Why Some Startups Win
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
Uh, if you've inherited employees that think their job as marketers is to pump out Press Releases, you certainly haven't inherited good ones.
Most people in marketing do not behave like this, any more than developers see their job as 'write lots of lines of code'.
Too many management articles (and Blank is often guilty of it) have the pattern of presenting the 'employee' as an unthinking zombie, and then present 'management' as the answer. 'See, without highly paid consultants like myself, this would all go to shit!'
Most employees would find this kind of micromanagement-in-the-name-of-onboarding intolerable because they are good employees who are capable of autonomous thought.
Steve Blank was last a VP of Marketing in 1992. This should give anyone pause to think if the advice is relevant, if the story ever happened, or if Blank has another agenda in telling them.
Even really good employees need an aligned sense of mission.
Of all the other early CEO's I've talked to (and it's a lot), none of them have ever told me "I just hire awesome people and never talk to them about what we're trying to do but it works out great because they are awesome people." Nor has anyone ever conveyed that these types of communication exercises are micromanagy. Aligning mission and understanding how your outputs are other people's inputs seems to me to be the exact opposite of micromanagement.
Most marketing people I know (and I know a lot) would consider the idea that their job was to 'set up trade booths' or 'send out a Press Release and wait for things to happen' as a thinly veiled insult. Of course the purpose of trade shows is to gather and qualify leads- otherwise you're simply spraying money up the wall.
Likewise, if a marketing organization doesn't have basic targets or marketing/sales alignment in place, then it's not because of the lack of management, it's because the marketing/sales people are incompetent.
And if I think of the negative cultures I've worked in - the one thing they have in common is a 'leader figure' at the top who spends his time abasing the team and generally getting in the way of things that, left alone, the team would organize to do anyway. The job of a leader is to hire good people and get out of their way.
I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part.
Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person.
I would love to have a dedicated person to do trade shows. Heck, I'd love to be able to afford to go to a trade show.
So for all the people out there who are at startups that haven't raised enough money to do those sort of things... you are not alone.
Ah well, all is fair with changing times.
For sure, there'll be problems other way around too. So there's no one-solution fits all problems.
Break down work in pieces that can be done independently in small groups, have the people of the small groups engaged by having them believing they're part of a greater mission. And then there is the "no excuse" culture. That seems like a great way of getting rid of people who don't follow.
I'd be interested in a anonymous feedback from their employees...
Also the end of the article really sounds self-congratulatory...
It reads almost like a business fairy tale.
I always wonder, when I read stuff like this, if the people in the story would characterize things the same way.