The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  “Bravery” is one of those highly charged words. The moment someone calls them brave, most people’s response is, “Oh no, I’m a coward. I was just brave that one time.” We’ve heard it many times. It’s easy for you to say too.

  We are all brave sometimes, and we are all cowards other times. The opposite of bravery isn’t fear. Fear is built into all that we do. Fear is quite often a helpful tool, so don’t ever mistake bravery and fear as opposites. Bravery is simply a noun, a choice.

  But what about the bravery of ideas? Contrast is just that. Here’s a story to illustrate this.

  Chris once worked for a wireless telecommunications company. He was senior project manager on a large computer-systems purchase project that was vital to the company’s operations. The company decided to hire a consultant to help run the project, and that consultant was a papered and certified project manager who did things in a different style from Chris. He wrote out vast project plans with minutiae documented at every turn. And the project started slipping.

  Soon thereafter, a reasonably new hire (but at the VP level) named Dan Carney came into the picture. Carney took Chris aside one day and asked, “Is this huge, monstrous project plan helpful to you?” Chris shook his head. The consultant was let go. Dan broke the project down a completely different way with Chris.

  “Let’s keep this to no more than ten lines. Let’s have ten-minute status meetings every day on this. The rest of the details belong to those people who own the tasks. Do you actually know better than the Oracle DBAs what they’ll have to do to get the database updated?” Chris shook his head. “Great, then just write down their ‘supertask’ and hold them accountable to it.”

  There’s much more to this story, but the whole project got back on time, every team did exactly what it was supposed to do, no one was ever late to the ten-minute status meetings, and Chris learned an even better way to manage projects than his previous methods, which had been somewhere in between the way of the overdetailed consultant and the minimalist work of Dan Carney.

  The whole idea of this method was brave. Carney trusted that the teams involved with the project would own their responsibilities. Carney trusted that a single line item could sum up several hundred detailed tasks. Carney believed that with that little bit of coaching, Chris could complete this crucial project successfully.

  The bravery was in bringing a new idea into play that ran counter to the obvious and the acceptable. The bravery came in creating ideas that so strongly contrasted with what had come before that people could have easily dismissed Carney’s methods as too simplistic. (In fact, many times in life, the criticism “too simplistic” is applied to a moment of success.)

  To work with Contrast is to explore your own bravery.

  Bravery Is a Progressive Experience

  There’s “brave” and there’s “psychotic break.” When you are exploring your own personal bravery, it’s great to feel empowered to stand out and have contrasting ideas and perspectives, but realize that if you spring such ideas dramatically and drastically upon others, they will rarely be perceived well, nor will they be immediately or easily supported.

  And yet you can certainly choose to be as brave as you wish.

  Eddie Izzard is a brilliant comic from the UK whose style onstage is a frenetic mix of references to Shakespeare, mentions of current events, and strange non sequiturs and segues. Another little detail that sometimes happens with Eddie: He cross-dresses.

  “Women wear what they want and so do I,” is what Eddie says about it. It’s not some kind of act or theatrical issue. He isn’t stating a sexual preference with it. He simply prefers to wear women’s clothing sometimes.

  What was that like the first time? Izzard most certainly wore such clothes in private before he did onstage. So there was a day when he decided (maybe after many days of thinking about it), Today’s the day I’m going to get onstage and wear my dress. What was that like, you have to wonder? What led up to it? Yet, somehow, Izzard has found a way to make it work.

  Now, you might not choose to be a cross-dresser at work, but your creative contrasting idea might be every bit as bold. Maybe there are parts of your personality or your backstory that you’ve always kept tucked away for fear they would detract from who you are. How might they contribute to what you do?

  A Beginner’s Guide to Bravery

  Here are some thoughts and little tips to practice, to get your ideas to start contrasting and to help you along your way to bravery.

  Your opinion is every bit as valid as anyone else’s. (It’s amazing how few people believe this.)

  Small victories lead to bigger victories. If you’re brave enough to order your food differently off the menu, and nothing bad happens, it prompts you to try bravery elsewhere.

  Accept that you’re not always brave. Sometimes you just aren’t ready. Don’t let that count as a justification. Accept it and move forward.

  Bravery should rarely cost others as much as it costs you, if you fail.

  Most people’s professional struggles can be attributed to breakdowns in their personal bravery. Once you play someone else’s game or follow external paths toward a goal, you’ve surrendered some part of your bravery. Remember to revisit this question if you feel the need.

  Bravery in your opinions creates Contrast. There’s nothing wrong with being a contrarian. That said, pair those contrary thoughts with Echo, to be discussed later. Few people follow a contrarian into battle.

  Bravery often comes from conflict. Someone says something racist and you call him on it. Someone makes fun of a shirt you like, and you defend it. You might not always stand up. You might not speak out every time, but remember that bravery is won or lost in those moments.

