Justice. There's No App for That.

The sides are forming: a union of haves versus a confederacy of have-nots. As Yogi Berra said, it's like déjà vu all over again.

So, during the holidays:

• Enjoy a little peace. Come January 21, peace is over.
  
  
• Subscribe to a source of real news. Deceit will be the government's weapon of choice.
  
  
• Be kind to women, gays, minorities, refugees and immigrants. Most wear targets on their backs.
  
  
• Prepare to mobilize. And I don't mean your iPhone.

Inch by Inch

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always found ways to leverage technology—whether e-commerce, rockets, drones or cloud computing—to give his company's flywheel another jolt.

Who doesn't want to find the profit-turning flywheel Bezos runs, the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great?

But the truth is, you don't find it; you cultivate it.

"No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop," Collins says. "There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution."

A flywheel is not the creation of the fast-buck "mercenary" (Bezos' term), but of the "missionary"—the patient, purpose-driven businessman or woman.

Yesterday

Does your meeting need a chief experience officer?

Samantha Whitehorne answers yes in Associations Now, and identifies three roles for the CXO:

• Attendee advocate. The exec who spots and fixes "small mistakes that could frustrate attendees."


• Listener-in-chief. The exec who studies live audience feedback and recommends adjustments in real time.


• Brand guru. The exec who polices branding before, during and after the event.

To Whitehorne's list of duties, I'd add:

• Guardian of truth. The exec who goads planners to up their game.

Want the truth? Attendees have zero tolerance for mediocrity.

Salesforce.com proves that fact in its new study, State of the Connected Customer:

• 80% of B2B customers say they expect real-time response
• 75% say they expect providers to anticipate their wants
• 70% say technology makes it easy to take their business elsewhere
• 66% say they'll abandon you if treated like a number

It's easy for planners to pine for yesterday, when the audiences were pliant; the competitors, pipsqueaks; the margins, porcine. But today's audiences want more.

"Excellence, quality and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves," Disney animator Ed Catmull says in Creativity, Inc.

The time is now to appoint a CXO for your event.

Indeed, it was yesterday.

B2B Marketers are Freaking Out

B2B Content has reached petrifying proportions. Marketers are freaking out.

As Rebecca Spary says in Smart Selling Tools, "the current content cycle is fundamentally broken."

Like food in America, millions of tons of fresh content are being shipped every day, only to wind up in the landfill (or what Gary Slack calls the "brandfill").

Salespeople—three in four, anyway—blame marketers: they produce content that looks tasty, but is irrelevant to buyers. In reality, that assessment is baseless, because nine in 10 companies don't own a searchable CMS. No one can search for content based on relevance.

And it doesn't help that most salespeople are numbskulls. Only:

• 62% understand their own companies' products
• 25% understand their buyers' businesses
• 22% can position themselves as trusted advisors
• 21% believe they have relevant content to share with buyers

CMOs are supposed to align the two parties.

That's no mean feat, considering each is rewarded for different things (marketers for accumulating vanity metrics like traffic, likes and followers; salespeople for closing business at any cost).

Until CMOs can hold both parties to new standards—marketers for their efficient contribution to pipeline and sales for closing profitable deals—little will change.

Trust Yourself

“Trust yourself," Dr. Benjamin Spock told young mothers, by which he meant trust your heart.

It has reasons reason doesn't know.

Never contradict it, because it's usually right about the things that matter.

Some people have a knack for letting their hearts sound the alarm and save them from failures.

The rest of us use our heads, and take a lot of hard knocks.