Don't try to manage complexity in a vacuum.

I know. You have no time. Your marketing budget is spoken for, or maybe you don’t have much of a marketing budget this year. You already have a marketing firm. You don’t want to suffer through a high-pressure sales session. It’s easy to come up with reasons NOT to meet with that marketing consultant who requests your time.

But there are at least three reasons why you SHOULD meet with a good marketing consultant.

1) Marketing has changed drastically even in the last two years. If you’ve been trodding more or less the same path for the last couple of years, there’s a better-than-even chance you’re not up to date on something you ought to know: how to use social media press releases to improve your Web site rankings, how to narrow-cast your updates to immediately support sales efforts, how to cut expenses by leveraging new interactive advertising techniques, how to direct mail to smaller audiences for better results… and lots more.

2) A good consultant will clue you in to very specific programs that are working for other companies. Maybe you’ll learn something new about affordable search engine optimization (SEO), advertising on Facebook, targeting top prospects by holding private events during trade shows, customer loyalty-building programs, opt-in email campaigns, company blogs, or who-knows-what. You’ll get the inside scoop quickly and painlessly.

3) Networking with people who have services you may someday desire – even if you don’t want them today – is forward-thinking. To be an executive or business owner with vision, you need inspiration. Personal relationships provide a source of inspiration you’ll get nowhere else.

Remember, you can set the ground rules for this meeting. For example, prior to agreeing to meet, specify: You have 30 minutes. You’re not in the market to buy services today. You’d like this to be a discussion rather than a sales session. You name it.

Have a great meeting.

Work well independently?

Telecommuting, flex time and virtual business models are all the rage. Outsourcing projects rather than committing to long-term staff additions is popular now, too. No surprise there. The current state of the economy (I can barely wait until we’re no longer using that phrase quite so often!) demands efficiency, forces uncertainty, and makes available some stellar candidates with whom to work. In other words, a lot of great people are out of their former 9-5 salaried work routines. Even the 2010 census work is moving faster than expected because of the availability of outstanding temporary labor. Oh, that’s not much of a silver lining, perhaps, but there it is.

These new ways of working bode well for some businesses, and for some individuals. Streamlined processes, virtual meetings, work from anywhere (okay, let’s not text from a moving car – work from almost anywhere) are a boon for the highly motivated, organized and talented. But what about everyone else?

One of the concerns many thought leaders express about the new economy is that it yields work for the best, brightest and most driven (now including all that consulting, flexible positions, telecommuting, and other non-traditional arrangements). It also continues to offer a range of service work that, at least for now, requires a human presence (from health care to fine cooking). And there are still a number of U.S. manufacturing jobs, although that number continues to dwindle.

But what else? There’s a gap, likely to continue broadening, where there used to be more jobs for the rest of the workforce. As the economy continues to shift, what happens to the worker who needs the structure of an office to maintain motivation? The person who shows up for the assembly line? Where are the jobs for the capable person willing to work steadily all day or night but simply not constituted to come up with lots of big ideas, manage time completely independently or work alone? If you’ve ever been an employer or a manager, you know that these people make up the majority of many a workplace – that’s the way the world is and probably always has been.

This week, Time magazine’s article The Workforce: Where Will the New Jobs Come From? provides hope that there will be new jobs. That’s good. But for any leader or citizen who hopes to see the economy truly thrive again, there’s that other question, not so easy to answer. Will there be enough jobs for the great majority of working class and middle class Americans who do well working for a company, who respond to expectations set by management and who would like to put in a good day’s work for decent pay, then head home to their real lives? That’s a lot of people, and we all need to put our imaginations to work to make sure our economy continues to fully employ and value what continues to be the majority of the population.

Continued funding programs for better roads and bridges? Encouraging young people to go into trades such as plumbing or electrical work, in which shortages are predicted? Putting more adults in the schools to work with the kids? Opening more child care centers, which require staffing? Offering real live tech support? Human cashiers at the supermarket?

What could work and be valuable? What do you think?

To read or not to read...

