“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -Arthur C. Clarke
Years ago I was contracted to coordinate and improve the digital marketing for an explosively growing outfit. Because I had so many tech integrations and public-facing information to handle, with one owner weighing in capriciously, I needed to build in several efficiencies to be able to make last-minute changes when needed.
The organization’s public-facing communication also needed to grow rapidly because their footprint doubled under my watch, and if we didn’t focus on growing their audience, sales, and public awareness (and enthusiasm) at a proportional level, they’d lose footing, need to trim back their huge management team, or let go of their nanny and side projects.
I learned their business, spotted trends, and enacted a comprehensive year-round brand communication plan to properly support their growth, while solving some user-experience issues they had around digital communication, online relationship-maintenance, audience growth, and confusion around multi-location sales plus technical glitches.
After I was asked to stay on board and agreed (I was asked to stay because I was told my presence helped the owners marriage), I was also expected to raise up and train internal workers. During my tenure, the smartest, most technically capable team members greeted me with “no, I don’t want to do social media” or “I don’t want anything to change,” before I even asked.
You could say there were also culture issues. So, my job was cut out for me.
Because I had personally needed to handle year-round public communications planning and execution, I needed some tricks to find stuff quickly for last-minute adjustments across several platforms. There were many.
So, scheduling important but non-urgent social content at times like 2:22 was handy.
Why? Repeat digits are easily recognizable even on a tiny screen, without one’s reading glasses. And, one owner wanted only his “announcement” posts to receive the highest stats, so there was an unspoken four-hour buffer on either side of these messages to avoid social friction and side-step undesirable stats dilution1.
I also observed this owner’s posting pattern was primarily dusk and dawn, so 2:22pm was a safe bet smack dab in the middle the open time span too.
At my three-year mark, I noticed team members started using this number for other things like side-hustle pricing. During that time other folks I’d never met were paid to run around and report on stuff I’d enacted that was plainly visible through direct observation (like “view source” on website browsers).
That’s how I found out I was being let go: by being oddly copied and ghosted by “new teammates,” who were clearly meant to be my replacements.
And I occasionally still wonder if they think the number 222 was magic?
I’ve come to know that sometimes, when you are effective at getting things done, folks copy the wrong stuff for the wrong reasons.
What shortcuts have you built into your position that work great, because you designed them to be efficient for you to do your job?
Lean into those maybe, someone may just think you are magic. Besides AI can’t copy that.
A worker-side view of what’s going on with Standard Operating Procedures (SOP):
I feel it is still better for you (if you are a ‘worker’) to get called magic instead of AI, group-think, or greed-motivated, C-suite efficiency hounds centralizing value at the oligarchical top of the economy.
There’s a huge push right now for folks to write Standard Operating Procedures in the business world, and honestly, I feel a bit wary as to the “why.”
SOP’s are function-centric, not people-based, or performance-based, so to me, SOP’s appear to be designed to make effective people replaceable, like by AI, robots, or cheaper/more compliant people to be treated like cogs in an owner’s machine.
This very well could harm high-level folks’ ability to make a reasonable living, or push key contributors onto their back feet.
I guess this is okay if owners intend to also work toward finding other ways to employ or provide a reasonable living wage2 to key people whose livelihood is threatened.
When you remove or marginalize the human builders of your business, you, the owners, get to centralize the monetary value for cashing out at the point of the business sale. And that is the nature of unbridled, careless capitalism: accruing and selling business systems and assets without regard to the workers who helped build them.
The more functions enclosed in SOP’s and the more people who focus on org charts, the higher price the owners can command at cash out. Besides, venture capitalists love this stuff. Text and charts can be plugged into LLMs and analytic models for re-working. Humans cannot.
Yay for owners, but sad for their workers who may have invested their hearts, souls, and creativity for real, then burn out or get discarded because an owner is always chasing something “better.”
In my experience, machine-like businesses are efficient, helpful even, but rarely humane.
So I’d rather stick with my middle-aged lady eyesight, a heartfelt support of workers, ground-up industry-building, my own creativity, insight and freedom than this latest wave of machine-style business hoopla.
And why not use fun efficiencies, observation, and pattern-recognition to support thoughtful, loving, sane people and their lovely occupations for years to come? Yeah, that’s where it is at.
Happy day to you, Elizabeth
- Stories v. Stats is a post indicating why stats-only approach to evaluating marketing is limited. ↩︎
- There’s so much to learn about Universal Basic Wage (UBI) and Universal Living Wage. I wonder if something like this may need to be enacted with prices going higher, and solid middle-class employers continually getting nudged toward selling to the venture capital and corporate class.
Independent middle-class professional workers (strategic planners, managers, etc.) may ultimately require supplemental compensation as these important transitional roles get subsumed by subscription based “DIY” digital app models, and value gets pushed upward to the few. ↩︎