Week 8 – MBA6101 – Ascend Your Start-up

In sharing her final thoughts in the book Ascend Your Start-Up, the author takes a look back at the mountain after having made the arduous trek up Mount Everest, which was the metaphor for scaling a start-up.

1. It's not about title, status or money, but about inspiring and motivating others for a common goal
2. There are a lot of unknowns along the way, but you can tackle anything
3. This isn't a sprint, it's a marathon so focus on what you want to build and map out your values, culture, while building your brand. Enjoy the journey.
4. Continuous improvement, endless curiosity, knowing you don't know everything so getting folks on your team that do is imperative so you can operationalize
5. Know who your consumer is, who your employees are, and stay focused on results
6. Measure & analyze KPIs and recalibrate your business
7. Hold people and teams accountable, getting rid of toxicity and encouraging positivity
8. Stay sane, keep your eye on the prize, and have fun along the way, constantly learning from your customers, your employees, yourself. 
9. Be better tomorrow than you were yesterday.
10. Grit, grit, grit

Be a multiplier. Multiply your joy, prosperity and knowledge and help others do the same.

Week 7 – MBA6101 – Ascend Your Start-up

I absolutely loved chapter 7 of Ascend Your Start-Up! Yu was talking my language. 

She repeatedly uses the mantra that "growth thrives at the intersection of technology and humanity." This was a little hard for me to wrap my head around but I think it comes from her experience in the tech sector where tech can help or hinder just like a person can help or get in their own way. It was so helpful to see that she broke it down into some precepts.

You must create believers

I agree so strongly with this. Culture starts and ends here. I have had the benefit of working for three organizations that make sure that onboarding or orientation begins with a history lesson with the evolutionary changes that occurred along the way. My first job was at McDonald's and they made us watch 15 minute VHS tapes in a library that included Ray Kroc (founder, 1955) and his story of humble beginnings and vision for a family-friendly burger joint at reasonable prices. Then later I was employed at Leo Burnett USA, an ad agency founded in 1935 by a very eloquent creative named Leo Burnett and his When to Take My Name Off the Door speech, that still makes my hairs stand up and I keep the book 100 Leo's a pithy compilation of wise Burnett-isms. Similarly, at Ogilvy & Mather, there was a grounding in David Ogilvy and how he built his advertising business in 1948. In all three, having their vision helped me know what the day-to-day needed to look like to make that vision a reality. Each are still around, many years after their founding. It provided the "why".

Define what 'staying special' means to you

"Staying Special" to me means working in an environment where opinions are encouraged and debates welcome because that only makes the work stronger--looking at things from every angle (even if not your own), building upon other's thoughts/ideas, where laughter often breaks the tension in the room and criticism is shaken off because the end-product is something everyone can be proud of having created. Where my strength isn't a threat--I identified with Yu, hard, when she said, "I have a strong personality, for instance. I say what I think, which stems from a deep sense of commitment. For some founders, that’s a bad fit. If that’s the case, then hiring someone more green to take orders might be a good idea." I am most definitely not a 'yes' person; however, you will have no stronger advocate on the team if I am on board.

Remain close to your 'why'

Simon Sinek has a great "Why?" exercise that starts with "why are we friends?" and it boils down to this: "Your why is the thing you give to the world". Boom! This is the humanity that Yu mentions. In a start-up or small business, the founder might clearly know why he/she/they started the company (hopefully they don't lose sight of it as they build something bigger, something meaningful, possibly life-changing, for consumers to buy into. As we all know, an organization is made up of people so understanding holistically, a culture is the very soul of a company. Yu says, "Trust is key to making a collaborative culture work...Cultural Collaboration means taking intentional action to build an inclusive, thriving culture where it’s safe to share ideas." The culture doesn't just happen. It is shaped, cultivated, fed by positivity, by vision, by shared beliefs, by aligning strategy to the day-to-day. It might not always be flawlessly executed, but not everything is perfect. In fact, whatever makes you uncomfortable is your biggest opportunity for growth. Growth is uncomfortable because you've never been here before...you've never been this version of you. So give yourself a little grace and breathe through it.

