Firebrick has been at the vanguard of innovative changes in strategy for hundreds of big tech brands like VMware, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Citrix Online, PeopleSoft, and many new category creators like AppSense, ClairMail, Riverbed, Taleo and Workday. Their process leads companies through the entire cycle required by a change in strategy – from market creation and positioning, to business model optimization, to go-to market planning and sales implementation.

The name Firebrick refers to the ceramic brick capable of withstanding extreme heat and stress with low thermal conductivity, which is therefore highly energy efficient. I like how the metaphor plays out: Firebrick helps companies exploit new inflection points (heat), unlocks critical problems that often impede a change in strategy (stress), and gets them quickly to the point of revenue (efficiency).

Before joining last month, I’d done a few consulting engagements with the Firebrick team and I’ve come to learn what distinguishes their firm: it’s strategy, speed and substance.

• Strategy is probably one of the most overused words in the consulting world. But what I see from Firebrick is the real thing: solving problems, making good decisions, thoughtful planning and story telling. Just the sort of work that I want to be doing.
• Speed certainly doesn’t come to mind when I think about the typical consulting firm where projects wane and get caught up in organizational inertia that blocks the real outcomes. Firebrick moves fast and opens the critical path to a positive outcome.
• Substance or impact, Firebrick delivers results. I’ve heard clients talk about what a difference Firebrick has made to their business: helping one move from old software delivery models to the newer subscription revenue model; giving another company’s legacy brand new relevance with a differentiated story; and arming another with a pragmatic sales strategy.

It was hard a few years ago to leave behind the comforts of my life and career in San Francisco for the new adventure of family life abroad and independent consulting. Now that I know it can be happily done, it will be bittersweet to leave. But I’m excited about expanding from communications to broader business strategies and developing many new relationships through my work at Firebrick.

As we make our way back to San Francisco over the next several months, I look forward to crossing paths with all of my friends and colleagues in the Bay Area.

I looked at him blankly and he repeated the question. In the seconds that followed, I scurried through several interpretations wondering if I’d been gone from Silicon Valley long enough to have missed some new secret code question about my credentials. Or, is he asking about what I’m working on these days, who are my other clients, or what is my take on the industry right now? Sensing that he stumped me, before I responded he said “I’m sure you do yoga” (typecasting me as that 40-something working mom who’s jumped on that trend and finds solace in her practice).

Never mind that I try to run regularly and that he’s a competitive downhill skier. I get it – he was genuinely just making conversation. There in that moment several thoughts and experiences collided to remind me of that powerful secret to networking and the magic of simply getting to know someone.

During my whole career as an agency executive, I resisted classic industry networking – going to an event to exchange cards in the hopes of drumming up leads. About 10 years ago, my CFO at the time advised our staff, during a session on attending networking events, that the best way to avoid networking anxiety is to forget your agenda and talk to someone like an acquaintance you’ve met at a party.

Many years later, in response to my reluctance to hard-sell my services an executive coach suggested not to think of myself as a salesperson. Instead, he said to have conversations with people to understand what problems they have that I could help solve. Great advice! I’ve always been comfortable with more personal connections and longer-term relationship building.

Right now I’m reading The Start Up of You by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. It’s a practical guide to developing your entrepreneurial edge with an obvious emphasis on effective networking and tapping your personal connections. This has never been more relevant now that I’m a remote consultant. I couldn’t build a healthy business thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley without drawing on my personal network. The more I keep my contacts top of mind and see how I can help them without an underlying agenda, the more new opportunities emerge.

That and my regular trips to the Bay Area to meet with people in person and talk about our workouts.

With CMO.com, Adobe has really mastered the new golden rule of publishing relevant and engaging content for their audience.

Horn Group believes that companies have to tell engaging stories wherever and whenever their audiences want to interact–whether that’s in person, online, in their hands, or on the go.  But many marketers struggle to create this kind of cohesive, breakthrough voice for their brands.

