Are some people born winners? Are genius marketing students coming from top MBA schools destined for greatness? Perhaps, but research shows there are additional elements, besides raw talent, to get a marketer or any other professional to “world-class” status….
Earlier in the year I wrote a MP Daily Fix post, “You Need Marketing Bootcamp”, in which I described how world-class cellists and pianists descend on Meadowmount boot camp, located in Westport, N.Y., every year for a grueling summer of practice, drills and more practice. These musicians have decided they need the rigors and training of a boot camp to get better, improve their craft, and set themselves apart from their competition.
In a similar vein, a recent Fortune article, October 30, 2006, “What it Takes To Be Great”, author Geoffrey Colvin concludes, “targeted natural gifts don’t exist–you will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years.”
Colvin quotes studies from British researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sulboda in which they find “the evidence surveyed does not support the (notion that) excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”
So, if natural talent isn’t the sole variable to becoming “world-class”, what’s the secret? The Fortune article draws some interesting conclusions:
1) Nobody becomes great without hard work. Even the most accomplished people need ten years of hard work before becoming “world-class”.
2) Continual practice is important. Researcher K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”
3) Natural talents are important, but not critical to greatness. Ericsson notes, “some international chess masters have IQ’s in the 90’s”
By now, you are probably thinking that hard work and practice are great, but surely that’s for those repeatable tasks like doing scales, drills (if you’re a musician) or hitting thousands of golf balls (if you’re Tiger Woods). Can these lessons be applied to the discipline of marketing?
I’ve taken five “what it takes to be great” rules from the article and adapted them to our world of marketing:
1) Approach each critical task with the goal of doing it better. For example, if your role is trade show marketing, is your last show better than the previous? Did you improve upon specific tasks with your last show (found better speakers, improved your floor exhibit, hosted a more focused customer event etc?)
2) Think about process. As you are doing a task, ask yourself, is there a way to improve this specific task to make it “leaner”–saving time, money and/or achieving better results?
3) Gain feedback. You may think you did the best job in the world with your latest marketing program. What does your boss think? How about the heads of business units?
4) Continually Grow. Getting better requires reaching outside your innate talents and gifts and learning from others, perhaps those not even in field of marketing. Notice what makes others great and see if there is an application to your challenges.
5) Practice Makes Perfect. Deliberately practice those marketing tasks you do often. Refine, improve and get better at them. If one of your key tasks is writing press releases, make sure that you practice, practice, practice, so you deliver the best possible release you can.
John Horn of USC observes, “The ten year rule (of hard work to achieve world class status) represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.”
Does the ten-year rule apply to marketing? Is marketing one of those disciplines that people can “deliberately practice” and improve their performance? And how much of a factor is “dumb luck” in becoming “world-class”?
Tags: boot camp, greatness, innnovation, ten year rule, world class
Nice post, and I like the plug for lean processes.
I don’t think the practice required to master the disciplines you talked about (scales, golf balls) can be applied precisely to marketing.
At their core, the goals of marketing are the same. However, the medium and the targets constantly change, which means marketers must be adept at tweaking the tactics or the message.
We’re all marketers in some sense… Our character is our brand, our friends are our customers, and our habits are our tactics… So there seems to be an anthropological basis for what we do as marketers.
As your article implies, there are still some who are more successful at it than others. I don’t know that there’s a single tactic or discipline you could encourage people to practice that grants any reassurance that it will result in success, but an overriding resolve to treat others as we want to be treated will result in a success of its own sort, whether it pleases the shareholders or not.
According to a few books I read, at least, (including John Maxwell’s “There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics”) companies that behave in such ways are generally more successful than those that do not.
I thought long and hard as to whether the ten year rule applied to marketing. Perhaps it can be looked at in a couple of ways.
On a micro level, there are surely some repeatable tasks that a marketer does daily or weekly that can be improved upon, and approached with a mindset of doing them better than the day before.
On a macro level, I have to believe that the ten year rule of hard work in a particular discipline (such as marketing) is the minimum to achieve excellence, and in some cases it takes much, much longer.
Each person is unique, and some have more talents than another in one particular area, but as the biblical parable goes, it’s up to us to not “bury” those talents, but to cultivate and put them into good use.
Well said, Paul.
Paul:
If I could add a sixth, it would be, “Become as smart as you can, as quickly as you can, about all the technology tools you can use to change people’s behavior.” I’m amazed at the number of marketing and PR people who don’t even know about blogs, for example.
Regarding your comment on press releases, people can practice all they can and still not improve if they’re writing press releases according to the old rules–only for journalists.
That’s because the rules have changed. Today, we also write press releases for consumers and post them online. We no longer have to limit them to a page. And we don’t have to cram the “5Ws” in the lead paragraph.
I just created a free email tutorial called “89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases” that explains the new rules, and how to optimize them for the search engines. By the time you’re done, you’ve almost earned your master’s degree in press releases.
A couple years ago, a Marketing Profs article challenged readers to start work each day with by asking themselves the question (and I paraphrase), “What can I do today to help me become the marketer of the year?”
For an elite few it’s a pedantic exercise, sort of like asking Peyton Manning how he read the blitz and threw a perfect touchdown spiral with a 300lb lineman in his face. But for the rest of us– Well, I appreciate each article and post, like the one above, that reminds me of that challenge and some of the steps I need to take to try and reach that goal.
I’d add self-reflection and peer-evaluation to this list above. I’ve found it helpful to cherish the small victories along the way and (with some trepidation) open myself up to constructive criticism from those around me. If it requires a boot camp or training camp so be it.
Hi Oliver, good feedback!
Interesting you mention Peyton Manning. Did you know his first year in the NFL, he threw 28 interceptions? That was a rough year! So now, while he’s considered one of the best, if not the best quarterback in the league, even the “elite” have to follow some of the steps of greatness (listed above) to perform at a high level.
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