The bank robber was convinced that lemon juice, when applied to the face, makes you invisible to cameras.

This is a leading example in a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” In essence, the paper suggests that this bank robber wasn’t just too stupid to be a bank robber. He was too stupid to know he is too stupid to be a bank robber.

The paper actually generated a term for this dynamic. Which I just love. When you’re too incompetent to know you’re incompetent, you’re exercising The Dunning-Kruger Effect. Here’s how they put it:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like [the bank robber], they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.

This has to be my favorite research paper. It came back across my radar not long ago, but in a strange way. In a guest blog post, I casually used the term “agnostic” when trying to describe people who refuse to believe in personal branding: “I am not a brand, spiel the brand agnostics. Don’t commoditize me.”

I was slightly uncomfortable with this line, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that I didn’t have a very deep understanding of what an agnostic really is, or how it’s different from atheism. So I did some casual searching about agnosticism and the paper turned up.

Turns out I was right about not knowing. What a gem of an insight for managing brands.

Let’s avoid going too deep into agnosticism and atheism (this is about branding, after all, and I’m by no means an expert anyway). You can read this fine agnostic manifesto by Ron Rosenbaum for more. To boil it down for our purposes, Rosenbaum says this about agnostics:

Our T-shirt will read: I just don’t know.

Turns out a Brand Agnostic would not spiel what I said they’d spiel. A Brand Atheist, maybe. But it’d be more scrupulous to say that a Brand Agnostic might spiel something like “I can’t ever possibly know all the permutations that my brand will take in the minds of people. And I’m cool with that.”

And the more I think about it, this perspective has become very helpful in thinking about authentic, enduring, sustainable brands. Especially in today’s social, deeply connected world.

We know that managers of brands must be comfortable with the reality that they can’t control their brand. At this point, that’s uncontroversial. We are fully aware of the fact that there are many, many ways that a brand will manifest itself in the minds of stakeholders that we can’t anticipate. But there are also many, many ways that we don’t know we don’t know.

And we gotta be cool with that.

Think about what happened to the Nestlé brand during the social media protests against their use of palm oil. It was clear that the Nestlé people didn’t understand the nature of the social web. They didn’t know how it worked, clearly. Their reaction was consistent with a belief that they controlled things, but there was more to their ineptness than that. They didn’t know they didn’t know.

Take one of their responses on their Facebook page during the melee. “Fans” were using altered versions of Nestlé logos as their avatars when commenting on the page, and Nestlé was deleting the comments that used them. Responding to the commenters’ outrage, a brand manager sarcastically posted: “Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.” (Get the feeling that if you asked that brand manager why s/he said that, s/he’d respond “I thought I had the juice on?”)

When you think about it, good brands are agnostic. They have the kind of realistic understanding in the unknown unknowns that musters a certain flexibility, exactly what’s required in today’s connected, resetting world. When something unexpectedly wonderful happens to an agnostic brand through the work of customers or clients, managers capitalize without dogma. When the bad stuff hits, agnostic brand managers seem to take a humble step back, evaluate, and respond in a way that engages us.

This is an approach that, unlike our bank robber friend, builds a reputation of pragmatic competence instead of thick-headed arrogance.

Managers of brands should try to facilitate the kinds of impressions they’d like to see their brands take in the minds of their stakeholders. Just like an agnostic is comfortable with pursuing answers that they believe to be unanswerable, agnostic brands need to be at ease with the fact that brands are not ours once we release them into the world. And that’s okay.

To tear another quote out of context from another Rosenbaum essay, maybe we should aim to manage brands with a “profound humility before the mystery [they] confront.”

(By the way, if you’re uncomfortable with living in the gray area like this, grab the closest artist around you and ask them to help you. (Better yet, hire a few of them to manage your brand.) Releasing a thing into the world that has deep investment and deliberate crafting behind it, for anyone to form an opinion about, is a reality that artists live with every time they hang a photo on a public wall, publish a novel, or distribute a song.)

