I remember when being a marketer was simpler. Essentially, marketers were expected to create an ad, get it to the consumer through one of the few available media sources, and then sit back and wait.
Those days are good and gone. The way the world speaks and listens has changed radically. And the tools we use to communicate are changing at a similar pace. As access to consumers grows, so does consumer power. They can choose from hordes of entertainment venues, use software tools to filter out unwanted messages, and shoot down surviving messages with a heightened sense of cynicism. It's just not as easy to be heard. Brand loyalty is tougher to achieve. Conventional advertising and marketing just won't cut it—and neither will traditional thinking among those who want to get their message across. The CMO of today and tomorrow must be a strategist, a technologist, creative, and always focused on the sales and financial return on his marketing investments. Not a lot of individuals, consulting firms, or agencies combine all those traits. As a result, the life of the CMO is a lonely one, and the life of the CEO who expects all this is too often a frustrated one.
My growing sense of these changes, along with conversations with respected marketers, is the main reason I founded FerrazziGreenlight, to focus on marketing strategies and programs that push the marketing spend closer to actual sales. To count less on big broadcast advertising and more on building personalized loyalty between clients and their customers. That might mean creating a loyalty program for a retailer similar to what we operated at Starwood Hotels. Or designing an infomercial for a complex new product launch. Or facilitating an "ambassador's program" for a large engineering firm that targeted just 500 customers, prospects, and infiuencers in the United States.
I hope it's not a surprise that I see effective marketing as just building relationships with customers and prospective customers.
Let me translate this macro trend to a very personal scene that repeats itself over and over again when I give lectures at colleges. It will take place just before or after I've given my talk. A student will muster the nerve to approach me, and admiring as I am of such initiative, I'll be very receptive. Then, remarkably, nothing will be said beyond, "Hi, I'm so-and-so and your talk was great." Perhaps I'll ask what they got out of it or how they see what I talked about playing out around them in the world. Too often, my attempts are met with comments like "Oh, I don't know," or "I just think what you said was great. I'm not sure I could ever do all t h a t . . . "
Oh, wow, I'd think, it was fantastic talking with you, but I've got some bathroom tiles that need cleaning. Not to be too rough here, but how can you talk to someone when they have nothing to say? How can you offer your company or your network anything of value if you have not thought about how you want to stand out and differentiate yourself in building that relationship?
Marketers and networkers alike take heed: Be interesting! All that you've read thus far doesn't relieve you of the responsibility of being someone worth talking to, and even better, worth talking about. Virtually everyone new you meet in a situation is asking themselves a variation on one question: "Would I want to spend an hour eating lunch with this person?"
Consultants call it the airport question. In the lengthy interview process that that industry has become famous for—a peppering of complicated case studies and logic-testing puzzles—the one question consultants use to choose one person over a pool of equally talented candidates is the one question they ask only of themselves: "If I were trapped in John F. Kennedy Airport for a few hours [and all travel-weary consultants inevitably spend too much time in airports], would I want to spend it with this person?"
Have you mentioned in conversation your large jazz collection, or the time you spent in the Ivory Coast, or your contrarian views on some political debate? Squeeze a little time into your schedule to keep up with what's going on in the world. Pay attention to interesting tidbits you hear, and work to remember them so that you can pass them on to people you meet. Get a daily subscription to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Remember, people don't only hire people they like, they hire people that they think can make them and their companies better. That means someone with an expanded view of the world. It means you need to be aware of your intellectual property, and what you have to say that others might benefit from. It shows you're interested and involved in the world around you.
What happens when you don't have a platform of ideas to defend? When you're running for office, you lose an election.
In my sophomore year at Yale, I ran for New Haven City Council. The party in New Haven wanted an outspoken, presentable candidate to run against the less-than-exciting opposing candidate. I had been known through my involvement in the Political Union as a very young chairman, having started one of the first fraternities on campus (Sigma Chi), and therefore had some name recognition. When offered the opportunity, I jumped at it. I didn't have a thought as to what I had to offer or why New Haven might want me as its representative. This was more ego than forethought.
To this day, my loss in that election sticks in my craw. I actually refused to dig in and really campaign, to learn the local issues. My opponent, Joel Ratner, developed a deep local platform and took to the streets and dining halls. I shied away from that level of engagement, expecting that my dynamic style would carry the day.
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 School: "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.
