There are new bedfellows in the world of communications.

I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing.

Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing:

People know this stuff. Let them uncover it.

I co-facilitated workshops on creating a communications plan for a leadership summit of some 200 people. The context of this group is one of tackling an enormous, multi-year endeavor with a dizzying landscape of stakeholders – deep government involvement, private industry engagement, for- and non-profit group alignment, complex technology requirements, countless values competing, and all within an industry in the midst of very real disruption.

In a world where the web is social (thus communications to inspire action and change is all about building trust) the summit was a powerful reminder that much of what we’re dealing with is actually common sense. Appealing to the audience’s intuition of developing relationships and the kind of leadership acumen it takes to succeed in today’s interconnected world was surprisingly straight-forward.

Ask a few questions, get a few folks to share an experience or two and you’re on you’re way to inspiring a shared learning moment. Much more effective than imposing something outside of their context.

This is also how we built our template for a communications plan: we let the members of the audience who’ve done this work before share their best practices. Then we continued to share the peer-developed plan template and best practices throughout the day. I think it was much more effective than if we had stood up there and tried to decree something.

When I guest lectured a few days later, I did the exact opposite. I made assumptions about the audience from past experiences in similar settings. Then I promptly preached.

About a third of the way through, when I sensed some disengagement, it occurred to me that I never polled the audience to better understand their level of understanding (head slap). And it was difficult to recover.

Why didn’t I apply what I know to be true and effective for the guest lecture engagement, especially after I saw it work so well in the workshop setting a few days before? Dunno. I had some new speaker-support stuff that I was excited to show. Maybe that exuberance (hubris?) led me astray. But the difference was clear.

Surround yourself with smart people who don’t do exactly what you do.

I co-facilitated the workshops with Judah Thornewill. A brilliant guy (and fellow creative-mind, frustrated musician). He’s one of those rare combinations of researcher and professional-world doer who has some exciting things to offer in the domain of social capital. He’s developed a method for measuring social capital and collaboration, and he’ll doubtless set the world on fire with his new entrepreneurial effort. His time is now, I’m convinced.

The time is clearly upon us to better understand social capital now that the way we connect and communicate is social. There’s plenty of work on this subject already in the milieu. Chapters are dedicated in just about every leadership book. And there are leaders and their books that focus on the topic exclusively like Bowling Alone, The Hidden Power of Social Networks, The Whuffle Factor, and Connected to name a few (Nicholas Christakis actually spoke earlier at the event – a brilliant mind who’s time has also obviously come).

As communicators, we need to understand how to intervene in the construction of social networks like never before. This is not a branding, marketing, or communications issue. It’s a systems thinking issue. It’s a leadership issue. If marketing people are able to adapt to our new-world reality, people like Judah and Nicholas will be key to our understanding of this new landscape.

Take market segmentation as an easy example. It’s almost intuitive that our social networks affect behavior. But Judah and Nicholas convincingly demonstrate that the way a network is constructed truly matters. This, without hyperbole, redefines market segmentation. It presents a much more complex challenge than what we believe to be true about distinctiveness, homogeneity, response to market stimulus, and reach-ability.

It so happens that my new friend Judah has a market segmentation background. He’s combining this experience with his work on measuring social networks and collaboration effectiveness. He’s the perfect example of the kinds of minds that need to lead marketing and communications professionals today. He broadened my thinking, to be sure.

Judah also demonstrated the kind of leadership style that is called for in our social times during our facilitation: he knew when to pull back, support, and jump in to comment or get us back on track at just the right time. Our workshops were better for it. He kept me from rolling too fast downhill as I’m sometimes apt to do.

The guest lecture? I went it alone. Lectured. Spoke. Presented. I rarely connected and too infrequently looked for the peers in the group to help create a shared sense of learning. I don’t think it was a bad experience overall, but it wasn’t great.

Now that our world is connected and social, the degree to which we can communicate effectively within it depends on understanding its social constructs. Collaboration rules. How we build and intervene in networks is paramount.

And winging it alone simply won’t cut it.

Lesson learned: Facilitate learning. And do it with great people.

