Episode 108: How to Escape Conventional Thinking to Build the Extraordinary with Jay Acunzo

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

When you question best practices, when you switch your mentality from acting like an expert who knows the answer in general or on average to acting like an investigator who looks at the firsthand context, you start making better decisions. And almost necessarily, you start to do exceptional work because you're betting on and using information based on what makes you an exception. Yeah. So you become that outlier in a great way. Not because you're trying to be a rebel, but because all you did was look hard at the reality around you, at the context around you, and base your decisions on that rather than on secondhand knowledge, conventional wisdom, or past precedent.

The average adult makes more than 35,000 decisions per day. Luckily, most of these choices are routine and small, so we can simply react to the world around us. But what about the most important decisions we make? What about the things that truly affect our companies, our customers, and our employees? Do we have a plan and a process in place for making the best possible decisions with clarity, or do we copy the conventional wisdom or the latest trend? This is what we're discussing today with our guest, Jay Acunzo. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at CommsQ. Jay is the author of the book Break the Wheel, which helps people make better decisions faster when they're surrounded by too much information. He's a former digital media strategist at Google head of content at HubSpot, and vice president of brand at the venture capital firm NextView. Today, he's the host and producer of several documentary series about the working world, including his podcast Unthinkable, named as one of the top career podcasts by Salesforce Inc., Entrepreneur, and more. And Jay is our keynote speaker at SKU Camp, September 22nd through the 25th. You can learn more and register at skucamp.com. A quick reminder, Sessions, the industry's one-day sales conference for distributors who want to ignite their sales growth, will be coming to Los Angeles on May 9th and will be in New York City on May 16th. You can learn more at commonsquesessions.com. And remember that you can ask us anything. Email me, bobby@commonsque.com, with any question, any question you have about sales, marketing, HR, technology, whatever topic. We'd love to answer your question here on the program. This episode is brought to you by Commscue, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at commonscue.com.

And now I'm joined by Mark Graham, Commscue's co-founder and chief platform officer, as we chat with our friend and guest, Jay, one of the challenges in our industry is this constantly comparing to each other, making simply a better version of our most respected competitor, as opposed to really thinking through the fundamental differences that shape what make us unique. It seems like we're building better versions of the company at the top rather than uncovering what makes us special. So you suggest that we should become like investigators with our own services, and only then will we stop acting like a commodity and become the exception. You call it breaking free from the endless spinning wheel of best practices. You cited 6 trigger questions that can help us. Can you elaborate on these?

Yeah, I feel like we kind of bifurcate in the business world into 2 camps. You have the people who know and follow the best practices, and then you have the innovators, the people who have some kind of gift, visionaries, if you will. And I think if you look at the camp that we laud, that we put up on a pedestal, that takes an unconventional path, we kind of shake our heads and we laugh and we say like, "Haha, that'll never work," or, "Haha, I wish I could do that, but here's my situation," right? And I think the problem is visionaries don't see the future, they don't see anything hidden. They just see the present more clearly. And their chief skill isn't something that, like, the muse gifted them or that they were born with or some mastery over the bleeding-edge technology. Their, their real skill that separates them is the ability to ask very good piercing questions, what I call in the book trigger questions, about the context that they operate in. So if a best practice is a lagging indicator, These other individuals, they make decisions based on reality, based on the present, not something that was from the past. So I like to say that we all like to hunt for best practices, but finding best practices isn't the goal. Finding the best approach for you is. And unfortunately, whether you disassociate from that visionary camp or you look horizontally at all your competitors, we're like anchoring to these methodologies of making decisions or these approaches that don't quite reveal how to make the best decisions for us. So I wanted to spend, oh geez, I think it was something like 2 and a half years telling stories on my podcast of people who did that and try to unpack what we can learn from those people to then apply it to the book.

It seems like you found out that we investigate two sources really within our own walls and looking closer at our own company and mining that data, cuz there's some gold there that we're overlooking. And then also, this quote I love, "When we pay more attention to the customer than to the competition, the customer pays more attention to us." But back to us, and what are those trigger questions? What are those 6 questions that drive this investigation?

So to understand the questions, we first have to understand something about a fish called the pike. So the pike is a predatory fish. I don't fish at all. I don't know if you do, Bobby.

No.

You noodle, Bobby, don't you noodle?

Yeah, noodle, right. Wait, what is noodling?

Oh, it's— yeah, hand fishing. Hand fishing for catfish that are the size of a small child.

Oh, you're one of them. Okay, so you're not—

I'm not— I'm not all Mark likes to think I am, but I'm not. I'll cook it and eat it, but I know.

Yeah, that's right. Like, anything daring, I'll observe. Like, I don't ski, but I cook for the skiers. Yeah, right. So that's who I am. So I don't noodle. I don't fish either. But if I did, I would probably know a little bit more about the pike than the average individual because I researched this phenomenon of why we make decisions by looking kind of out there for the answers, right? What's the competition doing? What's the expert saying? What's the trend? You know, we, we couldn't possibly know our own answers. There's this study from years ago, this, this scientific experiment run on the pike. They researched this. It's called pike syndrome. Essentially what happens is a group of scientists put a pike in an aquarium and then dropped a bunch of minnows into the aquarium to see what the pike would do. And they predicted this, and it did happen. The pike ate the minnows right away. But then the scientists lowered the minnows into the aquarium surrounded by glass, and the pike couldn't see the glass. It's a fish. It has no idea what glass is. And so it just started smashing up against that glass over and over and over again until it learned that minnows apparently aren't things you can eat. And the crazy part is when they removed that glass container and set the minnows free, The minnows could swim right in front of the pike and it wouldn't move so much as an inch.

