Focus To Build Expertise Rapidly: Win Without Pitching Clubhouse Recording 7/12

now all these heads turn i love that it's like fighting words most people will live with the undesirable circumstances rather than do the undesirable work you know anyone can make a claim it's very trendy to call yourself a storyteller a brand specialist or a strategist thank you for joining us if this is your first time here i want to tell you what we're doing we're doing a 12 part mini series based on the writing of my guest today blair ends the the book that i'm referring to is called the win without pitching manifesto it's one of the two books that blair has written it's the seventh proclamation from the book we will build expertise rapidly what does that mean well we need to claim our expertise as a rallying cry for perpetual progress that's a lot for me to say perpetual progress and then we work to add to those skills and it's a continuous learning process this is mandatory let's get right into it i'm on page 90 right now i'm going to read a few things and i'm gonna open up to blair to expand on it and blair has teased a couple of surprises first and i don't know where this conversation to go i'm a little scared okay so just to recap a little bit right so first we need to select a focus and then we need to articulate that focus via a claim of expertise and finally we work to quickly add proof to this claim because when we make a claim it's like us planting a flag in the ground and heads turn the competition takes notices notice all of a sudden because prior to that as a generalist firm nobody was threatened by us and you say in here the generalists it's an easier life it's not as lucrative and it's not as fulfilling because nobody attacks an unthreatening generalist why don't we turn it over blair add to that please yeah and so this proclamation the seventh is really building on the first we will specialize and in that proclamation i laid out three steps to positioning number one choose a focus which we discussed is a combination of discipline and market what do you do and for whom do you do it number two articulate that focus in a claim of expertise and that's as you've just alluded to that's that's you effectively putting your flag in the ground and claiming territory i claim this area of expertise for us and then number three is to build the skills capabilities and processes that allow you to support that claim and you might think well hold on shouldn't you build those first and then make the claim yeah you claim exp you choose a focus you claim expertise you put your flag in the ground with that claim and then all and now all these heads turn all of these people who these kind of we were all kind of brothers and sisters colleagues you know right well like the community and it's you can be part of a community and compete at the same time and there's nothing wrong with that right but it's like you're the non-threatening oh they do good work they're not really a threat to me wait a minute they just claimed to be experts in something that we do too and that what we do that your your competitor uh sees is what they do it might be a declared specialization or just might be one of many things that they do right so now you're claiming expertise in something so the competition is a little personally affronted they don't talk so nicely about you and they work harder to beat you that's not a bad thing we can all still be friends and work and be in this race together and or or not be friends like whatever i mean it's business here so that's so you know making the claim okay i've positioned my firm i think somebody in the first night i don't remember if it was on twitter or a question i was like okay well i've like i've made this claim and like the world's not beating a path to my door the claim is just the starting point right now you need to build out the proof so you could be if you're a little unsure if you're if you want to do this backwards that backwards isn't fair what i would say is make the claim before you are perfectly comfortable making it your positioning the claim that you make can be a little bit aspirational and recognize that the act of making the claim will hurry you up will sharpen your focus to build the missing skills capabilities and processes like nothing else so go ahead make that claim to the world of what you want to specialize in it's okay to be a little bit aspirational and then once you've made the claim now you need to work hard to make sure that you you separate yourself from the pack now you write something in here that almost sounds like fighting words and i love it because it's like are you in or are you out you know produce or get off the throne as they say okay you say in in the book here well average human beings avoid the difficult decision and that most people will change their desires even their values before they will change their behavior and the question you have for people the thing that you must face people is are you most people and i love that it's like fighting words you're like average people do this most people do this now you have to ask yourself are you most people how have people responded to you saying things like that uh i don't it's been a while since anybody's pushed back on that but it's something it's a deeply held belief of mine i one of my hobbies is experimenting on my body so i like to deprive myself of things i like to experiment with different diets and withhold things uh overdose on things um and uh what i'm struck by so one of my like my uh i'm a real amateur kind of nutritionist i'm really interested in how what we put in our bodies has such an effect on us and um so i experiment on it and i read about a lot i'm always struck by somebody who's got some sort of ailment that they could just fix they could just fix with sleep diets the big one exercise whatever it is but you know what is it 90 95 of people won't do it most people will live with the undesirable circumstances rather than do the undesirable work and so that that's what's going on here with uh creatives who aren't able to build a deeper expertise so number one the difficult business decision of choosing a focus and then doing the work that's required afterwards to build that deep expertise most just won't do it now like i've already said the good news is i think once you choose a focus if you have any pride in you um the work actually becomes easy because what i've noticed in in my career is you choose a focus and um so we've already established i have more confidence than i than is merited so i'll put a a brave claim out there it's a little bit let's say aspirational and then because i have a