The media, from my layman perspective of Chomsky and Herman’s central point, is a business. Like any business, it operates to generate a profit. Anything that acts against that fundamental premise isn’t tolerated within its system. Like an ecosystem that works to destroy a threatening virus, stories that dissent against the media’s main drivers of profit (thus the elite that gain the most from its prosperity) simply aren’t tolerated.

Chomsky and Herman are saying that it’s simply a systems issue with the media: resources are funneled toward their prime purpose. It creates a set of filters that allow or disallow stories to be told. Again, disagree with their findings. But the idea that there isn’t a backroom group of people that make decisions based on political agendas is helpful when looking at governing systems in general.

Like any enterprise, business schools are governed by a system. We can split hairs about the exact nature of their system, but one thing is certain. For many business schools, rankings help define it.

Rankings create a set of criteria that business schools must pay attention to. They play an influential role in determining where a b-school’s scarce resources are funneled. I’ve played the rankings game as a marketing professional for a business school and I have no ax to grind with the process. I remain convinced that activities related to garnering a ranking aren’t altogether antithetical to an educational mission. Especially in a business school, where things like understanding customer needs, returning fair value, and demonstrating measurable results are taught as keystones for successful enterprise management.

But I’ve come to wonder about one very important ranking criteria, and if it helps define a system that is opposed to empowering success among students who wish to exit as entrepreneurs or free agents: Placement and salary data.

To one degree or another, all major b-school rankings factor exiting placement and salary data in their evaluations. For Forbes, it’s just about everything. For Business Week, it’s about 10% of the calculation. (Entrepreneur magazine is one obvious exception.)

So it reasonably follows that business schools place a strong emphasis on post-graduation placement of their students. Without a definable job, there’s no salary data. And the higher the average salary, the higher the ranking.

You could argue that a career services function is also a response to what most students want from their school in the first place. Which is true. But if serving students is the pure motivation behind these staffed services, you’d see equally resourced advice centers for going it on your own.

Which you don’t. Even Babson – the gold standard for entrepreneurship education – doesn’t seem to offer much beyond the typical career services. I could certainly be wrong, but research during my tenure as a marketing professional for a b-school didn’t turn up much differentiation.

I’d argue that up and down the decision chain, business schools allocate resources, design degrees, craft curriculum, and hire faculty and staff in service to helping their graduates get jobs. Measurable and definitive, high-paying J-O-B-S’s. And in my experience, rare is the person within the b-school halls forthcoming with advice to not be tempted by a steady paycheck. To start your own venture. To break out on your own and work as a free agent.

So I wonder to what degree a b-school’s system—in no small part defined by rankings—contributes to their inability to teach entrepreneurship. Is this important in the larger dialog? Is it as much, more, less a factor than Saras D. Sarasvathy’s work on the inherent difficulties in delivering codified knowledge about something as contextual as entrepreneurship? More than the specific topics on which they focus? The inability of left-brain directed institutions to embrace the entrepreneur’s most critical strength: creativity?

I’ve shot a few emails out to some folks involved in this world to chime in—I hope we hear from them. What do you think?

She’s starting her own organization now. The natural progression from member to leader to creator. It isn’t easy. She’ll be the first to tell you.

To make room for her new pursuits she had to quit a board with a cause she believes in and a president she admires. It was going to be hard, something she wasn’t looking forward to.

So how does someone so involved, so committed, quit?

She committed – gave her word – to the president that she would start the organization she’s working on. And that by so doing actually be able to help his organization more sustainably by feeding him new young leaders with an understanding of community involvement.

A great learning moment for me. Quit something by continuing to add value beyond your commitment. Quit something by remaining dedicated to the purpose – ensure it isn’t a fleeting interest.

You could see Mos Def hesitate at first. A self-censored moment where he wondered if a transparent answer would somehow mitigate the fantasy we put around artists in the entertainment industry – the necessary fantasy for him and those like him to sell records and fill concert halls. But he came through, mos def:

To quote my good friend Malik Sayeed*, he said ‘Inspiration is for amateurs’… to quote Octavia Butler, she said: ‘Habit is more reliable than talent.”

A few days after the airing, Seth Godin posted some random rules for creating ideas worth spreading. One of them:

Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.”