Wow.

So this explains a concept called learned helplessness. And I think whether it's because of school teaching us that there's a right and wrong answer and the real world is not quite so binary, but we think it is, or because we disassociate from those visionaries like I mentioned before, whatever the case, we have this degree of learned helplessness in our work. And so what we try to do is we try to act like experts who want the answer. In theory. That's what an expert knows. They know the answer in theory or on average or in general. But here's the problem. We don't operate in a generality and we don't aspire to do what works on average. We don't want to be average. So rather than act like an expert, I think we can get out of this learned helplessness and switch to act like an investigator because the hallmark of an investigator is they ask really great questions. You know, they care far less about what works on average or what the absolute is in theory. They care far more about finding evidence and clues by asking great questions in their context. So that to me is like the fundamental switch between those who are thriving today and being creative and being innovative, and those who feel like they're stagnating right at average. So that I think is the precursor we need to know to know anything about these questions.

But I love what you said about being able to fixate on the now because somehow we think the answer is out there in the future, whereas it's actually could be right in front of us if we just ask the right questions. Can you cover those, those 6 questions?

Yeah. So if you look at, so what are we asking questions of? It's the thing that no best practice can take into account. It's our context. And if you break down your context at work, there's really 3 unique variables that we need to consider when we make decisions, because otherwise we're running an incomplete equation. Like, that's what a best practice is. So those 3 variables in your context are you, so the person or people doing the work, your specific customers or audience, the people who the work is for, and then your means to make the work happen. In other words, your resources. So you, your customers, your resources, that's your context. And it turns out if we ask great questions about those things, we can find better answers in the same way that like the pike had tasty little morsels floating in front of its nose. We have really valuable information floating right in front of us every day, right? And we just don't have a system to mine our context for that. But we do have lots of nice, neatly packaged lists of tips and tricks. So I wanted to get out of that mode and say, well, let's, let's apply the nice neat approach to the messiness of our situation. So break down your context into those 3 things. Then you can ask 2 different types of questions. Basically, they come in pairs, and you can apply each pair to each of those 3 things for a total of 6. The pairs are a trigger question, which is just an open-ended question that, to your word, they spark your curiosity, the most fundamental of which is why. The follow-up to a trigger question is called a confirmation question, which just confirms that, okay, we asked an open-ended question, which means there is no completely right answer in theory. We started our investigation. Let's ask a follow-up question after a time has passed to see if we actually have enough information to justify going in this direction. Can we confirm that? Because guess what? This direction is totally different than the convention, than the past precedent, than the best practice. We better be damn sure it's the right one for us. So asking a trigger question followed by a confirmation question of each piece of your context can help you act like an investigator and, and make better decisions.

One of those questions you had was the trigger question under you. So investigating you, yourself, your company, your team. The question was, what is your aspirational anchor? You wrote to combine your intent for the future and some kind of hunger you have today, whether you're dissatisfied with your own work or company or industry or something else. Mark mentioned to me recently, we were discussing a success story in our business, and he said he made this insightful comment. He said everyone has a little rebellion in them. Do you think this is part of where we find our answers when it comes to us, what we dislike, maybe even hate, that shapes our passions, but also when you're talking about investigating us, you're talking about stopping and looking at the services and that we're offering to our customers with a microscopic detail, but also the team that we have working for us.

Right. The only thing that no competitor can access, if you consider that services and products today are becoming more commodified than ever before, knowledge of how to do something. So the expertise that we were told in school, if you get expertise, you'll have a great career. That's now commodified. The only thing that is a true differentiator, and thus the biggest variable between your context and some kind of generic wisdom, is you, is the people. Yeah, we're our own unfair advantage, but I don't think we know how to deploy that against the work. And so we do it in all sorts of maybe kitsch ways. We're like, let's film a culture video and show how great our people are. Okay, that's fine. But I actually think that you can use that to your advantage in every decision you make, not just in the fun things that focus on people and culture and HR. And so when you ask those two questions, a trigger question and a confirmation, you start to tease out what is it about us that is, by the way, different and not present elsewhere that we can use to our advantage. So the two questions are, what is your aspirational anchor and why you? In other words, what is your unique unfair advantage for reaching that aspirational anchor? Yeah, I'm happy to define The aspirational anchor.

Can you expound on that?

