Digitalization is a subject that has now evolved far beyond the realm of the mechanical and ITC. Just as with the telephone in the early 20th century, it is stretching our understanding of how we live and work to the limit.  

I came across a really interesting article by McKinsey, titled “Why digital strategies fail". I wanted to share it with you because - as is often the case with this publisher - the piece is delicious food for thought and a great template for discussion. It's helpful to see it all lined up and written by people who are well known for their in-depth research capabilities.

The piece is quite the long read so, if you're pressed for time, I wrote up an executive summary for you:

Executive summary

I've highlighted the points that stood out to me most and that I believe are or should be the subject of strategic conversations in the finest boardrooms about digitalization and what it means for the future of their businesses.

It's hard to ignore that our world has already been altered by this new digital order. Think about how your smartphone increasingly runs your life and how it prompts your behavior.  However, despite the fact that these devices have only been around for just over a decade, it is quite surprising that many businesses still underestimate the potential of the access they provide for both sides. 

Another thing that stood out to me in the report is that while the cadence of evolution just keeps on accelerating, most businesses are still locked into strategy development processes that churn along on annual cycles.

In fact, according to McKinsey's study, only 8% of companies in the survey recently said that their current business model would remain economically viable if their industry keeps digitizing at its current course and speed!

In other words, most businesses know that they need to reinvent the way they run their businesses, but there’s an alarmingly low level of concern or urgency, despite the fact it isn't the first time this is happening: only 12% of the Fortune 500 companies have survived since 1955 thanks to the creative destruction that fuels prosperity

The article outlines 5 pitfalls that typically stand in the way of digitalization:  

Pitfall #1: Fuzzy definitions

Mackenzie reveals that when they talk with leaders about what they mean by ‘digitalization’, many still think it's all about an upgrade of IT systems and infrastructure. What is lacking is a more broad view of what digital really implies. It's about looking beyond the mechanics towards the more holistic impact digital has on the way we live and work. 

Then again, I guess what truly defines innovation is the willingness to explore the paths that lead out of difficult and challenging questions rather than obsessing about coming up with answers that feel more comfortable.

The article brings up an interesting example of the insurance industry where it will soon - if not already -  be entirely possible to directly connect to real-time information from automobiles and understand an individual's driving behavior. This data would allow insurance to price the risk associated with each driver automatically and more accurately. This could redefine the way insurance is sold. It might well result in a pay as you go coverage and eliminate many of today's intermediaries.

Pitfall #2: Misunderstanding the economics of digitalization

The focus here is on how digital is destroying economic rent, a traditional microeconomic concept that measures profit earned in excess of a company's cost of capital.

The point is that while before businesses would have an easier time predicting what the profitability would be of a certain product or service, today they are faced with an ongoing rebellion within existing earnings models. 

One of these major changes is an increasing shift towards digital unbundling which means that customers increasingly want to access only what they need when they need it. 

The main point of discussion around this pitfall is that executives need to learn quickly how to compete by creating value for nimble customers and keep some of it for themselves in a world with shrinking profit pool.

Digital is also driving us towards a winner takes all economy. Mckinsey suggests that there's a trend in place in which large incumbents that are ready to move and adapt to this new reality will only continue to get bigger. It also means that a company whose strategic goal is to maintain share relative to peers could be doomed unless that company is already the market leader.  So, unless you create your own different niche, the business will just gravitate towards the incumbent industry leaders. 

My own takeaway from this argument is that, as a market challenger, it matters more than ever to understand very well exactly who your customer is and the importance of making a choice and a commitment to who exactly you want to do business with. This is obviously a very uncomfortable place for many companies who are used to try to create messages that appeal to all.

McKinsey's research shows that things are turning sharply negative for the bottom three-quarters of companies while there is a notable increase in market share and profitability in the top quartile.  Not surprisingly, the research reveals that in digital scrums, the first movers and very fast followers gain a huge advantage over their competitors.  

One of the main reasons why this is happening is due to the fact that first movers and the fastest followers develop a learning advantage because they get to relentlessly test and learn from deploying early prototypes into segments of the market and then refine those results in real time.

To illustrate this idea, they use Tesla as an example of being a first mover in the electric vehicle industry. It once again offers a lesson in the cost of a wait-and-see posture because only four years ago, incumbent automakers could have bought Tesla for about $4 billion.  While nobody made that move, Tesla just sped ahead to redefine the electrical vehicles space. Since then, all the capital that companies poured into their own electric vehicle efforts over the past two years alone adds up to around US$ 20 billion on sensor technologies and research and development alone. 

Pitfall #3: Overlooking ecosystems,

There's obviously a need to understand new economic rules.  When you do so it will help you move ahead but only to a certain extent because digital means that strategies developed solely in the context of a company's industry are going to face severe challenges because a focus on keeping up with rivals is going to be increasingly perilous as a business strategy.

While it's already in full swing, industries will become entire ecosystems. We've seen how the tech giants have managed to build diversified hegemonies across a variety of industries, propelling them into the upper percentile of market capitalization. 

If you think back to your MBA strategy class 20 years ago, it would have seemed very difficult to defend the idea that you could build a competitor that offers the largest level of inventory, the fastest delivery time, the greatest customer experience and the lowest cost all at once. However, today it has become the norm and ecosystems economies have altered the fundamentals of supply and demand.

The best companies will have the skill to leverage artificial intelligence and other technologies such as virtual reality, 3D printing, and even blockchain to engineer exquisite levels of service and benefit from frictionless supply lines. 

McKinsey's research shows that an emerging set of digital ecosystems could account for more than $60 trillion in revenues by 2025. To put this in perspective that would be 30% of global corporate revenues of today!

The C-suite is going to need a wider lens when assessing competitors or partners because most of the time they wouldn't even know where to start looking for them. Today's competitor may turn out to be a partner or what they call a 'frenemy'. A failure to adjust strategic thinking to these new rules will mean that you will miss opportunities and be oblivious to potential threats.

The bad news is that traditional industry players have a far road ahead as McKinsey's research shows that only 3% of them have adopted an offensive platform strategy.

Pitfall #4: Over indexing on the usual suspects.

So most companies worry mostly about the threats posed by the new challengers that recently emerged from their 'garage origins'.  This group of digital natives gets most of the attention because they come with visibly disruptive and fresh innovative business models. 

The problem is that excessive focus on these usual suspects is dangerous because it takes the attention away from what incumbents may be up to behind the scenes. Their innovative initiatives, when unleashed, will play out on a scale that spells disruption with a capital 'D'. As the article says: 'Once an incumbent really gets going, that's when the wheels come off.'

McKinsey's research confirms that, on average, incumbents own around 20% market share on of digitizing markets. That is much more to work with than the typical 5% for digital natives at the gates.

A good example of a potentially disruptive move from a large incumbent in the financial services industry would be the switch to blockchain technology for mortgage approvals. Once it becomes fully functional, it could shrink the turnaround time for credit checks and approvals to only a fraction of what it is today. That would severely shake up an entire global industry.

Pitfall #5: Missing the duality of digital

The article states that the most common response to digital threats we encounter is the following: “If I’m going to be disrupted, then I need to create something completely new.” Understandably, that becomes the driving impetus for strategy. Yet for most companies, the pace of disruption is uneven, and they can’t just walk away from existing businesses. 

The duality is about striking the balance between digitalizing the current businesses while innovating with new models. Here's a two-by-two matrix featured in the article that plots the magnitude and pace of digital disruption:

So each company really has to calibrate or configure what their dual strategy is going to be. The competitive cost of moving too slowly can turn out to be expensive in loss of market share while a too aggressive digitalization may pose a cost in terms of loss of focus if the ability to execute becomes too much of a challenge. 

McKinsey reports that leaders tell them that their ability to execute their strategy—amid a welter of cultural cross-currents—is what they worry about most. So they struggle over where to deploy their focus and their resources. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that strategy and execution can no longer be tackled separately or compartmentalized. The pressures of digital mean that you need to adapt both simultaneously and iteratively to succeed.

The organizational implications are also profound as half the tasks that are performed by today's workforce may ultimately become obsolete as digital competition intensifies. New skills and analytics, design and technology must be acquired to step up the speed and the scale of the change. To make it all work, you're also going to need a more diverse set of digital product owners and agile-implementation guides. Then there are the ongoing questions of whether to separate efforts to digitize core operations from the more creative realm of digital innovation.

My own personal takeaways from the article:

There seems to be a sense of urgency amid top executives of large groups, but it rarely reaches the level of specificity or granularity needed to actually get to work and get it done.

What it probably all boils down to is that the right questions are not always being asked. This could be because executives don't really know what the right questions are in the first place or that an overly defensive attitude has turned the executive suite into a bunker rather than a laboratory.

The predators are all over the place. They will eventually force you out of the comfort of the lodge to venture deep into the wilderness. It helps to go out there prepared...

Provided that leaders understand what is at stake, finding the answers to these questions have now become their job description. Best of all, they don't need to come up with the answers themselves!

I read somewhere that Walt Disney had a wall where he would put up ideas, scripts and anything else he felt needed fresh input with the questions "How can we improve this?". Anybody in the organization was welcome to scribble their ideas on that wall. Apparently, some of the best ideas came from that place! I don't know if this story is actually true (I can't find anything about it online), but it is a wonderful idea, isn't it?

Innovation is usually seen as a threat. Change faces pushback. It triggers debates that consume unnecessary energy and motivation. But if you really want to give innovation a chance, you might want to turn it into an adventure people can be a part of. We all love adventures, that's why we read books, line up for movies and binge-watch TV shows.

