The Bittesuite – I'm German Now, Y'all

3 Instances of Correct Grammar Making the Day

Life is full of smile-inducing moments. Right? Someone holds the door open for you with an inviting grin. Another person moves out of your way when you’re in a hurry. Yet another gives their seat on a train to someone who has a hard time standing.

Just recently, I’ve caught myself grinning like an idiot over something I had never considered before. Some people (and don’t ask me how) remember English grammar lessons they received in High School. These super humans are capable of truly amazing feats. Avoiding dangling prepositions. Treating collective nouns like plural nouns. Using direct and indirect objects correctly. Truly mindblowing stuff.

I witness the three above often enough that I can simply describe the experience as “pleasant.” There are three others, however, that actually get me excited. These are bits of grammar that I hear used correctly approximately 0% of the time. Listen in your daily life, and chances are you’ll notice the same. When they are used correctly, I’m so surprised and delighted that I’ll probably smile about it again the following day.

And here’s the thing: I’m a member of the school of thought that considers language (especially English) fluid and malleable. It’s beyond cool that “classical” English phases out over time as its speakers break the rules more reliably and in larger numbers. What this implies about the influence of second-language speakers on English is freaking awesome. Nonetheless, hearing classical grammar in everyday speech makes me smile like an idiot.

Let’s do this.

Data

“Data” is a plural noun. Just about every time you hear the word, however, it’s treated like a singular noun. “The data doesn’t support your conclusion,” is what you normally hear. “The data don’t support your conclusion” is what you should hear.

“Datum” is the singular version of the noun. Who says “datum,” though? On the other hand, when is that word ever even necessary? I can’t think of a single reason to speak about a single datum at a time outside of some esoteric database diagnostic scenario. So, we don’t reasonably have to worry about looking weird in front of our friends and colleagues.

I have a lecturer in my Master program who uses “data” as a plural noun. It feels so good in my nerdy nerd of a soul every time I hear it.

Number/Amount

To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use these correctly. “Number” describes a quantity you can measure. “Amount” describes a quantity you can’t measure. I have an amount of water. I have a number of liters of water. I can only have water. I can’t have 1 water or 2 waters. I can, however, have 1 liter or 2 liters of water.

In the real world, what you always hear is the word “amount.” Your friend will tell you about the astounding “amount” of people in the subway this morning. That implies that an indeterminable number of humans were melted, and the subway was full of their goo.

Oh, no. Maybe that is what he saw this morning.

I’ll wait. One day, I’ll hear “number” when I would otherwise hear “amount.” Unless I manage to contain my glee, I’ll probably be committed for mental illness soon after.

Among/Between

Every now and then, I hear these used in the classical way. Academics know the difference. Business people do not. That’s the general rule I’ve observed over the courses of my studies and career.

“Between” relates two objects to one another. We have two apples between the two of us.

“Among” relates three or more objects to one another. There are three martians among our group of ten people.

Nobody ever says “among” when they mean between. They do, however, routinely say “between” when they mean “among.” Between the three of us, we have one college degree. That makes me cringe in a way similar to the way “amount” in the wrong circumstance makes me cringe.

When I do hear the word “among,” though, it’s sunshine and cervezas for the rest of the day.

When Founding a Business, Be Wary of Stray Ideas

I’ve yet to run my own business in the traditional sense. However, I have conceived business plans and pitches with teams of strangers on a number of occasions. I’ve also, on a number of occasions, conceived, socialized and built new programs for established companies during my career. And finally, I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing many presentations given by startup teams and venture capitalists, many of which elucidated the same handful of conflicts that plague the foundations of many businesses.

I say all this to let you know where I’m getting my information. I also say all this so that the following statement makes sense:

Nobody cares about an entrepreneur’s Idea. That should include the entrepreneur, but it often does not.

Ideas seem strong at first glance. But, they often lack long-term power by themselves.

“The Idea,” as many entrepreneurs would put it as a chorus of angels fill their conference room with “Hallelujah” and the venture capitalists present faint from overstimulation, is just what the entrepreneur intends to sell to people. It’s a new social network for expats. It’s a new delivery app for the sharing economy. It’s a cab service for the new millenium. It’s whatever they want it to be, it’s not in the least bit interesting and, if they conceived it too hastily, it will be the death of their founding team.