For sure. So consider that we mostly set goals and goals are mile markers. So mile markers are like, what is it and when? And when you put a mile marker down ahead of a team, you just turn the screws. It's like the best result is get there faster and more cheaply. So we kind of incentivize at all costs behavior. And if you have the wrong leadership or you don't have the right culture, that can really quickly devolve into just random acts of creativity. Pulling stunts or just kind of glomming on to trends because we got to get there faster and cheaper. I think far better instead of focusing on the what and the where is to focus on the how and the why. In other words, if we can somehow incorporate both our intent for the future and also some kind of dissatisfaction that we have today, some kind of behavior change we need to reach those goals. I think instead of a goal, you come up with this idea of an aspirational anchor. So an example would be instead of saying, let's grow our subscriber list 50% on the blog month over month, you might say, let's create the industry's most enjoyable educational resource. That's an aspirational anchor, right? Because the byproduct will be the mile marker. The byproduct is subscriber growth. But the real focus of the team now becomes, all right, well, how are we uniquely qualified to make something both enjoyable and educational at the same time? Like, how are we going to live up to that aspirational anchor? And very quickly you start to look inward. You start to look at those minnows floating in front of your face in that context of yours instead of like, all right, well, to grow subscribers, this expert says we have to rank on search and here's the approach, yada, yada, yada. So you start to make very contextualized firsthand decisions instead of whatever it takes. I'll just grab at it because I have a goal in mind.

Yeah, I love this because you end up analyzing the strengths, as you said, that no one else has, but also looking at your, your own team within their, the strengths of your team that would open up a unique competitive advantage. And Mark, what I'm thinking of is, you know, we typically will create an infrastructure that will mimic another company's infrastructure within our own industry, as opposed to looking at the skillset of our team and realizing you may have something dynamic that you haven't even thought about before that could open up a whole new vista for a new business opportunity. I think that's kind of what you're talking about, right, Jay?

Well, you know, it's interesting is one of the things I wrote this book about, you can almost hear the anger in my voice when I address these topics a little bit. I think because it's like I just want people to do great work instead of settle for average or churn out more commodity stuff, whatever it is that they do. But here's the problem. Once you do that, once you're like, okay, we used to do it this way and that looked like everybody else, and now we've answered these 6 questions, Jay, and we're doing it a new way, that can quickly become like your new version of conventional wisdom, right? It's just you start to codify and sort of, I don't know, like everything just gets harder and crystallized. You just like harden yourself to change after that. So rather than like one moment of change, I think we have this constant battle to be consistently creative or consistently innovative. And I think there's like two halves to that: find the framework and break the framework. And we're really, really good today, and it's super easy because examples and advice exist galore, instantly accessible and ubiquitous. It's really easy to find the framework. So like, I'll just keep using the blog example. Like, How do you write a great blog post? Well, there's endless advice, but there's also great examples you could just go look at and try to figure out, okay, what's the structure of their blogging? And the problem is now it's like, all right, well, how do you break from that? How do you start to insert those variables from your firsthand experience, from your context? And, you know, I think what we started to do in work today, you know the old phrase, what is it, stand on the shoulders of giants? I think we started leaning on them like a crutch lately. You know? And so like, we should stand on the shoulders of giants. It's fine to go and copy what you admire, what inspires you, you know, especially given the fact that we can access so much information. That's great. Like, there's a reason that the subtitle of the book is Question Best Practices, Not Reject Them. Yeah. Because I just want people to have a decision-making process where they could take any idea, whether it's theirs, some expert, something from outside the echo chamber, and kind of press it through this filter. And out the other end should pop like the percent of it that makes sense for them. Or maybe it all gets stuck and they try something else. So it's not that we're rejecting things and becoming a rebel. It's just that we have to get away from leaning on those we admire like a crutch, or those who get on a stage, people like me, and profess to have answers. Like, everything should come with like a think-for-yourself, question-it clause at the end of anything you consume that professes to be answers for your work.

Jay, I'm thinking as you give this answer about aspirational anchors and such, I think that if I think about where we're at in the promotional products industry right now is that I think that there's a turning point. On one hand, you've got these companies that I think have mastered the idea of an aspirational anchor. They're modern, they're progressive, they're serving a higher purpose than just being a guy who can get you a t-shirt. And then on the other hand, you've got this other segment of the industry that may have been around for some time. Let's say they've been around 10, 15, 20 years, and they got into the industry without an aspirational anchor, but they got into the industry as professionals that could get you a t-shirt, and they were really good at that and really good at the transactional level. Fast forward to 2019, where we are right now, this segment of the industry is finding themselves a little bit flat-footed because while business is still good and the economy is strong, there's a lot of pressure from the online sellers that are out there and a lot of pressure from these aspirationally oriented distributors that have kind of figured out this higher purpose. What advice would you have for this segment that has never been driven by any kind of aspirational anchor on how to find that? Because I imagine some of them are thinking, but Jay, that sounds flaky to me. Like, I'm all about trying to get the best practices here. Now you're trying to change things into me becoming something more than just a guy selling t-shirts. Like, how do I break out of that?

