June 2, 2013 by Ken Goldstein - 7 Comments

Let It Be

I write this evening from London on the last day of a short business trip. I am pounding this out on an iPad so it may be a bit less polished then some of my posts, but I want to share the passion with you somewhat unedited, while it is still fresh and resonating.

While here I enjoyed the tremendous experience of seeing the new Beatles revue, Let It Be, at the Savoy Theatre. The experience was full of wonder and magic, precisely the way music and theatre can touch your heart when you least expect it. The Savoy Theatre is an especially magical venue, one of the oldest working stages in London and the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity in the late 19th century.

Yes, it’s another Beatles cover show, like Beatlemania, like Rain, like so many appearances of The Fab Four. The lads appear in multiple costumes from the Beatles era, but are not allowed to call themselves The Beatles, nor use the names John, Paul, George, or Ringo. They refer to each other as The Bass Player or The Singer or The Drummer, and of course Billy Shears gets an appropriate shout out since he is a character of fiction. They start in black suits and thin ties, then put on Nehru jackets, then some colorful hippy fabrics, then the Sgt. Pepper Uniforms, then wilder hippy fabrics, then the John character in the white suit and long hair followed by the John character in the shoulder length hair, military shirt and sunglasses. You know the drill.

We open with I Saw Her Standing There, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, then we’re off to Shea Stadium, then the Rubber Soul period, then Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road, and we round it out with Get Back, the title number, and Jude. They don’t exactly go in order, more a thematic pastiche. There are television bits in the background showing black and white commercials of the nice lady in awe dropping the pearl in the Prell shampoo bottle, occasional blasts of Jimi Hendrix over Vietnam bombings, the marches, the flower posters, the peace signs, the weeping teens falling over each other in the stadium crowds—all of the familiar nostalgia that we have seen so often but still celebrate as boomers. No creative breakthroughs, no big picture inventions, no stagecraft of staggering originality. It was a concert of Beatles songs, two and a half hours with a break, four guys who didn’t look like The Beatles absent the various wigs, and the Paul character even played a right-handed (gasp!) Hofner bass.

So why was this show so different, so memorable, so moving, so unforgettable, so touching?

Two reasons.

For one, at half a century I might have been the youngest person in the audience.

The other, the audience was almost entirely British.

You might expect at a West End Beatles revue in London-town the show goers at a Saturday matinee might be mostly tourists. They were not. They were locals. They came to relive their youth, if only for an afternoon, and they loved every second of it. They were on their feet, they were twisting and shouting, they were dancing in the aisles, they clapped and sang along word for word, they echoed the chant: “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”

No one in that room felt they were 60, or 70, or 80. You could not tell anyone in that room that this was a 50th celebration of anything. This was real, this was vital, this was now.

And this was British. Very, very British. Lovely, as they say. Brilliant.

Yes, the image of John in Central Park is literally chiseled in Strawberry Fields. Memories of George in Los Angeles recording studios are etched in our minds. Ringo and Paul sightings in the Hollywood Hills have become as natural as any other celebrity on the west coast. We share the music with the world, but somehow we came to sense that The Beatles adopted America, and Americans unofficially adopted The Beatles.

Yet they are British, beloved here in a way I never before fully understood or felt until I spent this joyous time with their countrymen. Their fans here are perpetual, like those who have shared Shakespeare and Dickens and even Lloyd Webber with the entire world. The creativity and inspiration that has flowed generation after generation from this island in the North Atlantic never ceases to blow my mind. The impact is astonishing, the consistency in trendsetting almost baffling.

The people here are exceptionally proud that so much of what has touched them has touched so many others all over the world. The Beatles are a part of them and carry their love to us in ways that words cannot convey. You simply have to be on your feet in the crowded room feeling the music penetrate your bone mass to get it.

You say you want a revolution? That’s a revolution.

Now back to a few words on age, which I think is what really brought that tear to the corner of my eye. When that Yellow Submarine on the scrim behind the band sails through the Sea of Holes and past the Sea of Time to the Sea of Green, something enduring becomes clear, almost too real. John was taken from us, and hasn’t been here since I was a freshman in college. I still feel that loss. George has left us, and my guitar still gently weeps. We graciously do have Paul and Ringo—Ringo is even opening an exhibit this summer at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Two Beatles no longer living, but all four Beatles somehow alive.

