Hola from Pula
The Community Edition
Hello from Pula, Croatia. We made it out of Gatwick yesterday, blissfully unaware of any problems. I wonder if we'll make it home...
I've was locked away in an apartment all day yesterday trying to hit deadlines so I can join the team at the waterpark today. There are some beast-mode slides here.
So a a wrap-up for holidays.
Last week, we ran a drinks event to thank those folks who gave feedback a few weeks ago on the Executive Summary. It was a brilliant night - as you can see.
I've always enjoyed building media titles and communities. I’ve built three in the past -
Greenbang - 50,000 readership. Online news and research on sustainable tech, smart grid and green IT. I built it while writing for the FT using an early version of WordPress. It’s still going today as a newsletter on energy innovation and AI infrastructure. I started it from my flat in 2007 and within months had the big IT companies as sponsors.
CoinDesk - 1 million daily readers. I was part of the team in its early days - a founding member and editor number one. It was recently sold to Bullish Global, a crypto exchange. CoinDesk still operates with editorial independence with an editorial policy not dissimilar to the one I wrote.
Henbadges - A lovely little e-commerce business where bridesmaids could buy photo badges for the hen parties they had to organise. Badges were £3 a pop and you could buy extras, upgrades and accessories. By the time you'd bought for a flock of hens, the checkout carts were £40-£60. We built partnerships with the weddings shops, organisers and other players in the industry.
I also ran the Superuser Forum, a micro-event inviting people who could unlock opportunities around the City. There was never a charge or a job title but you had to be invited.
Of all of them, I made the most money from Superuser. I won a lot of work by inviting people to events with great I made the best recurring revenue from Greenbang because sponsors would sign up for a year.
So for those of you I dragged into this community - thank you for your patience while I worked on some old skills. It was two years ago the first newsletter went out.
Back then I didn’t know where it was heading, but I knew there was something in writing a newsletter for my friends in high places. I fell in love with the idea of cohorts and peer learning as a better way to tackle problems than using consultants. That was from a Harvard business course and I really enjoyed the way they turned the community into a study aid.
The voice of the crowd is never wrong.
All of the advisory work I do with companies is based on journalism - listening, asking questions and showing them how they are performing through different lenses: customer, sales, competitor, employee sentiment, online, social, funnel, search etc.
If I gave just my opinion it wouldn’t carry weight. But that data shines a light on what companies often want to ignore. Top-quartile customer voices are a lighthouse for strategy - but you should see the resistance I get from internal leadership teams under the spotlight...
Almost every company omits community from their growth model because they're not wired for it. It doesn’t fall into a department a KPI or a CRM. It takes too long to build and the benefits won't show up for a year.
True - that's why it's taken two years to get here.
Covid left behind a lot of poor working practices. I’m convinced that’s why companies today are stuck in risk paralysis and slow growth. It’s easier to say no while working from home than fight for your beliefs in the boardroom.
For this community, I wanted to avoid those people and focus on the challengers.: the small cohort of leaders who could make decisions and didn’t need 40 people to agree. The bullish, bold and brave.
My thinking was, if Fortune CEOs and their teams read and engaged, then others who want to be like them would follow.
After a couple of years of research and talking to CEOs nearly every day, the reality is that global CEOs are often the worst for relying on committees. They don't want to be - but they've inherited legacy practices that will not go back to autonomy mode.
Because of this, large companies are struggling to lead. They are petrified of regulation, brand cancellation and breaking process. They can’t get the insight required from consultants to leave this terrible state.
It's too big for them.
Imagine a set of cohorts built to challenge each other across growth, technology and new leadership practices.
That is why The Executive Summary exists.
We have one sponsor and another coming on board as the newsletter is hitting the point where it can go into scale mode.
I love doing this. I love the comments you send - and I still get excited when new readers subscribe.
And consider this. Companies cannot reach buyers anymore. Cold emails go to junk, buyers don't work in the office so you can't send them anything (and they have gift policies). And big events are manned by stand staffers.
The only way to meet great people is through relationships, introductions and face time.
So you might have thought I was mad for doing this. You may have read it and wondered what I was thinking.
But it's working.
Community is the only channel delivering results in B2B and C-level engagements.
That community has to be full of integrity and value. It has to help people move forward and unlock opportunity.
That is the cohort and the journey we are on at The Executive Summary.
If you are a business leader who wants to be part of something bigger. If you're fed up of talking to vanilla consultants, you will find a lot of other people here who are going in the same direction. Why not meet them?
Check out The Executive Summary Cohorts...
Have a great August.
Dan
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