Could it really be as simple as turning innovation into a story to get people to adopt the uncertainty as a thrilling adventure?  

If we get the script right, could it make resistance give way to the anticipation of 'what happens next?'

Could it be like that wall at Disney? 

This was my own summary of this thought-provoking article. If you have the time for a 20-30 minute read, I highly recommend it as time well invested.

Here's a link to the McKinsey article

Why?

Because it t forces you to see your business from the 'outside-in'!

A great website is the ultimate 'elevator pitch'. When people visit your website, they need to understand what you can do for them in a split second.

If the content on your site is all about you, nobody will care. Make it about what matters to your ideal customer's struggle and they might just hang around for a few minutes.

I often hear (B2B) businesses say "people only spend a few seconds on our website, so it can't really be that important" - for what it is worth, I used to believe this as well. It is a limiting belief that will cost you business. Accepting this belief is just like coping with the symptoms rather than dealing with the disease.

Most of the time, this attitude comes from the point of view that websites are mostly a web developers problem. "Make me a nice website and call me when it is done". Or even worse: you get inspiration from your competitor's websites and build something similar. In practice, that is what happens most of the time. You might have done this, I know I have...

By adhering to 'industry standards' you are failing to stand out. More strongly put: you risk blending in with the foliage of mediocrity!

I know this is obvious but, the easiest way to differentiate yourself from the competition is by being the unique version of your business or yourself. 

Simply put, your website is almost always the first impression people will get of your business, so I can't stress enough that you should obsess over what that experience will be like for your visitors.

You should consider your website as an asset, meaning that it should be put to work to provide a return on investment. If done right, your website should be a flawless business development machine that can help you engage with your visitors and initiate an ongoing relationship with them. 

Would it make sense to have a shop without a door? Of course not.

But that is exactly what most B2B websites are like. 

So why I am calling this a 'therapy'?  

Well, making a website that resonates with your ideal audience also means that you need to get clarity on who that audience exactly is and understand what they care about.

It is about clearly understanding what challenges they have and what kind of solutions they would value.

That in itself is an effort that will give you clarity about your business. It will force you to speak the customer's language instead of hiding behind corporate jargon and buzz words.

When you know what your customer needs, it becomes easy to talk about it. And once you trigger that special instant connection, your visitor will stick around for a while...  

Does your shop window have a door?
 

I know, this is not exactly a new idea...

But just beaming out slogans and sales messages will only add to the already deafening noise. That's advertising. Most people don't enjoy it.

This is where content marketing comes in - 'to provide valuable information that attracts and educates your ideal customer'. A wonderful idea! But how many special reports, white papers, reports, eBooks, and infographics can you handle?

Unfortunately, 'Content Marketing' is quickly becoming another kind of 'noise.

You will also often hear me say that businesses should think more like the entertainment industry does. The reason for this is because they already figured out a long time ago how to attract and keep an audience's attention.

Think about it: you probably feel too busy to get your work done but you willingly give up your valuable time to binge-watch your favorite TV show...

From a rational standpoint, this makes no sense because you get nothing in return from watching a show. Your time might be better spent getting some work out of the way! 

But the thing is that we are not rational. There's much research out there that says that only a tiny part of us is rational, I think the most common figure you will see is 7% - I didn't look it up, but that sounds about right from the top of my mind... Then again, even if we were more rational, say 10-20%, it wouldn't really change the argument very much, would it?

We are emotional creatures. For most of us, feelings trigger thoughts, not the other way around...

So the formula is actually quite simple: go and figure out how the entertainment industry gets people's ongoing attention and take what you learn back to your business communication... 

And you know what, that is actually really fun to do!

Let me show you an example of this in play. 

A couple of years ago, I helped produce an educational series about investing in diamonds. As you may know, it is an opaque and mysterious world, rooted in traditions and reserved for experts only. 

My client wanted to make it easier for people to understand diamonds as an asset class, so we set out to make our own little 'TV series'

Watch the pilot episode. We will take you on a covert visit to Antwerp's diamond district...

If you'd like to learn more about this fascinating world, you can sign up for the entire series on Rocks International's website.

You might come away knowing a lot more about diamonds while getting entertained :-)

What would your documentary look like?

I had an amazing job, a great boss who got out of the way to let me get on with growing the business. It took me all over the world and came with perks that simply couldn't value at the time. I guess that is why hitting the send button also felt very much like firing a torpedo into my defenseless career.

The thing is, I just had to do it. My mind was infected with an irresistible entrepreneurial desire. The mermaid had been calling for a while and I eventually broke loose from the ropes that tied me to the mast.

That was just over 10 years ago. Since then I've been involved in a number of new businesses. Some successful, many more never got off the ground. Regardless of the outcome, these experiences allowed me to learn things that I probably never would have picked up in the corporate world. 

Every venture started with a blank sheet, no resources, nobody to blame, no infrastructure, only the promise of hard work, bills you can't pay, perseverance and an uncharted growth trajectory. 

It stretched my creativity to levels I never knew existed. It challenged every thought and belief that I had come to accept during corporate life and it brought me back to understanding the essentials of what truly makes a great business.

So yes, the torpedo was a hit and the explosion was much bigger than I had expected!

The single most important thing that I learned from this journey was that, regardless of the industry or the size of the business, communicating with clarity is always more than half the battle. 

Only when a business has a relevant message that is proudly adopted by its own people and intuitively understood by its ideal clients, can it become a proposition that is difficult to ignore and resist. 

I've also come to believe that true innovation only becomes possible when it is presented as a compelling story that helps people adopt the uncertainty of transformation because the reasons, the stakes, and the benefits are easier to understand.

Today, the world is evolving faster than ever before. To stay in business you must constantly reinvent yourself to keep up with your clients and your competitors. This fast pace of change causes constant distraction and confusion, both internally and externally, about what the business exactly is and where it is going.

This is also why I have devoted the past five years to perfect the craft of helping businesses achieve clarity by finding that narrative that pulls its own people together and allows them to always understand why they are in business.

Is your business committed to ongoing innovation? 

Does it understand the strategic importance of having absolute clarity about whom you serve, why you serve them and what it will take to keep having the privilege of doing so? 

Did you see ‘Inception’? It’s that film by Christopher Nolan in which Leonardo di Caprio’ character plants ideas into other people’s minds while they are dreaming.

That movie blew me away! I lost count of how many times I’ve seen it, but I just can’t get enough of it. I think it might be my all-time favorite.

It literally stuck an idea into my head (pun totally intended) that changed everything about how I see business communication. Something just clicked in my mind. I had a big ‘aha moment’ and I was left with a clarity that I never had before about how we should be talking to our clients.

In the film, this idea of planting ideas in people’s head seems far-fetched, but when you think about it enough, you realize that it is not much more than a dramatization of something that is actually quite easy to do.

The problem is that most of us are stuck in an old paradigm. We are still mostly conditioned to the old way marketing was done: you create a product and then you put in front of people so often that they wind up succumbing to it. That is a costly and quite muscular way of getting your message out. It’s like drilling your message into people’s heads. It’s a game of force where the biggest marketing budgets win.

But there is a more subtle and elegant way of planting your message into people’s minds. It’s when your message becomes like a virus. Once it gets into your system, it is there to stay. This is when a message becomes an idea that is seamlessly adopted as your own. An idea that you will even defend and protect.

It turns out that there is an easy way to create this kind of inception….it’s called storytelling.
Think about this: When you read a good book or find yourself binge-watching a TV show, there is a good reason why you get so addicted to the story. This happens because before a plot unfolds on the page or the screen, it plays itself out in your head first!

Great storytellers understand this. They give you just enough information so you can fill in the blanks. They leave it up to you to connect the dots and as you construct possible outcomes, you adopt the story as your own.

Can you see how powerful this could be for your business?

Quick story first:

Back in the 90s, early on in my career, I spent a short while as a junior consultant.

I worked with this little firm in Portugal that helped businesses streamline their operations. I was on the team that went in to fix sales processes.

Our client, a local automobile distributor, had a number of underperforming dealerships. Our job was to find out what wasn't working. In one of them, located in Cascais, a prestigious coastal village near Lisbon, we discovered that even though the salespeople were taking all the credit for the already below-standard sales numbers, it turned out that - while they were out having coffee of playing tennis - it was the janitor who actually sold most of the cars!

It certainly wasn't her job, but when a customer walked into the dealership she usually was the only one around. Thankfully, she saw it as her duty to make the customers feel welcome, show them around and get the sales process started.

I moved on to another assignment, but I believe my colleagues eventually helped her become a sales director at the dealership :-)

The reason I bring this story up is to show you can find sales potential hidden in places you never thought of looking.

There is one place I know exactly where to look to find this hidden potential in more than 80% of businesses!

Interestingly, it isn't human. It never sleeps, doesn't need lunch or coffee breaks, it never ever takes a holiday, and it can be everywhere at once, non-stop. If utilized correctly, it is a force against which no human can compete!

Before you read on, watch this video. It is hilarious! (seriously, I can get enough of it!).
 

That secret salesperson is your website!

The reason I am sharing this video with you is because most business simply do not understand what their website can do for them!

One of the reasons why I am in business is because I am on a mission to help people understand that using your website as an alternative to a brochure is very much like using an iPad only as a chopping board for your kitchen!

Why do I say a "brochure' website? Think about this: what happens when someone gives you a brochure? Do you actually sit down and read it cover to cover or do you put aside for later consumption...'later' usually meaning 'never'?

