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The Culture of Asymmetric Marketing:
Enabling Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) through ‘Culture Management Systems’
Joseph E. Bentzel, Founder
Asymmetri Inc.
Self Organizing as a Values Component of MMBV
Not surprisingly, many tech companies that have non-sober, capital-dependent marketing and sales organizations and cultures that have difficulty ‘getting real’ are also highly ‘stovepiped’ or ‘siloed’ and culturally dysfunctional relative to facilitating ‘self-organizing’ activity. In other words, they are bureaucratic, not run like a highly mindful, high reliability organization. Embedding and fostering an attitude ‘self-organizing’ as a values component is the best way to limit the negative effects of bureaucracy while preparing for the on-again/off-again market uncertainty and competitive challenges of the sandstorm.
Bureaucracy to Special Operations Teams
Remember the sophomoric but hilarious 80’s comedy Stripes, starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. In the film, 2 cultural misfits join the army in order get some self-discipline. While undergoing basic training their platoon leader, the grizzly Sergeant Hulka, gets injured leaving them leaderless. But Bill Murray and buddy Harold Ramis end up actually saving the platoon by ‘self-organizing’ and training their unit for their final bootcamp graduation drill. They are then promoted to a secret special ops unit and end up rescuing their comrades from some Iron curtain era bad guys. The whole movie is basically about how the discipline of getting real transforms itself into the discipline of self-organizing under external threat.
Since the advent of the war on terror and it’s high media visibility many ordinary citizens have become more aware of the concept of ‘special operations’ forces, i.e., teams of specialists from different branches of the military that come together to address the special conditions of modern asymmetric warfare against open societies like the U.S. and other western democracies. Marketing professionals serious about applying these lessons to the challenge of cultural transformation ought to visit specialoperations.com, a website that provides insight on the basic ideas of military special ops. In an essay on the website, General Peter Schoomaker outlines many of the basic concepts that should resonate with asymmetric marketers. Concepts like the ‘warrior diplomat’ (somebody who can both strategize and execute), ‘joint interoperability’ (busting up the silo monopoly with new ‘task force’ forms of organization), surprise (even in an atmosphere of congressional ‘transparency’), information warfare (both truth and disinformation), and psychological warfare or Psyops are all included in the special ops bag of tricks. One of the things Schoomaker writes that literally jumped off the page was: “We must also have the intellectual agility to conceptualize creative, useful solutions to ambiguous problems and provide a coherent set of choices to the supported CinC (commander in chief) or joint force commander---more often like Sun Tzu, less like Clausewitz. This means training and educating people how to think, not just what to think. “
This same insight can be used to build special-ops-type asymmetric marketing culture at your company. Special ops culture has blossomed and come into it’s own in the context of the post cold war period where asymmetric threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction, terrorists and rogue nations challenge the safety of free peoples. Today, many technology companies are facing Weapons of Market Destruction from larger, stronger competitors and from the change in IT buying habits. Self-organizing cultures supported by culture management systems is one way to meet these challenges.
4 Elements of Self-organizing Culture
To be effective in the ongoing uncertainty of the new IT reality, businesses need to function less and less in corporate bureaucratic models and more in what I call the self-organizing or special ops cultural model. In my consulting practice I have seen 4 key distinctions between traditional stovepiped sales and marketing culture and a culture that values self-organizing. They are:
1. In the traditional corporate organizational model, a leader is primarily a manager, whereas self-organizing cultural leadership sees the leader as a ‘doer’ with rich reputation equity. Bill Gates organizational shift from his old role as COO to his current role as Chief Software Architect is an example of an organizational decision that re-enforces the asymmetric culture of doer leadership at Microsoft. Keep in mind that Gates decided to make this shift at a time when the company was betting the future on its Dot Net and web services initiatives, and was embroiled in the Department of Justice court actions. The leader as high reputation doer is the best cultural insurance policy against uncertainty an organization can have. It provides a role model artifact that is powerful and drives imitation of the best kind.
2. Bureaucratic organizational forms assume that people can be reduced to interchangeable parts, a mechanical model, whereas self-organizing units practice a more organic model and have a higher percentage of non-interchangeable parts, i.e. key people with reputation equity who are relied on in both good times and bad to add value to the culture and provide direction. Much of the sandstorm-broken organizational machinery inside marketing and sales departments is based on the assumption that restructuring is restructuring and people are people. This belief has a high price attached to it. In my consulting practice, I’ve noticed that much of the overspending and duplication of efforts that widens the marketing and sales culture gap is directly related to the downsizing or elimination of individuals who were true non-interchangeable parts, i.e. culturally key people who may have been seen as outside the norm and were forced out during episodes of cost cutting.
3. In a culture of self-organizing, relevant experience matters more than title. This is something everyone should have become painfully aware of during the tech meltdown when hundreds upon hundreds of companies run by wet-behind-the-ear, just-out-of b-school CEOs simply self-destructed while the CEOs continued their college education on the investors’ nickel. And as anyone who has been around the tech industry for a long time knows, experience with failure is just as important (if not more so) as experience with success. Relevant experience with market downturns and periods of uncertainty is highly valuable and produces higher levels of market mindfulness inside a sales and marketing culture.