I think the most practical thing we can do in our work is think for ourselves. Like, we live in this society where we've radicalized that notion. You know, we started at the top talking about this idea of visionaries, but you can think of rebels. I think about, like, in music, Johnny Cash, you know, like, playing his own tune. Doesn't matter what the man does or says. Like, we think of a think for yourself or as a rebel or a visionary or some kind of just, like, moving, inspiring voice. Or yeah, we start to twist it as, like, well, that's kind of squishy. This is like let's hold hands and sing Kumbaya. I actually think this is about making better decisions. And when I say better, what I mean is you have more clarity faster when you're surrounded by more information than ever before. And I just don't see what's not practical or results-driven or financially beneficial to doing that, right? It's like we have all these processes to execute the work, and then we also have very quick ways and ubiquitous ways to find others' ideas or codified knowledge from our past to continue doing the work. What we lack, I think, is the biggest missing piece, which is like, well, what's our process where very predictably and quickly we could take any idea, any tactic, any new trend, any best practice, anything, and decide, is this actually viable for us? And if so, to what degree? Like, to me, that's about the most practical thing you can do. If all you're thinking about is revenue, results and keeping the business that you're in growing in the right direction. I mean, that if you can't see the appeal of making better decisions, like, I don't know how to convince you, quite frankly.

Yeah. In this case, then the client's typically way ahead of us when we're still mired in the industry, so to speak, and still leaning on yesterday's best practices. And the client is shifting and changing and advancing faster than we are, which, which sort of moves into this next thing that we should investigate, which is the audience itself. What is, uh, one of your questions was, what is a first principle insight? Insight?

So a first principle insight, it's actually a phrase from physics, first principles of physics. It's the most basic rudimentary knowledge on top of which everything else is based. So it's a basic but fundamental truth that so often gets lost because of the day-to-day grind. Conventional wisdom just layers on top of it. So there's a really great story out of actually, of all things, environmental conservation of a company or an organization, a nonprofit called Rare, rare.org. And for years, when somebody wanted to save a species, you would go to the location, scout it, research it. You'd write a big report to the government and effectively demand that people in the environment or people in the location you're in change their behavior or else. And there was this principle that was not a first principle, but people believed it was called Homo economicus, which essentially means the rational man or the rational human. And this idea states that if you're going to change somebody's behavior because they are rational, logical beings, you need to offer the right carrots and sticks. So go to the government, pass a law, enact some punishments, or, you know, offer an incentive, a monetary incentive, a business credit or whatever, if you change your behavior. Well, in the 1970s, a guy by the name of Paul Butler went to the island of Saint Lucia where they just earned their independence as a country. And the parrot, the Saint Lucia parrot, was quickly dying. Because people were killing it as a nuisance or capturing it as pets, or even people in poverty were eating it as food. This parrot was going away and Paul was there to try and save it. And he tried all the homo economicus approaches and people just didn't care. But as he toured this new nation, he saw the pride people felt in their home and he thought, okay, well, people aren't actually rational. They're emotional. They make emotional decisions. They live emotional lives. So homo economicus is not the first principle. We have to dig deeper here. And what he realizes, because people are emotional, rather than demand that they change and provide carrots and sticks, he created what they call now a pride campaign where he built a mascot out of the parrot that he named Jaco the parrot. And Jaco became this like plush toy and t-shirts. And there were songs about Jaco and events like he'd show up in a big costume, Paul Butler, and dance around. And he associated the parrot not with a fear, not with a threat, but with a sense of pride that they already had in their community. And because it felt like it was part of their home and the home that they loved and felt emotional towards, these people in the island of St. Lucia decided to stop killing off this bird. And it didn't happen overnight, but slowly by slowly and in a more effective way than demanding change, people volunteered to change. So it was stickier. And today that parrot is thriving and there's even like created a lot of job opportunities around the national forests and the education of the local community for locals who were once in poverty to work thanks to Paul's conservation work. So that's an example of a first principle and how it can help you build up more original thinking. You know, everybody looks at Paul as an innovator, but he'd probably say that he was just being as logical as possible. It's just the difference was he started in a better place for that logic to unfold. Than somebody who believed in homo economicus. Right, right.

You wrote that there's a common misconception that entrepreneurs are great at convincing others to see the world their way. In reality, they're masters of rallying others who already believe what they believe. Can you explain?

So I worked in venture capital for 3 years, which might surprise some people because I'm wildly sort of creative and media focused. And, but I did work in marketing and tech for many years. And so I got hired to a VC firm. In 2013 called NextView, where I was their vice president of brand, which I guess does make sense for a lot of people if they hear that. And I met one of the co-founders, one of the early members of the PayPal team who helped co-found LinkedIn after that. So this guy did okay. And his name is Lee Hower, and he's one of the partners at NextView. And he talked to me about how that misconception exists everywhere in tech. And since I've left, I've seen it everywhere in business where We think that these innovative people we admire somehow convince the world to act in their best interest or the way they see the world, and they convince all these people to rally to their side. But in fact, what they're really good at doing is finding those who already believe what they believe and inspire them to come with them. And I think that's what good marketing and sales is today. It's not trying to convince other people. It's not trying to grab attention. It's trying to say, we share the same viewpoints on the world. Come with me on this journey. You know, find those true believers. So a good example, back to the same one of writing a blog. Most people think you gotta generate a ton of traffic to build a very big successful blog. So go to the lowest common denominator, rank on search, you know, uh, beg, borrow, and steal your way towards a giant email list. When actually if you knew 70 different people in your industry and you could email those people and say, hey, I'd like to feature you, or I'd like to have you guest post, or I'm writing this blog and I genuinely want you to be able to read it, what do you want to hear from— what do you need? All of a sudden you have this like small little group of true believers, and the signal there is a tiny number of people reacting in a very big way to what you do. And to me, that's way better signal that you should keep going in that direction than some kind of big top line number that we get excited about in business. To me, that's the power of true believers. It's just what good marketing and sales is today. It's finding the signal that you're on the right path, not the big top line number yet, but just a sign that you should keep pursuing it, even if it is not the best practice.

