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When Work Doesn't Want You To Work
Miyamoto Musashi is Japan's samurai of samurais. He was so into swords he used two of them at a time. This led him to win 61 duels. He was two fighters with two swords in one human. But he started out as an animal.
Later, he wrote a book called The Book of Five Rings. In his clear-headedness, he didn't name the book Five Rings. He named it The Book of Five Rings just in case anybody had any doubts about it being a book. However, this kind of clear-headedness was hard-earned.
Mushashi ended up a national hero but he would have been cancelled before he begun in our times. And rightly so.
In the Akira Kurosawa movie version of Musashi's life, Musashi is a troubled and enraged child that nobody wants. So he mucks about his village causing mayhem. The book Iron John: A Book About Men calls this aimless phase The Ashes. (Thank you for this gift, Lindsey Wehking).
The Ashes is a phase in our lives when we're between being carefree children and adults with clear responsibilities. Some of you are in your own Ashes phase right now. Many of us are envious of you.
This phase is proxied by the idea of a gap year. In the US, a gap year is seen as a way to "rebrand yourself so you can stand out amongst other college applicants" (LOL this is so American). In other countries, it's an excuse to "work at a bar" but mostly to get drunk.
Musashi emerges from his aimless phase with a goal: he decides to become a samurai. His first step is to join an army and do some killing. This doesn't work because his army is defeated, he gets caught up in some stuff, and he tries to return home but people are searching for him. So he does some more killing until a buddhist monk tricks him into his next phase of life: self-mastery.
In these times, Musashi has already been cancelled but the buddhist monk sees something in him and asks him, "Are you an animal or a human?" Then he locks him in a room with books for a year.
Many of you know the lovely strategist Rachel Mercer. She ran strategy at R/GA in New York and often publishes a list of all the books she's read in a year. It's a long list. I think Rachel would enjoy Musashi's fate here. I don't know if she's read Musashi though.
The monk gives Musashi a challenge: "Do you want to keep thrashing about life, wildly following your instincts, or do you want to cultivate yourself and channel your instincts for good?"
Musashi emerges more noble. A year of forced education and self-regulation cultivate him so that, as he goes about killing more people, he has the skills to write a book about it later.
The price he pays: a life without love. Like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, sword thrusts were Musashi's main love language. Human love would have been a distraction.
If only Gary Chapman had lived centuries earlier. Then his book The Five Love Languages might have understood that The Book of Five Rings was explaining a sixth love.
Now am I telling you this just so I can also tell you that I'm re-watching Kurosawa's trilogy right now and that I've read the original novel and that the actor who played Musashi–Toshiro Mifune–was asked to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and that many American movies and TV shows borrow from Musashi, especially movies involving a lot of aimless-then-purposeful, Don-Quixote-esque wandering around?
A little.
I also know my people are readers. They like to marinate in rabbit holes and they know shortcuts aren't as good a longcuts.
So here's the point: in many companies right now, strategy is in an Ashes phase.
It's caught between its carefree childhood and an adulthood with clear responsibilities.
It sounds like this:
"Umm. Where I work, well...it's hard. We have a good team. We have good clients. But people don't know how to bring us onto projects. People don't want to pay for our time. People ignore our creative briefs. We have to write really long, useless business documents that people borrow from but mostly ignore. Management tells us we matter but it's so hard–too hard–to make an impact. What am I doing wrong?"
This is the sound of a strategy team that's thrashing about like an animal trying to get traction on a treadmill.
Why is strategy stuck between childhood and adulthood?
1. Clients don't want strategy.
The book The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christenson describes this paradox: businesses might want to evolve but their current customers buy them for what they are, or what they were. So, existing clients often put a drag on a company.
2. Your company doesn't want strategy.
Ever worked in a place that hired strategists but didn't want them? I have. How do I know? Because I used to run people through my training and I'd give them my problem at the time: "None of you seem to want strategists here. Why?"
Real answers:
"I want to be the smartest person in the room."
"I don't want to share my clients with anyone."
"I am the strategist."
3. You don't know what you're doing.
Yes, there are strategists who let down the occupation but they are few and far between or, if they're new to the occupation, often they're new to the role and don't have any leadership. However, we need to admit that, sometimes, we need to point our fingers at ourselves.
What do you do about it?
1. Stare reality in the face.
In our line of work, here's a truth that is difficult to stomach: we get to do more of what we've done.
