Call meJeffrey

The other night, I watched a video by my friend Gary Vaynerchuk in which he was saying how he felt that the use of press releases are obsolete. His point is that you have a better chance at winning if you’re that “big fat-ass Italian uncle who tells a story and crushes it” – someone who has a conversation with people, rather than just blasting out information at people.

So, are press releases dead? A relic and a reminder of a way of doing business that once was? For Gary, yes – 100%. For others, maybe not so much. I happen to agree with Gary that if you tell your brand story well, and you have an openness with your community enough to have a dialog, then press releases are likely not necessary. However, any tactic should stay in play until it no longer provides value. So, what if you’re sending out press releases and they continue to provide value? The answer should be obvious: keep sending press releases.

This isn’t about press releases though. Not for me, at least. The bigger picture that I’m talking about here is tradition – and in particular, how tradition relates to business. A tradition is a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting; a customary or characteristic method or manner in which one does something. Let’s look at that definition and try to extract the “value adding” words: Long-established? No. Inherited? No sir. Customary? Nope.

My issue with those words is that they all imply that there’s build-in respect. But why should we respect something in business just because it’s something that people have been doing for a long time? The answer is we shouldn’t; and therein lies the problem with traditions. But, lets first get to the core of a tradition and discuss how it came to be.

Any tradition begins simply as an idea or solution that once created value. It worked its way from idea to tradition as time went by and the idea went unchallenged – and that’s the key. Unchallenged ideas that provided value at one point are ideas rife to become traditions. This is bad for business because if you never challenge you own ideas periodically, how do you know if they’re still relevant? Think about it this way – if you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with a problem that requires medication, do you get prescribed once and take that medicine forever without periodically getting checked? If you wouldn’t treat yourself that way, why would you treat your business that way?

We’re huge proponents of this at Threadless. We’re a business that started in a very non-traditional way. We’ve told the story many times about how our business started by accident, and we grew by only doing things that made sense to us – only taking steps that we were comfortable taking. Essentially, we did all the things that seemed like a good idea at the time. With all of that said, it wouldn’t make much sense for us to not constantly be challenging our own ideas, considering that the initial success of our business was an ongoing series of trials and errors.

While working to keep traditions out of our business is a logical thing to do considering how we began, that doesn’t mean that traditions should have a place in business that began in a more traditional way. The upside to this point of view is it really doesn’t take much to “de-tradition” your business. All you have to do is simply challenge the agreed upon “good” ideas to ensure they’re still relevant. By doing that you very well may discover that all your ideas are still good ideas, and nothing changes. However, you also may find that your ideas need to be tweaked slightly to regain relevancy. That’s not a bad thing, is it?

Ideas are not immune to the aging process. Like wine, they get better with age only if cared for properly (right Gary?). This care involves always challenging an idea to ensure that it’s still relevant. Double-checking the relevancy of your ideas is an important exercise because by doing so, you get to ensure that your ideas are working for your business and not against it. In the end it’s important to realize that no one is smart enough to come up with an idea that is so brilliant that it stays relevant forever without being cared for.

So what’s the bottom line? If you have a tradition of bringing in pizza for your whole staff on the last Friday of every month should you stop? Of course not. There’s a difference between traditions that effect the culture of your business and traditions that effect mechanics. Obviously, I’m speaking about the latter. A tradition is the antithesis of a nimble organization and can keep you from seeing how ineffective your once effective idea has become.