Lisa: So, the Bears are one of the oldest teams in the league with the Green Bay Packers, and they pursue greatness. They have the best available incoming head coach to the league in Ben Johnson, who is this wunderkind in Minnesota, coming from another central division, rough and tumble, OG football in the mud, in the snow, in the rain, playing through everything in absolutely almost rugby-like conditions. And the appetite for complete revolution in the Midwest is not the same as it is out here in the Northwest, where it's, “Okay, let's do it. Let's completely change our enterprise and build a culture.”. This isn't about the players that they're signing, it's about the fact that everybody is attuned, the owner, the general manager, the head coach, who is the defensive coordinator, the new incoming offensive coordinator to say, “We're gonna build a new culture.”
And out of that culture will come belief, and out of belief will come energy, and out of energy will come the best in our players.
Michael: Yeah, it's amazing how many parallels there are with companies that we work with.
Lisa: Exactly the same.
Michael: Where you have this same kind of dynamic that managers and everyone within the company is tapping into. This is something you've been working with quite a bit in terms of values and purpose and how to uncover, it's not to create, but to really uncover an organization's idea of why it exists and what it's there to do. And then playing that back to the organization in a way that can foster that.
Maybe talk a little bit about that and our shared experiences doing this.
Lisa: I will start backwards. We've talked about how brand and the strategic investigation of a brand is really the core of what we do, and then that translates into writing. Playing that back from the other side. My trained background is in writing and literature and poetry.
And when you are creating the name of a company or you are creating the line of the purpose of a company, you are writing poetry. And what is poetry but the distillation of the deepest feeling into a few words that make you feel everything without even knowing why you feel it?
So when we do this work, some of the work is to meet in the middle where you're doing an unbelievably rigorous research project and then taking what you hear and turning that into language, which is shorter than a haiku, and playing that back to hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people, and finding out where you meet a common understanding, and then belief, and then energy, and then practice. And so, the work that we have done when we've come into these moments of transition in companies is to start with: what is the purpose of a company? What is your purpose and reason for being? Why do you exist?
It's really simple, but it really is a lyrical exercise. It’s about verse and chorus. It's about the refrain of finding a language for something that is so deeply held that it holds emotion and connection and something, transcendent of simple strategic business language.
We take folks all the way back to the nucleus and start talking to as many people as will talk to us. We research the shit out of this stuff. We read every white paper. We look at every technological explanation of an innovation, for example, if we're working in med tech or biotech. We meet with leaders.
And the first step that's so rewarding is when you play findings back to an organization and they feel relieved that there's a real sense of a path forward that they couldn't see clearly. Wouldn't you say it's like the bush whacking that we do first to get to a set of brand ideas that resonate and feel coherent with what an organization is trying to do?
Michael: Absolutely. And there's this feeling that you're revealing something, right? And when you're playing back to an organization its story told in its own words and you see the light bulbs go off.
We heard it a couple weeks ago while we were presenting: "I feel seen right now," right? It's this idea that, okay, you've recognized something in us. It's not a surprise. It shouldn't be, and it can't really, it if it's gonna be successful, it can't be a surprise. It has to be something that people see, and they just start nodding because they recognize it immediately.
For us, brand strategy is business strategy, but it's not just strategy, right? It's not like we're coming in and just left braining the thing and being analytical. No, it's strategic because it's creative and it's creative because it's strategic. It's this total fusing of these modes that most people assume are always separate, right? I think we reject that dichotomy as being false. And we--
Lisa: --both!
Michael: We have to do both in order to do what we do.
Lisa: And to be effective. It's like asking the two hemispheres of a brain to not talk to each other. That doesn't make any sense to me, that you have your left brain and your right brain. Let's say your left brain is your analytic brain, and your right brain is the creative brain. We're sending stuff back and forth across the transom all the time. The brand is what sits as the container between those hemispheres that brings those elements together in a way that is meaningful to an organization. True, but then also resonant and expansive and emotional and true in the creative sense.It's very fun to get to do this work with organizations when they start to trust the process.
Michael: We were talking before about time of change and upheaval and everything else. And I want to turn to that because I think that a lot of the work that is exciting us now and is getting us focused is work that is about making a positive change and looking into the opportunities of a moment of intense, I won't say chaos, I'll say dynamism, but the opportunities that exist in that.
Lisa: What a great question. There's the practical question of what can brand do to be helpful? And then there's the philosophical question of why is this happening? Why have we been flung into this kind of endless oscillation. It's like we're just in the fan that's spinning around and trying to find any kind of way of getting some escape velocity and getting back to ground.
