GarthBox

There’s a beer we bring back to the bar over and over called Teal Label, from Modist Brewing. Depending on who’s sitting in front of me, it becomes two different beers.

To one guest, it’s a sweeter hoppy beer. Four words.

She nods, she orders, she’s happy, and anything more from me would have been noise.

To another guest an hour later, it opens up: a west coast IPA built on a sweet malt base that never goes thick on you, the hops doing their piney strut on top of something almost candied, one of the few beers that our guests and our own team love so much we keep bringing it back like a band that fills the room every time it plays.

Same liquid. Same tap. Two different verbal pours, because the person changed.

I do this behind the bar without thinking. Reading the guest and picking the words is the job. Nobody trained me on it. It would be absurd not to.

Then I go do marketing and see people forgetting the whole thing. (Myself included!)

Because at work I have a house pour, and it’s revenue. Ask me why a project matters and I’ll tell you what it does to revenue. Ask me what’s broken and I’ll show you where the revenue is leaking. It’s a sturdy format. Numbers hold weight, executives trust them, and I’m good at it.

But… that’s not why I reach for it. I reach for it the way I reach for a pint glass, by muscle memory. Revenue is what I pour, whether the person in front of me drinks it or not. Stepping outside of it is hard for me in a way that switching descriptions of a beer has never been.

Recently I watched someone land a difficult point, the kind that usually dies in a follow-up meeting, and they never touched a number. They traced the frustration instead. This process makes that person redo her work. It leaves this team waiting days for an answer they should have in an hour. It turns a simple request into four apologetic emails. They colored in the annoyance person by person until the whole room could feel the ache of it, the way you feel a pebble in someone else’s shoe once it’s been described well enough. Nobody argued. Things moved.

The revenue version of that argument existed. I could have built it in my sleep… could have said it in that call! It would have earned polite nods and a slide in somebody’s deck.

The complicated point wasn’t the hard part. The point was the beer. The hard part was the pour, and they chose it for the room instead of for themselves.

That’s the thing about a default format. It feels like a strength because you’re fluent in it, but fluency is a comfort you give yourself, not a service you give the listener.

A story, a number, a question, a sketch, a demonstration, a map of who’s quietly suffering: they’re all the same active ingredient in different dosage forms, and the dose gets chosen for the patient, not the pharmacist.

Behind the bar I’ve always known this, although things are a bit more simple when it comes to guests who come in versus an organization of 400 people… but that’s what makes it even more important, doesn’t it?

Stay Positive & Know Your Audience

Sound familiar?

I keep attending the same meeting. The company changes, the room changes, the brand of sparkling water changes. The meeting stays.

Somebody names a gap everyone already knows about. Heads nod. Somebody proposes a fix. More nods. The agreement in the room is warm and thick as August. Then the meeting ends, and the gap just sits there in the parking lot, waiting patiently for next quarter’s version of the same conversation.

For a long time I thought the problem was commitment. It wasn’t. Everyone in that room was supportive. Nobody was lying.

The problem was that the solution had been positioned for no one.

It floated above the table in company-speak, relevant to everybody in general and nobody in particular. And priorities don’t get set in general. They get set by each person deciding, privately, that this thing matters to them. (I’d go so far as to say, it’s not even decided via some digital tracker. It’s their spirit. You know… the thing we get hired to actually bring to the table of the work. The thing AI doesn’t have yet.)

Marketers already know how this works. We would never send a prospect an unaimed message. We segment, we study the buyer, we adjust the words until they land on the exact nerve. Then we walk into an internal meeting, present the initiative in our own dialect, and wonder why it dies of politeness.

I learned this the slow way. If you want sales to care about a gap, attach revenue potential to it. Not a vision. Not a principle. A number with a dollar sign that could plausibly show up in someone’s pipeline.

If you want product to care, bring a prospect’s actual words, verbatim, ugly grammar and all. Product people can resist a strategy document forever, but a customer’s own sentence gets under the skin and stays there.

Think of it as columns. Every function has one, the place their eye goes first. Revenue for sales. The customer’s voice for product. Risk for finance. Hours for ops.