That last bit is the really important bit. The part about founding team death. A hastily-conceived idea will kill a founding team, because a hastily-conceived idea attracts members of the founding team to the business for different reasons. I’m working on the cab service because I like disrupting industries–I value excitement. Betty is on the team because she believes commuting around a city really needs to be made easier–she values comfort. Ron’s on the team because he’s the one who came up with the idea in the shower one morning. The cab service will be his darling, his tangible contribution to the world. And he really values a sense of accomplishment.

In this case, Ron’s idea is a stray. It’s a Stray Idea and should immediately send up red flags for Betty and me to see. The reasons behind each founder’s buy-in aren’t clear when the idea is a Stray. Stray Ideas are hastily conceived. Stray ideas are ungrounded. Stray Ideas lack direction. And most damaging of all, Stray Ideas are nigh inseparable from egos.

Stray Ideas kill founding teams.

But neither Betty nor I see the red flag and, for the sake of example, we agree to join Ron’s team.

We come up with a business plan, pitch the business a hundred times, and not a single investor bites. Without investment, we’re not a company, so it’s back to the drawing board.

What happens at the drawing board is what will kill the team.

“Alright, guys. Supercab 2000 isn’t getting us anywhere,” laments Ron. His baby was denied the life he so earnestly felt it deserved.

“Yeah,” say I. “Anyone have any other ideas?”

There’s a pause.

“Maybe,” begins Betty, “What if we tailor the idea just to airport transportation? Like a luxury ride to the airport?”

Likely, mine and Ron’s faces are doing the same thing at this point, and the same noise is coming out of each of them. Our lips are pursed. Our eyes are squinted. Our heads are cocked. We look a bit like we’re grimacing. A high-pitched “mmmmmmm” is coming out of each of our faces.

Immediately, the idea sounds off to both Ron and me. Neither one of us knows why, but we feel it.

It’s because Betty’s looking for more ways to make life comfortable. Meanwhile, I’m looking for more ways to make life exciting and Ron is looking for more ways to feel accomplished. We’re all focusing on values that we hold, but that the others apparently do not. Betty’s idea gives neither Ron nor I what we’re seeking.

Ron and I will then pitch ideas that will meet the same reception as Betty’s. We’ll be at this impasse for awhile–until we accidentally land on a new idea that simultaneously satisfies three different values, or we split up and look for new founding teams.

What if one of our investor pitches had succeeded? What if we had never had to return to the drawing board?

Our team would still have died, but conflict would have drawn out for a much longer period of time. What happens when it comes time to pick a target market? What happens when we decide upon our first ad appeal? Ron wants to position our service as a wealthy status symbol to those who value acheivement as much as he does. Betty wants to position it as a convenience to anyone who feels busy. I want to target gen Y rabble rousers by positioning our service as the death of a stodgy conventional cab industry. We’ll ultimately have the same “final conversation” we would have had at the drawing board. Only the timing and the subject of debate would be different.

Maybe the result of all of this conflict would be dissolution of the business. More than likely, two of us would force the third out, or one of us would find a way to edge the other two out.

At this point, it probably seems like the alternative process I’m endorsing is extremely self-centered. Like the nature of the market isn’t even a consideration. That’s true and it’s also not true. Focusing on founder values is essential, because it’s much easier to market a new business to people who already think the way you think. If Ron, Betty and I channel our own values into the business, we’ll naturally appeal to what you might call “target market prime.” Appealing to that market will be easy, because we share a value with them. We know how to appeal to them. The market will also be large, because the common value we identify will be a terminal value, not confused with an esoteric belief or attitude.

As businesses mature, it would seem staying true to the value that linked its founders to Target Market Prime is incredibly difficult. At that stage, the business has probably hired a ton of people who don’t share that value, and it’s probably grown beyond Target Market Prime. It’s grown into new markets that may or may not share the original value.

