The Digital Seeker With Raj De Datta
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
The eCommerce world teaches companies to look for customers but what they’re missing out on is attracting digital seekers. As Raj De Datta would say, there is a difference between serving a seeker VS serving a customer, and it is a vital factor in creating a whole new experience for your audience. Raj is the co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach, the leading digital experience platform for eCommerce in the US and the UK. He joins John Livesay to talk all about digital and how it transforms the lives of both people and businesses. According to Raj, a seeker is someone who is looking for a quality experience, that magical experience that most companies fail to offer. Creating that magical experience is more than just selling a product or service; it is about building a new world of emotions that are tied to your product or service. Build a winning experience when you learn to focus on serving a seeker over-serving a customer.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Digital Seeker With Raj De Datta
Our guest on the show is Raj, the CEO of Bloomreach and the author of The Digital Seeker. We talk about the difference between being a seeker versus a customer and how winners are the ones that offer magical experiences. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Raj De Datta who is the co-Founder and CEO of Bloomreach which is the leading digital experience platform for eCommerce that powers brands, representing 25% of retail eCommerce in both the US and the UK. He’s a multiple-time entrepreneur before launching Bloomreach. He was the entrepreneur in residence and also served as Cisco’s Director of Product Marketing and on the founding team of Telecom Company, Firstmark Communications. He worked in Tech Investment Banking. He also serves on the Council for the Player Development for the US Tennis Association and has been involved with over twenty Silicon Valley Startups. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering with a Public Policy Certificate from Princeton and an MBA with no less than Harvard Business School. He has a book out called The Digital Seeker which we’re going to be doing a big deep dive in. Welcome to the show, Raj.
It’s great to be with you, John. I’m excited to be here.
What a fascinating career you have had, taking everything from artificial intelligence, technology and applying all these things together. I would like you to take us back to your own little story of origin. In other words, in childhood or school. You had an engineering focus at one point but even before that, if you want, give us a sense of who you were that you’re like, “I like to take things apart as a kid. I always knew I wanted to have my own company.” Anything along those lines.
I wish I could tell you that I was quite so intentional. Like most of us in life, find our way. Interestingly, I grew up in the Philippines. I spent most of my childhood in the Philippines. I lived there for seventeen years back and forth between the Philippines and spent a number of months in India as well, almost every year. I grew up as an international nomad. My family was not in business in any way. My father is a well-known agricultural scientist. He helped bend a lot of the varieties of rice that we all eat. My mother was an actress and a dancer. I have nothing in my background that would suggest that I should be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur except that I was good at asking questions and good at challenging people and their hypotheses. At the age of seventeen, I came to the US for the first time and went to Princeton, which was the first place I went to and then understood what it meant to live in cold weather and started college.
You took a break from undergrad before he decided to go to Harvard?
[bctt tweet=”Do you have seekers or customers? Go from transactional experiences to magical experiences.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s right. I finished up at Princeton. I studied Electrical Engineering. I was always interested in policy and public policy. I was an engineer early on at a pretty well-known lab called Bell Labs in New Jersey. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. In my first project because I was the newbie, the youngest engineer on the team, they were like, “We’re having this problem with processing this thing. This data stuff that’s going through our networks. It’s this thing called the internet but nobody cares about it. We mostly make our money with phone calls. Why don’t you figure it out and everybody else?” I went there, worked on it, came back with a solution. They were like, “We’re over budget. We’re not going to resource this thing. We do a great job making money, selling phone calls.” That was my first job out of college.
Eventually, I spent a few years after that on Wall Street as well, worked in investment banking. I learned about business and then decided I love tech. I loved the idea of creating something. That then took me down the road of my first entrepreneurial endeavor, which was in Europe. After I come to the US for the first time, I picked up and moved to Europe. I was setting up a telecom company over there. It’s selling broadband high-speed internet access. The funders and my cofounders were like, “Raj, you can move anywhere in Europe. Where would you like to go? I was like, “How about Paris?” I picked Paris. I was like, “There’s going to be beautiful women in there.” I moved to Paris then I went and tried to get a cell phone and they were like, “You need a bank account.” I went to try to get a bank account, then they were like, “You need an apartment.” To get an apartment they said you needed a cell phone. I got on the train and moved to London and set up the company in London. Lot’s changed since those days. There’s an entrepreneurial culture there as well but the most important thing which I think is the most formative experience of my career as I got to be an entrepreneur. I stumbled into entrepreneurship at the age of 23. That was before I went to Harvard and then never looked back because I loved it.
A lot of people are always fascinated by A) the people who get to go to Harvard then B) I know it’s probably a little bit impossible. If you had to sum up, what is your big takeaway from going to Harvard and getting your Master’s? Do you have a big insight? Was it the connections you made? Did they teach you something that you think was unique to Harvard for the MBA program?
Harvard is no different than any other university and other than the fact that it was started in the 1600s and had some pretty smart people, free education and lots of workplaces, as I tell my kids. The starting point is, there isn’t anything all that special about Harvard, except for the fact that you’ve got pretty accomplished, motivated individuals who come to try to learn something. For me, the biggest benefit of going and getting an MBA was I learned about business from its academic roots. Most importantly, it’s a very application-oriented school. It didn’t feel theoretical. It was every day you’re reading about actual real-life cases of situations that people are confronting and having to figure out what to do so that one day like riding a bike a lot of times and eventually getting good at it. You hope that your judgment is good when you’re ever in that situation. That’s what I took away from all this.
Let’s go to the story of Bloomreach because it is so rich. Kudos to you and your team for creating in such a digestible format of milestones. I don’t know if that’s your Silicon Valley experience showing but I look at a lot of websites, pitch decks and presentations. What I think you do well is define who you help and what problems you solve. It sounds may be obvious to everyone reading but it’s much harder than you might think unless you’re in that yourself to do that even the choice of words that you use because you and I are both authors. We love words. This premise here is that Bloomreach is that laser-focused. Right off the get-go, I’m thinking, “They’re not trying to be all things to all people. That tells me they might have some expertise.”
The Digital Seeker: A Guide for Digital Teams to Build Winning Experiences
You are painting a picture about having an intersection of eCommerce of what Amazon is. I know what marketing is, promotion, advertising and artificial intelligence. Let’s think about that for a second. As a person stopping by your site for the very first time, people process things and go, ”I know a little bit about each of those things. I know that even Amazon uses some artificial intelligence. If you liked this, you might want to buy that.” I start to feel like, “ I understand a little bit about what you do but then you go on to go, ‘We’re the only ones that take this data with the product the way people behave in the data which you’re not just giving projections or ideas on how to get more people to buy, get stuck in the checkout or you’re trying to deliver an experience.’” I thought to myself, “That I haven’t seen before.” I’ve heard lots of people like, “We’ll help you close more sales at the checkout. We’ll get more sales and things like that.” You’re doing something that you literally say is a magical experience. Please explain what a magical experience is as we combine those intersections.
You said it well, which is we live at the intersection of AI, marketing and eCommerce. We think that this is a golden age of eCommerce in many ways. We come off the pandemic, still with lots of suffering but eCommerce has accelerated by five years. It almost doubled in one year. It became the way we live. You asked about the founding of Bloomreach in many ways. The core insight of the founding of Bloomreach was that the class of AI technology that I became familiar with was being applied to places like Google and Facebook. It was being applied years ago. Mostly, in advertising. I thought to myself, “Do you and I go online because we’re interested in ads?”
