Tom Asacker

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The Business of Belief: Why We Believe What We Believe in Business and Life

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1. The marketplace is deaf

2. Breakout, breakthrough or breakdown

3. Branding is a dangerous concept

Belief is the path to action.

In his 1971 book Silent Messages, Dr. Albert Mehrabian revealed the importance of the verbal, vocal and visual elements on communications believability. The verbal cues--what was actually being said--were dominant only seven percent of the time, the vocal 38 percent of the time, and the visual cues were the primary carrier of trust and believability, a whopping 55 percent of the time.

Communications experts subsequently grabbed those insights and played up the fact that human beings are primarily visual creatures. And that’s true. But it totally misses the good doctor’s point.

What Mehrabian’s research really tells us is that people are persuaded primarily by behavior. You know, actions speak louder than words. Unfortunately, as Mark Twain once pointed out, actions speak louder than words but not nearly as often.

It’s time for everyone to wake up and smell the new millennium. The good old days of influencing by proxy are gone. We no longer dance to the lyrics of rules or rhetoric. We’re not enticed by promises nor threatened by precept. We’re not impressed by sensory hyperbole.

We’ve lost faith in business, government, and other institutions. Communication sans behavioral evidence, no matter how engaging or factual, is no longer enough to move us to belief and action.

Unless you’re an entertainer, the ultimate goal of your communication is belief. Not awareness. Not understanding. Not fear. Not laughs. Belief. Belief leads to experience and experience leads to adoption.

If we believe you can help us, make us look good, improve our relationships, make us feel good about ourselves, etc., then we’ll take your call, stop by your place of business, click on your link, join your organization, or grab your product off of the shelf. If we don’t, we won’t. We’re simply too busy today to act on faith.

So the next time you’re compelled to communicate; to send us a message. The next time you feel the urge to preach from the pulpit, make fantastic promises, tickle our funny bones, or entice our eyeballs . . . stop!

Stop and ask yourself: How can I bring people together--associates with each other, associates with our audience, and our audience members with each other--to create something real and valuable? How can I elicit belief through behavior?

Don’t say, “Just Do It,” do it with us! Don’t tell us that you want to be our friend, be our friend! Because if we do it with you, and with each other, we’ll come to believe.

And belief is the path to action.

Back to reality.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be an “artist.” Or perhaps I was an artist and simply wasn’t aware of it. I spent years in art classes, learning to observe and to create. I spent hour upon hour drawing and painting the sensual curves and complex colors of everything and anything, from lower backs to Bartlett pears.

My last intense experience of seeing and sensing with a brush in my hand seems like a dream. It was decades ago, and I distinctly remember being lost in a euphoric, creative state; totally immersed in an explosion of colors and textures. I’ll never forget that feeling, or my art teacher’s startling observation of my finished work:

“Well, you don’t need any more instruction. You’ll probably quit now.”

I’m not sure how he knew, but from that point forward I stopped being an “artist.” I still went to art school and I still painted, but I had become much more interested in “art” than in experiencing reality. I shut my eyes to the brilliance of the real world, and indulged my mind in the artificial realm of fashion, concepts and popularity.

I’ve witnessed the world of business going through a similar passage. We used to be deeply involved in the precious, living world of our audiences; viscerally experiencing their unique hungers, fears, and dreams. Today, we fantasize. We sit in meetings and create abstract works like “perceptual maps” and persuasive content.

We used to listen with awareness and respond with highly relevant and desirable products, services and communication. Today, we get caught up in the competitive game, more and more estranged from the real world. We worry about media mentions and our reputations. We compulsively measure email open rates, and obsess over our Google rank and Facebook friends.

“It is a sign of decadence,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, “to find one’s references in art instead of nature.” It’s a sign of detachment to find one’s business references in self-reflective concepts and content instead of the customer. It’s a delusion to believe that success is a few more tweets or one new management theory away.