So we set out to create a tool — combination sanity check and step-by-step guide — to help marketing executives create coordinated communications across every channel — PR, social, mobile, web, events…and more.  We’d had much success with the Social Media Action Plan template that I created a few years ago with my colleague Susan Etlinger, who is now an analyst at Altimeter Group.  (It’s been more popular than I expected and broke 55,000 views on Slideshare a few months ago.)  An actionable template for integrated communications seemed to be missing in the marketplace.

Like so many things, the formula was simple once I put pen to paper: a top-down evaluation of business goals, audience, messages, medium, execution and measurement that ties back to those business goals.  Horn Group’s mastered the magic mix of each of these but where they really stand out is with the unique ability to execute holistically across every medium.

I’m eager to see the market’s response to the Communications Blueprint. Hope it’s useful, looking forward to your feedback.

I realized I was in trouble when I couldn’t capture an underlying and marketable value of all the things that I love to do:  connecting ideas, solving problems, writing, leading teams and projects.  So much of what I do comes from innate abilities, but how do you sell intuition to the business world?.  So I asked a few mentors and colleagues who know me well “what happens when we work together?”  That’s when salt started to enter into the picture.

One person told me I have an innate ability to crystallize ideas into action, “to distill the essence of what’s most important in a sea of information and open the critical path to a positive outcome.”  Another helped me connect that idea to the effect of helping people self-organize under my direction.  He also introduced me to Nancy Duarte and her post  What Does It Mean to Resonate, where she describes the phenomenon of salt grains self organizing into beautiful patterns when exposed to certain sound frequencies.  I connected strongly with this metaphor and started to focus on helping companies crystallize their communications and resonate with their audience.

The salt metaphor resonated with me and I even thought it would be a great, pithy name for my new venture.  I started to research the symbolic importance of salt and to talk about it gingerly with friends and colleagues.  To my great surprise, a dear person immediately gave me Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt: A World History” and signed it “For Shannon, changing the world one tiny grain at a time.”  I loved that thought.

The book isn’t gripping but it is a wonderful history, and quotes like these made my mind run wild with possibilities:

• Salt has made a glittering, often surprising, contribution to history.
• Salt has had great economic importance, a substance so valuable it served as currency for centuries – hence the expression “worth your salt”.
• Salt is associated with longevity and permanence, it prevents decay and protects from harm.
• In some cultures, loyalty and friendship are sealed in salt because its essence does not change.

Meanwhile, I was still continuing my purpose work and it was starting to get heavy.  I assumed that my professional purpose wouldn’t have much to do with my personal purpose; and honestly, I’d never really thought about either, expect maybe for my responsibilities as a parent.  After lots of thinking, I realized that my ultimate purpose is to use the forces of language and interaction to help people realize how much they matter.  Professionally, this translates into helping companies create communications, strategies and interactions that resonate with their audience.  All of a sudden I had a more meaningful context in which to position my skills and services.

Even the most dynamic organizations and their people are stifled by beliefs, process and interactions that limit their ability to adapt and thrive. These limitations adversely impact strategy, communications and the ability to execute smartly and swiftly – and ultimately prevent a team or a company from being able to resonate with its audience.  In the way that salt is essential for all living creatures, I hope to be an essential ingredient to the people and companies I work with by distilling the essence of how to achieve their goals, crystallizing their communications and helping them matter more to their audience.

Much has been written about the poor use of language in business writing and there are even a few nifty tools that rate your use of jargon. But hearing the discussion aloud and listening to the crusaders in this podcast brought the topic to life in a meaningful way for me.  The moral of this story is that language (and great writing) is directly tied to the heart of a business. Language can reveal and solve many of the organizational roadblocks that keep companies in a state of mediocrity.

