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“You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique. You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.” Martha Graham, pioneer of modern dance
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“You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique. You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.” Martha Graham, pioneer of modern dance
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Dear Business Leader, Thank you for all that you do. It’s my pleasure to explore the practices, partnerships, and purpose that daily inform the beauty of our work. Midway through a rapidly passing 2021, our economy and society are emerging from the turmoil that marked the previous year. Both adaptation and innovation continue apace. Still, challenges remain. And with challenge comes fear and doubt, whether at the individual, team, or organizational level. I believe my responsibility as a trusted partner is to provide a space that allows our clients to empower their efforts by speaking their concerns plainly. Just as we believe #MessagesMakeMarkets, the most important message we convey at McMath Solutions is that we share our clients’ efforts to serve their customers. Even more critically, I believe that by combining clarity of purpose with radical candor, we empower a business to approach its challenges, and its strategy for overcoming them, with one key question: Are we becoming representative of our principles? This is a key question because the steps we take and the beliefs we uphold on the path to strategic goals will only be resilient if they are deeply rooted in core values and first principles. A company can’t change its community without a defined, shareable, and scalable understanding of how things are—and how they change. That understanding in turn provides the criteria by which to evaluate potential actions and results. For us, this means that all our strategic goals can be achieved by meeting customers where they are, and aligning the language of their solutions with their understanding of their goals. We understand that decisions are made by people, and we design our communications and information products accordingly, from the center of our team outwards to all stakeholders and customers. This means your further challenge, as a partner we serve, is to do the work to help your people act with confidence by providing them the designed, inside-out story of your brand. High-trust environments move faster, and your leadership is fueled by the clear purpose you provide to each team member, aligned with their values and personal goals. That shared purpose is what provides stability and safety to intra-organizational communication and decision-making: just as our internal stories underpin our self-efficacy, we as leaders are responsible for the organizational self-talk that surrounds our businesses. Practicing fidelity to values includes understanding the relative value of activities. A consistent, inside-out presentation of our best selves must begin with the end in mind. In order to “solve for you”, you have to pervasively curate the translation of values and causes behind your goals into actionable messages for all stakeholders. And the most important thing is to start. Let’s do our best together. Sincerely, Alexander David McMath
Principal | McMath Solutions LLC
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Positioning and Pipeline are meant to empower each other.
It's not uncommon to find that a client, for any number of reasons, doesn't feel right. To an extent, it's true that as you can complete work with integrity, any client is better than none. Still, the selection of your clientele (early or otherwise) isn’t a place for mental scarcity. While cashflow has the potential to trump other priorities, I just don’t see blindly chasing revenue or working with clients that don’t work for you. It’s hard to uphold our standards if we don’t fully appreciate the client. It’s also difficult to refine the value of our expertise if we don’t have a niche. There’s enough opportunity in your market to work a qualifying process and find a profile of client that suits your goals strategically and interpersonally, while telling yourself a story that keeps you in position to do your best work for each one. Our Offer Development & Capture practice uses information design to integrate emotional, technical, and business messaging. We can help you grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges by showing you how to present the value of your expertise. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. One of the most powerful strategies in business development is to demonstrate your process to communicate its value.
People buy from people, but process and values are what they buy. The key is to remember that your work isn't actually your technical expertise—it's transforming your customer's mission fulfillment from friction to flow. To overcome customer inertia from direct, implicit, opportunity, and switching costs, you need a vivid illustration of the value of your offer. The most evocative details of the story you tell will come from your expertise. To persuade of the revenue, savings, risk reduction, productivity increase, or improved market positioning you can realize through your approach, use the same principles of that approach to prepare for and make the sale. People want to be seen, and they want to know that you can help them be seen. Show the customer what they'll see as they work with you. Align your explanation of the actions you take with the problems you've already solved for your own business, and with the customer's vision as the information you provide brings it to life. Our Offer Development & Capture practice uses information design to integrate emotional, technical, and business messaging. We can help you grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges by showing you how to present the value of your expertise. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Details overwhelm us without constant attention to their context—and the intent that context affords. Every organization needs tools to enforce its intent and curate relevant details.
