Dear Colleague,
II'm thrilled that you're considering my firm for you next copywriting project. It's always exciting to meet people who believe that the road to higher profitability and market recognition is not more feet on the streets in the form of an army of peddlers but the magic of the written word.
You probably have a certain level of both anticipation and apprehension.
Anticipation driven by your innate appetite for success for your company, and apprehension driven by the little voice that we all have in our heads, saying, what if the guy is a dud.
So, if we decide to work together, I'm committed to delivering you the maximum value the time frame and the budget allow.
Since value-creation is a collaborative process, here are a few thoughts on how we can maximise this value.
Although I've been writing since 1998, we've never worked together. Every client-consultant relationship is unique. Different companies have different levels of politics, which can create different levels of both opportunities and dangers.
And as an outsider, I don't know the terrain, so I can easily step on a landmine and cause something that goes against the fundamental grain of your company's values and operating principles.
And to avoid that I will need your constant guidance to find my way on your corporate chessboard.
But projects that involve external professionals have both supporters and detractors. In order for the project team to maximise the value your company receives, it's important that we know both the supporters and the detractors at an early stage.
When we start this project, we agree on a time frame and project team members will bust their arses to make sure we make the most of this project.
But everyone's action is based current information contained in a plan.
As President Eisenhower once put it, "Plans are useless but planning is indispensable".
What that means is that the current plan is likely to have some holes on it, but if we ignore the plan as a product and focus on planning as an ongoing process of improvement, we can come up with better results.
Plans are chains of assumptions, hence not foolproof. But planning as a process can tweak the initial assumptions, so we can benefit from the changes in the assumptions.
Unlike a fixed plan, the planning process keeps validating out initial assumptions, so we stay on target.
Once we start on the project, you still have to make multiple decisions both trivial and vital.
You may have to fiddle with schedules, team assignments and the resolution of possible disagreements between team members.
Also, some decisions involve several people and that can take time.
So, as you see, there are some risks too.
So, it's vital that we make timely decisions without slowing down the project.
I bring you the best information I have available to help you to decide what to do next, and this is where your ability to quickly decide what to do comes into play.
Conventional wisdom says that the longer you take to decide the better the decision will be.
Well, just ask any soldier or skydiver (I've been the former and I am still the latter), and they tell you about how wrong conventional wisdom is.
Quick decisions allow for corrections. But the correctness of the answer does not improve with the time it takes to formulate the answer.
As General Patton put it many years ago, "A good plan executed today is far better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow".
One of the biggest risks in any project is the time it takes to make decisions. And what makes delay such an insidious risk is that its impact shows up after considerable, well, delay.
I look forward to working with your people on developing creative solutions to help your company.
But creativity also means ambiguity.
You see, many people love talking about creativity but do their best to avoid ambiguity. It reminds me of the boxer, Joe Louis' comment, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one is willing to die".
Well, people want to get the results bout most of them are unwilling to cross the alligator-infested swamp that leads to those results.
All in all, creativity is not a smooth ride on a neat slope with a steady gradient.
In their book, A Simpler Way, authors Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers put it this way...
"Playful and creative enterprises are messy and redundant. Human thinking is accomplished by processes that are messy and redundant. When computer scientists first tried to mimic the lavish parallelism found in human thinking and all of nature, they had to link together more than 64,000 computers working on the same problem at the same time.
Parallel systems are dedicated to finding what works, not by careful stepwise analysis in the hands of a few experts, but by large numbers of a population messing about in the task of solution-creation. They come up with better solutions, but they are based on a different kind of logic: trying thousands of things simultaneously to find what works.
Parallel systems are not afraid of error. Errors are expected, explored, welcomed. More errors create more information that results in a greater capacity to solve problems. Any one error counts for less because, while there are more of them, they are not linked together.
This is not the case in the more familiar serial system, where activities build on one another in lockstep sequences and our work depends entirely on what others have done. In a serial system, one small error has the potential to crash the whole system. In the summer of 1990, America's long-distance phone service experienced frequent failures. It had taken two million lines of code to run this serial system. It took only three lines of code to bring it down."
Look at every project like a symphonic orchestra's performance.
The performance itself may be outstanding, but do you know what every performance starts with?
Hm...
Every performance starts with the musicians' tuning their instruments. And that's an auditory chaos of biblical proportions.
But out of this chaos emerges the brilliant performance.
And projects are the same.
They have ups and downs. That is, the two main components of the project, perceived workload and confidence, go up and down.
But when the perceived workload goes too high and confidence goes too low, people click into overwhelm mode, and start panicking.
But one other sinister activity happens in the background...
Fighting for survival, the reptilian brain barges into the control room, takes control and pushes the neocortex out. That means, creativity goes down the toilet.
And many clients want to quit before we can reinstate the workload-confidence equilibrium.
While writing projects are not exactly military affairs, we can paraphrase it to...
"If you want improvement, prepare for setbacks."
It doesn't matter a poetic pig's prefabricated prosthesis how well we plan specific tasks, the shit almost always hits the fan at one point, and at that point the team either comes together or falls apart.
All in all, things always take longer than planned. We know Murphy's law, "If something can go wrong, it will".
A few of us also know Otto's law, "Murphy was an optimist".
The truth is somewhere in between.
Some parts of the project feel like a walk in the park and some like a swim across a crocodile-infested river.
But no matter how hard the work gets, we have stay focused and on target.
Yes, people may complain, emotions may go apeshit, but we have to pull though together.
Now I know that some people are sceptical and downright suspicious about outsiders in their organisations. Perceiving me as a threat to their jobs, they want to have me out of their turfs as soon as possible. And for good measure they'd like to see my head on a spike in the market square.
But the other side of the same coin is that if we hit it off, we may do some more projects together.
However, the current project is not complete until the After Action Review (AAR). I learnt about the AAR, introduced by the US army, during my military service in the early 80s.
One reason why most companies struggle with this is that during AAR ranks disappear. A sergeant can question a colonel's decision without negative consequences and future reprimands. It's the process that is under scrutiny not the people.
Companies, especially the larger ones, are pretty political and ego-driven, and while executives have no problem to go rank-less and transparent, most mid-managers are incapable of losing their egos and position power.
It's a structured debrief process for analysing and evaluating what happened, why it happened, and how it can be done better the next time.
Note that it's not a blaming or cover-your-arse process.
My aim is to make the project successful and help your company to step up to a higher level of performance and market leadership. And I hope the other project team members have the same aim in mind.
Some people say consultants are people who take your watch to tell you the time. Well, it all depends how buyers treat consultants from the beginning.
So, it all boils down to the relationship.
If we give scepticism, cynicism and suspicion, we the same back.
But if we give trust and respect, we get trust and respect back.
What I want you is to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, turn your company into a market leader and yourself into a respected and recognised hero in your industry.
But I can't do it alone. We have to work together on it.