There was a major problem at work yesterday involving marketing. In short, we screwed up, with consequences embarrassing to the organization. Imagine Brett Favre being in charge of brochure production, and printing 50,000 copies. Or public relations taking on an alternate, much older, meaning.
It was not, as Winston Churchill said, our finest hour. We tried to fight them on the beaches only to find they were back at the hotel. It was just one more precipitous slide to death on the roller-coaster that is marketing.
Needless to say, there were some long faces among those in the department that didn’t ditch the office in favor of the ball game. But it got me to thinking: Does it have to be a darkish hour? Can marketers put a spin like a Cliff Lee curveball onto our own stupidity?
There is something that suggests we might be able to, and it comes from jazz, of all places.
The jazz guitarist Barry Galbraith once said that a jazz musician is never more than half a step away from the right note. In other words, wherever you happen to be you can get to a good place with a fairly small amount of work.
So take our faux pas (or, as a boss of mine was fond of saying, a "foopa"). How does a marketing department hey-Jude it – you know, take its sad song and make it better?
By taking a page out of Barry Galbraith's Big Book of American Standards. By taking it a half-step up.
Start by tracing the root of the problem (assuming it was a problem and not just a random act of senseless senselessness). Was it a breakdown in people or procedure? If it's a breakdown in procedure, encourage the Powers That Are to resist like Pope Benedict at a Christina Aguilera concert the overpowering urge to add more procedures to the existing procedure.
Instead, channel the late greats Tom Bosley and Barbara Billingsley (and then they kicked Florence Henderson off of Dancing With the Stars; have the fates – and that little Italian twip -- no respect for parental units?) and guide them gently, with pearls around your neck, toward excising the surplusage from existing procedures.
For once in your life, be a Republican. Lift the onerous yoke of excessive regulation. Let the free market rule! No taxes on incomes of $250,000 and up! Opportunity for everyone! Guns for all! And I command the sunspots that cause global warming to vanish!
Sorry. I had a Sharron Angle moment there.
Marketers are creative people. They need latitude, they tend to resist layers upon layers of documentation, but they don't shirk accountability if it's leavened with empowerment. Give them the smallest amount of procedures necessary to do the job, give them control of the money and let them sign their name to the bottom, and they'll knock it out, singing Swiss mountain-climbing songs all the way.
So take a mistake as an opportunity to re-examine what you do and make it work better – even if it means instituting less control -- and then announce it to the world as a re-examination of policies and procedures.
If it's a people problem, again use it (or suggest to your supervisors that they use it) as an opportunity to re-examine who's doing what. People need to own some facet of what they do. It needs to be wholly and totally theirs and the working world needs to know it. A mistake is a great opportunity to see if the right people are assigned to the appropriate tasks – that Chris O’Donnell is in charge of communicating to your Wiccan stakeholders, for instance.
Match the skills with the duties and see how well they line up. If some need more, give them more to own out of the pool of shared responsibilities. If some need less, construct the less out of high-profile assignments that are in their wheelhouse – and get them the training they need to do the rest.
A mistake is not just an opportunity in disguise. That’s being too kind. It’s also not one more thing to be spun. That’s too crass. A mistake is another chance to do what marketers do best: apply common sense to a situation that needs it. Even if it’s a situation of your own making.
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