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I once made the mistake of telling a C.O.O. I was using a framework in my marketing with his company.
His reaction was nuts.
He went on a rant telling me that academic models don’t work and aren’t even remotely useful in the real-world.
Then he proceeded to demand I find something else more appropriate because they were in a ‘specialized niche.’
He really didn’t like using models in marketing.
Or maybe he didn’t like academia.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit not all “schooling” jibes with real world business.
I’ve read some bad business books and have been to some terrible lectures.
But…
There is no way you can toss out all academics in one fell swoop.
The genius leader of the tech titan Intel, Andy Grove, used research on innovation and disruption from Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen to keep Intel on the leading edge of the tech industry.
Christensen was called “Andy Grove’s Big Thinker.”
And the people who think that executives from all levels don’t learn from Porter, Drucker, and, more recently, the insights from Kahneman and Tversky, are fooling themselves, if not being downright obstinate.
Best I can tell, the revolt against academics stems from the need for hands-on experience.
You know, the street smart guys who get down in the dirt and actually do the work.
That’s a valid point.
For years, when first moving in marketing, hours were spent writing, re-writing, getting my ideas shot down, learning the ins and outs of lead generation, and uncovering the deep dark psychology of why customers “really” buy stuff.
Even before my foray into marketing, my first clients in tech were all handled by me. I did all of the IT setup and coding by hand, outsourcing only a few graphics.
Even today, when a new marketing idea pops up, I’ll invest my own time and money to see what and how it works.
Hands on work provides input that reading a book can’t give you.
There’s a problem with hands-on work, which I’ll get to in a minute.
The best framework falls somewhere in the middle… a combination of hands-on and higher level thinking.
But that wasn’t discussed during the COO’s minor breakdown.
Here’s a piece of advice for you – If someone goes off on an unexpected rant, there’s usually something hidden very deep that is causing the outburst. It’s best to leave to the therapists to figure out.
Just keep your mouth shut and wait for the storm to pass.
What made this experience so surreal is that our numbers were up.
Apparently, it was the topic of a framework that sparked the diatribe.
I still have no idea was caused the outburst.
How did I respond?
I’ll tell you in just a second, but first I want to tell you about Leonardo DaVinci.
DaVinci Dove Into… Everything
Leonardo DaVinci was a man worth studying for his curiosity and persistence.
Even with no formal education and no parents, he made amazing contributions to art and science, had immense curiosity in everything, and is rumored to have slept only 5 hours a day.
You may recognize his name as the painter of the Mona Lisa, yet DaVinci was a student of science, mathematics, aerodynamics, botany, and mechanical engineering. He sketched the first mechanical bicycle… 300 years before the first bike was actually built.
In some ways it’s odd to study a man who lived 567 years ago. Yet through his notebooks we’ve seen evidence of a brilliant mind able to create wondrous ideas and drawings that were well before their time. And his techniques are applicable and available for every business person today.
He is a great inspiration for entrepreneurs and big thinkers all around the world.
Here’s one point you’ll find relevant for the topic of frameworks.
DaVinci pulled his ideas from both theory and from hands-on experience.
For example, as a young child he would take a piece of paper, walk into the woods and sketch by hand the flowers he saw along the path. His sketches he did by hand, refining his skills with hands on practice, with no teacher, guided only by his eye, persistence, and practice.
When his interests moved to flight, he thought that man one day could fly. He spent hours every day studying and directly observing birds, and how their wings fastened to their body.
He even went so far as to dissect birds and their wings. The ultimate hands-on experience.
He combined both study and first hand knowledge to create several drawings of wings and mechanical flying contraptions. These drawings were his models of what he believed a flying machine would be.
If more of his models had actually been built, the lessons learned from building them would have led to flight thousands of years before the Wright brothers.
Here’s one takeaway.
The true power of a framework comes from the head start you have against others who are haphazardly trying things. With a model, you have a starting point to begin your testing without wasted wrong turns.
In today’s modern world, a head start translates into hours of time saved in meetings and discussion, and millions of dollars in wasted resources. Depending on the company and project, the dollars saved could reach the billions.
With a framework, you give yourself a head start.
