How to Shift Ahead and Pivot in Business with Allen Adamson

In this episode, host Eric Dickmann interviews Allen Adamson. Allen is a noted industry expert in all disciplines of branding. He has worked with a broad spectrum of consumer and corporate businesses in industries ranging from packaged goods and technology to health care and financial services, to hospitality and entertainment.  

Allen is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Metaforce (www.metaforce.com), a disruptive marketing and product consultancy which, unlike traditional firms, takes a multi-disciplinary channel-agnostic approach to marketing challenges.

How organizations do – or do not - stay relevant is the subject of Allen’s most recent book, "Shift Ahead." Using fascinating first-hand accounts and detailed case studies, "Shift Ahead" explains how the best organizations recognize when it’s time to change direction, and how they pull it off while bolstering their brands. Following the approach of Allen’s previous books, "BrandSimple", "BrandDigital", and "The Edge: 50 Tips from Brands That Lead" – which are used in universities across the country - "Shift Ahead" offers up practical and readily applied lessons learned.

Shift Ahead (https://www.shiftaheadbook.com)

Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com

Allen Adamson can be found online on Twitter @adamsona and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenadamson/

Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at https://fiveechelon.com/shift-ahead-pivot-in-business-s2e31/

If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast

For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com

Episode #31

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Transcript

Eric Dickmann: 0:08

Welcome to season two of The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann, founder of The Five Echelon Group. Our goal is to share strategies, tools, and tactics with fellow marketing professionals that you can use to impact the trajectory of your company's marketing programs. We have candid conversations about what works, and what doesn't, with marketing tactics, customer experience, design and automation tools. Our goal is to provide value each week with a roster of thoughtful and informative guests engaged in a lively conversation. So with that, let's introduce this week's guest and dive into another conversation with The Virtual CMO. Allen welcome to the virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Allen Adamson: 0:58

Thanks for having me fun to be here.

Eric Dickmann: 1:00

You know, I really enjoyed reading your book shift ahead. Thank you so much for sending that this was really quite an effort to put together. Do you know how many case studies you've included in this book?

Allen Adamson: 1:10

No, I don't think I've counted them, but, More than 10. Let's just say that.

Eric Dickmann: 1:14

more than 10. Yeah. And some of the were really fun for me to revisit because they're great, classic business case studies, I'm thinking of, you know, Blackberry and Kodak and some of these others that we'll talk to as we go through the interview here, but I wanted to start today. I know you're an author, you're the co founder of metaphors and you're also an adjunct professor at the NYU school, a stern school of business. And I'm a fan of a professor, Scott Galloway. I listened to him and Kara Swisher on pivot. And he's been talking a lot lately about changes in higher education, especially because of COVID. And the fact that everybody's doing online learning right now and there's a question about the value of what some of these schools are charging for higher education. And, you know, you talk about shifts and there's probably been no more dramatic shift than what's happened in education because of COVID. I wonder, as a professor yourself, what are your thoughts on how all of this has impacted higher education?

Allen Adamson: 2:16

I think it's one of the most interesting case studies because As a professor Galloway had said, universities have been slow to change, had been doing the basic same basic thing. They didn't doing for years. They haven't been forced to innovate. it's a legacy game and now they need to shift ahead. And as you know, universities are an experience when the student goes there is there is a learning experience in the classroom, but there is a sports experience. There is a social experience as the living experiences of food experience. And now all of these universities. Have been forced to compete on one dimension, which is what happens in that classroom. And most of them are just, popping up zoom like we are and delivering the same lecture that they did. in the classroom online. And it's a deadly recipe. If it's like when the movie started the early movies. they just filmed stage productions. and so you gotta think of this and say, these kids are used to playing virtual reality games are used to seeing the highest level HBO productions. And now they're sitting, looking at a static professor. Who's not that comfortable. Perhaps talking on screen and certainly the technology skills. Are even worse. and so they better learn quickly how to, create an online experience. It's more than a talking head.