proud streak it's like i want to be able to live up to it i have no problem making the claim but then i will run like hell to to go get what's missing to be able to support that claim so i and i think yeah again like i've said before i have this bias i know what i know about me and i can make some extrapolation to other people but i think actually making the claim is the hard part and then once you make the claim you go ahead and do the difficult work but not not everybody some people just you know like say well i okay specialization doesn't work because i specialized in this area and nothing really changed for me well that is the beginning and the great news is that uh competitive pressure to pay off your claim is really powerful and i remember i remember i had this idea that okay i'm gonna specialize i'm gonna make this put this bull claim out there and then i'm gonna run like hell as the metaphor to get a lead and then once i have a lead i'll be able to coast but anybody who's ever gotten anything close to some sort of leadership position in the space that they operate in knows that once you're out front once you have once you sense that you have a bit of a leadership position now you work twice as hard because you never want to give that up and similar to that it's not like so let's just assume that all that that leadership position the the point of view of the marketplace on your stature in the marketplace is directly tied to how good you actually are that seems to make sense right and i've heard you know we can't let a night go by without me dropping a david bakerism i remember watching david baker years ago address an audience full of designers and he said in the way that only he can have any of you ever tasted competence and i thought wow that's a bold thing to an audience and he said what i mean is he basically said you're all generalists you designed a bunch of things but once you once you start to focus on the same things you start to see the patterns the patterns in you start to see the patterns and then you benefit from repeated application you get to hone your craft etc now you taste competence and the the challenge with creative people going back to the first night the first proclamation it is in the nature of the creative personality to want to do all things for all people and to leave the field wide open so at the time he said it was probably 15 years ago there weren't a lot of highly specialized creative firms out there there weren't a lot of people in an audience like that who'd ever really tasted that deep competence and then i i've just had so many clients over the years they articulate it slightly differently than that but it's like i remember the first time somebody said to me i was struck by the length of time he said i have run an ad agency for 25 years and this is the first time in my career i have ever felt like the expert so you narrow your focus and then the work that you have to do kind of presents itself it kind of becomes obvious skills capabilities processes you start to codify how you do what you do you develop some really important standards and you you hold yourself and your team members to those standards we'll talk about that more in a little bit i think so i want to get right back into the book well you say something in here that you know anyone can make a claim and people often do they call themselves it's very trendy to call yourself a storyteller a brand specialist or a strategist or a thought leader or a social influencer people say all kinds of things but now we have to prove our claim and you say you do that through focus and there's kind of a thought exercise not quite an experiment but you said that two people all things being equal of insane intellect and abilities if you gave them a task to do something and one was to have broad focus and the second to have narrow focus that you would bet the second person the one who chose a narrow focus would build the depth of expertise exponentially greater than the first that it that we don't have to be smarter or more creative than our competition only more focus this really directly ties into the first proclamation it seems like we're always referring back to because if you fail there everything else starts to fall apart you know talk about putting putting the work in early to to to get a massive lead yeah i mean it's like it's uh it's not just hard work like i think we were talking about that last night or the night before but there's a time early on when hard work is really the value of it is overweighted right it's early on in your career early on in the life of a technology or a platform or some other opportunity in a in a business space hard work's really value valuable so in the book you say okay look we want to be a differentiated creative enterprise and how we're going to do this is through a couple of steps one is through consulting second is writing and third is artistry but there's a problem with the artistry part because it's increasingly becoming a commodity that it is inexpensively acquired now can you expand on that please i've worked with many creative firms over 19 years and every once in a while one will say to me the owner the uh the owner of the firm will say so uh what what do you see a lot of firms what do you think of our creative and my answer is almost always the same it's pretty good you shouldn't win or lose business because of it and that's meant to be a somewhat of a disarming comment because we think it's the like you said chris a few nights ago you came out of art school you were a high achiever in art school you had this fantastic portfolio and you thought the world would beat a path to your door and it just doesn't happen and uh really great work if if people can find it if it's out there in the world easily accessible does get you on the consideration list but it actu has to be really good right but once you're on the consideration list and we talked about this too i think in the fourth proclamation we will rethink what it means to sell once you're on the consideration list that really great work doesn't get you hired because early in the buying cycle the client overweights the positives or possibilities of change and late in the buying cycle they overweight the costs or the consequences of failure so when when prospective clients see great work your great work they are inspired by it and i talk about the importance to inspire the interested those who are in earlier stages of buying they actually they try on what it's like to have work as good as the work that you did they imagine what it would be like to have their brand video well so look whatever it is you do look like the