Thriv­ing in Ten­sion and Contradiction

Last Thurs­day was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 128^th birth­day. My moth­er in law would say ​“si estu­viera vivo estaría muer­to”, an extra­or­di­nary Venezue­lan phrase packed with untrans­lat­able nuances. I bring this up because, among many things, Fitzger­ald wrote this:

It’s part of a bril­liant essay-slash-con­fes­sion called The Crack-up. 

Our dai­ly lives are filled with con­tra­dic­tions despite being fed with ​“absolute” truths every sin­gle minute. We’ve been born and raised in dogmas.

In any case, most dog­mas crack under the pres­sure of expe­ri­ence. For instance, you know for a fact that every busi­ness comes with a set of pre­designed, unavoid­able, soul-suck­ing ten­sions. And every­one with man­age­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties must embrace them to succeed. 

It takes a mil­lion things to make any­thing work. Opti­mism, courage, an innate abil­i­ty to solve prob­lems, a strong com­pa­ny cul­ture (and a decent enough per­son­al cul­ture), expe­ri­ence, imag­i­na­tion, per­son­al­i­ty traits and soft skills, logis­tics, tim­ing, mon­ey and a shit­load more. And let’s not for­get about luck. 

Danc­ing with that ten­sion, hold­ing these two oppos­ing ideas with enough per­spec­tive and ele­gance to help us move for­ward, that’s the key. After all, it is ten­sion that holds a bridge together.

So it’s not about solv­ing ten­sion itself, but about fig­ur­ing out how to use it to reach your goals.

Humans thrive in ten­sion. →
B2B is human-to-human busi­ness. →
B2B thrives in tension.

I don’t want to abuse metaphors here but I will: Ten­sion is what makes a sling­shot throw the far­thest. Humans need the chal­lenge of con­flict­ing prob­lems to spark cre­ative solu­tions. Ten­sions (and con­straints) can be the moth­er of inven­tion too. 

Plat­i­tudes aside, Mar­ket­ing for B2B com­pa­nies is its own kind of game. The rules are dif­fer­ent. Most of the time you don’t have direct con­trol over the expe­ri­ence your end cus­tomers have. You have a whole lay­er of com­pa­nies between your prod­uct and the peo­ple buy­ing it. I spy tension.

There­fore, your suc­cess will large­ly rely on your abil­i­ty to train and empow­er your deal­ers or dis­trib­u­tors. Yes, sto­ry­telling still mat­ters. And the four Ps still stand. But ​“the work” is built around peo­ple; your rela­tion­ships with peo­ple, and their rela­tion­ship with your brand. Tech can make it eas­i­er, but will nev­er replace it. Ten­sion, checked.

Sell­ing is, to a great extent, help­ing our ecosys­tem man­age these tensions.

Ecom­merce thrives in ten­sion, too

Man­ag­ing web­sites implies a lot of choic­es. What, when, how. Pick­ing the price, the dis­count, choos­ing the right words to spark inter­est, to trig­ger action. 

It’s all about choic­es. The inter­net is rich with infor­ma­tion about those choic­es, too. Recipes. Edges that make you dif­fer­ent. And yet, the right choice for your brand is usu­al­ly flut­ter­ing amidst vibrant tensions.

Some famil­iar exam­ples: Would you choose an edge, or a mix?

• Paid ←→ Organic
• Empow­er your dis­trib­u­tors ←> Com­pet­ing with them
• Long term strate­gies (salience) ←→ Short term strate­gies (acti­va­tion)
• Online sales ←→ Offline sales
• Host­ed ←→ SaaS
• B2B ←→ B2C
• In-house ←→ Outsourced
• Open ←→ Closed

The edges are there to teach us how far we can go, not to be cho­sen as a des­ti­na­tion. They give us range and perspective. 

Suc­cess­ful brands use these ten­sions, from edge to edge, as strings. Our job as plan­ners, deci­sion-mak­ers, archi­tects or cre­atives is to tune all the strings, all the time. Have an adven­tur­ous mind­set. Try out many things and have a clear cri­te­ria to mea­sure suc­cess. Make the prop­er deci­sion to solve each spe­cif­ic problem.

Ten­sion is normal

I spend a good chunk of my day on LinkedIn. I have a fan­tas­tic net­work of very suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sion­als. Yet, I often come across posts with a Prat­fall effect con­fes­sion, that usu­al­ly ends with a twist that turns a ​“Hey, I suck at this” sto­ry into ​“Hey, here’s how I over­came my state of suck­ing at this”. Hum­ble­ness, but not too much.

So what I see every day is a col­lec­tion of per­fect-every­thing-now, includ­ing recipes for cloning the suc­cess, and invi­ta­tions to ​“steal” the hacks.

Cul­ture.

Bod­ies.

Ads.

Finan­cial statements.

Rep­u­ta­tion.

Strate­gies.

Oh my.

Per­haps every­body is per­fect. Or per­haps that’s just what works on social net­works. What con­vinces LinkedIn that your post will release more dopamine than cortisol. 

There’s the small noisy bunch of per­fect self resid­ual images of suc­cess, and then there’s you and me. Most of us strug­gle. We dwell in ten­sion. In-ten­tion. We sec­ond guess, exper­i­ment, try, and fail to cel­e­brate when some­thing actu­al­ly works. It’s chal­leng­ing, exhaust­ing, pro­found­ly inter­est­ing, fun, and some­times, profitable.

We revere the abil­i­ty to hold two oppos­ing ideas, to find the bal­ance in this game of solip­sist funam­bu­lism that’s grow­ing a busi­ness. Because the tightrope makes the acrobat.

That, in a nut­shell, is the goal of these let­ters. To bring you con­tra­dic­tion – and also our 0.02$ to inhab­it it safe­ly. Our Catch42.

Here’s to remain­ing in ten­sion for­ev­er. Like a bridge over trou­bled water.