Volume 7  Number 7   |   July 2017

Process Over Content

"Content" refers to what we are doing—insurance underwriting, pharmaceutical research, growing a lawn, selling cars. "Process" refers to how we do it, that set of repeatable skills, talents, judgment and experience that permits high performance and accuracy.

Most organizations have content experts dropping out of the rafters and stacked in the hallways. They change these people as content changes. The film industry once dealt with chemical developing and now deals with electronic imaging, so bench chemists gave way to digital technicians. But the process of taking a picture for the amateur is roughly the same—you point and shoot.

If you want to stay valid and important, you need to master process and leave content to other sources.

Content Is Everywhere For The Asking

People readily Google things today and check Wikipedia, but even that is giving way to simply asking Alexa. It's no longer important to know the dates of the French Revolution or the location of Bolivia. It's easy to find out from your mobile device and Siri while you're walking down the street.

However, the processes for decision making, problem solving, planning, innovation, negotiation, conflict resolution, priority setting and so forth and so on are immutable. Once you master them you've learned to ride that particular bike and you're not going to lose the skill.

Hence, knowing why you're good (the processes that work for you) is far more important than merely knowing that you're good, which is an abstract fact. We should never lead with our methodologies (our processes) in our marketing, but we should continually hone them so that we can deliver quickly and efficaciously, despite the changing content.

Drucker wrote a book called The Age of Discontinuity which was prescient (as he usually was) in anticipating a continually changing business landscape.

Fortunately, the skills we can bring to bear don't have to change with it.

© Alan Weiss 2017

I'm running a one day session on Maverick in Boston on September 8, and a two-day meeting on general marketing and sales in New York on October 19-20. They are for certain groups, but I'm happy to allow Mindset subscribers to attend.

Email me for details: [email protected]

Boston is $750 and New York $1,200, well below my usual workshop fees.