… and I’d like not to be worried. After all, for me, the smell of a Barnes & Noble is nearly aphrodisiac, and I consider the buying, reading and piling up of books and magazines my birthright. I confess to not having a Kindle or similar device yet, but I know that’s coming. To me, format matters, but content matters more. That’s why I found Fortune’s cover story The Future of Reading particularly thought-provoking. I can’t believe it… could it even be possible… that people will ever lose interest completely in reading? Let it not be so.

Fortune, of course, is speaking largely from a business perspective, especially regarding journalistic concerns. I noticed that I couldn’t find the text of that March 1 lead article, which I first devoured in print while waiting at my allergist’s office, online as I wrote this – since it’s this week’s issue, Fortune would no doubt like us to buy the magazine and thus support the advertising. I certainly understand this. After all, a great deal of vSA’s work is in public relations, media relations in particular. If there is no revenue, there will be no publications. Plain and simple. Fortune, and even Broom, Brush & Mop magazine – difficult as it is to believe – are not mere labors of love.

Here’s my educated guess, based on the cosmic and not-so-cosmic shifts I’ve seen in my decades on this earth and at my desk (including the door-on-file-cabinets that served as my vSA desk in those first daring years of entrepreneurship): Reading will not die. The stature of Amazon and my beloved Barnes & Noble are evidence to that. Sadly, small bookstores and publications large and small have suffered and will continue to do so. The media will continue to adapt, with false starts and many casualties, to new models for advertising and other revenue generation. More and more of our reading will be done on notepads and online. People will continue to love video in all its forms, and many – okay, most – will prefer it to the written word.

But there is a magnetism to writing and to reading, and, despite the challenges of doing it well, there is a certain simplicity and joy to creating stories – just think, most children compose tales and essays as soon as they can wield a crayon or navigate a keyboard. We love our news (both the important and the supremely trivial) and we relish our rehashing of information, much of which will continue to be in the form of articles, opinions and other text.

Fortune, by the way, agrees, by and large: Reading – somehow, someway – will live on. What’s your take?

Will it matter if I send or delete?

So much work, so little time. On a good day, we’ll reach out or get back to five or ten clients and prospects with consulting documents, articles, interactive marketing efforts, design comps, and estimates. Plus, we’ll respond to several dozen more clients and associates about business-related matters, and initiate contact with a few companies we’d like to get to know. Much of this happens by email.

Some days, what we get back bears so little resemblance to what we send out that we must naturally assume that our emails got scrambled and sent to the wrong recipients, and that in return, we’re getting emails meant for someone (who???) who wants to know:

I See Website You Need to Meet

Work from Home for $10000/month!

Start Your Heart Automatically

There are only a few reasons I can fathom for this disconnect, the first being a technical glitch so mysterious that even the most universally admired computer wonks (and you know who you are, don’t you?) can’t figure it out.

The second is that vSA works at a pace so much faster than ordinary humans that our missives shoot out almost as if into the future, and it therefore takes some time for our recipients even to receive them. Asynchrony of time, we’ll call it.

The third, less likely, is that our clients and prospects are variously busy; occupied with other, even more urgent projects; or, in rare cases, disinterested in what we’ve sent. While this is difficult for us to imagine, we’ve heard from other professionals that they’ve had the same impression.

It’s sort of like parallel play among small children – I email you what I’m thinking about. You email me what you’re thinking about. The emails are like two ships passing in the night. This year, some of our marketing programs are fun – really fun. We’re hoping this transitions the ships passing in the night to ships honking, waving and shouting words of affirmation to and fro: “This is great! Gotta do it again!”

I’ll be waiting at my in box, smiling.

Are you tired of hearing the words, “No one could have predicted…” and variants thereof? I am, because the consequences of people in positions of responsibility not thinking outside the box and not planning and initiating appropriate action are often extreme. Here are just a few examples that should be etched into our collective memories:

Predictable given the mood of the public-Scott Brown’s election and the resulting likely (if temporary) demise of comprehensive health care reform: Putting your personal politics aside for a moment, imagine you are President Obama, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid – it’s okay, it’s just for a minute. Obama should have become more involved, and Congress should have moved faster – before the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority.

