2011 – Page 2 – Eugene Eric Kim

Branding = Story + Community

Published October 11, 2011 by Eugene Eric Kim

My big angst about the Wikimedia Strategic Planning process was that we didn’t focus enough on story. We did a great job creating space, building relationships, guiding conversations, and structuring the process, all of which was why we were successful. But our only-okay execution on storytelling still sticks in my craw to this day.

This angst led to a heart-to-heart with Jelly Helm shortly after the project. Jelly is all about story, and he continues to inspire my thinking. It also led to bringing Gwen Gordon onto a subsequent project in a very outside-the-box role, an experiment that I loved and plan on continuing. Gwen is all about story and play, and she brought life to a project that involved a traditional IT department at a large, global company.

My angst also led to several conversations and a collaboration with Chris Grams. This post is about Chris’s recent book, The Ad-Free Brand, but in order to talk about the book, I first need to talk about Chris.

His title suggests that his book is about branding or marketing. It is, and if you’re interested in those topics, you should read it. But the title doesn’t really do justice to what this book is really about: Engaging with your community, and telling your story.

I first met Chris while leading the Wikimedia strategy process. He convinced Philippe Beaudette and me that we had a great story to tell, and then he pushed us to tell it.

A few months ago, I knew that Groupaya’s launch date was drawing near, which also meant that Blue Oxen’s time was coming to a close. Neither of these were secrets to those with whom I interact often, as I’ve been very open about both of these things. However, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it at a broader level.

I was strongly leaning toward the Big Reveal. You all know what I’m talking about: A cryptic note, all in black, with a mysterious gnome in the background, and the words, “Coming Soon….” Or something like that.

Chris talked me out of it. We spoke for about an hour, kicking around ideas and discussing philosophy, and it amounted to the following advice: Be yourself. Tell your friends the news when you’re ready to tell it. Keep the conversation going.

I know this stuff. It’s what I do. But somehow, when I put on a “marketing” hat, I started getting these crazy ideas about the way it’s supposed to be. I needed to take off that hat and throw it in the incinerator.

Which brings me back to Chris’s book. The Ad-Free Brand is a field guide for how to tell a story and how to engage with your community. That is what branding is truly about. This may not sound as sexy as the gnome-in-black reveal, but it’s much more important, and it’s at least as hard.

The conceptual essence of his book is contained in Chapter Two, entitled, “Ad-Free Brand Positioning Basics.” If you only have time to read one chapter, read that one. In it, he distills the basic framework for ad-free branding into four points:

Competitive Frame of Reference. In which market are you competing? The answer may seem obvious, but it may also be worth deeper exploration. Starbucks isn’t actually competing against other coffee shops, it’s competing against “third places” — places you go outside of home and work, such as parks, restaurants, the mall, the library.
Points of Difference. What makes you unique from your competitors?
Points of Parity. What makes your competitors unique from you, and how do you counter? You’re not going to be better than your competitors at everything, but you should be at least good enough. Target is not as cheap as Wal-mart, but it’s still pretty cheap, and it’s stronger in other areas.
Brand Mantra. This is the essence of the first three points in a few words. It should not only say who you are, it should say who you’re not. Nike’s brand mantra is authentic athletic performance. You will never see a Nike dress shoe.

If you’ve worked out these four points, then you’re halfway there, because you’ve articulated the key points of your story. Of course, how you work these out and what you do with them afterward is hard. That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Chris tells a lot of great stories and provides a lot of tools. If there’s a weakness in the book, it’s that he tries to offer too much advice on how to do certain things well. For example, in his section on designing and facilitating a brand positioning workshop, he starts by introducing design thinking, a worthy philosophical frame, but, when presented in such a short amount of space, one that may detract from the tactical aspects of throwing a successful workshop.

His stories are the great strength of the book. He tells countless stories from both his own experience at Red Hat and from others (including our Wikimedia strategy process) that reinforce his central premise: Building an ad-free brand is ultimately about engaging with your community.

I’ve shared his book with the rest of my team at Groupaya. It’s already proven invaluable in helping us figure out our story, and it will serve as a great field guide as we work with our community to tell that story.

Groupaya

Published October 1, 2011 by Eugene Eric Kim

A web site for a new company called Groupaya quietly cropped up last week. If you read the first blog post, you’ll see that I founded it with Kristin Cobble, and that Rebecca Petzel is part of our little cohort. I did a bit of explaining over there, and I’ll be doing much more over the coming weeks. What I’d like to do here is tell a more personal story about why Groupaya came to be and what it means for me moving forward.

