Author: remap_content_admin

In web app development, perhaps the best known “framework” is Bootstrap. It makes it easier to build a web app’s “front end”, which is what you are looking at right now. The Symfony framework, on the other hand, lets you build an app’s backend. Still other frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, help you build both. 

These “computing frameworks” save massive amounts of time, heartache, and risk by providing you, the web/app maker, with rock-solid, standardized, exquisitely well thought-out building blocks. They make it easier for software to eat the world. They make it so that websites that used to cost 2 million dollars now cost $50,000.

You might want to think about the frameworks you use – or about making your own.

Your framework doesn’t have to as grand and ambitious as Ruby on Rails. It can be tiny, actually, as long as it helps people make or do something of value. Actually, smaller is better – most computing frameworks become so cumbersome they defeat their own purpose.

And your framework doesn’t have to be about building something concrete, either (web apps are physical objects, ultimately – they are built out of microscopic pieces of carbon).

Now, if it is about building something physical – that’s also great! A framework for making fruit juice, perhaps. I hope you decommoditize the world.

But your framework can also be conceptual, which is helpful when you create complex creative and technical solutions.

A shining example is the Storybrand framework.

Like Bootstrap, Storybrand is used in business. It helps you build a business story and extract messages from it that you can use in your marketing.

In the Storybrand framework, there are four essential characters. See if you can spot them.

1. A Character
2. Has a Problem/Villain
3. And Meets a Guide
4. Who Gives Them a Plan
5. And Calls Them to Action
6. That Helps Them Avoid Failure
7. And Ends in a Success

Sidebar: Storybrand’s creator Donald Miller did something pretty clever here – he made the building blocks of a Storybrand “brandscript” also serve as the chapter structure of the book. Maybe you can write out your framework as a miniature story as well?

Anyway, did you find the four characters?

• Hero – this is what you call a character who avoids failure, ends in success, and thwarts a villain
• Guide – this is what you call a character who helps the Hero
• Villain – you know who this is
• Customer – this is another word for success*

*In fact, “And ends in success”, could be, “And ends in a customer”.

In the conceptual frameworks we create as consultants, we’re the guide. Our customer is the hero (not us).

If you have those two basic pieces in place, you’re on the right track.

It could be as simple as an intake questionnaire, an interview process, or a document that your customer fills out. Alternatively, it could be a complex, 6-month process that combines your consulting, your training course, your software products, and your services.

Here’s the main thing about frameworks – provide useful building blocks, make it simple to use, tell it as a story, have your customer win in the end.

Very best,
Rowan

 

 

 

 

Messaging is the clarification of value using words, images, and other contextual hints, in order to impact how people think or feel about a brand, its products, or just its projects and initiatives.

If it doesn’t affect or reinforce positioning, it’s not messaging.

Also see Positioning, Brand Messaging, Copy, Propaganda, and Strategic Narrative

The medium is the message 
~Marshall McLuhan

People mistakenly use messaging interchangeably with copywriting but they’re different in two specific ways.

Firstly, copywriting tries to convince someone to take (or decline to take) a specific action, usually now or in the near future. Messaging, though, is inherently more long-term and it may not care at all whether it results in a specific action. 

That’s because the purpose of messaging is to create new understanding or belief. Copywriting doesn’t necessarily care about that.

In Brand Messaging, for example, the messages in question are more or less constrained to the brand’s identity: “this is what the brand is about, stands for, has expertise in, or where it comes from”.

All of which might eventually lead you, the message recipient, towards a broad, flexible range of actions/non-actions. But that’s the secondary, not the primary, purpose of messaging. If you look at it that way, the long-term value of good messaging will far exceed that of good copywriting. 

Secondly, copywriting is limited to written words, with some small allowance for how those words are presented with respect to spacing, font type, etc. (which quickly overlaps with design).

You write copy, you make messaging. 

Sidebar: it’s easy to make the case that Benjamin Franklin practiced modern copywriting during his long career as a printing press entrepreneur. He wrote not just political essays but ad copy and set the type for both; he knew the advertising business well. He experimented greatly with spacing, in a way that surprised his contemporaries yet made his publications easier to read. Perhaps this is why the Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson and copyedited by Franklin, was visually bold compared to similar artifacts from that era. Its layout was part of its messaging (“message: the people making this declaration now observe their own bold standards“). 