And the fans, The Baby Boomers born between 1945 and 1964, each day a few more slip away. At the end of that tail, I have the least gray hair, some have all gray hair, some have no hair at all. When the Paul character sings, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” it’s the midrange of the audience. He was in his 20s when he wrote it. They were all in their 20s when they created that vast catalog of songs—not a bad one to boot—all in less than a working decade. Those songs remain as vibrant and relevant today as they were when we bought the singles on vinyl 45s.

How does that work?

The music keeps us young. The music compels us to stay young. When we hear and feel the music we have no ailments, no doctors to see, no life letdowns or shortcomings or missed opportunities. We are optimists with our lives entirely ahead of us, just as we were when we first heard the needle hit the record, pops and hisses, mono and stereo.

We remember all the lyrics, every guitar riff, where the drumsticks hit the cymbals, and when it’s time to harmonize on the refrains. We hold onto this because it keeps our youth, our joy, our hope. When you see an aging couple set aside their walking canes, swaying their hands in the air left to right and right to left on the final chords of Hey Jude, you know magic is happening.

Time travel is indeed possible. You are transported in mind and in toe-tapping body. The music is that perfect, that potent, that mystical, that important. It just feels that good.

We boomers didn’t get everything right. We know that. We know that peace and love and world harmony are still elusive dreams. The Beatles make it possible for us to feel those dreams anew, to be young in a way that is transformational, a dream as only it can be, a perpetual time to Imagine.

You can always see the clock ticking. You can always know what time it is. You can’t take away youth.

March 10, 2013 by Ken Goldstein - 5 Comments

The Parable of the Cold Burrito

“Do people do that with you? Offer you some food that, if you don’t eat it, they’re only going to ‘throw it away.’ Well, doesn’t that make you feel dandy? Here’s something to eat, Dave, hurry up, it’s spoiling… something for you, Angela, eat quickly, that green pod is moving… here, Bob, eat this before I give it to an animal.'” — George Carlin

No one can describe the unusual color and shape of discarded food left for transformation into yuck quite like my hero, George Carlin. And yet, often when I think of his incomparable Ice Box Man routine, I can’t help but associate the bit with business opportunity waiting to be discovered.

No, I’m not talking about mold morphing into penicillin, which isn’t a bad analogy. I’m talking about something I like to call the Parable of the Cold Burrito.

You know, the Cold Burrito—that really great burrito you picked up at your favorite burrito place about a week ago. The one with all the things you like in it— eggs, cheese, potatoes, salsa, the incredibly fresh tortilla— the one you couldn’t wait to gobble down, only it was so filling you only ate half, then put the other half in the refrigerator. Then you forgot about your leftovers, and like the Ice Box man, rediscovered it in less glory.

Perhaps it’s not as dire as Carlin might describe it. There could be life in it. That’s up to you to decide.

You have two choices—toss it in the garbage and be done with it, or see if a little creativity can bring it back to life. I guess there is a third option, leave it in the back of the refrigerator to continue full metamorphosis, but I’m going to take a leap of faith and say you know better than that (or maybe you have been warned about ‘selective obscurity’ by your spouse).

Let’s say you pick choice #2. You remember how good it was when it wasn’t a Cold Burrito—it was a warm, wonderful burrito, but you aren’t at the place where you bought it. You unwrap it, add some other ingredients you like, some onion, a different kind of cheese, a few spices from the pantry. You carefully wrap it in foil, put it in the oven for a while around 350 degrees (not a quick soggy fix in the microwave), then retrieve it and add some shredded lettuce and chopped tomato, a little avocado. What do you have now? Something that no one else wanted, something you weren’t even sure you wanted, something that is not the same as it was, but something that is really quite good in the way you have helped it change.

Okay, it’s not a perfect parable, but you get the idea. The Cold Burrito is something you want that no one else wanted—something in which you saw potential, that easily could have been scrapped— something that began with someone else’s creativity, was forgotten for a while, then became something you reinvented. That’s a story I have told a lot of people asking me how to find hidden opportunity.

