Things Frank Says on Podcasts

No, they were not in the back. This was just me solo, but I figured I really needed to pull over for this one. And what he said is he said, like, you're bad at your job because you think your job is getting positive stories and you should be thinking about your job as having interesting stories that showcase something about the company. And sometimes those are going to be less positive, but they're going to be more memorable.

…with this. And I didn't think we were going to be successful with it because we were later to the market and it was going to be more expensive than people thought because it required a data plan. So that, and so I said, like, I don't think we're going to be successful with this. And so everybody went around the table. And Steve said, should we do this? Should we do this? Should we do this? And I did not say anything. And I didn't say anything because I couldn't figure out how it was in my area of expertise to have an opinion. I'm the comms guy. I'm not the business person. You know, I'm not the technology person. I'm not the partner person dealing with Verizon and others. Right. So I'm just, I just happened to be in the room, so I didn't say anything. And of course, we launched it 43 days later. We pulled it. You know, it cost us a lot of money with and bad will with Verizon. And I think about that, thought about that later. And I said, what I missed is that this…

…that time was something that every reporter read. And so it became part of the perceived narrative of the company. And every interview, every reporter for the next four years would reference the lost decade. And so I should have seen that as a sticky narrative that needed to be fought. And this is the, you know, like, this is the point I was trying to make in my LinkedIn thing: is that you can, facts are easy to dispute. If you're going to dispute something, you can dispute facts. Narratives are sticky. And so you got to work a lot harder and a lot faster if there's a narrative out there that you don't like or you believe is inaccurate. And so it took us, you know, a new CEO to be able to sort of reset that.

And I was like, you're so wrong. And then I went off and I thought about it. And I realized he was exactly right. And so if you're doing a really good job working with anybody who is reporting about the company in the broadest possible sense of the world, what you hope for is you hope that they are going to create something that illuminates part of the company in a memorable way. And that always comes with tension, 100% of the time, comes with tension. And you have to embrace that because the idea that somebody came up with a product, we built it perfectly, and everybody loves it is just boring. There is no story there. And sometimes that's what we're asked to tell, a story of just an unimpeded march to greatness. It's like, that's dull. That's like the plane landed safely. Nobody cares, right? Except for the people on the plane. So if you stop and you think about that a little bit, it's like, what are you doing to illuminate a piece of the company in a memorable way? It opens you up to much more interesting conversations. Give