But we’re starting a business, right? We’re worried about getting the business off the ground. Developing a business into maturity will require strategy we don’t yet need. For now, we can make our team more cohesive and the ideation process much more straightforward by aligning on at least one common value from the beginning. Even before Ron brings his stray cab idea to the table. Especially before that. Clearly, excitement, comfort and achievement are mutually exclusive among us. But, on what do we all agree? I’ll be investigating that line of questioning in a post to come very soon.

Until then, be wary of stray ideas.

Founding a Business: The Market’s Value

Entrepreneurship has been an important part of my education, most so here in Munich at TUM. I’ve taken courses on entrepreneurship, attended startup rallies and conceived, launched and managed new programs at a series of small and large companies. All along the way, I’ve been looking for insight into what it takes to start and then run a business.

At this point, everything has told me that step one of starting a business is identifying what we might call our “market’s value” (not market value; keep your pants on, Finance). This is a human value that we, the founder(s), have in common with a group of people who need something (our potential market).

If you want to learn more about what I mean by “value” in this post, I recommend with every fiber of my being that you refresh yourself on Milton Rokeach’s value survey and the concepts of instrumental and terminal values. All of the above are inspiring the hell out of this post.

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Regularly, entrepreneurs present about failed teams that couldn’t agree on a direction. Failed pitches that couldn’t convince an investor that a market exists. Failed products that couldn’t generate interest among their intended users. Failed businesses that believed that they had rallied around the “wrong idea.”

Rallying around an idea is a mistake. I’m sure of this. But, I’ll get to that in a future post. This is about a productive approach: rallying around a market’s value. Rallying around a market’s value means all founders are on the same page from day one. All founders know why they’re in business. They know for whom they’re in business. With that knowledge, coming up with the idea that makes a market is just experimentation.

Human values are incredible drivers of business decisions. Here are three with which I identify very strongly. One of these will likely be the market’s value on which I found my own venture, one day.

Let’s do this.

_________________

#1: Wisdom

We succeed in life if, at the end of it, we understand how people, the world, and life work. Decision-making guided by this value can’t go wrong. Every step results in greater understanding.

Pitching a business founded on wisdom as its market’s value is easy:

“We believe that the true measure of success in life is the wisdom one possesses at the end of it.”

Instantly, we have the attention of our de facto target market. They believe that, too!

“The problem with accumulating wisdom, of course, is that wordly experience is costly. Learning languages, experiencing new cultures, learning new skills, exposure to contrary worldviews–this all takes extraordinary amounts of time and money. A lifetime of each, in most cases.”

The market is still on board. Accumulating wisdom is costly.

“We have an online repository of human experience ready to go. Want to know what it’s like to eat the hottest pepper in the world? Want to learn how to dance Salsa? Want to know what many of England’s accents sound like?”

“We’re YouTube. Want in?”

Yes. Now open the goddamn door.

#2: Feeling Accomplished (a.k.a. “Legacy”)

The world should be better when we leave it than when we entered it, and we should be responsible for some of the improvement.

“We believe that a truly worthwhile life is one that has a lasting, positive effect on humanity. One that shines even after it’s extinguished.”

“So, you can imagine our frustration, as we can imagine yours, when mundane, repetitive upkeep tasks distract us from those that contribute to the improvement that drives us.”

“Meet Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner that cleans floors so effectively that you won’t have to engage the chore ever again. One fewer distraction. One more opportunity to strengthen your legacy. Want one?”

Shut up and take my money.

#3: True Friendship

“Life is nothing without true friends. Friends that last forever regardless of distance. Regardless of circumstance. Regardless of conflict. Friends who comfort you. Friends who teach you. Friends who love you. A life with true friends is truly a life.”

“Nonetheless, distance and circumstance can keep true friends apart. What if we could maintain the intimacy we cherish with our true friends despite distance and circumstance? What if we could be there for each other, even when we can’t be there with each other?”

“We have for you an online service that lets expats share their culture shock with their childhood companions. It lets humanitarian workers enlighten their old college roommates from the other side of the planet. It lets true friends remain connected for a lifetime. It’s called Skype. Want in?”

Real Business Values Rule

Business values rule. Real ones, that is. Commonly not the ones you see on the placard in the conference room–“Innovation, Creativity, Discipline” or whatever.