Business isn’t an arms length, abstract creation. Business is reality, it’s life. We’re here to see, to feel, and to create with, and for, others. We must immerse ourselves in our audience’s world, so that we have access to real-world information and insights. We must look with fresh eyes and feel with childlike wonder and compassion.

Step away from the whiteboard, turn off Twitter, and reengage with life, with your curious senses and innocent heart. Rediscover your unbridled passion and idealistic hopes. Be daring and create new and preemptive benefits. Get back to reality and create brilliant and unique works of art.

As J. J. Van Der Leeuw might say today, The mystery of business is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.

How to give a great speech.

I get a kick out of the counsel that flows from the web. I find myself frequently smiling and shaking my head as I read expert rules for this or that, which inevitably conflict with other experts’ sage advice.

One authority declares, “Never use more than ten slides in a presentation,” while another spouts, “Kill PowerPoint!” The passionate management guru and professional speaker Tom Peters employs more than a slide a minute (and sometimes, so do I).

So what should you do? Split the difference?

Here’s what to do: Ignore the experts. Think about your audience--What’s on their minds? How are they feeling? What do they value? What’s important to them?--and bring your ideas to life for their benefit:

Be captivating – What can you say that will inspire your audience, and how can you say it so they’ll stay engaged and hopeful?
Be desirable – Bring your main point, your passion, to life in a way that’s reflective of their passions and that feeds their immediate and long-term hungers.
Be real – Character influences more than arguments. Tell your audience why you do what you do. Make your words vivid through anecdotes and examples, and speak clearly and from the heart.

Don’t become confused by the din of the web. The answers to all of your questions lie with your audience, and within you.

P.S. This isn’t really a post about giving a speech.

The telos of business.

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." ~ Lilla Watson

"We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves."~ Pema Chödrön

Aristotle believed that everything has a telos, that all organisms move from an imperfect state to an innate, perfect one. For example, an acorn’s telos is an oak tree. He also believed that human life has a telos, and that aim is happiness.

I’m not so sure about human life, but I’m convinced that the telos of our modern marketplace is happiness--happiness that comes from novelty, entertainment, and social interaction; happiness realized by being more productive, safer, and healthier; and happiness that flows from contribution, self-worth and identity.

Happiness must be a business’s intent. Not products. Not services. Not content. Not money. Happiness. Happiness should be an organization’s context; the frame through which its people view their purpose, activities, and results. Theodore Levitt’s “what business are you in?” if you will.

To be clear, I am not saying that the genesis of all successful ideas is the burning desire to make other people happy. It is certainly not. Many, if not most, innovations are born of curious and creative minds intent on solving their own problems and making themselves happy.

What I am saying is that the long-term success of those ideas in the marketplace is absolutely dependent on the happiness and well-being of others. Because given an abundance of choice, people pick and choose their personal definition of what they believe will improve their lives and make them happy. Happiness is their ultimate currency.

My friend Paul has profited greatly from this seemingly hippy-dippy concept. His initial idea for website testing software was launched in a University dorm room with a secondhand computer and a few hundred bucks back in 2005. He developed the product primarily to solve his own problems as a designer, impelled by the marketplace’s lack of an affordable and functionally intact solution.

Fast forward seven years and Paul, along with his partners, now operates a growing, multimillion dollar software business. But it wasn’t the original idea that rocketed him to success. Rather, he listened intently to his customers’ wishes and responded with new, market-shaking ideas; ideas that are feeding their hungers and fueling his growth.

Let me be clear about something else. Although Paul is a very kind soul, he is no altruist. He’s a shrewd and sensible capitalist. He’s simply aware that it’s all connected; his success and happiness is bound up with the success and happiness of his customers. The future well-being of his business lays not with its beginning, but rather with its telos, its aim. And so does yours.

We are in the midst of a massive marketplace upheaval. Like my friend Paul, we must all rapidly change our perspectives, our myopic focus on our short-term desires, and embrace a new, customer-driven ethos. It’s time to expand our concerns from measured performance and efficiencies, and obsessively ask, What’s going on in people’s lives? What role do we play in that drama? What role could we play to improve their lives, to make them happier?

