#44: Paralyzed by perfection, lessons the second time, a plea for men in business, and who will we trust?
Happy Saturday, friends.
The next two weeks is what I am calling the 2017 Boston Marketing Homecoming Bonanza. About a million events, all about marketing, all happening in the Hub:
Hypergrowth, INBOUND, Boston Content*, MarTech Boston, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, and TIE StartupCon.
Phew.
*Join me Tuesday night at this Boston Content event during INBOUND!
This is me:
In this edition (#44!) of the World's Best Newsletter
1. If Bostonians loved other institutions
2. Men in business, stop this.
3. Paralyzed by perfection
4. Lessons the second time around
5. Who will we trust in 2018? (New article!)
6. The best Powerpoint advice, ever
7. Turning one star into one hell of an ad
Let's go!
1. If Bostonians loved other institutions...
...the way that they love their local sports franchises.
Other day I went over to the Museum of Science.
— How was it?
Well it was the f*cking Museum of Science, so how the f*ck do you think it was?
It was superlative. It was a testament to our region’s proud tradition of rational inquiry.
(They toast.)
I love this.
2. MEN IN BUSINESS, STOP THIS.
A friend of mine works at John Deere as an engineer. She told me over lunch recently about a situation in which she has been excluded from one-on-one lunch meetings with a male executive because... sigh... he didn't feel it was appropriate to dine alone with a woman. So he made her bring a male colleague to the meal.
In this example from an Austin city official, this d-bag:
"canceled regular lunch meetings with the [female] consultant, explaining to her that 'I’ve been told it is not appropriate for a married man to have lunch with a single lady.'"
(Turns out Romeo was having marital problems with his wife, go figure.)
The article makes an eloquent point with:
"The implication there is that women are temptresses by nature and/or men are just giant floating balls of hormones and urges that can easily drift outside the bounds of marital fidelity toward any passing whiff of a woman’s scent.
Then there’s the Rick Ross school of thought, which holds that taking on female protégées is a bad idea, because it’s nearly impossible not to have sex with them.
Women miss out on important mentoring and bonding opportunities when the men in charge see them as latent sex threats instead of regular employees with admirable skills and leadership potential."
Knock. It. Off. Stop it. How ridiculous are you.
3. Paralyzed by perfection - just do it.
This is advice that we can all use from the book Art & Fear:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on.
Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
Perfection is terrifying. When we have writers block, or we’ve hit a wall, it comes from this fear of creating something imperfect. Just do it. Start.
Stop wasting your time thinking about the perfect things you’ll make, and start making the damn things.
Damnit.
4. Lessons the second time around
I found this interview with Marketo co-founder Jon Miller FASCINATING.
He's on to his second startup, ABM platform Engagio (client), and any entrepreneur and marketer can relate to the POV he shares in this interview.
So many insightful quotes to share:
"Perhaps the most important thing that we’re doing the same is we identified a great market.
Some people give me credit for creating marketing automation or creating this idea of account based marketing. That’s not true. What I did is I saw something that was existing, and then I helped to amplify it.
The key in both cases when I saw that there’s a good opportunity for a company was a category that had existing buyers with existing competitors, but the competition wasn’t so big and so strong that we couldn’t come in and ultimately win by executing well.
Those are the markets that I like, because you don’t have to do all the category creation. You can instead do this category definition and bring that to you."
"At Marketo, we built a great product and ultimately led to a really good outcome, but I don’t believe that we built a great company.
Patrick Lencioni, I’m a big fan of his writing and his work. He talks about companies that are smart and companies that are healthy. I truly believe, now on my second time, that a healthy company with average smarts will beat a super smart company with only average health."
"There’s a reason why so many people check their phones and bring their laptops to meetings. Most meetings suck, right? We work really hard at teaching our company how to have good meetings. The number one thing that makes the meeting good is debate.
You want that debate and conflict going because you’re going to get a good decision on the other side.""Another thing I’m doing differently is in how I’m thinking about the market.
The reality is, in Marketo, it was a hypercompetitive world. It was ugly at Marketo with our competition, especially with Eloqua going at it, if you will, both in the field, in marketing.
I’m doing it very differently here. We are taking partnerships with almost every company on this map if possible for the goal of building the category together, which has been great. That’s why account based everything has taken off so quickly because you have companies collaborating around it. Frankly, it’s just nicer. There’s no reason to be nasty out there."
Add the full article to your reading list.
5. Who will we trust in 2018?
My latest article is hopefully an important reminder for all marketers, as our buyers contend with a junction of who to trust, and where to get information today.
Take a read - and let me know what you think!
6. The best Powerpoint advice, ever.
Doug Fox! Thank you for submitting this article this week.
Straightforward, practical, and full of truthiness. This is some of the BEST presentation advice I've seen. Tips like:
- Tell one story at a time
- Take everything away until you have just the essential left
- The slides are not the presentation, you are.
Oooooh. That was deep.
7. Turning one star into one hell of an ad.
Mark Feldman! Thank you for submitting this post!
A Utah ski resort turned a 1 star review into an excellent ad. Check it out.
This reminds me of a webinar I hosted with the incomparable Doug Kessler, "Insane Honesty in B2B Marketing."
Insane Honesty is about putting your WORST foot forward in your marketing – actively seeking out your weakest points and making them the hero of your story. It’s about transparency, practicality, realism and real (instead of phony) empathy.
All of that.
See you soon, marketing friends.
Tell a friend about this newsletter and gain 1000 karma points! Tweet or post to LinkedIn.
Best,
Katie
PS: New event to add to your calendar: TiE Startup Con, October 6th, Boston
Scott Brinker, Janet Comenos, Michael Troiano, Anita Brearton, Jeff Eckman and I will be sharing six diverse experiences in growth at Hynes Convention Center, Friday, Oct 6th TiE StartupCon.
Save 15% with discount code ECKMAN.