I don’t think so. We go online because we’re interested in amazing experiences. We want shopping, reading, dating and all the things that make our life rich, just online. What if we could harness the power of AI and make it so that every webpage you see, email you open, SMS message you receive is exactly on point with what you’re seeking. In doing, the brands of when you over captured your hearts and you, on the other hand, found exactly what you’re looking for. If we can do that, if we can build the platform that made that possible, we touch the lives of seven billion people that all live with their lives online. The mission of Bloomreach was that magical experience. In 2021, many years later, we see those magical experiences. You asked, what do we mean by magical experience? At its core, the magical experience doesn’t just give you what you say you want. It knows what you seek but you haven’t yet set it and delivers that. That is the experience that’s magical.
Let’s get into that because that’s what great relationships do. When someone’s an active listener, they have any intuitive ability or a salesperson that shows some empathy to understand your pain points and can reframe what you are feeling. You haven’t even put it into words of, “That is my frustration.” My whole premise is that whoever describes someone’s problem is more likely to get a sale than someone who doesn’t because people think, “If you can describe my problem, you must have my solution.” This is completely relevant because everyone in retail is using eCommerce. It’s funny when I worked with the Banana Republic, they said to me, “We’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of price point or perception of luxury but we would like to up our game.” We brainstormed about, “How do we define what luxury is beyond price?” We came up with this definition that sounds very close to what you described which is giving somebody something they need before they know they need it.
What’s cool is that we can go industry after industry. I can tell you who is serving the seeker and who is serving the customer. There’s a difference between those two things. To make that distinction clear, let’s imagine that as part of a relationship, you’re organizing a date. You might go out and book a restaurant. You’re a customer at that restaurant. That’s what you’re looking for at that moment as restaurant research but are you seeking a dinner or a great relationship for which the dinner is one step along that journey? You’re a seeker of a great relationship. You’re a customer of the restaurant. The key distinction between these two things, I often say the seeker is the person behind the customer. A higher level of motivation leads you to be a customer.
[bctt tweet=”We’re just coming off the pandemic, still with lots of suffering, but eCommerce has accelerated by five years.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The web is there for years and yet Amazon, for all of its glory, has transferred the work from you walking into the store, having a conversation and somebody recommending a book to read at a bookstore or a shirt to buy. Instead of that, they’ve turned the work and made it your problem to figure that out. You go to Amazon with your list. Like a grocery list you say, “I’m going to go buy this and that.” We used to have physical to-do lists. Now we have digital to-do lists. We go online and we say, “I got to do this.”
If I were out planning a vacation, I’m a customer of a rental car company, flight, hotel and all these different services but what I’m looking for is a memorable vacation with my family. That’s what I’m a seeker. What I have seen in industry after industry is that the winning digital experiences are built for the secret. They’re built for the person looking for a memorable vacation. They’re not built for somebody looking to expedite the car reservation.
I’ve never had somebody describe the difference between a seeker and a customer in such a clear way before because of the loop on that Banana Republic story. We’ll be able to compare that. What they decided was the 80/20 rule, “Twenty percent of our clients and the flagship stores in Manhattan, Banana and Union Square in San Francisco are giving us 80% of our sales. Let’s do something for those people.” They had somebody who walked in and said, “Would you like to charge your phone while you shop? We’ll hit. We have people here guarding it.” Unexpected luxury. They did that to up the experience. The outcome surprised them that sales went up 15% because you may not be surprised but they were. People kept shopping until the phone was fully charged. Not just half-charged, they would come back and go, “I’ll keep shopping.”
Luxury is great. The example you gave the Banana Republic, which is owned by a Gap. We work with so many of the Gap brands and Neiman Marcus is of the world. Behind every one of those shoppers is somebody looking for that quality of experience. Often, in luxury, it’s not about the clothing because everybody knows you can make that piece of fabric for much less money than you just pay for it. The question with the clothing is what it represents about yourself. There’s a reason why some people wear the Banana Republic and some people buy Chanel or Neiman. It represents something about themselves. It’s what they’re seeking at the end of the day.
Luxury is one of those great categories where the distinction between customer and seeker is so clear whether it’s the Banana Republic, Neiman or even some of the modern examples. If we take another luxury example or fashion, a company like Stitch Fix promises you a personal stylist experience. They don’t just say, “You know what brand you’re interested in.” They say, “We know what brand you’re interested in before you even know it. You fill out a profile and we’ll tell you what you should wear to this occasion.”
Digital Seeker: The magical experience doesn’t just give you what you say you want. It knows what you seek, but you haven’t yet set it and delivers that.
That leads us into, I’m going to take a leap off and say, “This is what motivated you to buy the book, The Digital Seeker, which is a guide for digital teams to build winning experiences, AKA magical experiences.”
I have seen this in the 25% of eCommerce companies that we support. People would ask me all the time, “Raj, you see the winners, you see the losers. Tell us why the winners win and losers lose.” To put it simply, I decided to write this book to explain the answer to that question. The winners win because they build magical experiences fundamentally. Amazon happens to be one kind of magical experience. It’s a magical experience, grounded in incredible selection at affordable prices and incredible convenience. There are lots of kinds of magical experiences in the world. The winners win because they figure out what magic represents. They figure out that those experiences are built for the seeker, ultimately not the customer, then they figure out how to go about building those experiences. This is where the tools of AI, machine learning, different org structures and business models all come together to shepherd the building of a winning magical experience.
This is one of the reasons I was excited to get to have you on my show was when I work with the companies and introduce them to the concept of storytelling genres. We look at different genres of storytelling different movies and brands that use it. One of the genres is the choice to go on an adventure or stay home. The movie is The Wizard of Oz. If Dorothy had listened, there it wouldn’t be a story. Expedia uses this genre to not just book cheap flights and hotels but go on this amazing adventure as you were describing with your family, then come back and tell all your friends about it. Like Dorothy did at the end of the movie. It transcends much like a story does transactional experiences into an emotional connection that then makes you want to brag about the experience.
That leads me to my next question. If someone has someone as a customer, let’s go back to your restaurant example and let’s say they have the most amazing date and night. The service was incredible. They brought a little cake, candle and made it extra special. Does someone who goes from being a customer like, “I know this restaurant. I know the food is good but I’m seeking this wow experience.” Suddenly this restaurant gave me that wow experience. I’m now not just a customer but almost a brand ambassador. This restaurant has a meaning to us like if I ended up marrying this person. We’re going to go back on our anniversary and say, “This is where we met or had our first date.” Suddenly, I’m much more than just a customer. I’m seeking that same feeling of magic.
One of the other great points of contrast between being a customer and being a seeker is that being a customer is a left-brain pursuit. Being a seeker is the right brain to pursue this where one is much more rational. The other is much more emotional. If you’re a customer, you might say, “I’m going to count the Yelp Reviews. I’m going to go figure out what’s the lowest price, who has the cuisine I like.” You’ll analyze and figure it out. If you’re a seeker, there’s just going to be something about that experience that stays with you, remains memorable and draws you back. The rational, emotional spectrum is quite different between serving the seeker and serving the customer.