These fantasy sessions were productive. We started to imagine how games might be applied to more than just leisure and entertainment. We started to question assumptions such as what business we were in (was it entertainment, marketing, or services?), what product we should offer (was it games, advertising, training, consulting, enabling technology?), and who our real customers could be (geeky adolescents, adults, Fortune 500 companies?). We started to visualize how we might connect the gaming medium— which had a large and growing demographic of users—and the Internet medium—which had a large and growing group of companies trying to figure out how best to use it to interact with their customers.
As an entrepreneur or an employee, you have the creative abilities to make similar connections in your own industry. How do I know? Because everyone has them! Your abilities may be stored away or infrequently used, but they are there. The question is, how do you put them to work for you? We went to work to crack this nut.
The results were significant. We realized there was an opportunity to not just sell games or sell advertising onto game sites but to create interactive games online to be used as a powerful and new immersive form of advertising. When people redefined YaYa as a marketing company rather than a video-game company, we realized our customers weren't the end users; our real customers were the companies who wanted access to the end users. The shift in focus allowed us to see games less as a product than a medium itself, able to deliver any kind of message one wanted to send. You could use games to train and educate employees, as advertising vehicles, in brand-awareness campaigns, in direct one-to-one marketing, as a means for collecting data on the preferences of customers, and so on. Where television eventually turned to commercials to replace the on-air radio personality, games could replace banner ads on the Internet.
And thus the unique point of view for YaYa was born. We began to trumpet advergaming and edutainment as the next powerful communications medium, an untapped marketing segment perfect for product placements, branded gaming events, custom games-related training for businesses, and on and on. It wasn't long before I was not only attending games conferences but also speaking at them.
Once a resonating pitch is perfected, getting attention is less of a problem. Journalists are hungry for ideas. Getting access to them is often as simple as calling the magazine or newspaper they work for, which can be found on their Web site, and asking to speak with the reporter that covers your beat. I've never met a journalist with a gatekeeper. Moreover, I've never had my calls go unreturned after leaving a message that said, "I've got the inside scoop on how the gaming industry is going to revolutionize marketing. I've appreciated your work for a long time now; I believe you are the right person to break this story."
I've been leaving those kinds of messages on reporters' voice mail for years, and reporters are hugely appreciative. Most of the time, the story doesn't even involve my company or me. I'm just building the credibility I'll need when the day comes to make my own pitch. Which is probably why, today, I know people in top positions at almost every major business magazine in the country.
I've had fellow CEOs who view, say, the Wall Street Journal or Forbes as impenetrable institutions; they shake their head in wonderment at how over and over again, no matter where I'm at or what organization I represent, I never fail to get press. The answer is that I understand and give them what they need: great stories.
However, I've also had a lot of help. Once I had developed YaYa's unique point of view, for example, I brought it to the ad agencies. It was interactive agency KPE that brought YaYa and advergaming to market. They were the agency to "discover" us and what we were doing. And then the big games companies got involved. I went to the most progressive guys I knew, people like Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision who, in a partnership with the Nielsen Company, put his company's influence and money behind measuring how effective games were as a medium for advertisers. Bobby and I would be on CNN or CNBC back-toback plugging each other's ideas.
"Keith, what's your secret? Bribes, blackmail—come on, just tell me," one CEO friend jokingly asked after YaYa appeared in a major spread in Fortune, while his own company, which was four times larger than YaYa, and several years older, had barely made it into its own newsletter.
So I told him: "Create a story about your company and the ideas it embodies that readers will care about. That's your content. Then share it. Have you ever picked up the phone and actually talked to a reporter about why you think what you do is so special? You cannot outsource this to PR; journalists deal with thousands of PR people a day. Who's going to be more passionate and more informed than you? You're the expert on what you do."
They Can't Outsource Content Creators
We've seen how content helped transform a company into a recognizable brand. But what if YOU are the brand? What's your content? What hooks are you selling? The same process we used to figure out how to make YaYa interesting to the marketplace can be applied to making you interesting to your network and beyond.
A unique point of view is one of the only ways to ensure that today, tomorrow, and a year from now you'll have a job.
It used to be that two arms, two legs, and an MBA were a oneway ticket to the executive office. That's barely the price of entry these days. In America's information economy, we frame our competitive advantage in terms of knowledge and innovation. That means today's market values creativity over mere competence and expertise over general knowledge. If what you do can be done by anyone, there will always be someone willing to do it for less. Witness all those jobs moving offshore to Bangladesh and Bangalore. The one thing no one has figured out how to outsource is the creation of ideas. You can't replace people who day in and day out offer the kind of content or unique ways of thinking that promise their company an edge.
Content creators have always been in high demand. They get promotions. They're responsible for the Big Ideas. They're regularly asked to speak at conferences and are featured in newspapers and magazines. Everyone within their company—and many within their industry—knows their name. They are the celebrities of their little worlds, and their fame comes from always seeming to be one step ahead.
