#do they enable each others bad habits and make each other worse for everybody else involved? Yes.
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My loki and sigyn are incredibly funny to me because by all rights with the amount of issues they both have going on that they refuse to address they should be horrendously toxic, however it just so happens that all their respective mental illnesses cancel each other out and leave them with one of the most stable relationships in asgarðr
#do they enable each others bad habits and make each other worse for everybody else involved? Yes.#but they're happy together and that's what counts
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&. BASICS
Full Name: Evelyn Ines Barbosa Phoenix
Nicknames: Phoenix, Phoebe, Ballerina
Age: 96 years old
Sexuality: bisexual
Date of Birth: August 9th 1924
Place of Birth: Lisbon, Portugal
Gender & Species: cis woman & (fire) sprite
Current Location: Ardora, Concordia
&. MORE BASIC INFO
Languages: Portuguese, French, English
Religion: atheist
Education: Graduated from Lisbon’s dance and acting university
Occupation: Principal Dancer/Prima Ballerina of Lisbon
Drinks, Smokes, & Drugs: she began drinking and using Concordia-native drugs after becoming a sprite, otherwise it would have been too damaging to her human body.
&. PERSONALITY
Zodiac Sign: Leo -- The Leo woman is a regal Lioness, queenly in every way. From her royal bearing to her personal style (which tends to be extremely expressive and bold), the Leo woman is strong and comfortable in owning her power, like her planetary ruler, the Sun. Though slightly sweeter-natured and usually a little less over the top than her male counterpart, a lady Leo can still be counted on to take no bull – if you try her, you may live to regret it. It’s best to avoid inciting that Leonine temper if you don’t want to see claws. Should you attempt to mess with her way of being or quality of life (especially anything related to survival: her family, home, or income), she will take you down – hard. Lady Leos are vivacious, full-of-life personalities, and their enthusiasm and ebullience can be completely infectious. They want you to do something wild and fun with them, so being a bump on a log or a stick in the mud will simply not fly for these big cats, who take deep delight in feeling their freedom and exerting their autonomy.
MBTI: ESFP -- ESFPs are vivacious entertainers who charm and engage those around them. They are spontaneous, energetic, and fun-loving, and take pleasure in the things around them: food, clothes, nature, animals, and especially people.ESFPs are typically warm and talkative and have a contagious enthusiasm for life. They like to be in the middle of the action and the center of attention. They have a playful, open sense of humor, and like to draw out other people and help them have a good time.
Likes: her family (both her human and sprites family ofc), dancing, teaching, partying, the warmth, recklessness, the warmth within Mt. Ardora, silent nights, learning, freedom.
Dislikes: getting her heart broken, liars, people who end up depriving Phoenix of her freedom, people who give up after failing, indifference, injustice, the cold weather, boredom
Bad Habits: lip biting, always has to walk around somehow, or, if everything else is impossible, taps her foot and plays with something (mostly her hair)
Secret Talent: dancing, teaching, love
Hobbies: the wide and dangerous spectrum of love (and she’d like to punch herself for that, actually, lmao), ballet, getting together with her friends to cause some trouble and go on adventures, gossip (but in a non-malicious way),
Fears: waking up and realizing it was just a dream, being left alone, people avoiding her.
Five Positive Traits: passionate, fiery, compassionate, coquette, ambitious
Five Negative Traits: vengeful, temperamental, distrusting, vain, destructive
Other Mentionable Details: uses her ballet to get rid of her energy, uses dancing as her fighting style to contain her flames and direct them/to engulf herself in flames.
&. APPEARANCE
Tattoos: none
Piercings: earlobes
Reference Picture: ref picture
&. FAMILY INFORMATION
Parent Names: Jaco Barbsa (former soldier) & Linda Barbosa (retired nurse since Phoenix cared for their finances)
Parent Relationship: she had an excellent relationship with her parents, they mean everything to her and she prays every day for them (despite not being religious, but her parents were)
Sibling Names: she has no siblings
Sibling Relationship: --
Other Relevant Relative: NAME UP TO POSSIBLE PLAYER -- (technically) husband. His whereabouts are unknown, but Phoenix believes he’s dead. And if he isn’t yet then he better run.
Children: --
Pets: --
&. BIOGRAPHY
( tw: war, heartbreak, stalking )
Little Evelyn Barbosa was a creation of pure love. Her father, Jaco Barbosa, had returned from war and was celebrated within Lisbon as one of the few making it back alive. He’d fallen in love with a shy and compassionate but stubborn young woman named Linda. The charme of a soldier appealed to her and, not even a few years later, Evelyn was born into a world torn apart by coups, death and anarchy. No one questioned legitimacy as she’d always been a calm and sweet baby, smiling at the silliest pee-a-boo jokes. Despite her parents not being married, they stayed together despite the backlash from their families and even friends. A strong, grounded love in the midst of war. A love like her parents was the first she got to know. It was a love that made her childhood so comforting despite the ongoing wars within their midst. While the government struggled to uphold rules and even leaders, Evelyn remained in close proximity to her parents and their warmth. She grew up in a small, but lovely cottage in Belém, hidden away from the terrors of this world. One could even say she’d been sheltered and smothered with love -- others might, she certainly never did. Evelyn decided, at an early age, to repay her parents by aiming for a higher education, to eventually buy them a beautiful finca and enough food so they’d never have to worry about anything else. She turned out to be a little miracle, a progeny, a muse.