Eric Dickmann: 3:32

That's so interesting because I've had guests on the show before, and we've talked about things like the online trading platform, Robinhood, and some of the aspects where they've gotten in the news, because they've introduced gamification into trading. They've attracted a lot of younger people to the platform and they're getting in trouble because it's like a game as opposed to, our real life trading platform in some ways. And when you talk about higher education, you talk about attention Spans. This really hasn't been thought through. How do you keep that attention? I don't. I hope we don't get the gamification of education, but you almost wonder what it's going to take.

Allen Adamson: 4:11

it's going to take you. It's going to take simply. Having the education do what, something more than made, maybe major league baseball is doing, which is, you know, let's do the same thing, travel all around, just have paper cardboard for the fans. And there you're finding that, just doing what you did before. Online doesn't necessarily work just like the first online digital platforms. Just try to replicate. A physical thing and we're not that effective. So I think, and I think education actually, Eric is a great example. Most organizations be their universities would be the. dry cleaners. Be there dog sitters. Just generally approach things the way they did yesterday. They're very, if it's, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. for years universities have had it, lots of students coming in from global markets. it was working. There was no need to change the playbook, you know? So if you want it to do something innovative and education, I'm sure you were met with, or that's an interesting idea, but why. You know what we got, we'll do what we did last year. you know, it's working so well. Let's not reinvent the wheel.

Eric Dickmann: 5:16

That's a great segue actually into one of the chapters in your book, which is all about red flags in the warning signs that are out there for businesses and what they need to pay attention to. And certainly COVID has accelerated this. If there were red flags out there, this may have pushed businesses even further. into trouble because of red flags that they missed education obviously is one of them. But if you would talk a little bit about this idea of red flags and maybe what in this world of COVID in terms of acceleration.

Allen Adamson: 5:49

Yeah, I think, I'll start off with the point I was just making is that you need to realize that we are all like Marty crane from the old Frazier show, very comfortable in our own little lounge chair and, you know, without. Anything else happening, but just, you need to realize most people are more comfortable doing what's familiar. Then try something new. So you start your day, you answer your emails and you know, most people are just, you need to realize you're starting in the end zone. You're starting from a place of. It ain't broke. Don't fix it. And so the first red flag is if you're really comfortable in your, what you do every day and you're into a really deep routine. And everything is, this is how I do the coffee. This is how I go to work. This is where you are. You are. You got a big target on you saying you are potentially going to be shifted. Somebody is going to shift ahead of you. So that's the first one and that's human nature, but, and it's the hardest to understand, but most people don't realize how much of a rut and a routine. And how. They just doing what they did yesterday. Most of the time.

Eric Dickmann: 6:54

Another point that you make as a red flag is, companies that don't really differentiate on anything other than price. I remember when Amazon first came out and everybody thought, you know, it's a great place to buy books because they're cheaper, but it was much more than that, It was about the whole experience.

Allen Adamson: 7:09

And so that's the other place is that, oftentimes what causes people to. Say, maybe yesterday's game plan. Isn't working. Is oil and sales start, go down. Or their competitor across the street opens up and starts offering a lower price. And you know, there is this, you. An external thing where all of a sudden sales are going down, we're making less money. But what we found in looking at lots of these case studies is if you wait for sales to go down, And start falling. It's often too late that, you know, sales is a lagging indicator. The last thing to happen is people stop buying your product. But before that, They start feeling it's expensive. They start looking at competition and they start trying other things. And but most companies only weight. you know, the one barometer they pay attention to also the money is slowing down. And if you wait that long, you're in a whole bunch of challenges, because it's really hard. To shift ahead and do something new. If you're struggling to keep the lights on.

Eric Dickmann: 8:10

We're in an era of big data and mountains of metrics. Why is it so hard for companies that are sitting on all of this data? Not to see some of these trends and take action before it's too late.

