July 2014 – Andrew Careaga

The enchanting yes; the essential no

yes_man Just over a year ago, I was riding a conference high. You know the kind; that afterglow that comes following a terrific professional development opportunity. In this instance, I had just returned from the 2013 CASE Summit with a head full of ideas and a spirit lifted by thought-provoking sessions and inspiring keynote speeches.

One particularly inspiring keynote was Guy Kawasaki‘s talk on the topic of “enchantment.”

Enchantment is also the title of one of Guy’s recent books, which I purchased to read on the flight home. It’s a great little book. It’s a quick read and one that I ought to re-read on occasion.

But there’s one part of Enchantment, and Guy’s talk, the left me disenchanted — and that is the idea he espouses about making “yes” the default response to requests. “Defaulting to yes” is one of the keys to becoming more likable — and that, according to Kawasaki, opens the door to greater success.

“A yes buys time, enables you to see more options, and builds rapport,” Kawasaki writes in Enchantment. “By contrast, a no response stops everything. There’s no place to go, nothing to build on, and no further options are available.”

There’s some truth to this. And being on that conference high, I decided to default to yes more often in my work and life affairs. I didn’t go so far as Jim Carrey’s character in Yes Man. But I went far enough to cause myself a great degree of discomfort.

Just say ‘no’?

Still, I think there’s something to be said for “no.”

Here’s the thing: I’ve never been much of a “yes” person. And that’s gotten me into trouble more than a few times with internal clients, bosses, my family, my wife (God bless her), what few friends I have and the general public.

But I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to uncritically say “yes” to every request that comes down the pike. (To his credit, Kawasaki suggests that people like me could default to “not yet” instead of “yes.” So there might be some middle ground.) Saying yes too often will lead to dilution, lack of focus and exhaustion.

In my opinion, it’s important for people in our business to take a critical view when it comes to certain requests for assistance from internal clients.

Our job as marketers within higher ed organizations is twofold: We provide expertise in the areas of branding, marketing, public relations, graphic design, online communication and so forth. But we also serve as internal marketing and communications consultants.

We provide the most value to our organizations when we apply our expertise to a situation — that is, our understanding of the principles of good communication, branding, PR and marketing — and help our clients find the right solutions to their marketing and communications challenges.

Too often, however, clients come to us with their idea of a solution already developed. They want us to execute their ill-formed visions — produce a brochure, write a press release or speech, slap up a website — no questions asked. They prefer we not serve them and the institution by consulting — by helping them bring more clarity to their thoughts about whatever problem they think they need to solve.

After all, our clients aren’t marketing experts. We are. And we owe it to them to offer that expertise — even if they aren’t coming to us for our expertise, but to merely fulfill a request. (For more on this philosophy, see this post from way back in 2009: 3 simple questions for communicators.)

There’s another problem with saying yes too often if you’re a manager. When you commit yourself to “yes,” you’re really committing your team. That’s unfair and forces further trade-offs down the line where the really brilliant, creative work happens — or could happen, if managers would say “yes” to non-essential projects more often.

Essentialist angst

Anyway, I have tried to follow, more or less, Kawasaki’s advice and default to yes during the past year. I’m not sure I’ve been as successful as others who might have more of an inclination toward people-pleasing. But I’ve tried. Really, I have.

And then I started reading this other book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown.

McKeown is a big fan of the “no.” Not “no for no’s sake,” though. He’s really more of a fan about deciding what is absolutely essential for us to say “yes” to. McKeown believes that saying yes to less is the key to success.

(For more about McKeown’s book, I recommend you read these reviews by Karine Joly — who recommended I read Essentialism — and Donna Talarico, who has also chronicled her struggles with a default-to-yes approach.)

In many ways, McKeown’s approach is a 180 to Kawasaki’s. And for me, it’s more attractive.

Because the business we are in — branding and marketing — should be about saying no more.

We live in a world of clutter and over-communication. Higher ed brands are especially guilty of wanting to communicate every little feature of every degree program. Have you sat in on a university administrator’s PowerPoint presentation lately? Slides are jam-packed with cluttered, disorganized, unfocused information. Presenters and their presentations meander. Brochures runneth over with fatuous verbiage. A good 90 percent of that shit needs to go. (McKeown has a 90 percent rule that is worth thinking about.)

And yet, the world pulls us toward “yes.” Yes to more. Yes to dilution and bloat. Away from clarity and specificity and the essential.

