But, is there a way to enliven this process?

I’m not talking about team building exercises or issues meetings. I’m thinking about how we can enhance the information flow (both ways) so that the employee’s (work) life is better _and_ the company’s operations are improved.

Primitve examples of this sort of communication are sales force automation (SFA), customer relationship management (CRM), and (typically executive) dashboards. All these tools are slowly migrating across the enterprise as ways of sharing information. But, even if these tools were perfected and fully adopted (we’re not in danger of either of these events), I don’t think we’d have 10% of what’s needed to move operations to a new level.

In order to move operations to a new level, we need a dynamically adaptive communication system. Something like a _semantic intranet_. We have just in time, just in place logistics, why don’t we have that in information flow? And beyond mere delivery, why don’t we have just in time conversations? And just in time meetings?

Many of the barriers to this sort of thing are cultural. Many people dislike or even resist change.

There are also technology challenges. Implementing tools like this oftern require upgrading your infrastructure as well as your staff.

But, someone in your market isn’t resisting. Someone is adopting these tools and thus is outpacing you. And so this isn’t optional, if you want to not just survive but thrive in your market. Creating a free-flowing information infrastructure is the first step to exponential growth.

In addition, without a full understanding of these two things, it’s hard to connect them. As we all know, strategies are all too often shelved or ineffective. And tactics are all too often directionless. That is, strategies are often empty and tactics are often blind.

In the end, not fully understanding what these things are and aren’t can easily result in wasted time and money as well as in frustration and indecision.

In this presentation, I will offer definitions of strategy and tactics. Based on this, I will discuss the features of good strategy and good tactics. And I will add to this a crucial missing element, often overlooked: measurement.

Every successful marketing project results in a tangible expression – that is, an item of communication. This piece of communication contains attractive design and well-articulated content. In other words, good marketing puts a company’s best foot forward.

The business benefits of this are obvious: increased leads, sales, clients, and so on. But, there is another key benefit. When members of the company see, read, and understand these materials, they start to see their own company in a new light. Creative, intelligent communications pieces speak well of the company to its own employees.

The more this happens, the more it can contribute to a positive transformation of the company’s culture. At its most extreme, this effect can help transform a company culture from being depressed and pessimistic about future growth to excited and motivated.

So, don’t forget the internal power of external communications. These side effects are real and powerful.

The Masters has been around since 1934, so it’s a longstanding brand with a cherished history. How do they (and Augusta National Golf Club, where the tournament is played) protect this history? By keeping the Masters brand pure — free from distractions or affiliations with any other brands that may not have as great a reputation.

At the tournament, the Masters brand is front and center. Every available food item is Masters-branded (see the photo of the Masters crackers). You can order cola (which happens to be Coca-Cola), sports drink (which happens to be Powerade), or peanut butter crackers (Lance crackers). There are very few sponsorships of any kind, and the ones that are there are done very tastefully. You won’t see anyone handing out samples of chewing gum or headache powder.

At the Masters, it’s all about the golf and the history of the game.

How does this relate to you? Be careful how you promote your brand. Be careful of affiliations with your brand. It may not be realistic to completely isolate your brand in the same way the Masters has done, but there is something to be learned about the care with which they have protected theirs.

If it is necessary to link away from your site, be sure to a) have the link open in a new window so that your site remains live in an open window and b) bury the link if possible. In many cases, if your primary source of content is another web source (such as a news posting site), you can adjust your site to pull the content into your Web pages without showing your valued visitors the exit door.

Unless you are just looking to generate traffic or become a link farm, take the necessary steps to avoid becoming a trampoline site.

We already covered 2 major reasons that communications work fails in execution: execution is deceptively complex and execution takes a long period of sustained work. This time, I’ll add a couple of more reasons.

3. Execution is practical. It takes real skills. By this, I mean that it’s very clear if the execution is working or not. The materials “look good”, or they don’t. They are well-designed, well-written, and well-conceived, or they are not. They speak for themselves, whether favorably or unfavorably. It’s its own expression.

Thus, execution is much more susceptible to criticism and judgment. And these evaluations are much clearer and easier.

I do mean to imply the converse. Strategy is hard to judge and evaluate. This is because the strategy is not objective or concrete. It only promises that. And, in some sense, the strategy can’t be judged before its execution anyway.

So, for these reasons, execution is hard to produce because the standards are implicitly higher than for strategy.

In some sense, strategy is easy to fake and execution is impossible to fake.