Allen Adamson: 8:23

Yeah, part of it is it's too much data. And so you know, you're. You're looking at a lot of things. The other piece is that. Yeah. So people are a little unhappy with our customer service. They'll get over it or, you know, ours is a little more expensive, but we've been charging this for the same. This is the way we do things here. And I still think that when this guy starts falling in revenue sources and you see it so much in retail, Oh, lots of the retailers. That by the time we in the book, talk a little bit about an old retailer called radio shack for years, they were struggling. Even from the name you. You didn't go there to buy radios and they didn't want to be seen as a shack, but, you know, they kept on. And. they came up with a great brand positioning. Earlier before they disappeared. And the line was, if you've got questions, we've got answers, which was the real insight as to when people deal with technology is, today. Yeah. The one challenge is I can't work it. It's not working and you need help. But what they found out was by the time they came up with that insight and you went into a radio shack and said, look, here's my thing. It's not working. they hadn't invested in the people behind the counter at new lesson. You did, you know, they just had the lowest. Training qualified salespeople. So even though they promise that you got questions, we have answers, they couldn't answer. And then for them to hire and train the right people, they were losing money so fast that they couldn't invest. If they had thought of that idea. Oh, and executed that 10 years earlier, when they were somewhat profitable, they might've been able to hire people behind the counter, like the genius bar at Apple who could actually look at a piece of technology and say, Hey, you need a new battery, or this is not working. part of it is realizing that if you're going to shift, it's not easy. It's going to take more money than you're making now maybe. And you have to plan for a few tries at it before you get it right.

Eric Dickmann: 10:16

And sometimes I think it's companies don't want to give up on a market that they're entrenched in you. One of my favorite examples in the book, because I'm a photography not is around Kodak and Kodak. We're recording this in late July. Kodak was just in the news yesterday because they were awarded a big government contract. To make pharmaceutical chemicals for generic drugs to try to bring some of that manufacturing back to the U S but here's a company that, you know, was, an industry leader and. wiped out because of digital photography. And yet, in the example, you're giving the book, they're the ones that created the patent for it.

Allen Adamson: 10:52

Yeah. I had the privilege of, working with Kodak when it was still. Kodak and they were on every street corner, not only main street, but around the world. And. Kodak in the word, pictures were one idea in people's heads and Iowa thought that. You know, they. Didn't see the digital thing coming that, you know, But one of the more interesting interviews we did was with a head of strategic planning, who was a Kodak at the time. And they had a pretty good research and a lot of data even back then. And. The gentleman told us that no, they knew that the digital. As you said they not only invented digital photography. They knew that the world was gonna change. and they actually new to the year and the quarter when digital photography would start eclipsing film photography. And so that was even more surprising. So it wasn't like they didn't see the train. They tell the train coming for years, and yet they couldn't get out of the way, which led to another conclusion, which was, when you see this, you knew this was coming five years ahead, you had the digital technology. Why couldn't you shift your business and jump after digital? And that was because of what we call the golden handcuffs. They were making so much money on film, photography, the margins. At that point, they had optimized for years. That every time you shot a picture on Kodak film there, the profit margin, whatever the number was, 85% of it went to the bottom line. And the only thing for sure is if you. So digital photography, it was. You were making 10% or maybe losing money. So inside the company, the people that were making all the money on film set, we're not giving any of our profit in the film division to the digital division, because you're just going to lose it. We make more money here. So even inside Kodak, they couldn't move money. From film to the future because you were making more money today than you were. Just doing digital photography. And that's the big challenge for lots of retailers, lots of companies, because, you know, often shifting head means making some, making fewer dollars in the short term, which is going to help you survive in the long term. But that little transition of moving money from profitable businesses. To less profitable businesses, is even inside of a single company. Hard to do. And of course, wall street will punish you. If they started to say, instead of making$100 million last year, we're going to make 10 million, for you shareholders, because we're investing in tomorrow. You know, their stock. Would. and did get hammered and same happens with many other businesses.

Eric Dickmann: 13:24

How would you compare that to a case study of a Blackberry? It seems like Blackberry, it wasn't so much that they were tied to the existing revenue that they were making today. It's just that they didn't believe in the same future that other companies did.

