By Mike Millett (OB1) · Founder, Digilu Part Six of Six: Conclusion

Elevate or
Vanish

Every business reaches the moment. The ones that recognize it early have options. The ones that wait until it's undeniable have far fewer.

Download the book (PDF) · free, no email ↓

Elevate or VanishMike Millett

Execution keeps getting cheaper. Responsibility does not. That is the whole difference, and I found it by doing the wrong thing first.

Chapter 33

Somebody Has to Say No

I worked with Nick Vujicic, and the most useful thing I did for him was stop things.

For anybody who does not know Nick: he was born without arms or legs, he speaks to stadiums, and he is one of the most magnetic people I have ever been in a room with. Within about four minutes you stop registering the disability entirely, which is a sentence I know sounds like a line and is simply what happens.

Because he is magnetic, people constantly arrive with ideas.

Some were good. A lot were stunts. Somebody wanted to put him in the overhead compartment on a plane and film it. There was always another version of that, always presented with real enthusiasm, always by somebody who genuinely liked him and could see how well it would do.

And they were right that it would do well. That is the difficult part. The stunts were not bad ideas in the sense of not working. They would have worked. They would have got the numbers.

My job, on those days, was to be the person in the room who said that will hurt the brand.

That is what brand management actually is, and I want to be honest that it is unglamorous and that nobody thanks you for it in the moment. It is not campaigns. It is not clever. It is sitting in a room where everybody is excited, and being the one who says that in ten years this will be the thing people remember, and it will be the wrong thing, and we cannot get it back.

You are trading something measurable and immediate against something unmeasurable and distant, in front of people who can see the first and have to take the second on faith. You lose that argument regularly. You have to keep having it.

Here is the underlying idea and it took me years to be able to state it: a brand has a core that must stay stable, and an execution layer that should change constantly. Almost everybody gets that backwards. They keep the tactics they are used to and let the core drift, one reasonable exception at a time, until the thing people trusted is not there any more and nobody can point to the day it left.

Nick's core was never in question. What he stood for was fixed. So the whole job was making sure that nothing in the execution, however good it looked that week, quietly rewrote it.

I am not going to claim credit for who Nick is. He was who he was long before I was anywhere near him. What I will claim is that I understand what the job is, because I did it for somebody where the cost of getting it wrong was a real person's life's work rather than a quarter's numbers.

Chapter 34

AI Optimized the Wrong Thing

I found it by searching Google for my own work.

I do that periodically, partly to check what the machines are saying about us and partly out of vanity, and this time something was wrong. A paper I had written, sixteen pages on a subject I care about, was no longer where I had published it. The address I typed sent me somewhere else. To my own company's site, in fact, onto a commercial page, which is not where a paper belongs.

The AI system I work with had done it. It had seen a real problem and applied a real fix.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 35

What Does Not Get Cheap

Here is what I think is actually happening, and it is not really about AI.

Execution keeps getting cheaper. It has done it four or five times in my working life, and each time the same people say the same thing about how this one is different, and each time the specialists who were paid for the doing have to find something else to be.

I knew that. I have taught it. And when I restarted my own company, I built.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 36

The Six Stages

So I built the thing I had been describing, and I want to put it here plainly rather than leave it as an idea.

Observation is only useful when somebody is responsible for the response.

That sentence took me an embarrassing number of years and one failed dashboard project to arrive at. You can watch everything. You can have every number on one screen, updating live, beautifully arranged. If nobody owns what happens next, you have built a very expensive way to be informed about your own decline.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 37

The Part That Is Actually Leadership

Every transformation I have watched needed one thing that no amount of analysis supplies, which is somebody willing to act before it was obvious that action was required.

That is much harder than it sounds, and the reason it is hard is not stupidity. The people running a business are usually the same people who built the systems that are now going stale. There is real investment in those systems, emotional as well as financial. There are teams organized around the current model who will have to be reorganized. There are partners and stakeholders who will quite reasonably ask why you are changing something that is not visibly broken.

And the honest answer, that it is going to be broken before we can see it, is close to unsellable in most rooms. I know, because I tried to sell it and got told I was frightening people.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 38

The Business Cards I Will Probably Never Use

I have spent real time designing business cards I am almost certainly never going to hand out.

I am trying to learn to be a chief executive instead of being the company's most experienced marketer, and it turns out that includes learning when to stop working on the card.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 39

I Always Got Her a Friend

At every campsite we stopped at as children, I would go off and find myself a friend. I was good at it. I have never found it difficult to walk up to somebody and start talking, and at six I did not yet know that was unusual.

Continue this chapter in the free book →

Chapter 40