  Bravery comes from daring to fail.

  Bravery comes from realizing that mistakes are their own education.

  Bravery in leadership means accepting that you’re not always the smartest one in the room.

  Bravery in relationships means supporting the other person instead of always pushing your own agenda.

  Bravery is about giving other ideas air but having your own as well.

  There are endless ways we can talk about this, but from Sofia Walker to Dan Carney to Eddie Izzard and now to you, we feel bravery is where it’s at. What about you?

  Why Smart Content Means Emotional Content

  If you are Wikipedia, you can aggregate lots of information and have it be an amazing experience and even a great company. Most people will need another strategy, however.

  We strongly believe that the value of a single piece of information is diminishing as more of it becomes available for free, so basing what you do on giving information to others is not as interesting or valuable as presenting it in a human, emotional manner. This is true whether you end up being a smart, highly idiosyncratic rant creator such as Johnny B. Truant or a very personable, compassionate personal-development guru like Jonathan Fields. Using emotion in your content is essential to creating a unique value, and you will need to learn how. This is because information alone rarely sways people. Only feelings do.

  Even large brands must create emotional aspects to what they do on the Web. When you watch commercials, the best ones often relate highly personal experiences.

  A Super Bowl commercial we saw for Chrysler comes to mind, which featured Eminem and ended with the slogan “Imported from Detroit.” By using markers such as the city of Detroit in its ads, Chrysler presents a unique emotional experience that helps people feel the pride Chrysler feels, leading to an empathy no amount of information can buy.

  You have to be this way with your best content, or it will happen despite you. If warmth, strength, love, or any other emotion isn’t felt through what your channel produces, your audience will be left cold—the exact opposite of what you want. What the famous maxim of the Web “Great content spreads itself” truly means is “Great content makes you want to spread it yourself.” This can happen by accident, but it most often happens by desi
gn.

  Emotional Imprint

  Contrast is such a powerful force, on the Web and elsewhere, because it is one of the few ways for you to truly leave emotional memories. When trying to convince or sell, you’ll notice that most people focus on selling intellectually, using strong arguments they believe will work as effective retorts to their customers’ complaints.

  The more we worked in marketing, and the more we did presentations and wrote blog posts and launched projects, the more we recognized that information has no impact on people’s reactions. Instead of information, people largely react to emotion, and they feel an emotion when they are presented with something different and surprising.

  As we began to figure this out, we each began working it out in a different way. Chris started making his work funny, which was a natural extension and brought down people’s defenses as they laughed. Julien worked on creating an emotional connection in his work by inspiring people to action. We both noticed this was far more effective than working with bullet points and presenting case studies. At first, we didn’t understand why.

  Later on, it became obvious to us that one of the reasons this works is that we focus on a different part of an audience’s brain, a different wall in their mental fortress, than most people do. Have you ever noticed how the most effective episodes of a television series are those where emotional things happen to the main characters? We are now working with this same theme in mind.

  TYING EMOTION TO IDEAS

  If you need a car to get you from point A to point B, why spend too much time on that? Find something on Craigslist that runs well enough and is in your price range, and call it good. That’s how it works, right? Ideas work best when you can hitch an emotion to them. Look at these two pitches, for example.

  Drink Molson because it’s a well-made beer.

  Get your friends together and celebrate the local watering hole, where you laughed about losing that phone number, where you cried when the Leafs didn’t win the cup, and where you first admitted that maybe settling down and having a family wasn’t all that bad an idea. Grab a Molson and love your bar the way you love your beer.

  Now, which compels you?

  You can choose which emotions you want to work with, but also realize that you must be very honest in what you’re doing. If you manipulate people, they will never forgive you. The goal, instead, is to build a bridge between the emotion you want them to experience and how your idea best serves that emotion. Make sense?

  Extrapolation, Metaphors, and Ender’s Game

  Chris started his business career in customer service for the phone company. Because of this, community and customer satisfaction are at the core of how he preaches business. He lifted the skills he learned in one environment (customer service for telecom customers) and applied them to how a large company might have better business relationships and improved sales. Julien took what he knew and loved about the hip-hop culture and the underground and independent music scene and approached his business pursuits with those mind-sets front and center.

  Extrapolation is the ability to squint and blur, to see something and apply it differently, to work without the recipe but use the concepts you’ve learned. In her book Find Your Next, Andrea Kates talks repeatedly about learning not from your competitors but from people in entirely different verticals. What can shoe stores learn from oil-change outlets? That’s the goal.

  What can the Apple Store teach you about your business? What do Jay-Z’s lyrics teach you about improving your communication? How does turning your job as a bag boy in a grocery store into performance art set you up to be a sought-after keynote speaker making great money doing what he learned at age sixteen? Answering questions like these is the goal.