Mark, I see some corollary there with the community at Commscue and what you've done. Did that resonate with you as you're, as we're talking about this?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think it's, it's, it's so interesting when you start a business. And I think if you start and you speak to a mass audience, then you're not really speaking to anyone and you waste your precious limited resources yelling into the masses. And Jay, per your point, I think that in any experience that I've ever had in business, that starting off small and really focusing in on that really small micro audience, kind of that rebel group of people that almost take a chance on you at the very beginning, is way better to pour those precious resources into beginning, because then your voice amplifies that much greater, and then it starts to spread and it becomes more of a movement when starting small and then moving from there, because some people tell their friends, and then you then create this pool of advocates. And I think about the great work that you've done with your Exceptions podcast and also with Unthinkable, and you think about the folks that you're also featuring on those programs. They've all employed the same tactic in terms of starting small and then and just building these huge, this huge amount of momentum, I just think it's very exciting. And I think it's probably the only way you can go because as businesses start, they really don't have really anything in terms of resources or attention in the market. So it's best to start small.

Yeah, I just remember being so exhausted by so many of my in-house marketing jobs where I just felt like as a team, we were digging holes in dry sand. Like if we stopped exerting calories and extreme effort, none of the things we were doing would stick. So if we took a break from publishing content or we didn't use a certain social network for a time, or even just like took that little debt to think through our strategy a little bit more firmly, a little more strategically, and enact some of the lessons of Break the Wheel, I always felt like, well, wow, if we did that, we wouldn't hit our numbers. And I realize now it's because so many organizations are focused on who arrives. Yeah. In their marketing and sales. It's about who arrives, how many views, how many subscribers, how many leads, how many are qualified. But really, a good business is built— a successful, thriving, growing business is built on a good foundation. It's not digging a hole in dry sand. You know, the walls don't cave in on them when they stop working. What we do needs to be made to stick, right? And so it's not about who arrives, it's about who stays.

Well, it almost strikes me, Jay, what you're saying is there's a little bit of a hamster wheel effect going on with a lot of businesses where I mean, to use your example, in some of your past marketing jobs, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're on Pinterest, you're on YouTube, you're writing a blog, and you're going to conferences and you're listening to rockstar bloggers about what it is you should be doing. And you're working yourself into a sweat, you know, checking off all these best practices. And at the end of the day, it's almost like if you take a step back, that's not really driving as much value as if you had focused in on a couple of core things and really looked at yourself in the mirror and stayed true to yourself.

Yeah. Right. There's actually, there's a study out of NYU. They didn't have a name for this psychological phenomenon. So being a lifelong marketer and purveyor of words, I was like, we need to brand this. So I named this the foraging choice. I don't know if a psychologist would tell you that this is true or that that's the right name, but I call it the foraging choice. But essentially this study, which came out last year, talks about how a lot of decisions that we make under duress in life, workplace or otherwise, mimic what an animal goes through, like a squirrel, let's say, when they're making a decision of how to forage for food. And so what happens is you— it's almost like a binary choice. You can continue to exploit your current position, and today's current position, to your example, looks like, okay, we're on 7 social networks, so we just have to continue being on 7 social networks. So you can continue to exploit your current position, or you can go exploring other and newer possibilities. And the more stress you introduce to that decision, the more we cling to and exploit our current position. And that's true of animals, that's true of humans. It's so we basically make decisions when we're acting very nervously and we don't make clear-headed decisions. And I think an aspirational anchor is a way to get some clarity and understanding your true believers can, they can help be the guide instead of an expert. But also all these things in the book help free you up and make a better, more clear-headed foraging decision, foraging choice. But essentially, when you think about why we're so focused on activities instead of results or tactics instead of strategy, usually it's because, well, it's so much easier to talk about and do, right? We're digging, digging, digging, digging, digging. We're exploiting. We're zooming around this tree looking for the next meal as a squirrel. And we don't know what else is out there. Something worse could be out there. Yeah, but something better could be out there too. And the only way we can decide, as the study concludes, is to actually understand the surrounding context, to know if what you're currently exploiting versus other options that exist is actually more productive to stay put. And so again, that's back to your context. It's like to know that you have a funny team, but you're being staid and predictable is to say, all right, our context is telling us go left. Our context is telling us to leave this tree, even though everyone else is staying here. And to do something that seems radical to them, but it makes sense for us. So that, that study just hit home for me. It's not in the book, but this decision that we're always making, either implied or overt, to keep exploiting or go exploring, I think almost always, if we're trying to squeeze incremental value out of what we're doing now, we're better off just going exploring.

Yeah, I love that. Exploiting versus exploring. You know, you both touched on a while back— I'm gonna step back a little bit because these 6 questions covered you your audience, and your resources. And you both touched on this a few minutes ago. What are your constraints? What are our guardrails and goalposts is what you said, Jay. Can you explain this? You said if you want to succeed, we need to manufacture some constraints. So if we try to create small tests and win each little battle one at a time, we will continually learn, grow, and thrive, not because we buy into that myth of creative freedom, but because we embrace a more constrained approach to creativity. How do we find our breakthrough through constraints?