Week 6 – MBA6101 – Guerrilla Marketing

In Guerrilla Marketing's Chapter 6 Selecting the Most Lethal Marketing Methods, Levinson shares how crucial it is for an organization to have a marketing calendar that clearly plans and tracks all marketing activity, by channel, with the cost and description for each. The book is quite dated and today the calendar is often referred to as the Tactical Media Plan, which has the paid media channels; however, one should also have view that includes owned (marketing you control that includes your website YT channel, social, etc.) and earned (when someone mentions your brand/company or posts an image or vid to social that wasn't created by or paid for by you)--all should have performance metrics that should be tracked, reported and adjusted according to the business activity that is generated (or not!) as a result.

Levinson is spot-on when he says that of the two, reach (# of unique people that saw your ad) and frequency (now called impressions), it is frequency that is best since this is the # of times the ad was displayed, regardless of whether or not it was clicked. If an ad gets 50,000 impressions and had a reach of 10,000 people, that means that 10,000 unique users saw the ad approximately 5 times.

In addition, the message being delivered that reaches the customer with 'x' frequency is also very important because "it is not necessary to say everything to everybody, nor is it possible". This is so very true. And even Fortune 100 companies know this as budgets are sometimes constrained and choices must be made that take into account past investments in media channels and focus must drive what is chosen for activation. Which ones do you choose? He provided an answer to that: "choose as many as you can do well." I cannot stress this enough to my own clients, past and present. Which ones are working hardest for you? Which is most effective at driving customers to your retail outlet, to your website, to schedule a service with you? What does customer behavior tell you in terms of what their needs and wants are? Knowing the needs and wants, should that be in the marketing message or advertising--it might influence a new customer to close the deal with your product or service. Track, learn, adjust, and (hopefully!) grow.

Lastly, Levinson stresses the importance of convenience to the customer in the context of providing as many varying forms of payment for your organization's product or service. Making it a hurdle will cost you more, in loss of customers. Getting and retaining customers is something a strong Tactical Media Plan can assist with delivering.

Week 6 – MBA6101 – Surfing the Tsunami

Kelsey posits that there are three ways one could respond to AI: Adapt, Adopt, or Adept with Chapter 6 of Surfing the Tsunami focusing on what Adept is all about. He writes that being adept is a "best" response to AI, where one is adept at getting directly involved with developing AI or learning how to code and/or work with related data.

He suggests that one might look for a role in an organization that could use an AI-enabled platform, giving one the experience, knowledge or skill in data science, AI or machine learning as one is learning it. I'll be honest and say that across the board, I am not nor have I ever been an "early adopter" of any technology. My brother always bought first editions of tech devices. I usually wait for all the bugs & kinks to get worked out--I am also quite frugal so spending $10,000-15,000 for a plasma TV when they first came out in the late 1990s sounded ludicrous to me, regardless how amazing the picture was touted as being!

"Elon Musk is a unique example of someone who is wary of AI but fully embraces it at the same time..." He and I have something in common! "Embrace" might not be the right word, a more apt phrase might be "senses the inevitability of AI". I did take Kelsey up on his suggestion to download some apps so I can have the tools "at the ready" whenever I decide to start to dip a toe in the coding water: Coursera, DataCamp, Khan Academy and Mimo. I like Khan's interface which has an explore section, bucketed into math, science, economics, arts & humanities, computing, test prep and life skills.

One of the articles suggested in Surfing the Tsunami is quite good, with an infographic comparing the Python and R coding languages for data analysis. It appears that Python would be the clear winner, with many more pluses in the "pros" column.

