Behind the Conversation: When Playing It Safe … Isn’t

My first AMA conference, almost 20 years ago. Michael Stoner walked me across the floor and kept saying the same thing. You've got to meet Terry. You've got to meet Terry.

He was right. He usually is.

Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. First marketing director at Maryland. First VP of communications at American. First EVP and COO at CASE. Most of us inherit a function. Terry built hers from nothing, three times over, and then wrote the book the rest of us learned from.

So I asked her what that's like. Building something nobody has built before, again and again.

"Heavenly, honestly."

Boom.

I've been sitting with that conversation since we recorded it. Here's what stayed with me.

The discipline is the bravery

Everyone remembers Fear the Turtle. Everyone remembers Wonk. The campaigns that were weird enough to make people nervous and good enough to outlast the nerves.

What people forget is how they got made.

Terry walked us through it. Stakeholder research first. Then the president and provost in the room, naming what success would look like. Then a gallery walk, every competitor's work up on the wall, the whole team studying what everyone else was already doing. Only then, the creative challenge. “Now what are we going to do that's different?”

The bold part was the easy part. They had earned the right to ask it.

This is the thing I want people to take from the episode. The courage that looks like instinct is almost always built on a process you can't see from the outside. Terry made the boldness possible by doing the unglamorous work first.

Real is the part you can't fake

Terry gave us her test for a campaign. Different. Real. Relevant.

Different gets you noticed. Relevant gets you results. But real is the one I keep turning over.

Real is what your internal audience tells you. The terrapin worked because it was already true at Maryland before anyone put it on a billboard. Grit. Determination. The challenger who outperforms the favorite. The campaign didn't invent that character. It found it and turned the volume up.

You can buy different. You can engineer relevant. Real has to already be there.

The power of no

When Maryland first offered Terry the marketing director role, the budget was $48,000. No staff. No admin. A job description that amounted to coordinating the deans' messages.

She said no. She offered to help them find someone else.

A week later they came back and asked what it would actually take.

Most of us take the underbuilt job and spend the next 10 years trying to fix it from the inside. Terry made the institution build the job before she took it.

There's a lesson in this season we keep circling back to. The power of no. The discipline to walk away from the version of the work that was never going to succeed. I think when we look back at all 30 conversations from our first season, it's going to be near the top of the list.

The advice

We asked Terry what she'd tell the marketing leader who's exhausted right now. Shrinking staff. Slashed budget. A demographic cliff in the windshield.

She didn't reach for a framework. She said rest first. Watch the commencement recap your team made. Remember why you started.

Then find one small place where a little courage and a little creativity give you some hope. Measure the heck out of it. Share the credit. And turn back to your leadership and say, look what's possible.

You might have to shrink the scale of your ambitions. You don't have to give them up.

I've been doing this work for 30 years and I needed to hear that.

The grace is what you see in Terry. The measured voice, the matter-of-fact playbook, the campaigns that look inevitable in hindsight. The armor is what you don't. The faculty fights, the skeptical cabinets, the town hall where she stood up and took every question after her team played Titanium for her to ready her for battle.

She walked so a lot of us could run.

Listen to the full conversation at higheredicons.com.