After 2 years of consulting, 2 years of venture capital, 2 years of business school, I took my first marketing job doing industry marketing for Wellfleet Communications which then became Bay Networks.
At that point in my career, I could have written a book on strategy. I’d analyzed 100s of businesses, studied how Sun Tzu could have beat Jack Welch until Jack read leadership secrets of Attila the Hun, but in any case, they both were going down at the hands of Andreessen and company.
Three months into the job, my very successful colleague came in my cube and said ‘you know it’s more important to get things done than to figure out how to do things better in your ramp up phase’. Since then, I’ve realized that you change the strategy through execution, not the other way around.
After I had been in my first VP Marketing role for a year, my team gave me a Gary Larson cartoon of a T-Rex marking off each day of his calendar with ‘kill something, eat it’. They thought I was overly production driven and didn’t spend enough time on our marketing or corporate strategy, both of which needed real help.
Fair enough, so I moved the marketing mix away from traditional events and direct tactics to webinars (this was before there were webinars as the term had not been coined yet, no one was doing them, and you had to manually put powerpoints on a website as there was no Webex, etc.) and thought leadership oriented PR and AR. Similarly, I called foul on our corporate strategy and worked with the CEO to refocus our horizontal epublishing solution on one vertical market so we could go up-the-stack and build out a much higher value and differentiated ecommerce solution.
What’s the point? I stand by the ‘kill something, eat it’ approach as the way to do corporate development. If the management team questions marketing’s ability to execute, then you can’t have the strategic conversation (ie. it must be earned). Furthermore, the way to change the strategy (see growth blog post) is by getting deals and wins. Our CEO really figured out our vertical ecommerce solution through selling and deals after we had properly defined our segment focus.
I often say to my team ‘less thinking, more typing’. I know they’re smart (that’s why they’re on the team). I know they desperately want to do things in a better way. I know we have real growth blocking issues. But we get paid for results and those do not come from talking, they come from doing. You can pave the road as you drive down it but don’t tell the organization that we need to first pave the road before we can safely drive.
If you can kill something and eat it quickly, that gives you the rest of the day to lead the change the company really needs. If it takes you all day to get sustenance, then you probably should focus on being a better manager or executor.