#27 Story Time

Here’s the vignette.

I don’t like to talk politics, but this is a current example everyone can sink their teeth into: tariffs and tariff-talk.

There’s a lot of media noise at the moment consumed with this topic. Commenters on both sides have wondered how this will affect the outcomes of midterm elections, or the presidential one in four years.  

It’s a fair question, and probably the right one, but look that the timing:

Significant elections are more than a year out. So the narrative itself doesn’t actually matter for a while, and it can expect a few evolutions before it does matter.  The timeline is long.

Meanwhile, the controlling party (at any time) has possession of the best megaphone—which they can use as the narrative begins to matter more. (This is a blessing and a chore if you’re the one with the megaphone but that’s another issue.) Bottom line: The Trump team has time to figure it out.

The other side may not. Which is why you’ve noticed Schumer trying to seed the name, “The Trump Recession.”

He’ll need to say that every day for about 3 years and get a whole bunch of other people to say it too, if he has any hope of it working (and maybe he will).

But the real point is this: each side is functionally in a competition to set the narrative.

Now, let’s get weird. There’s two timespans to notice in this vignette:

1. They have a long time to SET the narrative.

2. The length of time they will BENEFIT from it is short: (between 6 months of ads and 6 minutes in a voting booth).  

Meanwhile, in the same week everyone’s retirement account dropped to 334 (that’s a 401K minus 16.5%), I have a client who, like many CEO’s, has a cofounder problem.

His cofounder hasn’t been able to grow with the company, to the extent that it’s holding everyone back. It’s now a board-level issue, and the cofounder has a (very) strong incentive to convince the board of the inverse—that the CEO is the derelict one.

Now consider the stakes: these two are never going back to being college pals barbecuing with each other‘s families. One of them is leaving. And both will need a good answer why.

Whoever stays will need to be able to lead with the confidence of investors, employees, and the market, without a reputational hit from the shakeup.

The other will need a new job. I mean inbound opportunities like investments, board positions, or as a C-something of any kind. For both of them, the final story will affect their future for a while.

So now we have different timelines:

1. They have a very short time to SET the narrative.

2. Each BENEFITS (or suffers) from it over an extremely long period of time. E.g., it’s not a headline, it’s a headstone.

The two timelines in play are the TIME TO SET the narrative and its TIME OF USEFULNESS.

There’s 4 combinations, and I think of it like a quadrant. Here it is.

There’s a lot to unpack in that graph, and here’s what you’re expecting me to say next: “there’s different strategies for each quadrant.”

There are! But that would be more of a book, and you wouldn’t need to read it anyway.

You can hire a pretty below-average consultant, and as long as they understand the above and literally almost nothing else, you’ll do just fine. 

It’s comms, not nano surgery.

I do find it kind of curious though: I rarely see any C-something accurately identify their two timelines for a narrative and its purpose. 

In general, I think know it’s because we have a human bias to think short term. We underestimate the time we have to set the narrative, and the same for how long it will matter.

There’s some funny nuance here, because activity in the bottom left will eventually feed up and over, and those will feed the top right—whether you want them to or not.

Thats’ because the two forces in life you cannot fight are NOT death and taxes. They are time and compounding.

In other words, eventually, everything is long term. Plan on that.

This means starting everything from the bottom left would be stupid, and also just wicked hard.

So here’s 1 easy rule that’ll keep you from spinning your wheels in the bottom left too long: “when in doubt, think long term.” 

A tweet off the cuff? Could be short term or long, or any combo in the quadrant.

You might think about it and decide it’s still a great idea to say something perfectly stupid on the internet global AI training data.

Or, you might edit it slightly, or put your phone down.

Either way: if you see the sky falling, it’s good to remember skies don’t do that.

The top right of the quadrant is a narrative that takes a long time to set and has a long period of usefulness. Marketers call that “brand.”

Andy Fennell, former CMO of Diageo and many other C-’s later, once whispered to me one of his talking points before climbing onstage, like it was a powerful secret. And it was, until he blabbed it to a giant audience:

“The way you build a brand is the way a bird builds a nest. Some straw here, a piece of fuzz there, some twigs—it all happens one small piece at a time, but it comes together as a sturdy, beautiful, and perfectly-shaped nest that is perfectly suited for its very important job.” 

