Content-Driven Strategy

Scaling Strategy by The Family

By Nicolas Colin (Co-Founder & Director) | The Family

This story is part of a The Family series exploring business strategy in the 21st century. Sign up for my weekly newsletter to make sure you’re up-to-date on how businesses thrive in the digital age.

Great business leaders master the art of crafting content to serve their companies’ interest. Warren Buffett has been a pioneer with his famous annual shareholder letter. Jeff Bezos, with his annual letter to Amazon’s shareholders, is another example. Elon Musk is a third one. In 2006, he even published the “Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (followed by a part 2 in July 2016), which carefully mapped out all that would happen over the following 10 years — and what’s incredible is that, even with the 2008 financial crisis in between, most things went according to plan.

What Elon Musk did was a bold move, but a rational one because it serves many strategic goals. First (rule of thumb of producing content), it forced Musk himself to articulate his vision for the future and the plan to get there, which made him stronger, more clear-minded and more able to share his vision with others. What’s more, it attracted the super-fans that Musk needed to help him grow Tesla Motors and turn it into the leading car manufacturer in the future. Additionally, as Tesla Motors was not much at the time, the story wasn’t widely read by key players and if it was, it probably wasn’t taken very seriously. Finally, it was a smart way of burning the ships: once Musk had laid down his plans for the future, the only option left was to execute it swiftly, with the sense of urgency and the radical model of execution that makes great Entrepreneurs.

Indeed there are many reasons why producing content adds value.

First, producing content is a powerful incentive for working on the issues in-depth. When you have to speak to an audience or write a paper, there’s no room for approximation. And everything that you learn creates more value in the long term, contributing to building more and more thought-leadership. And if, like Jerry Seinfeld, you do it on a daily basis, you get far more productive.

Second, as is widely acknowledged today, content is good marketing. It makes a company famous and attracts people from every part of the ecosystem. It’s also a good opportunity to build a network: when you publish content, you have a good reason to reach out to influential people. All in all, good corporate content attracts those who are interested, it converts those who feel a sense of trust, and it keeps those with whom you won’t do business anyway at a distance.

Third, producing content is aligned with the key role played by information in the age of personal computing and networks. One lever, among others, to access and exploit available information is to produce your own information to frame the discussion, to attract reactions and rebuttals, and to shape the industry as time goes by.

Fourth, producing content is also about decision making. The best way to convince yourself of an idea is to teach it to others. If it holds up when presented to an audience, and against rebuttals from the most critical among them, then it will become so solid and so obvious that it will serve as a rock for building further ideas. This is why great researchers are also teachers. One of the key advantages of producing one’s own content is that it deeply ingrains your investment thesis in your mind and body, sparing you the painful task of constantly referring back to the plan. In particular, teaching your own thesis is a great help when it comes to sharing it with your own team members. In-house content is the foundation on which you can grow a community of like-minded people that make decisions into a no-brainer.

Fifth, teaching your own thesis helps trace the “circle of your competence”. As recently explained by software engineer Adrian Kosmaczewski, “teaching will make you more humble, because it will painfully show you how limited your knowledge is. Teaching is the best way to learn.” As Charlie Munger once said, “the more you know the limits of your knowledge, the more valuable gumption is”.

Sixth, a great advantage of teaching one’s thesis is that it puts you ahead of potential competitors. Those who keep on teaching new things will always be ahead of those who are satisfied with following. And if that teaching is done with a radical tone, it will be so polarizing — even frightening — that it will dissuade many more people from following. Thus radical content marketing, far from revealing your secret sauce, helps you to keep potential competitors at a distance.

Seventh, there’s what you disclose and what you keep for yourself. A company’s public communication should be on its thesis and strategy. But you can keep the details of the virtuous circle that is carefully crafted to tighten your strategic fit just for yourselves.

Here are three key questions for all of you business executives wondering about content-driven strategy:

• Does your company produce content targeted at a wider audience? If not, you’re probably losing ground to competitors.
• Is this content genuine and accurate? Do you personally take part in crafting it? If not, that’s bad.
• Is this content radical enough to polarize discussions, or is it just the same old boring corporate soup?

I’m glad to have your comments and feedback. Also, sign up for my weekly newsletter to be notified when new issues are published.