Allen Adamson: 13:39

Yeah. Yeah. So one is that, the, you don't see the train coming and hide your head in the sand and or two what's the one I just talked about, which is he can't. You know, it's coming, but you can't get out of the way. So you get run over by the train. The third is, the Blackberry story was a bit of areas. They just believe that. Yeah, because the Blackberry had become the power tool of. Eddie investment banker, you met on Goldman Sachs or Lehman brothers, another branded vaporized, but any anyone you met, you know, in that powered circle had a Blackberry. Oh from, you know, super moms too. To the president. And so they just believe that, no one is going to give up this little keyboard thing. No. That's ridiculous. That's just a music player. So they were arrogant, you know, and that's another reason you can get run over by a train. Even if you see it coming and even if you can't, You know, move money to build a new railroad track, to get out of the way. This was a case of, and it's often the case. we're invincible. We're great. This too shall pass. No, one's gonna take a little music player and thinking at the same with Nokia, you know, they'd looked at it and they were on the phone business and they looked at Apple. It's a little music player. You know, people aren't going to give up their little Nokia phone. And didn't realize that they weren't selling a bigger phone. Apple was selling a computer in your pocket, not a, not a cheaper phone and they didn't even did research a story. That Nokia was interesting. Yeah. And they said no one is going to spend this much money for a fall. We offer a phone for 69 95. That's the number one selling phone. No, one's gonna spend$200 for an iPhone. it's a complete joke. and consumers were saying, you know, if you did a research and said, Here's our Nokia phone,$69. Here's an apples for, I forgot what it was is your 250, which would you buy? Of course, consumers. I'm never going to spend two full 50 for a phone. Yeah, I love the Nokia and they just didn't realize that they were asking the wrong question.

Eric Dickmann: 15:38

Yeah. That's the whole phone story is so interesting, right? Because Microsoft really dropped the ball there. There's that famous. Steve Balmer interviewers laughs it off. And I think, you know, going back to Kodak just for a second, do you look at this change in strategy that they're doing now where they're going into pharmaceutical chemicals as a shift ahead? Or do you look at this more? Is you know, a desperation move.

Allen Adamson: 16:02

So it was another interesting story with hope. We don't hammer Kodak too much for your audience, but there was a big board meeting at Kodak early during this period. Where, Oh, there was a decision. How much do we lean into digital? And half the board wanted to. Not do it, but to double down, cause they own Sterling drugs. They were a chemical company and they're half the board felt that our true DNA at Kodak is a manufacturer. And a chemical company, we should embrace the pharmaceutical side and the chemical side of our business and not try to be a digital because we're not a digital company. We're not in Silicon Valley. We're not cool. We're not hip the culture of kodak was a chemical manufacturing sales company, which was consistent with the pharmaceutical and chemical business. So there was a big board meeting, half the board wanted to stay in pharmaceuticals and to keep. A bet there and half board wanted to just say, let's be cool and digital, and try to compete with Silicon Valley. They ended up selling Sterling drug, which was a manufacturer Bayer aspirin, and that's done well. They set up a company. Called Eastman, chemical, which today is. I don't know what three or$4 billion in Tennessee. A very successful chemical company. and which brings up another point. You know, part of shifting ahead is to realize what's your skill set? Who are you? What's your DNA. And you could want to be the coolest Silicon Valley kid. Oh. But if you're a chemical guy and a sales guy, Oh, and you're trying to compete with the coders, in Palo Alto. you may try, but you're going to get eaten up. Professors Steckel often. He wanted to be a basketball player, but at five eight. You know, no matter how much he practiced, he was not going to make a living shooting baskets. And I think the same is true for Kodak. you know, so now. 25 30 years later, I forget how much we're seeing them go back to their roots back to the future. But that was always Kodak's strengths was as. You know, domestic, chemical manufacturer. and perhaps if they had chosen to stay with Sterling drugs and keep a big footprint. In pharmaceutical, they would be a real company today, not one, struggling to get loans from the government to do, business development and, and chemicals.

Eric Dickmann: 18:19

Now you talk about some of these decisions that are made in the boardroom. But what do you have a small organization or even more so when you have a larger organization, you've got this inertia of, we've always done it this way. How do you prepare an organization for change for these shifts? When you've got that inertia of this is just the way we've always done things.

