a Disney hallmark.
It’s What You Do Between the Rides that Counts
Disney knows that in between the momentary jolts of adrenaline, it’s the details that build an experience worthy of a 3 or 4 day investment of your family’s time. Disneyland has this down in spades. Each square foot is jammed with amazing detail, carefully crafted and maintained to add to the experience. And I’m not even talking the obscure Disney-mania touches like Hidden Mickies. I’m talking about carefully planned sight lines, well placed benches, meticulously groomed greenery and the architectural detail on buildings, to say nothing of the imagination fuelling touches found in rides like Splash Mountain, Peter Pan, the Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones. The competition cut corners. Walt absolutely forbid that in the making of Disneyland.
The post-Walt Disney Parks have struggled with this. We’ve been going to Disneyland for over 20 years now, and the overall look of the park hasn’t changed much. Toontown was added and a few new rides have debuted, but 50 years of planning and development have created an almost perfect entertainment experience. Major overhauls aren’t needed. The same can’t be said for Disney’s California Adventure. Disney is currently overhauling huge sections of the park because the same detailed magic was missing. Visitors treat California Adventure more like a typical theme park, rushing from major attraction to major attraction without lingering to enjoy the experience on the way. Of all the rides in California Adventure, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is one of the few engineered to the same standards of detail that you’ll find in the earlier rides. But this legacy of detail isn’t found so much in the rides, but rather the transition zones between the rides. It’s here where the acid test of detail is really found. It’s detail that keeps crowds amused while they’re waiting in line. It’s detail that keeps them from feeling like cattle, shunted from one chute to the next.
Most Skip the Details, Disney Doesn’t
So what’s the takeaway? Disney’s eye for detail came from an absolute certainty about what his visitor’s wanted and an iron-willed determination to deliver that without any compromise. Every last element of the visitor experience was considered and planned for. Every detail you see in Disneyland had a purpose – to make the visitor happy.
I think too many corporations rush past the details when it comes to the experiences of their customers. It’s because details take time. They’re hard work. You can get lost in a forest of detail. And obsessing over detail just doesn’t seem that profitable. In fact, if you get lost in the wrong details, it can be sure death for a corporation. But yet, details make the difference for Disney. Why? How does Disney avoid the trap of paying attention to the wrong details? They know which details are important because they take the time to understand what is important to their visitors. They spend a lot of time thinking about how visitors perceive and interact with those details. This is a legacy from Walt. It comes from a leader that obsesses about details.
Apple and the User Experience: A Lesson Learned
Another example of attention to detail is Apple. They obsess about the user experience. I recently watched someone demo their new iPad. You know what was one of the first things he showed me? How the iPad mimicked the look of turning an actual physical page in a book. Depending on where you place your finger on the page, the page itself curls up appropriately. It’s a silly little detail, but it was important in creating a Wow experience for this new owner. And it’s something that stood out to me as one reason why, eventually, I have to get an iPad. It’s a feature that probably took an absolutely silly number of hours of programming to implement but it was important to Apple because it was important to users.
Detail can differentiate you from the competition. It adds a premium to the value you provide. It tells the customer that you value them as users (or visitors), not just as another wallet to be emptied.
First published April 8, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider
Today you sit there, an audience spread across the digital marketing landscape, scraping together a few precious moments on your daily calendar to read this column. Next week I hope you’ll all be basking in the sunshine of Captiva Island, Fla., your cranium brimming over with tidbits and brain-bombs about search and the industry we toil in. The Google-gods willing and major algorithmic overhauls aside, we can all get away from the daily grind long enough to step back and take a look at where this whole thing might be going.
A Summit Three Years in the Making
I’ve been fortunate to work with MediaPost to help program the Search Insider Summit for the past five shows (I think, the brain’s a little numb at this point). Over time we’ve refined and tweaked to the point where we had a pretty smooth-running operation. This time, however, I decided to change all that. I’ve never been a particularly loyal adherent to the maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe in mixing stuff up on a pretty regular basis. In this case, the catalyst for change was a chance to attend the TEDActive conference this spring.
I loved how TED managed to lodge particularly toothsome concepts in my brain (at a breathlessly unrelenting pace, to be honest) and then throw me loose amongst the TED-sters (yes, it is a little cult-like) to try to digest in my limited downtime.
The resulting conversations were nothing short of amazing. The first day at lunch, I was sharing a picnic basket with five other strangers and eavesdropping on a conversation happening beside me. The topic? The role of mirror neurons in determining the vicarious enjoyment on thrill rides at an amusement park. I didn’t catch names at first, but one speaker owned an amusement part in New Jersey, and the other was a professor of neuroscience at UC Irvine.
This past week, as I was zipping past TV channels, I saw a familiar face. There was my neuroscience prof! He was appearing as himself on the crime drama “Criminal Minds.” He just happens to be one Dr. James Fallon, a world-renowned expert on the psychology and neurology of psychopaths! Now, where else could you just happen on a conversation like that?
