Creating We

Hi . . . Just back from my monthly 28 hour New York trip in my role as secretary to The New York Wedding Group. What is a high-tech marketing writer doing as secretary to a wedding group? As explained in earlier posts, my wife founded the NY and Boston Wedding Groups and brings me along to NY as sort of marketing consultant and all-around support person. (The NY Wedding Group was actually my idea, but don't let that get out.)



Anyway, the speaker this month was Judith Glaser, author of the soon-to-be-published book, Creating We. The publication date is April 12th, but all of you reading this blog can pre-order on Amazon by clicking here. Her premise is that there are basically two kinds of people in the world: I-Thinkers and We-Thinkers, and that the latter makes for a much stronger organization (probably not a huge surprise since We, after all, is another word for group). The interesting part is that We-Thinking also makes us stronger individually. What do you think? Here are five examples of I- versus We-Thinking:

"Fear it wont' work" VS. "Believe it will"
"Been there done that" VS. "How can we make it happen"
"I can't get any support" VS. "Rally support"
"Fear of mistakes" VS. "Learn from mistakes"
"Don't get your hopes up" VS. "Share your hopes"

I can't wait to dig into my autographed copy. But after listening to her speak, I think I know kind of where Judith is coming from. There is a practical edge to what she is saying that can get lost if readers simply dismiss this as just a lot of idealistic cheer leading.

A really good practical example is an affinity pool, where companies each contribute leads to a common pool with some sort of overriding activity or interest that ties the members of the pool together. If each company contributes 5 of their hard-won business leads to the pool, and there are a hundred companies, that's potentially 99 x 5 = 495 new leads each company can "withdraw" from the pool. Yet, where affinity pools break down usually is getting everyone to really believe they can benefit individually by making what looks like a sacrifice. Instead of stepping forward with ways to make the pool better for the members, they cynically sit back, take whatever new business they can get, and feel gratified if enough cynics bring down the pool.

There are actually all kinds of ways We-Thinking can help marketing strategy, not just organizational development. And that's not idealistic at all.