authenticity | CorporateIntel

I try hard in this blog to leave out my personal politics, which isn’t all that hard to do since I consider the topic of business innovation and its various threads to be about as nonpartisan a subject as there should be. Business enterprise and creativity are as fundamental to a shared sense of values as I can imagine, and where we may often disagree on the “how” I hope we don’t much disagree on the “why.” Together we create our economy, our opportunities, and our experiment in progress called democracy. We argue as we should about issues of governance and legal particulars, but we should agree that following the law is our duty as much as evolving it with the times is our right.

What does all that have to do with the Presidential Debates? While I was watching the first of them this week, I saw as I often do a collection of ideas that can be applied to our business thinking, in complete abstraction of the of the candidates, what they said, or who won, if there is such a thing (anytime rigorous and important discussion is had in front of and with the people, the people win). Presidential Debates are anything but ordinary, like the Olympics we have to wait four years for the next staging, but other than reinforcing what we already believe or possibly swaying a swing voter, there seems a deeper construct evidenced and worth exploring.

During the first debate one of my friends on Facebook likened it to a supercharged job interview, where the applicants were down to the final two, and given the stakes forced to faceoff in front of a panel consisting of more than 65 million of their prospective employers. I liked that analogy a lot — I am not even sure it is an analogy — but I was thinking about the event a little differently. For some reason, the debate struck me as the ultimate competitive sales call, where rather than entering a prospective client’s office before or after your potential competitor, you had to handle the sales call in tandem. Many of us have been on more sales calls than we want to remember, but seldom have I heard people either leaving or entering the room thinking of the other guy as their opponent. Perhaps that is more the case than we think — if that were going through our minds, we might approach the business pitch a little differently.

What stood out for me in the debate was the immense amount of time both candidates invested in preparation for the 90 minutes they spent together in the public eye. That 90 minutes on the rarely shared dais probably felt like a lifetime to the candidates, or opponents, but once it was behind them, it probably felt like a millisecond. I am sure the time leading up to the debate never felt excessive, as every precious moment invested in preparation was clearly a tradeoff borrowed from some other critical activity. As they felt the pressure of the event nearing, those tradeoffs had to favor dedicated preparation pods over other pressing conflicts. Preparation time is always discretionary, but imagine procrastinating too long when you know in heart and mind that preparation is everything. Definitely reminds me of selling — if you aren’t prepared, you’re sunk, your client expects you to be prepared and has no reason to cut you any slack on a stumble.

Second to preparation, I was struck by its counterpart, the role of extemporaneous behavior, dancing in the moment, listening, reacting, evidencing spontaneity that reflected realtime analysis and response to the unexpected, to the extent anything said might be unexpected. You can rehearse a speech or pitch perfectly, and both candidates did for multiple segments, but how do you handle the moment when someone says something you believe to be wrong, untrue, or unsupported? I was wary going into the debate that both opponents had come with a quiver full of “zingers” to flick at the other, where I couldn’t imagine anything less dignified than a canned response played as in the moment. Luckily we were spared that disrespect, and I take it as a lesson. There is a huge difference between a heartfelt moment and a too cleverly scripted remark — no one wants to hear B material from an A level player. The balance of preparation and live playtime is the heart of sales as it was the heart of the debate. We can argue at will about who did it better, but in my mind I kept thinking how consistently hard this is to pull off, to balance preloaded preparation with inspired retort, the art of the pivot.

Holding the balance between preparation and extemporaneous response was the notion of authenticity. Each word a candidates says adds to an outcome, and as we all have so often experienced, style is content. Any debate coach or sales leader will tell you how you say something matters as much or more than what you say, and here again, you have to be careful at all moments under extreme pressure to keep your eyes on the prize. The presentation layer matters, its visceral nature reflects passion and deliberation, that which people remember more than words. Yet it can’t be an act, it has to be who you are. Surely you can say what you want, anything you want, and you can say it any way you want, but ultimately your goal is not to win the debate, it is to win the Presidency. Cut to the sales call; you need to make a good impression, often you think you need to say what the client wants to hear just to stay in the room, but after you leave the room those words and that style can haunt you. Are you being consistent with what you said before and what you intend to do after? Do people believe that is what you really mean? That is the authenticity of your belief set, it underlies every moment you are on your feet, and it matters.

Only in high school are the trophies handed out after the tournament. In most of life the true impact comes much later — which means that immediately following the debate is the regroup. What went right, wrong, better or worse than expected, and how will that be factored into your next encounter. High stakes exchanges often reward innovation and quick thinking, playing it safe is unlikely to impress, and taking the right risk at the right moment calculated on the spot can be what it takes to close the sale. These candidates still have time to course correct or double down on their strides, and in the same way, an account is seldom awarded after an early high stakes encounter. To internalize the impact of your efforts and incorporate that into a subsequent approach is to know you participated in the event rather than performed. The real prize can still be up for grabs, which takes you back to the process, the cycle — preparation, extemporaneous interaction, authenticity, and strategic evaluation to reposition.