I’m talking about real values. The values that management can’t prescribe, but rather that they have to cultivate among their organizations over long periods of time. Values that people hold genuinely.

The kinds of values about which I’m talking are what I believe to be the most important consideration of a management team during the founding of a business. Values inform long-term direction, they inform strategy changes, they inform target market choices, and of course they inform hiring strategy. They also inform management team cohesion.

Like I said, you don’t observe a company’s values on a placard or a wiki or during a press conference or during an investor briefing. What you see there is marketing. You observe values in the assumptions colleagues make about their work and about each other. You observe values in the language colleagues use. You observe values in systems, protocol and chain of command, or the entire lack thereof.

Very soon, I’m going to write a post that plays around with values toward which I’ll want to drive my own business, one day. This post is about signifiers of values that I’ve noticed at my current and prior employers. Most of these will come from my experiences at three large tech companies. Some may also come from my experiences at smaller companies and agencies. Have you seen any like these among your employers?

Buckle up!

__________

#1: The Term “Best Known Method”

At one of my employers, the term “Best Known Method” was so institutionalized, that it was abbreviated to “BKM.” In standard industry parlance, it means “best practice.” It’s the first way you should consider getting a thing done.

“Best Known Method” is beautiful in a way that “Best Practice” is not, however. “Best Known Method” implies openness to new ideas. It implies an expectation that, one day, we’ll find a better method. Whoever brings us that method gets a pat on the back. “Best Practice” on the other hand, functions as a sort of biblical proclamation that disgruntled service managers staple to the cubicles of pigheaded program managers in order to show them the true way of the world.

“Best practice for YouTube video length is 2 minutes or less, so cut out 5 minutes,” says the video team manager before watching. Meanwhile, a catalog of 2-minute, 10-view videos and a picture of a top hat against a black background laugh behind their back.

“BKM is making the subject line of an e-mail no longer than seven words. Anybody have a better idea?” verifies the winningest program manager in the world.

#2: Division by Goal Rather than Function

This is an example of a slight way by which a team’s values might differ from the surrounding company’s. One employer of mine usually structured itself by function first and business unit second. You’d see a team full of ad media planners, a team full of product marketing communication managers, a team full of regional marketing communication managers, and a team full of event managers. Each member of a team, then, would align with a business unit or a market. One regional marcom manager, for example, was responsible for the Northwestern US and Canada. One ad media planner was responsible for one of the company’s major software products, for another example.

However, after a short time knowing them, the ad media planning team restructured. Instead of aligning with business units, media planners would be from then on assigned to company goals. One member of the team was the transactional ad planner. Another was the branding ad planner. The transactional planner ran campaigns that generated sales and money for the company. Click on their ad so you can buy the company’s thing. The branding planner ran campaigns that drove people to the website. Click on their ad so you can understand or like the company more and maybe buy later.

This communicated two things about values at the company, to me. The first is that both the team and the company (because their decision met no political blowback) value decentralized decision-making. The second is that the team value what one accomplishes for the company more than whom else at the company that person supports. “What did you do for us this month?” is more important than “How well-connected are you at the company?”

#3: Outsourcing by Degrees

How much of a given discipline (marketing, finance, engineering, etc.) is outsourced, and how much is kept in-house? If you look around and only see coordinators in-house, then it might be that you’re working for a company that values fast execution over thoughtful planning and creativity. If you’re surrounded by creative functions, then values may align in the opposite way.

Right now, I’m thinking of two large tech employers of mine. One had ad media planning and ad creative in-house. At this stage in my career, that blows my mind. This is my only employer that worked this way, and it’s my understanding that this is exceedingly rare in the mature-company world. Even more amazing is that the teams sat right next to each other in the office. This is a company that values getting it done right more than getting it done fast. Both the ad team and the creative team were, in turn, deeply connected with the company’s business units. Even if they didn’t understand a product or a market well, obtaining that understanding only meant putting a cafeteria date on a product marketer’s calendar.