The Cold Burrito is the opportunity you see in a company asset that no one else does. It’s the dog project no one wants, so you do. It’s the nasty problem no one is willing to tackle, so you are.

Everyone wants the fresh burrito! How hard is that to bring to market? It’s already new! It’s already fresh! It’s hot out of the oven. It sells itself. Do you think you are going to make your mark doing what everyone else wants to do? And can do? No, you want the opportunity no one else wants, no one else sees, something that takes courage and vision.

Sometimes the Cold Burrito is an abandoned brand that was once popular, but suffered neglect following mass harvest. Sometimes it can be the shelved initiative that was once loved, but now the research says it’s not going to work, but you know the research is wrong. Sometimes it’s the blank page, the blue sky initiative that terrifies everyone, so they run to the latest brand extension of what’s working now—but not you! You know trying to put something where there is nothing is hugely risky, but with risk comes reward, so you put up your hand and say give me that Cold Burrito, even though it’s invisible and I can’t see it. I’m joining a team that is willing to invent it. If I fail I can live with that, but I would rather succeed trying the untried than live under the radar with tiny fragments of credit for the ordinary and easy.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, the company was moribund, the once great products were ordinary, the stock was in the toilet— but what he saw was the Cold Burrito, the goodwill in the Apple brand that needed an infusion of passion, detail, and excellence. When Michael Eisner came to Disney, the company was in the gun sights of arbitrage, long without a hit, the animators on pause—but what he saw was the Cold Burrito, the creative legacy of Walt ready to be introduced to a new generation of families with music, characters, and stories. The Variety Show on network TV was dead, then there was Dancing with the Stars and American Idol. Friendster stalled, then there was Facebook. A lot of music executives thought guitar bands were a passing fad, then came The Beatles.

Okay, those were ice-cold burritos in the hands of master chefs, but smaller examples are probably sitting on your desk right now. Or your neighbor’s desk. Can you see them? Are you looking? They may be old ideas made new, or new ideas unproven, but they are the opportunities conventional wisdom tells you to avoid at all costs. I say embrace them.

Carlin made us laugh because he saw what we all saw, but he observed something else, that when revealed, offered stark reflection within its silliness. Try the same thing in business, perhaps absent the silliness, though without taking yourself too seriously. We can all see the Cold Burrito for what it is, but only a few of us can see it for what it can be. Try risking that, and the results might be career changing, even life changing.

You want the Cold Burrito. It can be your ticket to the big time.

February 19, 2013 by Ken Goldstein - 5 Comments

Why I Love LinkedIn

LinkedIn recently celebrated a milestone, surpassing 200 million member accounts, which they announced earlier this year. Shortly after that announcement, I received an email from LinkedIn congratulating me on having one of the 1% most read profiles on their social network. For a moment I felt like a big part of the celebration, until I remembered that put me among two million others. Curiously, I seem to know most of them, who have not hesitated to share this bragging right. Apologies, I guess I just joined them!

But that’s not why I love LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn because they have created a fantastic online service. I love LinkedIn because they do clever marketing like telling me unprompted where my profile ranks, which makes me feel good about being part of their community. Last year they sent a similar email thanking me for being someone early to their party, signing up in their first year as an early adopter (I tend to do that sort of thing, but very few beta programs ever thank me, especially a decade later). I love LinkedIn because I am convinced that they are eating their own dogfood, which probably means most of their employees love LinkedIn more than I do.

Here are some other reasons, with numbering left open so I can add more things as I think of them, and you remind me of others:

1) They are transparent. They say what they do, and don’t cause you to think otherwise. Your data is being mined by people you want to mine it for the reasons you want it mined. If you don’t want it mined, you don’t post it.

2) They provide a valuable service that brings me business. It’s my network, I built it. They facilitated my actions. I have hired talent off the site, my former head of Human Resources has used it to identify candidates for open positions, and I have been sourced for consulting work as well as investment opportunities, almost always by people I know and with whom I can quickly build trust. It works.

3) They don’t violate my privacy and I understand their privacy controls. They tell me clearly what they are doing with the information I give them and let me easily block what I don’t want to share either through menus or suppression. I know what I get myself into at all times and I am cool with that.