So how did they get that way? The easiest route is by expertise. As I look back on my career, the recipe seems straightforward:
I'd latch on to the latest, most cutting-edge idea in the business world. I'd immerse myself in it, getting to know all the thought leaders pushing the idea and all the literature available. I'd then distill that into a message about the idea's broader impact to others and how it could be applied in the industry I worked in. That was the content. Becoming an expert was the easy part. I simply did what experts do: I taught, wrote, and spoke about my expertise.
At ICI, my first job after college, I talked my way into a management-training program by convincing the interviewer to take on a liberal arts major as an experiment. Every trainee who had ever been hired prior to that had some fancy degree in chemical engineering, material sciences, or something technical like that.
There was no way I was going to advance at ICI based on my engineering expertise. In my first few months of the program, however, I noticed that Total Quality Management was all the rage, one of those consultant-driven business trends that light the business world on fire every few years.
In my free time, I studied all the texts that were available. A few months into my job, I volunteered my "expertise," citing my background in organizational behavior (from my total of two undergraduate courses I had taken!). With one stroke, I became one of ICI's three go-to guys when it came to TQM. The thing is, I only really became an expert once I started trying to teach the discipline within the company. I would go on to parlay my experience into giving speeches, writing articles, and connecting with some of the top business minds in the country. After a short period, I even persuaded the industrial giant ICI to craft a new position for me within a newly forming group as one of the leaders of TQM in North America.
There's no better way to learn something, and become an expert at it, than to have to teach it. Some of the best CEOs I know refuse to turn away business even when it might call for skills or experience that their company doesn't have. These CEOs see such a scenario as an opportunity. "We can do that," they'll say. In the process, both the CEO and their employees learn skills they need. They jump at trying something new and they get the job done. In fact, after reading this book, there's no reason you couldn't put together a course on relationship building or content creation at your local community college. You'll learn in preparation, and gain even more interacting with students.
In short, forget your job title and forget your job description (for the moment, at least). Starting today, you've got to figure out what exceptional expertise you're going to master that will provide real value to your network and your company.
How do you start?
Well, there's the easy way and then there's the hard way, and I've done both. As I did at ICI and Deloitte, you can find someone who has already connected the dots and become an expert of their content. That's the easy way.
The hard way is connecting the dots on your own. The bad news is there's no concrete blueprint or step-by-step guide for this process. The good news is that creating content is not an act of divine inspiration or something reserved for the brilliant. Though I imagine both brilliance and inspiration could come in handy, I don't claim either in abundance. Instead, I've relied on some guidelines, a few habits, and a couple of techniques that have proven wonderfully useful.
Here are ten tips on helping you on your way toward becoming an expert:
1. Get out in front and analyze the trends and opportunities on the cutting edge.
Foresight gives you and your company the flexibility to adapt to change. Creativity allows you to take advantage of it. Today, where innovation has become more important than production, not moving forward means going backward. Early adaptors, trendspotters, knowledge brokers, change agents, and all those who know where their industry is heading and what next big ideas are coming down the pike have become the stars of the business world.
Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you've acquired to connect with them. Take them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can. Online, there are hundreds of individuals distilling information, analyzing it, and making prognostications. These armchair analysts are the eyes and ears of innovation. Now get online and read, read, read. Subscribe to magazines, buy books, and talk to the smartest people you can find. Eventually, all this knowledge will build on itself, and you'll start making connections others aren't.
2. Ask seemingly stupid questions.
If you ask questions that are like no other, you get results that are unlike any that the world has seen. How many people have the courage to ask those questions? The answer: all the people responsible for the greatest innovations. "Don't you think having all your MP3s on a little Walkman-like device would be cool?" Thus, the iPod. "Why can't we view our pictures immediately?" Thus, the instant photographic industry. "People sure like burgers and fries. Why not give it to them quickly?" Thus, McDonald's and the fastfood industry.
The power of innocence in business is wonderfully depicted in a scene from the movie Big, where Tom Hanks plays a kid transformed into an adult. In one poignant moment, Hanks is sitting in on an executive meeting at a major toy company, and one vice president is PowerPointing his way through a presentation about a new toy. All the numbers work. All the graphs point to a successful product launch. And yet Hanks's childlike innocence prompts him to say, "I don't get it." In actually playing with the toy, as he had, all the graphs and numbers didn't matter: The toy simply wasn't fun. Sometimes the numbers do lie. Sometimes all the PowerPoint presentations in the world won't provide cover for a company that has forgotten to ask the most basic of questions.
