Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (3 page)

It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the braindead stuff.

We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish.

Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?

And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless.

And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”)

The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer.

Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see
something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.

And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base.

I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking.

Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years.

Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company … because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig. …” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems.

What a waste.

Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

I just got a note from Nathan, who asks,

I recently realized that I want to be a marketer. So now with a résumé that includes “Research Analyst” for an economics professor, “Finance Director” for a Nevada governor candidate, and a degree in physics from Harvard, I find myself applying for jobs in marketing. Ultimately, I would like to be VP of Product Development or perhaps CEO at a new company (I love
bringing remarkable ideas to fruition), and I have suddenly realized marketing, not finance, is the way to go for me. And, as I search for jobs and try to find an entry point for my newfound path, I have a few questions:

1. Where do I start? Most of what I read online seems to say I should have had a marketing internship in college. Can I get an Assistant Brand Manager position with no experience?
   
2. Do you have company suggestions? Which companies get that some of the millions they are spending on TV ads could be better spent improving their products/services?
   
3. Which books should form the backbone of my marketing education?
   

My answer is easy to write, harder to implement. In my experience, the single best way to become a marketer is to market. And since marketing isn’t expensive any longer (it takes more guts than money), there’s no need to work for Procter & Gamble. None. In the old days, you could argue that you needed to apprentice with an expert and that you needed access to millions (or billions) to spend. No longer.

So, start your own gig. Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc. Who knows more about marketing—Scoble or some mid-level marketing guy in Redmond?

You don’t need a lot of time or a lot of money. You can start with six hours every weekend. Over time, if (and when) you get good at it, take on clients. Paying clients. Folks that need brilliant marketers will beat down the door to get at you. After a while, you may decide you like that life. Or, more likely, you’ll decide you’d rather be your own client.

People who want to become great fishermen don’t go to work on a salmon trawler. And people who want to become marketers ought to just start marketing.

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful … and you blink and take a step back.

That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck are nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

People spend money (and make money) and join organizations and invest time and enormous energy to solve this problem. Every day.

I’m working today. In fact, if I’m conscious, I’m working. That’s largely because it doesn’t seem like “work” today. I’d write this blog even if no one read it.

More and more people are lucky enough to have a gig like mine—work you’d do even if you didn’t have to, even if you didn’t get paid to do it. This is a bigger idea than it seems, because it changes the posture of what you do. Different motivations ought to lead to different results.

My version goes like this: If I’m doing this for fun (and I am), then I might as well be doing something remarkable/great/worth doing. Otherwise, why bother?

Here’s something I wrote in 2003, shortly before
Purple Cow
came out. I reference it a lot; I guess I think it’s good:

Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In
Fast Food Nation
, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year-career at a slaughterhouse. Now that’s hard work.

The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.

Those days are long gone. Most of us don’t use our bodies as a replacement for a machine—unless we’re paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting
that we’re likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler. So do you still think that you work hard?

You could argue, “Hey, I work weekends and pull all-nighters. I start early and stay late. I’m always on, always connected with a BlackBerry. The FedEx guy knows which hotel to visit when I’m on vacation.” Sorry. Even if you’re a workaholic, you’re not working very hard at all.

Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

Richard Branson doesn’t work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells—and helped the company trounce Kmart—probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you, either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the
easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.

Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they’ve ever had. They’re working harder than ever—mentally—and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.

The big insight: the riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5
P.M.
) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.

As a young, first-year student at the Stanford MBA program (most of the other 300 students had wasted a few years working at a bank, but he came straight from undergrad), Chip Conley picked out four other students—strangers to him and to each other—and invited them to a weekly brainstorming session. He explained to us that once a week we’d meet for four hours and brainstorm business plans and entrepreneurial ventures.

A year later, we had compiled more than 500 great ideas and countless lousy ones, and we had figured out how to think about the structure of a business. I think the five of us would all agree we learned more in that room in the anthropology department than we did in the classes we were paying for.

The extraordinary thing about Chip’s little bit of initiative in setting up the group is how rare it is. Successful people have this in common. It’s not the giant breakthroughs, it’s the willingness to take little chances.

Chip has gone on to be the most successful of our team, running one of the largest independent hotel chains in California. We had a deal: I agreed not to open hotels; he agreed not to write books. He’s written a book [update: now it’s a few], and they’re worth checking out.

Even if you don’t have an anthropology department nearby, there’s no doubt that there’s some small piece of initiative you can grab ahold of tomorrow.

Padmanabhan wrote me a nice note today, asking why I so freely give away ideas. (It was nice because he thought some of the ideas were actually good ones.)

I responded that ideas are easy; doing stuff is hard.

My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create; at least it does for me.

History is littered with inventors who had “great” ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with doers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.

So, if you’ve got ideas, let them go. They’re probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.

Golf (or maybe tennis) has the true myth of the sweet spot. That special part of the club (racket) that magically makes the ball go farther and straighter.

There’s a sweet spot in promotion and PR as well. Let me give you a few examples from the book world to get us started:

Peter Drucker was in the sweet spot for the
Harvard Business Review
. His background, reputation, and style of writing contributed to his
writing more pieces for them than anyone else. (My stuff, on the other hand, is blacklisted by the
HBR
. They won’t even consider my work.)

If you want to get reviewed by the
New York Times Book Review
, don’t even consider self-publishing. Don’t write a how-to book. Don’t write something particularly funny, either. But it sure helps to be published by Knopf. Literary fiction by respected writers published by Knopf is the sweet spot (history comes in a close second).