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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. As 2021 opens, the operational and strategic trials of business in a time of upheaval are no longer new. We are ready to turn from defensive to offensive value. Please be encouraged that you are prepared to unlock new ways of serving. You have the tools and the advantages that you need right now. These challenges are gifts. “We are what we can prove by doing.” Empathy and gratitude are key practices for all healthy relationships, and that’s what a complex business problem gives back to those who solve it. Consider my own example: it’s understood that as the founder of a new firm, I didn’t find myself a capable team because I paid the highest salaries. Likewise, I haven’t won—and served—new clients because an extensive track record dominates my marketing mix. What actually moves me forward is the confidence of my talent, partners, and vendors alike that I enforce the alignment of my ambitions with an insistence on rigor and a servant heart. I spent 2020 treating the present crisis as beside the point because I understood that crisis only makes us more of who we are. “My team has to know I’m not soft.” I might’ve blurted that out while decompressing a bit with a colleague. But it came from the truth that the joy of our visions fulfilled lies on the other side of not only leading by example, but creating new leaders in resilient fidelity to clear values. As I now build a team of my own, I’m certain I know how to help establish an organizational commitment to the lavish value these modern problems demand. For my part I offer everyone I meet the promise of my best effort, and I trust my own promise because of the discipline I’ve designed and enforced over myself. I am to my partners a crucible and a catalyst for them to impart control over the experience they provide. “If you work on your integrity, it will work on you.” If you believe in values alignment enough to pursue it, now is the time to double down on that commitment. Commerce is fueled by honor. We took on the obligation to stand before peers—employees, customers, stakeholders—who trust us with their cares and woes, as we in turn trust their consideration. In this way, business is an act of profound humanity. Ultimately, as we declare ourselves capable of bridging the gap between present and future, we are each deciding every moment whether our integrity can support our word. If crisis is ever-present, that makes it, if not quite irrelevant, then ordinary. The world needs innovators uncowed by shifting circumstances or broad scope. We will create value and serve human needs if we credibly insist on doing so and act accordingly. If you’ve read this far, you are ready to go forth boldly. I want nothing more than to continue by your side. We desire to be more, and we will. Sincerely, Alexander David McMath
Principal | McMath Solutions LLC To learn more about how McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call.
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How does a growing organization exploit the depth of its tacit knowledge and speak it aloud?
Initial or core hires at young companies naturally face a steep learning curve. Likewise, people joining knowledge and service businesses. Moreover, the self-aware founder (cf. previous articles on empathy in talent management) knows that the etiology of a brand based on their inner life can be overwhelming. Those are reasons why we find our planning bottlenecked by our struggle to teach the operational art--regardless of how well we choose our team or how much our people bear with us. We document, we ask questions, we give answers, we send back deliverables for revisions, but ultimately we're humbled before the density of our own body of knowledge. And we scale more slowly than we'd like. A rare shift to first person here: I (Alexander David McMath, Principal, Founder) am not one to accept inefficiency. Communication is a dearly held discipline here at McMath Solutions. I cannot face my clients if I feel I've fallen short of effective mindshare myself. So: to more quickly bring my people to speed on how to change lives with information products...I'm going to make them responsible for creating the information products which persuade people that we understand how to change lives with information products. I want my team to have the best growth opportunities. If or when they move on, I hope I'll have cultivated their facility in both the human factors and design thinking domains of management. It's my responsibility to coach them in processing, combining, creating, and sharing information. A few months in, though, we're all realizing that relative to my standards, learning through one project at a time isn't good enough—it's not fair. We're going to try something different. Explanation bespeaks understanding. Usually, information flows from experience towards the formation and sharing of insights. However, I intend to invert the process: I will ask the team to directly communicate with prospective clients for the purpose of bolstering our authority. I believe this will close the distance between specific solutions and general principles. They'll have the opportunity to natively learn both areas in a continuous space, which is the approach I take as a mature practitioner. My intent is thus accelerate their fluency in our fundamental client-facing process: empathetically applying proven practices and models to measurably solve specific problems by actionable interventions. This tells us that the hypotheses behind my approach are:
There is uncertainty, but I remain confident because this is exactly who I say we are, and exactly what I ought to be able to lead. Watch this space. To learn more about the Talent Acquisition & Scaling practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. We're the only ones who can define ourselves. At scale, business leaders bear responsibility for creating a consistent and compelling identity from which their teams can deliver value.
