A few weeks ago, I came across this idea of companies who are more than just storytellers. They’re also storydoers. Tyler Montague, the source of this idea, outlined six characteristics of a storydoing company:

1. They have a story
2. The story is about a larger ambition to make the world or people’s lives better
3. The story is understood and cared about by senior leadership outside of marketing
4. That story is being used to drive tangible action throughout the company: product development, HR policies, compensation, etc.
5. These actions add back up to a cohesive whole
6. Customers and partners are motivated to engage with the story and are actively using it to advance their own stories

Tyler and his partners went looking for hard statistical evidence to back up their contention that great companies are storydoers. It looks like they’re on their way to confirming numbers that support the theory. The question I want you to consider is why would you need numbers to justify anything on Tyler’s list?

All six items are strategies that could benefit any company. And yet Tyler went after hard data so he could convince people that the idea of storydoing led to business results worth pursuing.

There’s no question we have more data than ever before, and some of it is incredibly useful. So what comes next may sound sacrilegious to data devotees. We don’t always need reams of data to determine if something is good for business.

Tyler’s storydoing example is just one of many sound business strategies that gets more attention if there’s data to support it. But while we’re busy combing through the data, what are we missing? Have we missed an opportunity to make our businesses better because we needed numbers to make us feel comfortable?

I’m not recommending that we go back to ignoring data or only trusting our gut. I do recommend not letting a lack of data blind us to smart business strategy. Sometimes when you’re an entrepreneur it’s the only option available. You often don’t have enough data so say that one decisions clearly tops another.

I suspect that our love affair with data is tied to something that keeps most entrepreneurs and even seasoned business owners awake at night: the fear of failure. Data can make us better informed about some decisions, but it can also create an illusion that we’re making a decision without risk. Data may tell us more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve got the meaning right.

So the next time you see a strategy like Tyler’s to be a storydoing company, put it in context. If there’s numbers, pull up a spreadsheet and have a party. But if there’s not, use the skills and talent that got you into business in the first place and ask a simple question: does it have the potential to make my business better tomorrow than it is today?

That’s the primary motivation of most business writing, right? It’s an easy assumption to make, but what if we’re wrong? What if the motivation isn’t quite so mercenary? What if the motivation of a business writer leans more towards helping people instead of prompting them to hit the “Buy Now” button? Then the question becomes why don’t readers see the real motivation more clearly? What’s happening that the reader’s assumption defaults to the mercenary instead of the helpful?

I believe it’s something simple: We never bothered to figured out what motivates our writing in the first place.

When we’re unclear about what motivates our writing (other than the obvious of checking something off the list) it’s easy for readers to misinterpret our intent. If given no guidance from the writer, then of course they’ll default to, “You want to sell me something.” Clearly some projects will be motivated by selling, but what about when it’s not? What if you’re trying to strike that balance between being helpful and being mercenary?

From books to ads, writing absorbs and reflects the world around us. George Orwell rightly noted that a writer will be influenced “by the age he lives in…he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.” Take a look around and you’ll see how our age has influenced what today’s writers produce. With short attention spans and evermore information available, it becomes that much more important for business writers to get really clear about their motivations for readers.

We (the general public) don’t trust companies. While some companies warrant this suspicion, others obviously don’t. So if you’re a writer facing these obstacles—time, information overload, trust—how can you counter these biases to accomplish something more than putting words on page?

1. Play the long game.

It’s rare that one or two attempts will be enough to communicate the true motivation of why you’re reaching out to people. The initial assumption is that you want something. It will take time to build trust and familiarize people with the difference between when you’re trying to sell them something and when you’re trying to share something useful.

2. If you don’t care about what you write, it’s difficult for the reader to care.

Ever had your business writing described as dry, boring or politically correct? You’re not alone. It’s easy to default to traditional business speak, but it’s possible to avoid if you take the time to find the most relevant entry point to connect the reader and the business. If you’re writing crap because you don’t care about what you’re writing, please explain to me why you think anyone will read past the first sentence. It sounds trite, but figure out a reason to care.