The other employer I have in mind kept neither media planning nor creative in-house. Media planning was managed by an agency, while creative was managed by an office of contract workers. Leftover in the marketing department were solely coordinators called “marcom managers” and “media relations managers.” Their evaluations (and incentives) were based on how many marcom or media campaigns were executed under their name. They were not evaluated based on the degree to which each campaign achieved the company’s goals. Run enough campaigns over time, and eventually your numbers will get to where management wants them. You need processes and connections to succeed at that company. You don’t need access to analytics platforms or sales data.

What Makes for Great Education?

I just finished the third of my master program’s four semesters. Even more specifically, I just finished the final exams of my third of four semesters. More excitingly, I only have three more courses and a thesis to write before I graduate from the program. Ecstatic, I tell you.

Anyway.

At this point, a whole lot of education has happened to me, and I’ve been thinking about what’s made certain classes particularly useful. In a word, it’s challenge. But that word is incredibly lame and vague.

More precisely, what makes an amazing class amazing is a combo of two things:

According to the instructor, their role is making students better at things and making students understand things. Their role is not making students know things.
Courses are fora in which we practice skills and ponder ideas. This means we take some responsibility for the getting better at things and the understanding things.

An example from each of my universities has run through my head repeatedly over the past few weeks, so I’m putting them on the Internet so that they live forever. To posterity!

The University of Texas at Austin

Digital Media was a class that hurt brains and egos.

In my undergraduate advertising program, the purest example of this optimal teacher/course combination was Digital Media as taught by Gene Kincaid. In addition to being our lecturer, he also ran his own web consultancy in Austin (my TUM example shares this trait, so I think there’s really something to it). At the beginning of each week, we would find articles in the class’s cloud–new media profiles, buzzword salads written by industry bloggers, ad tech developments, ad standards developments, legal developments, on and on.

Each class was a discussion of the articles initiated by Mr. Kincaid and then dominated by the students. He would ask the class for an opinion on an issue (are reach and frequency still valid ad metrics?). We would vomit our gut reactions at him. He would ask why. We’d break to listen to the cricket symphony while our gears spun into action.

Classes were headaches, and Mr. Kincaid was an intellectual task master. One of my favorite memories was a class day, at the beginning of which he wanted to start a discussion on augmented reality’s use cases (this was 2007-08). Nobody had an answer. He asked “who here read through the suggested articles before class?” Nobody raised their hand. “Okay, everyone out. Class is over.” Nothing feels more like failure than feeling directly responsible for a missed learning opportunity.

Technische Universität München

"The Power of Free" is a magical cognitive bias. — “The Power of Free” is a magical cognitive bias.

The ideal combo in my master program, so far, is definitely Behavioral Pricing as taught by Dr. Florian Bauer. Like Mr. Kincaid, he also runs his own consultancy, but in the Munich area. I really think this has something to do with the effectiveness of his teaching style.

Anyway, Dr. Bauer’s course was a seminar that took place all day on four days during the semester. On the first day, he told us to pair up and draw numbers from a box. The number told us which topic in behavioral pricing we would be teaching the class two months later. Half of the class were assigned topics in behavioral pricing theory (behavioral economics, cognitive bias…), while the other half were assigned pricing research tools (Van Westendorp PSM, BPTO, pricing experiments…).

He then gave us goals. Of course, one was understanding our topic (my partner and I had Gabor-Granger and the Van Westendorp PSM). What was our tool designed to accomplish? How does it work? How well does it do what it says it can do? Could it do anything else?

We on the tools side also had to link our tools to the other tools and the theories discussed by the other half of the class. Finally, we had to consider the tool from the “behavioral pricing” perspective, which meant understanding how the research tool itself might bias its own results.

That’s a lot of critical thinking.

The following three days of class (two months after the first) were days full of student-led lectures interspersed with Dr. Bauer’s commentary, corrections and anecdotes from his work as a pricing consultant. When other students presented, we were reminded of our own research that linked our topic to theirs. When we presented, we knew when to call out prior presentations and foreshadow future presentations. In between presentations, we had Dr. Bauer there to elaborate and make our presentations more real by relating his own experiences. If repeated exposure guarantees learning, then this is one of the most risk-free courses I’ve ever taken.