Imagine you had a salesperson who would do nothing more than just hand out glossy, wordy brochures to your prospects only to walk away without even starting a dialogue nor asking for a business card.

Wouldn't that be weird?

Would you want to keep that person around as a salesperson?

What kind of a first impression would that make about your business?

You see, that is exactly what happens with a brochure-type website: people see it, they decide to come back later when they have more time but never do.

Let's face it: your website is usually the first impression your prospects get about who you are or what you do. It certainly is the first thing I do when I hear about a business and I bet the same is true for you.

Before the internet took over the world, your salespeople used to be the first contact your business had with its prospects. Today it is your website. So, shouldn't your website be more like a salesperson?

Here's a conversation that I've had more often than I want to remember

"We need to work on your website."

"Really? Why? We just had it re-done. Don't you like the way it looks?"

"Yes, it does look nice, but there is too much information on there"

"But we need to show visitors what we do right? They are typically only on there for a few seconds, so we need to make the most of it."

"The reason why they are only on there for a few seconds is precisely because there is too much information"

"Huh?"

"Yes, they run away from it because they don't know what to do when they are there...."

It's actually quite simple. We are human. We don't like to be confused. We love clarity. In fact, we kind of like to be told what to do. Don't believe me? Just bring this up with any serious marketer and you'll be amazed at how 'promptable' we really are.

Convincing people to think differently about their website is probably one of the most difficult things I do. Most of us are totally stuck when it comes to what the purpose of our website really should be.

To get more clarity on what our website can and should be doing for us, let's go back to basics for a moment:

So what does a great salesperson do when facing a prospect?

1. He or she makes a great introduction (elevator pitch) so the prospect wants to know more (anticipation).
2. There is an agreement to continue the conversation later on (exchange of business cards).
3. Then the salesperson starts qualifying the prospect through an ongoing dialogue (follow-up).

How can our website also be a great salesperson?

1. Its message provides clarity in a matter of seconds (elevator pitch). It makes the prospect curious to learn more (anticipation).
2. The prospect trades an email address for learning more (business card).
3. Then the salesperson starts qualifying the prospect through an ongoing dialogue (follow-up).

You see, it is pretty much the same thing, the only difference is that a salesperson is limited to doing this with one customer at a time while a website can do this with thousands of prospects at once, anywhere, anytime.

This is a tough act for humans to follow!

And yes I know, you may be thinking, but there is nothing like the human touch....

But frankly, I think that is just the fear inside of us talking. A lot of people automatically start hyperventilating as soon as they hear about sales automation, especially those who are so blinded by primal fear that they haven't opened up to understanding it.

It's a bit like all those people a century ago who thought that automobiles were the devil's work.

Relax! Sales automation is NOT about evil robots running off with your jobs. Rather, this is about using technology to leverage the sales effort.

Simply put, if set up correctly, this technology will bring in more leads than any human sales person ever could.
 

In this interview, JB talks about what prompted him to write #New Fund Order, and about fintech and AI.

A summary of some of JB’s comments:

–He wrote most of the first draft of #NFO in a single week of feverish activity.

–Running a fund is neither art nor science, it is “fuzzy logic” and plenty of subjective judgement. We are human beings trying to make money for other human beings and for ourselves in the process.

–Fund companies might actually be inhibiting fintech progress, or maybe not. They don’t seem to be so sure themselves.

–Smartphones, and the companies that produce them, bring more disruption potential to the financial services industry than people in the industry seem to realize.

Thank you for your time JB, it was a great pleasure to have you back!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life managing inventory levels for wholesale import companies and forecasting labor costs for national retail chains. Since 2006, he has been teaching professionals how to present themselves and their companies better. His clients work for companies like Citibank, Allianz, 3M, P&G, and Deloitte.

Visit his website at Doppler Comminications

JB has listened to thousands of fund pitches in his career. In fact, he’s such a wealth of information that we will bring him back for an encore presentation.

A major theme running through JB’s comments in this particular interview is the internal organizational tension between the marketing team and the individual portfolio managers, and what this tension causes and why it exists.

A summary of some of JB’s comments:

—The pitchbook is important, it has to match the flow and the personality of the fund manager. The buyer will know something is fishy if it doesn’t. However, in a meeting between the fund buyer and the fund manager, the fund buyer is primarily there to talk to the fund manager and see how he/she thinks, not to review the pitchbook. The fund company needs to remember that the pitchbook is there for the fund buyer’s meeting prep, not to rehash during the meeting.

—Product marketing teams are too often equipping the fund manager with what they think the fund buyer wants, not what the fund buyer actually wants.

—One of the main reasons for this disconnect (the one between what the marketing team thinks the buyer wants and what the buyer actually wants) is that the marketing team at many houses has become obsessed with the volume of the information it is providing. The marketing department has essentially become a publishing department.

—A fund manager’s rough edges are important. They are what cements the bond between the fund manager and the fund buyer. Those rough edges might make the marketing department cringe, but if they are all rubbed off, no bond will form.

Thank you for your time JB, it was a great pleasure. We look forward to having you back!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life managing inventory levels for wholesale import companies and forecasting labor costs for national retail chains. Since 2006, he has been teaching professionals how to present themselves and their companies better. His clients work for companies like Citibank, Allianz, 3M, P&G, and Deloitte.

Visit his website at Doppler Comminications

Ole mentioned a couple things in particular that caught our attention:

One is the importance of good old phone followup. Ole mentioned that Murano’s people spend a lot of time on the phone with allocators; he used a great phrase, saying that allocators are essentially “drinking from a firehose.” Simply sending them a couple emails and hoping they’ll notice you is a recipe for failure. It doesn’t matter how great your slide deck is — if they don’t know you, you’re just a drop in the ocean. Call them up and become real, even if you are thinking a call is a little too much, or are afraid you might do it wrong. Stay top of mind.

Another is that many managers don’t know who they’re competing against. A great Ole-ism: “If I had a dime for every time a manager said they are unique and they don’t compete with anyone, I’d be a very rich man.”

Ole knows quite well what goes on in the heads of allocators — he talks to a lot of them, just in the normal course of his business. An interesting point that he makes, and we here at Doppler have seen the same thing, is that fund managers tend to stress performance, but performance is only third or fourth on the list of what a good allocator is looking for. That point alone (it’s around minutes 15-17 of the podcast) makes the podcast a great listen.

There’s lots of other great stuff here too. Thanks Ole, it was a pleasure!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life managing inventory levels for wholesale import companies and forecasting labor costs for national retail chains. Since 2006, he has been teaching professionals how to present themselves and their companies better. His clients work for companies like Citibank, Allianz, 3M, P&G, and Deloitte.

Visit his website at Doppler Comminications

Full transcript

Matt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons Learned podcast. Our hosts are Matt Krause, that’s me, and Baldwin Berges.

Baldwin:
Hello there.

Matt:
And, our guest today is Ole Rollag of Murano. Ole, can you introduce yourself a little bit, and tell us what you do, and who you do it for?

Ole:
Sure. Well, thank you very much for inviting me to be on the podcast. Like Matt said, my name’s Ole Rollag. I am the founder and managing principal of a company called Murano which is basically placed to go right up against that third party marketing model.

What Murano is, is essentially a matchmaking service. We don’t sell funds, you don’t say the name of the funds, we don’t get paid off the back when they sell. All we’re doing is listening to the allocators and finding out what they’re looking for and if we have a fund manager that fits within that profile, and there’s no deal breakers, we’ll have that manager get in touch with the allocator so they can start a relationship.

Baldwin:
I remember when I first met you, this has got to be about 10 years ago now, I think it was in 2007 or 2008, right? At the time, I was also setting up an investment boutique focused on exotic markets in Africa and the Middle East. And someone told us, or told me at least, you’ve got to talk to Ole Rollag. I was really having a hard time trying to get attention to that business in the beginning and all that, and so we met.

I remember we met in the city of London, and I remember we had this fascinating conversation about where you had this other way from the traditional third party marketing solution. Because as a fund manager myself, I was kind of nervous about paying away retainers to the wrong people because I’ve made that mistake before, basically getting on to their roster where they’re then struggling to divide time to the managers and don’t actually have the confidence of the final investor and most of the time it went nowhere. It was really exciting to hear you say, like, no, no, look, there’s another way.

A good place to start is maybe, what’s wrong with this third party marketing model, and because since 10 years, you have worked with thousands of managers, you’ve listened to them, and you’ve also seen all the mistakes that the managers have made. We can have a pretty long conversation, but what stands out most for you?

Ole:

It’s funny, because you know, when you think about it, I was one of those managers as well. And I think when we met, I was just kind of wrapping up this idea of a long volatility fund.

You remember in 2008 it was a really tough time. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anybody who actually kept their jobs within that period. I think everybody had to switch or move on, and I made a very good decision and a very poor decision, because an event driven long volatility fund in 2007 would have been the fund to invest in, but the timing of the business was wrong. So, Ole Rollag as a fund manager wasn’t going to happen in the near term.

Then, I don’t know if you remember, but it looked Armageddon. It looked like things were really just going to go to zero. One of the things that I really struggled with as an asset manager is of course, you know, I’m a genius right? (Laughter) People should invest in me because I’m really good at it. Most managers have this sort of [inaudible] where, if somebody has money, they should definitely allocate to you.