Marketing requires acumen. The creative mind works with a process. People who change their life after layoffs worked hard to get there. Creating content requires a discipline. Businesses may be inspired, but they fail to grow if they rely on passion.

Inspiration? It’s the spark. Transforming your inspired idea into action? Seems to me that’s the work of professionals.

________

* I’m actually not sure who he was talking about. You can make your own assumptions with a Google search, like I did.

As a newly self-employed guy, I very much appreciate blogs that catalog the trials of the free agent. To name a few: Steven DeMaio, Erik Proulx and recently (I hope)Chris Spagnuolo. I guess this is my contribution to some already-great thinking out there, for whatever it’s worth.

Oh – and Happy Indian Republic Day!

Everybody looses things once gained. It can be terribly depressing and deflating.

Your books are a mess despite once having the perfect accounting routine and system. You can’t run five miles anymore even though you once ran a half marathon. You used to network regularly but have been out of the scene for so long you can’t imagine going back to a room full of strangers. You lost sight of your kids’ soccer games this summer after getting to all of them last season.

Happens to all of us. As sure as we’ve all sent a regrettable email, open the refrigerator again, skim stuff we should read.

Or as sure as we’ve all had to spend alone time with a partner traveling without us. You know: your partner goes on a business trip, a trip with the kids to see relatives, a long weekend fly fishing with the guys. My wife (Neeti) is in India visiting family this week. It’s the first time since we’ve been married that she’s travelled there without me. She’s been making this trip every two years or so her entire life, and we’ve been three times together since we met. This trip she’s taking without me? It feels more than a status-quo week apart. It feels very different.

I’m spending more energy than I anticipated missing her. Imagining her there. The well-worn paths we take together with her family. All the hassles of Indian travel that I thought annoyed me are suddenly endearing. And now that I’m trying to write about it, it seems that my clearest (as in what I can describe in words clearest) memories of my time in India are actually not very exciting.

Many of my most meaningful memories of India are actually quite surreal. Now that I think about it, I’m convinced the real India is actually found at night. Unless you’re forced to as a tourist, it’s too hot to do much during the day. Walks with friends, going to the market, shopping for household items, often happen when the sun goes down.

So in my most interesting memories, like it is in a dream, the lighting isn’t very good and I don’t ever have a clear sense of where I am or what’s around me beyond the immediate. This makes for odd impressions that are very hard to describe.

Eternal back-alleys and exceptionally confusing markets of Mumbai… parents playing with their children on banal swingsets and slides and jungle gyms inside a fenced park while men offer rides on elephants and white baraat horses outside the confines… a rickshaw that stops at an intersection boxed inches between busses that are wonders in their persistence to still operate and stuffed with people you’d like to imagine the stories of but the unfiltered exhaust fumes preoccupy… passing an open door to a flickering florescent lit room packed with barefoot and dirty people of every unimaginable age huddle-squatting around a flat-screen TV watching Indian Idol… a relative casually pointing out a temple where a statue of a god has been crying milk for a week and then it’s gone in a flash like the hundreds of thousands of faces you’ve vainly and repeatedly asked your brain to make an impression of….

As a result of this poorly lit, dusty, polluted and over stimulated dream-state, my impressions of what Neeti is experiencing are abstract. I can see her spending those seemingly interminably days receiving visitors in her relatives’ homes but that’s a repeated, rather predictable picture that doesn’t leave much of a mark. The stuff that does leave a mark I just can’t clearly envision. So in a weird way I miss her more because I’m not exactly sure where she is.

Amidst all this fuzziness my mind is pivoting around the one thing I know for certain: Neeti is surrounded by millions of people intently interested in a god called (among his thousand or so other names) Ganesh.

Almost all of Neeti’s family live in Mumbai and other cities and towns in the state of Maharashtra. Like most other areas in India Maharashtra tends to put more focus on one god over all the others. In Maharashtra, it’s Ganesh. The god with the elephant head undeniably rules there. It’s hard to separate the place from him. He’s everywhere, cutting through the millions of people and confusion like a light ray in a rickety old theater.

So as sure as Neeti is on my mind, so is Ganesh. As is what he has to do with loosing something once gained.