Every single study, it's one of the few things under the creative bucket I've found where researchers are almost unanimous on this. Every study on creativity, on idea generation, shows the same thing. When you want to be creative, constraints are actually strengths, not prohibitors. So when you're generating ideas, for example, teams that know their constraints, timeline, budget, team product specs or content specs or mission statement or whatever, when you overtly know those things, you not only generate more ideas, you generate more effective ideas, which to me is bonkers. Like the idea that something could help us get more creative means quantity and quality together. Like that's amazing. I want whatever that thing is. Well, it turns out what that thing is, is knowing your constraints. Like we kick and fight and scream and want more resources, but sometimes it's actually doing ourselves a detriment to our work. And I'll give you an example. So if I told everybody listening right now, just to continue the through line of writing a blog, go write a blog post about anything you want and submit it to me. Immediately your brain is like, okay, well, what am I going to write about? Where am I going to write?

What—

when am I going to find the time? How long will this be? Should I embed a video? Like, what app am I going to use to write? Jay, when do you want this by? Should it have a word count? Like, our brains subconsciously install constraints. It's like we're telling ourselves, hey, if I want to be creative and succeed here, I actually need constraints. And so I think not only does creative freedom not work, which every single study shows, but it's a myth because in no scenario in life do you actually have creative freedom. So it's far better to operate inside of a box. But here's the rub. When people want creative freedom, when they kick and scream and fight against their constraints, What we're actually implying is not that we want freedom, it's that we don't agree to this box. So I think a really good leader, for example, sets the walls of the box with the team, makes them abundantly clear so they don't smack against some invisible wall they didn't know was there. And then, and this is key if you're a leader of a team, once the box's walls are set, stay out of the box. Let the team innovate and create within those constraints, and they will be so much more productive and happy and successful.

Yeah. You know what I love about that is, number one, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I've always thought constraints fuel creativity. And, you know, when you look at the most avant-garde artists or musicians, look at John Cage or Jackson Pollock, they still had constraints. They— you still had a canvas and paint, and you still had, you know, these guardrails or goalposts, if you will. But what I also love about this message, it should resonate with a lot of folks who are so busy taking care of customers. The economy is fairly robust. They're just crazy busy and they want to grow more, but they think they've You know, if we only had— it sort of sets you free from the if we only had, then we could syndrome.

100%. And I love that you mentioned Jackson Pollock. So while I don't necessarily personally appreciate his work, I do actually appreciate the hidden constraint that he placed on himself, which is like, what did— what does Jackson Pollock trade in? Like, what is his major medium of choice? Paint canvas. Fine. It's the drip. What can the drip do? Creativity, to expressing yourself, to using that drip in different ways. Claude Monet is a really good example of another artist who we think, oh, he had creative freedom. Claude Monet's claim to fame, you know, literally starting the Impressionist movement, was moving from, like, let's say a bridge or the water lilies that he's famous for. It's the same exact scene painted in different lights. Like, literally, he anchored to one thing which was, I'm painting a bridge. And then he had this tether that was connected to the anchor, but it let him explore in all kinds of little directions all around the anchor. And his movement of choice was, I'm going to paint this bridge and change how the sun hits it over time. So I'll do the same scene 8 different ways and I'm going to change, my emotions will change and I'll let that seep into the painting. So I think we're in this constant dance of, again, find the framework, break the framework, Find the framework seems nice and neat and orderly. Breaking the framework doesn't mean no constraints, creative freedom. It means, okay, these are our constraints. Those are, let's say, called anchors. We're going to tether off, off of each of those and decide like, well, we have a little bit of room to float in different directions. So Monet, the anchor was the bridge. The tether was the way the light changes it. And out came literally a movement in the artistic world.

Yeah, that is so refreshing when you feel as though you are handicapped by the limits you have as opposed to looking at these as some form of channel or freedom. You know, you mentioned Monet and I'm thinking of how many haystacks he painted and just the variations on that and what we gained from that very limited, you would say, viewpoint. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs as they're looking at their own business, as they're trying to consider their own resources, as they're considering their own team? Are there any other questions or points you can give them as far as investigating this?

