Chris Brogan

Jun 29 2020

Personal Leadership

Personal leadership is at the core of my new project, StoryLeader™. My premise is that in a world where effective leadership is more of a team sport, great leaders are the kind who work to develop their teams with good leadership qualities of their own. Let’s talk about which leadership attributes will help the most, and how being a leader means growing even more leaders along the way.

A Change In Leadership Styles

One change since the COVID-19 pandemic is that team members must work much more independently, especially as more people work-from-home (WFH). Personal leadership is the art of training up your team and empowering them. The goal for those teams is to operate as leaders from within their role while still supporting the greater structure of the organization. An effective leader is now one who motivates and encourages the unique strengths of her team and seeks a collaborative experience to grow team capabilities.

Communication Skills for Leaders

The core of communication is a mix of clarity, brevity, participation, and empathy, with a topping of keeping the objective central to the experience. That’s a lot. Let’s walk through it:

Objective-minded – always communicate from the mindset of the goal you seek to accomplish.
Participatory – communication is a more-than-one sport. The best communicators don’t only know how to speak. They know how to listen, and how to bring a sense of being valued to the other person or people in the interaction.
Clear – clarity is so vital to good communication these days. Attention spans are shot. Be very succinct in what you’re asking.
Brief – brevity is more than the soul of wit. Teach your team the “one topic per email/message” Practice reviewing messages to see if they could be shorter. Make it an okay thing to point out how to tune up brevity.
Empathic – communication is about understanding the feelings behind the mindsets of everyone involved. Businesses (most especially b2b) never talk about this. Which is why they’re rarely as successful as they want to be with communications.

None of this just appears magically for your team. To inspire personal leadership around communication, articulate what you want for the team, and encourage constructive reviews of communications whenever possible. Practice wins this.

Collaboration as a Team Sport

If bosses teach effective leadership skills around collaboration, colleagues learn to work towards group success instead of individual contributions alone. Collaboration promotes blending strengths and weaknesses of a team. If Jeremiah loves taking meeting notes, let him. If Imani is your most charismatic team member, and she loves leading client calls, make that her core. Build your team not to be repetitive replacement parts, but instead a team of experts in their core skills, and then work on cross-training. Second only to communication, collaboration is a great place to encourage strong leadership behaviors.

Configuration: Reshape Every Space

One important leadership trait is to break free of the “factory assembly line” mentality of decades past. I’ve said it in different ways in several of my most recent posts. Developing leaders need to feel a sense of ownership of their environment. Bosses must value their team’s approach and contribution to these projects as well. Look at this as further empowerment and a way to find comfort around their place in the organization’s value.

The idea of configuration is the concept that everything we observe isn’t what it has to be. Put the chairs where you want them. Take the clock out of the meeting room. Get ready… Let the team pick some of the software the team uses. (Yikes!)

If you’re going to lose language like “subordinates” and stop worrying about being a “motivational leader” and instead work on growing a team of transformational team members dedicated to helping your organization win.

Chris Brogan runs StoryLeader™, a training program for leaders and growing personal leaders alike. Combining communications, collaboration, and configuration as the core of leadership training, Chris teaches the three major types of business storytelling tools available to teams, and points to a way to approach the challenges of recovering lost business and leading distributed teams in a post-COVID 19 world.

Jan 07 2020

Why Business Storytelling is a Necessary Tool for 2020 and Beyond

Whenever someone tells you “stories are an important part of leadership,” you do what most people do: you nod and shrug and wonder what the heck anyone means by that. And yet, we use stories informally every day. Your business meeting with prospects breaks for lunch and what do you do? Tell stories of your families and where you’re from, or seek out what each of you have in common. (These are belonging stories in my Three Story Types for Business.) Everyone knows they should be doing something, but what? Why? And how?

Stories Transfer Leadership DNA

When I launched StoryLeader™, I realized I needed a way to explain the core benefit of the leadership training practice. What we do when we tell business stories is we transfer leadership DNA throughout the organization. The goal of the stories then becomes ensuring that people at all levels understand what kinds of goals and intentions their leadership has in mind, that people closer to the front line understand what decisions their leadership might make in a given situation, and that with everyone operating from the same perspective, friction is reduced to a minimum.

If you run an analytics group, one of your core mission stories might be about how your organization’s role is to act as a “backup brain” to the groups you support, and that your primary function is to absorb and relieve all their primary brain worries while being alert to prompt for future threats and trends. The more your team thinks about what it means to be a “backup brain,” and that “absorbing worry” is a core function of that brain, they’ll align their decisions and efforts accordingly.