Andy is no joke. But a different way of looking it would be the words of C-something and famous guy-who-really-understands-customer-relationships, Marc Benioff.

He once said, “eventually, your customers tell you who you are.”

I like both of these.

There’s an element of control, and an element of wildness. Sort of like living with a toddler, but there’s fifty thousand of them, and it’s not chickie nuggies it’s your company.

In any case, you can definitely guess what I’m going to say next is nearly always the solution:

Repeat yourself. 

I almost named this whole newsletter project Repeat Yourself. Maybe the next one.

In the meantime, repeat yourself—if you’re good enough to. Repetition sounds so easy when I type it all the time, but it’s the hardest possible strategy to implement.

Repeating yourself is hard for two reasons. 

First, as anyone with more than zero employees can tell you, hearing yourself say something over and over is much more annoying than hearing someone else do it.

Smart people don’t like to say the same thing twice. Especially smart people who are busy leading other ones. So repetition is actually hardest for the people who benefit from it most.

Second, repeating yourself makes it harder to adapt to new situations, markets, world events, acts of god, etc. Which is to say repetition makes it harder to be flexible, to RESET or shift the narrative when you need to.

Solving for the first is just a question of discipline. I call it the product head’s problem:

By the time you’re onstage announcing it to the world, it’s old hat to you. You’re actually kind of exhausted with it. But for your audience it’s just the beginning, and they need you and your excitement to ever really care about what you made.

Having the discipline to stay in your own past is very hard, and I don’t blame you for trying to wuss out of it—you literally have more important things to do. But that’s discipline. I didn’t invent it.

Solving for the second problem of flexibility is WAY easier than you think.

Just spend a few minutes future-testing your story. Here you need more imagination than discipline. And if you don’t have it, just find someone who does.

After that, relax! Resetting or evolving a narrative isn’t tough. You can fit anything into a brand, if you really want to. 

Don’t believe me? Virgin is a record store aerospace company, and that hasn’t seemed to bother anyone. 

Yamaha is highly respected in dirt bikes and pianos. I’m pretty sure you’ll be okay if your mission statement doesn’t feel grand enough right now.

Instead, just click print. Say it a whole bunch, all the time, and focus on what’s more important: whatever it is that you do here.

Finally, a personal note.

Last week, a game of chess similar to the above story about cofounders (minus a board), technically concluded. It was the outcome we targeted 18 months ago. A win.

But it hasn’t felt like a win. (Said to me once by an interesting attorney: “it’s like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie.”)

My strong warning to you, especially as you think about your own personal narrative: you can be in a story so long that you forget its purpose. 

But there has to be one.

I have an older friend who’s been a lawyer or agent for me, except he’s more of a mentor. We once surveyed a farm on the California coast that I wanted to buy (this was way back when that wasn’t popular and those properties were called “foreclosures.”)

The farm needed a lot of work. The house, barns, and half-structures all needed a bulldozer. It was a hodgepodge of ruin built by someone more capable than they were consistent.

We walked the entire property, and then stood quietly at the center of it. Bob is of few but wise words. “This,” he announced, “is work without purpose.” As if the main reason not to buy that land is that it was polluted by a moral failure. 

I think of that often: “work without purpose.”

Work without purpose—in comms, in a barn, in a company—is almost always the result of what I’ve been trying to describe in today's issue.

It happens when you miscalculate the time you have to make something, or the amount of time it’s going to be useful.  

As a jarring epilogue, I probably would’ve bought the farm anyway, but a friend of mine died in an awful accident that afternoon. 

He lived a life full-of and driven-by constant purpose. His story is the best thing we have left. 

Rest in peace,
Jesse

PS: LINKZ! 

• I’m sorry for more politics, but no matter what your side, the Peter Navarro/Ron Vara story is absolutely hilarious. He made an alter ego expert from an anagram of his name to quote in his books—for years!

• So I tried this prompt with ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Perplexity won with my new alter ego: WES RYDER.

• SONG OF THE WEEK. I have to give credit where credit is due: Wes Ryder is actually who recommended this jam, not me. He listens to it while working on my taxes.

PSSSSSSS:  Share button. Send this one to your friend who wants to set tariffs or a narrative.