Monthly Archives: December 2009

Shugyo and choices.

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Shugyo – a term frequently heard in Aikido circles – is generally defined as austerity or intensity in training. However, this does not necessarily mean simply training more or harder. (How then could an 80-year-old martial artist be the embodiment of shugyo as they so often are?)

Another term – musha-shugyo – dates back to Japan’s feudal era. Musha-shugyo is a pilgrimage whereby a serious disciple of the martial arts embarks on a journey across the countryside to visit other schools principally for one of two reasons:

One, to prove the superiority of their own lineage, school and skills or

Two, to improve their own skills by experiencing other schools and approaches.

It is here that a useful interpretation of shugyo might be extracted. The first agenda above I might typify as an articulation of the Western Ego. The second agenda I would typify as of Eastern Ego. I have written about Western Ego vs. Eastern Ego before. As I see it, few of us today are 100% of either. Mostly we are a dynamically shifting blend of the two. As young children, white belts in martial arts or junior executives we see the size of the world before us and eagerly absorb as much knowledge as we can.

As we get older and more experienced we begin to believe we know something. With that knowledge often comes a sense of entitlement and a nagging desire to protect our hard-earned status and knowledge.

I have observed this watching my older daughter boss my younger one around. I have seen this in my dojo where relatively new students with a little training suddenly begin ‘teaching’in class when working with anyone junior to them. And I have seen this in office parks where VPs push the repercussions of their own failings down the pyramid so that  some junior is coming in on the weekend to make up for lost time. Worse still I have heard these things glorified as ‘paying dues’, ‘good training’or ‘good experience’. They can be, but not when offered or forced upon the junior as a means of taking advantage of status.

I have argued before that experience is a requisite for expertise. However, earned expertise brings with it temptations. These temptations are well-known to anyone who has become even a little ‘good’at something. There is the temptation to boast. There is the temptation to compete with people you know you can beat. There is temptation to shut out new ideas and different approaches. I have felt and acted on all of these temptations at points in my life. Try as I might, it is very hard to resist them.

Shugyo is a means to do so. Shugyo, to me, is a mindfulness to make choices that counteract complacency and homeostasis. In this sense it is ongoing training inside the office, the dojo, or anywhere.

In Aikido these are some of the choices to be mindfully considered:

  • Do I clean the toilet in the dojo or wait for someone else to do it?
  • Do I partner with people smaller and easier to throw or find someone bigger and more challenging?
  • Do I attend beginners class to refine my basics or to ‘help’the junior students (meaning show them what I know)?
  • Do I train day in and day out, consistently, or heavy up right before rank exams?

Among executives these choices might also be considered as shugyo:

  • Do I hire and encourage people who will tell me what I want to hear or instead people who will give me their honest assessment even if it potentially offends me? (And can I choose not to be offended in such case?)
  • Do I do research simply to validate my beliefs and assumptions or instead do I sincerely endeavor to discover something I did not know?
  • Though I ask for them, do I really want out of the box ideas? The kind that challenge my expertise and perhaps are better than my own ideas?
  • Do I empower people working with me to make decisions even if they might make different decisions than I would?
  • When someone is arguing a point, am I listening with an open mind or just waiting my turn to counter their opinion with my own?

I come up against all of these questions again and again in my life. At times I behave the way I would hope I do. At others, I do not. This is the process of shugyo and why it is ongoing.

Of course, the pendulum swings the other way too. Equally dangerous to the tunnel vision of me-centric Western Ego is falling into a rut of romanticized ‘selflessness’that becomes an insular bubble.

The Aikido student who hides behind the phrase ‘I don’t care about rank’in order to avoid the challenge and stress of testing is akin to the executive who never forms an opinion of her own, never takes a stance, and never sticks his neck out by challenging group-think or offering a contrarian perspective. It is easy to hide behind ‘putting others first’and in doing so to miss numerous opportunities to develop one’s self.