You’re very cognizant that when you’re starting a new business, the formula for success is AUM times management fee plus performance fee equals success. There’s no point being in the asset management business if you’re running a sub-scale fund. It’s just not worth the risk. So, we were doing management consulting and I sort of kept myself employed throughout the crisis, and then kind of came up with this idea of Murano because, you know of the many, many things that are very complicated in this industry, we find that getting that first meeting is probably the most costly and the most difficult. So, trying to find out ways for people to kind of work through that is sort of a major factor. And that’s why people go to conferences, and all that sort of stuff.

Baldwin:
And that’s an interesting point you just raised there, because from what I’ve seen in the industry is, there doesn’t seem to be this awareness of the cost per meeting, so asset managers from my experience don’t really think too much about, is it really worth me doing that trip to let’s say, Hong Kong, because actually I haven’t analyzed what the cost of client acquisition is. They’re kind of in the dark about that, aren’t they?

Ole:
Totally, and it’s extremely frustrating.

Baldwin:
Exactly. There’s no rationale behind it, right?

Ole:
Yeah, and then what I think the biggest or one of the big problems is that sales is relegated into a corner where it’s very much underappreciated in this industry. You think about any other business, any other listed company, what do we care about? We care about earnings growth. We care about sales. And business is sales. And that’s what is going to make you a success or a failure. And yet, we’re so isolated in this industry and then we have these sort of notions of, call them what you will, but this sort of inability to understand what the business is of asset management.

Baldwin:
So you put these parties together, you make a match, and then, have you over time now gotten also involved in coaching these guys on how to make the right impression to actually get the business, or has that become part of your proposition? Because you must have seen all sorts of things going wrong once that match was made.

Ole:
Yeah, yeah. Maybe it would be helpful just to give some scope of what the scale of the business is, and all this other sort of stuff. So right now, we’re just under 30 employees with offices in London and New York. The majority of these employees are calling allocators all day long. They make about 50 calls each. They get hold of about 10 allocators and if they can find one allocator that fits within the requirements of what one of managers are doing, then we write it up and asked the manager to contact this allocator.

We have just under, or just about 90 clients that range anywhere from tiny little funds all the way up to very, very large asset managers. Our largest client is just over a trillion dollars in AUM, and the way the service works, is it’s a pure informational service. Like I said before, we don’t represent anyone or shout any names out, or anything like that. So, there’s a big challenge, is that you can find the right investors, but if the clients are not using the service correctly, then they’re going to cancel the service. The service can be canceled within a quarter, so with three months’ time, and so we have to make sure that not only are we finding the right investors, but that we’re also, that our managers know how to contact these investors.

The biggest problem that we find, is that a lot of people hide behind e-mail. And if you want to start a relationship, you have to call. It’s funny, because these days we’re looking at algorithms, and the majority of our work is done on a computer and all this other sort of stuff. People have this natural tendency, or this need, to actually hear somebody else’s voice on the phone, and that’s my big intention.

Baldwin:
So you actually probably have then, evidence that allocators want to be called by the right people.

Ole:
Oh, yeah. When you think about it, how many e-mails do you receive a day? How many e-mails do you think an allocator receives a day.

Baldwin:
Oh, it’s ridiculous the amount. It must be amazing, yeah.

Ole:
It’s easily 200. I know one guy who has just three years in the business and he receives actually 2500 e-mails a day.

Matt:
Say that again, 2000 what?

Ole:
2500 e-mails a day.

Matt:
Wow.

Ole:
The read rate on e-mails we know is 5%. One thing that I always ask allocators is hey, how do you decide which e-mail to read, or which call to pick up? The basic response is, if I don’t who you are, I don’t read your mail.

Baldwin:
Of course, yeah. So the fund manager then has a limiting belief in his head, saying that the allocator actually does not want to be called, and that’s where this whole thing gets stuck, right?

Ole:
It’s rubbish. They have to be called. Also, you notice in your own personal lives, you get this e-mail from a conference organizer or somebody, and then it will say, come to this conference, and then they’ll respond to their own e-mail, saying hey, Ole, did you receive this? And it’s like, yeah (laughter), you know, this isn’t sincere. Because e-mails are free, they’re abused. It always goes back to the relationship. If I know who you are, you at least introduce me to your product, then we can chat.

The other problem that we’re seeing past the call is that oftentimes e-mails are too long, so you get the TL;DR, too long, didn’t read sort of thing. Managers need to know what their value proposition is. What’s incredible, is that people don’t know how they compete or why people allocate to them. Which to me, is crazy, right?

Baldwin:
Yeah, yeah. I know it’s striking actually to hear it, because it’s all metrics about performance. It’s all about basically, that they’re so good at segmenting information when it comes to the financial part, but when it comes to the commercial part, they actually haven’t even thought about it a second, about what makes them so unique.

Ole:
Yeah, and yet you’re dedicating millions of dollars to this business, and you don’t know how to segment or target yourself. Which is really funny, because it’s across different sort of things, so if you look at CTA managers, commodity trading advisors, [company name] and so on and so forth, they know the pecking order. They follow the rankings and they follow what’s going on, and they know, well you buy me because so and so doesn’t do this, or that, or the other thing. When you’re looking at most long-only managers or a lot of other managers, they do not know who they compete against.

If I had a dime for every time a manager said they’re unique and they don’t compete with anyone, I’d be a very rich man. (Laughter)

Baldwin:
So Ole, what can managers do to better understand … is it about better understanding … so with your services that you speak to allocators all the time, and so you make a map of what they’re looking for, what they want, what their preferences are? But, do you also help managers help find out what makes them so unique, or is that something that they just have to do by themselves, is that an exercise …

Ole:
Unfortunately, it’s a combination of the two. If you’re looking at big mistakes which there are many, I’ve learned … let me tell you a story. At one time, what we did was, we would help managers with their presentations. You know, get it to look pretty, make sure the messaging was efficient and clear, and all that sort of stuff. The one thing I learned, and I don’t know, Matt, if you’ve had that same experience or Baldwin but you know, you can only go so far with what the message is. Ultimately, the manager is going to have to do a lot of work because that is their job. But they don’t know how to a lot of times, and it’s not uncommon to be so close to your business that you don’t really, you can’t really see anything else except what’s five inches from you.

It’s a little bit funny, we’ve all had relationships and everything, and then whenever you go over a problem or something like that, you talk to a friend or significant other, and it’s like oh, well you should do this. Like, gee, I don’t know, and all this other stuff, and you kind of hesitate. But then you think about that a couple of weeks later or a month later, and you’re like, yeah they’re actually right. Why didn’t I just accept it.

It’s like that with a lot of managers. You can give them the tools, but also from what I said, they’re going to have to make the changes and you come and do all that tough work. It’s a little bit like, with consulting is never do something that cannot be sustainable and replicated in house. Because if you do something for people, they will never know how to recreate it.

Baldwin:
Yeah, that’s the fish, or learning to fish kind of analogy, right?

Ole:
Yeah.

Baldwin:
You have to be able to internalize it. You’ve spoken to so many allocators. I know you actually produce content about your interviews with them, I think you’re still doing that. What comes to mind as this recurring desire by fund allocators that they wish fund managers would behave better at or become better at? Is there something recurring?

Ole:
Yeah, but I think the biggest recurring … I would say there are two kinds of allocators. There’s the simplistic one who buys performance and then there’s the professional allocator, and I have to be very careful how I say this, but … the problem with allocating to third party funds is that there is no book that I’ve seen that tells you how to allocate to a third party fund manager. You can’t go to school, or there’s not an association, and so really it’s a craft.

When you’re coming into the profession of third party fund allocation, most of the people say, well, what’s performing, what’s not performing, and that’s the allocator who is down a very, very difficult road because what happens is that you’ll buy a high performing manager, all of the sudden they go into draw down, you’re unhappy that you lost money, you redeem from the fund and they go off to find the next best thing to replicate your mistake.

What really happens, you start to understand that performance is the product of a good process and a good edge. So a good allocator doesn’t look at performance right away. As a matter of fact it’s usually, what’s funny is this is actually sort of like across the board, performance is probably a third or fourth factor in the whole look and feel of the fund. It’s up to the allocator to understand under what conditions this manager will perform. Are the conditions right, or are they not right?

Also, understand what that edge is, what makes that manager different from everyone else. Just because of a manager’s underperforming an index, or peer group, or he’s outperforming the peer group, or his asset classes are not at the right time, there’s a whole bunch of different factors that you can’t discount as an investor.

I kind of go back to my grandfather. My grandfather was a veterinarian and when I was a kid, I didn’t really care about it. I thought, oh yeah, a veterinarian, cats and dogs, big deal. He doesn’t work on humans, he isn’t a brain surgeon. But actually, you think about it, a veterinarian is a tough job because animals don’t tell you where they hurt. And fund managers don’t tell you why they’re special. They don’t know, most of them don’t. It’s really a skill that an allocator has to get and it’s a thankless skill that they have to have.

Baldwin:
And is that across hierarchy, so even the principals struggle with this? You maybe attribute, maybe it’s lack of experience by the salespeople, or is it just across the company in general, when you see this?

Ole:
It’s usually, newer managers typically will suffer from this a lot. Smaller managers will. If you’re talking to like, a Blackrock, or a large asset manager, they know it exactly. They’ve got it down. There’s a reason why some of those guys are big. But it does seem to be across the board, and with allocators just as with fund managers, some are wiser than others, but that’s what makes this industry a little bit complex, is because you have different experience, different skill sets, and a lot of people haven’t made all those mistakes just yet.