Week 6 – MBA6101 – Ascend Your Start-up

In chapter 6 of Ascend Your Start-Up, when Yu states "I needed to architect the outcome. I knew the choices I made were stepping stones to what I wanted to achieve in life..." I felt that to the core. It reminded me of a Tony Robbins quote, "Decisions decide destiny, there is no action without decision." 

Life puts you at a crossroads--left or right? go forward or back? Each choice is a decision with consequences that may or may not be known. So having a vision is important to remind one of the destination, even when the path is not quite crystalized. The journey is the adventure, where each experience, event, interaction, thought should be viewed through the lens of the vision. That's not to say that there won't be setbacks, hurdles, or failures along the way. What it does say is that recalibration is necessary to ensure success.

"Success is systemized by establishing processes to make results repeatable and dependable," Yu says. If you don't have the experience of knowing what process will yield positive results, you must seek individuals, to be in your organization, on your team, that bring that knowledge with them, as a sherpa for your own journey. This will save time, "time is money and efficiency creates time." It's like muscle memory. Muscle memory is where one consolidates a specific motor task (tensing and relaxing particular muscles) into memory through repetition. This also has the added benefit of building confidence, familiarity, and capability in your own skill(s).

How does one know one has succeeded? Arrival at the destination? Sure. How is that measured, especially across function-based teams? One suggestion is to establish objectives and key results to conquer process and measure disconnect. This ensures that each team understands their role and contribution to the organization's mission, aligning strategy with execution all while driving accountability. Genius. 

Week 5 – MBA6101 – Guerrilla Marketing

In Chapter 5 of Guerrilla Marketing, Levinson covers the topic of developing truly creative marketing. He provides a great exercise for one to do. First, practice writing what you think might be the creative strategy for current advertising you've seen, composing three-sentences that apply to them. Do the same for their competitors and the comparison between them would establish the brand's positioning. Very insightful approach! He goes on to outline the seven-steps to assuring successful marketing.

1. Find the inherent drama within your offering
2. Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit
3. State your benefits in as believable a way as possible
4. Get people's attention
5. Motivate your audience to get involved
6. Be sure you are communicating clearly
7. Measure your finished advertisement, commercial, letter, website, and/or brochure against your creative strategy

These steps are brilliant in their simplicity and require having a clear idea of what you want to say about your own product or service. To picture the mind of your customer at the moment that customer makes a decision to purchase and talk about the feelings that the prospect will experience after owning what you are selling. Levinson does caution to be wary of basing your creative strategy on rapid societal changes that are more anecdotal than factual.

One last point: Guerrillas are attuned to world happenings including at the national and local level, breaking news, and up-to-the-minute trends--if you're not keeping up, you're falling behind.    

Week 5 – MBA6101 – Surfing the Tsunami

Kelsey posits that there are three ways one could respond to AI: Adapt, Adopt, or Adept with Chapter 5 of Surfing the Tsunami focusing on what Adopt is all about.

He writes that adopting is a "better" response to AI, where one is adopting AI-related tools & platforms, becoming more actively involved in managing AI. Whatever company uses AS will have a competitive advantage.

I came across an article this week that touches on a point made in the book, where new tech comes along, displaces workers or creates a new job opportunity. At Chili's Grill & Bar restaurants, robots are being used to make their server's jobs a little easier, which "allows their staff to be more engaging with the guests while benefiting the restaurant altogether." The Chili's example is one that highlights how routine work became the mother of automation AND stressed the importance of the employee's focus to be on making the customer experience better as more of his/her time was spent engaging with the customer, not hustling to get dishes back to the kitchen.

In a nutshell, "sooner or later, because of economic competition and past precedents, AI will be increasingly adopted" (Kelsey, 2018). So, if someone is in denial, that won't stop the marketplace from adopting AI-related tools & platforms. What I do like is the approach Kelsey notes, calling it "sustainable transition" with AI where adoption is facilitated by organizations willing to redevelop their workforce to maintain relevance, gain a competitive edge, and sustain growth with a skilled labor force.