But the point is that copywriting exists solely as words (thus it’s impressive when well done), whereas messaging always consist of words, or maybe lack thereof, delivered in a specific, deliberate context. Messaging might be wrapped in any number of contextual clues, from medium, as McLuhan clued in on decades ago, to physical location, to clothing, to format, to color, to voice, to timing. And more – there’s no limit to context.

The selection of speakers and performers at the presidential inauguration, for example. The selection itself was a part of the event’s messaging.

It has to be said though, that this was an example of clumsy messaging revealing the myopia of the Neo-Liberal establishment. It wasn’t quite as dull as the new president’s speechwriting, but something was off – the word unity fell flat. Messaging doesn’t always work.

So the next question becomes: should the person who writes your business copy also make your business messaging?

Very best
Rowan

While discussing the current, industrial-era “elite”, Venkatesh Rao has this to say about the elite’s counterpart, the masses:

The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. 

For me, this sounds familiar. It sounds like the century-old practice of database-driven demographic targeting, recently supercharged by Big Tech’s collective mass-appropriation of private information. You could also say, “Big Tech takes your measure. Height, weight, gender, wealth”, etcetera.

This type of analytics-driven digital marketing can be a bit slimy (not always). Do people really understand Facebook and Google’s Terms of Service? Or do they just want to see family photos or find income? It depends.

A less-conflicted form of digital advertising is retargeting. All you need to know to retarget is, “did this device-user recently visit my site and almost buy something?“. Don’t need to know pedigree, genotype, credit score, or phrenological measurements. But retargeting doesn’t help fill the “top of the funnel”.

And let’s be honest, mass-marketing and advertising will keep slicing and dicing people as long as it’s allowed to. Running demographically-targeted ads on Facebook/Instagram is world’s most effective form of cold selling (which retargeting isn’t). Cold ads work.

In fact, thanks to the Internet, we are living through the height of “industrial marketing”. 

Yet at the same time..

1. we have to ask how long will industrial internet marketing last – and will it crash and burn or diffuse slowly?
2. we’ve already entered a new era of marketing that is also – paradoxically – hastened by the Internet: post-industrial marketing

What does that look like for independent consultants and entrepreneurs?

Simple answer: a content marketing practice. ‘Building a Storybrand’ won’t enough (though it helps!).

Better answer: not sure yet. But here are some ideas.

Learning. Probably some kind of structured self-learning practice that forces us to make better products and design better services, among other things. I met a woman in an Akimbo workshop who “was in a PhD program” – of her own creation. Because there was no Dharma PhD program on the market. Another name for the program is “Independent PhD in the Philosophy of Mindfulness”. It consists of practice, scholarship, teaching and discourse, each of which she mindmaps on her site.

Connection. This means some kind of content marketing practice that connects what your business does, or your opinions as a business owner, beyond what you now think of as your client base and your peers. We have to figure out a way to connect what we do to the broader world that you would never see at an industry conference.

Paradoxically, the things we make or do will still need to apply for a small group of people. But the connection with the broader world will help you clarify why your business exists and make it more appealing to that small group.

Make-and-advise mentality. Speaking of what we do and of content marketing,  the mindset of consultants (and product developers) should be: I make things and I advise. By make things, I obviously don’t mean the plastic garbage on Shark Tank. I mean make content. But I also don’t mean the lead-magnet type of content products that have been standard the last 10 years. The bar will be a little higher.

All of this will take a Hunger Games level of guts – because what if it’s not just a “crazy year” but a “crazy decade”, as seems inevitable?

Towards the end of Venkatesh’s reflections on what the new elites will look like at the close of this decade, he asks, if you want to be an elite, what kind of elite? If you want to be a non-elite, what kind of non-elite? Because both are up fro grabs. But this will take courage. As he puts it.

To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.

The Dharma PhD student (here’s her independent PhD formula, if you’re interested) is example of the kind of courage we need. Beeple making and publishing a piece of digital art every day for 13 years is another example. A fairly famous musician, Nick Cave, publishing an email newsletter after his son died, and discussing that tragedy openly and artfully, is another. 

There are many examples of the courage we’ll need to figure out what post-industrial marketing looks like; I hope you find one that resonates with you.

Meanwhile, have a great weekend (:

Rowan

 

 

All words have multiple meanings, but often a single meaning stands out as the most useful. But that’s not the case with value, whose most useful meaning is hard to detect. 