Matt:
Could we back up to something you mentioned earlier? You mentioned the volume of e-mails they get, and a lot of the allocators won’t even talk to somebody who they don’t know personally. We run into a lot of clients who, they think that oh, we’ll take our prettied up slide deck and we’ll e-mail it off to a bunch of people that we don’t know, and our lives are going to change. Can you talk a little bit more as to why you see that as the wrong way to go about things, and what’s happening on the other end of this erroneous belief?

Ole:
Yeah, and essentially these, a lot of allocators are drinking from a fire hose when it comes to information. They just have too much of it, and also, it kind of falls flat. The bulk e-mailing thing doesn’t work, I know for a fact that doesn’t work. People just don’t rush out, and I think what people miss out on is this very intuitive nature of that actually, we are service providers. If I’m going to give somebody my money, I’ve got to trust them. It’s about a relationship. Can I trust you? And you’d be amazed how many fact sheets disappear when the performance is bad. And above all, if I have a manager that will not take my call if things are not going well, then they’re not going to do business with them.

It’s amazing just to go through this whole thing. Most businesses will map out their sales process. If you think about this, the only reason why you send an e-mail, or the only reason why you call is for them to read your e-mail, and the only reason why you want to read your e-mail is prompt them to open up the presentation of the fact sheet. The only reason why you have them read the fact sheet is so that you can get a meeting. The only reason why you want a meeting, is so you can follow up and get another one.

It’s not get an allocation, it is, what do I need to get out of these next steps, what do I need to get out of this call and all this other sort of stuff. Then the sales sort of tend to break down in so many areas, because, I can’t tell you how many times where we’re working with a fund manager, and they get a meeting, and they don’t follow up. And they say, well, if they’re interested they’ll give me a call.

Baldwin:
That one there, yeah, I think you’re right. That is the cardinal mistake that is always made, and it’s the easiest one to remedy.

Ole:
Why bother having me if you don’t follow up?

Baldwin:
I’m thinking there’s a lot of limiting beliefs in the heads of fund managers. I’ve had them too, as a fund manager. Obviously that’s why I think that’s why this one resonates so much with me, right? The limiting belief is that if I follow up too much I’m going to look desperate, which is, that one happens often. Also, the fact that you know, if you’re going to follow up you may actually blow it, because you’re going to follow up in a poor way and you actually may blow it.

But what they don’t understand, is like you said, 2500 e-mails every day, they probably have to make at least two or three meetings with people every day, you’re going to move into the background. It’s about staying top of mind. You’re doing them a service by doing that via e-mail is not going to help because there’s too many e-mails. You know, you’re doing them a service by staying top of mind because they’re only human, right?

Ole:
Yeah, no, absolutely and then it’s funny because a lot of people think sales is somebody showing up in a plaid suit and a suitcase selling vacuum cleaners or whatever, but at this level of the game, you’re not selling anything. You’re guiding people with what to do and helping manage their time.

One of the cardinal sins a lot of people suffer from is they will work so hard to get this meeting, and then they’ll go and rehash the presentation again. The allocator is there, he’s already gone through the presentation, he doesn’t want to go through it again if he’s doing his job. And also, if I have the manager in the meeting, I want to talk to the manager. I want to find out what makes him tick. I can read that presentation whenever I want to.

Baldwin:
But I think you’re bound to have read it, because you want to have that first impression. You want to see if you’re see if you’re dealing with somebody that you intuitively can already select as someone who’s material you’d be willing to read, right?

Ole:
Yeah, and you know, there’s a lot sort of … one of the biggest tricks because you kind fall into this fact sheet purgatory to where you know, oh well, we’ll put you on the distribution list and then people get the newsletters and that’s kind of it, is to structure the meetings in a way to where after this meeting we can do one of two things if you’d like to follow up. We can do x, y, or z, or we can do all three of them, and then sort of manage it that way. That way you follow up, you provide people with more information doing all that sort of stuff.

When you think about it, most of us need to be managed in some way. So the salesperson is basically managing you, handling you to make sure that you get enough information you need to have to know whether you’re going to do business or not.

Baldwin:
I’d like to ask you a question that’s always on my mind. I’m really curious of what you about it. Usually when you speak to an allocator or the designated person to listen to you as a fund manager, they’re a gate keeper. They are eventually going to have to convince other people around them. If it’s a private banker, it’s their clients. If it’s an institution, it’s the people at the investment committee. Generally there are always more stakeholders.

What in your opinion can fund managers do to really help the gate keeper do his job by making it easy for them to convince stakeholders if they’re convinced? Do you have any insights on that?

Ole:
The first thing that I would say from the very top is, there’s a reason why these gate keepers are there. I’m just going to back up for just a minute. If you think about it, if I hire an equities analyst and Baldwin, you come in with an equity fund and say hey, Ole, look at this, I’m going have to pass this straight down to my equities analyst and have him take a look at it. If it rises back up to the top, then that’s my job.

These gate keepers, you need to obviously have a tremendous amount of respect for these people, and also we need to help them do their job. If there is a report that needs to be written or whatever, oftentimes it doesn’t hurt to write those reports for them, to help them do their work.

The one thing that’s really funny, if you go outside of fund management and let’s say that you were a big consulting firm or whatever, and you’re describing the process. The work that you’ll take in order to get a proposal sent and all this other stuff, will be about a week sometimes, sometimes maybe even more. In asset management, we don’t do that. It’s like, here’s our presentation. You’ll get all the answers there. Here’s the DDQ.

You know you’re going to win the business if you’re the one who actually does a lot of the hard work for somebody, because they know that when they need you, you’ll be there, and you have your stuff and your house in order. It’s just amazing how sort of willy nilly we are in asset management about these sort of things. To put that into perspective, if you’re a 100 million dollar fund and you’re looking for, or let’s just say 500 million dollar fund, and you’re looking for a 50 million allocation, and you get 1% management fee, that contract’s worth half a million dollars of revenue for you. It’s worth your time. It’s worth your time to work hard.

Baldwin:
It’s almost worth establishing a team to devote its time entirely to that opportunity. It’s seen as a new division sometimes. (Laughs)

Ole:
One of our clients was based in Dallas, Texas. There’s a number of funds there, but typically if you ever want to allocate you have to travel down to Texas. They’re not right around the corner. They went through every single thing to figure out okay, well what is the best way, what is to happen here. So the investor would arrive into Dallas at whatever hotel. On the bed would be a number of files with a handwritten note saying, “Dear Baldwin, welcome to Dallas. We’re looking forward to seeing you at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, but just in case you’re eager, we thought you could use these due diligence files for your review and preparation.” Or, getting an idea of what your favorite food is. If you like pizza, or steak, or whatever, making sure that we have those things on hand. Mapping out that whole bit is what services should be like.

Baldwin:
Did I get this right? This is a fund manager who refuses to travel but wants the investor to come to Dallas, is that it?

Ole:
No, no. If an allocator is going to allocate them, they’ll have to come Dallas to do the due diligence on the manager.

Baldwin:
Oh, okay.

Ole:
So they would really map it out …

Baldwin:
That’s going to happen anyway, and what they do is they make that a special experience for the allocator, something that … what they’re doing is they’re absolutely convincing him that there’s a service level provision and …

Ole:
No, just think about it. Whenever you walk into an office there’s always a bit of standard where, you know, take your coats, would you like some water or coffee and all this other stuff. There’s a reason why we have these sort of things in place, is because we want our guests who are coming to our offices to feel comfortable. You need to think about that experience. These guys would go to the extreme of actually mapping out the whole day, or the whole two days or whatever time it took.

Baldwin:
That’s fascinating, because if by chance you have an allocator who is willing to abide by your plan then you’re playing in your home field twice, right? That’s the great thing.

Ole:
Yeah, well you just want to make sure that have people that are comfortable and happy and can trust you.

Baldwin:
That’s actually very easy to implement. Yeah, that’s a great takeaway.

Ole:
But it’s funny, because it’s even good with smells. What does the office smell like when somebody comes in. Does it smell good? Does it smell stale?

Baldwin:
And they will want to walk through the office, that’s for sure, if they’re doing their job. You have to make … that was a pet peeve of mine, when we got allocator visits.

Ole:
You don’t want to have a meeting just after somebody had a big curry. No matter how much we love curry.

Baldwin:
It smells like McDonald’s takeout. You don’t want that.

Ole:
There is so much detail to this and I’ve kind of learned throughout my experience that this is a real skill. Fund distribution is not an easy game. There’s so many parts.

Baldwin:
Something I fondly remember when I was also in London and we hung out a lot, when I’d come to your office, sometimes we did the box of presentations trick, right? You’d dump all these presentations on the floor and they’re all gray and blue, they all look the same, right? That was hilarious when we spoke to people. What should a good pitch book look like? Should you have a short first version and then a long DDQ type version? What have you learned over all these years about what a good pitch book looks like?

Ole:
I really think it is personal to everyone, but I think for me it’s under 20 pages. It tells me who these people are, which is extremely important, you know, who am I dealing with? And also don’t tell me about Apple or Google or whatever, that’s not what makes you different. Tell me what makes you different.

For example, one of these things that I always insist on whenever I see something is that you’d be amazed, I went through one time a pitch book that was 60 pages long and by the end of it, I didn’t know if it was an equity or a fixed income fund. I swear to God. I looked hard. You have the cover page. Second page, what am I looking at? What are the terms, i.e., can I invest in this? Is it the right legal structure? Is it the right liquidity? Is it the right size?

All these sort of things, and don’t lie to me. If you’re a small fund, tell me you’re a small fund. Give me the AUM. Don’t hide it from me. Then also things like phone numbers, giving contact. It’s not only in presentations, but also in e-mails. Do you know how many times you have to look for a phone number everywhere because somebody just doesn’t put it in their signature?