stuff in your portfolio so they get excited they enter into a conversation with you but by the time they buy they are now they're no longer overweighting the possibilities of how good things could be they're now overweighting the likelihood that something is going to go wrong and the costs or consequences of that failure so great work is a tool of inspiration that works early and you need to learn to shift in the close from inspiring to reassuring calming people down and letting them know why things are not going to be horrible so your work says look how good things could be and then closing is about let's talk about how bad things are not going to be and in this proclamation the book i talk about the importance of codifying your methodology codifying how you do what you do you once you choose a focus you start to build these skills capabilities and processes you will start to formalize a way of doing what you do and in the first proclamation we talked about the importance the secondary differentiator after focus which is discipline and market is your perspective or point of view and once you have a perspective or an ideology on how this discipline for market should be done then that sets you apart from your competitors who also do the same discipline for market but it also very easily lends itself to two things number one thought leadership it becomes easier to produce thought leadership because you have an ideology so all of the content you produce or most of it is framed through some sort of ideology or imbued with this ideology and a defined way of working and remember when we had john gleason up on the stage procurement ex procurement guy from procter and gamble he talked about that he dropped that i don't know if people caught it as kind of a secondary differentiator is like i want to see that you've codified you have a codified methodology of how you do what you do now most creative firms that have been around for a few years have a claim of a codified process it's usually a four-step process it usually begins each step begins with the same leg letter it's usually d and it's all so but it's i shouldn't say it's a starting point right discover develop design duh we should have done it differently i got to change our copy deck i left the fourth one as duh but once you're focused and once you have a bit of an ideology then it's easy you you'll actually like fall into this like set way of how you do what you do and you kind of tried to bring this up earlier and i think i steer the conversation somewhere else in that example in the book i'm actually talking about ditch digging although i don't think i say it so you do say it i do say it yeah if i ask you to dig a ditch one time certain width and length it'll take you x long and you'll do it to y quality but i if i ask you to dig 50 ditches by the time you've dug 50 ditches you will be faster you will be better and you will have developed a way for diagnosing the ground and what tools you should use and what the shape of the ditch should be and all of this just becomes from repeated observation and repeated application so you once you narrow your focus you start to find the best way to do this then you keep iterating iterating iterating you keep developing and furthering and then one day you realize wow i actually i have this codified methodology for ditch digging that you know people who only dig a ditch once a year they would never know this so let's write this out better yet let's draw this out so when i'm in front of a nervous late stage prospect where the quality of our work got us there but now my job is to calm them down i can roll out this image this visual graphic and say now let me show you how this is going to work so you can rest assured that we're going to get this right we've done this before we do it all the time we have a bulletproof way of doing it first we're going to diagnose the ground by using these tools then we're going to select the right digging tools then we're going to prescribe the shape of the ditch and if the ground looks like this it's going to be a curved ditch and if the ground looks like this it's going to be right angles and we're going to use slightly different tools and then it's going to take us this long to build it and we could go in these different directions and just by walking through your codified methodology the client is reassured because the inference is little variability in process equals little variability and outcome if you've done this so many times that you have developed a codified way of doing it i the client can infer from that low likelihood of screwing up and that is really important late in the buying cycle when you're trying to close it's not important early on what's important early on is your ability to get the client to see a beautiful future and you can do that just through your portfolio the quality of your work so blair says from the beginning of the book choose a focus make a commitment to that focus and work over time to develop the expertise so you expose yourself to the same problem over and over again you're going to notice patterns you're going to develop efficiencies and then he says document that process to create a formula and when you have a formula what happens is the client becomes much more confident in you because what they don't want is a surprise they're good surprises but that's not the one they're worried about they're worried about the bad surprise and i've said this before i don't i don't think i've stolen this from you blair but let's see is i've said that clients do not hire the best option they hire the least risky option so your job is to reduce risk risk management risk mitigation and you do that by formalizing your process now the whole word formula makes creative people their skin crawl i'm not a formula monkey you know that's an assembly line mentality there's something in here on page 96 i have to bring up because there's a charged word in here that's become a little bit of a debate within the design community so you say when we choose to follow the 12 proclamations in this book and we make the transition from order taker that's the charge word to the expert we commit to the idea of perpetual learning and continuous approve improvement as mandatory some people feel like the word order taker is used in a pejorative way and i guess maybe it is here that now all of a sudden we're not good enough as craftspeople or we're not going to ascend towards expertise can you expand on this blair i'm not disagreeing with you i'm just asking in case some people are listening like hey wait a minute there's that word order taker again and and i was perfectly comfortable before