Transcript of Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work
Transcript of Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work
Transcript of Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Everybody loves best practices. Give me an example. Give me a template to follow. Well, I think that that practice leads to mediocrity. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I speak with Jay Acunzo. Weâre going to talk about breaking the wheel, questioning best practices so that you can do your best work. Youâre going to want to check this out because this might be the ticket to innovation for your business.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.
This is your host John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Acunzo. He is the founder of Unthinkable Media and the author of Break the Wheel: Question Best Practices, Hone Your Intuition, and Do Your Best Work. Jay, thanks for joining me.
Jay Acunzo: Thanks for the invite, John. Itâs good to be here.
John Jantsch: Now, you also spent a little time at Google I think, didnât you?
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. That was actually my first foray out of where I started, which was sports media and into tech and marketing.
John Jantsch: Iâm doing a couple episodes today and my last guest was a head of engineering at Moz. Iâm not going to lie to you, we did a little bit of Google bashing.
Jay Acunzo: Look, thereâs a reason Iâm not working for any of the large companies I worked for before.
John Jantsch: Actually it was more dang it, we have to play. You know? It was more of that. You know?
John Jantsch: Letâs get into the book. One of the lines that jumped out at me really from the very beginning, stop obsessing over otherâs right answers and start asking yourself better questions. Thatâs really in some ways the premise to the entire book, isnât it?
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. You know, work has this tendency through a number of reasons that I explore in the book to regress to the mean. We look at content marketing as a really easy example because itâs so public. You look at a lot of blogs. I came out of the marketing tech world. Every marketing tech vendor, marketing trade publication, if you see a list article of tactics on a given channel, six ways to drive leads from LinkedIn for your business, Iâve seen that article in 17 other places and it looks identical. Thereâs this glut of average or commodity work out there, which is becoming a real problem for marketers.
In writing the book, I wanted to explore in a world where thatâs table stakes where knowing just the basics of how to do anything is instantly available, how do you go not from zero to average, but from average to exceptional?
John Jantsch: What are some examples of ways that people because ⌠I mean I think most people get that, âOkay. Yeah, Iâll ask better questions,â and then the next thing is like, âWhat does that look like? How?â
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. Well, in the book, I propose a two by three decision-making model, which is basically a fancy term for like I think there are six great questions to ask, but itâs about what you ask those questions of that truly matters. I think if you look at commodity work, especially from marketing teams, what tends to be missing is the variables found within your own specific context. Because what weâre so obsessed with doing is finding some existing playbook and repeating it or guru or expert or best practice or new trend to glom onto. Weâre looking for these generalities or what works on average and Iâm using air quotes because I know this is a podcast here, but we look for what works on average or in general.
Really thatâs a dangerous way to make decisions because it doesnât take into account your context. If you just break down your context into three different things, I think investigating those things becomes paramount to making really good decisions. The decision here isnât what works on average. Itâs what would work for us. Your context is basically you, the person or people doing the work, your audience, especially key for marketers, but the people receiving the work, and then your resources, which is your means to make that work happen.
If you ask really good questions and I propose two apiece of those three things for a total of six, ask good questions of those three things, your context. All of a sudden you have a lot more clarity than just trying to grab at all those general bits of wisdom swirling around our industry and thereâs more than ever before.
John Jantsch: Hereâs the problem though, of course, it worked for them and I wonât get fired if I do that. People are scared to make a decision that maybe breaks the wheel. I mean would you agree that thatâs part of what holds people back?
Jay Acunzo: 100%. I always say two things. One is I wanted to take thinking for yourself out of this realm of the rebel and hand the ability to do that to the practical individual working in business where itâs not like Iâm bucking the trend for its own sake. Iâm not different for different sake. Iâm not running in an opposite direction or counter cultural direction because itâs cool or because I have an idea and I disagree with my boss or client. No. I think itâs very practical to do these things. Itâs just that weâve never really been taught how to do this. Finding best practices isnât actually the goal. Finding the best approach for you is.