This is the power of frameworks.
About Frameworks
Ok, here’s something about frameworks that you might not know.
This idea came to me only after 10 years of marketing when I was noticing patterns and systems in the work we were doing. It prompted me to ask this: Can I find the common patterns and re-use them in different industries and with different size clients?
Models are popular today. Charlie Munger, the financial partner of Warren Buffet, has made them famous.
He says this of models:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
Yet even as models are gaining momentum among business owners, back then it was a stretch to think you could develop a series of marketing models.
It may sound impossible to develop a set of patterns to apply in different business situations. But at the time, I knew software engineers did it, so it just made sense that it could apply to marketing and customer acquisition techniques. I didn’t know if it was possible, but if they could do it in software, then it was possible to do it in another industry.
But as I’ll show you in just a minute, developing these models can take time and effort and if you aren’t careful, you can screw up and end up with something useless.
So, the first thing I did was pretend I was a grizzled old veteran programmer who was developing a software model… or a mathematical finance guy developing a framework to make money from the stock market. With those ideas firmly in my mind, I thought, what could I come up with for growing a business?
With that question in mind, I did come up with something.
I realized, “What if I could document the top 10 customer acquisition strategies and then generalize them? That is, find the patterns and abstractions without getting bogged down in the details? Would that lead me to new ideas?
Now that is perfectly achievable, because in the business world almost everything is taught as an abstraction. So it was doable, except in this case I was started from proven principles and then moving up to a generalized model.
In other words, you can create a marketing system template, like a software program, for a given marketing strategy, apply it in different companies in different industries, and get results faster than almost all other marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners in your industry.
Let’s say you develop a highly successful lead generation program through digital media. You can then customize it, then deploy it into any industry you choose. If you do that while others are bumbling through their discovery process, you’ll have leads and prospects coming in almost immediately.
The accelerated time to market is tremendous.
What’s more, after you establish a baseline number for incoming results, you can immediately began testing to find boosts in performance that are unique to the company and their customers. What’s more, as you dig deeper into your customer research, you’ll find additional ways to increase revenue, taking your sales results through the roof even before a similar program is hitting “final approval” in your competitor’s camp.
Once a company sees how quickly this marketing models begins work, the thought enters her mind, “What other models do you have that we can use?” And if you actually have other models available, you go from a single source of sales to a “stacked acquisition model” where many models work together in a feedback loop to bring you exponential business growth.
Now if doing that seems so far out of reach to be unbelievable, that’s your skeptical part of your brain kicking in, just like the COO you read about earlier.
If you need more proof, you can simply investigate Charlie Munger’s remarks on models, read the books written about his model thinking, or look up the hundreds of books on modeling in computer science and investing. If you go ahead and do that, it is a small step to see it could be done in other areas like marketing.
Once you let this idea inside your head, you can then see how easy it would be to apply to all sorts of ideas in business. Which is exactly why hundreds of millions of dollars have been made with marketing models.
You are left with a toolbox of useful ideas that can be applied when the right situation comes up. The systems are repeatable and can be launched quickly, but you must not hold your ideas too tightly. Every company is different and unique in it’s own way, and the framework is not a rigid steel frame. A downside to frameworks is to possess “hammer thinking.” If you’re believe you’re a hammer, everything you see is a nail.
Avoid this with frameworks. When you have framework that words, treat it as a first step to be improved and customized over time.
Yet there’s another downside.
In some cases, you must cover new ground and create these models from scratch. This is what Da Vinci did when he took the flight principles from birds and applied them to flying machines. Or like the bicycle, where he creating a drawing of the modern bike 300 years before the first one physically appeared in the world.
I will show you a short version of how this is done.
To drive the point home, I’m going to tell you about something other than marketing and customer growth.
The reason for this is simple.
Because I’ve been using my marketing models for for so long that I’ve long forgotten their origins. Over the years they’ve been built up, battle tested, and boosted with so many layers that to try to figure out all of the sources would take forty forevers.
So instead I’m going to talk about something else.
You see, a few years ago, a client had a problem recruiting.
They needed help with the hiring process.
So they asked me to look into it.