Jeremy Bullmore of the WPP Group said Brands are built the way birds build nests — by the scraps and twigs they chance upon. There are flaws in this concept, as he himself writes about here. One of them being that birds don’t chance upon anything. They deliberately seek out the materials they need, just like we build brands by deliberately seeking out information across our connected social network of information, opinions, and experiences.

But the image is a very good one. My nest is mine. Yours is yours. And the business of trying to anticipate or control how anyone forms an opinion isn’t branding. It’s something altogether the opposite of trying to engage someone to believe in a vision.

As Nestlé can now tell you:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

I am quite sure the author of that famous poem had intentions fully different from how I’m choosing to use it here. But it’s mine now. Too bad for Rummy.

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.

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.

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.

Think about what it would be like if you started from scratch. If there was no such thing as advertising agencies. No preconceived notions.

You have a big entrepreneurial idea. You figure you could  start a business that solves problems for companies by executing efforts that reach new customers and motivates them to buy something. You’d integrate other efforts with those efforts that would retain existing customers, too. And probably a few reputation-building efforts thrown in to make sure stuff like the company’s social license to operate is in good order, and that various stakeholders feel good about their investment in the company.

If you were to start from scratch, you’d probably do a bunch of research to figure out what companies’ pain points are, what they’d expect, and what they’d be willing to pay for it.

My guess is you’d find companies with pretty basic needs. Get us lots of customers, make our existing ones so happy that they buy again while telling others to come to us, and give our other stakeholders a good feeling about their investment in us.

I’m guessing you’d also find plenty of companies willing to pay handsomely for that, so long as you can prove what it is you’re doing actually works. My guess is that your research would conclusively demonstrate that any investment a company makes must demonstrate a return, and the investment made in your activities would be no different. Management and stakeholders wouldn’t have it any other way.

I had coffee a few days ago with a good guy who started a marketing firm with pretty much this approach. His isn’t a creative background: it’s an analytical one (though he understands the creative function very well). Research and results first. Demonstrate we can measure and prove what’s working and what isn’t. Creative follows the data. If it isn’t working, we’ll change it because we’ll actually know if its working. We don’t guess.

Assuming he makes good on his promises, it sounds like the way to go. Well, turns out that early on in his business he lost all kinds of work because prospective clients were blown away by the creative presentations from other firms. Happens all the time, he says. Ya gotta wow ‘em with creative—play to their ego by putting their brand in flashy lights—and you’ll get the gig. Data and results? Yawn.

So like a smart business guy he’s re-tooled his approach and delivers great creative first, and doesn’t even talk about his unique and differentiated measurement tools until after a client asks.

He’s seen at least 50% growth in revenues over the past three years since changing his approach.

Does that raise anyone else’s eyebrows? That no matter how hard companies cry foul at their agencies for not proving their worth, they really aren’t demanding it from them in the first place?

Ed Stein, EdSteinInk.com, reprinted with permission

If the current dialog about health care reform can teach us anything, it highlights the importance of figuring out our values.

We all know the importance of inside-out strategic planning (and brand development, for those who consider them separate). The enterprise values, vision, and mission (brand) should be a collective exercise. Involve as many people as possible. Hold retreats, perform exercises, play games, put the words of participants on giant sticky notes. Transform the more insightful quotes into pictures on the graphical strategy map. Include verbatims in the final deliverable. Stage-gate the process by communicating back to the larger enterprise during development.

And we’ve all seen the process devolve and the gears grind. Collaboration turns into open season across units: operations launch scuds at market verticals, marketing challenges revenue models. Anyone can write copy — wordsmith-ing hijacks strategy.

Then at some point getting the damn thing done trumps involvement. Can we just move on already? I’ve got work to do.

How to avoid this in strategy and brand development? It’s probably in the values.

I was lucky enough to work with ethicist and educator Dr. Buie Seawell* for many years. An important mentor for me in many ways, Buie was the first to introduce me to Values Based Leadership, a term coined by another colleague, thought leadership guru Dr. James O’Toole in his seminal book (I’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with O’Toole a few times as well). Values Based Leadership was a centerpiece of the brand I was charged with developing, providing me the opportunity to dig into it a bit.