Weâd all agree with that, but we donât really have a practical system in place for how to make those decisions and more importantly, John, how to vet any best practice or precedent to ensure itâs working for you in the here and now. Our main skill as marketers need to be not finding someoneâs answer, but vetting on all those possibilities to work for us or to throw out the ones that donât. The main answer I would give you is I wanted to take that scariness and make it practical, but part of me honestly wants to say whatâs deep in my bones here is there is a certain type of person that this book is not for.
This book is not for somebody who just wants to follow a blueprint and clock out sharply at 5:00 and doesnât care about the results and doesnât care about serving their audience. That is not who this book is for. This book is for somebody who really truly is bothered by shipping it when itâs terrible or mailing it in because whatever, I donât really care about my work. Thatâs not who Iâm speaking to.
John Jantsch: I was with you completely on the practical side until you threw the word intuition in there. Now, Iâm picturing the crystal ball approach to making decisions, but thatâs not what you talk about, is it?
Jay Acunzo: No. I hate that idea. Iâm a creative person. I run a business, Unthinkable Media, that makes original series for brands. I think about big ideas and big picture creativity all the time. I can get lost in the fluffiness of all that stuff very easily and be fine with it. But I know when we enter the real world, A, thatâs not everybody, and then B, we have work to do, results to get, clients or customers to serve. If you look at the history of that word intuition, itâs really been twisted. Itâs embedded in this idea of like the mystical muse. But all intuition means, if you look at the root of the word, is to consider. Itâs from the Latin intueri. Thatâs all that means, to consider.
I like to think that these visionaries that we laud in business, the ones who seem to react to their intuition effortlessly, the Elon Muskâs of the world down to the creative individual on your marketing team, these people that we call visionaries they donât see the future. They donât have the gift. Theyâre not like visited by the mystical muse. They just see the world for what it actually is. They just have this incredible ability to consider their environment and make decisions based on that, based on reflection and testing and learning instead of somebody elseâs general idea. That to me is what intuition is about.
Itâs about understanding how to ask good questions, how to contemplate and consider the world in a critical way, which might be slow at first. What Iâm trying to do in the book is propose a system to make it faster for you. So that if you leave the book, if you go and implement what I researched for a couple of years here, the product of that is you can start making better decisions faster, and your first impetus is to investigate your environment instead of to glom on to what some expert said you should do.
John Jantsch: Iâm going to pile on your intuition idea because I think one of the missing ingredients quite often is you actually have to care about the people that youâre trying to serve. I think that thatâs a part thatâs often really missed. I think when you really care about the people you serve, then you start looking at ⌠Thatâs part of what to me drives this looking at the world in a different way. Iâm looking at the view through the lens of my customer or who Iâm trying to serve and I think that allows me and I think allows most people who have done anything innovative to say, âHey, thereâs no new ideas. But if we combine them this way, itâll serve this group better.â Would you agree that thatâs a missing ingredient?
Jay Acunzo: Totally. One of my favorite examples of someone who did that in the book, and it seems radical or innovative what he did, but when you hear this story itâs like, âOh, itâs really logical what he did because he just focused more of his time on the people he served,â is a guy by the name of Paul Butler who if youâre an environmental conservationist is like a rockstar and has a nickname, which I love, The Parrot Man of the Caribbean. Best nickname ever, The Parrot Man of the Caribbean. Here was a guy in the â70s who went to the island of St. Lucia to try and save a species of parrot. He did all the usual things youâre supposed to do as an environmental conservationist.
He wrote a big essay to the government and demanded all the people locally stopped killing the bird or capturing it for pets or for food. Very little result, just handing out facts and demands, as you can imagine, but it was all based on this convention in conservation called homo economicus. Actually itâs a term from economics which means the rational man. The idea here is people are rational, so target them using rational argument. Any marketer worth their weight in clicks here knows that people are emotional. Theyâre not solely rational. In fact, we mostly donât make decisions rationally.
