CHAPTER 12

SKILL #4:

LEARN, UNLEARN, RELEARN

You don’t learn to walk by following rules.
You learn by doing, and by falling over.

—RICHARD BRANSON,
founder and CEO of Virgin Group

In my favorite book, Future Shock, author Alvin Toffler wrote: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Unfortunately, I’ve met many marketers who chastise others because they themselves lack the skills they need in this new world. So, instead of humbly admitting that they need to learn more, they undermine the people whose skills they don’t understand.

The concept of the hive mind is powerful. I use it with every team I lead. Its manifesto in business is, There is no smartest person in the room. The room is the smartest person in the room. In other words, the collective is more powerful than any one individual.

MARKETING’S BATTLE WITH OBSOLESCENCE

Education experts estimate that up to 40 percent of what students are learning today will be obsolete a decade from now, when they will be working in jobs that have yet to be created. Moore’s Law isn’t just changing computing power and technology or marketing; it is also affecting the education required to learn new marketing skills.

The Role of Continual Learning and Corporate Training Programs

If marketing is rapidly being transformed to look more and more like education, it made sense for me to speak to educators who are at the forefront of this transition. I spoke to three experts. The first, Ann John, is currently curriculum manager at The Flatiron School in New York City and formerly was senior manager of professional development programs at Mediabistro (where I teach online education courses on social media).

It’s difficult to walk into a university setting and ask the business school to teach a class on how social data informs a company’s content engagement strategy. Or how podcasting is the new networking. Or to hold a social media master class that discusses how to personally brand yourself and bring in more business through relationship economics. Ann John saw these needs and decided she wanted to be at the forefront of online education. To her, brick-and-mortar education is missing a lot of elements that online education strives to address.

Ann John thinks that because education is stuck in a four-year time frame, businesses are also stuck in a noniterative mindset. “It’s hard for companies to plan out a whole year anymore,” she says. “It really requires [that] a company . . . be iterative. And a lot of this comes from learning new skills.” John noted that Mediabistro was established to help professionals who “didn’t have time [to spend] in a conventional classroom . . . learn non conventional skills such as social media, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing.” She breaks learning into two camps: informal and formal. Much of what we do on the job is the former; what we do to prepare for the future is the latter. She explained:

[At Mediabistro,] a lot of the things we would talk about . . . with companies looking to educate their workforce had to do with a change in attitude. You can’t silo disciplines into four years of learning. Learning has to be ongoing . . . throughout one’s entire life cycle. I think where we’re moving is [to informal] learning. If I’m at work, or I’m at school, and I have to learn to use something like Outlook, I would Google it and learn how to use [it] in real time. This is informal learning. So much happens informally that we must ask ourselves how . . . we formalize informal learning.

Ann John’s points about education demonstrate the difficulty in writing a linear book on disruptive marketing—or explaining how to do it. The tactics are old by the time a person finishes reading the book. For this reason, disruptive marketing is more about personality change based on customer habits than it is about specific tactics a marketer can implement.

This is a point noted by so many others I spoke with, too. How do you change your personality from linear to dynamic? How do you leave behind the vertical thinking and doing, which is what most of conventional marketing practice consists of, to become a lateral thinker and doer? Ann continued:

I do corporate training and the organizations that approach me are so desperate to really change their entire company’s personality that they are happy to pay a lot of money for a three-hour course, [but] then that’s it. This type of stop-and-go learning doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. You can’t say, “We’ll take a three-hour course and everything will be okay.” Moving forward, it has to be lifelong learning if it’s going to have any true effect.

There are other, bigger issues with the value of education in improving marketing skills. For example, how do you measure the effect of skills training? Ann noted, with a heavy sigh of frustration:

People don’t want to do anything hard, which is why it’s difficult to get people to adopt what amounts to a lifestyle change. Also, how do you measure the ROI of training? Turning training into small, iterative batches is a key. Many orgs don’t offer any training at all, but if they did, it [would have] to be a lot like [the way] tech companies release products: not in one big release, but iterative test-and-learn phases.

Ann John steered clear of using threats, scare tactics, and “fear of missing out” messages so as to force conventional marketers to rethink their ways:

When [your message is] “You have to keep up or you’re going to be left behind,” that is a bad way to frame things. It should be simpler. It should be, “You have to learn these skills to make it in the world.” I think this attitude would change how people approach learning. [The purpose of] education is [to teach] how to solve a problem. It shouldn’t be used [to evaluate] how well you’ll do in a job. The model . . . in education is [still] . . . knowledge transfer. But that model makes no sense anymore. I learned how to think critically in college, but shouldn’t I have learned that starting at age five?

Marketing’s Need for Technical and Analytic Education

Ann John laid the hammer down hard on marketers who are ineffective because they lack technical prowess:

I think in this day and age you need to know or understand a basic level of code regardless of what you are marketing. Every product, every organization . . . has a website. A website is built on code. Most people in marketing don’t have that. The person making decisions in many marketing teams has no technical skills. They have a traditional background.

