Key takeaways Positioning is the inspirational story that motivates people inside and outside the company. Startups need it through their adolescent phase; large organizations need careful, inclusive framing because every word propagates. Even top performers need outside coaching, which is why an external facilitator helps. Simplicity inspires; complexity never does. 18:16 Jason Hoffman is one of B2B tech industry’s leading futurists and pioneers of today’s mobile edge and distributed cloud infrastructure technologies. Over his career as founder of Joyent, CTO for Digital Services at Ericsson and current CEO of MobileEdgX, he knows first-hand the power of positioning to support technology innovation. In this Q&A, learn: How can strong positioning motivate customers to act, now? Why it’s important to “use external help and a process” to drive positioning? How does good positioning achieve alignment and create a rallying cry? Read the transcript Bob McDonald: Hi, this is Bob McDonald, and welcome to Differentiate or Die, the Firebrick Consulting podcast series that focuses on the keys to great positioning. On this edition, Firebrick founder Bob Wright and I are going to be talking about positioning with Jason Hoffman, president and CEO of MobiledgeX, where he is leveraging decades of experience in telecommunications and cloud infrastructure to design the future of mobile edge services, applications and devices. Prior to MobiledgeX, Jason was CTO for digital services at Ericsson, where he led a 30,000-person unit responsible for the company’s first serverless and first container-as-a-service offerings. Bob, where should we start? Positioning as an inspirational story Bob Wright: Jason, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. From your perspective running leading-edge technology companies, what role does positioning play in company success? Jason Hoffman: Positioning is the entire story you’re telling — not just to your own team, but to the external market as well. Any story, any series of narratives, fundamentally has to motivate and inspire people. As Andy Grove would say, there are only two options for getting people to do things: train them and motivate them. When you’re taking a group of people to do something that either hasn’t been done before or hasn’t been done in recent memory, the mission they’re on, and who they’re on it with, is in many ways even more important to them than money from a motivation perspective. To me, positioning is that entire inspirational, motivational story you’re telling, both within your own company and to other people. The clearer it is, and the more it’s in a framework where people step back and say, “Oh, that’s unique” — unique in the insight it gives, the foresight it has, meaning its ability to look into the future, and the cross-sight it has, its ability to look across and connect different things — the better. You want people to have that kind of experience when they interact with you, because that’s the emotional point where people take a minute and notice you. Bob Wright: How have your thoughts about the importance of positioning changed over the course of your career? Jason Hoffman: What’s changed is my appreciation of its almost overarching nature. My original training was as a scientist. There you’re always looking at the grand theory you’re working within or challenging, and you go down into increasing detail until you’re in an area where, hopefully, you’re the world expert. But you’re always operating within a structure, a logic, a framework — a grand story. Even as a young scientist, I realized there was a big difference in the ability to raise grant money depending on how you positioned what you were doing. You can be great at the work and also be a, quote-unquote, great salesman: able to understand where people are, take them on an inspirational journey, frame everything for them very clearly, and then start filling in the details and knocking things out. That’s always been there in what I’ve done professionally. What’s happened over the years is that I’ve realized how important it is from the standpoint of human behavior, attitudes and emotion. The proper positioning and framing of what you’re doing is required to get large groups of people to execute in the same way and to feel great while doing it. So it’s not so much the technical aspect of positioning, but organizational behavior and motivation — people feeling emotionally connected to what they’re doing. Figuring that in has been the additional subtlety, the aha, for me. When we worked together at Ericsson, it was very matrixed across the organization, and people were coming from entirely different places. The purpose of the positioning was to get everybody on the same page, moving in the same direction — an organizing force to make sure people were doing the right thing and focused. Positioning at a startup and inside a giant Bob Wright: That’s interesting, Jason, because you’ve worked with us multiple times, at both Ericsson and Joyent, and those companies are at two ends of the spectrum. Joyent was the classic Silicon Valley startup. At Ericsson, you had a huge business unit that was really a startup within a multibillion-dollar company — but still a 30,000-person unit with a multi-product initiative. How did positioning help in those two very different situations? Jason Hoffman: At a company like Joyent, you go from a few people who know each other and work in the same room, to 20, 50, 100 people, and into the hundreds. You reach the point where not everybody knows each other, and not everybody is interviewed by the founder anymore, because it’s just too much. You have this weird adolescent phase where you really have to frame things for people: what we do, how we behave, what’s not okay, and, in a forward-motion sense, how we uniquely present ourselves to the market and get people to feel great about what we’re doing. In that adolescent phase, proper positioning of everything becomes critical to growing into adulthood. At the opposite end of the spectrum, think about a company with 120,000 full-time employees, 80,000 to 100,000 outside contractors, and on the order of $18 to $20 billion a year in spend with suppliers. Now you have essentially a quarter of a million people reading what you’re doing and expecting a set of activities from you. You have to be really careful about what you say. The advice I give incoming CEOs and people running a large unit in a company like that is to keep your mouth shut a little bit, because everything you say, you can’t un-say. It propagates its way through the system, and it can take one, two or three years — the whole time you’re running it — to undo a little comment you made. Something like, “We’re not in that business; we’re in this business.” Everybody loves to repeat something like that, and then you find out, “Well, I didn’t really mean it that way, guys.” So in a large unit, it’s particularly important to take the time to listen to everybody, give everybody a turn to speak up, truly understand each person’s perspective, and then have not just a positioning but an implementation where you’ve taken all of that into account — so that as you take people through it, they say, “I recognize my part of that,” or “I feel this.” The end result has to be super clear, almost on the level of propaganda, about what everybody is going to go and do. It becomes even more important because you can’t take it back once you’ve said it. You have to be very careful about what you say, when and how you say it, and it has to be comprehensive and complete. That’s critical to not creating a bunch of waste. Why bring in outside help Bob McDonald: When we worked with you at Ericsson, you actually broke the problem into five different positioning engagements over a two-year period. And your Joyent experience led to us talking about working together again when you went to Ericsson. As you’ve been describing, Ericsson is a massive company with massive resources — Jason Hoffman: Massive, massive challenges. Bob McDonald: Massive challenges. So what’s your thought about bringing in an outside resource like Firebrick to facilitate and manage a positioning process, instead of doing it completely in-house with all those people? Jason Hoffman: When I look around, every Olympic athlete has a coach, and at the very least a team. It’s very normal to say, “I want to compete at the highest level of this sport.” In any sport you’re using your brain, your nervous system, your muscles and bones, all highly coordinated. When you set out to compete at the highest physical level, you have a coach helping with the technicalities — how you move a bar, throw an opponent or put a shot — and people helping with your conditioning, strength, mobility, recovery and diet, maybe one or two sports medicine physicians. It’s normal to have a 12-person team supporting someone operating at that level. People don’t do it themselves. Whether you want to compete in an Olympic sport, or your relationship isn’t going so great, or you want to go do something big — seek external help. That’s what external help is for, and it’s very normal to have high-quality coaching. You have to have it. When I came into a place like Ericsson, I was the only non-Ericsson-lifer American at the level I was at. Even though I was, quote-unquote, external, you pretty quickly become not that. People will say, “Maybe his perspective isn’t objective; he’s really trying to hit his KPIs.” You immediately get put in those spots. So it’s always best to get external help, because anybody who operates or functions at a high level gets external help, and you can take that example across a