4) Their ads are relevant and not intrusive. They don’t get in my way. They don’t annoy me. I would advertise here if I had a product or service relevant to segments of the network.

5) I don’t currently subscribe to their premium service, but I might. The price is reasonable for what it offers. The rest is free, and I like that a lot, especially because they respect me in spite of my free use. I am part of the ecosystem and their multiple revenue streams. They don’t discriminate and treat me worse than a paid member because they need all of us active and happy.

6) The site helps me teach recent graduates how to think about presenting themselves and creating a resume. Come to think of it, it helps me do that for people with thirtysomething years of experience. Focus is good.

7) The site forces me to think about keywords that matter to me, which forces me to think about the science of keywords, which is the backbone of internet search.

8) It has been an awesome vehicle for growing my blog. I suspect the same will be true when it is time to release my book.

9) The community self polices. Just try posting something polemic on LinkedIn. The community will remind you this is a place for business, not politics. In fact the community is so dynamic on LinkedIn, it makes the whole thing work, a place of relevancy for smart articles, worthwhile referrals, and relevant personal milestones that matter to readers as much as writers.

10) It is more of a cable channel than a broadcast mishmash. I find useful, targeted business information posted by individuals in my network every day. The weekly email summaries use well-designed filters to point me to posts that interest me. The group subscriptions are equally helpful, and can be personalized for volume.

11) The software is robust. It is solid on all my systems and browsers. It is not an open platform which makes their life easier, but because it doesn’t need to support so many third-party APIs it remains remarkably stable. The mobile app is intuitive and efficient, especially handy on iPad.

12) I am not overwhelmed by the time commitment to get value from LinkedIn. I can use it, not use it, come, go, whatever, and it is always there for me. It takes the right amount of time to be useful, and is seldom a frivolous waste of time. It lets people stay active and visible even when they are busy and engaged, so opportunities don’t slip by because of timing or assumptions. Again, I think a lot of this has to do with the community self-policing. It’s a big enough network to have boundless value, but not overcrowded with unnecessary distractions.

Yeah, bravo!

Why did I write this post about LinkedIn? Because since the holiday season, I have been overwhelmed by all the online and mobile brands I don’t love, I’m not even sure I like, and some I have simply abandoned. While that was going on, I longed to present a model of a brand that was getting better in spite of its success. During that same period, my network on LinkedIn led to a whole batch of advantageous stuff, not just for me, but for a lot of people I know. I don’t think it is a coincidence. Good brands are created when good people create and embrace good products.

People, Products, Profits—in that order. The formula still works, at least for me.

I write this entirely unsolicited endorsement for LinkedIn freely and without interest. I don’t currently own the stock, nor do I have an opinion about its valuation. This is about loving the company and its product, not the equity. I don’t know if you can love a stock, because your motives are pretty limited, but I do know you can love a product, a brand, even a company. Hopefully they will love me back and this relationship can continue for a spell.

If you know someone who for some reason has not yet thought it worthwhile to be on LinkedIn, feel free to pass along this post. LinkedIn is a good place to do business, with a solid team running the show.

January 14, 2013 by Ken Goldstein - 4 Comments

Too Busy To Save Your Company

One of my final posts of 2012 memorialized the brands we lost last year, and inspired the question, how do so many companies so often and so badly miss the boat? It’s even more perplexing when they know where it’s docked, what time it leaves, and who the captain of that departing ship is. Seems they are just too busy to make their way to the boarding gate.

Yep, you could have found your way out, met the challenge of Creative Destruction, and banked the opportunity by reallocating resources from historic enterprises to future growth, but you didn’t. How does that keep happening?

In a recent Wall Street Journal profile, longtime media executive Strauss Zelnick, who has worked his way through several platform shifts, summarized it perfectly:

One of the problems with some of the diversified media conglomerates is you get the benefit of the cash flow of legacy assets and the burden of owning legacy assets. You own a motion-picture company and you should be thinking about what digital technology will do to your business. But when you wake up in the morning you’ve got to be on the phone with the folks in your studio, talking about a $200 million picture that’s going to cost $300 million and the star who’s not showing up at work and the marketing plan that’s going to cost you $100 million world-wide.