4. Another reason that execution is hard is that it doesn’t attract as much talent. For some reason, strategy is considered to be more challenging and much “cooler” than execution. Execution is looked down on as “beneath” strategy. For this reason, strategy attracts more senior talent than execution. Indeed, it’s often the case that, after a few years in the mines and trenches of execution, individuals can “graduate” to become strategists. This suggests that only at the strategic level is where the real work happens.

When the work is staffed like this, the already-difficult execution phase loses much of its guidance. Without seasoned, senior executors guiding the work, the work derails. I see this all the time where the “strategic” minds can’t be bothered helping with execution because they don’t consider it worth their time.

Conclusion

So, to sum up, execution is much harder than commonly conceived. There are many pitfalls between a well-conceived strategy and a well-executed communications program. Next time you start working on execution, don’t forget to give it the time, attention, supervision, and staffing it deserves.

Another person chimed in to the conversation and mentioned a competitive mechanic not two miles away that actually told them they didn’t need a repair that they went in for. And didn’t charge them anything for looking at the car and giving a diagnostic review.

This got me thinking about how agencies treat customers. Is your agency the type that will gladly take your money without analyzing the necessity of the project? Or, does your agency take the time to look at your situation and suggest a new, more effective solution, even if it means working on a less lucrative project?

A client-agency relationship should be about a long-term relationship, not about one-and-done projects. Sometimes, deadlines or compliance predicate a certain deliverable, but generally there is some room for exploring other options. Effective agencies will get “under the hood” and see how your marketing engine is running.

So, why is communications execution so difficult?

1. To start with, the execution is usually around 90% of the overall effort required. Strategy just doesn’t take as long. (Of course, there are exceptions—projects where the strategy is somehow over 50%—but I regard these as not just abnormal but as an abomination.) This means that the execution will require many more people, more skills, more planning, more direction, and more organization. The complexity of the work increases geometrically with additional resources and work streams. So, the execution part of the work can quickly become a great deal of inter-related parallel work, especially compared to the relative simplicity and linearly of the strategy. Thus, personnel that functioned perfectly well during the strategic phase might become overwhelmed and ineffective during execution.

2. Moreover, execution takes much more time (duration). Hopefully, the strategy gives good direction. But, over this extended time, there is a great deal of opportunity to forget the strategy entirely. This happens most commonly when an execution is based on a previous execution, rather than on the original strategy. In the diagram below, you can see how this should work.

There is always some variation in the execution. But, if you return to the strategic path before the next execution, you will come close to the planned result. If, on the other hand, you base the execution on the previous execution, this will happen.

Here, the result is far from what is desired and planned. The most common way this happens is that a new piece uses a previous piece for brand and communications guidelines. The natural variation in execution, then, means that the execution gradually “wanders” from the strategic path. The more time elapses, or the more pieces executed, the wider the strategy-reality gap widens.

The solution is to ensure that the project personnel in the execution phase are 1) well-versed in the strategy, 2) believe in the strategy, and 3) capable of managing the execution at the level required. To be sure, it’s often very difficult to find personnel like this. The strategic phase seems easier to staff, because the work product is documentation. In reality, the work is much harder, but almost no one is capable of judging whether a strategy is good. In the execution phase, deadlines are met or not, quality is high or not. It’s very easy for everyone to evaluate the success of the project leader.

Next time, we’ll look at 2 more reasons why executions fail.

To be sure, the communications strategy is often the greatest source of a client’s problems. Their strategy, if they have one, is often poorly targeted and poorly planned. This means that it will be double-difficult to achieve the goals.

Moreover, it seems that any good exercise will start with the strategy. Indeed, I have discussed this before under the topic of strategic execution.

In addition, strategy is often much easier to perform than execution. More specifically, I think it’s true that it’s easy to have an adequate strategy. But, it’s very hard to have a good strategy.

For these reasons and others, most clients want to start with strategy.

Yet, this isn’t the whole story. For one, don’t forget that strategy needs execution. No strategy can stand alone. It must always include some idea of its execution. This means that, at the very least, the execution has to be considered when planning the strategy.

If the execution is not considered, and planned for, the strategy will never be executed. And the execution is difficult. The execution is so difficult that it’s the primary reason that communications strategies fail.

For these reasons, I recommend that clients start with the execution. It seems counter-intuitive, but it leads to more success.

In the next post, we’ll look at some detailed reasons that communications execution fails. And in the post after that, we will consider what it means to start with execution.