How To Hire Right
For the past 10 years or so, finding new people has been a huge hurdle for companies of all sizes.
As finding new hires becomes important for growing your business, there’s a drastic search for people who are truly good and adaptable, not those who simply have the right skills.
So to bring in better qualified people, a client asked me about creating a model for a hiring process.
I didn’t have one built at the time, but I agreed to develop a model for them.
To start building their hiring model, we went through several steps.
First, we looked at several of the top recruiting gurus and training programs. People like Lou Adler and the program called Topgrading.
Lou Adler is famous for hiring on skills, not on qualifications. And Jack Welch used Topgrading with amazing results at his time at GE.
We reviewed and read the top books on skills and careers, including “What Color Is Your Parachute” and “First, Break All The Rules.”
Then dove into other hiring books, including ones written by HR people and by headhunters. All told , we dove into several dozen hiring books.
Let me tell you something, there are a lot of books out there on recruiting and hiring.
We turned and looked at the top hiring companies. Google and Microsoft showed up on the list, of course, but so did Virgin and Southwest Airlines. That gave us a view of the company side of things. How they hire, what they look for, what they are taught.
Lastly, we looked at the entire industry of personality testing and profiling. This was eye-opening. More on that in a moment.
Then we switched from the demand side (the jobs) to the supply side (the people).
We looked at interviewing techniques, networking techniques, resume writing techniques, and all sorts of insight about the unending options of online resume sites on the Internet.
We dug through hundreds of comments and posts about using Monster, Indeed, and the other big sites. We looked at forum posts and social networks where these topics where discussed.
At this point, we stumbled upon something interesting.
We uncovered blog posts from the “old-timers” in various industries giving advice on how they would look for jobs if they could start their career again.
Instead of repeating the self-help mantra of ‘Follow your passion’ , these guys gave very practical and useful advice.
For example, one tip was to consider yearly salary as only a part of your total package.
Salary is only one piece of the complex decision about working for a company. They suggested considering aspects other than salary, including bonus, vacation, room for promotion, the personality of your teammates, the personality of your boss (and your boss’s boss…), and other perks like food, transport, gym memberships, and stock options.
One guy pointed out that having a lunch facility on site gets grumbles from people because the company “only wants you to work longer hours.” But, he pointed out the convenience of getting food from a cafeteria on campus beats venturing out into traffic, red lights, and long lines. Besides, he argued, you aren’t forced to go back to work, you can sit in the cafeteria or sit outside and eat.
Interesting stuff for sure.
With all of this information forming the foundation, we could have stopped there, but we went further.
We took everything we had and investigated the arguments against them.
In other words, we considered the counter-arguments.
For example, huge tech companies have changed their employee performance reviews. In fact, Microsoft abolished it’s employee evaluation system in 2013. The evaluation system is blamed for Microsoft’s “Lost Decade” from 2000 – 2010 when innovation was virtually zero. Read “The End of Average” if you’re interested in learning more about this.
Further, I looked at stories about people getting fired or not performing well. Stories about bad hires and bad attitudes, but also about burnout, micromanagement, and gross incompetence.
And then we came to the negative comments about personality testing. Boy, let me tell you. There’s a big controversy about this type of testing for job success. This is a billion dollar industry, yet there is a huge debate on the usefulness of these tests. It’s heated.
Now, at this stage, all of this data would have been enough.
We had collected the top thoughts from almost every big wig in the industry, from the employer and employee side.
The next step was the most important of them all.
I took a few days away from the project to clear my head. Then dumped all my notepads, scribbles, and books on a conference room table to see what I had gathered
Then I sat back, looked over the mound of papers, and asked this question: “What information will I never find out? ”
Let me explain what that means.
Looking For What’s Not There
In research, it’s useful to look for the data that isn’t there.
Sometimes missing data will not affect your results. For example, in a survey of entrepreneur’s attitudes, I don’t care about NON-entrepreneurs.
But sometimes thinking of what’s missing can save lives.
During World War 2, the United States had a problem – their planes were getting shot down.
The solution sounds easy. Just add more protective armor.
