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History Invents Itself

The town I grew up in had a population of 20,000 people. The school I went to kept the same kids in the same classes all through 8 grades … then many of us went to the same high school.By third grade the first week of school held few surprises. I suppose that way good in some ways.

But in one way that situation made for a terribly skewed view of how the world worked.

We grew up in a universe where the people rarely changed. That was true in too many ways.
We rarely changed in that

we were the same individuals with the same names.

we were the same in our relationships to each other.

we were the same in that we couldn’t change or outgrow the stories we knew about each other.

The “kid who wet his pants in first grade” was still that “kid who wet his pants in first grade” on the day he graduated high school. And I can still tell you his name today.

Anyone who’s ever attended a family or school reunion knows what this means. We live up to the stories that define us and sometimes when we get back to the people who were there when those stories first came to be, we revert to being who we were when the story happened.

We believe that our history defines our present.
Don’t believe that. Claim the right to define your business and your life.

The Place of History in Business and in Life

We’ve all heard that history repeats itself. That those who don’t pay attention to it’s lessons are bound to end up learning them again. But not all of histories lessons remain important and relevant. And staying tied to them when situation, skills, and experience change isn’t always a good thing.

That boy who had a bathroom accident at age 6 is now quite successful business man. The people he meets today never see him as that “kid who wet his pants in first grade.” Part of the man’s success is that he knows that story from the past might be true, but it’s irrelevant. He doesn’t let it define the person he is today.

The gorgeous cheerleader named “Cookie” who had straight As, personality, and the coolest crowd going for her in high school is now working as bartender in that small town of 20,000. She still tries to live the old stories, but they’ve faded.

History can be dangerous in it’s ability to keep us stuck in the past. Like a fifteen-year-old hairstyle, if you’re still telling a story from the past to define why your life or your business isn’t good — the story isn’t working for you.

Wisdom comes when we learn from history and use it to write a new and more successful story now. That’s true of business as well as life.

Using History Strategically to Claim the Future

Once SEARS was the World’s Largest Store and named a radio station WLS to celebrate that. The catalog won that title is gone. ABC bought WLS in 1960 and the SEARS Tower was sold in 1994.

Sears story of past success is irrelevant, unless they look at how a future SEARS might apply what they did in the context of a 21-century Internet environment. Even with the same vision and mission, Sears is in a new position with new conditions. They’ll need to make new decisions, build new networks, and new systems to find the unique opportunities to build success — much as they did in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Numbers are important and useful, but they are not as deep as the questions we ask. All numbers we have — sales numbers, revenue numbers, even responses to commercials, ads and blog posts — report history, the success or failure of we did in the past. We can set new goals and build new plans with numbers to measure them, but once we execute to where the measurement occurs that action is past. Those mile markers on the road, at best, show us how far we’ve come.

History can’t drive the present into the future. The right questions will lead to our best true story now. A typical view of history and numbers will inform that, but the right questions will ask:

what were missed opportunities.
what behaviors always led to your successes.
what you’ve learned from wrong turns.
and what you want to learn to make your future stronger, faster, easier, more meaningful.

In other words, use history to benchmark how you’ve grown and to guide your path. But make your one true story about who you are and where you’re going and why your history doesn’t draw the picture only adds nuance to the colors.

Research and mine your history to know what was and might have been true once. Then interpret and reapply that lesson to the new situation, skills, and experience to use history to invent a new future — combining what you wish you knew then, what you know now, and the two offer unique future opportunities for you to go.

Are you using history to claim your business and life opportunities?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

PAST: A Brief History of Social Media

Social Media Marketing budgets are on the rise.
In 2008, I had a conversation at BlogWorldExpo with Lorelle VanFossen aka @LorelleonWP about the future of social media adoption by corporations. The basis for the conversation was my experience with the Whole Language movement — a holistic approach to interaction around information that had moved through the field of education.

The prediction I was drawing focused on four key stages that occur when a social meme moves from “first believers” to the mainstream.

