Your Idea Needs More Mouths

One faucet on our draft system pulls sideways.

Most bars have the standard handle you rock forward until beer arrives. Ours is a side-pull, a European thing with a little restrictor plate in the nose, and it takes a new beertender about three weeks to stop fighting it. It pours slower. It cost more. It made our training longer on purpose.

I did not buy it because it makes better beer, although many-a-beertender argues it does. I bought it because it gave every person behind that bar something to say that belongs to them. A guest asks why the pour looks different and the answer is not printed on a card by the register. It comes out of whoever is standing there, in their words, with their hands showing the angle.

That is the whole trick, and I keep watching it fail everywhere else.

At work the number one priority changes constantly. Not yearly. Not quarterly. Barely monthly, if I’m honest… Something gets funded on a Tuesday and by the following Monday there is a newer fire with a better story, and the thing you have been carrying slides down a row on somebody’s board while you were in a different meeting.

The instinct is to defend the slot. Better deck, louder business case, more urgency in the update.

Notice who actually wins those fights. It is almost never the person with the strongest argument. It is the person whose idea already lives in three other people’s vocabulary, so when they are not in the room, the idea still walks in, spoken by somebody with more credibility on that particular subject than they will ever have.

You cannot hold the slot. You can make the thing unownable by you alone.

Marketers need to stop evangelizing and start teaching. Build the skill into somebody else. Give the sales lead the two questions that make a discovery call bend your direction. Give the support manager the frame that explains the roadmap in support language instead of yours. Then let them say it however they say things.

I have watched quiet people get very good at this. Folks who would rather do inventory alone at midnight than present to a room, who figured out that if you hand a colleague something that makes that colleague look sharp in their own meeting, the idea travels farther than any presentation they would have given. They never had to become extroverts. They just stopped being the only distribution channel.

Which is a positioning problem in work clothes. Messaging that only works in your mouth is not messaging, it is a performance. The test is not whether the sentence is right. The test is whether somebody else can say it badly and it still lands.

(This is also why I quit correcting my team on the faucet story. Half of them tell it poorly. Myself included. Guests love it anyway.)

The kicker of a pill we need to swallow: Priorities are supposed to move.

Build in public. Ship in intervals. Find the loud beta customer who says it better than your deck. But mostly, give your best idea away to three people who have no reason to protect it, and then watch how hard it becomes to kill.

Stay Positive & You’re A Teacher Whether You Wanted To Be One When You Grew Up Or Not