Predictable given geological and infrastructure facts-Haiti’s disaster: Construction with few building standards built on a fault line. An airport with such small capacity that only a few planes can be there at any one time. Add one (predictable) earthquake and we have the tragedy we see today. Worst thing? It could happen again.

Predictable given economic facts and indicators-The collapse of the housing market and the too-big-to-fail banks and our subsequent economic woes. As I’ve mentioned in this forum in the past, my father, a retired schoolteacher, accurately predicted the housing market collapse a couple of years before it happened. It’s hard to believe bankers, economists and politicians lacked the same data.

Predictable given clearly inferior engineering combined with neighborhoods below sea level-By now, what we knew and didn’t act on following Hurricane Katrina should be obvious. But guess what? We still haven’t fixed the problem with the levies, even as we rebuild below sea level in New Orleans.

Those are political issues that affect the world. Complacency and inaction are enormous factors in business, too. Consultatively, vSA always urges business leaders to step outside the box to think the big thoughts and then to act on them as needed. We all know how easy it is each day to pursue the latest deal, address the most recent 200 emails and just try to stay afloat keeping up with the urgent. However, it is hardly cliche to remember this: Do not overlook the important in favor of the merely urgent.

Thoughts, examples, strategies?

I hope Martha Coakley will win the Massachusetts Special Election today, I really do.

As I voted for her this morning, I was struck by a feeling that she needs all of us to pull her feet out of the fire and that, to some extent, she has earned this close race through her lackluster campaign. This is not to say she won’t be a good senator – she’s been a good attorney general. She simply isn’t experienced as a politician running for election, and she appeared to somewhat take this election for granted once she’d cleared the primary.

To the Coakley campaign, Scott Brown probably appeared at first  to be an upstart without a chance. Martha Coakley’s campaign missed the mood of many Massachusetts residents – residents tired of the bad economy, worried about what health care reform will actually mean to them and impatient with the Obama administration. Brown painted Coakley as an insider and himself as some odd combination of good lookin’ cowboy and down-home neighbor. In fact, he’s more conservative than is a match for Massachusetts. Boston.com published a January 10 article citing important examples: “Last week he embraced waterboarding. Last month he expressed skepticism that climate change is being caused by humans. He has even denounced two national proposals that he supported in Massachusetts as a lawmaker – mandatory health care coverage and a cap-and-trade system to cut global warming gases.” Great.

Martha Coakley, I hope you win… despite yourself.

Once upon a time, all was well with the world.

Once upon a time, tech start-ups talked about their “burn rates” a lot, as in, “How much money will we flame through before we get the next big round of funding?” Some of them had bubbled glass in offices for people who’d never completed the development of the product being funded. Delicious lunches and indoor soccer were not out of the question. Then the tech bust hit  around 2000, for many start-ups signifying the beginning of… The End.

Fast forward to now. We’re kind of deep in the latest recession, a Great One to be sure. Oh, perhaps we’re swimming toward the surface now. But will business be the same as it was before the fall? Or is RESHAPING a more accurate term for what’s ahead than RECOVERY alone?

Well, not ALL is not all fog and mystery. In a time when vSA staff is asked more days than not what WE see ahead, we’re happy to talk about the reshaping (and that touch of recovery) that we, as marketers in the thick of it, are party to…

•   Businesses moving forward with cautious optimism. Maybe not happy-ever-after-times, but better times are coming. Whether, in the lingo of economists, it’s V-shaped (quick), U-shaped (gradual) or W-shaped (another dip ahead) is unknown. However, we’ve likely hit bottom and are on the way back, however gradually, to prosperity.

•   Marketers using the Web. We’re seeing a major surge of Web-related business coming in the door. Why not? People are going online to reach prospects quickly and efficiently. Whether creating an online catalog, interacting with customers or getting your Web site into Web 2.0 or beyond, it’s a smart place to start.