Allen Adamson: 18:42

Another really great question, Eric, another interesting finding, was it. The companies that tended to be, this is a business school were very myopic and hired everyone who went to the same school and we're the same button down shirts and watch the same movies tended to get. Disrupted and they're business tended to get shifted ahead by someone else, because they all looked at the world through a fixed worldview. They all saw. Yeah, the same thing. They all watch. They were in a bubble. And so one of the, one of the things, the key lessons in the book is if you want to. Try to keep your business relevant. Make sure you. Don't get in a bubble, make sure you hire people different than you who look at the world differently, different backgrounds, different educations, because that diversity will help you go from a very narrow view. To what we call peripheral vision because most companies. Bigger smile. Don't get disrupted. If you would buy the person right in front of your nose, you know, Kodak, didn't get beaten by Fuji film, you know? yeah. And so most companies don't get Gillette. Didn't have trouble with Schick. Yeah. yeah, they were wet when I worked with P and G, they were very focused on Schick and shifted something in the razor market. There was five meetings to discuss what could happen. No one was watching the kid in LA whose father got home, some cheap. razorblades to do dollar shave club that wasn't, you know, they were not. That was not even on their radar screen. And so part of it is because everyone went to the same business school and sat in her the way you run a big business. As you look at what your competitor does, you do deep analysis. that was, Yeah, another. Red flag is if everyone looks the same talks, the same has the same background. Watch out. You're going to get run over. Not by the person right in front of you, but by somebody coming out of your. peripheral vision.

Eric Dickmann: 20:34

There's been so much talk lately. There's a great book too called pivot that's out now. And do you look at shifting ahead and pivoting as the same thing, or do you really see a difference? In those two concepts.

Allen Adamson: 20:48

No, I think they're pretty similar, you know? oftentimes, you know, as you said, companies get in trouble is because they keep the hands straight and they're going to go straight ahead. And there's no need to. To pivot or shift, you know, it's just, Steady as she goes. And, the, they built and often times what happens from a cultural point of view is, you know, is you build an organization. To optimize what you've got. You don't build an organization. So the Kodak organization was built to optimize film, not to invent digital. When I was a brand energy Unilever. Yeah. And worked on. So category are lots of my job was can we make the rapper a little thinner to save some money here? Or can we change this? You know, a lot of it was, how do you make this soap? Cost less, maybe work a little better, but fundamentally you were in the soap business. You weren't thinking about cleaning your hands with a pump dispenser. Or, you know, You were just in the, you were in a category and you were optimizing it. And I think both are similar. and, yeah. Again, the theory on this stuff The caveat I want to put out here. Yeah, everyone knows us. You've talked to any Oh, We're constantly changing the state relevant. We're looking all around and you know, but there's a big difference. It's like when I say, you know, I know I should work out every day and stop eating Twinkies. And there's a big gap between the knowledge of needing to work out every day and not sit at a desk and stop eating Twinkie and the realities of what happens when you sit at a desk all day and have a Twinkie at three o'clock.

Eric Dickmann: 22:17

Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. You know, what are the other examples in the book that I can relate to a lot, I spent a lot of my career, marketing in the financial services industry. And if you look at a company like IBM, IBM has always had a very trusted relationship, especially with, you know, big banks, big corporations. They've been a trusted partner, but they've shifted. They've pivoted multiple times during their history. It's hard to stay relevant for a long time in technology because technology keeps changing. When you look at a company like IBM, do you think that they have been successful at shifting over time?

Allen Adamson: 22:55

Yeah, I would say that, First the technology category is one of the hardest categories in the world. to stay relevant because different categories as, you know, move at different paces. And so if you're selling donuts that business changes, but not. If you're in a technology business, what's driving your business today could be totally irrelevant. And gone tomorrow. and To IBM's defense. They are in the worst possible situation of trying to stay relevant that probably the fastest moving category or one chip. Design could put you out of business and make you completely irrelevant in a blink of an eye. But given that, I think they've done a pretty good job of trying to stand for thinking and standing for solutions and the process of helping business, not so much buying this computer or buying this system. you know, cause if you're just selling stuff, that stuff is going to change and you need to think about what your value proposition is and so I think they've done a pretty good job, even though the results recently, they still struggling. but I think they would be struggling. They'd be gone. If they had followed the traditional technology player of just focusing on. They are, what they make. What they're making now is completely different. Then what they made 10 years ago, certainly, but they made 50 years and a lot of companies who've survived. Realize it's not. What we make today is what problems we help customers solve tomorrow.

Eric Dickmann: 24:24

And there's been a huge shift amongst a number of big players, not only to cloud based businesses, but to subscription based businesses or having a larger component of services within their organization. Which, as you said is a big change for making things, to providing these services.