If I have this about right, a few thousand years ago the Yoga Sutras articulated a number of obstacles we all face. Among them was this notion of loosing something once gained. (I’m pretty sure the author/s call it anavasthitatva.) It’s a tough one to overcome because of how deflating it can be. It’s one thing to summon the courage to do something new. It’s quite another to recognize a failure and then do it all again.

Among other nice attributes, Ganesh is the remover of these obstacles. Some believe that God (thus Ganesh) is in all of us. So it follows that meditating or worshiping or however you go about patting Ganesh on his elephant back is really about meditating on what he represents: how we all struggle with similar challenges in life and that we have the power within us to overcome the obstacles that challenge us.

It doesn’t really matter if you believe in any of this. To me it’s just nice to know that as I work my way through this solo gig I’ve chosen to pursue, I’m not alone in the frustration of a step back after a few forward. That I have it within me to overcome it. And that millions of people around the world think so too.

Thinking of Neeti surrounded by a culture that every moment of every day is giving Ganesh his props gives me some smiles this week. I’ve been lucky to not have many setbacks in my adventures as a free agent. But one thing is crystal clear in my mind: they’re coming as sure as Neeti is coming home.

She was burned as bad as I’ve heard someone getting burned with a trade agreement. It was a harsh learning experience for her, the kind of pill anyone who’s a free agent has been forced to swallow at one time or another. She asked for my perspective and since I had never articulated my guiding principles for this kind of thing, it was something I learned from as well.

Here’s what I told her. I (and she) would love to hear other approaches as well.

I approach trading services for services like I approach loaning money to friends. It isn’t a loan. It’s a gift. If I decide to help a friend out with some cash, I expect it to not come back. If I don’t want to or can’t give it, I don’t give it.

Likewise if I decide to do something for someone without being paid for it, I assume it’s not quid pro quo. I’ll do it for friends without a return, or I’ll suggest an actual business arrangement. Even if they press for some kind of trade, I refuse to accept it. If they’d like to do something for me out of the goodness of their heart later, fine.

The problem with trade agreements is that they’re entirely too vague. How much time writing is worth how much time planning? What’s a logo design worth against technical advice? And how many revisions will I get until it’s right? What happens when I think I’ve put in enough hours but you haven’t received the value you hoped?

These are the kinds of things that can sour otherwise perfectly good relationships. If it’s a free value-add for a friend from the outset, then those issues aren’t nearly as important. It’s the difference between a favor and an obligation. And I try to keep those very distinct.

A few cows I ran into during a recent trip to Naskik, India.

Here we go again. Another joke at the expense of the ever stupid and boorish client providing me with another opportunity for my soapbox: the ad agency industry is struggling to demonstrate its value in today’s radically changing marketing landscape. It needs to put an end to its practice of openly disrespecting those who look to them to add value. It doesn’t help.

(Semi-random idea: Wouldn’t it be an excellent job for an ad agency professional group—the missions of most, I assume, have something to do with enhancing the profession—to monitor these things and comment on them? Mitigate it? Assign that to the PR Committee Chair. Give them something productive to do beyond promoting their awards dinner.)

The guys behind Business Guys on Business Trips are funny and insightful, and their blog is balanced (this cartoon is not a reflection of their work as a whole). Here’s the truly insightful thing though: people do business with people they know and trust.

Brad Simpson put his teeth on the bone (which came to me via @Carl_Ingalls in Twitter on 9/16/09):

The sales profession has many sacred cows, and the holiest of the herd is the belief that people buy from people they like.

That’s exactly who I bought from when I hired agencies and guys like me.

So. Why do we think a client turns to their blogger brother-in-law for input on our web strategies? Why are they seeking advice from their first year art student boss’ kid about a logo design?

Because we haven’t established enough trust with them.

I encourage my clients to seek input from wherever they feel most comfortable. I can’t force trust: I can only earn it. One way I can earn it is by demonstrating a sensitivity to the fact that people need to turn to people they do trust. If their boss’ kid gives irrational, uninformed feedback on my work and the client accepts it then that’s a client to whom I’m not going to add much value anyway.

Recognizing I haven’t been at this very long, seems to me that all I have is the trust of my relationships. And I can’t spend enough time building and maintaining it.