The conversations inspiring me

FWD 123 - Fewer Marketers | Touch Grass | Better Workers | Authenticity

I thought for this week, as we continue to play with the structure of this newsletter and how it delivers the best value I can, I would highlight four conversations I'm having right now that inspire me right now and how you can be involved.

1) We need fewer marketers.

I'm convinced that in five years 30% of the marketing workforce will be functionally working in another discipline. Digital marketing, as it was optimized for the 2018 web is an echo chamber of dying strategies and leaders across the board from SAAS to professional services expect results that the internet has no interest in giving.

I love marketers. They are often talented, creative, and solution-oriented, challenging many businesses to think beyond the tactical now. But their discipline sold itself to Google and Meta 15 years ago and now those platforms don't want or need them anymore. Things have to change.

I started a conversation about this on LinkedIn, you can join it here.

2) The future is offline.

Recent data now reports that over 50% of the activity on the web is bots. This used to be a funny dark web conspiracy called the "Dead Internet Theory." Now it's called Tuesday. But the battle for trust, for engagement, and for brand attention will have to go somewhere. In addition, the shifts in political and cultural values seek to remove one more bastion of the past - higher education - from the game board. We need places to find and build trust, the internet can't and won't do it anymore. We need places to think in interdisciplinary ways and grow citizens not workers, the university cannot scale (and is in fact descaling). We need to replatform the path to wisdom and integrative thinking. Where will it go?

I was inspired by that conversation and the interactions in created as well in this thread.

3) How do we build a better workforce?

The conventional wisdom now is that people don't need higher education (a premise I challenge, of course) because they'll just learn on the job. But job culture is on an efficiency tear where anything and anyone that doesn't produce ROI in the next five minutes is at risk. The systems and wisdom needed grow talent at work (training, managing, and mentoring) are often anemic. I dove deep on this topic with my colleague Brad on last week's episode of Working/Broken.

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My apologies to those of you who got our Authenticity episode early, we linked the wrong one last week. It's corrected now.

Speaking of Authenticity...

4) Should we keep showing up as ourselves?

The shift in online recommendation algorithms to virality versus relationships, is wreaking havoc on who and how we show up online. The temptation to build a algorithmically-approved persona and game the machines to get the eyeballs you think you want is real.

The obvious side effect is that everyone is pretending. We've known this about social media for a while, but given the amount of time we're spending online and more apropos to business, the amount we imagine some magic social interaction is going to produce new business, the more this inauthenticity (with an AI overlay) is incentivized.

But authenticity, leading from a place of credible truth, is essential to growing trust. On the podcast, Brad and I came from very different perspectives on authenticity and the wrestling really inspired me in the newest episode of Working/Broken.

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