Joel was emboldened by his ideas, and his passion galvanized voters. I, on the other hand, just thought it would be cool to run for an elected office. After all, I was recruited. I didn't seek the office, and I told the party up front that my studies and other leadership responsibilities had to come first.
Well, my defeat was embarrassing, and it was my own fault. The experience taught me an important lesson. No matter what organization I represented or what professional avenue I pursued in the future, all my efforts had to be powered by a deep passion and a set of beliefs that went well beyond my own personal benefit. To move others, you have to speak beyond yourself. Boldly putting yourself out there was one thing, and a good thing, but that wasn't enough. There was a difference between getting attention and getting attention for your desire to change the world. Congratulations, Joel, I hear you did a great job. The better man clearly won in that race.
Be a Person of Content: Have a Unique Point of View
Being interesting isn't just about learning how to become a good conversationalist. Don't get me wrong, that is important, but you need a well-thought-out point of view. I honestly hope from now on you'll be a newspaper-reading maniac ready to engage the topics of the day with anyone you meet. But being interesting and having content are very different. The former involves talking ntelligently about politics, sports, travel, science, or whatever you'll need as a ticket of admission to any conversation. Content involves a much more specialized form of knowledge. It's knowing what you have that most others do not. It's your differentiation. It's your expertise. It's the message that will make your brand unique, attracting others to become a part of your network.
Being known is just notoriety. But being known for something is entirely different. That's respect. You have to believe in something, as Joel Ratner did, for people to believe in you.
Once I learned my lesson, I wasn't going to repeat it. I was not just going to be another generalist. I was going to have a unique point of view, an expertise. My first job out of college at Imperial Chemical Industries, I mastered the ins and outs of Total Quality Management. Later, when I worked at Deloitte, reengineering was my hook. At Starwood, I pushed for direct marketing. Later, I mastered interactive marketing. Today, I've wrapped all my experiences into a set of beliefs around the radically changing dynamics of marketing overall and its evolution toward relationship marketing: moving marketing dollars closer to sales.
In every job and at every stage in my career, I had some expertise, some content that differentiated me from others and made me unique, made me more valuable in my relationships with others and the company I worked for. It created precious opportunities for me to gain credibility and visibility in my field. Content is a cause, an idea, trend, or skill—the unique subject matter on which you are the authority.
What will set you apart from everybody else is the relentlessness you bring to learning and presenting and selling your content. Take, for example, my experience when I was hired as CEO of YaYa. The company's board was aware of how I had used reengineering to heighten the market's perception of Deloitte, and how, at Starwood, the idea of changing the way the hospitality industry branded itself generated a wave of publicity. They knew that the ability to capture a buzz-worthy message and get it into the crowded marketplace of ideas would prove crucial for a new company whose product was totally untested. This seemed right for me. I was a "market maker": someone who could create excitement and belief around YaYa's point of view. The problem was coming up with the credible and unique point of view that people were ready to buy. That was our challenge, or the company would fail.
One of our first goals when I came to YaYa was to find a hook that could transform the company's current lack of sales while also generating broader intrigue in the marketplace, and really create a market. I started, as I always do, by immersing myself in the subject. I became a voracious reader and would spend hours late at night checking out a variety of articles, analyst reports, books, and Web sites. I talked to CEOs, journalists, and consultants who specialized in the interactive advertising industry, games industry, and training world.
This stage can be quite frustrating. There's a huge learning curve to get up to speed. Suddenly you're confronted with a miasma of numbers, data points, differing opinions, and a boatload of disparate new information. On some occasions, as was the case with TQM and reengineering, you can acquire content by simply appropriating another person's innovative ideas and become a leader in distributing and applying those ideas. On other occasions, as with YaYa, we had to develop the content from scratch. That meant taking all the disparate dots of information and connecting them in a way others had not.
There should be no mystique around dot connecting among those who are continually at the forefront of business innovation. Remember those wise words of Mark McCormack in his book What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business Schooclass="underline" "Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon."
As my immersion process continued, I became more and more frustrated that the marketing and training field was not taking advantage of the two powerful new mediums that YaYa was based on—the Internet and video games. As I learned more about marketing and training online, I drew analogies to other new mediums that changed the landscape. I reminded marketers that when we first transitioned from radio to television, all we did was put a camera in front of a radio announcer and call it advertising. It took a while to settle into the medium and its new rules. Here again, with the Internet, we were applying old models to a new environment. The Net was all about interactivity and community building, where concepts or just jokes were spread around the world in moments. And yet marketers were just taking old advertising ideas, like billboards and bumper stickers, and putting them online in the form of banner ads. That those ads weren't successful should have come as no surprise. Training had a similar argument. Would you rather engage in learning in a fun interactive environment or the traditional and stale forms of training that employees were being force-fed today? Which would be more effective?
Then you had the games world in general. The startling numbers suggested an untapped phenomenon. In 1999, games revenues surpassed movie box-office revenues. And the demographic of online gamers was changing radically as content was branching out to cater to adults and women. The average age of online gamers is now thirty-five, 49 percent of whom are women. I also learned of a German company that developed a cool turkey-shoot game for Johnnie Walker that got so many downloads, the prime minister commented that the game had become a drain on national productivity. Still, no one thought of games as anything but niche entertainment.
With the information at hand, I now had to connect the dots and find that new wagon. This is actually the fun part. You start in a fantasy world with no limitations or constraints. Instead of bashing my head against the wall trying harder and harder to solve a specific problem, I like to ask the question: "If I could use some magical potion in this situation, what could I do with all this new information?" Such fantasizing doesn't have to be, and often shouldn't be, a solitary endeavor. I get other interested parties— employees, colleagues, and insiders—to help me create wild scenarios and ask seemingly absurd questions. I did this with a small group, and we threw out each and every fantastical idea that came to us. By fantasizing, using the magic potion, and including a group of people to riff without rules, we were able to use our creativity to find a way forward.