Call the Ball - Career aspirations start with being authentic

Managing your career is based on a combination of aspiration, inspiration and attitude.  You are charged with manifesting your own destiny.  All our lives are products of the many small decisions we make. How you spend a minute can dictate how you spend an hour and eventually how you spend your hours determines whether you will reach your goals. An opportunity lost is lost forever and ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

 

More and more people are looking for their purpose in the world and in the workplace looking for validation as a sign of life. People want to be heard, but more importantly they want to know that their contributions are being noticed and not taken for granted.  Not for the sake of attention, but more so because they want to know that their skill sets are still relevant and useful and that they are making a difference to advance the organizations they serve.   With training and professional development budget cut-backs in recent years, people have had to start investing in themselves as concerns grow about where their capabilities best fit in their organizations and what their futures hold.

 

At the same time, leaders are trying to make their people feel more secure in order to maintain consistency, conscious that if too much disruption leaks out into the workplace, there is risk of losing high-performers which is challenging to replace from the impact of time, lost intellectual capital and cost. In this ever changing “war on talent”, landscape, leaders need to think differently about how to keep their teams on track. 

 

They must become more intuitive, diverting from the traditional ways of leading that have become too predictable and uninspiring. Many leaders are out of touch and disconnected from their employees, focusing solely on their own personal agendas.  

 

Where it becomes most apparent, are when leaders try to use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to earn trust, build loyalty and inspire team and individual performance. Leaders must understand that in today’s new workplace, there does not exist a single formula to inspire employees to perform better.   Rather, it’s about how to maximize all the components in order to create hundreds of formulas that provide long-term value, continuity and impact, but are most importantly authentic.    Organizations have a responsibility, but so do the people who comprise  the organization.  The mutually beneficially relationship between employer and employee has gone by the wayside like work life balance.  These are semantics and you need to be authentic and true to yourself, leading your own career, in order to realize your full potential in any organization.

     

 

Inside Out - The haze of commoditization

Inside Out - Breaking through the Haze of Commoditization

The business of professional services is to take away problems and or capture benefits.  At the center of professional services is that they work to prepare clients for the future, identify new opportunities, anticipating adversities controlling what can be controlled.

 

The main objective of any professional service marketing organization is to establish a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with their clients.  This is where experience based marketing and positioning comes into play.  The level of interactions through a number of different endpoints and platforms need to be consistent in order to break through the haze of commoditization.

 

Firms Need Differentiated Strategies for Their Brand to Stand Out - One of the biggest challenges for professional service firms is category parity. Surprisingly many firms lack differentiation not because of their brand necessarily, but because they all have virtually the same business and operating model, the same strategies, and the same mission. The root of the problem with professional services is not brand differentiation but business differentiation.

 

Success of professional services is based equally on the quality of the client relationship and on the quality of the solution to a performance, regulatory or legal issue. But most of all the challenge lies in the fact that advice is often intangible. While it may appear as self-serving, the role of marketing plays a significant role in the context of standing out. Professional services are intangible by the nature of services, so they must excel at branding, marketing and such other processes as business development and knowledge management.

 

Successfully branded organizations base their brand on a core positioning that is uniquely own-able and represents a distinct attribute or capability. This clear definition is supported and reinforced by everything the firm does – requiring all professionals and staff to live the brand every day. This internal dimension of branding is critical to product, services and professional services is becoming top of mind with many organizations.

 

Operationalizing the brand, may appear to be a lofty management consulting term, but think about the implications.  What does it mean to operationalize the brand, to live the brand? It involves the alignment of the brand and its values, long-term strategy, human resources, operations, internal communications, and more, to ensure the right behavior is in place. Obviously branding cannot solve every business performance issue and cannot be applied in all situations, but the transformation of the brand must start from Inside Out.