[bctt tweet=”We go online because we’re interested in amazing experiences. We want all the things that make our life rich, just online.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The one that people talk about the most is Apple which is that seeker-centric experience but they’re all over the place. What I love about this approach is it isn’t just about Silicon Valley Startups and incredible creativity on Madison Avenue in New York. Every domain of every business has the opportunity to serve the seeker and win digitally in ways that prior to digital might not have been possible because digital opens up a set of tools that allow you to redefine your business and your brand in ways that in the physical world are much more expensive and often not affordable. Let’s use an example of if we take something like Peloton, which many of us know for an exercise bike. Is Peloton an exercise bike, a spin class or sets of spin classes or is it just for somebody seeking fitness?”
The people who built Peloton said, “People might be customers of exercise bikes but what they’re seeking is a fitness lifestyle. I’m going to give them the full lifestyle, a bike, infinite classes, schedule, great reviews and track it, competitions, the whole thing and put it together.” The best thing about the seeker-centric experience is the magical ones, as you almost can’t put them in a category because you don’t know, “Is Peloton a gym? Is it a bike? Is that a spin class?” Kind of. It’s all of the above. That would have been very hard to do in a pre-digital era.
You’ve tapped into my songbook here where you’re talking about left brain, right brain because the biggest mistake I see people when they’re selling anything whether it’s in person or online is, “I got to get people to know, like and trust me so let me push out a bunch of information.” That left-brain transactional customer thing do you know enough now to buy in how many Yelp Reviews. People buy emotionally then back it up with logic, whether it’s a luxury product, sports car or even a business purchase. Most of the people I have worked with are not aware of that. They don’t lead with stories. They lead with facts and figures and they’re like, “This makes the surgeries go 30% faster. Do you want one?” They wonder why they’re not winning sales.
It’s that ability to make the doctor using the equipment a hero that makes the doctor go, “This is how I see myself now. You reminded me of why I became a doctor for moments like this,” and all of those stories that make people resonate. The other thing that’s taken off is online courses. I’m thinking of talking about the range of Harvard all the way down to community colleges, then everything in between including online course experiences and options that are available to people. People are like, “Am I seeking a solution to a problem I have? Am I seeking a skill to improve myself? Maybe it’s both.” It becomes a whole different framework.
Education is interesting and we talked about how it’s hard to categorize things. Take something like a Coursera or Khan Academy which are online educational tools. What’s interesting is when you go to college or to a university, the question is the one you asked is, “What are you seeking?” If I gave you an option, I said, “John, I’m going to give you two choices. I’m going to either give you a great education on one side or a great credential that gets you a job on the other side but you can’t have the other one. If you pick A, you don’t get B. If you pick B, you don’t get A.”
Digital Seeker: The winners win because they build magical experiences fundamentally, figure out what magic represents, and then go about building those experiences.
It’s behind door number 1 or door number 2.
The interesting thing about identifying the seeker and the underlying motivation is sometimes people want things to cross boundaries. Sometimes people want to break things up. The reason I say that is we all lament in America how expensive college education has become. Many young students are in student debt because of it. Some of that is because universities are an unholy marriage between education on one side, research on another side, credentialing on a third side because if all you wanted to do was put coursework online. Coursera and Khan Academy have shown us that for free. You can create a website with all the knowledge and videos of the world without needing to go to Harvard and pay them $50,000 a year. What you’re paying for there is a fuller experience. It’s the environment, teaching, research, culture, conversations, knowledge and credential. What’s been very interesting about thinking about the world in this way education is a good example is it’s pretty clear you can dis-aggregate universities into the learning and the credentialing in different ways. It’s going to be pretty disruptive for education.
I remember when I was working with Lexus in LA when they were launching. The ad agency had said, “Our target audience is people who buy BMWs and Mercedes.” We have identified two different kinds of people that the behavior looks the same. They buy the BMW or the Mercedes but some people are buying it for external motivation. The same thing I’m sure it’s true of Harvard. I want to say I graduated from Harvard. Some people say, “I need that BMW logo when I pull up to the country club. I want to tell people I drive it.” If you’re an agent in Hollywood, back in the day, that all the agents at CA drove BMWs. It was part of the Armani uniform. It is all that outside motivation to fit in. I’ve arrived at all those statements but then there’s a whole group of people buying Mercedes and BMW that have don’t care about what other people think.
They’re internally motivated instead of externally. They are into the craftsmanship, workmanship and the way it feels, driving it for them is the motivation. That’s who we’re targeting because we can not compete with X number of years of history and branding as we’re launching a new thing. It was a fascinating conversation of the same thing is true of people who buy Gucci or Chanel products. In the fashion magazine, I was representing and saying, “The reason someone’s buying something is either they are trying to impress other people or they feel good in it they like the craft.” That’s another version of seeker versus customer in another lens that allows readers to start thinking of themselves of, “I need to take a look at my languaging on my landing page and the experience I’m giving people,” because there’s a reason why you have such a large percentage of market share. Twenty-five percent is huge.
We’re fortunate to power some of the best brands on the planet. The reason they work with us is it unlocks growth for them but it also allows them to reach customers in a much deeper way than ever before. I don’t want to send a message that analytics, data and math aren’t important in the digital era because it is. It’s not enough. It’s the beginning of reconstituting a magical experience. We have many more signals available to us to understand our consumers than we ever had before. We used to rely on surveys, focus groups and that’s how we would understand. Every click, every purchase and importantly, every non-click and every non-purchase is a yay or nay vote on what you just did online. Intelligent digital marketers are extracting those data points, leveraging the power of AI, figuring that out and then adding creativity and storytelling on top to reach people deeply.
[bctt tweet=”Digital allows you to redefine your business and your brand in ways that in the physical world are much more expensive.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This is the marriage. That is why you’re so successful and why this book is so needed now. I remember when it went from being sell ads in a magazine to a brand like Lexus or Neiman Marcus was all about brand awareness, feeling and the luxury of the magazine would be true. The feeling that someone has as they’re in that mode would be transferred to your ad. The measurability was brand awareness. It wasn’t anything about sales tracking, then it went digital. Now we want to track how many people are buying from the digital ad to programmatic where it’s like, “We don’t even care what the environment is.” One extreme or the other is probably not great, all gut or all numbers.
When you can integrate that final icing on the cake, if we just relied on AI, who’s clicking and who’s not clicking, then you’re just competing with somebody on pricing and technology. What you’ve done and what your book allows other people to do as a digital seeker is to figure out, “How I am going to add in this very important element of emotion and a magical experience to this process, knowing that that’s shifting somebody from just a customer who could be gone tomorrow if they get a better deal to someone who’s seeking an experience and is more likely to not only return but tell their friends about it?”
Sometimes people tend to think that data and technology are the enemies of emotion, humans and the light. I don’t believe that. I think that one is key to the other. If you were to have gone on that Peloton experience and can’t find a spin class, it could be the most emotionally resonant experience in the world. You still won’t like the surface. Technology still has to play its role. When we go on Spotify and it recommends a song to us because it just feels like it knows us. That’s technology reaching us emotionally in ways that are very deep because it knows, “I like this particular band or that genre of music.” No human being could probably figure that out correctly. Technology and AI can play a critical role in reaching us emotionally if we harness them well.
Like a good friend putting something in front of us that we didn’t even know existed or that we didn’t even know we needed, like the phone charging at the Banana Republic. Our brain is constantly craving new things to learn, see, do and experience. That’s what keeps things fresh. If someone wants to buy the book, the title is The Digital Seeker: A Guide for Digital Teams to Build Winning Experiences. If someone is interested in finding out more beyond the book of what Bloomreach can do, they can go to Bloomreach.com. Any last thoughts or quotes you might or a story you want to leave us with?