Baldwin:
Yeah, all the time. In this industry, all the time.

Matt:
Tell us about some more of the disqualifying factors, not having a phone number, and then Baldwin mentioned that a stack of anonymous slide decks was in blue and gray. What else do you see that, pet peeves that you have?

Ole:
Pet peeves. Um, ooh, there’s so many. The, ooh, I don’t want to tell you that information sort of thing.

Baldwin:
Oh, right, yeah, yeah. That’s a big one.

Ole:
It’s like, well then I can’t invest. So that one’s quite big. Also, people who aren’t being truthful about procedures. We know for example, that everything goes … any fund that’s out there, they’re going to have a drawn down, and it’s going to be a nightmare position. Tell me about what happens with a nightmare position. Tell me what you learned when you did that trade. Is there anybody there to take you out of it if you are emotionally attached to it? That sort of stuff, where people are very ambiguous about it. That’s very frustrating. If you look at the volume of funds, there’s about 14,000 hedge funds in this world. According to the ICI handbook, there are over 100,000 retail or mutual funds out there, 100,000 of them. There’s more equity funds than there are equities.

Baldwin:
I’ve never thought about this, you’re so right.

Ole:
You might be different, but you’re not that special. Be transparent. If it really is something that’s different and unique, then you should be paid for it. That really gets me irritated. Having information that’s not very clear is frustrating. Sometimes allocators mention, or managers will have opinions about macro when they’re actually more of a sector focus fund to where they’re really bottom up, but they’ll give you a top down overview. All these sort of things kind of waste time, and I think what’s really funny when you’re looking at pitch books, I don’t know about you guys, don’t tell me if I’m just sort of short term memory, but the first three or four slides are really the most important and the value of the slides starts to decrease the more I go through the presentation. I’ll tend to look at the first couple of slides in great detail, and then I’ll be yep, yep, yep, oh wait, okay, yep. Are you guys like that at all?

Matt:
I think that by the time you hit slide number five, the viewer’s attention is dropping precipitously, no matter how good the deck is.

Ole:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So what that means, I guess, is that you have to get everything that’s relevant within those four or five slides.

Baldwin:
What I like to look at when I put together presentations, I think of them as a storyboard for a play or for a story, because there’s got to be a reason why you want to flip the page. There’s always got to be a little bit of a storybook thing, but that’s just me, but yeah I think you’re right.

One of the things that I always find interesting, I’d like to also know what your opinion on it is. Maybe I’m a bit of an extremist in that sense, but I believe that anything that’s on a slide you should be able to internalize in a matter of three seconds, so that means there’s a lot more visuals and less text, and so that means that you can have somebody page through 50 slides without any effort at all, right? Is that something that would work in the investment world, you think? Or is that too weird.

Ole:
Yeah, but I would actually add to that, is don’t make people work for it. A lot of people will have these slides like this graph, and it’s supposed to be self explanatory. But just because you think you’re smart, doesn’t mean that you can guess everything and want to actually take the time and the brain power to get it. So, don’t make me guess. Just tell me what I’m looking at, or what your interpretation of this is. On the title, equity markets are going to go down, okay, and this is why.

Baldwin:
And this is the evidence, yeah right.

Ole:
Don’t make anyone work too hard.

Baldwin:
You know what, this has been amazing, Ole. Thanks for that. Matt, do you have anything else for Ole? Burning questions that you’re trying to extract from the genius?

Matt:
How do you feel, shall we wrap it up?

Baldwin:
Yeah, well, Ole, thanks a lot. Every time I speak to you, there’s more there. That’s been 10 years going and more. So, thanks again for making time. Keep up the good stuff, and I hope to see you very soon, my friend.

Matt:
Thank you very much for being with us.

Ole:
You’re welcome. It’s always a pleasure.

This is one of the top 5 fears or objections I get when I speak about becoming more visible online.

I have a peculiar view on this. It comes as a result of some thinking and mostly from experience:
You need to work on your customer relationships!

Remember this scene?

Personally, I believe if you are that worried about your competitors it means that you haven’t done enough to build strong relationships with your customers. Apart from offering massive value, this is the only other thing you can control.

Avoid repelling customers with your insecurity

If you cultivate the belief that you can keep your competitors away from your customers or vice-versa you may be at risk of coming over as insecure, and that is pure 'kryptonite' that will certainly make your customers choose your competitors!

Embrace the power of abundance

It is also a symptom that you are suffering from a scarcity mindset. That is a condition from the past when information was power. Today information is a commodity, you get power from sharing it so that people can make sense of it.

Tell your story through the people in and around your business

There's one thing your competitors will never have and that is the group of people in and around your business. All it takes is to tell your story through them.

Make your people or your customers look amazing and they will share it with the world. When your competitors see that your people are proud and happy, they will want to defect over to you.
 

This 'analog' form of fasting felt very much like 'taking the red pill'. If you don't know what that means, you need to (re)watch The Matrix. Whoever came up with that script was on to something big, very early on.

The experience gave me a much larger perspective on something that has been bugging me for some time now: 3rd-millennium slavery...

A great example of this was the initial Star Trek series. Looking back, it may have been one of the most innovative sources of inspiration ever created.

Take a moment to consider all the things we take for granted today that made their first appearance on the show.

I don't know about you, but I just can't wait until we figure out how teleportation works...

Star Wars is another example.  

In 1977 it first spurred our imagination about what a hologram could actually look like.

And once again, it has now become a reality!

Candi Carrera

I was speaking at the GalaMarketers event last week in Luxembourg. During the event, Candi Carrera, Microsoft’s Country Head, blew our minds with his presentation about the fourth industrial revolution.

His talk was essentially about how holograms will change everything about the way we live and more importantly, how we work.   

If anybody in the audience thought Microsoft’s Hololens was mainly a gadget for fun and leisure, his presentation made it pretty clear that this type of hardware will become the most effective tool in the business hardware kit in a very near future. 

If there is anything you do with this blog post, I really hope you take the time to watch the video below. It'd the kind of clip that makes me dream. In any case, it does an amazing job at showing you what is waiting for you in the next 2-3 years...

Then there is MagicLeap. Based in Florida and since it was founded in 2010 it has managed to raise billions from investors such as Google, Alibaba, Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Names like that certainly make the fog of doubt go away.  Forbes recently estimated the business to be worth US$ 4.5 billion. 

MagicLeap is probably going to be one to watch because they may be able to deliver the promise of the hologram without all the clunky hardware. 

Here’s how wikipedia describes what these people are up to:

"Magic Leap is working on a retinal display which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by projecting a digital light field into the user's eye, involving technologies potentially suited to applications in augmented reality and computer vision. It is attempting to construct a light-field chip using silicon photonics."

A more pedestrian way of describing this may be something like “dreaming with your eyes open”

Personally, I believe we may be looking at what will someday become one of the largest companies ever created.

I don’t even know how or where to start expressing how virtual/augmented reality will change EVERYTHING.

What I can say is that from my corner of the sandbox (how we tell business stories and communicate our key message) it turns everything upside down. 

First of all, soon it will be no longer be about just telling a story, instead it will be all about showing up in someone’s own story. This may seem a bit abstract, so allow me put this in the right perspective:

This is a huge shift because until now marketers have told stories that others could step into. With augmented reality, it will be the other way around because marketers will have to find a way to become a part of the beholder’s story. 

In essence, augmented reality means that we will get to edit our own world. This will be irresistible because for as long as we’ve had an imagination, we always dreamt about altering our reality. If anything, social media is undeniable proof that this desire is too strong to resist because it allowed us to create a much better version of ourselves for anyone, anywhere to see.  

It is hard evidence because social media has caused the biggest human mobilisation we ever seen: more than 3.5 billion people moved onto social media in less than a decade, willingly trading their privacy for nothing more than a user name and a social profile...

Social media was only the beginning because it is still little more than a 2D veneer over our reality. Is it a coincidence that the biggest merchants of VR also turn out to be those who know all our little secrets like Facebook, Linkedin, Google and Amazon?

They already have one foot in the door with billions of users who simply can no longer live without their edited realty. What do you think will happen when they will offer the gear to make your life even more exciting?

I triggers many, many questions, ranging from the functional to the deeply existential.  As a marketer and storyteller, here is what is mostly on my mind when it comes to the transformative power of virtual and/or augemnted reality:

What happens when we can actually step into the fantasy version of how we want to see the world? Will the ‘real' thing still be good enough? 

How will we get to insert ourselves in someone else’s edited world?
Actually, let me rephrase this question: ”how will we earn the permission to be included into someone’s edited world?”

If you think about it, 'edited reality' may not only be about adding things that are not there, it might equally be all about suppressing things that you don’t want to see.

It could start innocently, like replacing an overcast sky with a sunny blue day or seeing a rendered reconstruction of a ruin, but what happens when augmented reality also becomes the ultimate spam filter? What will that look like and how will it work?

I certainly don’t have the answers, but if you are in marketing or communications, I do think it is one of the most urgent questions we need to start asking ourselves...

The fact that they keep doing it means that it must somehow work. I guess there is a whole playbook of tried and tested scripts on how to turn no’s into yesses.

Then again, I am not into telemarketing just like others may not be into hunting.

Just trying to get off the phone with these 'sales creatures' is quite the challenge because they use all this verbal aikido to keep you on the line.

Eventually, you just hang up as soon as you hear the murmur of the call centre on the other end of the line. Doing this to someone who is trying to make a living isn’t exactly the most uplifting feeling in the world, but it certainly beats stepping into the proverbial chewing gum of the forced sales call.