Here’s the BBC’s summary description of the segment:

There is no reason why the words used in corporate communications should be pompous and jargon-ridden but that is how it often turns out to be. Peter Day goes into a huddle with a group of enthusiasts determined to improve the way business language works. Producer: Sandra Kanthal Editor: Stephen Chilcott

The program is about a group of business people who gathered for the Dark Angels writing program at Oxford; it was designed to sharpen the way they write and think about the language they use at work.  The fact that the Dark Angels are based in Britain recalled a few memories of my own.  At least 10 years ago, on one of my first missions to Europe to meet with potential business partners, two different U.K. colleagues remarked that they had a hard time appreciating the American tendency for hyperbole in business communications. Their advice about bridging any cultural divides in business between the U.S. and Europe was to “watch your language”!  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

These are some of the points from the podcast that resonated with me:

• Writing for business is really just about writing. Whether writing creatively or for business it’s all acute observation — finding the words to better engage with the outside world.
• It’s about understanding the pomposity (so English, isn’t it?) of language and that that’s not the best way to get through to people.
• The language of business school (not unlike the language of PR that I and so many of my peers grew up learning) only provides a veneer of importance that’s totally incomprehensible.
• Most companies are filled with terribly mixed messages. The message they give in their advertising is totally different from the message you get from interacting with them.  How you bring together all of your communications to have a really clear and cohesive narrative comes down to story telling and personality.
• The best brand writing comes from those brands that write with personalities.

There was a generous discussion on using words to bring out the real voice of an organization. All corporations these days are talking about how genuine and authentic they are. But there is often a gap between the external and internal voices of the company — which reveals a difference between what management and employees believe and say about the organization. One of the Dark Angels suggested that “the best brand carriers for most organizations are inside the four walls of the company.” Any communications professional will recognize this as a classic trait in a client engagement: we’re often put in a facilitator role where we help teams work through real organizational issues — we get into “the guts of an organization”.

Here’s the topic that really piqued my interest. We’ve all worked with brands that hide behind a mission statement that doesn’t mean anything to any one.  Everyone marches under a trivial tattered banner not believing a word of it, a purpose statement that has no real authenticity, that has little credibility with any of a company’s audiences because it’s made up of the typical dry management language that’s so easy to draft.  Regardless of intentions, so many companies and communicators are limited by the dominant default lexicon.  Only a few years ago, I conducted a core values exercise with my entire staff at the time.  I was passionate about including everyone in the process in the hopes of capturing the true essence and beliefs of the office. The exercise and the outcome were both quite genuine, we captured the spirit of the company.  But language limitations led the team to cliched terms like “strategy, creativity and performance” — all respectable core values but unoriginal in my opinion. I challenged the team and pushed the exercise to the point where we came up with “insight, imagination and results” — which are different, more precise and differentiable values — a better reflection of the team and its mission at the time.

So the final message from the podcast was close to my heart: Look at the language you use and ask yourself “does this really mean anything to anyone?” Does this make a connection, do you feel excited about working with or for this organization?  All of a sudden, you go from thinking about the language you use to the real heart of the business.

• They were custom — totally unique to the individual company looking for an agency, no boilerplate
• They asked great questions — this made me really want to respond and win the business, it gave me a preview of how they think and what it would be like to work together
• They were short — the company knew enough about what they wanted that they could get to the point and spare the agency from providing so much detail that’s usually irrelevant to the nature of the work.

A client recently asked me to help write up an RFP for his company’s corporate identity and website redesign bid.  I thought about it for a few hours and realized that there were really only about 5 things he and his team needed to know from the participating agencies.  By sticking to clear requests and simple language, I hoped to invite the participating agencies to show themselves through their work and people, not through their answers to dozens of useless questions.

Here is a generic version of that RFP here, in the hopes that it’s helpful to you someday.

I’m fortunate to be able to continue with Horn Group as a consultant and strategic advisor to the team there — acting as virtual CMO, driving business and marketing strategy and leading international relations for the firm and its global network.  In some ways, my interaction with the agency and its community doesn’t change a whole lot.  That makes the transition a lot easier.  Nonetheless, it is a significant change for me. I’m now a free agent looking to consult selectively until I find the next dream team and dream job to give myself to.

I plan to write and share here as I explore, network and consult.  Watch this space and wish me luck.