•   Worn-out ways of doing business… flying out the window. Businesses are scrutinizing everything. Are the salespeople delivering the right message? Is the company even selling through the right channels? Does print advertising work at ALL for this company? Should the company focus on its stronger offerings and (gulp) scrap other products? Tough times create tough questions – as they should. We’ll continue to see seismic shifts in businesses – from big mergers to dropped lines and brands, and even to more door closings – as well as hot new companies popping up like mushrooms.

•   Speaking in an authentic voice to build relationships. In a rough environment, trust rules. Savvy marketers are building relationships with the people they need most. They’re using public relations, social marketing, sales conversion programs, and customized grassroots outreach.

•   Executives, coming out of their back-office meetings to communicate new direction. And THAT is good news. Direction, after all, suggests movement. Reshaping, too.

Imagine for a moment that the communication in question isn’t marketing. Imagine you’re at a social event, talking with a stranger you’d like to know. What will keep this stranger talking with you? Will allow him to become intensely interested in what you have to say?

Talk about a topic in which the other person is very interested. (“Oh! You collect spiders?”)

Not only BE truthful and sincere – project it. Interestingly, even when you ARE being genuine, people don’t always believe it, probably because they have been exposed to so much that is false.

Hear and respond to the other person. Answer his or her questions directly, rather than swerving back to what you wanted to say anyway. Eventually, you can get to your message, but don’t force the matter prematurely.

Inspire curiosity. Be interesting enough that the person wants to learn more, and to continue talking with you, and to resume the conversation another time as well.

Now – let’s get back to the discipline of marketing. The principles are the same, but the barriers are higher. When you have something for sale (or, shall we say, “skin in the game”) you face the challenge of appearing biased. Gosh, wonder why! So it’s all the more important to project that you are telling the truth. The type of communication we’ve described above is a slower, more authentic way to build relationships than old-school hit-me-over-the-head-with-it marketing. But IT WORKS. Banks and financial service companies need solid relationships with customers and clients. So do companies whose products require a major commitment of time or money, or a switch to a new technology platform. So does your company, I’ll bet.

Think about the many types of communication you employ – from speaking engagements to webinars, editorial coverage to white papers, social media to sales meetings. Each of these can be studied and, as necessary, retooled to more clearly and effectively speak in an authentic voice.

In a time when trust is rare and business is still recovering from a nasty year or two, is it worth your time to make sure your communications resonate? At vSA, we’re voting yes-absolutely-yes, and the nature of our clients’ communications increasingly reflects our focus on building trust as we build their brands and sales.

Is it just me, or is business getting extraordinarily complex?

Oh, it’s just me?

I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Because here’s my thesis: nothing is easy anymore. Only the strong will thrive. Just as jobs for low-skilled labor are as scarce as flowers on Mars (or has that changed, too?) successful careers for high-skilled professionals in marketing, technology, industry, and the like are not for the weak of spirit.

Top five reasons why Work is So Complicated Now:

5- The oversupply of really smart people, devising new stuff. Innovations are everywhere.

4- Global everything, with all the cultural differences, language barriers, legal obstacles, and heavy competition that brings. (Leben ist schwierig.)*

*Life is difficult (German).

3- TECHNOLOGY.

2- Related to #3, new communication techniques, and a startling abundance of information sources, some of them reliable. Who can possibly read it all? Or remember 50% of what one would like to know?

1- Energy. And I don’t mean alternative. I mean the kind that you and I need just to keep up, let alone lead the pack.

How does a marketing professional serve clients brilliantly, especially when staffing is short, budgets are tight, and careers can live or die by short-term ROI? Few people can glide by for too long anymore without hard work. (And yes, I suspect that once, in a faraway time, perhaps the 90s, some mythical ad people could do just that. Probably they had talent, or charm. Something like that.) In a profession that has at times received and on a few occasions even earned the dubious distinction of being composed of hot air (yes, marketing, unfair as that may seem) the air has cooled, at least for the moment.