I think the story I’d leave you with is that all of this, that we’ve talked about. The Digital Seeker, the changing nature of how digital can transform, business life and people’s lives got a lot more interesting after the pandemic. As I say in the book, they are not which is what people talk about, the rate of spread of COVID, the infection rate and how it goes. The rate of spread of digital has just become explosive. I believe we’re almost an economic boom that comes from digital being in the center of a lot of our lives and inventing a lot of things to serve them and in happiness boom because if we do this right then maybe we’re commuting a little less. We’re randomly going on plane journeys a little less. Maybe we’re doing fewer things in the real world that we didn’t enjoy doing. We’re getting a lot more done digitally because the experiences are speaking to us so directly. With all the extra time that we have, we’re enjoying our friends and family that much more, hanging out at local restaurants, going on more pleasure trips if we can afford it, helping more people, transforming education and healthcare in the process. There is a potential happiness boom that I think is that.
Here is a cheer to not only an economic boom but a happiness boom that goes along with it. Raj, thank you for sharing your insights, tips on how we can all become better at giving magical experiences.
Thanks, John.
Important Links
- Bloomreach
- The Digital Seeker
- Coursera
- Khan Academy
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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How To Make Informed Decisions With Pate G. Smith
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Just because you have covering footage for your insurance policy doesn’t mean you have the right coverage. You need to sit down and look over the terms of the policy to make informed decisions. John Livesay’s guest in this episode is Pate G. Smith, Vice President of Marketing and Attorney at McClenny, Moseley & Associates. Pate advises you to get an attorney to help you understand the policy. They can also help you make a cost-benefit analysis of the different types of coverage available. Tune in to make better, informed decisions!
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Make Informed Decisions With Pate G. Smith
My guest is Pate Smith. We’ll talk about the importance of networking, getting over your fear of asking for what you want and not taking rejection personally, and how important that marketing be everywhere. Finally, it’s crucial that when you make a decision, it’s an informed one. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Pate Smith, who was born and raised in Ozark, Alabama, a place where hometown values and relationships are at the heart of the community. He’s thrived on building relationships and helping others his entire life. He feels those connections give him a purpose within himself. After he graduated high school, he finished his secondary education by graduating from the University of Alabama with a Political Science degree. He felt going to law school was a natural path to better understanding business and gave him a chance to help others. Now, he has his degree from the Birmingham School of Law. During his last year, he had a realization that he could help people through professional development coaching. He started Positive Change USA, his travel speaking at various events, coaching businesses and professionals alike. Pate, welcome to the show.
Informed Decisions: You can sell yourself through communication and connectivity with individuals.
Thanks, John. How are you doing?
I’m good. I gave a little tip of the iceberg there of your background but give us a little flavor, tell your story wherever you want, the a-ha moment in law school or even earlier. It’s your choice where you want to start.
I grew up in Southeast Alabama. It’s a rural area. Ozark, Alabama to be exact, 90 miles or so, maybe 70 miles above Panama City of Florida. That’s how people know the area. I knew that networking was important. My parents always made me attend events, do speaking engagements, do public speaking and connect with others. I don’t think that connected on the professional and personal development side until maybe I was in college or late high school. I got into, at that point in time, various professional, personal and relationship development literature, whether you’re trying to date somebody or make a sale, connect with an individual on the opposing side. You’ll be able to sell yourself through communication and connectivity with individuals and by providing a consumable narrative based on facts and truths. That’s what I do. I ran a professional development company for a little while that was fun. I miss it at times. I have grown a public adjusting firm and now, I’m here on the law side and I enjoy that.
Was it your parents that taught you the importance of connecting and networking, or how did you realize that was a skill that you wanted to develop separately from the hard skills of law?
[bctt tweet=”You never lose when you give your best effort.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I can remember when I was in probably third grade and there was an opportunity to sell candy to raise money for the school. I don’t know what we were raising money for. My parents were like, “This is great.” They would drive me around and have me go up and knock on people’s doors that we knew. I wasn’t cold knocking but knocking on people’s doors that I knew and go in. I had to introduce myself, explain what we’re doing and sell them the candy. I can remember after it was all said and done, I was talking to my friends and I was like, “It was hard talking to those people,” and they’re like, “I didn’t do that.” I was like, “What did you do?” They’re like, “Mom and dad called people and did it for them.” My parents made me go through those exercises. I was like, “Mom and Dad, why did everybody else’s parents call it for them?” and they’re like, “No, you’ve got to do that.”
When I was growing up, I can remember in sixth grade, I had this thing called The Sock Hop, which was a dance where you would go. I was like, “I’ll go with somebody at The Sock Hop.” I can remember mom and dad were like, “You’ve got to ask them.” I was like, “What do you mean?” I had this realization early on where they would constantly force me or encourage me to do this self-selling or approaches. I think that was huge for my development because, at that point in time, I wasn’t good at pitching. I was like, “I’m Pate. Do you want to buy some candy?” The fact that I broke that emotional barrier, went through the process, and learned early on that it’s not about yeses and noes because you can never make a person purchase.
You can never make a person come to your side. You can present in the best manner and the outcomes are there. You’re either going to have positive outcomes or outcomes where you learn, but you’re never losing when you’re giving your best in that effort. I was from a very rural small area and to be able to date people was hard. I didn’t want to date people in that area. I had to expound wider. To be able to do that, early on read a lot of male personal development forums and business networking, etc., because that is what was available to an 8th, 9th or 10th grader. It was huge for me. I’ve learned how to meet people, network with people, become their friends, and found fun value in relationships. That was a huge epiphany for me, whether it’s professional development, speaking here at the firm, connecting with other law firms, with commercial property owners or contractors, these are great skills that I’ve learned, some purposefully and some I’ve learned naturally through experience. That’s me in a nutshell.
It sounds like you learned how to not be afraid of asking for what you want. After that, it became, “How do I let go of any fear of rejection?” Is that correct?
Informed Decisions: We are invested in our client’s success.
Yes. I don’t believe that noes are bad. When I was a professional development coach, I would tell my clients like, “Don’t concentrate on yeses. Yeses come. I want to see you to fifteen noes in a day.” If you’re going out and trying to meet people or find somebody that you want to go on a date with, what’s your volume looking like on people that you’re interacting with? If your volume is low, your success is going to be low. There are opportunities where you meet somebody, hit it off one and they’re not great. In this day and age, I think you have to be incredibly high in person-to-person interaction if you want to be purposeful and dictate your outcomes.
You brought up a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, which is this concept of comparing dating with selling. I got interviewed by Fortune and Inc. Magazine around the topic of, “Are you stuck at the friendzone at work?” We all know what the friend zone feels like in the dating world, where we like somebody more than they like us. I think in sales and business development, marketing, where someone’s interested but they never get out of that, “Send me info,” and then it’s crickets. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to says, “I’ve been in the friend zone at work. I didn’t know that was what it was.” Where I’m like, “I’m interested but I’m not going out with you. I’m not buying.” Maybe they click on something and get to download something but they never take the next step to close the sale or buy from you after the presentation is done. Let’s talk about what that looks like in the world of law firms. You’re in charge of the marketing for your firms. Tell us a little bit about what makes your firm unique, and what is it that compels clients to want to hire you and your firm?