Stage 1: The Community Culture and Vision Begins. Individuals come to the community through curiosity and contact with a believer. They are like-minded thinkers who see the vision, adopt the culture, join the community — they want to wear the t-shirt. They learn tools with deep interest in how and why the tools work to support the vision of the community. They learn the process, etiquette, rituals, and traditions with respect for the people who teach them as they align their goals and values and become part of the vision.

As the follower population grows, the meme moves outward from the “first believers” like rings around a stone dropped in the water.

Stage 2: Quiet Revolution Moves Outward. The ideas move out like the rings from a rock dropped into water. Spreading wider, but with less power. The new believers share their passion faster than they can learn the depths of the vision. They tell their friends how cool it is to be part of something important. Each generation further from the center gets less depth of the original vision, culture, and community. They get the vocabulary, the tools, the rules, but not the reasoning.

Stage 3: A Demographic Emerges. A critical point occurs at which the vision, culture, and community gathers a large enough following that it has become an identifiable demographic. Thatâs not a good or a bad thing. It’s what built great religions, great art movements, great style in architecture and fashion. It’s also what brought us Muzak, bad television, and spam.

Stage 4: Business Objectives Disrupt the Community Culture. Business establishes a reason to participate. But business comes as an entity not as individuals. They have their own vision, culture, and community. They don’t want to wear the t-shirt; they want to market to the people who do. They pick up the tools and visit the venues without changing their thinking. They will also bring organization and money. All of these will change and affect the original culture.

What dies or survives?

Present: Death and Rebirth

In her book, RenGen, Renaissance Generation, the Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business, Patricia Martin demonstrates how throughout history every rebirth of a culture is preceded by a death — the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the kind of changes we face today.

In a world poisoned by a century of progress at any price, it is easy to look around and believe we are in a free fall. But civilizations have cycles. The twilight moment right before one civilization ends and another emerges is often driven by cultural clashes, religious wars, polarizing viewpoints and overreaching rulers. Look around you. What you see marks the end of the end ? but also the beginning of the beginning. — RenGen

Death and rebirth? Yes.
In 2007 – 2011, when the community culture met and mixed with the corporation, neither came away unchanged.

In 3 short years, from a mildly polarized blogosphere of hobby bloggers and business bloggers emerged a group that became the social businesss-phere. An entrepreneurial and freelance culture began testing new business models where there were none. Three sorts showed up: blogging gold rushers, business pioneers, and those who watched. The evolution raced and the learning curve raised as the floor fell out under the economy. Business pioneers started playing for keeps.

At a slower, but still noticeable pace, the corporations realized the loss of their business models. Print publishing took it especially hard, responding in ways that looked a lot like Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s Five Stages of Grief — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Print publishing’s use of the term “citizen journalist” is good example. It changed from at first patronizing,, to an attempt to control and spin things, followed by public conversation by old media on how they should respond to new media, on to writing negative comments on blogs using false names, until finally they saw their advertising profits flowing out the door like so much ink on the pressroom floor — which led to sales of properties, layoffs, and new social media teams playing catch up.

So what’s working and what will be next?

The Future in a One Sentence Test

Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone.

Social media doesn’t grow a business. Strategy and service does. Great and growing companies know what business they’re in and how to take care of the people who help their business grow. Facts are that … social tools are important in the way that computers, telephones, and pencils are, but business grows the way it always did.

The companies who can’t see their customers lose my business.
The companies who use social tools, but lose at service and partnership, might count me as a friend, but I don’t buy from them.
The companies that deliver great service are growing and I love buying from them whether they’re on Twitter or not.

I say this often. I’ll say it again …

In any sentence that uses the term “social media, you should be able take out that term and replace it with “telephone,” and the sentence should still make sense.

If you want to predict where social media implementation is going in the next two years, do the sentence test. After all, there was a time once, when cutting edge businesses had only one person who had a telephone. Here’s a brief discription about the telephone as a disruptive business tool.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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