Especially in business.
I had a meeting with one of my advisors last week. She’s definitely one of the sharpest strategic thinkers I’ve ever met, and someone I reach out to when I feel I’ve reached a cross-roads in life. Her feedback to me was crushing, she was telling me that I need to up my game in so many ways. It felt really unfair, and deep down I was thinking does she have any idea what I’ve had to go through, and sacrifice in order to get where I am. Well, now I understand better how my clients feel when I give their business my acupuncture treatment, or, creative direction as it’s also called.
However, the thing that really touched me, was when she talked about values. She told me I need to define my three values and be true to them. Simple as that. I’ve thought about the importance of values before, but I really understood it now for the first time. I understood that if I want to get somewhere, I need to focus on the past instead of the future.
I thanked her and headed out to have dinner with my lovely mom who turned 60 last week. After having a delicious dinner with my mom, I went to my apartment. My Friday nights are notoriously known for not being wild.
I couldn’t get to sleep, and I stumbled upon an interview of the best-selling author, Seth Godin. As I was watching the interview, the thing that really made me think, was when he claimed that this whole “find your passion, follow your calling” –thing is just bogus. According to Mr. Godin, it’s all related to circumstances. What matters is leaving a trail, he concluded.
I’ve seen countless business leaders, gurus, and strategists talk about the importance of focusing on how to climb the next mountain. The whole business world seems to be built on the idea of what’s next. We’ve all heard it a million times – a business needs to have a vision and a mission, a strategic plan, reach targets, and create an estimate – everybody is planning how to build a great next fiscal quarter.
But what if we didn’t obsess with the future, but instead the past?
Even though we are not all business leaders, all of us have the opportunity to show leadership. Corporate growth always starts with personal growth. Businesses can grow only if individuals decide to do things differently.
Yes, the bigger the business, the more strategy-obsessed they are. Talking about strategy makes you seem credible, professional, and often valuable. Especially if you wear a suit to a meeting, voice out abbreviations, and use mystifying lingo. But one could even ask, does strategy matter in a world that is evolving and changing constantly? None of us really know what will happen tomorrow.
How does all of this relate to marketing communications?
I was one of the judges of the Estonian National Advertising festival, The Golden Egg, a few weeks ago. The jury consisted of legendary mad men, leaders of the new school, and some young guns. The question we discussed was: does the traditional format of an ad, highlighting a problem first and then providing a quirky solution at the end, still work in 2017? Or can a modern ad be more open-ended? Does an ad still need to give a solution that often feels too obvious and straightforward? What if a brand claims something to position itself, and the next day the circumstances have drastically changed?
Timo speaking at the Password 2017 conference in Tallinn.
I’ve been using an acronym, A.C.E., when talking about the building of a magnetic brand – a brand that is so appealing, it is almost impossible to resist. I’ve been stating what the building blocks of an appealing brand are: igniting Emotion, fostering Culture, and taking and making Actions. At the end of the day, it all comes down to values. Values that the culture is built on, values that define what kind of action should be taken, and values that put a finger on what kind of emotion is needed.
They say hindsight is easy, but that’s the beauty of it. What if Volkswagen had defined its values, and acted upon those values, instead of claiming to be Das Auto (the car in German).
What if CEOs of businesses were honored and praised for leaving a trail? How would a business define what kind of a trail it wants to leave? By defining values and looking back after each fiscal quarter to see if they’ve been true to them. Not by having a strategy, a purpose or a calling – rather something that’s abstract and distant.
What if all of us simply strived to be true to our core values, instead of having a strategy or a calling? I believe that it’s better to look back at the end of each week and ask yourself: “Do the things that I did this week, match my values”?
If yes, it was a good week.
What if we dreamed of yesterday instead of one day?
Does this mean we can ignore the future and we don’t need to have any plans at all? No, definitely not. But in an unpredictable world, the importance of having dreams is greater than having grand strategic plans. The good thing about dreams is that it’s perfectly okay to change them, and you can have many of them. What if the business world was more human? What if businesses had dreams and they built their products around those dreams? This example is obvious, but Tesla is a company that has a dream and has built a whole product portfolio around the dream of a more sustainable world.
What are your values, and did you act upon them yesterday? By doing so, one day becomes today.
***