Your job, before the meeting, is to fill in the column for every person who will be sitting there. Same gap, same fix, translated into every currency in the room. (I hinted the work of cross-department alignment was possible. Not that it was easy!)

Then you need one shared scale so the whole group can rank the pile together, and it should be embarrassingly simple. Effort, time, impact.

Something anyone can read in ten seconds. The translations get each department to lean in. The shared scale keeps them from tearing each other’s lists apart.

None of this is extra work. (And damn, I’d say it even buys you back time in meetings that never happen and words that never get echoed in them from the previous status meeting…)

It’s the same audience research we already do for strangers, finally aimed at the people we eat lunch with.

And there’s something almost tender about it done right. It says I know what your week looks like, I know what you’re measured on, I did the work to make this land in your world. That’s not politics. That’s respect wearing a spreadsheet, which makes the whole thing work even harder!

The gap doesn’t care that the room agreed. The gap moves when each person in it can see their own reason to move it.

Stay Positive & Ask Them What It’s Worth To Them (Might Mean A 1-1…But Ask It)

Before an email leaves my outbox, it has to survive one question: could anyone put their signature at the bottom of this and the recipient wouldn’t know the difference? If the answer is yes, it doesn’t go. Not yet. An email anyone could have signed is a form letter wearing my name tag, and the person on the other end can smell the laminate.

We spend a lot of energy trying to be recognizable by our answers. Wrong end of the animal. Answers have gotten cheap. Any of us can summon a competent answer to nearly anything before the coffee finishes dripping.

What still can’t be borrowed is the question you refuse to stop asking. People recognize you by what you ask before you act. That’s the signature now.

I have three I’ll share now.

At work, every prompt I send to Claude carries a standing order: along with whatever I asked for, bring me one competing idea, still on strategy, that adds an element of surprise & delight. I built a rule that lets a machine outvote me, which sounds like surrender until you watch it work. Sometimes its idea wins outright. More often it arrives as a supplement, a strange little rib I can weave into my original skeleton, and the finished thing is better than either of us would have managed alone.

The second is the signature test above.

The third lives at home: before I do anything there, I ask whether it benefits someone else in my family. Not instead of me. Also.

I know these questions earn their keep because I know what it costs to skip them.

Skipping feels like efficiency in the moment. The bill arrives later.

There’s an email out there with my name on it that anyone could have signed. I was busy, the send button was close, and I wrote to a job title instead of a person. The reply was polite the way weather reports are polite. Regret is just a question you didn’t ask, showing up after the deadline.

You don’t have bandwidth to run every worthy question before every action. Nobody does. The checklist would outlive the task.

But there is always time for one. One question at the door costs seconds.

The real investment is the quieter audit underneath: are you running the right one? A question can go stale in your mouth without telling you. Worth checking its pulse now and then.

Companies have signature questions too, though most never wrote theirs down, which is why their emails read like everyone’s emails and their strategy decks could get shuffled together at a conference and returned to the wrong owners without incident.

Positioning, underneath all the frameworks, is a question a company refuses to stop asking before it acts. If your competitor could ask your question with a straight face, you haven’t found yours yet.

And here is what bothers me… I have a question for the machine, a question for the inbox, a question for the kitchen table. I don’t have one for the bar. The room most full of people I care about, and the doorway stands unguarded. I’ve started interviewing candidates. None have been hired.

This post took the test, by the way. The advice, anyone could sign. The vacancy is mine.

Stay Positive & What’s Yours?

Jeff is at dinner, a double date he didn’t want to be on, and somebody across the table is working through the shared plate at an alarming rate. Jeff watches the meat disappear. And instead of doing what the rest of us do, which is perform a small silent grief and fill up on bread, he says it. Out loud. This guy is eating all the meat and I haven’t gotten any.

The table freezes. The audience roars.

That laugh is worth studying. We built an entire genre of television around the pleasure of hearing somebody say the thing everyone at the table is already thinking. The laugh track is not decoration. It’s evidence. Millions of people tune in every week to feel, secondhand, the relief of a filter failing.