For years, the people running the companies that produced games believed they were in the entertainment business. I asked, "What if we're really in the marketing business?"
3. Know yourself and your talents.
I had no chance competing with the science geeks at ICI. In developing an expertise that highlighted my strengths, I was able to overcome my weaknesses. The trick is not to work obsessively on the skills and talents you lack, but to focus and cultivate your strengths so that your weaknesses matter less. I'd apply the 80/20 rule in that you should spend some time getting better at your weaknesses but really focus on building your strengths.
4. Always learn.
You have to learn more to earn more. All content-creators are readers or at least deep questioners or conversationalists. They're also sticklers when it comes to self-development. Your program of self-development should include reading books and magazines, listening to educational tapes, attending three to five conferences a year, taking a course or two, and developing relationships with the leaders in your field.
5. Stay healthy.
Research has discovered that at midafternoon, due to sleep deprivation, the average corporate executive today has the alertness level of a seventy-year-old. You think that executive is being creative or connecting the dots? Not a chance. Sounds hokey, but you have to take care of yourself—your body, mind, and spirit—to be at your best. As hectic as my schedule can get, I never miss a workout (five times a week). I try to take a five-day vacation every other month (I do check e-mails and catch up on reading). I go on a spirituality retreat once a month, even if it's a one-day local meditation retreat. And I do something spiritual each week—usually church. That gives me energy to allow me to keep my otherwise twenty-four-hour schedule.
6. Expose yourself to unusual experiences.
When management guru Peter Drucker was asked for one thing that would make a person better in business, he responded, "Learn to play the violin." Different experiences give rise to different tools. Find out what your kids are interested in and why. Stimulate your creativity. Learn about things that are out of the mainstream. Travel to weird and exotic places. Knowing one's own industry and one's native markets is not enough to compete in the future. Take a deep and boundless curiosity about things outside your own profession and comfort zone.
7. Don't get discouraged.
My first e-mail to the CEO of ICI regarding TQM was never returned. To this day, I face rejection on a regular basis. If you're going to be creative, cutting edge, out of the mainstream, you'd better get used to rockin' the boat. And guess what—when you're rockin' the boat, there will always be people who will try and push you off. That's the bet you have to take. Deeply committed professionals need to know the score: Passion keeps you going through the rough times come hell or high water, and both will come. There will be continual changes and challenges requiring you to be persistent and committed. Focus on the results and keep your eyes open for what is happening on the edges of your industry.
8. Know the new technology.
No industry moves quicker or places more emphasis on innovation. You don't need to be a "techno geek," but you do need to understand the impact of technology on your business and be able to leverage it to your benefit. Adopt a techno geek, or at least hire or sire one.
9. Develop a niche.
Successful small businesses that gain renown establish themselves within a carefully selected market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate. Individuals can do the same thing. Think of several areas where your company underperforms and choose to focus on the one area that is least attended to.
A former mentee of mine, for example, works for a growing start-up that offers a new kind of pet product. Not long after he was hired, he noted that one of the countless issues the start-up was struggling with was pricey postal rates that were cutting into the company's margins. Frankly, that's not the kind of issue that registers very high up on the totem pole of priorities for a startup, but then again, this mentee wasn't very high up either.
He took it upon himself to research the problem by calling the official responsible for small business at UPS, FedEx, and others. A few weeks later, he sent a detailed memo to the CEO about how the company could reduce its postal costs. The CEO was delighted. The mentee's niche expertise in mail branded the young man as a valuable up-and-comer in the company, and these days, he's developing expertise in issues much farther up the totem pole.
10. Follow the money.
Creativity is worthless if it can't be applied. The bottom line for your content has to be: This will make us more money. The lifeblood of any company is sales and cash flow. All great ideas are meaningless in business until someone pays for it.
CONNECTORS' HALL OF FAME PROFILE D a l a i L a m a
"Use your content to tell stones that move people."
Known as a world leader, holy man, diplomat, hero, and the Tibetan G h a n d i , the Dalai Lama simply prefers to be recognized as "a simple Buddhist monk—no more, no less."
On his great ascent toward wo r ld renown ever since his escape from his homeland in Tibet—fleeing the occupying armies of China in the late 1950s—this unique national figure has captured the public imagination, raised millions of dollars, and rallied celebrities, politicians, and laymen alike to his cause of reclaiming his homeland.
W h a t can the aspiring connector learn from this deeply modest man?
The answer: Powerful content communicated in a compelling story can energize your network to help you achieve your mission.