When you say “no” to requests — or ways to do things that are unessential, that don’t add value — you can be seen as uncooperative and disagreeable. You’re not a team player. In fact, you’re more of a team player than those who want to pile on unnecessary, non-essential stuff.

A middle way?

So here’s the conundrum: The enchanting yes vs. the essential no.

It seems to me that the right path is a combination of the two approaches.

First, follow McKeown’s advice and winnow our choices down to only the best options for us. This is where McKeown’s 90 percent rule kicks in. It works something like this:

List all of the opportunities for you to say “yes” to something — a project, an event, a purchase, a speaking opportunity, a new social media channel, a short term commitment, long term commitment, whatever. List it all.
Score the value of each opportunity to you and your mission on a scale of 0 to 10.
Eliminate everything that doesn’t score a 9 or 10.

Then and only then should we apply Kawasaki’s advice to say yes.

This follows a path Michael Fienen discusses in a 2012 .eduGuru post about Pinterest. That post is not really about Pinterest. It’s really a platform for Fienen to preach his mantra to “do less better.” That sums up the point of Essentialism quite well, I think.

It’s my tendency to default to McKeown’s approach. But in a world that continuously demands us to say “yes,” it’s tough to be a no man.

Corporate U? How about Military U?

I wonder what academics who feel uneasy about former business leaders taking the helm of colleges and universities think about the University of Texas’ decision to pick a Navy admiral as the sole finalist to lead that 15-campus system?

UT announced on Tuesday that Navy Adm. William McRaven, head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, is the sole finalist for the job of chancellor. This means that, barring any unusual occurrence, McRaven will assume the job in January 2015. According to the Washington Post coverage of the announcement, McRaven (UT class of 1977, journalism) beat out another non-academic — the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — for the job.

Stepping into the role of college president or chancellor seems to be a good move for former CEOs and ex-politicians. Those appointments usually raise the eyebrows of faculty and staff, who fear that people from outside the academy don’t fully understand how higher education operates. Not surprisingly, some commenters on the Chronicle of Higher Education story about the McRaven announcement are skeptical.

According to the Chronicle, the UT board’s rationale for selecting a non-academic like McRaven has to do with his ability to manage large, complex organizations. Board chair Paul Foster says that he and his fellow regents believe campus presidents should have “extraordinary academic backgrounds and skills” but that the chancellor’s job was “more of a management and leadership role than a pure academic role.”

Under that rationale, the selection of a former CEO or ex-military leader may make sense. I’m not so sure about the selection of an ex-politician, though.

Say what you will about McRaven, he delivered one heck of a commencement speech at UT-Austin last spring.

Embracing the C-word in higher education

29_WS_GeorgeCarlin-th-723092 — Comedian George Carlin made waves in the early ’70s with his “seven dirty words” monologue. He would probably chuckle at higher ed’s dirty words.

Back in the heyday of the hippie era, counterculture comedian George Carlin created a stir with his anti-establishment monologue about the seven dirty words that weren’t allowed on television. (Four decades later, as The Atlantic pointed out in 2012, society is still struggling with the role of government on restricting language.)

More recently, Brian Wm. Niles, founder of TargetX, has identified some dirty words that make many of us in higher education nervous. Niles spoke recently at ACT’s annual Enrollment Planners Conference and shared the “five dirty words” that admissions officers — and others in higher education — should embrace.

Topping that list, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage, is the C-word.

Customer.

“Many people who work at colleges dislike the word, preferring to call students ‘students’,” writes Eric Hoover of The Chronicle. “But as more Americans question the value of higher education, Mr. Niles said, institutions must think more like businesses, with customers to please, customer-service to enhance: ‘It gives you a sense that you have a responsibility to them.’ Colleges exist to serve students, he insisted, and not the reverse.”

Cussing and fussing about ‘customer’

Why do college and university personnel find it so difficult to think of students (and other groups, such as employers of our students) as customers? There’s something unsavory about instilling our academic world with the language of corporations.

The subject came up in a recent conversation with a faculty member, who expressed the thought that today’s students feel a greater sense of entitlement, and that thinking of them as customers adds to that sense. (The customer is always right, so we must give the customer what he or she wants, which is a passing grade, if not an A, at all times.)

The comments on the Chronicle post point out that there is a difference between college students and consumers of other goods and services. This response from John Nezlek, a psychology professor at William and Mary, probably summarizes the thoughts of many faculty:

Students’ needs, values, and opinions certainly need to be taken into account as institutes of higher education decide what to do; however, students attend institutes of higher education to be taught, to be led, they are not patrons in a restaurant. They are not to be served anything. They are clients in a collaborative relationship with the faculty. We work together.