And when you dig into it, you find more than a little in common with branding. In fact I’ve often made the claim that Values Based Leadership is really the first treatise on branding. Marketing folks, in my opinion, have re-branded concepts from leadership scholars like O’Toole.

In the end, branding is really about aligning the values of stakeholders. Internal, external. For purposes of talent management strategies, for purposes of selling something by adding value. To empower internal brand ambassadors, to facilitate external buzz through respect for your customers. To guide discussions and build your reputation in an aligned, focused way.

Among the more important things I took away from my time with Buie is an enterprise, unit, or team that’s interested in leading with aligned values has to agree on their values before moving forward with strategic (or brand) planning. Nothing is more important. Hard to dedicate yourself to, but primal.

The first reason is the most obvious: How can you possibly align values if you don’t know what they are?

The second reason is a bit more subtle, but illustrates the utilitarian reason for discovering and articulating values. Buie used to cite a research study that found, despite the hours and days enterprises spend in coming to an agreement about their core values, the same set of values bubble to the top almost every time. (The point of the study is that it isn’t necessarily the outcome of such exercises that matters, but rather the collaborative process.)

In the top five of every company’s list is almost always Trust. Differently articulated and manifested, but primal to the core values of almost every enterprise. In my opinion, this is at the crux of why strategic and brand development can devolve, and why discovering core values has a utility beyond the altruistic.***

At some point an enterprise simply has to trust those who are charged with certain areas of the execution if they want to move forward. Operations has to let go of markets. Marketing has to let go of financial logic. The copywriter has to be trusted with the wordsmithing.

Seems to me that the health care debate (such as it is) is devolving because it’s running into these two problems: we’ve skipped the dialog about our values (thus we can’t figure out how to align them) and we haven’t developed the trust necessary to feel good about the decisions that are about to be made.

I wonder what the town hall meetings would have looked like if there were no strategy or tactics on the table. Instead, what would the dialog have looked like if we spent our time asking questions like Should all people, regardless of past behavior or plain ol’ bad luck, have the same access to care? Do we value profit as the impartial equalizer of our society, even when profit is derived from disease? And at what point in the process—if at all—do we trust those we empower to represent us in going about the work of making values-aligned decisions?

Then figure out how to go about addressing the problem.

Another important point that Buie left with me: Values Based Leadership is time consuming business. It sacrifices efficiency for sustainability. Put in the time to do it collaboratively and you’ve a better shot at an enduring strategy (brand) because you aren’t setting it, you’re discovering it. Leave it up to a smaller group and you’ll get it done quicker, but you risk loosing the engagement and buy-in of the stakeholders responsible for executing it.

I’m sure we’ve all seen down-and-dirty, small-group strategy and branding work well in situations where values are articulated and trust is established and nurtured. It can (and does) work in the right contexts. And with a little luck.

But have we established our values enough for the strategies and tactics of health care reform to succeed? And are we ready to trust our representatives?

What about the strategy and brand planning within your or your client’s enterprise?

A recent article from a farmer makes no bones about Michael Pollan and his dilemmic omnivores acting as “Agri-Intellectuals” with no moral authority: one-book experts who think farmers are “too stupid to farm sustainably” and “too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families…Enough,” he writes. “Enough. Enough.”

Crocs, once “the quintessential American success story” with their staggering IPO giving a windfall for fashion laymen in Niwot, Colorado is facing a series of oddly brash predictions of their demise. Crocs is “toast,” and needs to “do the right thing” for shareholders and sell. The ugly shoe we love has somehow become the ugly company we hate.

Today, the jam-band festival of the internet, the gathering place for media-intellectuals, the promised land for laymen content creators is under attack. People are happily pointing out the cracks in social media.

Plenty of others have already done the heavy lifting on this topic. @olivermarks digs in and suggests that all of this is just too messy, too noisy, and too many amateurs are involved. He aptly alludes to the desktop publishing revolution, suggesting to me that there’s a learning curve to overcome and metaphorically we need to stop using so many fonts.

