I was having dinner recently with a friend and we were talking about how our children learned how to cook. I reviewed my experience with our son Peter, who wanted to make spaghetti and meat balls for dinner one night. He gave me the list of ingredients, which was short and fairly devoid of spices, so I had an idea of how this would turn out.
The day came for this dinner. I provided the ingredients and let him go for it. He wasn't a novice in the kitchen. He'd helped Pam periodically, took some cooking classes at Sur La Table, and had mastered pancakes and waffles.
When we served up dinner, I tasted first. As I expected, it was bland. Then Peter ate some, looked at me, and admitted it was bland.
I mentioned the value of spices. They initially were used to mask bad flavors, then evolved into adding flavors to a meal. I volunteered to make this dinner again but with a different recipe. He got his from a You Tube video, mine was coming from a well-worn cookbook.
When we finally had that meal, he smiled after eating some and acknowledged that spices had really improved it. A simple lesson learned.
My friend mentioned that "Baking is a science, cooking is an art." How true. It was a clever way to compare the two things.
It occurred to me that many aspects of life fit that observation. Some things were a science, well known and able to be replicated well. Others were clearly an art, they required some style and thought to become unique and impactful.
I was managing a team in marketing that was responsible for promoting and supporting a set of products we made. Every new product required us to create a data sheet to describe it, some training information, and possibly a magazine article and/or application notes. Creating the introduction plan was certainly a science, but there was art in how it came together and the flavor of what the product was.
I had a new engineer on my team that was assigned to create the data sheet for a new product. A data sheet required some nice photos, a promotional section highlighting the value of the product, the technical specifications, and the ordering information.
When they created the first draft of the data sheet, the back-end specifications and ordering information were fine, this was the science part. The promotional section was lacking in energy, it wasn't punchy, it was honestly, boring. Marketing is about the FAB concept. Feature, Advantage, and Benefit. You want to highlight a key feature of the product, show the advantages it provides, and how the user benefits from it. It was a soft sell but required to entice a user to want the product.
After some discussion, I'd realized that the promotional section was bland because they didn't really get the Advantages and Benefits part. They'd never really used the existing product or competitive products enough to showcase that stuff.
We setup some time, pulled together some equipment, and were prepared to be our customers by making several of their key measurements. While this person had done this before, they didn't get why some features were really valuable.
After going thru that exercise, they finally got it. Now they could really convey the advantages and benefits of the product because they had experienced it themselves. It is a truly valuable experience, and one that is important to glean every time you get a chance to engage with a customer, or friends.
There is an art to telling a story, whether it be a lesson learned in life or in business. In some respects, it is turning something that's science into a thing of art. There is a reason chefs have a signature dish. It is also what makes you special. That you can have an impact. That you can offer something magical to others.
So where's the art in your life? What learning events caused that to happen? And maybe more importantly, how can you convey that to others to make the story continue?
