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“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 2 of 2

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Lose control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was about having fun, meeting friends, checking out great music, escaping the everyday, belonging. Each person defined the experience a little differently, and the group defined the whole. There were interesting subgroups wandering along as part of the larger odyssey that was the Grateful Dead experience.

In building a community, the Grateful Dead were willing to give up a large degree of control over how they were defined and instead hand it to their fans. While this approach is highly unusual, it is also often very successful. When organizations insist on operating in a command-and-control environment with mission statements, boilerplate descriptions, messaging processes, and PR campaigns, their strategies can both hamper growth and backfire in execution.

Let your community define you, rather than trying to dictate what’s said – and how – about your company. When you let others define and talk about you, it is more likely that a community will develop.

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

Management and Leadership Best Practice 3 – Demonstrating Commitment

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Buy-in, engagement, support… terms used to suggest commitment to a particular course of action, but are they really? What is true commitment?

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective – Managing Health Insurance Plans

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcasts examine the unnecessary marketplace uncertainty created by today’s headline events and the actions business leaders should take to ensure their organizations succeed under these circumstances.

In Managing Health Insurance Plans, we are joined by George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute. George shares his thoughts on how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so, including:

  • under what circumstances company leaders would want to keep their organization’s existing health insurance plans
  • what leaders must do to have their organization’s current health insurance plans grandfathered
  • what a Healthcare Performance Management program is and how it can help companies keep their current healthcare insurance plans
  • the costs and benefits associated with implementing a Healthcare Performance management program
  • why some executives may want to eliminate their organization’s health insurance program altogether

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights George shares in this StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.HPMInstitute.org.   George can be reached at [email protected].

Final Request…

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About the Author

George Pantos is Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute, a research and education organization dedicated to promoting the use of business technology and management principles that deliver better and more cost-effective healthcare benefits for employers who provide health insurance coverage for employees and their dependents. To read George’s full biography, click here.

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Leadership Inspirations – Great Vision

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“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.”

Jack Welch
Respected business leader and former Chairman and CEO of General Electric (1981 – 2001)

The Five Floors of Relationships

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I know thousands of people, and many of them wield tremendous influence. If life and business were all about “who you know,” then I’d be set. But none of those relationships took on extraordinary value unless I approached them with the idea that they mattered for something above and beyond the transaction.

I think of relationships in terms of a five-floor building. The deeper and more meaningful a relationship, the higher the floor it resides on. My closest, deepest relationships are Fifth Floor or Penthouse, relationships.

Let me be clear – relationships seldom fit neatly into a box (or a building). They’re far too dynamic. Some overlap on different floors, and others seem to move up and down floors like an elevator. But the Five Floor plan helps give me a reference point and allows me to think about the boundaries that define my relationships, so that I can continually work to make them stronger and more rewarding. I try to develop strong relationships at every level. And because my relationships with others matter so much to me, and because I come to them intending to help others, many of these relationships develop into something more meaningful than anything I had imagined.

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About the Author

Tommy Spaulding is president of The Spaulding Companies LLC, a national leadership development, consulting, and speaking organization. Before starting his firm, he was the head of the international nonprofit, Up With People. Tommy is the founder of Leader’s Challenge, which has become the largest high school civic and leadership program in Colorado. He is the co-founder of The Center for Third Sector Excellence and the founder of the National Leadership Academy. Tommy also created Dialogue for Tomorrow, an annual international global leadership conference. He received a BA in Political Science from East Carolina University, an MBA from Bond University in Australia, and an MA in Non-Profit Management from Regis University. In 2007, Tommy received an Honorary PhD in Humanities from the Art Institute of Colorado. To read Tommy’s complete biography, click here.