Look at the ways we use the word value in business:

value shopper
value proposition
value-added
value capture
value selling
value creation
value chain
value conversation
valuable conversation
valuation

Price, profitability, and money run through these definitions to varying degrees. But behind them all is one constant: emotional experience. At least for an independent businessperson.

value is the emotional experience something creates and sustains

So while value is subjective and unquantifiable, it is not just a “perception” that our minds hold. Value is a quantification of the way we feel during some part of a life lived – including our business life. That’s what matters.

Of course, that emotional experience is often connected to money in some way. But it’s never a 1-to-1 equivalent.

After all, money has only existed for 5,000 years. Was there no value prior – was there no price? The last time I checked, the price of God’s favor to Abraham was Isaac, not 50k. 

Note that you can also define value as the monetary price you buy/sell at or as the monetary profit it has the potential to create (ie valuation). These money-formulas for value are useful hacks. And sometimes it makes sense to stop at the useful hack meanings, and not dive deeper. But not when it comes to value.

Because if your emotional experience varies wildly, as these money-formulas of value stay the same, are they really accurate?

This is the thing: don’t let people force you to define, discuss, or price your work only as a number. Insist on holistic value and if you’re not getting it, sell something else, find a better customer, or create a more valuable conversation.

And have a great week ahead,
Rowan

Ultimately, value is the net positive emotional experience something creates and sustains.

Notes

• Value is subjective 
• All kinds of value constantly fluctuate
• Value is usually primarily expressed as a monetary quantity
• But value is unquantifiable
• Value is similar to, but never exactly equivalent to, financial profitability
• Value often carries an element of surprise

Thus you can define value as the price you pay for something, or the profitability it creates – as long as those aren’t entirely defined monetarily either.

An unexpected, hidden, or deliberately layered-on side benefit

Usually, this benefit is for the buyer or end-user of the thing, but it can benefit anyone connected to it – maker, seller, investor, partner, etc.

Mike Tyson has said,

“everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

No one could put it better, but let’s extend the thought:

“everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face… at which point their thinking is paralyzed by non-strategic fight-or-flight responses. These can only be overcome by a response that is equally deep-seated and instinctive. Plans don’t cut it”.

In other words, you need more than the panic plan baked into your genes. You need a strategic plan that you learn through practice, training, preparation, etc. Some call this muscle memories. Though for our purposes, we’re talking about muscle memories that mostly happen above the neck.

In consulting, you most need these instincts when you negotiate a contract. Because it’s when money is on the line that you get (metaphorically speaking) punched in the face.

This is why some sales training programs have participants workshop the negotiation and sales process over and over again. Wax on, wax off, except while communicating complex ideas. Hundreds of scenarios and responses are practiced.

Another approach to creating intellectual muscle memories is to define in published writing the terms you use during such conservations.

That way, when someone asks you, “well, what do you mean by ______?”, you already have an answer to fall back on. An answer based in a definition that has been exposed already to the public. Maybe you’ll use it, or part of it, or maybe you won’t. But you have a baseline definition, that you wrote, to fall back on should your off-the-cuff analogy or explanation fail to hit the mark.

This is the way we do ______ at this business. This is the way we define _____ at this business.

And this serves you not just in initial communications, but through the lifetime of a consulting engagement or anywhere else you might be conversing.

What if you took it a step further, though, and presented your meanings as definitive definitions? In other words, as dictionary definitions. 

After all, what is a definition but a helpful, contextual hint at the meaning of a word. As the linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky has said,

“What we call definitions are not definitions … they’re just hints that a person who already knows the concept can use to understand what’s really going on”

So when you tell someone what Human Resources really means in 2021, or what DevOps actually means now in the cloud-era, or what digital NFT art is, you’re not necessarily redefining those terms. You’re simply adding a layer of meaning – a  hint – as to what they mean.

Your conversation partners will admire and take comfort in your certainty – and sometimes they need a new hint to understand what you’re talking about.

Very best
Rowan

I’ll pick up where I left off, with a (really) brief history of thinking outside the box.

As I was saying while referencing our paleolithic cousins,

 thinking inside the box has happened forever and is good; thinking outside the box has also happened forever and is also good.