Dancing lifted her spirit, made her feel alive, burning with passion and dedication to the craft. Especially ballet. The pirouettes and poses, the blood, sweat and tears one had to give to perfection such beauty -- Evelyn enjoyed the idea of being excellent at something so extraordinary, watched and admired by thousands. She trained for years to come and, with a scholarship at one of Portugal’s best ballet companies (what would later rebrand and become the national ballet of Portugal in Lisbon), Evelyn fully committed to becoming a professional ballet dancer. With such a natural talent like hers, paired with the passion needed to survive against all the competition, enabled Evelyn to graduate with honors. This is when love intervened. Not only after a year of performing on the big stage, Evelyn met her match -- a young, handsome and charming man. They locked eyes and Evelyn was fun over, just like that. Five times he went to the same play before Evelyn eventually gave in and decided to get to know him. Saying she wasn’t in love would’ve been a lie, no, in reality she’d fallen in love with him the moment they locked eyes. With her career unfolding and with herself slowly making some decent money, Evelyn eventually bought her parents the finca she’d always promised them. With herself on top of the world, Evelyn let herself fall into the arms of one of the only people she truly trusted.
The war arrived in Portugal at a time in which Evelyn finally tried to talk to him. Both her father and the stranger she’d fallen for were drafted and Evelyn put all her energy back into ballet. Each day her anxiety increased and the news got worse with more and more people dying. She’d hoped for good news -- her father arrived first, wounded by a gunshot wound in his right arm, then, a few days later, he returned -- perfectly fine and barely changed. While this should've raised red flags for basically everybody else, Evelyn remained clueless and naive. Maybe he was just one of the lucky ones and had been able to prevent any injuries. She dedicated a large portion of her time to him after the war in the hopes of making up for all the lost minutes with him. Evelyn got engaged rather quickly after spending some wonderful weeks with him and, not even two months after their engagement, the two got married with all the glitz and glamor possible in their post-war world. They honeymooned on the coast of Portugal while reality struck her like lightning. All her belongings -- gone for good. Evelyn spent most of her honeymoon searching for answers, she even went as far as to believe he’d been kidnapped. Yet, her search ended up in various dead-ends.
Like a bird with broken wings Evelyn found herself grounded, completely lost of all her innocence and naivete. Her pink tinted glasses turned red and with that her mood completely changed. Instead of channelling her passion for ballet, Evelyn requested the next few weeks off to find out more after there’d been rumors of him being spotted in the Caribbeans. A fire ignited inside of her, pushing Evelyn forward towards her husband. The closer she got towards the Caribbeans, the more hope she had that everything would be alright in the end. There was still the possibility of him returning to her, of him just being kidnapped. Evelyn would never find out since the plane she’d boarded crashed and burned before she could even reach him. She awoke in a strange, but beautiful world. Evelyn survived her personal hellfire and emerged as a new person. Less naive, less tender and with her innocence lost she joined the fire sprites on her quest to true love. The passion located in her heart fit perfectly into the ranks of the fire sprites, as did her rage. She channelled the intensity of her personality by using fire and from that a Phoenix arose out of the ashes of everything she’d lost. Ardora not only provided her with the perfect opportunity to change, but it also opened a completely new world to her in which she could start anew without worrying about anything, or anyone, else. Phoenix completely devoted herself to the social structure of her new home, like she always did. From her fighting skills to her place within Ardora -- she cared and made sure she’d remain important and respected. She rarely got out of her shell at first, but it didn’t take too long for Phoenix to warm up to everyone else. With self-love everything seemed possible now. Phoenix arose with an appetite to express herself, to dance surrounded by fire, to test her limits. A sense of freedom completely took over from there and with the new name a completely new person entered this world: hardened, free, passionate. She crammed all her missed out years into a few months, went from exciting activity to the next big thing, hoping to keep that rush alive inside of her. It would never go out, that she’d only realize a few decades later. The fire inside of her, bright and warm, would never go out again. And that naive, little girl described in the beginning, eyes as bright as stars and her heart filled with love? Phoenix loved to surround herself with fire now, fully embracing the previously asleep firebug within -- her spark would soon ignite the hearts of many -- and she would gladly pour all her energy into welcoming the next generation.