Shugyo is ultimately about choosing to act on the more challenging option – whatever that option is. It is about looking inwardly at our own tendencies to protect our status quo and place in the scheme of things and then making a decision to go against those impulses. In this way, shugyo is a thousand decisions made every day and it changes as we change. This is intense and exhausting training indeed.

As the year winds down I find myself reflecting on my own tendencies as both an Aikido practitioner and teacher and as a businessman. Though often dismissed, the quintessential ‘New Year’s Resolution’can be useful when taken as an opportunity to earnestly consider how to improve ones self in the coming year. I am evaluating what shugyo will mean to me in 2010. It is an interesting exercise.

I will wrap this up with one of my favorite maxims. It comes from a translation of the Book Of Five Rings and I find it is appropriate in almost everything I do:

“Too much is the same as not enough.”

In relationships. In diet.  In exercise. In learning. In playing. In resting. In working. In everything. Something I like to dwell on as I look out at the blank slate of 2010 with high hopes for a great new year.

Perfect Storm: Building awareness today

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No one contests that there have been amazing advancements in media over the passed few decades. However, as with most innovations, problems arise as a consequence of the changes innovation creates.

Looking out at the state of marketing today, I am convinced that Awareness is the Achilles Heel of modern media. The reason why is that there is a confluence of factors – something of a perfect storm – that threatens to swallow up and sink without a trace even the most creative and intriguing communications efforts. Here are the substorms I see coming together:

I. Splintered media undermine Awareness efficiences.
Say what you will about the old world of three TV networks and a modest number of magazines, newspaper and radio stations, but back then it was pretty cost-effecient to build awareness through a media spend. Today people are scattered across an infinitely more complex media space and getting enough bang for a traditional media buck is only getting harder.

II. Pervasive, consumer empowered media undermine discovery.
We’re all 100% in control of our programming intake. That means we can search for topics that interest us and find endless amounts of media to experience. If we can quite literally fill our days with media focused on things we’re already interested in, what time (and fraction of our attention) is left for discovering new interests and passions? Add to this the time constraints we all experience with our demanding lifestyles. Ultimately, there is less time and opportunity to become aware of something we weren’t aware of before.

III. Social media speed is incompatible with business speed.
Business is moving faster than ever. Innovations become parity quickly. Entire industries erupt seemingly overnight. In this sprinter’s marketplace, most companies have taken on the form of competitive runners – they’re lean and streamlined, without the time, people or budget to wait too long for Awareness to build. Yet social media, for all of its efficiencies, works slowly as an Awareness builder on a scale anywhere near what mass media used to deliver. Word of mouth spreads slowly, from person to person to person yet many companies are structured such that they require a critical volume of new customers if they’re to remain in business.

A Perfect Storm.
These are the ingredients of a perfect storm. Traditional media are getting worse at building Awareness efficiently  while consumer empowerment narrows the window of opportunity for discovery. Meanwhile lean businesses need to achieve revenue quickly and do not have the resources to wait out long, slow Awareness builds. Nor do they have the resources to sustain big mass media campaigns.

The following image is my attempt to visualize the problem in terms of the relative wave profiles of four media approaches:

Admittedly, this is not a scientific diagram, but a gestural sketch. The attempt here is to visualize when an investment in a media campaign begins to pay off. The ‘Resource Neutral’line would indicate roughly an even return on investment. That is, the company gets back in awareness, sales, etc. what it invested in time, money and human capital. This is plotted on a y-axis indicating the passage of time.

Media waves – the splashes and ripples
Mass media both in the early and late stages cost a good deal to get out the door. Early mass media (Let’s say from the Industrial Revolution until the its apex in the 1960′s – advertising’s golden age) would pay this off relatively quickly in high awareness splash with a reasonable lingering ripple effect (the descending curve to the right of the apex of its spike). Back then, there were simply fewer products and less advertising so repeat impressions and subsequent overall retention was easier to achieve.