[bctt tweet=”It is not about a yes or no when you sell.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We only do insurance claim dispute resolution for policyholders. We strictly work on the plaintiff’s side. I think we’re 22-something attorneys now. We’re working in a considerable number of states. We’re known for working large commercial insurance claim losses. That’s our day-to-day but what makes us special is the people we have here. Everybody is very invested here in the firm and our client’s success. That makes a difference because it’s not 9:00 to 5:00. If it’s a person’s business, their home or something in experiences, a catastrophe, a hurricane, a hailstorm, a tornado, a fire, vandalism, whatever, they’re not getting adequate indemnification or maybe it’s a complex loss that needs management from us from the beginning. I have a connection to that because I have a home. I want my home to be my place of sanctity. I like coming to work. I like having a structure around me that supports me in that work. For us, it’s very positive.
Let’s paint a scenario. For those of us who live in Texas, in February 2021, there was a freak snowstorm, electricity and water was out. Pipes burst. In those kinds of scenarios, do people depend on their insurance company to help them get repairs done?
We did many of those losses.
I’d love to hear a story without giving any names away of a situation where an insurance company was saying to a homeowner, “Sorry, that’s an act of God. It doesn’t count or your deductible is not met yet.” Anything that you would give an example of where they need your firm’s expertise?
We typically see insurance claims underpaid significantly when they come to us or they’re very complex. A great example is in Hurricane Laura and Charles, a religious structure that the community got around. We represented that structure from the beginning. We dealt with the carriers, engineers, their attempts at underpayment saying, “No, asbestos-lined material is okay to repair,” and there’s a daycare there. That’s semi-concerning. Numerous hotels in that. You mentioned the pipe burst and the winter storm that happened in Texas. We had a lot of commercial structures that were completely flooded that we’re handling. Some of those we see were underpaid massively. Maybe they were offered $15,000 or $20,000.
The indemnification model may be upwards of $500,000 or more. We have some that had 7 and 8-figure indemnification models here at the firm. Anytime you see a number and you’re like, “I’m not sure if that’s going to represent the full restoration,” shoot me a call. We don’t charge any time for consults, “This is good. This is bad. Consider this, talk to these people.” Our goal is to be there when you need us or the management of an intense commercial claim. Those are examples of when hail on metal buildings or flat roof buildings are almost always underpaid. That’s something that we do a considerable amount of. It can sometimes be tens of millions of dollars in difference.
A lot of people think of insurance as something they need to do. They may be shopping around a little bit, I’ll gamble maybe, not get the most coverage I need, forget about it, and then something happens. Since you’re in charge of marketing for the firm, how do you get the message out to people to know how to find you? Is it an SEO kind of thing? How do most people find you?
Informed Decisions: Our goal is to be there for you when you need us.
I believe marketing should be done land, air and the sea is what I always say. If you can do it, you probably should do it. I speak constantly. I’m here on this show, so hopefully, that does the marketing. I do as many speaking engagements a year as I can with my family. I can remember one time where I was sitting on my bed, I prayed and said, “God, I want to be able to do 30 speaking engagements in a year where people ask me to come in.” That is now a haunting thing because I get asked constantly to do podcasts. There are conventions I’ll go and sometimes speak 2 and 3 times a day. The most I’ve ever done is 5 panels or 5 breakout sessions in a day. It can be exhausting.
What’s the most common question you get asked when you’re on a panel?
That’s tough. It’s probably how is the best way they can initiate a claim, set it up at the beginning for success? It’s the one that I get the most that are across the board and all industries. That’s a good one. It’s issue-specific.
That brings up a point that someone should engage or could engage your firm before they have a claim to make sure that they’re doing everything properly so they won’t be running into problems of not getting the money they need?
We can have a conversation before an issue ever happens and make sure you have the right coverage. The biggest heartbreak in the world is someone calling me and saying like, “We’re owed this money.” They send the information over. We get that policy and because of the specific terms and the policy, they’re not able to get coverage because they haven’t been paying for it. The policy dictates the outcome of the claim. Is it even possible? If it is possible, then we’re there to assist.
That’s where a lot of people don’t even think they go, “I only go to the doctor if I’m sick. I only go to the lawyer if I needed to make a claim,” but you’re like, “You should go to the doctor for a physical, stay in shape and eat healthily so you don’t find yourself sick.” You’re saying the same thing is true legally. Check with a law firm like yours to ensure the policy you’re buying is getting you what you need and don’t take the word of the person selling you the policy. Is that accurate?
[bctt tweet=”Marketing should be everywhere.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Correct. Just because you have coverage doesn’t mean you have the right coverage. Do you have exclusions in there? Do you have endorsements that limit the ability for coverages to kick in? If you want to keep those endorsements, that’s fine but you need to know what they mean. I don’t care what decision you make. I want you to make an informed decision.
It’s because you’re not selling insurance, you don’t have any skin in that game so people can trust that your advice is in their best interest. You’re giving them the information that lets them make an informed decision according to their risk ratio and whatever else is going on. It’s an unknown problem that can be fixed or much like the analogy of health. You may not go to an orthopedic surgeon until you’ve broken a bone or something but imagine if an orthopedic surgeon was giving a talk on, “Here’s how to be involved with contact sports so you don’t get injured.” How valuable that information might be? Is that another analogy?
Yes. Particularly, with commercial structures if you have a property manager on it, property managers do great at managing. If a large-scale catastrophe happens and let’s say you have fifteen structures within an area and you’re fifteen appear okay but they haven’t had a forensic look, they haven’t had their coverages looked at and had someone go in, make a determination, and discuss with you, a lot of times, your property managers are going to say, “This building isn’t leaking. It’s fine.” Maybe it is fine but let’s go a step further and find that information, get that data and have you make a cost-benefit analysis of, “We want to do this. We don’t want to do this,” and make an informed decision.
Let’s talk about what happened in Florida with that complex. From a storytelling standpoint, which is where I live, in reading those stories of hearing a noise that sounded like an explosion, you open up your door, look down the hallway, and there’s no hallway, you realize how close you came to death? All those warning signs were there that something needed to be done, water leaking, this and that. Obviously, it was made for them. They had everybody had to get out because they took the whole building down. I think that news should be like an anomaly. That’s a rare thing that happens. I’m guessing in your line of work, you say, “John, this goes on more than most people know. It doesn’t make the headlines.”
I know one of the engineers that are working on that. I spent some time with them in Fort Lauderdale. He was telling them stuff that they were going through with that. I believe I know one of the attorneys that are working on the wall side of that as well. That’s a very interesting loss, and I’m interested to see how that’s going to play out.
Does your homeowner’s insurance for your condo cover, you bring in a hotel until you find a place to live? There are so many thoughts.
That would depend on the policy.
Informed Decisions: Every time you renew the policy, sit down and look over the terms.
It’s like if you’ve damaged your car, do you opt-in to get the rental car coverage while your car is being repaired? That’s a box you check off and pay a few bucks more. It’s that same thing. I think why I was so fascinated to talk to you is the pandemic has not happened in over 100 years since 1912. People and I included as a speaker like you, we’d be like, “What do you mean I have to plan for a time I can’t give a talk in person?” That’s not even in my frame of reference. I never had that as a contingency plan of, “Live events will be canceled. There’ll be no conferences in Vegas,” or whatever. The same thing is true with what you’re doing here with, “Your condo building might collapse.” I’ve never heard of it. I’ve never seen it.
