Musings of a Marketing Maven

Every now and then you come across a gem to share broadly with oth­ers: What Mat­ters Now, a com­pi­la­tion of great ideas by bril­liant thinkers and change agents. Agent provo­ca­teur Seth Godin has pro­duced this com­pi­la­tion and offers it as a free down­load­able ebook from his blog. He encour­ages like-minded folk who are sick and tired of the sta­tus quo to do likewise.

Each of these big thinkers has offered up pearls of wis­dom from their life’s expe­ri­ence or their pro­fes­sional adven­tures — and some of their notions will res­onate for days after in your mind. It’s easy to con­sume: one big idea per page.

For exam­ple, con­sider this gem from Daniel Pink under the head­ing “Autonomy.”

Pink writes that “man­age­ment isn’t nat­ural” if you want peo­ple to engage their hearts, minds and cre­ative pas­sions at work. Man­age­ment is great for ensur­ing com­pli­ance, but not for elic­it­ing break-through ideas or world-changing prod­ucts. I love Pink’s quote in What Mat­ters Now:

If we want engage­ment, and the mediocrity-busting results it pro­duces, we have to make sure peo­ple have auton­omy over the four most impor­tant aspects of their work:

• Task — what they do
• Time — when they do it
• Tech­nique — how they do it
• Team — whom they do it with

After a decade of truly spec­tac­u­lar under­achieve­ment, what we need now is less man­age­ment and more free­dom — fewer indi­vid­ual automa­tons and more autonomous individuals.

Daniel Pink’s mus­ings on the sources of moti­va­tion help me to under­stand why I find life as an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant vastly more reward­ing than climb­ing the cor­po­rate lad­der inside a tra­di­tional enterprise.

Pink’s insights also explain why my hus­bands and friends (all trapped within management-dominated enter­prises) com­plain so often, and so bit­terly, about their jobs. No doubt their frus­tra­tion is caused by lack of con­trol over 1 or more of the 4 items cited by Pink. I can offer advice on how to improve their sit­u­a­tions, but if they’re tightly con­trolled by man­agers or con­strained by their under­stand­ing of  “the sys­tem” — the way things work here — they can see no light at the end of their per­sonal tun­nels as long as they con­tinue to work for those enter­prises. And that’s a cry­ing shame, because these are bril­liant, tal­ented, car­ing and expe­ri­enced peo­ple at the height of their careers.

Unlike them I chose to exit the cor­po­rate job envi­ron­ment 15 years ago. As an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, I can con­trol or influ­ence all 4 of those aspects of my work, so what I do pro­fes­sion­ally is mean­ing­ful and intrin­si­cally moti­vat­ing; offers oppor­tu­ni­ties for out-of-the-box think­ing and resource­ful prob­lem solv­ing; and allows me to make last­ing con­tri­bu­tions to my clients in ways they find dis­tinc­tive and mem­o­rable. Thanks to Daniel Pink, now I under­stand why.

And thanks to Seth Godin for shar­ing these con­tri­bu­tions from such bril­liant thinkers. What a gift to all would-be change agents for 2010!

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