Tuesday after Labor Day, Ovation on Burnside, a woman I used to sit two desks from at the agency. She is four years into research now, good at it, bored by it, and she wanted to know how to move into strategy. She had brought a notebook and a pen and she asked me what she should read.
I told her the reading is the easy part.
Every frameworks book she could buy this afternoon would make her better at arriving at the answer, and arriving at the answer has never once been the thing that stopped me. I have been right in rooms where it made no difference at all. The best strategic idea I have ever been near died in a conference room in 2017 with everyone nodding, because by the time we got to it the CMO had already decided the meeting was about something else and nobody in the room had been given anything to do on Monday.
The job is not finding the right answer, it is getting eleven people who did not find it to carry it out of the room and defend it in meetings you will never attend.
Which means most of the work happens before the deck exists. You call the head of product a week early and let her poke holes in the weak version, so that in the room she is defending her own fingerprints. You find out which VP is quietly at war with which other VP and you do not build a recommendation that requires them to agree in public. You learn who actually decides, which is almost never the person with the largest title on the invite.
And you write the idea so it survives being repeated badly. Every strategy gets retold by someone who was not there, in a hallway, in about nine words. If those nine words still point in the right direction, you have a strategy. If they collapse into something generic about being bold and human, you had a slide.
None of this is manipulation, which was her first worry, and it was mine too. It is just taking seriously that a recommendation is a thing you are asking people to spend their credibility on. The research tells you what is true. Persuasion is what makes true useful.
She wrote down two words the whole hour. I hope they were the right two.
I told her the reading is the easy part.
Thursday I will be back at the sticky-floored place off Belmont, and the host will call me baby and hand me the mic, and I will sing something a full step above what my voice can do. Badly is fine. Commitment is what carries a room. That part transfers.