@geoffliving points out that the allure of social media is innovation. Not the end state, not the result of the activity, but rather the process itself. And now that the technologies have matured, social media is disinteresting him (in fact, it’s dead to him). Without “What’s Next” there’s “Not Much.”

Increasingly there’s Not Much in social media for younger demographics. If against-the-status-quo campaigns are any barometer younger participants are clearly resisting Facebook (or if you prefer, there’s actual data). And have you checked out Urbandictionary.com’s definitions of Twitter? Here’s the entry with the most Up’s:

A stupid site for stupid people with no friends, who think everyone else gives a s**t what they’re doing at any given time. Also lacks the functionality of other social networking sites, not that it matters because just like Twitter all those sites suck anyway.

(So if I’m on Twitter and Facebook, is my brand Bermuda shorts and black socks? Yikes.)

Yes, the backlash is in full swing. Spam is pervasive. Snake-oil salesmen are accused. Charlatanism warned. Value questioned.

But what does a backlash mean? How and why do backlashes occur? And why is it happening to social media?

Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi wrote a manifesto about a backlash against feminism in the 1980’s. In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women she suggests that backlashes aren’t coordinated conspiracies “with a council dispatching agents from some central room.” Nor are the elements of backlashes equal in their significance or power, and they aren’t always intentional.

Some manifestations, Faludi suggests, are “generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a ‘fresh’ angle.”

Certainly an apropos thought for the social media backlash. Once a brand or idea is perceived as breaking free from the margins (Dave Mathews Band) early adopters flee like frightened sparrows. Once the pragmatists take over, you’ve entered the Early Majority stage. Good for brands looking to scale, but not so good if your core market segment’s identity is on the margins.

There’s another possibility for the social media backlash. Quoted in Faludi’s book, Dr. Jean Baker Miller says backlashes occur when an existing power structure feels a threat. A backlash, Dr. Miller suggests, can be an indication that a new movement is actually having an effect, “when advances have been small, before changes are sufficient to help many people….almost as if the leaders of backlashes use the fear of change as a threat before major change has occurred.”

Do Pollan-ites pose a threat to the agri-business structure? Do small entrepreneurs who break rules and make millions with simple shoes upset the fashion status quo?

We clearly don’t know what kind of effect social media will have on the revenues of Bermuda-and-black-socks media giants. Or exactly what effect it’s had on newspaper closings. But if you’ve even heard of Manufacturing Consent, it isn’t a reach to suggest that there’s more than a little power under more than a little threat.

Systems have a way of casting out agents that aren’t in service to their prime function. All you have to do is come down with a cold to understand how this works. Or watch a few episodes of The Wire.

Or see the power that 140 characters and a YouTube video can have in the midst of a disputed election.

The new age of collaborative information: a threat to power structures or just not cool anymore?

The past few weeks have been powerful. I’ve reconnected with two long-lost friends. One’s a guitarist I met while attending Berklee College of Music, the other a magazine editor I worked with for a short stint in my career.

The guitarist moved back to Israel, the editor moved a few blocks away from me. The guitarist I found on Facebook, the editor I found at the neighborhood frozen custard shop.

International, hyperlocal. The reach of social media, the power of sugar and cream.

Two very different people with whom I shared important times during transitional periods in my life. I learned important lessons from both of them. And the lessons connect.

The guitarist taught me about the importance of technique. That you have to work to get it, that it never comes easy, that it isn’t the end but rather a means to an end, and that you must have it to be great. I’ll forever admire his technique, his work ethic, and his steadfast focus.

The editor taught me about forgiveness. That bad decisions happen and we’ve all made them. And if someone owns it, demonstrates how they’ve learned from it and will change (demonstrating attrition is not enough), then we all have a responsibility to forgive. I’ll forever be thankful to her for forgiving me once, and instilling in me the responsibility to forgive others.