3. Write about why you’re writing.

Humans excel at making assumptions. So it’s no surprise that the humans in business assume that people just know why they’re doing what they’re doing. While it doesn’t have to be anything dramatic, like a manifesto shouted from the rooftops, put into words why you’re writing. It can become a reference point for writer, business, and reader alike. It provides an invaluable baseline to help you accomplish both #1 and #2 and provides a way to measure if you’re meeting reader expectations.

For decades, we’ve defaulted to the notion that business writing was motivated by making more money. It’s still a valid motivation, but it’s not the only one. Business writers and the businesses themselves must highlight the other motivations that exist and make the case that not all business writing is about sales, but also about being incredibly helpful sources of information.

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I get excited about my clients’ projects and ideas, usually because I’m challenged to think of a better, smarter way to capture what’s amazing about their work. However, I don’t look for ways to romanticize how I write about their latest product or market strategy. Writing is my job, and I do my best to treat it with the respect both it and my clients deserve. Yes, I do get writer’s block, but project deadlines often require that I pull out the metaphorical jack hammer.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but forcing the issue provides the necessary perspective to get the job done and usually done well. I completely understand the need to take a break or look for inspiration elsewhere. However, what separates the professional from the amateur comes down to pushing through, to not letting yourself off the hook.

This isn’t about process, because different writers work successfully in different ways. It is about intent.

What do I mean by intent? This post was originally inspired during a re-read of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Early on in the book he shares a story from when he participated on a writing panel. He offered up these words of advice to the audience of aspiring writers:

“If your job is to write everyday, you learn to do it like any other job.”

When you sit down to write, do you give it your full attention? Do you give it the respect of a job or do you treat it as a hobby? It matters little to me if it’s a blog post or a book. If you’re serious about writing, you need to understand your intent and what you’re willing to commit. If you aren’t willing to take what you do seriously how can you expect anyone to take the results of your work seriously?

Writing asks something of the writer, and in return, the act of putting words on a page, can give us something back—the perfect sentence, the clear paragraph, even the thought-provoking page. It’s why I bristle when someone offhandedly says, “Maybe I’ll try writing someday.”

“Trying” when it comes to writing isn’t enough. It’s not enough for the writer and it certainly isn’t enough for the client. If you’ve embraced writing as something more than a hobby, understand that we don’t have the luxury of taking a day off from it because we aren’t in the mood. We must find a way to get words on the page, to treat writing, as Zinsser notes, like any other job. That’s what makes you a writer.

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On the surface, it makes perfect sense. Identify your niche and the very specific way you can offer a service or product to improve your odds of succeeding. However, what happens when you fall into the trap of doing one thing so well that it blinds you to what’s happening around you?

This blind spot came to mind when I saw a recent list of brands that no longer exist. Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia were obviously casualties of the financial crisis. But the one that caught my eye was the disappearance of Saab.

Saab had a niche and delivered a very specific product. But Saab made a mistake. It picked a niche that didn’t give it much flexibility or room for growth. So despite managing to do one thing really well for many years, Saab went bankrupt December 19, 2011.

In a report reviewing the demise of Saab, authors Matthias Holweg and Nick Oliver highlighted how Saab feel into the trap of relying on doing one thing well. But that one thing proved to have an expiration date:

Taking a wider perspective, the fundamental economics of the modern automotive industry simply can no longer support individualistic designs at the prices that Saab was able to command. Low volume producers can survive when their customers are ones with very deep pockets. If their customers don’t have deep pockets then they at least need to be plentiful in number. Sadly, Saab’s customers were neither.

Whether it was planned or not, Saab’s strategy placed it in the middle of the road, another aspect that doing one thing well can blind us to. We tell ourselves that because we focused on one thing we aren’t hedging our bets, but the entrepreneur’s trap opens wide if we’ve picked one thing that doesn’t inspire much emotion one way or the other.

For instance, one of the reasons restaurants like In-N-Out, Five Guys, and Shake Shack have made us willing to pony up $5+ for a burger is they’ve changed our expectations of a fast-food burger. We want this different experience. It’s such a clear step up from the McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King experience that it stands out. Even more interesting, if you take a look at their menus, the available options are fewer than what you see going through the standard drive-thru.