Which is to say, both approaches are evolutionarily valid; they’ve contributed to our species’ survival. But as a consultant or entrepreneur, you may be more concerned with outside-box thinking – a mini-framework:

1. Notice patterns others don’t
2. Learning & doing stuff lots of different ways, with the goal of (a)
3. Learning & doing the same way over and over, also with the goal of  (a)

I think (c) is how we discovered the Olduvai Handaxe 1.5 million years ago in what is now Tanzania. You can see one of the earliest examples of it at the British Museum. I once stopped there after a day’s work at my Clerkenwell co-work. Look what I found:

This happened because someone used one stone to chip away at another stone, over and over, in a very controlled, artful way. Or many people did, for many generations. For perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. And finally they noticed and codified patterns that let them reliably replicate these useful objects.

These were so useful that in the exact same region, the Olduvai Gorge, the exact same objects were being made one million years after their invention.

The British Museum provides play-by-play detail:

This example is made from fine-grained, green volcanic lava called phonolite. Using a stone hammer, the maker has carefully struck flakes alternately from both faces around the entire edge, making it thinner at the tip and thicker and heavier at the bottom, with a regular edge all round. 

Imagine how much more useful the Olduvai handaxes were compared to any old rock you picked up off the ground.

… handaxes were used for a variety of everyday tasks, including all aspects of skinning and butchering an animal or working other materials such as wood

Not all version of these handaxes are as big as the one pictured, though. The versions used for hunting would have been lighter and smaller and as carefully honed as possible, whereas the versions used for skinning and butchering would have been as thick as possible, and possibly less carefully made.

In order to survive, people spent their time perfecting this axe. Effort well spent: they survived and thus, here we are as a species – not extinct yet.

Fast forward 1.5 million years, from East Africa to North America, to our recently deceased stone age homo sapien grandparents. There, 13,000 years ago, we still sharpened rocks to survive, yielding the Clovis point. This was quite an improvements over Olduvai stonetech – sleeker, more balanced, lighter, usuable as spearheads.

That’s because just like our ancient rock-artisans, we iterated improvements: a better blade stone or a better hammer stone. Maybe a new striking technique. Or maybe we applied heat. We applied Agile and eked out piecemeal innovations.

Whatever case, we were thinking inside the box – the “sharpen rocks to survive” box. Even if some of us were quite creative as we did so.

*    *    *

Then – boom – true innovation struck: PsyOps hunting.

The first Buffalo Jumps happened about 5,500 years ago in the great plains of what is now Head-Smashed-In((“In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the buffalo plunge off the cliff from below but was buried underneath the falling buffalo. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.” via https://allaboutbison.com/buffalo-jumps/)), Canada.

Long before riding-horses, rifles, or bows & arrows appeared in North America, our forebears figured out how to use coyote costumes and carefully orchestrated movements to corral herds of bison from grazing pastures to steep cliffs.  Whipped into a panic stampede, some members of the herds were forced off steep cliffs, to fall to their deaths below. This yielded far more meat than any handaxe, no matter how light or how sharp.

Who knows how the first Buffalo Jump happened? Maybe one day, after thousands of years hunting bison, a few crazy hunters started wearing coyote masks? Maybe to startle their prey into an ambush consisting of a fellow hunter hidden on some perch. And then the lightbulb went off,

what if we drove them to the cliff?!

That’s pure speculation, by the way. But here’s what didn’t happen – a CTO co-founder didn’t say, “Okay guys, can we think outside the box here for a sec?”.

People who ask for outside-the-box-thinking might mean well, but they’re not understanding how it works. They’re asking the wrong question. They’re over-relying on meeting-banter to ideate. They’re thinking too hard and now allowing space to not think.

By the way. they are often the same kinds of people who are bent on productivity. I know because I’ve been that person. The problem is that productivity stamps out the opportunity to (repeating myself for emphasis):

1. Notice patterns others don’t
2. Do or learn in many different ways, to notice patterns
3. Do or learn the same way, obsessively, to notice patterns

And as we all love to blog about, productivity is not equal to effectiveness.

They want you to perfect the processes by which you make the axe, make more axes per hour, “innovate” better axe materials, and improve axe UX.

But no matter how many amazing axes you make, you’ll never drive a herd of 2,000-pound buffalo off a cliff and feed 100 family members for a year.

Happy hunting
– Rowan

 

In consulting, content creation, software, and other avenues of contemporary/digital entrepreneurship, a Point of View is an idea or set of ideas, about where, how or why value is created, or even how value is hidden or locked, in your marketplace.

Because of its linkage to value, others in your industry should find this idea impossible-to-ignore and should be likely to take action on it. A Point of View is often a personal and industry-specific take on some long-existing common wisdom. A Point of View is the prerequisite for Thought Leadership.