Allen Adamson: 24:42

So they've always been in the business of helping you solve problems. oftentimes what you would put in a big IBM system back in the day, they would talk about their IBM 360 and the million dollars you have to spend on these big boxes, but often what you were really paying for, it would be the IBM consultants to help you figure out what to do. And how to design the system. And now Excenture and other people have taken a piece of that work, but so I, you know, I think the tendency is to be very focused on what you make the box. Oh, and not paying enough attention, to, How you help people fit that box into their lives? I think Apple is a perfect example. Lots of people are very fixated on Apple and saying, their screen is not as good as the Samsung. And you look at an iPhone versus a Samsung galaxy. It's impossible to tell the difference. They're both sleek there. You know, but what I think is keeping Apple. Head of the game. It's the genius bar is the experience is the fact that, they're selling more than just pixels on a screen and battery life is that they realize that this is a part of you're creating an ecosystem in a wafer. Eh, they're probably spending far more on customer service than others. And you don't see that until you call customer service and you, I see what my dad, who's a. 90 95. He's on the phone with Apple care. You know, once every two weeks for his phone or his computer and they will spend 45 minutes with him. And he's not a big customer, helping him figure out why his email is doing this or Oh, why his calendar is not syncing. And if he didn't have that Apple person, screen-sharing with him to help him. Send out some more checks on online banking, even though that's not their software. And so a lot of that is below the radar screen. People are fixated on the beautiful image of the piece of hardware that comes out. But I think lots of differentiation today needs to come on the softer side of helping consumers better use products and understand it.

Eric Dickmann: 26:39

That's where this whole customer experience design has really come to the forefront. it's not just the product, as you said, it's the whole experience of buying and being serviced

Allen Adamson: 26:48

And that's hard to execute. And that's the other thing is once you decide you want to do that, Back to the radio shack example. It's pretty, it's not totally able to somewhat easy to ask people what they want and come up with a solution that you got questions. We have answers, you know, that's part one and you get 30% credit for that 70%. And you know, what will make or break you is. Can you pull it off? Can you get people? Can you actually answer the questions? I worked on a brand positioning campaign for a large insurance company. And they came up with a line we're in the business of caring. We care about you and they beautiful ads to make that promise, come to life in that. But that's the type of insurance company I want somebody to care about me. Yet at the same time they were cutting costs and they told their customer care people. You can't spend more than one minute. with any customer because we need to have you do 14 calls an hour. So one hand, they had a message out saying we care about you. And the other time when you call the insurance company, they said, that's an interesting question now, but I gotta run to my next line. Good luck figuring that you know how to do that claim out. You know, you go to your self help center and read page 17 of the brochure. That's the harder piece is to deliver on that promise. and just don't estimate underestimate how hard it is. So to do that. As you shift ahead.

Eric Dickmann: 28:03

That's a perfect setup for this next question, because as you start to get to the end of your book, you start to talk about the leadership aspect of it and what it takes to be a good leader to shift ahead with your company. And I think, especially for public companies, they have this huge challenge where wall street is pushing them for short term results. And yet, in order to be relevant, they have to be thinking about longterm where the company is going, what markets do they want to address? How do they want to build? So there's this pressure on cost cutting and getting up the share price. And yet you want to stay relevant for the long term. And you know, we've seen great examples. companies like GE and others that have just tanked because they've made some Poor choices. how are, how can you be a good leader? And think and satisfy short term needs as well as building for the long term.

Allen Adamson: 28:53

Yeah, I, again, I don't think there's a magic. Here are the three steps you do, and you can become a great leader. You know, one of the characteristics that struck us as we did some of these interviews. Was that leaders attended to shift ahead? and keep their business relevant. often had the edit. There was a famous quote from bill Marriott, which is view of success is never final. and they had a notion that their business just because they had a good day to day, it doesn't mean there's a good day coming tomorrow. And they had a sense of another famous quote from the former chairman of Intel, which is only the paranoid survive. And to be a little worried about. And so if you have the idea that, Hey, we're doing great. And that's the time you're doing great is not the time to kick back, put the feet on the desk and yes, you should celebrate and acknowledge all the work, but. Just because you're doing great today does not give you a guarantee. You'll do great tomorrow. And good leaders are always trying to look around the corner. And seeing. that, yeah, it was a great quarter, but that doesn't mean, and there's always going to be something unexpected, even in the best of projecting in the future. not many people were. on the news in January of this year saying, I think there's a pandemic coming you better. You know, stock up on hand sanitizers. If I were you, until, We were in the middle of it. And of course, then having somebody who said, I saw it coming, but I didn't want to say anything. It's not really. Not really credible.