Leading Change

2010 was a great and a challenging year for me professionally. My professional reputation had crossed some threshold where I had a steady stream of projects coming in, and the projects were getting bigger, harder, and more meaningful. I was also dissatisfied and completely burnt-out.

Blue Oxen Associates should have failed back in 2003, shortly after I had started it. We had no clients, a misguided strategy, and lots of debt. My cofounder had just left the company, and I felt very alone. We survived because of faith (both in ourselves and from others), because we worked like the dickens, and because we were very, very lucky. That survival process is a great teacher, but it comes at a personal cost, and if you’re not careful, you never heal.

As well as things were going in 2010, I wanted more. I was getting work opportunities, but I didn’t feel like I was fully empowered. I had big ideas about possibilities, and I was gradually moving toward those, but it was too slow, and I was exhausted from seven years of scrapping.

So I started creating space for myself so that I could think about what I really wanted and what I could do to get there. It was the healing process that I had put off for years. As I got clarity, I created new structures for myself, and the cycle of healing and clarity reinforced itself. One thing became very apparent very quickly: I was ready for a big change. I just didn’t know what that change should be.

That’s when beautiful, reliable serendipity took over.

Courage and Vision

In 2009, Pete Leyden, a journalist and entrepreneur who had been one of the founders of Wired, was returning to San Francisco after a stint in D.C. as director of New Politics Institute. He had this brilliant, wildly ambitious idea of combining the best of Silicon Valley and the web with a more traditional think tank as a way of revolutionizing public policy. He called his new company Next Agenda.

Part of his vision entailed bringing the best tools and processes for both face-to-face and online collaboration into a single, coherent practice. He started recruiting a team to help him make this happen. Henry Poole, one of Blue Oxen’s advisors, suggested that he talk to me.

Through his friend and former colleague, Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, Pete also discovered Kristin Cobble. Kristin was an organizational and leadership development superstar. She had started her career at Innovation Associates (Peter Senge‘s consulting firm), and she had served as the Director of Strategic Change at Banana Republic.

Several years ago, Kristin had started to formulate a vision of a large-scale, participatory process that would empower the people in this country to take ownership of our future. When Pete discovered her, she had just left Monitor Group to try and make this vision a reality. She called her new company, “Courion Group,” where “Courion” was a combination of “courage” and “vision,” values that she herself embodies.

I immediately bonded with Kristin. We shared strong values around group process and the future of the world, and we brought complementary lenses and experiences to our work. Plus, I simply admired the heck out of her abilities. She is a tremendously skilled coach, designer, and facilitator, and she has the ability to think through complex, systemic challenges quickly and deeply.

We spent a lot of time outside of Next Agenda talking about our respective philosophies around collaboration, coming to a much deeper shared understanding in the process. Kristin also became a valued friend and advisor, and I started leaning on her as I worked through my professional angst.

New Life

By April 2010, I was 99 percent sure that I would shut down Blue Oxen and pursue new opportunities, most likely at someone else’s organization. I was exhausted, I needed a break, and frankly, I was curious to know what sort of opportunities were out there. Then I got an unexpected email.

My friend, Scott McMullan, is responsible for partnerships for Google Apps. One of his customers (let’s call him “Harry”), then a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, wanted to explore an initiative for improving collaboration across his organization. It was a very big, very vague idea, and he was looking for a non-traditional thinking partner who understood collaboration deeply and who wasn’t afraid to play and take risks. Harry asked Scott if he knew anyone, and Scott generously mentioned me.

So Harry sent me an email. One energizing conversation later, I realized something about myself: As tired as I was, I still felt passionate about my work and my path. All it took was the right conversation with the right person to get excited again.

I knew that Harry was talking to other larger, more reputable firms. I also knew that we could do a better job than any of those firms. So I started putting together a team and a plan.

This was also an opportunity to start testing some of my structural changes. One of those was a requirement that I bring in a senior partner for all big projects. The first person who came to mind was Kristin, who, to my delight, agreed to join me.

Another change was an intention to create opportunities for people who were less experienced than me, but who were as passionate as I was about collaboration and who were hungry to learn.