The Convergence of Conversations
That was the spirit I wanted to create at Captiva (minus the psychopathic stuff). Like TED, we have an atmosphere that invites conversations. The informal and intimate atmosphere is conducive to brainstorming. And this time, I wanted to borrow from the TED concept and transition what happens up on stage to be more forward-looking and strategic in nature. I wanted to give more people a chance to share their thoughts, so I borrowed the TED format of a mix of 18-minute and five-minute (TED actually limits to three-minutes) talks. Plus, we retained unique Search Insider traditions like our roundtable break-out sessions.
The challenge I threw at presenters was to crystal-ball the question: Where is search going from here? I divided the question into five parts: the core technology, the user experience, the marketing strategies, the search marketing industry and the data and tools. Then, with the help of our advisory board (Gian Fulgoni – Comscore, John Nicoletti – Google, Stefan Weitz – Microsoft, Chris Copeland – GroupM and Frank Lee – The Search Agency) we created a 3-day agenda from the pitches we received. It’s promising to be a fascinating summit. And for good measure, we’re bringing Ball State University back to re-envision Google through Gen-Next eyes.
It was a little hairy, taking a tried-and-true format and reinventing it, but I think you’ll be pleased with the results. See you soon in Captiva!
How many companies today are run by caretakers? How many of the Fortune 500 are run by CEO’s who are really just thinly disguised accountants?
The Leader of a company determines the heart and soul of that company. If you run the company by your profit and loss statements, you’ll end up with a fiscally responsible corporation that will slowly screw itself into the ground. If you have a reckless leader, you’ll flame and burn in spectacular style. Somewhere in between the extremes is where you have to live
Walt Disney was not overly concerned by fiscal responsibility. That was Roy, his brother’s job. Walt drove the company by embracing risk. Roy lost his hair by trying to balance Walt’s enthusiasm.
Risk is the fuel that drives the future. And risk is risk. It can only be calculated up to a certain point. After that, you have to close your eyes and jump. Walt jumped again, and again, and again, each with spectacular style.
1923 – Walt moved to Hollywood from Kansas City with a short film called Alice’s Wonderland that he hoped would net him a distribution contract. The film was pretty much all Walt had. He managed to secure a contract and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for 4 years. And just when he looked like he had a winner, in a new cartoon character called Oswald the Rabbit, the distributor stole both the rights and the animators, shutting Walt out.
1928 – After losing Oswald, Walt started from scratch with Mickey Mouse. But he only created two cartoons with the new character before deciding to risk it all with the first sound cartoon. The struggling studio dumped everything they had into the cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Luckily, Walt’s gamble paid off. Mickey was a hit.
1937 – Building on the success of Steamboat Willie, Disney turned out a series of profitable Mickey Mouse cartoons, and added the Silly Symphony series, netting himself a number of Academy Awards in the process for pushing the boundaries of animation technology and art. but Walt soon found a new dream worthy of risk – the first full length animated movie. It what was quickly becoming predictable behaviour for Walt, he risked all their profits from the animated shorts on Snow White. And, as before, it was a phenomenal success, becoming the highest grossing movie until Gone with the Wind bumped it from it’s perch.
In it’s following releases, Disney struggled with finding the right balance between budget and profitability. The war restricted access to foreign markets so profits relied on domestic audiences. Walt continued to push the envelope of what was possible with animation in Disney’s next two releases, Pinocchio and Fantasia. This came at a cost – a budget that meant these films didn’t break even until decades after their debut (thanks to eventual release on VHS and DVD). Walt continually tried to find the right balance between artistic accomplishment and profitability, eventually finding a happy middle ground with classics like Bambi, Cinderella and Mary Poppins (another technical and artistic milestone). It’s amazing to consider how quickly animation progressed, from the primitiveness of Steamboat Willie to the polished art of Show White in just 9 short years.
In the interim Walt also explored TV and live action features, finding significant success in both. Finally, it seemed, Disney had found the groove that led to sustained profitability. Almost any other leader would cling to this groove for dear life, building up the bank account and enjoying the rewards that come with success. Not Walt.
1955 – Walt got restless when he stayed in one place too long. he became bored with incremental improvement, no matter how profitable it proved to be. Walt thrived on risk and new, monumental challenges. And so, he looked for a new one. Walt was 54 years old and had been running Disney, in one form or another, for 35 years. By any measure you might want to apply, he was successful. And he risked all this, everything, on a new dream – an entertainment park. Disneyland represented Walt’s biggest roll of the dice yet, because he had everything to lose.
This restlessness and desire to push the limits epitomized the Disney company for the first 45 years of its history. Walt and the company were really one and the same. His leadership determined the soul of the company. When he died of lung cancer at the age of 66, he left a hole in the heart of Disney that took years to mend (and some might say Walt was never successfully replaced). Never let it be said that one person does not determine the direction of a huge corporation. Disney was testament to the fact that a single person’s vision and ideals can shape and guide a company for decades. This is not the job for a caretaker or bean counter. This is a job for someone who can grasp the impossible and shape the future.
I’ve just spent 16 hours on various airplanes, so the mental processes are not the clearest, but I promised myself I’d do a blog post before succumbing to the pharmacological effects of mixing Ambien and German beer.
Out of My Gord 