Now, they can get away with this strategy of offering fewer options at a higher cost, but only so long as they continue to deliver food that excels AND customers are willing to pay more for that experience. They’ve picked a side, they’re doing one thing well, and for now they’re avoiding the trap. In the coming years we’ll have to see how or if these companies can adapt if we move on from our love affair with expensive burgers.

So as you assess your options consider these questions:

1. Does my one thing give me room to grow?
2. What triggers can I add to help me see what’s happening around me even as I’m succeeding?
3. If the one thing I do well stops being needed, how could I transition to something else?

To be clear, doing one thing well isn’t the primary problem you face. Instead it’s assuming that doing one thing well is all the strategy you need to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Photo credit: Vilseskogen

According some quick Google searching, the total cost of the Voyager program, and that would appear to include both Voyager I and Voyager II has been roughly $250,000,000 over 36 years. During that time, they’ve encountered Jupiter and many of its significant moons, Saturn and its moons, Neptune and its moons, and Uranus and its moons. Now, Voyager I has apparently discovered something scientists didn’t expect to find at all at the edge of our Solar System. In terms of pure science, we’ve arguably gotten more from these two small unmanned craft than we have from the manned space program itself. That’s not too shabby.

Read that second to the last sentence again:

In terms of pure science, we’ve arguably gotten more from these two small unmanned craft than we have from the manned space program itself.

That seems like a big claim to make, but one that I think is both reasonable and highlights something entrepreneurs often overlook.

We get so focused on discovering and chasing after the big idea that we often pass up something smaller. We start equating size with value, and in the process, we miss the potential of something small to have a big consequence, like the Voyager program.

It becomes incredibly hard to give small it’s due when, going back to the space example, the news shows astronauts at the space station or talks about winning a trip to Mars. But while both of these stories captured our attention, it’s incredibly easy to forget that the U.S. no longer supports manned spaceflight and going to Mars is still just a big idea. Yet Voyager I and II are still speeding away towards the boundary of our solar system, and in the process telling us amazing things about our universe.

So as you consider all the ideas you’ve got tucked away in your notebook, give the smaller ones another look. You may discover that the secret to succeeding as an entrepreneur comes in a small package.

Photo credit: NASA

How many stories have you heard lately about someone trusting their gut and failing miserably? That’s at the heart of survivorship bias. We hear about the successes, the ones who made it, but we rarely hear the flip side, the ones who didn’t have the best intuition. This bias towards success then leads us to believe that we’re on to something, that we’ve discovered the secret to making tough business decisions. It leads to a question I think all entrepreneurs needs to ask themselves: why are we so obsessed with finding a short cut?

Obviously efficiency is a huge plus in business, and as an entrepreneur, you want to make the best use of your time, but this pursuit of silver-bullet strategies seems like a fool’s errand.

Let’s go back to survivorship bias for a minute. One of the things that makes this bias so attractive is the idea that it’s identified something predictive, something that will always work. That’s the entrepreneur’s version of catnip. There are so many unknowns in both starting and running a business that it’s understandable why we’re looking for ways to remove the uncertainty.

But we get into trouble when we start thinking that these ideas should take precedence over our strategy and assume we’ve found a short cut around uncertainty.

There’s a reason that entrepreneurs collect data about how their business is functioning and how their customers are reacting, then taking the time to analyze it. You need the specific information about your organization to determine what’s working and what’s not. So if you’re opting to put aside all those other data points and trust just one—your gut—it looks much more like a Hail Mary pass instead of a so-called executive decision.

There will definitely be decisions when circumstances will force you to make a call that isn’t supported 100% one way or the other by the data. That’s part of being a leader and using your knowledge to make the best possible decision at that moment in time. What’s not particularly good leadership is waking up one morning and deciding since your gut was right last time, it makes sense to let your gut trump everything else going forward.

The only predictable thing this approach offers in the business version of indigestion. So please remember that your gut may be an important data point, but it’s rarely the only one that matters.

Photo credit: Ed Schipul

The Mike in question (for anyone younger than 30) was Michael Jordan. The ad worked incredibly well because at the time, circa 1992, Michael Jordan was THE sports figure. And the setup was perfect. Every kid (and many adults) who played basketball loved the idea of being “like” Michael Jordan. It was an easy leap to say, “If Michael Jordan is drinking Gatorade, I should, too.”