At Missouri S&T, we have embraced the word customer, at least at the leadership level and among many staff members. Yet, some faculty I speak to still bristle at the term. Just as they bristle at words like “marketing.” Our university’s strategic plan even goes so far as to identity six “customer groups,” and on our strategic plan website, the introductory letter from Chancellor Cheryl B. Schrader (@SandTChancellor) uses the term when she talks about “providing a top return on investment to our key customers.” (Return on investment — or ROI — is another candidate for Niles’ list of bad words and phrases, and it, too, came up during the ACT meeting.)

Embrace the profane?

So, what will come of the term customer in higher education? Will it, like Carlin’s seven dirty words, still be the subject of angst 40 years from now? Will we still wince when we hear it used as a synonym for student?

I don’t think Niles is trying to be higher ed’s version of George Carlin. But perhaps if he makes fun of the dirty words you can’t say in academia enough, we’ll begin to laugh at ourselves a bit more, and at how much we worry about certain terms. As The Atlantic‘s Timothy Bella writes about Carlin’s shtick:

To George Carlin, the routine’s driving force and message weren’t in the ideas behind the seven words, but rather the words themselves. For the first time, someone was doing a convincing enough job of cajoling an audience into thinking that these words weren’t really so tasteless after all.

In the 42 years that have passed since Carlin’s famous rant, the media landscape has changed radically with the rise of cable TV, live-streaming and satellite radio, and the fragmentation of audiences into smaller and smaller niches. In step with those changes, the use of profanity on television has increased dramatically. All of those seven dirty words actually can be said on television, at the right time, on the right channel (usually cable) and in front of the right audience.

Perhaps, as the media landscape and the higher education landscape continues to morph over time, we will grow more accustomed to the coarse business language that is invading our academic lexicon, and customer will be as common in the language of higher education as Carlin’s dirty words are on Netflix programs.

But will the word be thought of as a profanity?

Maybe we should let the customers — I mean, the students — decide.

P.S. – For more on Brian Wm. Niles’ take on the use of the word customer in higher education, check this blog post from last summer.

Friday Five: Fiscal year faves

Blogger’s note: I know it’s only Thursday. But like many of my fellow Americans, I plan to put away the digital devices for much of the day in order to properly celebrate our nation’s independence.

An early Happy Independence Day to those of you in the U.S. A belated Happy Canada Day to our neighbors to the north. And a belated Happy Fiscal New Year to those of you in higher ed who live your lives by the July 1-June 30 fiscal cycle.

Today’s post is a round-up of my favorite blog posts from the past fiscal year. They may not necessarily be your favorites (judging from the site analytics, more of you visited my list of the best pop and rock albums of all time than you did some of the posts below; apparently you got wind of my exquisite taste in music) but I think they were pretty darn good pieces of writing that may be worth a second look. Plus, these sorts of retrospectives are an easy way to reuse existing content, and that’s what the content marketers and brand journalism experts tell us to do, right? So let’s get with it.

1. Boring old brand-building

I wrote this post nearly a year ago, based on an observation from an old book about branding. Both the book and the observation — that “Brand building is boring work” and “What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time” — remain relevant today. And should for as long as brands exist.

2. 3 branding game-changers and how #highered must adapt

This one was my interpretation of a September 2013 study by brand consultancies Wolff Olins and Flamingo (The New Mainstream: Creating a new relationship between people and brands). Here, I tried to show how these three branding game-changers apply to higher education. This post was also the most popular entry for FY14 in terms of visits.

3. Adventures in meme-jacking

Wow.

Very blog.

Much analytic.

Many April.

So Fools’.

Amaze.

My attempt to describe the short-lived but very fun social media sensation that was our university’s 2014 April Fools’ Day web joke.

4. Media relations in a disintermediated world

Heavy navel-gazing about the future of media relations. This led to a presentation delivered at a regional PRSA conference last month, and to a HigherEdLive.com conversation on the topic of disintermediation in university advancement the month before. I’ll probably be discussing disintermediation again in September at the Aggregate Conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

5. 5 proven, mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog

You won’t believe what happens next.

Bonus link: Friday Five: Marketing lessons from the Beatles

Hey. I can’t hide my love away from this post about what marketing lessons we can learn from the Fab Four. This was posted on the eve of the 50-year anniversary of the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan Show appearance.