2020 is About Upskilling and That Requires Growth Stories

In the fast world of transformation culture, organizations have to be able to shift quickly with new opportunities, adapt and be more resilient. As human capital starts to account for as much as 50% of a company’s value (source), it becomes important that leaders tell belonging stories so that people feel valued, included, and most vitally part of the solution for all and any challenges that arise.

Employee retention is an exercise in storytelling matched by actions that support the story. The third story type in StoryLeader™ are called growth stories. Sometimes, these are corrective or lesson tales. Other times, they are the stories that empower us or invigorate us during the challenging parts of our work.

Studies say over and over that when an employee starts to seek employment elsewhere, it’s almost never an issue of pay. More often than not, disengagement comes when the employee no longer feels like they are working on meaningful work. The right growth stories and belonging stories (fronted by action that shows that employee a path to being part of solid execution) are more vital than any dollar or title increase.

Telling Stories is Now a Participatory Sport

The 2019 movie box office revenue for the US was $11.9 billion, but if you add worldwide revenue, the number goes up to $42 billion. That’s a pretty decent figure for movies as entertainment.

UNTIL

Until you realize that the video game industry took in $120 billion last year. Before you scoff and think of yourself as not a video game person, mobile games accounted for $64.4 billion on its own, dwarfing traditional PC or console games.

Why am I sharing this? Because storytelling (movies) has become far more interactive (video games). That means we as leaders have to learn not only how to tell a business story, but that we have to build participatory stories where everyone absorbs and acquires the leadership DNA you intend to transfer.

No, you don’t have to create video games to tell business stories (they fail horribly when people try). But you do have to learn how to tell a more participatory story. (I can help!) Stories must be crafted to be more bite-sized (like a series of text messages) and with room for others to participate and lead from their own level, while retaining the core importance of the mission stories that form the organization’s objectives and intentions.

What Does This Do?

Working on business stories improves decision making, cuts down on rework, reduces friction, and obviously saves time and money in the process. By learning the simple (but not easy) skills of telling better business stories that reinforce the organization’s mission, people’s sense of belonging, and everyone’s path to growth, leaders can focus more on vision and clearing roadblocks. Smart leaders let stories do the heavy lifting, and what I shared in this article is why.

Chris Brogan runs StoryLeader™ as a leadership training experience. Get in touch here.

Jun 27 2019

Who Put Chocolate in my Peanut Butter?

In his book, Choose Yourself, James Altucher turned me on to the concept of “idea sex.” Mash two things together. Get your ideas mingling with other people’s ideas. Little column A, little column B. That kind of thing. You get it, right? Just whatever you think it means, that’s what it means. But I think you’re already there. Idea sex is a good way to mash things for a better output.

Collaboration and sharing and getting better ideas comes from trying something new, something that doesn’t always go together, or not for necessarily for everyone. Kool-Aid pickles, for instance. That’s a thing (google it). I love China Poblano, Chinese and Mexican food mashed. Old and new. Whatever it is. Mix it all up.

Adam Sandler did this quite successfully when he collaborated with Dan Bulla on his 100% Fresh special on Netflix. (If you’re not a fan of Sandler’s other work, watch this. It’s really really really good. If you’re a fan, you don’t need me to tell you.)

Smash Your Ideas Together

Today (like today today), I realized my next book has to be two books mashed into one. Dented is about how we can be a bit dented and still show up at work and in life. The Picnic is about how companies can create better spaces for the people they want to serve. The ideas are mashed. They have to be. Take your dented self and bring it to the picnic. It totally has to go like that.

And the thing is, with ideas that don’t immediately make sense to you (like Kool-Aid pickles), it needs explaining. Over and over. This is where people muck it up. If you share your crazy idea and it goes over like a fart in church, you’ll be inclined to shelve that thought and move on to something else. Don’t do that right away. Give it a try. A lot of tries. Give more than a few people a taste and see if you can get the recipe just right.

On the Conan Needs a Friend podcast, Lin-Manuel Miranda talked about how he was working on this rap-musical multicultural adaptation of Ron Chernow’s book about Alexander Hamilton. People literally laughed in his face and thought he was joking. Jon Stewart poked fun at him on the daily show the day after Miranda debuted it (at the White House for the Obamas, by the way). Well, his joke has earned him almost half a billion dollars in gross receipts, an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize and plenty more accolades.

Keep Swinging

I’ve said for decades that the big difference between me and a lot of other people is that I’ll make 100 attempts at something, and if two of them succeed then I’ve got two more wins than someone who hasn’t taken one shot. Swing for your idea. Mash it with something else.

There are so many derivative and copycat ideas in the world. But give an idea just a little twist and it works. When Ridley Scott pitched Alien, he said it was “Jaws in space.” People got the idea right away (Julien Smith used this reference in Trust Agents). Years ago, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield founded (the widely popular and innovative at the time) Flickr when they were really trying to make a chat app for video gamers. It was a shift from the original idea (the kids called this a “pivot” for a while).