But more armor makes the plane heavier, making it harder to steer and a fuel hog. Too much armor and you’re vulnerable because you can’t maneuver, too little armor and you get shot down easier.
The answer is somewhere in the middle.
To solve the problem, big named mathematicians were hired.
Many of them took note of where the bullet holes were. The fuselage was riddled with holes and the engines only had a few shots in them. The most common advice was to armor the spots with the most holes.
This is the wrong answer.
The real answer is to take note of the areas on the returning planes and see which spots were hit the least.
How does this make sense?
It’s easy once you get it.
You see, the planes with the most holes in the fuselage were surviving… and there the ones that made it back home. Taking bullets in the fuselage was ok. Even if you took heavy gunfire, you could still make it back to base.
But what about the engines? The engines surveyed only had one or two shots in them, which means that if you took more than three bullets to the engine then your plane was likely going down. Thus, to save more planes, armor the engines.
This step is counter-intuitive, but important.
And this is what I did with the data I had collected.
In the midst of all of this data, there’s going to exist a survivorship bias. All of these books, programs, and gurus are published and have gained attention.
But what about the mediocre employees and the average recruiters?
If you have a team of average employees, there won’t be anyone raving about them to others.
And if you’re a 3rd rate recruiter, you probably don’t have a best selling book.
So if there’s no data, how do you investigate this?
That’s where the hands-on experience comes into this framework.
I interviewed the client about their experience. I asked the managers to ask their own employees about their own job hunting stories.
I included my experience of hiring full time and part time for 20 years. I included my experiences with companies who are hiring, including my own experience of being interviewed, as an employee early in my career and as a consultant for the last twenty years.
In the end, it all came together rather nicely.
As a weird side note, spawned by luck or synchronicity, I met a recruiter through a mutual friend while going through this process. She didn’t mind talking about work, so I pulled a few nuggets out of her during our conversation.
For example, LinkedIn is hailed as a great place to find jobs, but recruiters find it a challenge because it’s hard to tell if you’re actually looking for a new job. In her company, the best performing technique was paying for subscriptions to the big resume sites, then sorting through the resumes that had been updated or uploaded in the past 30 days. These were the hottest prospects who were either actively looking or considering a move elsewhere. More interesting data to toss into the model.
After all of that, I put together a system for them.
It’s working now and has brought in better, higher quality employees for the client.
Now, does this seem like work to you?
You might think that it is a lot of work.
First, it’s not really that bad. It sounds like a lot but really in today’s world of information , it’s easier today than it ever has been.
But all of that aside. You still shouldn’t consider this work at all
Why?
Because the alternative is much, much worse.
If this work hadn’t been done, the client would have been stuck for years in a process of hiring poor performing people who weren’t helping them.
And it’s not just recruiting.
When researching a new business opportunity, you’ll see people skimp on researching the industry and developing a plan of attack.
In researching competition, very few people spend enough time truly understanding the marketplace, the competition and the customer.
In pulling together marketing plans, there’s almost a dearth of effort. Look around you and not only will you see poorly executed advertising campaigns, you’ll see marketing messages that make you wonder if they even studied at all.
In any case, the work of building these frameworks is worth it, because the cost of failing is much worse.
I’ve seen all sorts of people jump at shortcuts early, only to spend months and years recovering.
I’m fully of the mindset of Lincoln: “ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
This is something I’ve come to believe in my bones after all this time.
The Power Of Frameworks
You can literally change the world when you put frameworks to use.
That’s why I was shocked when the COO so brazenly blurted out that frameworks didn’t work in his business.
His assertion that frameworks were some academic nonsense was itself… nonsense.
If he has stopped to ask, he would have discovered my frameworks were built on real-world research, testing, refinement, and customization for his product portfolio.
In other words, my framework wasn’t simply a drawing on paper.
It was actually working…and had been working for 11 months.
That’s why I said, “Interesting. Since using this model we’ve seen a boost in traffic, calls, inquiries, and sales.”
His paused, but not for long.
Always looking to have the last word, he said, “Well we’re not were we need to be”
“I agree with you on that point, there’s lots of upside still coming,” I said.
Then got up and walked out.
And I never brought up frameworks with him again.