Business Time
Perspicacity, Optimistically.
The last year has, I feel almost guilty saying, been really good to LAM. And to me in particular. We’ve grown in size, scope and ambition. We’ve brought on amazing new clients, and talented new team members (more on that soon). We’ve learned a lot; some of it the hard way. We’ve tried, succeeded, failed, and tried again. Our clients and creatives have been(mostly) patient with us as we’ve navigated these uncertain waters, and I’m extremely grateful for that. I have a new enthusiasm for the business, after 2019 nearly took it away completely (more on that later).
Importantly for me, I’ve had less time on the tools, and more time to step back and think about where the business is going, and how I want it to be managed.
One beach weekend over the summer, I somehow managed to finish both Bob Iger and Stephen Hawking’s latest books on the same day. The latter got me thinking about the bigger picture (on, like, a cosmological level), while the former got me thinking about how to get where I wanted to go. Iger’s tenure as CEO of Disney is (literally) well-storied, but the most salient point for me was his 3 Priorities rule. While applying for the role as the successor to Mike Eisner, Iger consulted a friend—a political strategist—for some advice. This is what he was told:
Pick 3 priorities that believe are critical to the success of the business.
Make sure they’re clearly articulated.
Repeat them ad nauseam as long as 1. and 2. remain true.
Having fewer, clearer priorities, Iger argues, was instrumental in his success in managing a growing team and business.
If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks. You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life. A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a road map. A lot of work is complex and requires intense amounts of focus and energy, but this kind of messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered.
– Robert Iger. The Ride of a Lifetime (pp. 100-101).
So, that beach weekend, I wrote them out. I’ve since had time to work them through with Blake, and share them with the rest of the team. Of all the managerial tactics I’ve tried to employ in the last 9 years, this has almost certainly seen the most ROI. Given that Priority 3 is about gaining and sharing knowledge, we thought it made sense that I share them.
So, because you never asked:
Here’s how we become the world’s leading authority on Brand + Technology for the world of E-commerce.
We need to become world-leaders in developing, installing and promoting Memetic Branding™, a functional internal system for driving margin, market share, or both.
In a world dominated by cultural movement, content, and ecommerce across myriad media, we need to double down on a brand as a memetic device both within and beyond an organisation’s four walls. This means having a focus not just on extremely good work at an executional level, but on a practical and theoretical level, too. It means being equally dedicated to 1) honing an individual solution for each client; 2) tailoring the delivery in such a way that they not only understand it, but use it as their own, and; 3) abstracting what we’ve learned from any one individual project into a broader, deeper and richer understanding of Memetic Branding, such that we can share it internally and externally as a methodology.
We need to be on the bleeding edge of e-commerce development, integrating the latest in emerging technologies to make creative commerce that converts.
Ecommerce is the future, and the future’s here, now. We need to stay ahead of a rapidly-evolving world by leveraging emerging technologies and methodologies to create proprietary, scalable, integrated, cross-platform e-commerce solutions that deliver measurable results to all of our clients. We need to achieve our own internal economies of scale by learning on the job, and constantly updating our own best practice into a set of strong opinions about ecommerce technology, then be humble enough to hold them loosely as and when we get better ideas, data, or opportunities. It’s our job to make products that help businesses scale by creating systems that allow a brand narrative to draw a customer across a wide range of mediums and platforms, and ultimately back to the checkout.
We need to become a real-world teaching academy, investing generously in raising the standard of knowledge and experience of not just our staff and our clients, but our entire industry.
If the status quo is a losing strategy, then to stop learning is tantamount to admitting defeat. So we need to be collectively dedicated to constantly learning. And because the best way of testing your knowledge on something is to teach it to someone else, everything we learn should be codified and shared on graduated scale: Management, Staff, Clients, Industry. Secondary to raising our own internal standards of work and knowledge, this should be both a way of attracting the best and brightest clients and colleagues to the business, and accelerating their career paths through their time with us, however long or short it may be.