Late mass media (beginning say in the 1970′s) continue to get more expensive (starting deeper in deficit) and build less awareness (the ‘return’spike is not as high) for every dollar spent. Similarly the lingering effect is shorter because we have far more products and advertising messages today which lower recall, retention and awareness for any one marketer. The well-known reality is, fewer people remember less advertising for shorter periods of time today. This is compounded by the consumer-empowerment aspect of modern dgitial media which allows people to evade advertising easily.

The viral media campaign is rather less expensive to kick off (a benefit of the low-fidelity Internet and free distribution system), and if it goes viral (which is a challenge on its own) returns a quick burst of significant awareness as this or that video rockets across the referral grapevine. However, the lingering effect is very short as viral is something of a shooting star phenomenon especially with our Internet-empowered collective A.D.D. Viral is also very hard to sustain because frequency in a campaign-like format tends to make something less virally relevant with each execution. Not always, but more often than not.

Wholly different, but not without its challenges, is the long-tail like shape of the social media approach. Here the cost deficit is low (though it can be formidable in terms of human capital when attending to a cocktail of social media outposts in order to get sufficient coverage). However, the time it takes to build Awareness among a sufficient volume of people can be quite long. Like the long tail, the Awareness benefit of social media happens in onesies-twosies not in efficient mass hits.

This is important to note, especially in light of the hype surrounding social media, and here’s why:

One reason is Awareness is just the beginning of the sales funnel. From there more time (and resources) must be added to informing that awareness, persuading to the point of conviction, and stoking purchase. Social media can be very good as the latter three points, but its long Awareness building cycle offsets some of these gains.

The second reason is related to the first. All companies, large and small, have a resource burn rate. Small ventures have limited resources and if they run out before sufficient Awareness (and, by conversion, sales) accrue, they will shut down. Similarly, large established businesses that built themselves up to national or global stature (interestingly, often as a result of success in the mass media past) have greater operating costs and therefore revenue needs and they can’t afford to wait long periods to build sufficient Awareness and sales to satiate the voracious appetite of their massive enterprises.

Weathering the Perfect Storm.
Let’s say I’m planning a business or a new product line within an existing business. I’m inundated daily with numerous case studies and ideas as to why TV is still relevant, social media is the future, direct marketing and promotion yield results, experiential marketing matters most, etc. etc. How do I sort all of this out and determine a media mix that will work for me?

There are two factors to consider and they should be considered early on, before money is poured into product development or opening the businesses. Missing either, in my opinion, is no different than setting out to sea with a light crew, limited supplies and that perfect storm sitting offshore. Sure, you may make it, but I’d bring along a life jacket.

First, know your audience’s media usage profile. There are huge differences between generations, ethnicities, socio-economic levels, education levels etc. in terms of media preferences and consumption. A good portion of the right media mix will be defined by what a target audience prefers. Rather than letting the media-of-the-week define the strategy, let customers.

Second, know the realities of your run rate. If an audience is dictating a largely social media approach bake the accompanying long Awareness cycle into the business plan and make sure to have sufficient resources to wait it out. Think through the rollout strategy and find ways to keep the business running on limited revenue during the early stages of this slow-build process.

If, on the other hand, the target audience is still largely reliant on traditional (and expensive) mass media, planning for this in advance will help as well. Depending on their media usage profile, there may be efficiencies to a limited initial mass media launch that seemlessly feeds into a more localized social media play. There may also be a way of amplifying the impact of those expensive mass media dollars through continuity offline via experiential marketing.

There is no shortage of available media tools. The trick is to understand the relative splash and ripple effect of all of these media such that a cohesive strategy is drawn up in which the costly quick hit Awareness media catalyze the slower building Awareness media and all point to the marketing funnel that ultimately leads to that lifeblood of industry – revenue.

I’ve written before that developing this strategy might best be accomplished by thinking from the bottom-up and inside-out.

By understanding the relative splash and ripple effects of media, a company can limit how many resources it pumps into the more costly channels while balancing the potential risk of resource depletion while waiting out a long cycle social media Awareness build.