I had recently met Rebecca Petzel at a tweet-up organized by Christina Jordan. I was literally on my way out the door when I met Rebecca, but she stuck out for three reasons. First, she had started a cohort in graduate school that called themselves “collaboration ninjas.” Second, she had moved to the Bay Area without a job because she was drawn by the people here and their purpose. Third, when I told her I was a collaboration consultant, she was absolutely delighted. She had no idea that such a job title actually existed!

We had coffee a few times, where I learned more about her work and her drive. In the process of putting together our team, I learned that Rebecca was thinking about transitioning from her job as community catalyst at Myoo Create. I told her about Harry, and I set up a meeting with Kristin. The three of us clicked, and the third member of our team was in place.

Groupaya

Kristin and I filled out the rest of our team from our network of colleagues, we made our pitch, and we got the gig. Thus began the best working experience of my life. We were working on a complex project in a large, global organization with strong leadership support. We had a superstar team in place that kept challenging my thinking and motivating me to work harder. Everyone on the client’s team was smart, great at execution, and simply good people.

Working with Kristin was just really generative. It broadened and deepened my thinking, and it emboldened me to step into my vision. It had a reverberating effect on the rest of my work and even my personal life. I was happier and more productive, and I felt a renewed passion for my work.

In September 2010, we decided to join forces. Rather than ask Kristin to join Blue Oxen Associates, I decided I wanted to create a new organization with her. I’ll explain why in a more detailed post on the Blue Oxen blog, but the short explanation is that I wanted a sense of closure and starting anew.

We’ve spent the better part of a year figuring out what we were going to do together, and we finally signed our partnership agreement last month (September 15, 2011). We’ll be documenting that part of our journey over the next few weeks on the Groupaya blog. It’s a great story, and it involves a lot of important people in our lives. I can’t wait to tell it.

And the journey continues. We’re still getting clear and moving forward, but we wanted to start sharing earlier rather than later. It’s part of our ethos of openness, and it’s also a great way for us to learn with a broader group of people.

In some ways, I feel like I’m getting married after living with someone for a long time. It’s special, but it’s not really new. Kristin and I have been working together for over two years now, we’ve been working with Rebecca for almost a year, and we’ve been operating as if we were already a company since the beginning of the year. That said, we have so much ahead of us, and I’m really excited to be making more and more people a part of this story.

You can follow the ongoing Groupaya saga at our blog, on Twitter (@groupaya), and on Facebook. I’d love to hear what you think!

Moneyball and High-Performance Collaboration

Published September 22, 2011 by Eugene Eric Kim

On Friday night, the movie, Moneyball, opens in theaters nation-wide. It’s based on the book by Michael Lewis, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2003. I was pretty shocked that they turned a book about how data is changing baseball into a movie starring Brad Pitt. I’m even more shocked to hear that the movie is pretty good, even by sports fan standards. Regardless, it’s a great excuse to revisit the ideas in this most excellent book and to explore the implications on high-performance collaboration.

In a nutshell, Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, who used (what was then considered) radical new ways of measuring performance in order to stay competitive in a market where other teams (e.g. the Yankees) were spending orders of magnitude more money on talent. It documents the huge, ongoing culture shift in baseball away from old-school, hard-scrabble views on player evaluation to a more data-driven system.

In my book review, I wrote:

How do we measure the effectiveness of collaboration? If we can’t measure this accurately, then how do we know if we’re getting better or worse at it? Baseball has the advantage of having well-defined rules and objectives. The same does not hold with most other areas, including collaboration. Is it even possible to measure anything in these areas in a meaningful way?

I think we’ve made progress in exploring this question. There’s a world-wide trend toward leveraging the tremendous amount of data now available to us in order to try and understand, in real-time, how we behave and why. This is a good thing, and we need to see a lot more of this.

At the same time, we also need to be careful about a potentially false sense of confidence about what all this data actually means. I love what Joe Posnanski wrote about Bill James, the father of sabermetrics:

If there is a guiding principle to all of Bill’s work, it is this: What difference does it make? The world is a complicated place. Baseball is a complicated game. This, more than anything, is what the Bill-as-cartoon people miss. He does not think that there are RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, certainly not to the questions that rage in his head. He just thinks that there are ways to get closer to the truth.

“We will never figure out baseball,” he says. “We will never get close to figuring out baseball.”

This, I think, is the critical final piece. Curiosity might have been the flint, distrust of conventional wisdom might have been the steel, but that only gives you a spark. What turned the work into a raging fire was that Bill James has never really believed that he had figured it out. He never even believed that you COULD figure it out. All he wanted to do was get the conversation going, advance the ball, give people new things to think about, let the discussion evolve and keep evolving.