Well, so in the book I propose the 6, right? So 3 pairs apply to 3 pieces of your context. But what I'd prefer people do is if you use those as jumping off points, great. But I'd prefer they come up with their own questions, right? Because what I'm trying not to do is be a hypocrite and say question best practices, here's my best practice for doing that, right? So that's why the methodology is a list of questions, not a list of steps. So it's less important that you follow prescriptive questions. It's incredibly important while we're talking about resource constraints to understand, to anchor to the reality right in front of your face. Like back to why we kick and scream against resource constraints is because of the promise. It's implied some places, it's overt in others. The promise is if we only had X or if we succeed doing Y, we will get Z. But I would much prefer someone tell me, Jay, consider this a test. You're going to create a podcast for our brand. Okay, that's one little anchor, one constraint. You have like 2 hours a week. You have this budget. And mostly we're like thinking to ourselves, okay, if I succeed in that little box, then they're going to give me more budget. And I want a boss to say to me, actually, we're never going to give you more budget. Right? We're never going to give you more time. We're never going to give you more team. Because now instead of focusing on what I can't do, I have to shrug and say, all right, that's reality. Let me focus on what I can do. And imagine the creativity that could come out of somebody who says, all right, I need to— me and me alone. I can't interview people, but I want to do something that leads this industry, a great podcast that everyone loves. One voice, just me. I'll script some stories. It's going to be 10-minute episodes because it's got to be short and snappy. Like, you start to really have to, by definition, innovate. You're forced to do it. Yeah. You know, like, that's why giant companies are so behind the times in so many cases. It's not because they're lazy. It's because what they're doing is working, right? And so they reach this point of stagnation and they're like, well, it's good enough. And then when it craps out, they're acting after it's too late. And they hire the speaker who screams from a stage like, innovate or die. Well, it's like they're already dying. So they should have been innovating in little ways all along. And what forces you to do that is just looking reality in the eye and saying, actually, we do have a set of constraints here because that's just every reality, every scenario, right? Whether those are the 3 parts of your context or within the 3rd part, your resources, something more specific like a goal, a team, a budget. And if we can only embrace that box, I think we'd find that if you put down enough boxes, if you put down enough tests, you look backwards, you're like, oh man, we've covered a lot of ground here. Like, it looks like a total giant field of creative freedom, but if you zoom way in, it's actually little moments, little micro moments of doing something that felt innovative, felt creative in the moment, but also felt very safe to do.

Yeah, it's almost like the magic is like we're looking for the breakthrough, but the magic is really is in the iterative and in the incremental within those constraints. I love that.

Well, what's crazy is a lot of companies, a lot of teams, I hate the word brand or company because it kind of couches what we're talking about. We're talking about people. So a lot of people somehow misconstrue the work, mostly through no fault of their own, into, okay, my job is to manufacture a spike in the numbers. The problem is like, what is a spike if not something that goes up really quickly? And also down really quickly. Like, that's what makes it a spike. So what you actually want to look for is the trajectory of the whole line starts going in the right direction. Like, real progress will always be zigzaggy, but when you look at the macro, you want it to be marching in the right direction. I love the quote from Charles Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame. It's actually from a British economist named John Maynard Keynes, but everybody attributes it to Munger because he's a lot more famous today. And it's, I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. So when we try to have the solution, it's like, this is the straight line, we're taking forever. That's being precise, but eventually it's going to stagnate or die. But instead, if we can say, all right, I have to always update my knowledge in little ways, I have to pivot in small ways constantly, and that's just what progress is. It sounds exhausting, but it's just what reality is. You're always vaguely right and you're always making micro course corrections. And I think that's the best way to make decisions in business, not I have the answer and I'm done learning, so now it's time to execute. I just don't think that exists. Right.

Jay, I know you'll be leading our keynote at SKU Camp. We've had, you know, limited time here within— speaking of limitations of resources in this podcast to cover what we've covered. We'll dig into this a little further. What else can we expect at SKU Camp as you join us?

I just love telling stories. It's like the thing that gets me most excited in the world. And I love looking at those stories and then looking at them with other people. As a guide. You know, I host shows for a living, podcasts, video documentaries, things like that. I think a great host isn't the star, they're the guide. And so I like standing shoulder to shoulder with people and just like pointing out interesting stuff. So I'm not there to like give a performance. I'm there to share what I've found. And I think I've found a better way to make decisions than this endless cycle of best practices and conventional wisdom and trendy new tactics. Because I think All those things are just spokes on a wheel and one is on top one day and then it's another and another and it just spins forever. And it's both exhausting and it really just stagnates at average. So, you know, what I'm excited to do is to get in a room with a group of people that already understand, like, our jobs aren't to be average. We want to be exceptional and to talk about that gap. Because I think too often we talk about zero to average. So let's talk about the next step because I think we're all ready, but that's what I want to talk about.

Yeah, that's awesome. Mark, did you have any further questions?

I mean, I'd say, Jay, in closing, first off, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been absolutely fascinating just hanging out with you, and it's such a precursor to the time we'll spend with you in Pittsburgh. But I know that, Jay, you're on this journey to rid B2B marketing of crappiness. I'm not sure if that's your word, but I love it.

I love it.

Like, you're on this journey, right? I kind of see you as like Frodo You know, with the ring, trying to, trying to go in and correct this. Why do you think B2B marketing sucks so bad today? And do you feel you're making progress with the work you're doing to highlight B2B brands that are doing a really good job?

I think we're living through this very fundamental shift, which is affecting everybody in marketing, quite frankly. But I think given the documentation and the precedent and also the slower arc of evolution that is B2B, I think B2B feels it more acutely than maybe B2C sometimes. Yeah, but I do think it's a marketing and really a human shift, which is our jobs are no longer to grab attention. That's from a bygone era. That's the stink of like the 1950s where there's a few channels and an agency creative director would have the idea or the best practice. It's Mad Men. And that doesn't exist anymore, but we're still living through the echoes of that where people are talking about things like content marketing, but they haven't changed their mentality. So as an industry, I don't want to talk about the reaction to this shift. I want to talk about the shift. Our jobs are not to acquire attention or grab it. Our jobs are to hold attention, to care about things like time spent and loyalty. And trust to build passionate audiences, not just generate traffic. And we're not really digging deep down to, you know, use a phrase we just use, first principles to understand that shift. But it's so interesting. If you just talk about that first principle, you can start to build up really interesting strategies and tactics from there, because you're starting in a better place than, than everybody else. So if I had to explain in one generic attempt, I guess, why B2B suffers so much. And I think it's because we're so based on precedent and documentation and predictability and building the machine that we've lost sight of that basic principle, which is we have a new mandate. Don't just grab attention, hold it.