If nobody wanted candor, the joke wouldn’t land. The joke always lands.

Now … about a recent meeting.

A few days ago I sat in one about documentation. One small corner of the business runs its own platform and its own process. Everybody else runs a different one, and by most accounts a better one. Everyone in the room knew it. I had the sentence loaded: this is a strange way to do this, can we just handle it the way the rest of the business does?

I swallowed it. I’m new, still learning which walls are load-bearing, and new people who blurt tend to get remembered for the blurt instead of the point.

That silence wasn’t free, though. The clunky process is not the expensive part. The expensive part is a whole team privately narrating the same complaint, every week, each person separately concluding they don’t have the power to change it. That stops being a workflow problem and becomes an energy leak. And energy a team spends resenting a process is energy that never reaches a customer.

Point is…Every meeting has a laugh track. It’s just muted.

If I had said the sentence out loud, I don’t think the room would have gasped. I think it would have exhaled.

But this is where the sitcom and the strategy split. After the meeting I found a colleague and asked one question: who actually owns this decision? Then I brought the sentence to that person, on purpose, with the door closed.

Because Jeff says it to the table, and the table laughs, but the table cannot cook him more meat. The kitchen can. Saying the true thing to the room is relief. Saying the true thing to the person who can act on it is change. (The double date guest asks the waiter for more meat, btw.) The standard courage advice stops at the first half, be brave, speak up, and skips the part where the room is usually the wrong audience for the sentence.

There’s a marketing lesson hiding in that gap, too. The distance between what a room says out loud, which is nothing, and what it desperately wants, which is for someone to name the thing, is the same distance good positioning covers. The brand that names what the customer already privately believes gets the laugh. In a market, the laugh sounds like trust. Heaven knows we can use more of that amidst the sea of AI slop.

I don’t know yet whether the process will change. The sentence is out of my head and sitting with someone who can do something about it, which is more than it accomplished while the whole team took turns thinking it. That will have to be enough for now.

Stay Positive & Pass The Meat

Call summary. Sentiment: positive. Talk ratio: 46/54. Competitor mentioned once. Pricing discussed. Next steps: confirmed.

If you sell for a living, you’ve read a hundred of these. The machine listened to the whole call, and this is what it heard. The deal looks healthy. Everyone said the right things.

Then the call ends, and the actual work starts.

On one deal, the huddle after the call was where everything happened. A few of us, no agenda, just talking it through. Somebody remembered a name the champion had dropped in passing. Somebody else knew that name reported to a VP who’d been burned on a similar tool. Slowly we started mapping the connective tissue: who actually decides, who influences the decider, whose blessing our champion needed before she’d stick her neck out. None of it appeared in the transcript. The microphone was off for all of it.

That’s the trouble with call intelligence. It scores what’s said, and deals are rarely decided by what’s said. They’re decided by what people carry into the room and never mention. The reorg. The last vendor that overpromised. The career risk hiding inside a yes.

The software grades the performance. The pros investigate the play behind it.

And I’d go further. The tool doesn’t just miss the story behind the story. It quietly trains reps to stop looking for it. When the dashboard rewards talk ratio and keyword hits, you learn to have calls that grade well. Discovery becomes theater, and the deal gets won or lost in a hallway you’ll never hear.

__

A couple came into the bar one Sunday afternoon. Traveling through, easy smiles, and only after me talking to them to get the story behind the story, I learned they hauled a cooler with them, packed with bottles they’d collected along the way. On paper, two customers who ordered a couple of pours. But that’s not what they came for. They wanted more than our tap list. More, even, than being treated as special. They wanted to share. They’d carried those bottles across state lines looking for a place that deserved to open them. They weren’t shopping for beer. They were auditioning establishments.

If I’d only listened to the order, I’d have missed the entire reason they walked in.

People rarely announce what they actually came for. They order something reasonable and wait to see what kind of place you are. The story behind the story isn’t extracted. It’s offered. And it’s only offered to people who’ve proven they’re worth telling.