Buckle Up - Breaking through Legacy Perceptions

Evolving Legacy Perceptions & Future Expectations of the Professional Services Marketing

The contemporary CMO and marketer can no longer be just a brand ambassador and storyteller; they must also have a deep understanding of marketing technology.  There are several market and psychological shifts occurring in professional services and I would dare to say that globally were are evolving towards a services based economy:

 

Creative Storytelling – Too many brands, specifically professional services brands continue to fail at persuasively placing what they have to offer inside the lives of the people and operations of people within organizations they are trying to reach. A lot of that seems to come down to a simple gap in the alignment of priorities: while marketing teams contemplate data and speak energetically about really understanding their buyers as individuals, those interests are not reflected as clearly as they should be in what they end up saying.

 

So while organizations focus on what they are doing and think about that quantitatively and in terms of deliverables (because that is how they are judged internally), clients focus on how the brand or experience makes them feel and which of the many brand options available to them feels most like them (because that’s how they make their decisions). The role of the CMO is evolving at a rapid rate and equally for marketing professionals – the shift in digital, emotional space of your brand, developing conversations and experiences.

 

Integrated Experience - We can debate functions but in a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire “experience that it delivers” from internal employees to suppliers and customers — is now the scope of marketing. How are we as marketers shaping the conversation and our positioning in the marketplace? 

Technology is saturating the discipline—Marketing has more software intertwined in its mission today than any other profession.  Many CMOs have larger technology budgets than CIOs due to managing every interaction the brand has with customers. Using these capabilities requires new approaches to brand management and marketing strategy — as well as new competencies across the Marketing organization.

Branding is not linear anymore — it is not just what you say to your clients, but what your clients are saying to each other about your brand. Most importantly we must ensure brand strategies must be authentic with the audience whether it is transactional, strategic or ethereal.

When are we going to start to demand the professionalization of the Marketing discipline?

 

 

Kickstart - In Search of Personal Motivation

Kick Start - In Search of Personal Motivation


Everyone wants a happy beginning and ending in their journeys and activities, but guess what – life is not perfect.  The subtle art of KICKING A** is about kicking your own a** with a personal smack down.  Not about negative speak to yourself, but about committing yourself to a broader plan of attack.  Complaints and venting are often cathartic, but you need to move from “complaint to commitment”. There are times where we get so caught up in what everyone else is doing and telling us that we need to do that we stop listening to the signals that our bodies are sending us. If something feels wrong, it probably is.  Sometimes the stress that we place on ourselves for results, in and of itself, is enough to make us sick and unsuccessful in our pursuits. We get so obsessed with trying to ‘feel’ something that we can actually create that effect or symptom.

I’ve done it to myself and I see it over and over again in the misguided and futile attempts of people who are not committed – this is small stuff and obsessing about it is sucking the life out of you. It’s not okay to spend your life caught up in the idea that life stinks because you are not making the right amount of money, have a specific title, weigh a certain amount or because you look a certain way, have this number of friends on social media platforms. Until you start to know yourself – where you are and for who you are – you aren’t going to find happiness.

 

So the fine art of KICKING A**, is about motivating yourself to live and be the best you that you can be – because that’s enough.

 

It is true that that hard work doesn’t always equal success. Some people work really hard, but fail. They tried and didn’t succeed.  The simple fact is that people tried and there is a subtle difference in what I just referenced – “hard work doesn’t always guarantee success, but working harder than anyone else opens unique opportunities and insights if you are paying attention”.

 

While it may not appear to many people that know me that my confidence is not based purely on my innate talents, it is based  on the fact that I try to work harder than anyone else.  No one is going to come out of the shadows and hand you things. A good friend and associate joked around with me that he would have to get up at 3:45AM to get a jump start on me – get ahead of my morning emails, rants, celebrations and personal expectations.  The fact is he was as passionate about the day as I was! It is about passion and jumping, crawling, careening out of sleep to meet the day represents an opportunity. Kicking A** is about sucking the marrow out of life and realizing that every day you have an opportunity to be at your personal best – seize it as fortune favors the bold.

Early riser or night owl doesn’t really matter it is about finding the morsel of motivation – if you can’t find a way, make one!