By talking to the local people he served, these native people who killed these birds not because they were just being terrible people, but because they were poor and had mouths to feed, or they were growing crops and they were ruining those crops, or they ran a tourism business and these giant noisy creatures were disrupting that, whatever the case was. The commonality was these people had pride in their home and pride in their profession. Paul created this icon, which turned in to a mascot that he actually dressed up as called Jacko the Parrot. He associated this parrot not with a problem or a nuisance or a thing to discard, but it became a symbol of national pride and all of a sudden they stopped killing them.
They agreed, âOkay. This region is for the bird.â They made all these decisions that he was demanding of them as a population before that they didnât respond to. But just by understanding their world and seeing that this was an emotional group of people that cared about national pride, he flipped his approach and it worked. If all you see is the mascot and the songs and the t-shirt and the content and the videos, youâre like, âThis guyâs creative. He has the gift,â but to hear his story is just to see him actually investigate in his own environment first and put aside the precedent in his industry for a moment to see how much if any of that actually applied in his shoes.
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Youâve been podcasting for a while now and a great deal of ⌠I wonât put words in your mouth, but a great deal of the book and these stories come from your interviews and your storytelling that youâve done on your show.
Jay Acunzo: Oh, yeah. 100%. It was kind of my sneaky advantage of the last couple of years for my show and my speaking is actually I just aerate these ideas and these stories with a real community. I get to hone my craft and the ideas before I actually put it into a book.
John Jantsch: The book Break The Wheel you self-published, right?
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. I did whatâs called a hybrid publisher where I actually owned all the creative and then the production parts or the backend and the distribution came from a publishing service that offers that.
John Jantsch: But the point that you just made about ⌠I think where a lot of people who look at and they go, âI want to write a book or, I want to have a podcast, or I want to do videos and have a YouTube channel,â and I think the folks that have really built something that is a true asset, I mean obviously theyâre people that do something like that and it blows up and goes crazy, but regular practical people that built something like that as an asset, you really kind of look at how all of these things can work together, donât you?
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. I mean I look at your work with Duct Tape. I look at people that came before me in the marketing world like your Jay Baerâs and a dear friend of mine Andrew Davis who helped mentor me throughout my career. I look at some of these people I admire, Ann Handleyâs another good example, and I think thereâs only really two ways to ensure youâre, A, building an asset with compounding value, and B, serving the audience in deeper and deeper ways, A.K.A., ensuring the thing works. You can do an idea tour or an idea journey.
I donât know if these words exist and maybe youâve experienced this too, Job, as someone who speaks a lot, but an idea tour is I have proven in, in my example, a podcast episode that this story is really resonant with my audience. Iâm going to take it out of the episode and put it in more places. Iâm going to bring it with me into a speech on a stage for example. Iâm touring around with this idea. Iâm doing that right now. Arguably, the book tour is a type of idea tour, but then the idea journey is Iâm going to see how deep this well goes and ask a lot of questions, and Iâm inviting the audience to join me, which is what Iâve done for years on my podcast Unthinkable.
Iâm like Iâm exploring this big idea with lots of questions underneath it, and Iâm going to necessarily tell stories and pull out insights from them over time. I donât have the answers. Come with me as I explore. For a while, it was whatâs the difference between average and exceptional? How do we avoid creating commodity work? Now that weâve broken the wheel, now that weâre questioning conventional thinking, itâs like, âOkay. Well, how do you create consistently creative work?â Thatâs my 2019 on the show is how do you do that. You can do an idea tour or an idea journey.
I think what that that does is it unhooks you from this idea of like a newsletter versus a podcast versus a blog versus Twitter. Itâs like Iâm using all of these things in a coherent connected way.
John Jantsch: I guess the next book is fix the wheel, right?