Replace “baseball” with “life,” and you have a philosophy worth living by.

Picture by pursuethepassion. Licensed: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

Wednesday Play Days

Published August 9, 2011 by Eugene Eric Kim

This is my calendar for this week:

It’s a pretty typical week for me, except for one thing. Can you see what it is?

One of the things I need to be happy, creative, and productive is space. Lots of it. I usually fill it up quickly, but that’s okay, as long as I have space to fill. One of the things I’ve done poorly since starting Blue Oxen Associates is create space for myself. It’s hard to do when you have your own company, especially if you love what you do. But it’s necessary.

Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been making some structural changes to try and create space for myself. One of those changes was to start taking vacations. I took my first extended vacation in eight years last October, and last month, I went on vacation again.

(Vacations, by the way, are awesome. I highly recommend them to everyone — real vacations, where you leave your devices at home. I know this is obvious to most people, but for the rest of you, please, do yourself a favor, and take a week off.)

Another change I made was to raise my consulting rates. I had not raised my rates since starting Blue Oxen eight years ago, and I was below market rate, so it was definitely overdue. That made a difference as well, partially because it gave me a bit more financial peace-of-mind, but mainly because it allowed me to hire more and better people for my projects. That made the work better and more fun, and it created some additional space for me to focus my energies on the stuff that excited me the most.

Still, at the end of June, I decided I needed a heart-to-heart with my partner-in-crime, Kristin Cobble. We had just finished a massive project together, busting our butts toward the finish line. Along the way, we had also been pouring hours into building our business, cultivating new clients, recruiting new talent, and planning and thinking together. Not surprisingly, we were exhausted.

So Kristin and I sat down together, and I said, “I want to take the entire month of July off. I don’t know if we can, but I want to. And then we need to make more changes so that we have more space — space to rest, to reflect, to play.”

Kristin was supportive and enthusiastic. We both already had vacations planned in July. Our previous client wanted to do some more work with us, but we weren’t sure when that would get started. We were also in discussions with other potential clients. We knew at worst that we’d have our vacations plus a small break from client work. But knowing that was not enough. I wanted to make more structural changes.

We decided to experiment with a new practice: Wednesday Play Days. In short, we would essentially treat Wednesdays as a weekend. That meant no meetings and no client work. Beyond those constraints, we could choose however we wanted to spend that day. We were using “play” in the broadest sense of the word.

We had several inspirations for this. One was Kristin’s dad, who believes strongly in working intensely for two days, then taking a break. He’s been practicing Wednesday Play Days for a long time. Another inspiration was my friend and colleague, Odin Zackman, who keeps his Wednesdays clear so that he can use it for thinking time. I was originally surprised that he did it in the middle of the week, but he made a really compelling case for breaking up the week that way.

We put it into practice immediately. Kristin has since stopped doing it, finding that, as a mom, it works better to distribute her rest time throughout the week. I’ve been doing it for a month now, and I’ve been absolutely loving it.

In the beginning, it was painful for me to schedule around Wednesdays. When client work is light, I tend to schedule more meetings. Wednesday Play Days prevented me from doing that.

It got easier quickly, though, because the impact was immediate. Whenever I look at my calendar and I see that blank space in the middle, I feel joy.

I’ve filled that space in different ways. A few times, I did “work” — not client work, but thinking and writing work, stuff I really enjoy and never find enough time to do. One time, my parents were in town, and so I spent the day with them, completely guilt-free. One time, I literally did nothing. I just relaxed.

So far, it’s had the desired effect, and I’m going to try to maintain it. This week, I’m being severely tested. A new project is starting, and we’re going to be working our butts off again. I also have some proposals to write for potential projects that I’m excited about. We’re in the middle of an internal strategy process, and we have the usual laundry list of things to do for everything else we’re involved with. What’s truly making it challenging is that all of this stuff is actually fun!

I am sorely tempted to break the “no client work” rule tomorrow, but I’m going to do everything in my power to resist. It may be easier to lift that rule and just keep Wednesdays meeting-free, but I’m not going to lift it without a fight. Things are picking up, but not insanely so. Leaving space in the middle of the week is enabling me to maintain that sanity, and I think the results will pay off for everyone — my clients, my colleagues, my friends and family, and most of all, me.

See you all on Thursday!