Here’s the better question. What could have been prevented to prevent that condo from collapsing? What had happened through the lifespan of that structure, water, treated, allowed micro-fractures and then settling, etc.? That’s a better question. Some of this could have been prevented had adequate data been given there. Maybe adequate data was given and bad decisions were made. As an owner, if they weren’t given adequate data, that’s a tragic scenario.
What about all the fires that are happening not just in California but in other places on the West Coast and this perfect storm of things? You own a business and it’s not your home you’re worried about and that structure, do you get involved with advising business and property owners who maybe haven’t looked at their insurance coverage lately and you say, “We need to check up on your coverage just like you go for a checkup with the doctor?”
Yes. I encourage people every time they renew their policy to sit down, look over the terms of that policy and get an attorney to spend time looking, negotiating, and doing a cost-benefit analysis of what type of coverages are there. Let’s say you have warehouses or storage facilities that are metal. “I’ve got full coverage. Coverage is adequate for my commercial lender.” “Question though, sir, do you have a cosmetic endorsement in there?” “A cosmetic endorsement, that sounds fine. I’m not worried about cosmetic damage. However, though, if my building gets scratched, hail minorly dense my building?” What if hail majorly dents your building? What if hail has the potential of decreasing the lifespan of the structure and causing rust over time?
Are the terms in that cosmetic endorsement in a manner, which it’s not going to let you recover, and then you have a structure that’s going to rest out in a portion in somewhere between 5 to 15 years, depending upon where you are in the country? If the answer is yes, that’s something we need to do a cost-benefit analysis of, maybe it’s $8,000 more a year to have a large warehouse insured adequately. You say, “I’m good with the $700 more a month. Let’s go ahead and do that. Let’s get the right coverage. Maybe we have to talk to a different broker.” I’m not sure but this is something that we do. All of this is free of charge. No cost up until the point where we have to negotiate the insurance claim for you. We do this pro bono because we want people to have the right coverage.
What you’re doing from a marketing standpoint is creating incredible brand awareness and value so that people see you as someone who cares and not coming in at the last minute when money is involved?
Correct. One of my favorite sayings, and I wish I could say I came up with it but I can’t, “We don’t like to shake hands over the rubble.” It changed my mindset.
[bctt tweet=”Always make an informed decision. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Pate, thank you on behalf of so many people who you’ve helped and will help. If people want to reach out to you, I know they can find you on LinkedIn and Instagram. Would you share the details and that special middle initial that everybody has to remember to find you?
For Instagram, it’s @PateGSmith. If you add me, I like to send everybody that adds me a, “Thanks for adding me,” and I try to get to know you. That’s sometimes a daunting task but don’t think it’s weird. It’s me messaging every single person on there because I’m proud that people message me. It’s the same on LinkedIn. Find me on there, Pate G Smith for McClenny, Moseley and Associates and say, “I heard you on John’s show. I do this.” Even if you’re not in my industry, I want to be able to connect with you. I love networking. I’m across the country constantly. If you ever want to hop on a call and maybe it’s something that’s an idea and kicks around some stuff, say, “I’m stuck somewhere,” I’m here. I love connecting with people and sharing values. Reach out. I appreciate you having me on, John. This is a powerful show.
Thank you. It’s been an honor to have someone of your caliber and kindness on. Thanks so much, Pate.
Thanks, John. Everybody, have a great week.
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The Long Game With Dorie Clark
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Think long-term. Plan for the long game and learn to reinvent yourself. Just how important is it to do this when it comes to your career? You are about to find out. Join John Livesay as he sits down with author and executive education professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Dorie Clark as they discuss long-term strategic planning and how to reinvent yourself for success. Pay close attention and learn the ins and outs of self-assessment and self-improvement.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Long Game With Dorie Clark
Our guest is Dorie Clark, the author of the book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. She said, “Just because something is long, it doesn’t mean it’s slow. The effort we put into something compounds over time as interest does with the money.” Enjoy the episode.
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I welcome back a guest, Dorie Clark. She’s been named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and was recognized as the number one communications coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Dorie is a consultant, a keynote speaker and an author. She teaches executive education at Duke and she’s the author of a book called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. She’s also been a former presidential campaign spokesperson. The New York Times described her as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. She speaks for companies like Google and Microsoft. Dorie, welcome back to the show.
[bctt tweet=”Effort compounds the same way interest does with money.” username=”John_Livesay”]
John, thank you. It’s so good to be here.
Let’s tap back in to do a quick refresh for anyone who didn’t get to read your other episode as to your roots. I know you grew up in a small town in North Carolina. We start to get a sense of how you didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley. I’m always interested to hear those stories of people who are in a situation where they go, “This is not the end for me. I’m going to figure out a way to do something else.”
I was thinking about this because there are some interesting accidents of birth. I used to work in politics. I worked at Howard Dean’s presidential race as a spokesperson. Our campaign manager for that race was known for being one of the first people to harness the power of the internet during a presidential campaign. His name was Joe Trippi. Part of his origin story was that he had grown up in California and he went to San Jose State. It’s almost through that accident that he became turned early on into the world of the internet and its possibilities. Even though he went on to be in politics, he had that Silicon Valley orientation and was able to cross-pollinate it. For me, I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, which was most famous as a golf resort. I have not yet found a way to cross-pollinate my work with golf so I fled instead.
I was reading a newsletter from Chip Conley who was talking about that within the word flee if you rearrange it, you can turn it into feel. I’m like, “That’s clever. I hadn’t thought of moving that L around like that.” Sometimes we don’t want to flee something and we want to feel what it is. Sometimes we feel it and go, “It’s still time to leave.” Let’s talk about your book. The reason I was trying to be clever with the pronunciation there is you’ve turned the word Long on the cover into “XOXOXO.” I’m assuming the X is silent. Maybe there’s another way to pronounce that but I thought, “That’s so clever in terms of hugs and kisses.” How did you come up with that long game with all those Xs and Os?
I published the book through a commercial publisher, Harvard Business School Press. As a result, I didn’t have too much control over the initial design. I can’t speak to what the designer was thinking. However, what I think it’s about is sort of bingo’s Xs and Os. It’s about the strategy of the long game. I’m so happy that you liked the cover because one of the challenges that authors with commercial publishing houses often face was a battle royale over the cover. Unfortunately, I tried to be generally a very agreeable person but I made the publishers hate me because this was the fifth cover concept that they gave me. The other ones felt like we’re not doing it. They were not speaking to what the book was. As the author, you want as best as you can for the cover to help add to the message and to convey it. For me, the idea of the strategy of Xs and Os and how you win the game is part of it. When I finally saw this design I was like, “This is the one.”
I’m sure you’re going to be able to give a talk on this and show all the covers that were rejected as part of the process of getting to the right story and right message as a brand since that’s one of your areas of expertise. A lot of people, when they see a finished product or finished talk they assumed that was your first stab at it. I have found that when people take you behind the Wizard of Oz curtain a little bit and you go, “No, this was a journey,” it inspires other people to think, “Maybe I’ll be on a journey and it won’t be my favorite thing right out of the get-go whether it’s something I write or something that I say or even the name of a talk that I give.”