Eric Dickmann: 30:25

I think the book is just shock full of great examples. before we wrap things up today, were there any case studies or interviews that you did with business leaders that, surprised you or you really walked away with, with some unique insight?

Allen Adamson: 30:40

yeah. One unusual story. Cause we didn't wanna just do Kodak and Blackberry and Apple. And we spoke to the folks who, Had re-imagined a public library. It was the Greenwich library, which is a little bit special because of Greenwich is a very affluent community, but they, years before life changed, they had noticed that, of course, people weren't necessarily hanging out at the library to pick up books or magazines. at least in Greenwich, people were coming there to be entrepreneurial, to do research, to work. And so early on, they said, gee, we need to reimagine. What problem is a library solving tomorrow? Not what is it doing today? And they built a we work. Situation in Greenwich library where you could come. And if you want to start a business, have some place to work. They realize that just because you could Google something and you could find things, you still needed a concierge. So their library ends became consultants and advisors. If you wanted to start a business, they can help you think through how to find things. no, they had the benefit of time. Because they started early and I also had the benefit of the high tax base in Greenwich so that when they wanted to redesign the library and put more work in cubicles in and do lectures on technology. and set up their own genius bar actually for their community to. You know, cause part of the problem and technology, if you've got an Apple, that's great. He goes, but most people have an Apple and a samsung. And if you have multiple pieces of hardware, multiple pieces of software, you know, you get, that's not my problem. No one can fix it. So they set up a station in the Greenwich library, which was a technology help desk. And it didn't matter if you came in with a PC hooked up to an iPhone, you know, they. their job was to figure out how do you put all these pieces together? And. And so they were able to do that. And I think if a library can do it, yes, you need to have the leadership. any business should be able to do it.

Eric Dickmann: 32:34

I love stories like that, where people re-imagine spaces reimagine their company, really look at things from a customer's point of view and say, you know, how could we adapt to more of what the customer needs? I think that's great. And I love this book. do you have another book in you?

Allen Adamson: 32:47

we're working on something now about, How to survive this massive change and what type of innovation is necessarily, and it may not be totally a technology base. It may be more experienced based, which is, would you see happening in the marketplace is less about. Changing what you do, but how you do things.

Eric Dickmann: 33:07

That sounds like a great topic. And I'd love to have you back when the book comes out to talk about it some more. Tell people how they can find you online and the book, where should they go to get it?

Allen Adamson: 33:18

yeah, it's shift ahead book.com has a website or of course Amazon in any of the books. And, I'm at, metaphors.com. and we're in the business of trying to help people. Figure out how to shift ahead. Cause the other notion is that if you try to do everything and you do only everything averagely, you're still invisible. Lots of people try to change and they do a little of this. A little of that. if you look at what separates winning businesses from loosing business, it's usually doing one thing. Maybe two extraordinarily, not five things averagely. No one gets excited about. Average in a word of mouth world.

Eric Dickmann: 33:54

Oh, that's great. I will have all of this linked up in the show notes, both to the book and two metaphors. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. This has been a really interesting interview and I can't wait to see what the next book you come out with.

Allen Adamson: 34:06

Thanks for having me and enjoy your day.

Eric Dickmann: 34:08

Thank you. that wraps up another episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. As a reminder, if you'd like to learn more about Virtual CMO, strategic marketing consulting services, or anything else discussed here today, please visit us at fiveechelon.com. There's a link in the show notes. If you'd like to send us comments, feedback, guest inquiries, and your five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts are always appreciated. If you'd like to reach me. I'm EDickmann. That's E D I C K M A N N on Twitter. If you'd like to connect on LinkedIn, please let me know. You heard about me through The Virtual CMO podcast. I look forward to talking with you again next week and sharing some new marketing insights on The Virtual CMO.