today doing what it is i'm doing the throwing around and it's an insult to me in my craft why does everybody need to become a thought leader and expert why does that matter yeah i don't know that everybody does need to become a thought leader thought leader and you don't need to be an expert and if you if you want to be a generalist designer that designs everything for everybody that's uh creatively that's a rich life and i ca i see the appeal and even though i might uh you know for simplicity's sake just i might make the point i might use strong language that says you shouldn't do that that's a that's a mistake it's not a mistake you just need to understand that every decision you make there's a trade-off so if so back to something that came up the other night there are two functions in business making things and selling things if you're going to focus on the craft making things and just be a skilled craftsman and you want to be broad and you don't want to be a thought leader you don't want to specialize etc that's fine and i i hope you can pull it off you have to be really good and probably get famous i hope you can pull it off the trade-off that you make if you choose that path is selling is going to be really really difficult because this is where i'll push back on something john said but i think it's an issue of semantics i don't think it's i don't think it's as directly conflicts with what he said as it's going to sound um relevance isn't enough positioning is an act in an act in relevant differentiation right so he's he's saying um he thinks differentiation is overvalued you need to be relevant i like you need to be meaningfully different so if you take the if you build a differentiated firm and then you embrace the other proclamations like we will be selective which i think we talked about last night what does it mean to be selective it means to only pursue the those clients to whom you are most relevant right so what was the question the recurring theme with blair what was what am i talking about i don't know it's sounds good to me you're saying basically if you are a generalist you live a rich creative life and if you're successful we're really happy for you but there's many pitfalls to being a journalist that doesn't have the deep focus that doesn't want to maybe develop some form of expertise so that you eliminate or reduce your competition yeah the trade-off is sales and marketing becomes difficult and if you bought a book called the one without pitching manifesto it's because you have a sales and marketing problem and i want to bring it back to this one thing about continuous improvement and i love that you put this in the book and you talk about it we must make an investment to train our people that when we hire somebody new a new employee comes to work for us they must feel as though learning never ends and the pace of learning never lessens we race together and you as the leader need to set the pace yeah and just before we went live an hour ago i tweeted something that i tweet roughly every year it's a link to what i think is the smartest piece of thought leadership ever written for knowledge based businesses so if you look at tap on my profile you'll see a link to my twitter handle there and it's the most recent tweet and it's an article written by david maester who's retired he's retired now he was a harvard business school professor and then he was a management consultant it's called the problem of standards i read this thing once a year and i think oh man this thing is brilliant it was written in 2001 about halfway down i forget what the subtitle is called he talks about this but he basically says and i'll paraphrase there really only two cultures in your firm one of two cultures there is a category there's a macro category of tolerance and a macro category of intolerance in the tolerant category nobody gets fired in that firm nobody is held accountable for the quality of their work right and employees there's no employee turnover in the intolerant firm culture everybody understands so in in the tolerant culture we're all a family we're all in this together and and and there's no judgment here and maester talks about this himself he says the tolerant culture is we're all a family we're all in this together we're all doing our best in an intolerant culture it's a culture it's a firm that has said we are going to strive to be the best we possibly can we're going to support you to be the best you possibly can be best you can possibly be but if you can't keep up you're out and maester does this incredible thing in the room in the moment of that speech he says so he describes the two different cultures and he says okay so uh hands up if you're if you your firm represents the tolerant culture hands up if your firm represents the intolerant culture he said it's about 50 50. he said okay so you're all business advisors i see this all the time i go in i survey a firm and i say do you want to have a tolerant culture or an intolerant culture about half the people say we should have a tolerant culture and the other half people say we should have an intolerant culture he says you're all business advisors what would w what would your advice be and the audience says the firm should split he says yeah exactly see how easy it is that both of these are perfectly acceptable cultures you can't mix them so you have to understand in your firm whether that firm is just you or you and one other person or you and 10 people you're trying to scale it do you want to be a place where nobody gets fired everybody's happy and everybody's feelings are okay and this is a gross like simplification or do you want to be a firm where you underst everybody understands we are trying to carve out a leadership position of the best in the world at something and that means everybody in this firm has to be capable of growing rapidly and we will invest in you we'll support training we'll throw money at you all these things but if you can't keep up you're out i'm gonna fire some people on monday team you hear that we're an intolerant culture moving forward i'm trying to carve out a leadership position in the marketplace if you can't keep up you're done hey everyone ricky here i'm one of the content directors here at the future thanks for watching today's video and if you want to help support us by bringing high quality education to everyone consider buying one of our courses there you will find courses to improve your process with clients manage your projects and sharpen your design skills head to the future.com courses to learn more thanks for watching and your continued support and we will see you guys in the next video