Bring me a rock

Why the customer comes last, most of the time

“The audience comes last.” The white-bearded creativity- and music-guru Rick Rubin could not have been clearer in expressing the sentiment to Anderson Cooper in a recent 60 Minutes interview. After decades of hit-making with artists like Adele, Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, and other mega-stars, he was putting his ideas on the record.

Rubin continued. “The audience doesn’t know what they want. The audience only knows what’s come before.”

Cooper seemed confused for a moment, then asked, “Isn’t the whole music business built around trying to figure out what somebody likes?”

Rubin responded instantly, “Maybe for someone else it is, but not for me.”

***

Now, if I’m being honest, this sentence triggered then transported me back a dozen-plus years to my earlier life as a military staff officer.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I walked back through the maze of cubes, sunk low in my seat, exhaled like a boxer who just took a gut-shot. My cube-mate, older and scarred from similar battles, whirled around his office chair and said, “He wants you to bring him a rock, doesn’t he?”

The “rock” in question was a one-page policy argument gone wrong. I thought I had done my homework and written a solid proposal. But when I’d gone in to discuss the draft, I figured he would want a reasonable adjustment—a “little this way” or “a little that way” on a point or two. Instead, his criticisms cut away each point in turn until there was nothing left at all on the page. I had to start over.

When I went back in for Round Two, the same result.

Round Three, same result.

I don’t think I ever finished.

Some business types prefer to bin this leader-who’s-never-satisfied problem in the “management” section. I see it somewhat differently.

Especially as it pertains to strategy-making. Strategy-making is a creative act. It must be for survival’s sake. (If the adversary can spot your next move, you’re dead.) Creative ideas are typically untested ideas and so involve varying amounts of uncertainty.

Leaders’-in-charge want certainty. They want a continuation of the glide path that got them to now. They want to see a chart that shows “today” and then the way forward to “tomorrow” unobstructed. When presented with an uncertain path they get glitchy. They don’t know how to respond. As Rubin points out, they get tunnel-vision on what’s come before and that can kill the creative process.

Of course, filling in the blank page in strategy-making isn’t the same as making music hits. Rubin’s clients need millions and millions to buy records. The strategist needs buy-in from one or two or three in the chain of command to move out.

The other thing is Rubin’s clients offer a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. They say, “this is the album, like it or not.” When the album’s done, the album’s done.

In strategy-making, the strategist pitches strategy to leadership—and that’s when the journey begins. Expect the painful process that follows. It always comes. Take pride in being the one that is first to fill in the blank page. Get something down, a start point.

Then know that’s when the knives come out. That’s when creativity collides with criticism and the desire for certainty. At that point, it almost becomes a contest of endurance.

But first, always first, the audience comes last. Keep that in your mind when crafting a new strategy…