What did I speak about at MAD//FEST London 2 weeks ago? Here’s my dot point summary - ✔ Most business questions should be open ended questions as they give more room for people to come up with a more effective creative solution - e.g. what would have happened if you gave the Eurostar brief to Disney? ✔ Most businesses like closed ended questions as there is less perceived room for failure. ✔ You will always have marketers come up with a bunch of great ideas, then have to run them past the finance team, but you will never get that happen in reverse. e.g. you will never have a bunch of accountants say “I’m pretty sure the answer is 7.3, but let’s go and ask some whacky marketers” ✔ People need to stop trying to sell as efficiently as possible, and start trying to sell as effectively as possible ✔ Rather than trying to change the world, we can change how people see the world These are the exact discussions I take a deep dive into in my MAD//Masters course. The course is for everyone who wants to upgrade their mind and think about the business world differently, in turn making huge effects from small changes. From Police Officer’s to CMO’s - MAD//Masters has students from all over the world thinking differently. The upcoming intake gets underway on the 29th of July (less than 2 weeks away) and spots are running out! So fancy taking the plunge and spending your summer with me? Claim one of the last few places here - https://lnkd.in/eBXJD2ek Or you can contact my fantastic course lead Sam Benton for any queries or group booking rates. Sam Benton Dan Brain Harry Clark Ian Houghton Aiden Lucas Ben Phillips Richard Robinson🔥Chris Kemp
Loved this point 👇 You will always have marketers come up with a bunch of great ideas, then have to run them past the finance team, but you will never get that happen in reverse. e.g. you will never have a bunch of accountants say “I’m pretty sure the answer is 7.3, but let’s go and ask some whacky marketers”
“People need to stop trying to sell as efficiently as possible, and start trying to sell as effectively as possible” Rory Sutherland I love this point. The most maddening aspect of modern marketing is this insane focus on “performance” which means, “I hit some random cost per _ metric” and has little or nothing to do with changing behavior or converting the high value audiences.
The issue of Sales efficiency versus Sales effectiveness is spot on — and this also extends to Marketing. Both of these disciplines suffer from heavy investments in process & technology to automate a lot of the wrong behaviors at scale (just do them more efficiently). AI will be the next misused technology in their ever growing stack. Meanwhile, dissonance with customers and prospects continues to grow.
love this, esp the first 2 points. i like how erika hall says it - that we're socially rewarded for being right, so asking questions and showing that you don't know something is uncomfortable. closed questions help buffer you against being wrong, because there's more certainty of getting a comfortable answer. open questions are about embracing the unknown and uncertainty which is scary.
Thrilled to have won at place on the course at MAD//FEST and can’t wait to get started!
Effectiveness over Efficiency. Transformation over incrementalism. To all those who say the utter rubbish of: “What gets measured gets managed..." Genius, really! Make sure you know the full quote: “What gets measured gets managed even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.” Simon Caulkin summarising V F Ridgway’s paper ‘Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements’ in Administrative Science Quarterly 1956 Shame on you Accounting and Audit firms (e.g. KPMG, et al); Strategy Consultancies (e.g. McKinsey & Company, et al) and Finance folk. Our organisations would do better with: i) more Finance interns, and less Marketing interns; and ii) focusing on truly Creative, Insightful Contrarians. Any other suggestions welcome. Rory Sutherland Sir Kenneth Olisa Zaid Al-Qassab Dame Annette King DBE Neil Henderson
"Rather than trying to change the world, we can change how people see the world." - Love this one in particular.
Point 3 is inspired. Always feels like finance is the tail that wags the dog.
This: ✔ People need to stop trying to sell as efficiently as possible, and start trying to sell as effectively as possible. Words on marble.
"Rather than trying to change the world, we can change how people see the world" Great line. A lot of people fail to understand that the world is only what we choose to look at. Change what you want to see, and you'll see it. And be less certain and see change in context