4. Corporations draw up abstract, committee-driven Values Statements whereas many self-organizing groups rely on cultural traditions passed down by word of mouth (mythmaking) over the course of the company’s history. This allows an organization or company to become a self-organizing system that self-directs and self-corrects based on the traditions of prior campaigns and business victories/defeats, not abstraction or political correctness. The right traditions can keep groups of highly inexperienced people on track and serve as a ‘constitution’ or set of rules about how to make rules, to borrow a term from Clay Shirky, a long time observer of the group effects of social software-enabled self-organizing. This truth has been known to self-organizing groups for many decades. Look at the 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous as an example. They are ‘group guidelines’ that keep thousands of addicts and alcoholics culturally united in the face of constant personal obstacles to living a new life free from addiction.
Here’s an example of word-of-mouth tradition Microsoft style. Over 10 years ago, a mentor of mine, a CEO of the US branch of an Asian PC OEM told me this story. My mentor was a true sales and marketing warrior so to this day I don’t know whether the story is true or was simply designed as mythmaking to motivate me. It goes like this. Long long ago in a PC industry far far away (i.e. before he became the most powerful software guy in the world) Bill Gates used to make regular visits to the office of the President of a major PC retail chain (who shall remain nameless) Apparently the retail chain guy, who resented the must-have, natural monopoly nature of Microsoft’s operating system, used to schedule Mr. Gates in at 9AM and then make him wait in the reception area all day, until at least 5 PM. In the meantime, the CEOs of other PC software companies (Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, Borland, Corel) would be ushered past Mr. Gates into the office of the retail president to conduct their business. This would go on all day long until the retail CEO thought he had made his point. According to my mentor, this systematic ‘dissing’ (disrespecting for the rest of us) had the exact opposite effect and helped to bestow on Mr. Gates an iron-willed competitive personality and a steely resolve to rise to the very top of the PC software business. The point here is that true or not true, traditions-based cultures produce this type of word-of-mouth legend.
Additional Benefits of Self-Organizing as a Cultural Value
There are also some not so obvious benefits to taking the time and effort, and following through on the commitment to building a marketing culture that fosters self-organizing. Here’s a few.
- Crisis Response: In the sandstorm economy, crises can come out of nowhere. Cultural conditioning becomes the foundation for how quickly and effectively you respond to the crisis. In the new uncertainty of the war on terror, crisis response is probably going to become a core competency of healthy marketing organizations as it is for IT organizations responsible for business continuity. Fostering a culture of self-organizing is like having a crisis ‘immune system’ that can automatically react to crises.
- Strong Reputation Equity: Organizational culture is the foundation for reputation in the marketplace. And reputation equity is becoming the key ingredient in brand equity. Market leaders Intuit and Yahoo call it branding from the ‘inside out’. For example, try to imagine eBay without its reputation management system for the millions of participants who trade with each other having never met face-to-face. We’ve also seen the opposite, rapid loss of reputation equity tied to bureaucratic cultures that don’t get real and don’t foster self-organizing. The corporate accountability scandals rapidly imploded reputation equity at companies like Enron and Andersen resulting in a quantum loss of brand confidence and business failure. The cultures of those companies kept them from mounting countermeasures in time.
- Stealth: Asymmetric marketing teams practice stealth relative to competitors and customers. With a strong and healthy culture you can do this. Without one, loose lips sink marketing ships. Stealth often comes to the fore in an acquisition or merger situation. With a self-organizing culture that fosters doer leadership, the breakdown of silos, and reliance on its key people with high reputation equity, acquisitions are easier to negotiate and integrate, and people are more likely to succeed in executing them with stealth and speed.
Culture Management System Module 3: Self-organized Collaboration Space
So far I’ve discussed the first 2 modules of what I call a CMS or culture management system. The first module is a professionally conducted sales and marketing culture gap assessment to begin embedding sobriety into your organization. The second module is a community dialog platform based on social software that fosters a critical mass of mindfulness, conversational candor, get real thinking that teaches people how to think, and contributor reputation equity across the whole sales and marketing organization.
The 3rd module of your CMS, designed to foster self-organizing behaviors, is the use of online conferencing and real time collaboration tools to facilitate the discipline of internal market management. One way to enable a culture of self-organizing is to internally launch all your products and programs in a dress rehearsal or war games setting that unifies your community, surfaces objections, fosters creative dialog, and prepares people to swarm or mob around the real market-based launch events. These conferencing tools (e.g. Webex, MS PlaceWare, SocialText WorkSpace) are commonly used for regular customer contact and sales presentations but can also serve to be very effective in embedding a culture of self-organizing into your organization while breaking down silo behaviors. While marketing community applications like weblogs serve to align thinking across sales, marketing, service, etc., collaboration technologies like online conferencing serve to align go-to-market action. In focusing this technology internally you can begin to reinforce what I described above as 4 properties of self-organizing teams, i.e. doer leadership, unique people (armies of one with reputation equity), relevant experience, and word-of-mouth cultural traditions. Addressing the ‘internal market’ through war games and go-to-market rehearsals can accelerate the closing of the culture gap in your company by facilitating the emergence of real self-organizing teams who see themselves as ‘owning’ the shared challenges of sales and marketing.
About the Author: Joseph E. Bentzel is President of Asymmetri Incorporated, a marketing consultancy providing ‘asymmetric marketing’ services to high technology companies in the U.S and around the world.
Copyright 2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction with Author’s Permission.
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