One of the other reasons I love your title so much is the juxtaposition. Anytime there’s something like, “Long-term thinker but this is the short-term world,” that’s an interesting premise for our brain to try and put those two opposites together. If it is a short-term world and people are worried about the next quarter’s results, does it still make sense to be a long-term thinker? Let’s start with that open-ended obvious question of what we know the answer is. I’m curious to know not only what the answer is but what makes it the answer.
The Long Game: One of the best ways to differentiate yourself from the competition is to share your ideas publicly.
Ultimately, most of us can probably agree that the world has been getting more and more short-term oriented. We see it in businesses where many corporations are focused sometimes excessively to bad ends on short-term results and choosing stock market returns, in consequence making some poor decisions. We also see it in a lot of people’s lives. As we get more and more inundated with the internet culture, social media, constant comparisons and looking around, a lot of people are driven to distraction by what other people are doing and accomplishing. It does create pressure about, “Why are they succeeding? Why am I not succeeding? What do they know that I don’t? What am I doing wrong?” That leads to a frenzied rumination that is not the optimal way of being.
We know intellectually the things that are worthwhile in our careers and also in our personal lives are usually things that you have to work out for a long time but it can be hard. The biggest thing that I wanted to address in the book is that we all know intellectually that success does not come overnight but in practical terms, we don’t know what not overnight is. Maybe it’s a week. Shouldn’t it be a week? Often, it takes a lot more than that. This is a book about how to gird yourself for that uncomfortable period of time where you’re working hard towards something meaningful but you are not yet seeing outward signs of success. In order to get to that success, you have to persevere, which is not an easy thing to do. This book wants to give you the ammunition to be able to do it.
Let’s talk about creating online courses because I know you’ve done that and I went through that whole process as well. I remember, when I first started it, it seems so daunting. I thought, “Was anyone going to want this or buy this?” Don’t worry about that now, worry about creating something that you think is valuable and that you see as needed. As opposed to well, “When’s the payoff on this investment?” That is a great example of you’re not only an author and a speaker. You’ve decided, “Let’s create another source of revenue but more importantly, another source or way for people to consume our content that can be packaged with a talk.” When that happens, then you’re not just waiting for that once-a-year meeting that they need a speaker for.
I am a big fan of trying to think strategically about these questions and about building up multiple revenue streams. This was the topic of my book Entrepreneurial You, which was about how you create passive income. How do you create multiple revenue streams in your business? COVID showed us all pretty vividly that if we only have one income stream, certainly if you have a day job, but even if you’re an entrepreneur, but you only do one thing or one type of thing, COVID or any disruption like that, you don’t see it coming. It can be swift and dramatic. The more legs you can have on the table, the more different things, ventures or things that you have your hands in, the better because it provides you with a lot more stability and solidity if something changes in the marketplace. It also enables you to capture more upside.
It’s ironic because you’re talking about taking the long view or the long game of something, yet you have this wonderful marriage of saying, “There is a way to create rapid content for a masterclass because so many people get so overwhelmed with writing anything.” In one of your courses about that, you say, “I’m going to show you how to quickly come up with some ideas to get your message starting to flow. There is a happy medium and you are straddling both sides of it to keep the big picture and still take action.” Would that be a fair assessment?
[bctt tweet=”Be a long-term thinker in a short-term world.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Absolutely. In terms of the long game and the big picture, one of the drums that I like to beat is if you want to become a recognized expert in your field if you want to differentiate yourself from the competition. One of the best ways to do this, and this applies across industries, is to share your ideas publicly. If you don’t do that self-evidently, people don’t know what your ideas are unless they’ve worked with you directly. That is always going to be a small number of people.
It inhibits the virality of you as a person if the only people who know you are the people who personally know you and have worked with you directly. Whereas if you’re creating content, writing articles, doing podcasts like this or what have you, it enables a ton more people to see who you are and what you’re about. It’s shareable content so the word can spread and that enables you to grow much faster and make a big impact. That is an essential component of playing the long game in your career. With that being said, long doesn’t mean slow.
One of the covers that were proposed to me by my publisher that I was vehemently opposed to was they wanted to put a snail on the cover. I said, “First of all, snails are ugly. Second of all, the long game means strategic. It does not mean inherently that things have to be pokey or take a long time. You can be swift. You can move with alacrity. It’s about choosing the right things to do.” Similarly, that’s why I created a course, the Rapid Content Creation Masterclass. It is in your long-term interest to create great content and share your ideas but that doesn’t mean it has to be a painstaking process.
We know success takes a while. We start getting impatient and comparing ourselves to other people. That’s such a rabbit hole. First of all, imposter syndrome and resentment can kick up. Your resilience can go down. Much like the pandemic when it started, we didn’t know when it was going to end. For many of us, myself included, that was one of the hardest parts of it. More than eighteen months, let me try to wrap my head around that. It’s the same thing, “When is this success coming? Is it coming?”
I would love to hear what you do but what I’ve done is I think of myself as a stock. If I invest money in this stock called Me, I know my work ethic. I know a sense of some talent and some previous successes that I could say, “If that was a stock, I would invest in it. It might have some dips and not get profitable right off the get-go but it’s going to get there.” Do you use a metaphor like that for yourself? Do you have other ways of looking at things and helping other people see themselves in a way where they don’t get so impatient?
I love that metaphor, John. You’re exactly right. There are a couple that I would use. The first is your effort compounds the same way that money compounds over time. I’m a big fan. To go back to our previous example about writing articles for instance, which is something that I’ve done a lot in my business and in working to get my ideas better known. It is a process where you can’t just write one article and assume, “I’m done.” It doesn’t have to be onerous. You start where you start. Maybe it’s an article a month. If you can, maybe it’s an article a week. If you do that over enough time, eventually, you have built a body of work that is substantial. People do begin to know who you are because of those small efforts. It’s deploying an hour a week towards something meaningful.
Another financial metaphor that I like a lot, which I share in The Long Game comes from a gentleman that I interviewed. He’s a friend of mine named Jonathan Brill and I wrote a piece with him in Harvard Business Review. He talks about the way that he thinks about structuring his career portfolio. He says that his first goal is to create what he calls Heartbeat Income. It’s like, “What is the amount of money you need to cover the basics, pay the mortgage, pay the health insurance, get your food and whatever?” He always says, “That’s the first part.” After that, you can afford to be a little bit riskier. He said, “You need to take 20% of your effort and ask yourself, ‘What’s a bond and what is SpaceX stock?’” It’s good to have things that are secure to take care of the needs that you need to be met. It’s also good to have a little bit of something risky in the portfolio in a small way that could pay off exponentially. It’s true in our stock portfolios but it’s also true in terms of our career bets and where we’re investing our time.
Everyone’s aware that technology is changing at a rapid rate that no one’s experienced before in their careers, which requires people to stay in a learning mode. You can’t go, “I know how to be an engineer. I know how to be an accountant now. I don’t need to learn anything new.” With artificial intelligence coming along and a lot of professional services industries and things like and even computers doing radiology and reading X-rays. There are many things now that you would think you know what you know and you’re good now. You can coast for 40 years. What you’re saying is no matter what you’re doing, you need to be this long-term thinker and say, “What else could I be doing with my career to keep myself relevant or ahead of the curve?”
The Long Game: It is in your long-term interest to create great content and share your ideas. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a painstaking process.