I like to think of it all as ‘weaponising the human experience'.

But here’s the thing that really has me confused:

What happens when you decide you want to speak to a business?

Maybe you liked their webpage.

Maybe it was a friend who recommended it.

Maybe you read an article or got drawn into an ad.

When that happens, why is it so difficult to actually speak to a real human!?

There’s the “touch 1 for….touch 2 for….” robot

...or the "Sorry we really care about you but it is unusually busy….”

…what about the happy chatbot?

…sometimes you simply can’t find a number to call to begin with and you have to use that stupid chat box that leaves you wondering if you have really been chatting with real people or with cylons...

Then again, I guess all those pepped-up human operators are too busy figuring out how to call all those people who really don’t want to hear from them…

Can you make any sense out of this?

It would be like dismissing the possibility of the internet changing the world back in the dial-up days.

The thing is, that is exactly how most of us saw things back then.

I'm old enough to remember that businesses thought that having a web page was a cute little 'nice to have' idea.

A century ago, people didn't believe in automobiles either. Where are the horses!?

What about aeroplanes? I remember how my grandfather put all his affairs in order before taking his first flight in the mid-1970s. It wasn't only his idea, people advised him to do so.

Today, it is happening again. This time, that new fad is virtual reality (VR).

I believe that VR will be the most transformative force we have ever seen. 

Think about it...

We really want it. It is the thing of our dreams. I mean this quite literally because our dreams are essentially a form of natural VR with a Snapchat effect.

And if that is too abstract, think about how we spend most of the time daydreaming. That is VR, no matter how you look at it!

We crave alternate realities because we want to escape from our mundane lives.

Think about how we already go out of our way to create virtual identities for ourselves. Not only in our imagination but for the whole world to see. Isn't that what social media is all about?

We want it so badly that we managed to get more than half of the world’s population online in less than 15 years! 

We simply can’t resist the lure of escaping!

Need more proof?

Why do we binge-watch TV series?

How come the rules of tight attention spans don't apply to great movies?

Again, it is all about escape.

But what if we could ‘really' step into those worlds?

And, what if you could edit and select your ‘reality’ on demand?
We want it and we will get it.

But most importantly, how can you be a part of someone’s edited world?

As a business, that may be one of the most strategic questions you can ask right now...

What is your VR strategy?

It would be like dismissing the possibility of the internet changing the world back in the dial-up days.

The thing is, that is exactly how most of saw things back then.

I'm old enough to remember that businesses thought that having a web page was a cute little 'nice to have' idea.

People didn't believe in automobiles either. Where are the horses!?

What about aeroplanes? I remember how my grandfather put all his affairs in order before taking his first flight in the mid-1970s. It wasn't only his idea, people advised him to do so.

I believe that VR will be the most transformative force we have ever seen. 

Think about it...

We really want it. It is the thing of our dreams. I mean this quite literally because our dreams are essentially a form of natural VR with a Snapchat effect.

And if that is too abstract, think about how we spend most of the time daydreaming. That is VR, no matter how you look at it!

We crave alternate realities because we want to escape from our mundane lives.

Think about how we already go out of our way to create virtual identities for ourselves. Not only in our imagination but for the whole world to see. Isn't that what social media is all about?

We want it so badly that we managed to get more than half of the world’s population online in less than 15 years! 

We simply can’t resist the lure of escaping!

Need more proof?

Why do we binge-watch TV series?

How come the rules of tight attention spans don't apply to great movies?

Again, it is all about escape.

But what if we could ‘really' step into those worlds?

And, what if you could edit and select your ‘reality’ on demand?
We want it and we will get it.

But most importantly, how can you be a part of someone’s edited world?

As a business, that may be one of the most strategic questions you can ask right now...

What is your VR strategy?

My business school had a campus there so I thought it would be a great place to finish my Bachelor’s degree, learn Spanish and have way too much fun...

"You know nothing about markets!? You'll do just fine!"

That night, I got into a conversation with this guy to who I had just been introduced.

When he learned that I fluently spoke five European languages, he said: “Come to my office on Monday, I’d like to talk to you about a position at my firm…”

Just like that...

He ran a brokerage desk at one of the leading local securities firms in town.

It was 1992.  Spain’s capital markets were opening up to foreign investors and I was in the right place at the right time.

I knew nothing at all about bond markets, but that didn’t matter. The fact that I could pick up the phone and speak to investors all over Europe in their own language got me the job even before I went to the ‘interview’.

"You'll figure all that other stuff out once you get started" He said.

How I miss the nineties!

Like most of my fellow Belgians, I have a thing for languages. Where I am from, speaking three is the norm and having five isn't really that exceptional. But in Spain - especially back in those days - it was very much like having a super power.

Eventually, I also learned Portuguese and enough Italian to carry a conversation. My 6.5 languages continued to lift the tide of my career. It was the prime feature on my resume and it went a long way in international finance!

But the thing is that I never really believed that it made that much of a difference. I've come to think that the idea of language skills giving you an edge is a mostly a myth.

As I constantly traveled to different European capitals, I would say that seven out of ten people I visited saw it as an opportunity to practice their English. 

But I guess this language thing is a myth that we all want to believe so we just play along and give it more lip service than it deserves.

But why am I talking about this?

It is certainly not my intention to toot my horn, but I thought it serves as a great example of the point I’m trying to make with this article: the fact that disruptive trends already lurk under the surface long before they become game changers. 

Let me clarify what I mean with this:

It is about the idea that innovation lives among us in disguise long before revealing itself.

I’m writing this article during the week that Google announced the launch of its live translation earbuds. I know it came as quite a surprise to most of us because not that long ago, people would roll their eyes when I’d suggest that artificial intelligence-driven simultaneous translation would soon render the knowledge of foreign languages obsolete. 

But if you've been following the advances in translation technology, you kind of knew this was coming...

Last September, Zero-Shot translation technology came online for the first time. It might be one of the most important breakthroughs in recent history. The problem was that nobody was paying attention because we were having too much fun watching Hillary and Donald throw mud at each other as the height of the presidential campaign.

If you haven’t used google translate since then, try it again. You will be amazed with what it can do!

One of the reasons that this technology was such breakthrough because it wasn’t created by humans. Google essentially asked an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm the following question: “So, why don’t you come up with a good way to translate languages". The AI said "Aye, aye Captain" and shortly afterwards it came back with Zero-Shot translation. 

One year later, it runs on ear buds that whisper simultaneous translations into your ear.

I don’t want to get too ‘techy' on you here, but the Zero-Shot algorithm figured out how to seamlessly translate between any language by creating a functional language of its own. 

It is able to convert language pairs never before seen explicitly by the system. But what is really freakish about Zero-Shot is that, despite no human intervention, the way it ‘thinks’ is eerily similar to the way humans would go about it. This is when machine learning gets creepy, fascinating or even somewhat religious. Take your pick.

I get into all of that some other time.

The thing is that attempts to use devices to translate has been around for a long time. Have you ever heard of the Rosetta Stone? Napoleon’s people discovered it in 1799. It was a rock with the same text translated hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek.  

That was the Zero-Shot of the 19th century because it finally allowed us to decipher hieroglyphs and, in turn, unlock more secrets about ancient Egypt. 

So basically, this is yet another example that goes to show that the sudden technological innovations that freak us out are usually already amongst us, keeping a low profile, constantly evolving and going about their business while most of us aren't paying attention.

And when these breakthroughs reveal themselves, we call it 'disruption'. At first it always seems like a threat, but they are really nothing more than the gradual systematisation of our core human needs and desires. 

First we create it, then we reject it and finally we chase it.

No matter how much you fear, mistrust, or want to reject disruption,  know that it is a mostly product of humanity (at least for now). 

Take 2 minutes to watch this short extract from one of my talks, I speak about what those needs and desires are that drive us and machines, to be so inventive:

Here’s an essay by Google about Zero-Shot translation technology in case it got you thinking. It is nerdy, but oh so fascinating :-)

Curious to know more about this talk?

In case you or someone you know would be interested in featuring a talk about human strategies for a virtual world at an event, feel free to get in touch with me via my speaker page.

How about this: Coffee, yogurt with fresh forest berries, the company of brilliant positive-minded people having a conversation that connects brain waves, psychology and the possibilities of virtual reality and the future of fashion technology. 

They say you should start your day on a strong footing. Check! 

This morning, I went out to Antwerp to get together with a few friends that I wanted to introduce to each other.  I thought there would be a special connection because they all have a shared interest in the application of brainwaves and virtual reality for their innovations.  It turned out to be magic! 

So who are these people? 

Jasna Rok in one of her 'smart' outfits

Let me start with Jasna Rok. She is on a mission to revolutionise the fashion industry.

She makes a compelling case that our clothing should become more ‘intelligent’. Think about it, all our devices have become ‘smart’: our phones, our household appliances, our vehicles, and so on. Her question: why not clothing?  

And it’s not just talk, Jasna already designs garments that play an active role in our day-to-day lives. Her work ranges from biohacking clothing to make it more resistant, temperature-regulating, liquid repellent, self-cleaning and shape-shifting to interact with our environment.

Her outfits even respond to how we feel by connecting them to our brainwaves. And if that wasn’t groundbreaking enough, she created a virtual reality-based design studio to craft these outfits so they can be 3D printed.  

