Good and Timely

When clients pass along good books to read, I take note. The most recent book came from a long-standing client who heads up HR at Lincoln Financial. The book is “Who’s Got Your Back – The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success – and Won’t Let You Fail.” Here’s a link to the author, Keith Ferrazzi’s Web site: http://www.keithferrazzi.com/WGYB/.

What did I take away from the book? Deep relationships create lasting results that will help fulfill your dreams and goals for both the business and the personal aspects of your life.
 
I have always believed we are in the relationship business – this book helped me make an even greater commitment to that wonderful business of relationships.

Entering the Conceptual Age

Are you left brained or right brained? It’s a rather simple question, until you read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Pink, a best-selling author, speaker, and the former chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore, explains that we are moving beyond the Information Age – a society powered by left-brain thinking that defined our skills to logical, linear, computer-like capabilities – and into a future that belongs to “a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind.”

He writes that we are entering the Conceptual Age with right-brain qualities where creators and empathizers, meaning makers, designers, and big-picture thinkers are taking over our economy and society. Does that mean that left-brained thinkers are doomed? Not at all. It means that left-brained thinkers need to recognize that the capabilities and utilization of both sides of the brain are essential for future thinking. It also means that they should not be afraid to turn to those who are right brained in situations they might not have previously.

Pink goes on to explain what he calls “the six senses.” Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning are, what I now understand, the aptitudes that professional success and personal satisfaction will increasingly depend on. As a person who grew up as an Informational Age thinker in an industry that relies on right-brain creative thinking, I’ve been fortunate to have been able to constantly cultivate my right-brain skills. And any guide that helps lead me to new ways of conceptual thinking is welcome.

Design was the most interesting sense for me because it involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, artistic thinking, and, what I feel is most valuable, the ability to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.

Pink refers to Google as an example of a company who gained its edge through design. Its look is simple and iconic and instead of complicated algorithms, it has a better business model. Pink sites Google as a company that is whole-minded.

Throughout my career, I have always believed that everyone in our firm is creative – that skill set is not reserved for just certain people. In fact, we’ve made a point to build a staff that uses both sides of their brains – even in what has been called our “creative” department. This book and its themes support all that we do at Versant. Yes, we need to be creative and conceptual across all disciplines.

Sharing the Blue Ocean

There's been a lot of conversation here lately about the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" by authors Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. The basic premise of the book is to tell the reader how to achieve a business goal of staying out of the "red ocean" – the bloody, competitive, dog-eat-dog world of competing for the same business with the same business strategies as everyone else, and moving to the "blue ocean," a marketplace virtually free of competition. The idea is to create a product or service that is so unique and to do business so differently that you have virtually no competition.

At Versant, that's been the vision for several years now, as we've expanded from a traditional ad agency, selling what everyone else in the industry is selling, to a specialist in strategic advertising, interactive marketing, business-to-consumer, business-to-business and business-to-employee branding, that is focused to achieving measurable results based on a foundation of research. And as we've done this for ourselves, we've been able to help our clients do it as well.

I've been in marketing and advertising for more than 20 years, and in my experience, this is a sea change in the depth and breadth of business support offered to clients by marketing agencies. It has become the new core of our business, with traditional marketing tactics almost an addendum to that. For my healthcare clients who face an increasingly competitive and constantly changing landscape because of managed care, Medicare limits, Pay-for-Performance and changing-by-the-minute technology, it's crucial that we help them achieve their own "blue ocean strategy." And when we succeed, the impact on their business, and ours, is profound.