Now, working smart is critical. Just for starters, keeping up with industry news and trends is a marketing must. At vSA, we’ve become selectively engaged with Twitter, for example. We can use it to quickly get the word out about news of interest to important editors and our clients’ prospects. We’ve also seen that our clients can sometimes benefit as much by having customers make positive comments about their products on Facebook and post engaging videos on YouTube as they do from certain trade shows. More than in the past, we feel the need to monitor even relatively recent vSA work to assure that it’s up to the minute: for example, some Web applications we created to help clients sell online four years ago need to be updated… already and probably not for the last time.

But we have an additional responsibility as well. Outside of subjects that are clearly “of our industry,” it’s become more incumbent than ever to follow world news, fast-changing consumer trends, the mood of the nation, the day-to-day state of various segments of the economy, and more. Today I learned something more about Total Recall, a Microsoft research project based on the prediction that an archive of an individual’s digital data, largely generated without much of that individual’s thought, through GPS, cell phones, cameras, credit cards, health records and everything else he or she does, will someday create a pretty comprehensive record of that person’s life… and will thus change the way humans use and recall memory. Concepts like that, when they achieve traction (aside from being in my opinion pretty creepy) are always appropriated by business and marketing interests. So we marketers need to know about them. I also learned today that some prominent economists are concerned that the Obama administration has lost its way in pushing for regulatory reform of the financial markets and that these same economists fear that another economic collapse may be just scant (really scant) years away. Mmmm, hope they’re wrong, but better bear it in mind.

My point is that to be truly excellent as a high-level consultant in marketing today requires vision, diligence in meeting world situations face-to-face and the energy to continue to understand the ways people want to communicate now – and what these people want and need to hear. No hot air.

Boston Consulting Group is just one of the voices we’ve heard recently warning us of the dangers for companies of becoming wildly optimistic in the face of a few positive economic signs. Its study Green Shoots, False Positives, and What Companies Can Learn from the Great Depression “warns CEOs to guard against the kind of hasty optimism – based on an excessive reliance on one or two promising indicators – that undermined some companies during the Great Depression” according to a press release from the firm.

American Public Media’s August 3rd Marketplace show featured a segment on navigating the upturn, in which Standard & Poors Chief Economist David Wyss says mistiming the end of the recession can be a fatal mistake. He warns that “The danger is that in some industries if you sort of stay in self-protect mode too long, you’re going to miss the upturn completely and end up losing market share. More companies go broke in the upturn than they do during in the recession.” However, he then goes on to say that he doesn’t think the fabled upturn has arrived yet. Hmmph, he’s probably right.

So, what’s a company to do? We ask our clients to separate risks too big to assume in uncertain times from sensible business moves that have a way-better-than-even chance of paying off. As a marketing firm, we’ve watched with dismay as some clients have chopped budgets and then complained about anemic sales. (In case you wonder, we ourselves have navigated through client budget cuts by taking on a larger number of clients, including a number of new ones, balancing out the reality that most companies are spending less than they did in 2008, and in some cases, probably less than in 1908.) We’ve used more media relations and other PR, more Web surveys, more grassroots marketing, and a lot fewer big splashy campaigns to get the job done for clients.

Where one Downturn Downfall comes in, we believe, is in paralysis. If revenues are shrunken, sure, reduce spending somewhat. But don’t cut off all your outreach or you will be forgotten by an uncaring world. And if your company can’t seem to decide what product to introduce in this tough market, or when to introduce the thing, GET TO WORK ON DECIDING. If sales are down, sell harder. Sweat still works if you combine it with smarts. The fact that the company down the street announces its sales are down 30 percent, or even the fact that your own company’s sales were down 45 percent last quarter, is not adequate reason to assume that you will inevitably match this depressing performance going forward. Expect more, just don’t spend all your mythical earnings yet.

The economy is an orchestra. It does take a combined effort to make sweet music, sure, and we’re an earplug-worthy cacophony right now. But each musician – from Acme Ant Traps to Toyota – has a singular part to play. Your mother was right. Practice your music longer each day, focus, be open to inspiration, and improve your – and all of our – performance.