The Monday Media Diet with Mimi Turner

On Dr Seuss, Luntz, and Roger Martin

Mimi Turner (MT) is a friend of WITI and a strategist at LinkedIn, working at the B2B institute. Thank you to the great Jann Schwarz for the introduction. Have a great week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

For the first half of my career, I was a restless lane-changer. I moved from journalism to communications to sales, marketing and finally to marketing strategy, where I have been for the last decade. As disciplines they are connected but also very different.

Journalism rests on being able to prove that your story will factually and legally stand up: you have to get it right in real time every single day. On the commercial side, success is much more about selling a future vision of success. The outcome cannot be proven at the point of sale. The actual results are basically a problem for Future Homer.

I found these oil and water routes to success both unsettling and intoxicating at the same time. Strategy is something like an emulsification of both worlds. Decisions are low-frequency and high-risk, but you know all along that you will have to answer for the bets you take.

There are many ways that people think of strategy: as technical frameworks, as extended team exercises as three-to-five-year plans built on complex Sharepoints by analysts from biz ops. It may be all of these things.

But I have come to think of strategy in a very specific way: I think strategy is the premonition of future death. If you have a premonition of future death, you need a new way out. That’s why I tend to find myself in environments where change is needed and why I am drawn to people who will bet their careers on innovation.

Describe your media diet.

For about ten of the last 15 years, I was in a job where I had to read most of the newspapers every day.

As the Director of Communications of a media conglomerate, I had to read the British national daily papers cover-to-cover before 7am, and as Director of Strategy, Messaging and Research for the UK’s third biggest political party, the Liberal Democrats, I had to be across the newscycle virtually 24/7.

I have developed a sort of anaphylaxis to that now, to the point where I am totally discriminating about what I give my attention to and rarely find myself grazing the news. I read very specific high leverage writing and do it for pleasure alone.

I pick up my sense of what is happening in the business world from LinkedIn. And for deep reading I recommend Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View, No Mercy, No Malice from Scott Galloway, McKinsey’s The Week In Charts, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook and absolutely anything that Frank Luntz or Michael Ashcroft (two political pollsters from different sides of the Atlantic on whose shoulders I managed to blag quite a bit of political success) are thinking about. For quirky expertise, WITI! And most highly, I would recommend the Medium blog and books by Roger Martin (the person whose opinions on strategy have most shaped my career).

Beyond that, I’m mainly looking at the internet for pictures of things I want to buy.

What’s the last great book you read?

A few months ago, I decided to read The Iliad and The Odyssey side-by-side because I thought it was time for me to confront the foundational texts of European literature. I felt like I was about to embark on a Joseph Conrad-like journey into the unknown. I practically packed sandwiches for the trip. But they turned out to be much easier to read and a lot less abstract than I thought.

Both books could be interpreted as evaluations of strategy and are pretty contrarian in their take by modern standards. Homer gives us Odysseus as “the man of many devices” who learns that using flexibility and guile and subverting his own ego is what is needed to keep his promise to return home: “Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned. And many were the woes he suffered in his heart, seeking to win his own life.”

And then there is Achilles, the most admired and heroic of all the Greeks, whose focus on glory for its own sake is what ultimately destroys him: “Sing, goddess, of the rage of Achilles, destructive as it was, which hurled down to Hades many strong souls of heroes and made them spoils for the dogs.”

In a very real sense, Odysseus owns many more character traits (brand associations) than Achilles, who is limited to basically just one. Bend to the vagaries of circumstance and survive or stick blindly to one truth at the expense of all others and you won’t even make it to Book II. That’s pretty much Homer’s whole message in case you want the TLDR version.

What are you reading now?

I read different books concurrently. At the moment I am re-reading Machiavelli’s The Prince (in the bath), which has lessons about territorial acquisition and managerial vs Princely models of leadership that are totally relevant for today. It has developed a bad rep as a book, perhaps because it is open about the need for ambiguity at the heart of leadership. But at the time of writing, it was intended to create a model for stability in an Italy that was fraught with regional conflict and in desperate need of well- managed peace.

My dipping-into-for-inspiration book on my desk is Frank Luntz’s Words That Work (clue: solutionizing isn’t one of them) It is a devastating analysis of why using words to signal how clever you are is a dumb political strategy. And with my morning tea I’m re-reading Roger Martin’s The Design of Business. Because design is an act of intent. I re-read a lot of books. I should probably start more new ones.

What is your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

This is a TREMENDOUS question, and I don’t know why people don’t ask it more often.

I subscribe to The Economist and I read it from the back page to basically the middle. I start with the obituary, which is usually an incredibly intimate account that reads like it was written by a friend. Last week it was about the death of Milan Kundera, and a few weeks ago the obituary of Tina Turner was very poignant. I browse through the book reviews and scan features on things like artificial cheese from Israeli food tech startups, an app for hailing a rickshaw in Bangalore and pieces on occasional tech and retail quirks. I read the Buttonwood column on money things, the Schumpeter column on who-knows-what and my favorite column of all is Bartleby, an agony uncle column about workplace mores and attitudes. The problems of the world swirl around on pages 1-50, but I usually leave them where they are.

What should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Dr Seuss.

What is the best non-famous App on your phone?

They’re all pretty normcore.

Plane or train?

Airports make me sad. I travel quite a bit for work, and I like it a lot, but I often find myself experiencing a sense of being untethered from all my worlds when I fly alone. Trains, on the other hand, make me happy. The EuroStar is so civilized and easy, and you go from city to city in what feels like a heartbeat. British trains, when they actually show up, are also pretty nice. GNER trains from London to Edinburgh Weekend First are a top treat, with cinematic coastal views from Newcastle onwards and a fantastic full English breakfast complete with bacon and brown sauce.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Hmmm, this seems like a trick question. One place that I would be happy if no-one ever visited would be the Idwal Valley in Snowdonia. It’s a glacial valley with three peaks that make up Cwm Idwal, a hanging valley formed by a river of ice that flowed through the valley between ten and fourteen thousand years ago. It’s beautiful in the sunshine and even more beautiful when sheets of rain cascade above it in waves and cloud tendrils cover the jagged limestone. Right about then, inside that weather, it feels like it could be a million years ago.

A rabbit hole you fell deep into?

I have become very interested in the neurochemical consequences of making a promise, because of a research project I have spent a lot of the last year working on with my colleague Jann Schwarz and my strategy hero Roger Martin. We looked at over 2,000 ad campaigns and found that campaigns that make a promise to the customer perform better on brand and commercial metrics than campaigns that don’t make a promise. So that’s where I started. Making a promise essentially triggers a lot of social and emotional cues and heuristics. But I found myself in the forest of neural gating; miserliness in human cognition (Keith Stanovich); the idea that evolution does not reward perfect design or happiness (Richardson & Boyd); the Algernon Principle (‘any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage) which is really an incredible idea. Turns out that for all our efforts, human thinking is slow, cognitively expensive and delivers diminishing returns. We are actually under enormous evolutionary pressure to think as little as possible. I find this makes sense of huge chunks of my life. (MT)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Mimi (MT)

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