While detail drives value, value itself requires the integration of tactics into strategy. A project of any significant scope is sure to generate details in more aspects than can be actioned, or even remembered, at once. The complexity of the problem—and its solution, for better or worse—grows with each additional perspective added. This is true whether those perspective come from management frameworks or individuals. Neither "analysis paralysis" nor oversimplification will do. What you actually desire as a business leader is: sufficient informational value to accomplish the objective. Moreover, you require sufficient understanding of the interdependencies between perspectives to reach an integrated conclusion. Likewise, the decisions rendered at the top level of their process should communicate an intent clear enough to withstand contact with reality at all its functional touch points. In the military, comprehensive yet streamlined presentation of the decision space is a matter of life and death. The information product providing commanders with an integrated view of factors relevant to their intent is called a common operating picture. Just as military leaders need to quickly understand the relationships between their circumstances, abilities, and approaches, you can do the same as a business leader. Take time to define the both the problem to solve and the desired outcome, and then map its relationships with each of the functional areas (and stakeholder audiences) of your business. Choose the analytical frameworks, metrics, and qualitative factors that inform success in each function. Finally, establish the hierarchy of dependent and independent variables between functions and tools in view of your strategic intent. This mapping process creates a robust product for integrating your intent with your team's talents. And it's ultimately that facility in shifting from complex detail to simple intent—and back—that drives competitive advantage. Our Operations & Program Management practice deals with the challenges of business by dealing information available to businesspeople, aligning motivation and incentives so that key activities align with key outcomes. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Process improvement in small and medium business, regardless of its tools or outcomes, requires extra emphasis on maintaining efficiency between scope, schedule, and cost performance. Many project management and communication frameworks become overwhelming to maintain, imposing an additional cost beyond the delivery of the new process implementation and execution. An overwrought path to project initiation degrades operations, capture, and quality outcome for all stakeholders.
Our work in implementing new capture, delivery, and knowledge management processes for small and medium professional services vendors has led us to proven practices for quickly illustrating the key elements of a process improvement project: endstate, delivery path, and expected milestones for time or cashflow. Technical and professional vendors can adapt the following implementation plan framework. It will quickly illustrate the value offered to a client in terms of defining their goals, framing expectations, and showing the necessity and benefits of interim steps. It’s also easy to adapt to any particular set of deliverables, outcomes, and customer benefits. Purpose & Goals | The objective of the new process facing stakeholders and market outcomes. Benefits | Advantages of the new process over legacy or ad hoc methods. Project Approach Requirements by Benefits | Necessary strategies for creating deliverables to achieve desired benefits. Key Scope Control Aspects | Establishing limits for the products, features, and stakeholders addressed in order to maximize benefits relative to work performance, both in the process implementation and future execution. Cost & Schedule Performance Estimates | Defining key metrics and targets for an acceptable path to ROI from the new process. Deliverables Estimate for Workflow Implementation | Agreement on necessary tools, documentation, and training to complete implementation, handover, and execution of the new process. Addressing the implementation of a process according to thesis structure ensures that all stakeholders have a common operating picture for the technical and business outcomes sought. Unity of stakeholders around the journey from expertise to value is critical to building solutions that serve a targeted purpose. Our Operations & Program Management practice deals with the challenges of business by dealing information available to businesspeople, aligning motivation and incentives so that key activities align with key outcomes. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Simplicity is key. And that's why our approach to doing things via simple rules is best curated through detailed, repeated experience. Every decision has a story informing it, told and retold by the stakeholders involved. The question is how well and faithfully it’s told—whether stakeholders conserve its key details—and to whom.
We know that systems matter to return our thought capital from current operations to strategic improvement. But a system whose scope is mismatched to the details of its required input and output is worse than no system at all: it forces unpredictable deviations that destroy alignment to values, actions, goals, and learning. The fact remains that innovation doesn't arrive fully formed, and difference is the best cure for suboptimal outcomes. Think in minimum viable by introducing systems at a level where the resource risk of change is controlled relative to scope, while still accruing lessons learned that inform the transformation of details into principles. In every phase of business, detail is what evokes emotions, explains value, and spurs action. Details are the difference between replacement-level value and lavish value. And they can't be micromanaged; they have to arise from understanding of first principles. Teach your team to appreciate detail—to observe it, communicate it, and solve for it. Successful organizations run on well-curated, well-repeated truth. Our Operations & Program Management practice deals with the challenges of business by dealing information available to businesspeople, aligning motivation and incentives so that key activities align with key outcomes. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. A certain degree of ego defense drives us to achieve. But we can't allow that drive to begin acting on its own initiative. If this ego derailment occurs to you, entrepreneurship and all its adjacent forms may present a moral hazard to you.