Which is why no recording will ever catch it. The real story shows up in huddles, hallways, and Sunday afternoons, in rooms where people trust each other enough to open the cooler.

Stay Positive & Ask What They’re Carrying

Someone broke a glass in the hotel pool.

Not near the pool. In it. Most of the guests were annoyed about toweling off early. I was doing a different math. You cannot see glass in water, and you cannot vacuum what you cannot see, so depending on the hotel’s appetite for risk, that pool might get drained. Thousands of gallons and somebody’s whole night, because one person let their kiddos bring a glass toy into the pool.

I have never worked at a hotel pool. But I have stood over an ice bin.

Behind a bar there is a ranking of where glass can break, and every bartender knows it by heart. The floor is nothing: broom, thirty seconds, a joke about tipping the bar gods. The glasswasher is worse: shards hiding in hot soapy water, every glass in the rack washed again, your hands moving slow and suspicious for the rest of the shift. But the ice bin is the one that hollows you out. You cannot pick glass out of ice. You cannot even be sure how far it traveled. So you burn the whole bin. Melt it, dump it, all of it down the drain, then start over while the tickets stack up.

The pool crew and I have never done each other’s jobs. I still knew exactly what their night had just become, because my own small disasters had taught me the shape of theirs.

That is the thing about empathy I think we get backwards. We treat it like it runs on experience, like you can only truly feel for someone if you have lived their exact version. But nobody gets enough lifetimes for that. You get one bar, one career, one family, one body. Everything else you will ever understand about people, you will have to get by watching.

And watching is a skill you can aim. We already observe constantly. We just aim it at the wrong things: outfits, cars, typos, who got the promotion.

Aim it at hardship instead.

The barista counting her drawer twice. The contractor redoing drywall on his own dime. The manager apologizing for a decision made two levels above her. Two things happen when you do. Your own hard days stop feeling like solitary confinement, because you have seen the same weather over everyone else’s house. And grace gets easier, because you have watched what people are actually carrying.

This is also the quiet trick of anyone good at marketing, or at leading. You will never be your customer. You will never live your employee’s Tuesday. The people who seem psychic about what an audience needs were almost never members of the audience. They are watchers. They know where the glass tends to break in other people’s lives, and they build for it.

I grew up on “give them the benefit of the doubt.” It is a decent motto, but it is a courtroom motto. It withholds a verdict. It hands nobody anything.

New motto: give them all the empathy. Not a measured amount. Not what their behavior earned. All of it. The crew fishing a pool for glass that night did not need my reserved judgment. They needed one person on that wet deck who looked at them like someone staring into an ice bin.

Stay Positive & Watch For The Glass

I looked at my to-do list this week and realized I had built myself a very nice place to hide.

Everything on it was real work. Follow-ups, edits, scheduling, a handful of small fixes. All of it legitimate. All of it checkable. None of it the thing.

That’s the trouble with tasks. A task can be finished. A mission? Not so much. Checking a box pays you immediately, a little hit of progress right there in the moment. A mission pays in months, maybe, and only if you were right. So given the choice, and we are given the choice every single morning, we reach for the boxes. Not because we’re lazy. Because we’re hiding, and a full list is excellent camouflage.

The costume works in the other direction too. Stack enough tasks on top of each other, give the pile a project name, and it starts to look like a mission.

I know because I’ve sewn that costume myself before.

At a previous gig I ran a go-to-market motion I was proud of at the time. It had everything a launch is supposed to have. Sequenced emails. A one-pager. Enablement. A checklist that got checked all the way down. It felt like momentum, and momentum is a very convincing feeling.

What that motion never had was the question underneath it: is this even the feature worth this much of us?

In hindsight, the answer was no. The time belonged to a different feature entirely, and to a much more drastic prioritization of the actual initiatives instead of the tasks orbiting the first one. We executed beautifully on the wrong bet. Nobody noticed, because every box was checked, and checked boxes are what reviews are made of. (Thankfully it was one of our most successful releases, but I knew I could point the success to only a couple checked boxes; not all of them.)

Stay Positive & Tasks Are Receipts; Missions Are Bets