Because here's the thing with the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people: Folks give him money, love, and support even though he's peddling neither product nor service. Folks pay him, big time, even though he makes no promises about a bountiful return on investment. Folks pay just to hear him speak about life in general, or the struggles of Tibet, his non-nation nation.
You may have thought that a degree in business, or better yet an MBA, was needed to become a leader or person with content. Not true. The Dalai Lama doesn't have a single degree. He does, however, deliver a simple but profound message of wo r ld peace and compassion packaged in colorful stories and anecdotes—a message that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1 9 8 9 .
N o w you might be thinking: " W a i t a minute. There's no w a y you can compare my white-collar pursuit to connect—and the stories I'd be telling to w i n friends and influence people—to the stories that the Dalai Lama has to share. I eat three meals a day. He's been without a country since the Fifties."
And you'd be correct. Your story won't be as compelling as his. But your storyte///ng can be. Here's how:
In telling a gripping story, the Dalai Lama understands that the message must be both simple and universal. Journalist Chris Colin, in speculating w h y the Dalai Lama's cause is so popular, wrote, "Perhaps the clarity of the atrocity resonates in the West, where few international disputes seem so cut and dried . . . Here, in a nation nostalgic for the seemingly black-and-white struggles of the comparatively simpler past, the 'Free Tibet' cause has w i n g s . "
Though he is one of the most learned scholars of one of the most complex of all the world's philosophies, the Dalai Lama is sure not only to present his cause in a clear, simple-to-understand vision, but he also goes to great lengths to show how the cause relates to us all.
The most gripping stories are those concerning identity—who we are, where we've come from, and where we are g o i n g . They tap into something common to all people. The Dalai Lama tells us that to be concerned with the Tibetan people is to be concerned with yourself. "The more we care for the happiness of others," he says, "the greater our own sense of well-being becomes." In this way, he shows how the basic concerns of all people—happiness based on contentment, appeasement of suffering, and the forging of meaningful relationships—can act as the foundation for universal ethics in today's w o r l d . Thus, he appeals to his cause by appealing to everyone's cause.
That doesn't mean your business, your resume, or whatever content you're trying to pitch has to actually be oversimplified or overly universal. But you should figure out how to spin your yarn in a fashion that a) is simple to understand, and b) everybody can relate to. Another w a y to think about this is to ask yourself, " H o w does my content help others answer w h o they are, where they are from, and where they are going?"
On some level, it's still baffling w h y anyone gives money to the Tibetan cause. For the Tibetan cause, arguably, is a lost one; after four decades, China still shows no signs of reversing itself.
And still, the Dalai Lama persuades people to donate their money and energy. How does he do it? One thing he does is use facts and historical examples within his stories to stoke our passions. He does not, as a businessperson might do with graphs and analysis, attempt to logically convince us of his position. He makes us feel his position. For example, check out this Q & A , from a 1 9 9 7 interview in Mother Jones:
Q: W h a t do you think it will take for China to change its policy toward Tibet?
Dalai Lama: It will take two things: first, a Chinese leadership that looks forward instead of b a c k w a r d , that looks toward integration with the world and cares about both wo r ld opinion and the will of [China's] own democracy movement; second, a group of world leaders that listens to the concerns of their own people with regard to Tibet, and speaks firmly to the Chinese about the urgent need of working out a solution based on truth and justice. We do not have these two things today, and so the process of bringing peace to Tibet is stalled. But we must not lose our trust in the power of truth. Everything is always changing in the w o r l d . Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the M i d d l e East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago.
What truly moves us as human beings, what prompts us into action, is emotion. Despite the odds, the Dalai Lama makes us believe that the seemingly impossible is, in fact, possible. In your own stories, use emotion to convince your doubters that underdogs sometimes win and Goliaths sometimes crumble.
Follow the example of this simple Buddhist monk who channels his charm and warmth into compelling stories that energize a diverse swath of people into action. In this new era of brands, in an economy that values emotions over numbers, storytellers will have the edge. As Michael Hattersley wrote in a Harvard Business Review article, "Too often, we make the mistake of thinking of business as a matter of pure rational calculation, something that in a few years computers will handle better than humans. One hears this in conference room and corridor: 'What do the numbers indicate?" Just give me the facts."Let's weigh the evidence and make the right decision.'And yet, truth to tell, few talents are more important to managerial success than knowing how to tell a good story."
So forget bullet points and slide shows. When you've figured out what your content is, tell an inspiring story that will propel your friends and associates into action with spirit and fearlessness, motivated and mobilized by your simple but profound storytelling.