The second person I spoke with was Allison Hemming, founder, CEO, and recruiter of the creative class. She named her firm The Hired Guns, and it’s one of the top New York City firms in its field. Hemming has placed me in jobs and is always exciting to speak with; her point of view is always unique.

Allison Hemming thinks companies can’t find the technical marketing talent they need, and that is a big reason some organizations are having difficulty transitioning from conventional to disruptive marketing. When listing those who have the technical marketing talent on her job board, she calls these highly sought-after candidates “mathletes.” According to Hemming, “There are various things in marketing I believe are undergoing a radical shift right now. It’s funny that the show Mad Men ended at the same time the world of marketing was undergoing the De–Don Draperization of advertising.”

In just the past five years, Hemming has seen a radical shift in who hires her firm to find talent, as well as in the jobs she lists on her weekly gig board. Hemming thinks this is because brands increasingly want people with these skill sets in-house. She explained:

In the first five years of our existence we did a ton of agency placement work; now we are solely hired by brands and companies to place creative positions directly. Staffing has moved to the brand side.

Marketing has changed; agencies were filled with creatives because they were told there was no math required in marketing. That age is gone. It’s now all about accountability. If you are a marketing mathlete, you have the potential to do exceptionally well. Look at our gig board; it’s all about finding people to help grow audience using analytics.

If you’re just starting out thinking about working in marketing, looking at positions where there [are many openings] and no [or few applicants] is a good thing. The numerative space is always going to have openings. Being predictive using analytics is something every company now wants. If you’re the CMO and you’re not touching data, you’re not acting in the best interest of the customer. Gut-level CMOs are dinosaurs.

The Role of MBA Programs in Training Tomorrow’s Marketing Talent

Glancing at one top-tiered Ivy League business school MBA schedule, I found only one class in analytics offered, while candidates were forced to take several classes on classic business theory and strategy. Much of this could be the result of a lack of qualified teachers. It might also be that education is as far behind in its understanding of what it should offer its customers—in this case, the students who shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn the advanced degree.

I still find higher education amazing and worthwhile (though I may be a tad biased because my father was a political science professor), but if my father were alive and teaching, I don’t know if even he would agree with an antiquated system that fails to prepare students for the lateral thinking and other skills required to live in our modern world. The third person I interviewed was Georgette Chapman Phillips, who is dean of the College of Business and Economics at my alma mater, Lehigh University. Phillips is one of the few African American women to head a Top 50–ranked national university business school and is quite the educational futurist.

If anyone can change this way of thinking, it’s Dean Phillips. On a Friday morning in Seattle I telephoned her, some three thousand some miles away on the lovely hillside campus of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I asked her where higher education is headed, and if marketing and business students will be amply prepared for the disruptive mindset that’s needed and be able to morph into the talent Hemming is seeking to place in companies.

A solid ROI seems to be at the heart of what marketing is all about now. So I wanted to know if business schools are creating a product that will provide an ROI for enrolled students. That is, if MBAs cannot prepare candidates for the new marketing organizations, is earning the degree even worth the investment? What if universities abandoned this business program for something radically different?

Phillips responded that “the [thing] that needs to be transformed quickly is the dated model of how faculty interacts with students.” Talking about how technology is changing the way we learn, she added:

I think this is one of the biggest changes . . . academia [must] face. You can be a very effective teacher by opening up your students to the same facts, day in and day out. But the four Ps (product, price, promotion, place) are not what we need to present to our students today. Our mission is to teach nuts and bolts . . . but [we must] present them in a way that they are still relevant five years from now. Our challenge in business education is to give students enough of a foundation.

I asked Phillips if universities should be offering programs in a year or two that reflect today’s customer behavior. Her response reflected the urgency she feels: “We don’t have to wait a year or two to offer classes on disciplines students need to learn now. If there is an area students need to learn, we roll out programs next month.”

What Phillips responded sounds almost like something said by the agile engineers I speak and work with on a daily basis at Microsoft, or the many conversations I’ve had at startups. The difference is that instead of shipping a new product or feature to customers, Phillips is talking about shipping education to students as the demand necessitates. When we got into a discussion on the future of education, and how it will help students prepare for a world of disruption and disruptive marketing, her answer was what I would expect from an outfit like Mediabistro, Lynda.com, or Code Academy—not the dean of an accredited business school:

I think education involves a lot more experiential learning. Throw students out into real scenarios and give them a safe place to swim in the marketplace. Required co-op programs. You can’t learn just by reading a book anymore. Everything must be team based. Cross functionality, team-building exercises. The concept of a professor teaching students taking notes will soon be long gone. The student will do the homework in the field. This is what experiential learning is all about.

In other words, the future of education mirrors the future of marketing. “Test and learn” is the name of the game. There are no Fs or even As in these classes—just as there aren’t any failures or home runs in marketing. There is only the ability to continue to adapt and learn—and then unlearn and relearn.

Learning won’t be limited to four years anymore; it will be a lifelong process during which the phrase “I have twenty years of marketing experience” will be a curse, not a badge of honor unless you also have Photoshop, audio-recording, video-editing, photography, and analytical measurement skills.