When engaging marketing or creative consultants, decision makers rightfully fear deliverables that cause them to "be someone they're not". So the best way to prepare to manage those resources is to practice with words and information personally. This allows us to take inventory of our good instincts and our limitations when developing messaging. Writing need not be a daunting task. There are only three key principles:
A lot of "creative resistance" comes from a conflict between (2) and (3). Many capable managers communicate effectively in other contexts, but their confidence in public-facing content creation is eroded by what they perceive as a gap in quality between theirs and other content they see. However, that insecurity is irrelevant because separation between ours and competing voices is in fact essential. We must choose to sound like ourselves, and to iterate on values and messages until our communications integrate with other processes at scale. That's why we should write how we please. Writing is not art or mysticism. Writing is a design process to be integrated with other operations and managed into creating value. It only takes intention to refine our “unique" words and phrases authentically over time. The best part of managing the creation of a customer-facing language (written positioning) is the opportunity to involve our teams. Imagine their enthusiasm as their ideas come come to life and enable better business. At McMath Solutions, we believe clear communicators are clear thinkers. An organization that approaches service delivery with clarity can build the same advantage in its conversations from their expertise to their stakeholders' value. Lean into that advantage. As we create internally and externally facing information products, we need to treat our identities as a force multiplier for content creation rather than a constraint. People will communicate in writing for the foreseeable future, so it is critical to set our teams up for success in that arena. We can all build systems to harmonize our choice of words with the other pieces of our brand experience—empowering us to find the people who appreciate us, in the numbers we need. To learn more about how the Offer Development & Capture practice, and how other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. In externally facing conversations we understand that "experts" who can't meet people where they are fail to make their knowledge useful, and miss out on the promise of their expertise. This is why business leaders need to reflect on principles of transparency and humility within their organization, where mistrust can tempt them to hoard knowledge and wield it against others.
Leadership comes with responsibility, and the letdown around a suboptimal decision is frightening. Discomfort is easy to externalize or even ignore. However, talent development demands change from the organization as a whole as well as its leadership. Teams notice their leaders' habits and biases along with their victories and defeats. A team that notices is one that can pursue improvement. A proactive leader invests their team in a story that builds empathy towards a person, real or imagined, who has the advantages they seek. The people who spur growth are close at hand—in identity and interests, not just geography. Likewise, no one is perfect. Perfection is a straitjacket anyway. The real leadership advantage comes from making the team a party its own introspection. What matters is a team's ability to practice gratitude for its opportunities and empathy for whom they serve. Through thick or thin, this attitude is practiced from the center outwards. A leader who asks their organization to help them process lessons learned creates an organization that is informed and strategically aware at every level of how to move towards more comprehensive service. We're meant to approach business as the work of leading people to recognize, from within, better choices and visions for themselves. What small step can we can take to control risk and maintain flexibility while still gaining meaningful insight?
While management is often a process based around constraints, occasionally we find ourselves facing a wide range of possibilities. Much of our experience and cultural context encourages business leaders to find a "complete" solution before committing to a course of action. However, with too many confounding variables in a given situation, no definitive conclusions can be reached to confirm a strategic direction. Unchecked, analysis paralysis gives way to scope insensitivity: as the overwhelmed manager oversimplifies the problem, they also curtail the solution space. This often leads to "innovations" that fail to fundamentally act on root causes and needs. But innovation doesn't have to arrive fully formed. Difference is the only cure for mediocrity. To think in minimum viable is to introduce difference at a level where its resource risk can be controlled, while still accruing lessons learned. These small experiments incrementally provide information about the system a manager faces. Minimum viable thinking thus equips a team to develop solutions to complex problems under relatively controlled circumstances. Process sets us up for success. The structure by which organizations create, collect, and analyze information can empower contributors' thinking to move their locus of control inward, transforming uncertainty into opportunity. By embracing a design approach to information architecture, businesses will reap the rewards of agile innovation and continuous improvement. To learn more about how the Operations & Program Management practice, and other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Goal-setting is inherently systemic. Organizations are especially likely to pursue outcomes with complex dependencies that arise even between what appear to be clear causal drivers of change.
People are the classic source of this complexity, because people are themselves complex. Without a clear vision and steps for stakeholder management, business leaders can’t make the changes they desire to make—it's impossible to align multiple parties' interests into a window of feasible interventions, much less to measurably enact those ideas across groups. At McMath Solutions, we execute stakeholder management projects by targeting key objectives:
We tailor implementations of this project process to client organizations by adapting possibilities from key areas into an integrated approach to communications flow:
As a result, we help our clients pursue the success of complex initiatives by building information products whose messages align the interests of stakeholders towards each other. Our clients are empowered to deliver their partners through interim to critical changes in perspective, by progressing from challenging questions to desired benefits and finally to features and procedures. We design the respective paths of productive dialogue for each audience to converge. To learn more about how the Stakeholder & Change Management framework and other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, contact us today to schedule a strategy call. Project results have spurred revisions to the Triple Breakeven (TBE) model for analysis of go-to-market costs and returns. It now assesses cost, risk, and return between delivery, marketing, and opportunity cost according to team capabilities as well as spending and capital expenditures.