Stamp this impulse out every time it occurs, lest you be forced to choose between solving for ego and solving for the selling/delivering/scaling/leading/learning of our business. Speak against emotional investment that doesn't connect with return to human or financial capital, with a story formed ahead of time. Entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) are what they are for a few key reasons:
To be clear, a certain degree of self-belief and even self-centeredness is beneficial to entrepreneurship. A new business faces many forms of resistance; sometimes a bit of stubborn self-aggrandizement can bridge a gap in engagement from external sources. But if a person is inclined to perceive slights readily in interpersonal relationships, and to respond to them with proactive efforts to vindicate their value or control risk, their project will be integrally imbued with those personality traits as much as any others. If the project owner treats their work as an amplifier of this unhealthy personal narrative, the venture insulates the person from risk and consequences of adverse personality responses. Until it doesn’t. The problem picks up right where the healthy self-concept leaves off. Success in building a business or asset provides fertile ground to our worst traits, because they hides their seeds among those of the heroic narrative in which we frame our efforts. The personal brand becomes the dominant mode of personality, and either pride or frustration defend the personal brand without self-awareness. In the shadows of the heroic journey of entrepreneurship, toxic ego purports to cultivate knowledge and imperatives kept hidden from our unfeeling detractors. But what’s actually happening is that the "ego defense industrial complex" is entrenching itself as the venture’s most important stakeholder. Ego for its own sake is ultimately choosing to allow their preferred weeds to choke off their growth rather than emergent ones from elsewhere. This leads to a harvest of thoughts and actions we’d previously have never countenanced. That harvest will almost surely show itself penny wise and pound foolish in view of business and personal goals, unless you—along with your support systems, use the preparation of information in your life to equip you for the moments in which the ego's needs diverge from those of the true value of your organization. Our Operations & Program Management practice deals with the challenges of business practice by dealing with the motivations and information available to businesspeople. We believe that information design is what aligns motivation and incentives so that key activities align the outcomes of delivery, capture, and customer goals. To tell us more about your goals, and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Whether selling or buying, it pays to be aware of the emotional states within the sales process. In addition to a technical and a business win, the exchange of value necessarily both heightens and offers to resolve certain emotions depending on the vendor and the customer.
Breaking through resistance with a prospective client, in order to speak into the solution space for their problems, requires four pieces:
These aspects are key to how (and why) we practice consultative, complex, or solution sales for our professional expertise. And frankly, we either choose to solve for beneficial emotional states or we risk persistent frustration for ourselves and our audience. We believe designed information products change system-wide outcomes. This is because while Life write large is complex, people simply respond to information. We only have to model the people (including ourselves) and design the messages based on known styles of response and desired feeling endstates. Maintaining a positive emotional journey around the value provided is a great competitive advantage. It can be built by clear communication from the inside out. Conversely, without clear communication there is no clear thinking—and that's exactly why our customers are primed to journey from frustration to satisfaction. When customers empathize with us and resonate with the journey we describe, they understand that we can help them enact a similar story—one that empowers them. The model starts within. Designing the message (to) ourselves is the most critical work because once we've sold the toughest audience, we've equipped ourselves to understand, at a visceral level, why people buy. At McMath Solutions, we approach our Offer Development & Capture practice as the building of an information architecture to integrate emotional, technical, and business messaging. We can help you grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges by showing you how to present the value of your expertise. To tell us more about your goals, and to discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Life is not binary between knowledge and the lack thereof. It’s always experimental.
Push your team to develop a practice for thinking and communicating around complexity. As focus begets effectiveness, clear communication fuels clear thinking. Everything we want to create or achieve proceeds from this dynamic. Knowledge builds its own value. When we communicate our body of knowledge aggressively, as it is being built and explored, we unlock unforeseen returns on its investment. Design the flow of information in your work to set you up for successful choices. Whomever you serve, you must face your audience with designed expertise that's readily actionable, easily communicated, and internally consistent. We are what we can prove by doing, but we won’t get to prove what we don’t understand deeply. We earn opportunities when we communicate valuable understanding, over and above mere information. But if we find ourselves short of clarity that matches insight to action, we have to evaluate ourselves honestly and adjust the scope of information we consider—and produce—to pivot towards solutions beyond the obvious. A successful leader and organization refuse to wilt in the face of insufficient scope, proof, or resources. They choose to believe Messages Make Markets, and they control narrative to drive emotions in tandem with logic to mobilize action. A successful pivot, or any form of change management, comes as we design our story to tell "why it works" by matching feelings to rational arguments such that the evidence corroborates and refines the story over time. I want people to actually care what I know, and I want to be able buy nice things for myself and other people I care about. The work we owe our organizational vision is to care for stakeholders and prove our concepts by unmistakably executing on them from struggle to success. Your vision is as real as your investment in building it. At McMath Solutions, we approach the alternatives analysis and information architecture of marketing management as a critical part of our Our Offer Development & Capture practice. We can help you present your expertise as value facing partners and customers in order to grow your capabilities and tackle bigger challenges. To tell us more about your goals, and discover how McMath Solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. |
As a businessperson, you’ve taken the obligation to stand before someone who has their own goals and needs, and to assure them that you can help bridge the gap between present and future. You desire to bring something real to bear both on the gap itself and on the customer’s understanding of it—nothing hidden behind cliché or sophistry. We know you take the promise to maximize customers’ time and money as seriously as we do. That’s why we treat thought leadership as another means to earn the trust your dreams will place in us.
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Make Your Market Today!
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