When someone says to you, “I think you should meet with this guy, he’s 26 years old, he graduated from MIT, he’s in Brooklyn doing a really interesting social media startup,” you say, “It does sound interesting but I’m too busy to do that.”

That happens a lot, way too often. People are so busy in their jobs, ensconced in the past, they have no time to breathe the future. Then the future becomes the present, and it’s too late.

Busy, busy, busy. But is busy the same as productive? Not quite. Sometimes, not at all. Companies intend to keep you busy. If you aren’t busy, or if you at least don’t look busy, you’re probably at risk. But do you add real value, especially in light of constant change?

How we prioritize our time says a great deal about what we value. In leadership positions, we have to manage available time carefully, our “to-do” lists are rewritten each day, week, month, and year as a series of choices. In the simplest examples, we have to decide which emails and calls to answer, which reports to read, which employees and customers to see. On a more grand scale, we have to develop a strategic plan and manage the component tactics that are meant to create value for all stakeholders in that plan.

We have an awful lot of choices to make short-term and long-term. There are things we can change and some we cannot. One thing human beings have yet to do is create more time on the clock. We think we do this by multi-tasking (or foregoing sleep, family, and fun), but we are just borrowing against a fixed asset. The choices we make about priorities have much more impact on the far-ranging output of our ventures than any hour we steal back, the memo we draft during the meeting we’ve decided we can ignore while sitting in it.

Which brings us back to the most important question—are we not only busy, but productive? Are the choices we are making that comprise that busy state truly adding value commensurate with our position and expectation? Surely meeting with every young entrepreneur or technologist who fires off a business plan would be impractical, in fact irresponsible! Think of all the wasted time given the low the hit rate for unproven initiatives. Many executives choose to delegate this kind of responsibility to a new box on the org chart—for a while it was vogue to have a Chief Innovation Officer. I was sourced on what I thought of that several times over the past few years, to which I replied, isn’t the CEO always the Chief Innovation Officer? And if she or he is, doesn’t everyone on the leader’s team, up and down the line, know immediately they are a de facto part of the solution by virtue of the reporting structure? Remember the old maxim—what my boss finds interesting, I find fascinating.

Carving out discretionary time might be the most important thing an executive can do—thinking time, learning time, creative time—and yet, where does it get prioritized? Too often somewhere between doing an expense report and tidying up your desk, after hours when you’re exhausted. What if you scheduled an hour at the beginning of each day specifically for exploratory purpose? Or if not at the beginning of the day, as a respite sometime during the day? You could block it on your calendar like an appointment with your boss, inviolable, as important as anything else you are doing. You could make it clear to those around you that you want them to help you fill that hour with introductions to out-of-the-ordinary people, invitations to exhibits, maybe just an obscure white paper on a tangential topic. Your hour could then become their hour, and the exploration could cascade. Would you catch every single opportunity that might have eluded you? Doubtful. But would you instill a culture of openness where meaningful resources were clearly dedicated to the unknown? It couldn’t hurt.

Just walking that walk, talking often about your natural curiosity, leading by example to set the tone for the mandate and institutional respect of creativity, yeah, I think that would help. There is a good deal of room between having to ingest every new idea that comes your way and fully delegating innovation to an isolated “special projects” department. Balance in leadership is critical, making good on today’s commitments while preparing for tomorrow, and it would be hard to maintain respect in an organization for a boss who neglected contractual obligations that paid the bills to wander aimlessly in dreamland.

Clearly there is no textbook approach on getting this right or fewer companies would fail, but leaders who strive to find a workable balance between maintaining focus on existing lines of business while bridging access to the unknown—even if only by maintaining an honest open-door policy—seem to have a better shot at extended shelf life. Whenever I worked for someone who did this, who asked me to bring them interesting stuff to look at that may not have mattered to everything else we were doing, that made me think harder about everything we weren’t doing to deflect the attackers quietly sneaking up on our castle. It also led to a few projects over the years I never would have conceived could make a difference in our business.

Fostering a culture of openness is much more promising than insisting on a culture of busy-ness. And there you have it, that strange root word that compels us to activity often in abstraction of thought. We need both to survive, don’t you think? If you have a moment, get back to me on that—although I will understand if your dance card is full. In fact I expect just that.