Somebody Else Judges Next Round

Horrible Therapist runs on one rule. Each round, one person is the judge. Everybody else plays a card meant to land with that judge, the judge picks a winner, and then the job moves one seat over.

Two plays are available every round, and they are not the same play.

You can play to the judge. You know this person. You know the joke they’ll pretend not to laugh at and then laugh at anyway. That’s a read, and it’s a good one, and it wins rounds.

Or you can play to the table. The card that makes six people at once go oh, that’s the one before the judge has finished reading it. Different instinct entirely. You’re not solving for one taste, you’re solving for the sound a room makes.

The second play looks softer and is actually the colder calculation, for two reasons. Judging is temporary. Everyone at that table is going to hold it, and people remember who made them laugh in the rounds they weren’t in charge of. And judges feel the room. When a card lands out loud, the judge’s job quietly stops being taste and starts being confirmation. Very few people pick against a room they can hear.

It costs you though. Playing to the table loses rounds you could have won by reading one person correctly, and you will sit there watching someone take it with a lazy card because they know exactly what the judge’s ex-boyfriend was like. That’s real and it will annoy you.

Worth separating two things that look alike: playing to the table is not the same as pleasing it. The card that makes a room go quiet counts too. Pandering is a table-read with the spine removed.

My first sales kickoff at a company, an account manager took the mic during some open-floor stretch and told nearly a hundred people she was glad I’d joined. Then she said why. She named the intel and the backup I’d given her on accounts she was fighting for, in specifics, on a microphone, to everyone.

What my manager thought of me that quarter, I could not reconstruct for you now. Those thirty seconds I could recite.

It wasn’t only that it felt good, though it did. It kept working after she sat down. A room’s opinion has legs. It walks into other rooms, shows up in meetings I wasn’t invited to, sits in somebody’s answer when my name comes up in a hallway. A judge’s opinion ends when the round ends. The table’s opinion goes home with everybody.

Which is the whole reason to point your work at the people beside you instead of the person above you. Your team carries your work into rooms you’ll never see the inside of.

Same game on a grocery shelf. The pull-instead-of-push idea has a beard on it by now, and every marketer nods along and then goes right back to building a deck for the buyer.

The category buyer at Woodman’s is the judge. The obvious move is the pitch: margins, velocity, planogram fit, a sell sheet with your best photograph on it. Fine. Fine wins rounds sometimes.

The other move is to make the aisle loud before you ever walk in the building. Get enough people asking for it, requesting it, mentioning it to the guy stocking shelves. Then the buyer’s decision changes shape. They are not evaluating you anymore. They are being handed cover.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Buyers are rarely trying to be convinced.

They’re trying not to be the only person holding the bag if it doesn’t sell.

A room full of demand is an insurance policy with your logo on it, and no pitch is required, because the pitch already happened in seven hundred small conversations you weren’t in.

Careers built entirely on judge-reading have one specific failure mode. The judge leaves. Reorg, new boss, acquisition, she takes a job in Denver. And then you find out whether anyone at the table would have picked you.

Stay Positive & Go Find Whoever Grabbed The Mic For You