Yes, I'm sitting here with a stomach bug from Mexico City but I can deal with this bug more easily than this truth.
Change is hard. Not only do you need to change but, to sell what you change into, you need other people to want–then pay for–what you change into.
This is why it's important to ponder your answer to this question: "What's the one thing you want to be known for?"
Your answer could be broad like "strategy" or it could be more specific like "teaching people strategy by teaching them about themselves". You decide. But, once you or your company locks in, any meaningful shift is difficult.
Staring reality in the face means working out how you and your company or department are currently perceived and used. Idealism is our electricity but start with reality.
2. Define the problem.
The three problems above are perfectly fine starting points.
If clients don't want to pay for strategy, sell in strategy as a default activity to new clients. This might require you to attract a new kind of client, a point made by The Innovator's Dilemma. McCann New York took this approach about 8 years ago–they went all-in on pitches to sell in a new philosophy.
If your company doesn't want strategy, you're in a more difficult place because you need to work out how to even discuss this.
I was gaslit by the President of one place I worked at when I brought this up. And this was after running a workshop with 40 of their most senior people about the topic and having spoken with at least another 50 people at the agency as well as former employees about the history of the discipline there.
Your options:
- Bring up the issue (with potential solutions) then deal with potential reprisal,
- Keep your head down and do what you're told,
- Take your department on a tour of the company to sell it in to colleagues, or
- Go where you're wanted.
I'll give you another crappy truth: mostly, it's not your fault if strategy doesn't work at your company.
When strategy doesn't work at a company, it's a failure of leadership.
And if the management team goes through strategy leaders like rolls of toilet paper, maybe they're crapping in the wrong place.
This churn happens because the management team doesn't understand the discipline, won't share power, won't make strategy activities default in processes and client relationships, and makes decisions based on a "casting" mindset, or optics.
Finally, the third problem above–you don't know what you're doing...well, read, study, learn, and bring in some people who know what they're doing.
3. Go where you're wanted.
Some of you are in a superhero phase right now even while your strategy discipline is in an Ashes phase at your company. You think you're going to fix it all. You're just going to keep on flying in your fancy super hero clothes straight into the sun and, boom, you're a hero.
I hope this happens for you. I do.
But my hunch is that, based on my conversations with people and the Sweathead surveys we've done over the years, at least half of strategists and people who do some kind of strategy work in an agency or in-house team know they are in this situation. And another twenty per cent don't even know they are.
Eventually, if you stick around long enough, you'll learn that you need to go where you're wanted. Sure, you can milk a salary and health insurance for a few years but then what?
I'm not telling you to give up but you, the practicing strategist, have three options:
- Make people want you,
- Survive as long as you can without being wanted, or
- Go where you're wanted.
Musashi followed his sword. He cultivated himself then he wandered around Japan trying to test himself against the best with the goal of being known as Japan's samurai of samurai.
But, if you're an agency or in-house team leader, think about the monk and his role in Musashi's life: the monk encouraged Musashi's self-cultivation and he told him there's a place in the world for him if he can emerge cultivated.
Leaders, if your strategy discipline is in the Ashes, be like the monk. Stop the divisive corporate politics I've seen up close in the USA in which leaders use American individualism to divide and conquer their own workplaces. Unite your workplace in a room, possibly full of books, and don't let your workplace leave until they're ready to meet the world like Musashi did–with sword and mind sharpened.
Management teams, if your strategy team isn't working, it's your fault.
I can't make this any clearer. But I'm not saying this to make you feel bad.
I'm saying it so you take action.
Fetch all the difficult truths from your strategy team, their colleagues, and your clients. Realize you don't have all the answers. Ask for answers. And listen.
Talent is everywhere. There's more talent in this industry than leadership.
Bringing in strategists for the first time isn't like getting a new hairstyle.
Bringing in strategists for the first time is like adopting a child, a child in the Ashes. And getting the discipline to work is full-blown adult responsibility. Only take it on, dear leaders, if you're up for the challenge.
Good luck, my friends.
P.S. If you read this longcut this far and you enjoyed it, please share it and feel free to let me know. Being a writer is an isolated lifestyle. Open rates and click-through rates aren't the same as real people interaction :)
You can subscribe to the For Friday's Sake newsletter here. This is "sake" as in "cause" or "gain", not the Japanese drink. Not yet.
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Peace
Mark (@markpollard)
Strategy Friend, Sweathead
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