But the me-too strategy that works so well for a marketer trying to sell a product comes with issues for a business trying to be like another business.

I’m a firm believer that there is much to be learned by watching how others do business. Whether you’re an entrepreneur assessing how the industry leader does things or the enterprise solution checking out a startup’s innovative idea, there’s value in watching and learning. Where the trouble starts, at least from a strategic standpoint, is when the desire to emulate becomes a me-too strategy.

For instance, I read a profile of Costco and its current CEO, Craig Jelinek. It would be incredibly easy to say that based on Costco’s success, every other company would be crazy to not follow Costco’s lead.

While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour)…Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance…Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.”

There is little in there to disagree with, especially add it all together and get Costco’s success. But, and this is the piece that gets overlooked, Costco is Costco. It’s built a set of systems and an environment that lets it excel at what it does really well. So if you assume that you could transplant in whole what Costco is doing internally that tells me that you don’t really understand how your business works.

The actual Costco (Apple, Nordstroms, Whole Foods, etc.) lesson that does matter is that you must learn and define what systems and environment your business does need to excel.

You don’t need to be the next Steve Jobs or Jack Welch to run your business really well. You just need to be the version of you that pays attention to your business and what’s actually working.

Yes, strive to meet the standards set by industry leaders, but please don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to look like them in every way. If you do, you run the risk of becoming generic, the business world equivalent of a “parrot.” So look for ideas and opportunities to improve. Look for the bigger why in a company’s success instead of seeking to copy the specific moves. Because once you understand the underlying reasons, it becomes much easier to see what’s applicable to you and your business.

As a result you’ll become the kind of business that attracts customers who love you for very specific reasons instead of an off-the-shelf version that’s only tolerated.

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Christopher Penn highlighted one particular sticky wicket for middle of the roaders: creative destruction:

Right now, the email marketing industry is going through a destruction phase. The “mid market” is vanishing, and has been since 2010-2011 in the email marketing industry. In the email marketing space, you are either serving the small business niche…or you are serving the enterprise. The middle of the road customer is vanishing as they either move up or down market, and the vendors are consolidating, too. That’s the destruction phase. The big players buy up the healthy companies, and the sickly ones eventually wither and perish. Very few companies ever successfully walk the middle of the road for their entire existence – they have to go big or small to survive.

Let’s focus on that last line: They have to go big or small to survive.

I appreciate that there’s a certain comfort in feeling like you can go one way or the other. I even understand the arguments for offering that level of flexibility. What I don’t accept, however, is the middle of the road as a long-term strategy. As Penn notes, it’s about survival, and hanging out in the middle doesn’t come with very good odds.

First, the middle is too narrow. Over time, the winners gravitate to one side or the other and the losers disappear. What remains is such a tiny portion, that unless you own the middle in your niche, survival becomes incredibly difficult.

Second, when you pick the middle, you’re setting up a scenario where someone else (i.e., not you) can determine your future success or failure. That can’t have been on your to-do list when you started your business. The desire to be an entrepreneur comes, in part, with the desire to have control. Sticking to the middle means giving up control.

Finally, you’re way too exposed when you hang out in the middle. You can only stand in the middle for so long before your hedging makes you a target. Instead of appealing to customers, you’re making it easier for competitors to do two things: 1) beat you (think small business) or 2) crush you (think enterprise).

Playing the middle game looks incredibly tempting. I’ve done it a time or two myself. But the cost is incredibly high.

Pick a side. You can’t afford not to.

Photo credit: Mike

What processes in your business show similar signs of build up? Have you ignored the issues, assuming that it wasn’t an emergency—yet?

I pose these questions as an equal offender. There are business channels and marketing efforts I’ve left to their own devices the last few months, and I’m seeing the signs of a weaker flow. So the advice I’m giving myself and you is this:

Instead of focusing on new opportunities, look at the channels you already have in place and give them a good cleaning.

It’s not sexy advice, and I’m not advocating that you pass up making a time-specific decision. However, we’re obsessed with the idea of new to the point that we’re leaving viable strategies and tools by the wayside. Fight the temptation of new and shiny and spend the time polishing up what you already have. The results will probably surprise you—in a good way.