If your job description has “understanding customer wants and needs” in it, I urge you to take the Sweathead Strategy Summer camp.
A lot of the summer camp course material, including what you are going to see next, comes from Mark’s book, ‘Strategy is your words’. If a lot of your work has to do with finding meaning, and you only have the money to buy one book, I recommend that this be it. I spoke about it more in my last article.
Day 07 of the 100-day summer camp is titled ‘Truth is disobedient’. The class video is a poem about love, sacrifice, hatred, coming of age, and everything else that only the truth can elicit.
It gave me goosebumps. Every time I replayed it in my head, it got more and more detailed. It got louder, and each time I felt love, hurt, anger, more and more intensely.
So, I had to transcribe it. I have to share it before I explode. Don’t mind the silly typos.
Truth is disobedient.
One of the most obvious things to say about strategy is that it is a search for truth.
Perhaps a less obvious thing to say is that truth is the trailer trash of business.
Most businesses are not comfortable with truth and they would prefer not to see it. They struggle to respect it. They're not sure what it's doing around. And that is to say that most business people don't really do 'truth'.
You only need to spend a day or a thousand in offices and workshops and meetings and emails and searches to realize that truth is a difficult thing to have and to express in business. And that makes sense because if you think about truth in life and in the history of humanity, truth doesn't always end well and it often involves the threat of violence.
So, the truth might require someone to coerce it out of you.
“Tell me the truth. We won't leave here until you have.”
Truth test relationships.
“Tell me the truth, you've never lied to me. Would you?”
Truth starts criminal trials.
“I swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
So, truth is difficult. And it would be totally understandable if you didn't want anything to do with truth and just lived a life turned away from it to avoid pain. It's a valid coping mechanism.
[It’s] difficult if you wanna do strategy though, because you need to kind of dig into it, and I think there's a journey for many strategists which is from banal truths; truths that are obvious, that lack energy, that borderline cliché, to what I would call edge truths.
And there are two ways to look at the idea of an edge truth. One is that an edge truth might give you, your clients, your company a competitive edge, a competitive advantage. Another way to look at it is that an edge truth just happens to be very very provocative and out there.
I'll tell you a story. Banal truth litters the early years of your strategy life as you seek to fit in and survive and pay off debt but over time your ear will develop a disdain for the banal. In its stead, a zeal for the extreme will appear.
This journey to the edge may take many seasons. You'll read case studies, research papers, strategy books, books about those books, and so much research you won't know what to do with yourself when you're not reading research.
Your ideas will test themselves in public and they'll report on how they fare. And no matter what you live, and this is critical, you'll suffer but you'll live.
Love, travel, jobs, loved ones, awards and titles will come and go, come and go.
Mud laden step by sludge schlep you’ll plug to the edge of strategy’s domain of knowledge to find truths that give people a competitive advantage. This journey will turn you radical. As you reach the edge the land ahead will disappear into a cliff.
Above, dark clouds will grind, and lightning will crack. Below, sharp rocks will rabbit punch fishing boats and heave waves around their necks. The wind will rip your clothes asunder. Naked, you’ll stretch for the horizon and glare at the storms.
“Aye, is this it? Is this all you have for me? All this reading and researching and writing?
All the late nights and working weekends? All the timesheets?
The timesheets! My thoughts were only for them. I didn't wanna sell time in the 1st place. Time isn't even real, but you took it all!”
The storm will hold its choke grip. You'll take a crouched boxes stance, plant 1 foot back until its dividend the dirt. The storm will hurl ogre whales and now world trolls at you. It will slap you in the face with goblin bats.
A mini-golf course of all the holiday parties you ever attended will flying saucer at your head. A death breath of a trillion ping pong balls will pummel your skull. Flying fish zombies of all your failed relationships will purge from a hole in the sky. And there are a lot of them, so they'll fall for hours.
It will hail feedback.
Still, you will grid and stand and soak. After days, the wind will abate, and you'll emerge raw from the cliff with the colossal hall of storm truth. Now you'll see people as they are, witches as they want others to see them.
And you allow them that while also looking through them. You'll also see yourself with clear eyes because you'll no longer need a mirror or camera to look at yourself. You'll see truth everywhere like Patagonia vests and anklet socks on Wall Street, and early fall and the mini-skirts shorter than hats that swarm the streets of Manhattan Soho in spring.
And hear your strategy will take a turn and you'll shift from obedient truths to disobedient truths. You might even leave behind the ideas of ‘right' and 'wrong'.
Intense stuff.
I hope you read it and felt it wreaking havoc in your soul. Here’s a photo that describes how I feel every time I watch the video.