I met Jasna a couple of years ago when these were still mostly outlandish ideas. Since then, she has made it all happen and has taken the FashTech world by storm. I like to think of her as the ‘Elona Musk’ of fashion 😃 

Iseult Beets and Hannelore Nys enjoying a moment of 'flow'

I wanted Jasna to meet Hannelore Nys and Iseult Beets of Lilid, a brain research and treatment centre in Belgium.

Their work is at the crossroads of neuroscience, psychology, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. They treat people and their relationships with the latest knowledge and brain technology available. They also help companies determine their psychosocial health with Lilid's own validated instrument. They distinguish between objective and subjective factors of employee satisfaction. This allows them to exactly pinpoint real organisational problems and remediate them.

Please know that I’m still trying to process what I learned this morning, it feels very much like trying to make sense of what exactly happened in a dream, hours after waking up. 

I think I have been able to gather an intuitive understanding of it all, so here’s an attempt to let it flow through my fingers and onto this page. Please also know that I have no medical training whatsoever and I am feeling a strong dose of imposter syndrome as I am trying to formulate these words.

What I do have going for me is my fanatical drive to make things simpler to understand, even if only I do it as a service to myself. I admit that, while writing this, I repeatedly jumped onto their website, hoping it would serve as a compass to avoid getting lost in my own narrative, and that is when stumbled upon this quote: 

“The brain is heading our mind. If we control our brain, changing the mind is a no-brainer.”

Read that again…  

Powerful words Hannelore! 

What I took away from our conversation this morning is that beyond their practice as psychotherapists, they also use technology to modulate the functionality of the brain to improve its performance, well-being, and induce positive attitudes while treating a wide array of mental ailments.  

Recently I’ve been spending time and effort on better understanding the concept of ‘flow' - a state in which we can feel one with the world around us and achieve the most amazing things.  

I think that Lilid, in its own way, is also on the path to harnessing flow.  I have an endless fascination with the brain, and even though my understanding of it it is much akin to the awe a monkey may experience with a smartphone, there are a few things that especially blew me away: 

Hannelore explained to us how virtual reality can help patients externalise and visualise their ailments so they can process them in a way to overcome them. I guess what impressed me the most is how it can even be used to treat chronic pain. So what I think this means is that if you can give an observable shape to an abstract problem, it creates a better dimension for patients to deal with that problem. 

When it comes to brainwaves, I learned more about how these can also be retro-fitted to re-program the way our brain works. I’m sure I am missing out on a number of peculiarly important details here, but all in all, I found it utterly fascinating.

I think I am going to need a few more mind-bending breakfast meetings like this one before I can take the training wheels of this narrative, but I hope you get the picture. 

Can you imagine the conversation between these people? It was quite the experience. I may have been nothing more than a fly on the wall but I felt more like a happy pig rolling in the mud! 

The thoughts I came away with from this discussion are still percolating in my mind. I guess it gave me an even bolder perspective on the transformative power of virtual reality. What is on my mind right now are two major impacts:

Dematerialisation

Instead of all the complex international logistics that make up the process between design and getting garments into shops and the limited possibilities it offers for true personalisation, Jasna uses VR to make anyone their own designer and print their clothing on demand. This is yet another example of how VR is dematerialising our world.

If we can render our hardware virtually, will we still need phones, screens, or keyboards and all the other things that need charging and cables to work? Will we still go to offices when we can be together without being present in the same place? Will we still travel for business?  When you start thinking about what VR can replace, it just goes on and on like that.

I like to think of VR as a sort of ‘minimalist virus’ that will spread across the world. How will that affect your business? What is your strategy? 

The power to edit anything and everything

We treat VR as if it is this new amazing innovation, but the thing is that it has been with us for as long as we can remember. Think about your dreams, especially your daydreams or the imagination and abstract thinking we take for granted. Even a good movie or TV show temporarily bring us into another reality.

We have embraced the idea of VR since a very long time ago and that is why we will adopt whatever comes at us without much resistance. It goes way beyond the goggles and the quality of rendering.

I’m starting to internalise the idea that VR is an extension of our conscience. It not only allows us to ‘edit' our external perception but more importantly, it allows us to tweak our inner dimension and even toggle experiences that are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. In the end, since the brain can’t really distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what isn’t, this makes ‘reality’ something that is increasingly subjective. Actually, I think I there might be a better way to say this: our brains will process anything, regardless of what the exact nature of the input is. 

And even though many of us may feel uncomfortable with this line of thought, there are even more amongst us who are already editing their ‘reality’ all day long!

Don’t believe me? Just log onto Facebook or Instagram and tell me what you see… Do you really believe that all those people are that happy all the time?

So there you go, I felt the need to document this amazing encounter. I could just take notes about it and keep it all to myself, but doing it in public forces me to really think it all through, after all, that is what writing is all about, it is the ultimate way to internalise knowledge. And while I am at it, I hope it also gives you something to think about.

On the way back from the meeting, I wished I had taken a few pictures or maybe even recorded an interview. But I’m sure we will all get together again sometime soon to continue this conversation and take all the pictures we want. 

Here are some more resources so you can get to know more about Jasna Rok and Lilid  

Jasna Rok
Website
Facebook page

Lilid
Website
Facebook page

The most essential of these formulas is the 3-act story structure. This is a format that has been the essential blueprint for most stories for as long as we can remember:

Opening > Confrontation > Resolution

If you start paying attention to it, you will notice that almost every story that survived the test of time was built upon this foundation.

It is the formula that keeps audiences engaged. This is why the best scriptwriters, producers, and book editors always impose this 3-act structure onto their stories. They swear by it because it works like a spell.

I like to think of it as a password to anyone’s attention.

Get this free guide and learn the simple and proven storytelling secrets to always make a powerful first impression.

<-- JUST CLICK ON THE BOOK COVER TO GET YOUR FREE COPY (No email opt-in required)

We had just managed to create yet another confused prospect...

There are a number of reasons why this ‘delegation’ approach didn’t work very well.

When we started this little travelling circus, the idea was that all of us had something to say at the meeting. We thought it would be great if the prospect got a chance to meet all the key players in our team. While we had the best intentions, in hindsight, it often had the same effect as taking your entire family along with you on a first date.  

On a more practical level, we soon realised that this approach usually forced us to go overtime and didn’t leave much time for the client to speak. If you have any experience in sales, you know that this is not going to help you win the business. We eventually changed the game plan and only one or two of us would do the talking, and even though it helped to bring more focus to the meetings and gave the prospects more space to talk, it still kind of creeped out many clients with a "what are these other silent, suited up people doing at this meeting?" feeling.

The bottom line is that the ‘delegation’ approach caused a lot of distraction that got in the way of our main goal: to qualify the right prospective investors. The first impression we made was one of complication and confusion. 

I picked the above example because it is extreme, somewhat funny, and quite illustrative for the purpose of this article. We didn’t always go out as a team of 5, but that day in Frankfurt it got a bit crazy. However, it would be fair to say that our culture was all about travelling out to clients in teams of 3-4 people! Personally, this habit drove me crazy and we had long arguments about it. 

I think there was another reason why we went out on the road as a ‘herd’. To put it bluntly, I think we didn’t trust each other to go it alone because the ‘control freaks’ inside of us worried about others botching up the meetings. There was this thinking that by going together, we would mitigate that risk. In hindsight, that was such a misguided and limiting belief on many levels.

There is one thing that I didn’t understand back then. And because hindsight is 20/20, if we would have spent more time and effort on clarifying our message and making sure that everybody always knew exactly what to say, we could not only have been able to leverage our coverage but also trust each other more to get it right.

So, instead of the 5 of us cramming into a conference room and creeping out our prospects, we could have been doing meetings in 5 different places and get a lot more traction!

And then I figured out a way to fix it!

I eventually discovered the power of storytelling and it changed everything. I know, there is a lot of talk about storytelling and it is quite a nebulous subject, but for me there is a life before and after the moment I learned how to create engaging and repeatable business stories.

Before I go on, allow me to offer you a reality-check on storytelling: Many still see it is a ‘silly’ buzzword that somehow found a way to sneak into the world of business. It is mostly associated with entertainment, and therefore hard to take seriously.

I could not disagree more.

Storytelling is the secret magic formula that has always been hiding out in the open. I like to think of it as the 'password to anyone’s attention'.

Tell a great story and people will fall under its spell. Stories are designed exactly for that purpose. They weren’t developed for the purpose of entertainment. In fact, the entertainment industry leveraged these powers to get us to waste time and money on multi-million dollar movies and endless TV series that always tell us the same story.  

Don’t get me wrong, I love a great story and I spend more time than I should binge-watching TV shows and reading fiction. And even though I know this and that about storytelling, I always fall for its tricks.

But long before we all knew how to read and had all these magic screens, the main reason why we perfected the art of crafting stories was to efficiently transfer information across space and time. For thousands of years, stories were the only way to keep important knowledge in circulation.

It is precisely because we always use the same story formats that they are easy to remember and reproduce. Religions use this to spread their messages over millennia. Folk tales are stories that help us tap into the collective wisdom and avoid mistakes. Major historical experiences are packaged as stories so we can learn from them. Entire nations and economies are built upon nothing more than a story that its citizens adopt, believe and sometimes are even willing to die for.

So, coming back into the main fold of this article, can you see how getting your businesses story right makes it possible for anyone, inside or outside of your organisation to get your message right?

There’s a more dramatic way to put it: “A great story can make your business as contagious as a virus”.

I know, that last phrase might evoke all sorts of feelings, but if you really believe what you do is valuable, why not make it contagious...

Can you see why your story is your most strategic asset?

A good way to get your message right is by starting with your elevator pitch...