Where the TBE was originally conceived as assessing the level of success necessary to break even across time phases, feedback from clients led us to reconfigure the model to group its costs, margins, and returns according to function. The current build of the TBE tool assesses the offer price and margins against separate estimates for:
Both models are available, and can be combined into a global estimate across critical metrics. For most cases, however, we felt the functional/longitudinal decomposition of costs was a more intuitive presentation; this is because breakeven analysis often deals with unit sales and costs over time. TBE 1.2 also adds a complete module for opportunity cost analysis across multiple courses of action. This tool is invaluable to startups and small businesses considering disparate projects for pursuit by the same team. The model allows teams to assess the risk posture and relative gain for multiple opportunities according to normalized estimates for both return on financial investment and strategic returns to organizational capabilities. Find the introduction to the first version of the model here. To learn more about how TBE and other McMath Solutions...solutions can help you Make your Market, please contact us to schedule a strategy call today! At McMath Solutions, we believe Messages Make Markets. It is unavoidable that people decide to act based on the information presented, and they further assess the results of their actions based on the effects they observe. Similarly, our implied task is to consider the different ways of reasoning—emotional, heuristic, rational, abductive--that cause people to regard the same set of information as a valid indicator for different responses.
Whether we are facing internal stakeholders, compliance bodies, suppliers, vendors, talent, or customers, we are always messaging towards mobilizing our audience. We need people's (iteratively escalating) commitment to thinking and acting in accordance with our purpose. It is our responsibility to communicate that purpose in a way that cannot be misunderstood. Our Talent Acquisition & Scaling practice addresses one of the core obligations of information architecture-based management. When we speak of building a team that sells and delivers solutions aligned with management values, we truly refer to the system-wide outcomes of an entire constellation of value-producing (or value-degrading) decisions. Our task is to engineer the ways that information flows between the people who modulate those decisions. Processes in the abstract are only part of the scaling solution. Likewise, technology is only as effective as the strategy behind its deployment. Both of these improvements are dependent on the empathy with which an organization approaches people. It is almost cliché to pronounce that business leaders must reflect clarity of purpose throughout areas of responsibility such as talent selection, acquisition, and retention; project management; human resources practices; knowledge management; and professional education. However, there is a second layer of complexity to consider. Despite its criticality, empathetic content is often elided within "internal" audiences. Unfortunately, those speaking incautiously fail to acknowledge that human capital is not immutably organic to the organization: anyone can leave, and they will if their personal language of values and decisions becomes sufficiently misaligned with that of their team. Empathy is thus a core discipline of the information architecture-based manager. It's a necessary condition for anyone wishing to create a message which mobilizes people to choose the emergence of a market for themselves. Empathetic management, like any other practice, requires conscientious development. That is why, if processes equip them to do so, empathy can be applied at granular levels of an organization by individual contributors. The way to empower individual empathy in alignment with (individual and) organizational values is to begin by building empathetic messaging natively into the strategic alignment of What, for Whom, How, and Why the organization acts. Examined empathy is the genesis of scale without friction. The empathetic layer of talent-facing information products (to include informal documents and speech) enforces candidate fit, increases yield of accepted offers, and rewards sustained engagement from team members. We must control and design for empathy, across stakeholder time and space at scale, to ably serve overall values and goals. When Messages Make Markets, the presentation of expertise as value is as critical the value of expertise presented. To develop a new product or service offer and bring it to market is to conduct an experiment confirming or denying demand for that offer as formulated.
There are many variables to control in such marketing experiments. One of the most critical is that of the relationship between cost to the offeror, the price point presented, and the value realized by the customer. Customer satisfaction depends on a return to customers' investment. Likewise, return to the offeror's investment can be measured against a breakeven analysis over three key indicators:
While it is critical to control the cost of the offer development experiment across all three of these parameters, that cost control must be balanced against necessary investment in positioning and marketing campaigns. Those investments are necessary to preserve the validity of the offer experiment relative to the competitive landscape of the market being penetrated. A successful go-to-market strategy describes, defends, and delimits the approach to building a successful offer at minimum viable cost. Decisions are made by people.
People make their decisions according to the information they are presented, and their context for processing it. Regardless of intentions, most people find it difficult to engage their rational mind over the powerful combination of heuristics and emotions. Of particular note is our thinking around loss aversion. There is always resistance to choosing an investment in potential gain; there's less resistance towards investing in alleviating loss. Money is often how we assess gain or loss. The use of money as liquid capital also means that people face great difficulty deciding to part with it. Regardless of money's potential uses, its default state as "cash-in-being" has a great deal of emotional inertia. That is, most people are aggressively cashflow sensitive. They resist even densely beneficial investments in new vendors. So in the practice of offer development and capture management, vendors must do more than simply convince customers logically of a potentially good use of money. The true task when building an offer is to layer and message a return on the customer's investment that goes far beyond their opportunity and switching costs. Every vendor is competing against an unknowable number of alternatives, including inaction on the part of the customer. That means the costs to overcome include not only money but also time and human factors. It is crucial for vendors to iteratively build the offer development and capture activities to ensure alignment between marketing, solution delivery, and customer outcomes. |
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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