Jay Acunzo: I have this thesis Iâm working on which is like if youâve broken the wheel, the attempt might be to like keep just swinging at something thatâs no longer there. Itâs like okay, cool. Iâm not following the best practice. Iâm doing things on my own. Well, now youâre at risk of like manufacturing stunts essentially or what I call random acts of creativity. Just make the numbers go up right now faster. I donât want people to do that. Next book maybe itâs ⌠I donât know if itâs like rebuild the wheel. It might be like refresh the work. Itâs sort of like break the wheel, refresh the work.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I like it. Youâve already shared on story of the Parrot Man. You want to give us another one of your favorites from the book because essentially the bookâs about a lot of stories.
Jay Acunzo: Yeah. I mean I know nothing if not story. Thatâs what I want to build a career on. Another great example, one of my favorites is ⌠Well, letâs actually go to something timely here, which is Howard Schultz from Starbucks, whether or not you agree with his stance on politics or the fact that heâs going to run for president apparently. Thereâs this tactic or this moment rather under his reign at Starbucks when he was their CEO and chairman where looking at the audience and pulling out a better more human insight than at first glance the data revealed or any best practice showed them turned around the company in China.
Not a lot of people know this story. As he leading the company, they were doing what you would expect when you move from region to region like wildfire. They were taking the playbook that was proven and trying to apply it with incremental changes to fit each new market and that had worked except in China. They encountered a really odd problem. Their employees, unlike a lot of coffee shops, the employees of Starbucks, historically anyway, were very educated, decently paid and they had a lot of great benefits offered to them.
They were able to provide exceptional service at Starbucks because they hired exceptional people who werenât just like there for a paycheck and they were either burned out or looking to do their next thing. They werenât like the proverbial L.A. barista who wanted to be an actress.
John Jantsch: Except for the ones at the airport. Iâm just going to throw that in.
Jay Acunzo: Oh my goodness.
John Jantsch: Go ahead. Go ahead.
Jay Acunzo: You and I could share more stories about coffee shops in airports. Oh my gosh. Donât get me started. But for the most part, in general letâs say, most of these employees were taught to provide exceptional service because they were treated exceptionally well. In China, they kept losing these employees and they couldnât figure out why. Then when Schultz talked to Jack Ma, creator of Alibaba and another billionaire who probably has political influence, thatâs a different podcast though, he told him, âWell, look, in China, if you actually talk to these people and investigated this context instead of Americaâs context, youâd realize that the parents have more of a say in these individualâs careers.
They spend good money especially because they can only have one child because of that rule in China, that law in China, they invest very heavily in that childâs life. They spend good money to bring them to college and university and they donât want to see them working for Starbucks. They want to see them working for Alibaba or Google or all these other notable tech companies or what have you.â What Starbucks did seems radical, but it made a logical sense in this situation, in this context. They started giving not just the employees great benefits, but the parents of those employees.
They had an annual summit, almost like a shareholder meeting, with all their employeeâs parents where they could attend, see the great work that Starbucks was doing, help them understand that this is a great corporation to work for and have a say in the direction however little it might have been in that room. This is a radical thing. Itâs a very expensive thing. It seems crazy in Seattle, but it doesnât seem crazy in China at all. The difference is that Starbucks was willing to investigate and ask good questions of a different context instead of just rerun an old playbook that was proven elsewhere.
John Jantsch: Jay, where can people find out more about your work and obviously acquire a copy of Break The Wheel?
Jay Acunzo: The website jayacunzo.com/book has way more information than youâll need, including some behind the scenes stuff about making the book because I make stuff for marketers who love to make stuff. Jayacunzo.com/book, and then my podcast is Unthinkable.
John Jantsch: Jay, I should have asked you this at the beginning of the show, where are you located?
Jay Acunzo: Iâm just outside New York City.
John Jantsch: New York City. All right. Well, Jay, thanks dropping by. Weâll have links to all the things we talked about today in the show notes and we love those reviews and tell us who else you want me to interview. Jay, hopefully we run into you next time in the just outside of New York City area.
Jay Acunzo: Thanks, John. I appreciate it. To every listening, thank you for getting this far.
