Why does LinkedIn hate your mother?

And at the end there's a little surprise (but don't get your hopes too high)

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? Some of you may have noticed that this newsletter usually arrives in your inbox on Wednesdays, yet today is (checks calendar) Thursday. That’s my bad…

But also my good! I was running a messaging workshop for a client and life got in the way and let’s be honest I’m going to focus my time where I’m being paid and maybe focus my time a little less on, let’s say, this newsletter, where I am not getting paid.

And then I was going to send it late last night when it was done, but longtime Gobbledy reader Gary S. reached out (complaining about not getting the newsletter, natch) and suggested I wait til today so that doesn’t, and this a quote, “have the stink of your workshop on it.” So this stink-free edition is thanks to him.

If your company needs help re-working their homepage, I run workshops to help with that. They’re painless, I promise. I’m at jared@sagelett.com.

OK, here we go…

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The ‘Willful Ignorance’ of Success

Let’s imagine for a moment, shall we, that you’re a member of the Board of Directors of technology company. Congrats!

And as a board member, your duty is to represent the shareholders’ interests in the company and oversee the chief executive. That sounds normal enough.

But also let’s not kid ourselves - the Board is often in cahoots with the CEO, sometimes because the CEO hand-picked the members of the Board. In that case, the Board’s duty is to represent the shareholders’ interests (wink wink), but also their job is basically to sign off on whatever the CEO wants.

We just saw an extreme case of this - Tesla’s Board was kind enough to offer its CEO, Elon Musk, a $56 billion pay package a few years ago. Then, because America hates capitalism (?), a Delaware court judge voided that agreement.

So that’s kind of the outlier of what happens when the Board loves its CEO.

On the other end of the spectrum, maybe, is where a Board member says nice things in the press about a CEO, even when, perhaps, they haven’t generated much shareholder value. Or, rather, when a CEO says nice things in the press about a CEO when, perhaps, they’ve destroyed a significant amount of shareholder value.

I was thinking about that when reading this Wall St Journal article about Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of spit collection and tell-me-i’m-12%-Afghani startup 23andMe. In the article, which is mostly about how under her leadership the company’s market cap has dropped from $6 billion to $0 billion, a Board member discusses the CEO:

“Patrick Chung, a longtime board member, said Wojcicki is a great startup founder because she has stuck to her big vision despite tough obstacles. ‘Anne has a willful ignorance of constraints,’ he said.”

Now, that’s a funny thing to say - “Willful ignorance of constraints.” It’s an even funnier way to describe someone who, I guess, sorta reports to you and upon whom you’re supposed to (legally bound to?) put constraints on. Like his entire job is to say to the CEO, “We’re here to support you but also what we’re really here to do is to make sure that whatever you do, you don’t destroy $6 billion in shareholder value.”

Though on some level he’s not wrong - one great trait of early stage startup founders is sticking to your vision despite tough obstacles. That may be the best description of the traits you need to be a successful startup founder. Bravo, Patrick Chung.

Except Wojcicki is no longer a startup founder - she’s the CEO of a (currently, though likely about to be de-listed) publicly traded company.

So while I can understand the Board sticking with their CEO, even through the tough times, it’s quite hilarious (“hilarious”) when a Board member so wonderfully turns that CEO’s shortcomings (what maybe I would call an unwillingness to make the changes necessary to stop the company from destroying $6 billion in shareholder value), into a very Silicon Valley-esque positive of “willful ignorance of constraints.”

Great work, Mr. Chung.

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Maybe Your Mom Is Not the Enemy

One of the marketing strategies we’ve talked about here is giving your product a foil, or an enemy, so you can show how your product is good compared to how evil the other thing is. A while back we discussed how interoffice envelopes were the enemy and email was the good guy (yes, there was a time when people were happy to send and receive emails because it was better than that incredibly annoying and evil interoffice envelope. The world was a funny place.)

In general, it’s a little easier if the enemy is a concept rather than a person. For example, for Grammarly, the enemy is writing insecurity (you can use Grammarly knowing that even if you’re not a grammar nerd like me, that your work and school communications will be error-free and people won’t think you’re a doofus).

In our Gobbledy Classic (tm) about air fryers, we talked about how the enemy was cooking with grease. “Frying” wasn’t the enemy. “Cooking with grease” was the enemy. You can get the same benefits of frying in oil without the drawbacks of cooking in oil. They could’ve made the enemy be “wasted time” (because an air fryer is faster) or they could’ve made the enemy “splatter” because that’s an annoying thing about cooking in oil.

It’s considerably more challenging to make a person the enemy. Although I’ve sworn to myself that I wouldn’t talk about politics here, we’re seeing this issue occur in real time in the political world (apparently I was lying to myself).

The Democratic party, for example, has been split in regard to whether the current president should make the previous president the “enemy” or make “greed” (for example), the enemy (my opponent only cares about cutting taxes for those fat cats!). Or “authoritarianism” or whatever.

You might think that making a person the enemy would generally be a better idea, but abstract concepts actually tend to work better. In the politics example you can imagine fans of the prior president saying, “hey, don’t pick on him, he’s my guy” while it’s hard for one to imagine those same people saying, “hey, those fat cats deserve tax breaks, too!”

In the old “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ad, the PC was supposed to personify the enemy, which, according to the Mac, was “technology complexity” (or something along those lines.) Those ads used both a person and a concept as the enemy.

But, weirdly enough, I always found the Mac to be the far more annoying of the two (sorry, Justin Long). The Mac felt like the insufferable know-it-all, while the PC was just trying to get a little work done and move on with his life. In that case, the smug up-and-comer became the enemy.

Why am I boring you with all that? Good question!

Mostly to tell you that this ad from LinkedIn is everything that’s wrong with making a person the enemy:

What kind of company makes “Mom” the enemy??? And how unbelievably dumb is your mother that she would think “cloud sales” is a weather forecast? Even if she didn’t know what “cloud sales” was (I guess it’s a term for someone who sells AWS?) why would she think it’s a weather forecast?

And why would LinkedIn suggest that businesses are mistakenly advertising to your mother? And why wouldn’t your mother “get” B2B?

Oh - and “Mom” is only capitalized when it replaces a name, not when used as a common noun.

(Not everyone gets grammar, LinkedIn.)

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The end is the best part, so thanks for reading to it. As a thank you that has nothing to do with gobbledy, here’s a clip of the band the Lemon Twigs that sounds very much like if REM and the Beatles had a baby.

And somehow the Calendly link I include each week so we can chat for 30 minutes has been broken, and only reader PK even noticed. Thanks, PK. Here’s my Calendly link.

And lastly - as I mentioned above, I’ve been doing a bunch of 1-day workshops around messaging, and the outcome is that your homepage will be SO much clearer. If you want your homepage to be clearer, we should chat.