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proust’s narrator also contrasts the conversation of bergotte (the writer friend his description of whom i quoted in the last post) with that of his dad’s friend norpois:
I let myself go in telling him what my impressions [of a recent performance of Phèdre] had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. “Ah! the designer will be glad to hear that; he’s a real artist, and I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I don’t care for it much, it bathes everything in a sort of sea-green glow, little Phèdre standing there looks too much like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. ... [A]fter all Racine isn’t telling us a story about love among the sea-urchins. Still, it’s what my friend wanted, and it’s very well done, right or wrong, and really quite pretty.” ... And when Bergotte’s opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were less valid than the Ambassador’s; far from it. ... It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality. (2.185-6)
norpois is a career diplomat; the narrator’s other big implicit criticism of him is that he talks about everything the way he talks about politics--namely, like this:
M. de Norpois entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his diplomatic colleagues, quoting now some ludicrous period uttered by a politician notorious for long sentences packed with incoherent images, now some lapidary epigram of a diplomat sparkling with Attic salt. But, to tell the truth, the criterion which for him set the two kinds of sentence apart in no way resembled that which I was in the habit of applying to literature. Most of the finer shades escaped me; the words which he recited with derision seemed to me not to differ very greatly from those which he found remarkable. ... All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind. (40)
so basically the reverse of how bergotte talks. Good Politics Talk rephrases a familiar maxim or demand in a persuasive way; Good Art Talk shows us reality from a new angle. when i put it that way these seem really similar? but i think this is behind the difference the narrator perceives btwn disagreeing with bergotte and disagreeing with norpois. like: the goal of political argument is either a. for your opponent to endorse your view instead of the one they held previously and/or b. to show those on your own side that you agree with and understand their opinion. so, unanswerable is good; making all other ways of seeing the issue look stupid is kind of the goal. (is this why slogans often posit oughts as ises? “gay rights are civil rights”--not “should be considered.” or like, “black lives matter,” instead of, “american cops need to stop killing black civilians.” stating an obvious fact in order to imply an imperative.) whereas bergotte wants to enable his interlocutors to understand and acknowledge the validity of his view also--not instead.
i think this is why i feel uncomfortable around people who talk about politics a lot. ime, the habit bleeds into how they talk about other things too. like the way norpois talks about bergotte’s work. he begins by saying to the narrator’s parents, “I do not share your son’s point of view”--meaning his admiration of bergotte. but the I statement is... kinda fake? he goes on,
“Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, there’s no more to it than that, and that is not much. ... At a time like the present, ... you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.” (61)
notice the passive tense, the pleas of objectivity, the way he has to turn his personal dislike into an argument as to why we should disapprove. you can’t frame an effective counterargument to this? all you can say is “yeah well i like art for art’s sake,” or, worse, “actually bergotte has an important social message about x.” either you agree to disagree (which ends the conversation) or you’re reduced to arguing that the thing you like is important, quite possibly for reasons that have little to do with what you like about it. (n.b. the narrator, who at this point knows bergotte only from his books, originally brought him up in hopes of learning more about him from someone who’s met him in person--not of learning merely norpois’ opinion of him.)
...of course i’m not saying art shouldn’t be political, lmao--and neither is proust, who, for example, goes on a lot of long digressions later in these books about why anti-semitism and homophobia are bad. i just really like his argument that art-motivated eloquence and politics-motivated eloquence have different interests, and different effects on conversation. it helps me understand why i get so frustrated in classes when people spend the whole discussion time trying to persuade each other that x character is or isn’t evil
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how to get cheap car insurance with bad driving record
how to get cheap car insurance with bad driving record
how to get cheap car insurance with bad driving record
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Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers
Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers
In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”
Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.
Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.
We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet
Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.
That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.
Agile marketing team – what is it?
Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.
This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.
A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.
Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.
Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]
Step 1 – Hire amazing people
Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.
In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.
That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.
But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.
#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet
Step 2 – Empower teams with agility
Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).
For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.
Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.
You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.
An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.
An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet
As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter
Step 3 – Get in other people’s way
You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.
Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.
Respect tradition … or profit from it
Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.
Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
0 notes
Text
Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers
In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”
Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.
Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.
We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet
Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.
That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.
Agile marketing team – what is it?
Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.
This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.
A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.
Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.
Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]
Step 1 – Hire amazing people
Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.
In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.
That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.
But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.
#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet
Step 2 – Empower teams with agility
Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).
For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.
Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.
You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.
An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.
An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet
As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter
Step 3 – Get in other people’s way
You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.
Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.
Respect tradition … or profit from it
Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.
Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/03/disconnected-teams-high-performers/
0 notes
Text
Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers
In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”
Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.
Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.
We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet
Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.
That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.
Agile marketing team – what is it?
Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.
This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.
A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.
Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.
Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]
Step 1 – Hire amazing people
Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.
In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.
That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.
But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.
#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet
Step 2 – Empower teams with agility
Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).
For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.
Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.
You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.
An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.
An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet
As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter
Step 3 – Get in other people’s way
You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.
Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.
Respect tradition … or profit from it
Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.
Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm
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Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers
In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”
Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.
Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.
We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet
Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.
That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.
Agile marketing team – what is it?
Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.
This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.
A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.
Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.
Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]
Step 1 – Hire amazing people
Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.
In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.
That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.
But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.
#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet
Step 2 – Empower teams with agility
Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).
For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.
Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.
You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.
An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.
An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet
As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter
Step 3 – Get in other people’s way
You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.
Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.
Respect tradition … or profit from it
Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.
Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers posted first on http://ift.tt/2maTWEr
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