But I guess that's the answer to both, which is that there's a real grounding force to things that can hold steady and rich meaning at a time where meaning is not shared and being buffeted about. And anytime, whether you agree with the meaning or not, if meaning starts to cohere, then you have something grounded and solid to be able to practice or respond to.
And I think that's a real antidote to the vast amount of noise and the fast twitch attention that we're dealing with now. Nothing about the attentional society that we're in as very grounded. Wouldn't you say? And to create that kind of grounding and to think deeply and at length about things.
We talked before we got on this call about the fact that we were gonna have an extended conversation, and then have to cut it into tiny sound bites just to be able to dialogue with folks. I think that we're both somewhat defiant in wanting to understand those trends, but to beat back that which is so over-oscillating and dynamic that you can't get grounded in being able to put one foot in front of the other and know where you're going.
Michael: Selling is about the needs of the seller. Marketing is about the needs of the buyer. And true marketing is the creation of a customer. It's understanding, what are the problems? What are the challenges? What are the aspirations? What are the pain points that are out there that people have that can be addressed by a group of people? And I think we tend to think of that as being product development, not marketing, right? That's just the role. And marketers really are about selling, about creating messages that are gonna go out there to get someone to buy something that exists.
The work that we're doing is much more about activating a potential that's out there that is not yet realized. And that's the work that I want to be doing. And I know it's the work you want to be doing, and it's the work I think we need more and more of.
Lisa: Or I'd amend it to say, getting people to understand it when they're not at the brink. You know that this is purposeful work, not in any kind of a virtue signaling way. This literally is the work of finding purpose in what you do, no matter how much profitability comes from that. This is not about being a nonprofit or working only on sort of social issues or social impact. It's far from that. It is about using a sustainable sense of purpose to help make all the best decisions for a company to be able to grow, and last, and endure, and make positive change for its customers. Not sell them what they want to hear because there is a gap.
Michael: I don't think that our attentions have gotten shorter because humans have changed in some way from the ancient days where people could sit down and just read a book, or this is the way that people are being trained by a a world that has been funded by and built by digital advertising, right?
What I hope is true, is that people begin to demand something better than that. And I think that it will happen because I just don't think that this world where, as you said, fast twitch, attention switching is I don't think it's sustainable.
I think that it's making people unhappy, and I think that it's making people angry, and I think it's making people a bit depressed. And it's exhausting.
Lisa: Yeah. And it's polarizing, and there's no patience in it. We probably date ourselves when we're talking about this, but there is the pleasure of an unfolding and being patient in that process. I know this is in your brand work, going all the way back to the beginning. I'm telling the story around the campfire and we're all hanging out listening to the story unfold. And I think one of the benefits of the time that we're in and the work that we do is that we are living in history unfolding right now. We're living in an age of phenomenal, incalculable innovation unfolding right now.
We don't have to rush to pretend that we can stick a label on that and market it because we have the customer base. It is sitting with that unfolding and helping companies execute, with patience, towards long-term goals that are good for what it is that they want to be making.
But if you think about value in the most abstract sense, value is meant to be additive, not subtractive. And another word for that is evolution.
So how do we add to be able to progress as a company, as a city, as a family, as a sports team, as a cuisine? How do we move forward and add to what we have been and become and learn? Versus, how do we pull back and contract and subtract? And I think there's a real interesting tension right now between the tendency to contract and subtract versus add and extend forward.
And any of the kind of work that we can do in these conversations, again, coming back to this toolkit that we use called “brand”. This gets philosophical really fast. But in a way that is appropriate to the sense of: if we're going to be economical, if we're going to make the right investment, if talent that's out there, that values itself and wants to come to my organization, needs to see itself reflected in what we value, then we have to be making things, whether they're messages or products or services or technologies that are adding something, not subtracting something.
The thing that sits between these two, revolution and evolution, is innovation. And, we had an experience with somebody that we were meeting with last week who talked about the fact that innovation is to make things better. Invention happens, it's awesome. We're in a period in history, which is full of actual invention of things that never existed before. But that's not really the human condition.
The human condition is about innovation. And I love and have played around with this language before to make things better, is to make things, to make the built world that we live in better than before. But it's also to make things better in the sense of, to make there be a sense of being that's better than we had before.
And that's very interesting to the human imagination. Innovation is tolerable and desirable and attractive and valued. Revolution is violent, by nature and not the way that nature works.
Michael: Lisa, thank you so much. This has been a ton of fun. We've been waiting to do this now for a couple of months. So it's great to finally do it.
And thank you for everything that you've shared ,and all of your insights.
Lisa: It's a total pleasure. It's really fun to record one of these conversations that, in all honesty, we have all the time anyway.
Michael: True.
Lisa: See each other soon. Take care.
Michael: Okay.
Lisa: Bye.
Michael: Bye.
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