Well, and I think as I reflect on that question, because I think Bobby and I think about a lot at what we're doing at Common Skew is that I think that back in the day, and I think even up until now to some extent, I think that brand in a B2B environment has never been the most crucial part of being a successful B2B company. Whereas in B2C, if you don't have a good brand, it's sort of impossible to imagine how it is that you'd be successful in terms of carving out attention in a very crowded marketplace. But in B2B, you can hide behind a crappy brand because you may have a good product or you may not have a lot of competition or or there may be something very technical about your product that your customer absolutely needs. So you can ignore that. And what I think is— and I think that's a little depressing, but I think what's really exciting— and Jay, I certainly credit you as being one of the leaders of this— is shining a light on B2B brands that are doing an exceptional job in adopting that consumer mentality. So companies like Mailchimp and Shopify and even Google to some extent. You think about how these B2B companies are putting design and brand thinking at the forefront of their go-to-market strategies and how that is almost forcing these more stodgy brands to really sit up and listen because they're starting to lose market share from these types of companies. And I really hope that they'll become the new standard because it's, it's a much better world for us as B2B customers to be in a world that's served by these inspirational brands. And so I certainly credit and salute you for shining a light on that. That's been my experience as a B2B guy over the last 20 years.

Well, I very much appreciate that. And I'd also say, like, look, in venture capital, we have this idea that we'd ask— it's not unique to NextView, but we'd ask entrepreneurs or ask ourselves, is this company building a painkiller or a vitamin? And so often the businesses that unlock big growth, they end up selling, especially in B2B, a painkiller. Now imagine we're living through this era, which we are, where everybody says that they're selling the same painkiller for insert B2B problem here, right? Companies with their services and products, if that part has been so commodified, we're at like almost total feature parity in most niches in B2B, even though we don't like to admit that because that puts us at a vulnerable position. So what ends up happening is like our consumer brothers and sisters, we have to now sell not just like how easy it seems to do your work, how much pain we solve when you adopt us. We also have to share how delicious it is to consume those painkillers, right? Like in other words, the experience is the only true separating factor, the only defensible moat in B2B. And slowly, like, my favorite example is Gusto, a billion-dollar-plus tech company that, you know, they're using experience and brand and great design, like you said, in a niche that is so far behind the times with HR and financial software to help the backend of your business. Like, that's not a design firm. That's not Google. That's not, you know, Wistia, which creates video software. It's a boring, stodgy, slow-moving niche. And even there, and maybe even especially there, experience, how enjoyable you are to deal with, that is such a differentiator. So think about brand as the only defensible moat left and also define it as just how people feel about the behavior of your people.

Yeah. Well, I think the reason, and in closing, why I bring that up is I think it's such a wonderful connection, Jay, between your great work and what we see in the promotional products industry. And I think that the great thing about the promotional products industry is it's a vast, massive, and growing industry. So that's all great, checkmarks all across the board. The drawbacks to it is that there's a lot of similarity, there's a lot of commoditization, there's a lot of people who can sell you t-shirts, and at the worst end of the business, it can be a race to the bottom in terms of price. But what's so fascinating, and I've certainly seen this over the last decade or so in my times in this business, is the segmenting off of this part of the business that is really focusing on their brands as distributors and how brand is becoming the central point of differentiation for these companies that is allowing them to preserve margins. It's allowing them to have conversations with purchasing managers that are not about beating them up on price. It's about value-added solutions. And I think that's a real shift in this industry, which is pretty old school. I mean, it's been around forever. And I think that it's so exciting to see how this investment investment in brand in a B2B industry like the promotional products industry is one of the sole reasons why this segment of the market is doing so well. And you didn't see that 10, 15 years ago. So maybe indirectly, Jay, that's because of guys like you.

Well, I appreciate that. And let's, let's see if we can stitch the two big ideas here together and stick the landing. Let's see if we can do this. So when you question best practices, when you switch your mentality from acting like an expert who knows the answer in general or on average to acting like an investigator who looks at the firsthand context, you start making better decisions. And almost necessarily, you start to do exceptional work because you're betting on and using information based on what makes you an exception. So you become that outlier in a great way, not because you're trying to be a rebel, but because all you did was look hard at the reality around you, at the context around you, and base your decisions on that rather than on secondhand knowledge, conventional wisdom, or past precedent. And to me, I, there's nothing more powerful than we can be in this world today than investigators.

Wow. Jay, thank you. This was such a wonderful chance to have a chat with you and looking forward to continuing it in Pittsburgh and on behalf of the entire community, we really thank you.

Thanks to you both. I can't wait.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Skewcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.