Landing an account of any size will never be the same as a Presidential Debate, but maybe with President Obama and Governor Romney at the podium fixed in your mind, your next high pressured sales call might be a tiny bit better.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus was an early observer of the ever-occurring change in our universe. About the same time in the 5th Century BC, Parmenides pondered the notion of permanence, what we could presume in nature to be essential. Between the two of them, we have a thesis and an antithesis that have yet to reveal a synthesis beyond argument some 2500 years later. We see change all around us in almost unfathomable complexity, while we wonder what we can hold onto as firm. For me, it’s a good problem to have, as contemplation of the unsettled forces us to chew harder and argue better.

Then there are books.

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece with the header “Books That Are Never Done Being Written,” Nicholas Carr contemplates the far-ranging impact of digital distribution on long-established but fluid notions of traditional publishing:

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

The realization that books are no more permanent than this year’s understanding of medical treatment is hardly shocking. The very paradigm of printing on paper and binding a work has throughout its history adopted the notion of editions and revisions. Where would the school textbook industry be without an excuse to update a classroom volume rather than allow you to feel comfortable buying a dog-eared half price two-year old version? If we only needed one unabridged edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, think of how many academic preface summaries we would have been denied annotating discovered corrections in the core text.

Yet in the worlds of literature and even political theory, we do seem to maintain an expectation that the version we read of Charles Dickens or John Stuart Mill is largely the same as the draft the author called final. “A Tale of Two Cities” even when presented in its initial serialization was eventually finished, as was the essay “On Liberty,” and when we buy a copy of one of these today, either in paperback or download, we do believe in the authenticity of replication representing if not a fully steady state, a pretty firm slice of life. That is helpful not only in getting us all on the same page for discussion and critique; it also offers us grounding in history and social evolution, the ceaseless churn emerging from deliberately placed bricks in the wall.

I have a hard time thinking today is much different, and no matter the short attention span theater that victimizes so much of our patience, my sense is our books have never been more important — no matter the brevity of their life-cycle, no matter their imposed truncation or expansion, no matter their delivery format or storage means on a wooden shelf or cloud server. Our books will change as they must, but their timeliness and meditation as a collective might be the primary permanence we retain, even if it is more spiritual and metaphorical than natural or physical. The means of delivering the book does not define the book; it is largely irrelevant, a timely convenience worthy of disruption. The material of delivery is subordinated to the material of substance. It is the content that matters, not the media. The Platonic Form is the ideal, and that cannot be taken from us by technology.

However we acknowledge its consumption mechanism, the book as ideal is a bridge among scattered coordinates. We learn to read an organized set of drawn thoughts to see what is meant by change, and those who have the gift and discipline to construct a book add to the global library of permanence by carrying the torch that challenges all that came before. Historic observation is clear and consistent: the buildings decay, the land can be conquered and utilized anew after wars and governments are gone, but the ideas underlying arts remain for examination. The composed book is the codification of the idea however it is presented — that does not change.

My amazing wife, who is also an amazing teacher, enters her classroom on the first day with a simple statement:

“Our books are our treasures.”

Her specialty is English as a Second Language, and whether she is teaching adults or children, this mantra is always the same. Books are precious. If you look around our house, you might see why this is our chorus. Books are everywhere. That is what we want to be surrounded by. We also have a Kindle and an iPad. They are filled with books as well.

Another recent story in the Wall Street Journal discussed how the price of e-books was sometimes dropping below the price of “real” books, which I guess means paper books. To me, one is no less real than the other. The broader question is whether the great majority of people should still find the time for long-form written expression in a world cluttered with half-baked tidbit social media posts like this one. The answer has to be yes, because if we are going to allow character count to trump in-depth inquiry, we condemn our more severe concerns to being adequately addressed by less than substantial narrative. Our pace of change is only becoming more frantic, and the hope for some form of understandable permanence is all the more desirable in addressing unending anxieties. Committed writing and reading get us a good deal of the way there, because the acts of reading and writing might be one of the few forms of permanence we can share.

I say this as someone who just spent the better part of a year writing my first book, which is now in first draft and undergoing edit. I haven’t talked much about the book, and won’t until we get closer to publication, but let me say that whether anyone reads it or it sells a single copy, it will remain one of my proudest achievements. Right now it is a long book. It will get shorter to accommodate marketing concerns, but hopefully it will still be a substantial book. I couldn’t have said all I needed to say in a blog post or I would have. Believe me, I would have!

In our world of constant and increasing hyper flux, books can be thought of as a noble but flawed exercise in establishing some sense of the enduring. Now that digital publishing allows current authors easy access to further disturbing permanence, any foothold in establishing the concrete may remain even more illusive, but the stepping-stones of thought that bridge us from there to here can certainly maintain significance if we view thought as continuum, a timeline. In that regard, as a roadmap or even a set of breadcrumbs, books for me have never been more relevant, nor the mission of authors any less permanent. Some books are good and some are bad, some certainly more ephemeral than others, but the connectivity of books is ongoing. Apps or facings, that is as it should be, as long as I can read.

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