Swing. Take more swings. Try new things. It’s all good. Find your groove by trying a lot of things.

Fear of failure? That’s so 1994. Stop it. Give it up. Fail. Shake it off (Thanks, Taylor), and then get back to it.

Ready? Go!

Chris Brogan (that’s me!) is a business advisor and keynote speaker, and an author, and all kinds of things. You can be all kinds of things, too! You’re invited to the picnic!

Jan 28 2019

Why Your Company Needs to Understand Memes

This picture is my 13 year old son’s recent project. He printed out the Sunday funnies (we don’t get a newspaper so he went online and found some to print). Then, he chopped up each panel and sliced out each bit of dialog. Finally, he mixed them all up at random to make his own comics to see if anything unexpectedly funny would come of it. It was funny enough. The idea comes (roughly) from “Garfield without Garfield” and other remixes of old comics tropes.

Your Company Probably Doesn’t Pay A Lot of Attention to Memes

Shortly after Barack Obama became US President, a lot of politicians and corporations decided to take social media a lot more seriously. Before then, it was “that thing kids do.” Afterwards, I was hired by some of the biggest companies in the world (Coke, Disney, Pepsi, GM, Microsoft, and so on) to talk about how these tools could drive better human interactions.

Memes and meme culture are that same thing all over again. And everyone’s ignoring it. Again.

Okay, So What is a Meme?

The word meme (rhymes with “seem”) take a little unpacking. The official definition is “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”

The other definition (the real one): “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.”

It’s these two words “spread rapidly” that should raise your eyebrow.

Oh, and a quick aside: bookmark this site. It helps explain some of these.

Memes are a Fast Pass to “Insider” Feelings

Here are three things you might not know about right now:

A massive petition went out requesting the song “Sweet Victory” be played during the SuperBowl halftime show. This song is from the cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants, created by the recently deceased Stephen Hillenburg. It appears that Maroon 5 will be honoring this meme request and playing the song. (Wait and see.)
Elon Musk (of Tesla and SpaceX fame) just reached out to PewdiePie (YouTube’s most subscribed channel with 82 million viewers) to host “meme review,” after several memes and fake tweets were posted saying he would. (Memes drive reality.)
Teachers and companies all over are trying their hand at posting memes to interact with students and customers, sometimes hitting and other times failing, but definitely earning attention they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Not everyone is there yet. And yet others know it feels weird but they want to participate.

It’s not that you care all that much about SpongeBob or PewdiePie or memes in general, but to realize that a multi-billion dollar event and a billionaire CEO are being influenced by memes is worth thinking about. The fact that memes are “technology” that travel fast, convey meaning in a VERY brief format (in a world that is attention starved) and that give you a potential quick connection into otherwise distracted and attention-starved people, that’s worth thinking about.

If you’re already thinking of ignoring this, let me remind you that in 2008, no one thought Twitter or Facebook or YouTube were all that interesting, either.

About Memes

Often times, the point of the meme is easy to understand, even if you’re not aware of the reference material:

That’s Squidward from SpongeBob. You don’t need to know that to accept the premise of the meme.

The format doesn’t exactly matter much.

This is just a graphic of a tweet that’s spreading around as a meme. It’s obviously a political jab at the current US President, cloaked in a reminder that other presidents were a bit more wholesome.

Other memes come from adding an interpretation to a photo for multiple potential future uses:

The obvious hinge of the meme is “but.” We have all kinds of ways to use that. “I know you didn’t ask for any opinions…” or “I’m not racist…” etc. Everything before the “BUT” is the joke.

Why Should You Care?

I’m least interested in convincing you to care. That’s a hard rule I have. But you might become a bit more aware of this as a tiny media type, as a way to earn attention before seeking even more attention from the people you most want to serve. People are far more willing to invest the small amount of time required to possibly laugh and relate (even more importantly) with your meme before they decide to check out your larger and more time-consuming business content.

This is most definitely a B2B play as well as B2C. Everything I’m talking about here is in play for as long as humans are your intended customer or prospect.

As with all media types, a little bit of thought is required before execution. (By the way, I consult about that.) You might review any potential memes created to ensure they’re not offensive to particular groups, and also to ensure that the content you’re creating is reasonably current. One insanely frustrating detail with the world of memes is that they seem to have a shelf life of less than a week.

But there’s value in here. You might not immediately see it. That’s okay. Other companies are noticing and they’re adapting.

Chris Brogan is a business advisor and digital marketing consultant. Get in touch with him here.

