Importance of partnerships in running a successful business

Every single time someone quotes a successful business, it is always attributed to one person. Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sam Walton of Walmart, Richard Branson of Virgin, the list is endless.

Occasionally, the success of a business is attributed to the entire team rather than a single person. Semco Partners from Brazil is probably the best example here. They were one of the earliest companies to move from corporate autocracy to corporate democracy, where the decision making was left to the employees.

Back in 1980 when Semco underwent this transition, they had many skeptics, but they have proved they could be like a bunch of ants working towards to a common goal of building an anthill, without any direction from a single leader.

One could argue that there indeed was a leader in Ricardo Semler who laid the foundation with a motivating vision, and this brings us back to the first point of attributing the success of a business to an individual.

A motivating vision is the driving force behind several companies today, in some cases that vision has surpassed a century of its existence. Unilever is a prime example here where despite divesting their margarine business a few years back, which was the basis of their origin (Uni was the margarine brand and Lever was the soap brand that formed the company 134 years ago) they continue to uphold the values setup by the founder, Lord Lever.

Unilever and Semco are great examples of a team working efficiently despite their founders being long gone. Apple and Walmart are great examples of companies that continue to be quoted in the same breath as their founder. However, in all cases, success is either attributed to an individual, or a team that has embraced the vision of an individual. Very rarely is any credit given to one important element of all these companies, which is the person who first partnered the founder.

This is about Steve Wozniak partnering Steve Jobs, Paul Allen partnering Bill Gates, and possibly even Helen Walton partnering Sam Walton.

This person is the inspiration, the execution, the pragmatism, or sometimes just the capital, behind that visionary. But there is usually that single entity that compliments another in a manner that it snowballs into something much larger than anything each individual of that partnership ever deemed possible.

We never give this second person much credit because our brain remembers in stories, and stories are best told with one hero. It was just Neil Armstrong or Usain Bolt. Nobody ever remembers or at least cares too much about who came second.

There are exceptions through. Wright brothers were a partnership, and so were Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay. But these are exceptions because their stories were always written and shared with both members together.

The importance of a partnership should not be underestimated though. Steve Jobs may have almost never made Apple if it wasn’t for Steve Wozniak, or at the very least, taken a much longer route or found much lesser success than becoming the world’s largest company in 2019.

The importance of a partnership can be found all around us when we break things up to its lowest form. Every single piece of software code breaks down to either 1 or 0. Every single atom contains a proton and an electron (the neutron is just a good friend of the proton sitting tight in the nucleus).

There is always an entity of a complimentary nature to make another entity as big and successful as we know them to be. Partnerships are therefore vital to the success of a business as much as it may be to a relationship.

Finding that single right partner is the key to ensuring you’ve taken that vital first step towards creating something of value and leaving a legacy. Attempting to do this alone or attempting to directly start with a team may make that effort a lot more arduous.

What therapy can tell us about consumerism

Therapy is an understated and often scorned at phenomenon, where people are stigmatized to believe that they have some sort of a disorder if they seek therapy.

But the great equalizer this pandemic has been, where you are forced to do exactly the same thing that almost everyone else in the world is doing, therapy is also beginning to receive its much-needed attention and acceptance.

Be it talking to a professional therapist, or a life coach, or even a friend, people all around are starting to reach out. And for those who may still be uncomfortable opening to a another human, there are plenty of virtual therapists, and even bots in some cases, who can address you and potentially alleviate your vexations.

The most common form of therapy though, that almost everyone in this lockdown is embracing, is some sort of home-skill that they never knew they were interested in before, or never had the time to delve into as much as they are doing now.

Bet it painting a canvas or baking a “coronabread”, everyone is up to something and splattering their achievements across social media. While the ones we have visibility to may be out of vanity, most of them are also underpinned with therapy. Because these things people are doing are also bringing in a sense of peace to our idle and perturbed minds. At its very core, this is exactly what therapy is.

What’s interesting though, is that what one person finds therapeutic, may be stressful for another. I find doing the dishes in the dishwasher therapeutic, and I know this is a source of stress for many others. However, I also know I am not alone in this, because Bill Gates himself does the dishes to unwind, and he is definitely not short of help, either humans or machines, to do this for him.

Why is it then that we have different tasks that are therapeutic for us? It’s because we have a System 1 at play in the brain, that operates as differently as System 2. System 1 is led by the limbic brain that controls primary emotional functions like fear, hunger or sex, while System 2 is the neocortex that is unique to just us humans which is what makes us top the food chain.

Now how is all of this understanding of the democratization of therapy and its relationship to System 1 linked to consumerism? Well, that’s because as much as we may want to deny it, purchase decisions are not driven by System 2 or our rational brain, but always by System 1. So much so that we will concoct rational explanations and even become brand evangelists for a purchase we have made, while it was actually just the food-craving, sexually-starved limbic brain making that choice.

So if both therapy and purchase decisions are driven by similar underlying motivations, does it not make sense then to develop an understanding of what we find therapeutic, in order to sell something to us?

As marketeers, we always need to ask why repeatedly to go beyond the root issue, but also hold back before we reach God, in order to find the real insight behind any consumer problem or opportunity. Delving deeper into therapy, which everyone has now embraced, may just open up some interesting demand spaces.

In the mighty challenge to generate strong insights, asking the right questions are key. 

Maybe questions around therapy could also be added to our repertoire. 

What therapy tells us about people

Therapy has never been as relevant as it has been now in these lockdown times of Covid. Often understated, this time by ourselves is leading to enough self-introspection to reach out to that therapist, life coach, best friend, or even perfecting that sourdough bread that may as well be called coronoabread going by the number of posts by people trying their hand out at baking bread.