In my professional world I’ve connected these lessons to the recent high-profile marcom gaffs and the discussions that have followed. Mistakes from the likes of Cayne, Ballmer and Judge seem to me to be a function of sub-par technique. Business executives certainly know better, but sometimes they just don’t have the chops to execute correctly.

And it happens to all of us. So we should be able to forgive a brand or a person every now and again if they’re willing to learn and change. I’d suggest that this is a lot more powerful than fanning the flames.

I’ll point once again to this seemingly simple post from @chrisbrogan. What makes it a gem is the last section: This Could Be You.

A guitarist taught me that it doesn’t have to be. An editor taught me what to do when it is.

It’s a simple concept: repeat as many skills within as many contexts as often as possible so when it comes time to execute, you aren’t thinking. You’re fully in service to the prime function of the enterprise and its mission.

It’s precisely the opposite in business. We’re executing all the time with hardly any practice. The results are obvious. Time and again we see gaffs far more destructive than an MJ missed dunk. And we blog about it and pass it around the social media sphere, fingers pointed.

As several recent blog posts have illustrated, discussions about your brand are prototypical examples of unpracticed behavior in the marcom discipline. @chrisbrogan has a nice post in response to Best Buy CMO Barry Judge (with a nice twist that looks at the back side of the issue). @stevetobak turns some problematic statements from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into productive advice on how to speak about your competition.

(These are the positive examples. Big kudos to these two for providing us with something to learn instead of the too-typical banal jeer.)

For me, there’s always a little voice in the back of my brain telling me these folks know better. That it was poor execution. That maybe they just didn’t practice enough.

And that I need to find more practice fields so I don’t make the same mistakes. Or invent entirely new ones for people to blog about.

There are several leadership thinkers who have written about the concept of practice fields for leaders. Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow come to mind. As does Kouzes’ advice for finding practice fields in everyday meetings. And the practice field experience is often cited as a key benefit by enterprises offering leadership training programs.

So where to find practice fields for branding and marketing folks?

At first glance, the repetitive nature of new and social media is numbing. How many times can we be expected to read a post about brand monitoring through social media? Sit through a video about search engine optimization? Hear advice about the still-illusive practice of viral campaigns?

I’m beginning to think that new/social media is my practice field. That maybe I can never read or view or hear this stuff enough. That I shouldn’t be so quick to skip a blog post or a snappy quote in my Twitter stream. Maybe the repetition in the new/social media domain is my practice field. Maybe this is where I can hear, again and again, best practices that will make my execution more effective.

And if I involve myself more in discussions instead of glossing over a topic I think I’ve heard before, my assumptions will be challenged. I’ll dig a little deeper. I’ll practice.

Another apropos @chrisbrogan blog post: Five Tasks in the Morning. Seems to me that he’s scheduled time for practice. And he does it every day.

From what little I know about him, he doesn’t miss many slam dunks.

Insurance Guy is lobbying congress hard on our behalf because the government is inefficient, and the private sector isn’t.

NPR Guy**: Then why worry about it? If you and your company*** are so efficient, shouldn’t the market take care of that? Won’t an inefficient government-run program simply fail?

Great question. A question that cuts to heart of the argument, that exposes the straw man.

Cliff Kuang recently posted on FastCompany and he cuts right to this chase. You don’t bring your Huffy to challenge Lance Armstrong. If you want to beat Lance, you change the game.

The insurance industry should be afraid. They should be lobbying. The competition landscape is changing because a well-funded competitor is entering their space to solve a fundamental problem within it. A solid entrepreneur approach: recognize what’s broken and bring to bear something new to solve it.

The government isn’t interested in competing on the incumbent’s terms. They want to change the game and they have the resources (if not the competency) to do it.

Are you afraid of the competitive landscape defined by the Great Reset or inspired by it?

————

* Can you find this guy on Twitter or the blogosphere? I couldn’t.

** Steve Inskeep seems to be the only NPR person without a Twitter handle. He isn’t even on LinkedIn. Am I wrong?

*** Couldn’t find a blog for this company. Twitter accounts seem to be squatters. Can they compete in a world that they aren’t even communicating with?