Dec 30 2017

Amazon Alexa, The Need for Better CRM, and Trust

Amazon Alexa and Google Home have the same problem: they can do some really clever things that make them feel “real” to us, but the illusion is easily shattered. You might think “So what? That’s Amazon’s and Google’s problem.” But the thing is you need this, too.

Smart Speakers Aren’t All That Smart

I can say, “Alexa, who am I?” She’ll say back, “You told me your name is Chris.” I can then say, “Alexa, my son’s name is Harold.” She will say: “Sorry. I can’t help you with that.” Meaning that the information really has nowhere to go. But this context is important. Let me explain out.

First, Alexa DOES know my voice from other people’s voices. If my son Harold says, “Alexa, who am I?” she won’t be able to answer it. She doesn’t reply that he is Chris.

So that means that somewhere there’s a data “match” to my voice. Meaning, there’s some record stored in Alexa that says “Chris Brogan” is logged into this Alexa unit and I have a matching voice print for what I’m expecting him to sound like. Right?

But why, then, does Amazon need my “voice password” when I order something with Alexa? If she knows my voice is different than my son’s, why does she need a four digit passcode? Isn’t my voice a pretty good passcode? I guess “someone” could record my voice or splice up recordings to sound like I’m ordering them a Bugatti. So maybe that’s why. But I think it’s because Alexa was built to be dumber than we think.

(Note: every single time I’m saying Alexa, I mean Alexa/Google/Siri/Cortana)

And every time I’m talking about these big companies, I want you to think about YOUR place in this, because that’s upon you faster than you think. Voice interaction is here now. Amazon Echo and Echo Dot were the #1 purchased Christmas gift in 2017 on Amazon’s site, and the Alexa app was the most downloaded app on both the iTunes and Google Play store the next day.

Our CRM Needs to Get Smarter

Every company that sells something has a Customer/Client Relationship Management software (CRM). Whether or not they want it, they keep some kind of record of your purchase history tied to a phone number or a credit card or an email address. I suppose in more modern systems we can set the “unique key” to whatever we think will be most permanent. But every system has records of this nature.

But if you look at these, they are often mostly “dumb” data. You bought this thing on that date. You paid with this form of payment. The product was shipped there. All good to know, but not really smart enough.

I’ll tell you a simple one. “Alexa, my son’s name is Harold. Say hi to Harold.”

I want Alexa to be able to store that data record and link it for me. I want to be able to say, “Alexa, did Harold add anything to his wish list last night?” Hell. I want him to be able to say, “Good morning, Alexa” and her answer back, “Hey Harold.”

A lot of hotels are starting to add the option to use your favorite Internet apps there as well. When I check into the Residence Inn, I stick my Netflix (or Hulu or YouTube, etc) account into the room TV so I can binge Peaky Blinders on the big screen instead of my laptop.

Some hotels are adding smart speakers to their rooms so I can ask Alexa everything I ask her at home. (I’m in a hotel room writing this and I’ve tried talking to her about six times so far.) But will those also be tied to my account? And will it know I’m in a different location? And will my skills already be transferable to it?

Remembering is Part of Trust

This is basic, but also deeply true. Ask Jacq. If she tells me something she thinks is important and I forget what it was she told me, it hurts her feelings. She takes every instance of me forgetting (which happens a lot) as a slight against our relationship.

We humans tend to feel this way. We want to be known. We want to be remembered. I told you I’m staying in a hotel room as I write this. I’ve been to this property probably 20+ times over the last year. When I walk through the door, I want pretty much everyone working to give me that “Norrrrrm!” greeting (from Cheers – it was a TV show. Look it up!).

So when chatbots and robots and voice apps can’t remember the absolute basics, it FEELS (and we definitely do feel emotions around these technologies) like someone (your company) has forgotten us. That feeling is massively negative to some and simply negative to many. If you treat me like a first time buyer, it shows me what little value you place on my loyalty or commerce.

Start with CRM

At this point, you might not be building your own chatbots, but what has to come first no matter what is a better way to store and access the data that will make the experience better for all those involved. The ability to capture non-sales-related data and “knowledge” about your customer, I believe, will be the most overlooked competitive business opportunity of 2018 and beyond.(tweetable)

This isn’t massively hard work. Build in some fields to capture some more potential information, when available. Allow it to have flexible labeling sometimes. Because my example was “son” doesn’t mean that someone wants to add in “dog” and “stepdaughter” and “crazy uncle.” And then keep working out what other information might be useful to store that benefits both you and your buyer.

I promise that as “smart” speakers proliferate, the novelty phase will wear off quickly. We will not only demand more of companies using bots and voice interfaces, but we’ll gravitate towards those companies who treat us through these artificial interfaces like we matter and like we belong. The gee whiz phase is now. You still have time. Help make the distance between your business and me smarter. Please?