But when it comes down to what really feels therapeutic, the coronabread is not the only option. People are dabbling with dancing, painting, and maybe even doing the dishes!

It’s a little surprising though, that what feels therapeutic for one person, may even be stressful for another. Dishes for example is a huge source of stress for many people. For me though, this is therapeutic. And I’m not alone here. Bill Gates himself does this, and he’s clearly not short of people or machines who could do this for him.

What is it that makes doing the dishes therapeutic for people like us, and coronabread for the others?

To understand this, we need to know the operations of System 1 and System 2 in the brain. System 1 is the operations of the limbic brain while System 2 is the neocortex brain. All mammals have the limbic brain which gives us basic emotions like fear, hunger or even having sex. Humans are blessed with the neocortex or the cognitive brain that gives us rational thought processing and made us all-powerful.

However, we give the neocortex too much credit. We tend to believe that our neocortex is operational through most of our waking day, but in truth, the neocortex is only marginally more active when we are awake than we are asleep. It is the limbic brain that remains most active even when we are awake.

Continuously operating the neocortex is exhausting. Which is why, it is a default mode for us to quickly find the best way to operationalize or standardize a task, so that the limbic brain can take over, giving our brain the rest it always craves for.

Increasing the operations of the neocortex is of course possible, and there are two ways to do this. Through meditation, which is akin to a sharpener if our neocortex were the pencil. Or through performing tasks that use up our limbic brain, so that it is well rested enough to then fire the neocortex.

Yuval Noah Harari meditates 2 hours a day, which gives him enough brain power to write books like Sapiens and Homo Deus, and then some to even write 21 lessons that nobody wants to read. Bill Gates does the dishes so that he has defaulted to his limbic brain for long enough to figure the solution to the corona crisis.

Given most of us don’t meditate, since the results appear a lot slower than the cuts on your biceps after a month of bicep curls, we tend to use the limbic brain more, thereby leading to tasks that are in effect, therapeutic for us.

The limbic brain is as different for us as our neocortex is. Just as how the neocortex for one person is sharpened to Jave code, while for another it is playing Fornite, the limbic brain also differs in the exact same way. For one person it is painting, for another it is dishes.

The reason for this difference goes down to the fundamental operations of our brain. When it comes to the dishes, there is a certain geometry and arrangement involved, and this lies in the limbic for some people, while when it comes to painting, it is the brush strokes that lie in the limbic.

It is up to each of us to identify what exactly it is that fires System 1 and therefore makes this therapeutic for us. But the bottomline is, it can be very different for each of us.  

Why Marketeers will be one of the last to go in the age of automation

That’s a pretty bold statement when marketeers are being laid off by the dozen around me. But the way I see it, technology is freeing up so much of our time, much like many other professions, that it has freed enough time from the job of an erstwhile marketeer, to no longer require a fulltime human resource to do that job.

This is what is leading to the layoffs of marketeers currently, since you can combine 2-3 jobs into a single fulltime resource. And this figure may only get worse off as technology improves. The most recent technological disruption I noticed was the Voice Automation by Microsoft.

Microsoft has subtly created the best speech-to-text software ever, and somehow nobody is talking about it. We are all familiar with Amazon through Alexa, Apple through Siri and even Google through their voice search and maps. But Microsoft has built in their feature in their business chat app of Microsoft Teams, and in my experience, it outperforms anything else I have seen before.

There is the perfect capture of words, grammar and punctuation. Apple and Google don’t even come close to this. And what has this tiny feature done? Make that marketing intern who used to take minutes of meetings redundant.

This is just one example. As technology improves, we would have RPAs for all tracking and monitoring, machine learning algorithms for programmatic media buying, and maybe even AIs for creative judgement.

But there is one key task of the marketeer that may be held out by machines for a long time, and this is insight generation.

To understand this better, we first need to understand that all tasks can be bucketed under logic or magic. Logic is straightforward. If a set of inputs give a desired output, then the inputs can be coded in order to generate that output at all points in time. These are the operational tasks that all of us do. Magic is more complex, it’s what the creative ones around us do. But today, you have AI composing music and painting canvases. So even magic can be coded to some extent.

The complications arise when you have a combination of magic and logic. And this will exist in many professions, and it is what will retain some humans at work. An extreme example is that of a doctor. Technology may replace every prognosis, diagnosis and even surgical operations that a doctor does, but when you want the news of a terminal illness delivered to you, you’d rather it be from a human than a machine.

Therefore, jobs that involve a healthy mix of logic and magic will continue to exist for a long time. And the specific task of insight generation by the marketeer, is such a potent mix of logic and magic, that it will be a while before a machine learns to do that.

To explain this simply, it took a marketeer to tell us that dirt is good. Fabric wash started as a simple cleaning product for clothes and then evolved into brands that communicated one of the only three benefits with washing clothes; whites, brights and perfume. But when everyone started saying the same thing, the only differentiator came when Surf said dirt is good. This is pure insight. It unlocked creative messages, broke the shackles of functional benefit communication, and brought out consumerism at its best; make us feel good about buying something, even it is just a pack of fabric detergent!

This is the job of a marketeer, and will remain as the only relevant job of a marketeer as machines take over the rest. But they will still not make the marketeer redundant, because there happens to be this one peculiar task of insight generation that involves both magic and logic, and also because spending money is the surest dopamine fix that we as humans will always need as a species.

Therefore, just as sure as we will need doctors so long as we remain mortal, we will also need marketeers as long as consumerism exists. 

And yes, that would make marketing one of the last professions we lose out to automation.