Early this year, I heard a piece on NPR that I felt had direct relevance to A/E marketing. The piece was from an article in the (then) current Harvard Business Review (HBR). The next time I was at Barnes & Noble, I bought the issue.
I'm just now getting around to reading it. In fact, it has been so long since hearing the NPR piece that I don't remember which HBR article interested me. So today, I opened the magazine and read the first 36 pages.
One article ("Success Gets into Your Head--and Changes It") was about what the brain remembers. Apparently, if you get a reward (i.e. when you succeed), the brain remembers what it did right; failure has no impact. This is very interesting information for those of us who manage marketing departments and proposal teams. It says a lot about recognizing success and good work, and not wasting time casting blame.
On the other hand, when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts stuff, the processes, the technical knowledge, we're told that we learn more from our failures than from our successes.
It seems to me, then, that the answer is to give failure equal time on the technical and procedural stuff, and learn what you can from it -- but when it comes to the behavioral stuff, let go of failure quickly and move on.
Six pages later, I found an article called "We Can Measure the Power of Charisma." What an interesting piece of writing. We've all known that if you walk into a short-list presentation thinking you can't win the project, you won't win the project. It's hard to be positive when you believe the effort is doomed to failure. But this article talks about ways to measure charisma -- our gestures, expressions, tone of voice -- and predict with some accuracy the outcome of a competitive situation.
This is something all marketers -- especially proposal managers, presentation managers, marketing managers, directors and CMOs -- need to learn about and put to use.
So because of the value in just the first 36 pages of the January-February 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, I did something I rarely do. I actually started a new magazine subscription!