All of us can probably think of examples. I have a person I know whose father has been long-term unemployed. This is an educated guy who had a great career but he was an architect that refused to learn AutoCAD. That’s what architecture is now. It’s using this software and not drawing things by hand. For years, he hasn’t been able to get a job because of his unwillingness to do this. You can say, “He’s pursuing other things,” which is great but he doesn’t have a job. It is incumbent upon all of us to be thoughtful. If we decide, “This is intolerable. I don’t want to do this.” Fine. Pick something else. Reinvent your weight into it but the problem comes when there’s not a goal and a thing that we’re reinventing ourselves into. Instead, “I’m not doing that thing anymore,” and there’s a void.
I remember when I was selling advertising for magazines back in 2008. It was the first time I got laid off. Someone said to me, “This reminds me of what happened to the silent movie stars. Some made it to talkies and some didn’t.” You’ve got to figure out if you’re willing to learn how to sell digital ads instead of print. Yes, it’s a whole other language and a whole other set of things but it is an ongoing choice we are continually making. It’s like, do I want to understand blockchain and what an NFT is? Do I want to say, “This is where I check out. I’m not going to learn anymore?”
I don’t necessarily think I’m going to run and invest in one but at least I’m going to understand the language. I think what you’re saying is to stay relevant, you have to speak the language. I remember listening to Lisa Gibbons being interviewed. She said, “I agreed to appear on Dancing with the Stars because that’s the language that a lot of people are speaking these days for actors or hosts to stay relevant.” She’s not a professional dancer but you’ve got to be willing to stretch out of your comfort zone and go, “If this is what people are talking about and I get invited to play the game, I’m going to learn how to dance enough to do the Mamba for two minutes.” Those were a couple of examples in addition to that architect that you said.
At a certain point, it’s like someone said, “I have a flip phone so I don’t text.” You’re like, “What?” Maybe if you’re a grandparent and you have checked out and you’re like, “I stopped with the flip phone. I’m not going to use Dropbox. I don’t know how to get this to you then.” We don’t realize that we’re constantly saying yes and learning and adapting to new things, including Zoom versus Skype and Blackberry versus iPhone.
This is what I want your opinion on. I see so many companies thinking, “We’re at the top. We’re going to stay here forever,” Kodak, Blackberry, Blockbuster, on and on. The irony was there’s a documentary on Netflix about the demise of Blockbuster. What advice do you have because you work with such big companies? They hire you to come in as a speaker and consultant on making sure that they are not just chasing after every new shiny thing but are having some long-term thinking when it’s hard with all the demands on them.
Some of the best advice about corporate strategy comes from my friend, Rita McGrath, who I profiled in one of my earlier books, Stand Out. I talked a bit about Rita and her ideas. Her book is called Seeing Around Corners. She shares a lot of interesting information about how companies can begin to see inflection points as they’re happening or before they’re happening so that they have time to pivot if needed. To a certain extent, it’s asking yourself simple questions like, “If you work for a company, are you noticing that you don’t buy its product anymore? If you are working at a company, are headhunters trying to poach your talent?” It’s a good thing that headhunters are trying to poach your talent because it means that you are seen as a leader in your industry. If they are not circling, that’s ominous. It’s looking for little things like that.
I love the concept of if your family is not using film and everyone’s taking digital pictures or your family’s not going to Blockbuster every weekend anymore and renting these little red things from Netflix or starting to stream. That process is fascinating to me to watch. Eventually, it’s going to be every studio and network. We now have NBC streaming. That whole demise of cable in a weird way. Do you remember when people were talking about, “I’ve cut the cord to cable?” I thought to myself, “Is that a few people doing that? How would you figure out how to watch what you want?” I don’t know many people who are still paying for all that.
[bctt tweet=”We all know intellectually that success does not come overnight, but in practical terms, we don’t really know what not overnight is.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I remember my mother coming to visit me at my house and being upset that I didn’t have cable because she’s like, “I’m turning on the television and what do I watch?” She was upset by this whole situation. She demanded that I order a cable subscription for when she came to my house. I’m like, “This is dumb, mom.”
We can get Jeopardy on YouTube. It’s pretty funny. I sold my place in LA before I moved here to Austin. I was talking to one particular real estate person that I’d worked with for a while. I said, “There’s a competitor that’s a lot more digital than what you’re doing. I’m interested to hear what your strategy is to sell the house now that it’s been ten years since I bought it.” They’re like, “We run an ad in the LA Times on Saturday and a magazine.” I’m like, “If there’s anybody I know that still gets the LA Times, it’s on a Sunday only not a Saturday. You’re putting a magazine in a Saturday thing and someone’s got to flip through that magazine to see an ad for my house and I’m paying you for that? That doesn’t make any sense at all.” That’s horse and buggy time.
Here, they also deploy some pigeons.
It is fascinating to watch the resistance of industries like real estate, which has been so much the same for decades of how people get paid and how things are marketed. They do a virtual tour of the house and they even have a thing where you can measure to see if your sofa will fit. I’m like, “Do you guys do anything like that besides pictures?” They’re like, “No. We can’t do everything.” How our brain justifies not evolving. I wasn’t in complete shock that I got laid off because you could see print was dying but it is a death of anything. There’s that denial like, “Did it really happen? I thought it might, but it did?” That’s the psychology of what you’re doing that I find fascinating. You’re encouraging people to get out of this frenetic of putting out flyers every day. I’m sure the people at Blockbuster were busy up until the point where they realized, “This isn’t going to work anymore.”
You do need to zoom out and by the time they did, it was too late because they didn’t have the money to go after the subscribers the way Netflix did. It’s a fascinating little nuance in that documentary I watched. You watch all these other people try to join the party. He has an advantage and they bought Fox on top of it. Isn’t that interesting? Talk about a long-term view of something. Disney doesn’t have enough content that they have to buy those premises. Looking at that can help us look at our career. That’s what you’re saying in the book as well.
Something that I’ve striven to do in all of my books is essentially take the way that we think about corporate strategy and apply it to our personal lives. I got my start doing consulting for organizations in enterprise-level consulting. All of my books have been aimed at individual professionals. It’s fundamentally the same analysis. It’s the same way that we ought to be thinking about these questions.
The Long Game: Long game means strategic. It does not mean that things have to be pokey or take a long time.
That’s why I kept toggling back and forth because I knew that was your specific area of expertise. You have your niche and that’s a great place to wrap up this wonderful interview. When you have a brand like Dorie Clark, people know you, all of the books have a thread, all the talks and courses are all connected, then we know we’re in Dorie’s world. What a wonderful place to be in. It makes the momentum and the energy pull in because you know where you’re going. Any last thoughts or quotes you want to leave us with? We can get the book, The Long Game on Amazon and your website DorieClark.com.
Thank you so much, John. I appreciate it. I’ll also mention that for people that are interested in doing more of a deep dive on strategic thinking. I do have a free resource that people can download, which is The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self-Assessment, which is at DorieClark.com/thelonggame.
I saw that. It even pops up for me when I went there. What a great tool that is and what a great person you are sharing your warmth and wisdom, which is a wonderful combination. Thanks, Dorie.
John, thank you so much.
Important Links
- Dorie Clark
- The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World
- Episode – Dorie Clark Past Episode
- Entrepreneurial You
- Rapid Content Creation Masterclass
- Harvard Business Review – Jonathan Brill and Dorie Clark Article
- Stand Out
- Seeing Around Corners
- Amazon – The Long Game
- DorieClark.com/thelonggame
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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