The telos of the marketplace is happiness. Does that mean it has to be yours? Of course not. This isn’t a short-term, hard and fast rule; there are far too many exceptions for it to be. But, I assure you, your marketplace competitiveness and organizational well-being over time will inevitably come down to your telos. The difference between you and an acorn is that you get to choose yours.

The riddle of marketplace success.

Are you driven by your perceptions or by your dreams?

The how of great brands.

I've had the opportunity to work with many leading brands over the years, and I’ve also watched purposeful, passionate organizations struggle for significance. I’ve seen dedicated religious leaders lose their ministries to apathy, while others swelled their church attendance into the thousands. I’ve witnessed friends start businesses to change the world and ultimately fail, while self-interested, financially motivated ones continue to thrive.

As much as I would have liked to (and believe me, I’ve tried), I have not found an individual’s or organization’s ‘why,’ its purpose or cause, to be the basis for success. Even though it feels good to make that connection—to think in terms of intent instead of execution—it’s clearly not the case. And for one simple reason: People don’t buy ‘what’ you do or ‘why’ you do it. They buy ‘how’ you do it; the unique and compelling way you bring your idea to life for their benefit. It’s your ‘how’ that creates engagement, adoption and devotion.

Did Steve Jobs and Apple believe more passionately in elegant product design than Sony? Jobs was inspired by Akio Morito and fascinated with Sony products. Did Martin Luther King Jr. have more passion for equality and civil rights in America than Howard Thurman? Thurman enlivened King and served as his spiritual advisor. How about the Wright Brothers? Were they more stirred to fly than folks like Gustave Whitehead and Lyman Gilmore? Of course not. But they did conceive a patented control system, which is still used in modern aircraft today.

Don’t let your feelings fool you. Intentions carry weight; they help inform decision-making, inspire like-minded people, and sustain motivation during difficult times. But they only matter if you bring them to life in a bold and memorable way. What matters most in today’s marketplace is timing, guts, and creative execution. It’s the combination of domain expertise, strategic value creation, and an obsessive attention to detail—especially with regards to others’ experiences—that gives rise to great brands.

What propelled Apple to its cult and Wall Street status? Steve Jobs’ powerful strategic vision and uncompromising sense of ‘how.’ Why do we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.? Not because he cared deeply, but because he inspired us to care with his carefully crafted experiences and expertly delivered oratory. What accounts for the rapid growth of companies like Hyundai, Standard Chartered Bank, and Chipotle? Their ‘how,’ pure and simple.

Picasso had it right when he wrote: “Success is a very important thing! It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, out of love for art, so to speak, and hold success in contempt. But that is wrong! An artist needs success. Not only to live but to be able to create his art.”

What ‘why’-inspired organizations need in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace is strong leadership to help them stay focused on the ‘how.’ Without a strategic obsession on the external needs and feelings of your audience, your ‘why’ will slowly fade as more ‘how’-driven organizations attract away your customers, members, volunteers and donors. And, like you, I’d really hate to see that happen.

Businesses are not made.

Why is change so difficult for organizations? Primarily because of the generally accepted myth of business creation. We believe that businesses are made by arranging and rearranging parts; people, departments, managers, et al.

Leaders think of themselves as technicians and architects who develop a plan and fashion the business in accordance with that plan. They imagine themselves as carpenters or sculptors, who impose their will on the "material" and bring the creation to life.

Businesess are not put together. You don't work on them from the outside in, like a potter works with clay. Businesses grow. They expand. They blossom. Like a cell in the womb, they progressively complicate themselves.

Businesses are living organisms that resist foreign materials, including new ideas, just like the human body resists beneficial new parts.

(Rest assured, we will never provide your email address to anyone. Period.)

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Tom Asacker is timely and thought-provoking. I went to school on his ideas.

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