  What’s a metaphor? Oh, they’re for helping people understand things. Metaphors are mental shorthand. (That’s pretty much a metaphor, by the way.) They let you explain a concept by stealing from another concept that people can already understand. Here’s one of Chris’s favorites: “Social media is the telephone. It’s no different. A hundred years ago, I’d be telling you, ‘You’ve got to get a phone! It’s amazing!’ And now I’m saying that figuring out Twitter and Google+ is important.”

  Social media is the telephone. That’s a metaphor. You get it. It’s fast. It’s shorthand.

  Learning metaphors helps with Contrast like you wouldn’t believe. If you want to build impact, learn and practice to understand metaphors. Learn how to build mental bridges between something that’s hard to understand to something that’s a lot easier to understand.

  In 2009, our concept for a “trust agent” was something like the Walmart greeter for a company. In 2012, our concept is more that it’s a concierge. If you know what those two roles mean, you can save yourself 265 pages of reading and you’ll have at least the thumbnail of the concept. See? That’s what a metaphor can do for you.

  TRY IT

  Come up with five metaphors for concepts you find yourself struggling to explain. Try to make them as simple as possible and still make sense. The more complex the concept, the better. If you can explain a data center as a giant exploded expensive computer, only bigger, then you’re in the right place.

  Practice metaphors on friends and acquaintances. The ultimate place would be in situations like on an airplane, when the dreaded “What do you do?” question comes up. Try using a metaphor instead of a job title. You’re a project manager? No. “I’m the babysitter at a software company.” We promise it’ll get you much more interesting responses.

  Ender’s Game

  Okay, if you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re both nerds. We both use lots of reference points from science fiction, comic books, video games, and other things that will rot your brain. The book Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, is secretly an instruction manual on how to think about extrapolation and use it to improve Contrast in your own Impact Equation.

  The details of the book aren’t exactly important to this explanation (aliens threaten the survival of Earth, so a young boy learns how to become a general and possibly save us). What is cool about the book (and if you haven’t bookmarked this, written yourself a sticky note, or just Kindle/Nooked the book already, do it now; we’ll wait) is that it teaches us to rethink our perspective, to throw away the maps and consider our GPS instead. Perspective, perception, and desired outcome are what you start thinking about while reading Ender’s Game.

  None of this requires that you give a crap about aliens and bugs and laser guns and stuff. Those are the trappings. (This, by the way, is extrapolation. Once you learn how to take the cool nugget from the not-your-thing experience, you’re trading in extrapolation.) What’s cool is learning that the gate is down, no matter what. (We will not explain what that means, but it’s the very kernel of the idea. Read the damned book.)

  In your terms, or in business terms, or in Contrast terms, the idea is this: Practice shifting your perspective. Rethink your business as if you had a thousand employees instead of three. What would that change? Someone just did your idea better than you. Now what? You’re sick for an entire month. What does that do to your business?

  Now blend some extrapolation into the mix. What have you learned in the last few months or years that could apply to your next move? What if you rewrote your résumé to assume you already had your next (very different) role? Rewrite it to explain what you’ve learned in terms that will relate to the new gig.

  Extrapolate and Conquer

  This the same as thinking about leverage, except in this case it’s mental leverage. Take what you’ve learned, and move it to the next game. It’s building on what you know and helping you find even more Contrast from those around you.

  Flip video did this. While other camcorders went with tons and tons and tons of features, Flip made a big fat red button and said, “We are so very easy to use.” They iPodded the camcorder space. (Yes, that’s now a verb.) Want to extrapolate that same idea again? Head over to the Chipotle restaurant chain and look at its men
u. It’s one of the simplest chain menus out there. Chipotle might be the Flip video of restaurant experiences.

  But bear in mind one vital detail: Choose the wrong idea as the “important” part to extrapolate, and you’ve got a problem. What matters? What’s the real secret of it? That’s for you to figure out.

  Extrapolation is a power tool. Metaphors are mental shortcuts. The enemy’s gate is down.

  How McDonald’s Added a

  Hundred Million Dollars to Its Revenue

  When you are already the world’s largest and most recognized fast-food restaurant, getting sizable growth, the kind that stockholders care about, is no simple feat. But McDonald’s took a plan that involved extrapolation, spent heavily to market it, and found one hundred million dollars at the end of the rainbow.

  McDonald’s was thinking, Parents come because their kids like the food. What if we gave parents a much more premium coffee experience? It would never say so out loud, but what it was also thinking was, We could beat Starbucks up a bit with this, and it’s not a normal competitor of ours, so this might have a bigger impact than anyone suspects. And thus McDonald’s launched the McCafé.

  This was in store. It was as simple as introducing some new products and as complex as changing the look and feel of the internal colors, building a specific café frontage area inside the restaurants, and cueing people to the mental, social, and emotional concept that McDonald’s could indeed present a quality café experience.