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Why your core message doesn’t survive middle management

Is this the biggest lie we tell ourselves:
“I’ve made it very clear”.

Well, not in the strict sense of the word, of course. It’s not technically a lie. You did make it very clear.

But we both know that clarity is not really what happens on the stage (or in the email). Clarity is what happens in the hallways, two days later.

The actual lie is this: It’s the middle managers’ fault. They just didn’t get it. They passed it along wrong. Spinned it. Mis-quoted you.

Which they did.

Only that it wasn’t their fault. I don’t mean to be harsh here. It’s not your fault either.

It’s more like we’re operating on false assumptions.

Most leaders operate on a model of broadcast. You treat yourself as the signal tower and your team as the receivers. You obsess over the fidelity of your signal, your “Core Message.” You pack it with nuance, context, and strategic pillars because you want to be thorough.

But two days later, in the hallways, your 23 slides have become: “This is just another reorg.”

What happened?

Well, you are not a broadcast tower. You are the first child in a game of broken telephone, played by 500 tired, cynical adults.

By the time your message reaches the people who actually do the work – the sales rep in Ohio, the junior dev in Poland – your pristine “strategic pillars” have rotted away. What arrives at the bottom is not your message. It’s a degraded, mutated fragment.

Almost everyone considers this a “sender problem.” They try to fix the transmission with more volume and better logic.

But in truth, it’s a design problem.

You are designing for the sender (you),
when you should be designing for the carrier (them).

Jeff Bezos, who built Amazon, the company that changed how the world shops, crafted core messages as pass-along phrases, much like a storyteller.

In his 1997 shareholder letter (Amazon’s first), Bezos introduced Amazon’s obsession with maintaining startup-like energy, relentless customer focus, and long-term thinking over short-term profits.

But his core message wasn’t: “We maintain a customer-obsessed, long-term orientation with relentless innovation.”

He used this: “It’s always Day 1.”

A statement that’s easy to pass along.

Do you see the difference?

The first is a statement that survives 12 rounds of board room approval. The second is a statement that survives 1000 rounds of the telephone game.

But it’s more than memorable. It’s useful.

When asked “Why are we doing this risky thing?”, an Amazon VP didn’t need to start a complex argument and recite the 30-page shareholder letter. They could simply say, “Because it’s Day 1.”

To be fair, Bezos did have a core message. And he explained it in great detail, on 30 pages. But he made sure that there was a way for that message to travel from employee to employee. A pass-along version of the core.

Here’s a simple test you can use:
If someone gets asked in the hallway: “So what was the town hall about?”

Would they repeat your core message?

If not, it’s not pass-along ready.

The bad news is this:
If you can’t do that … if you can’t boil your core message to something that travels without your slides, your audience will craft something for you. And that’s what happened to your message in middle management.

If you don’t design for how messages travel, the organization will redesign them for you.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Survival of the message

Did you know that Charles Darwin didn’t invent the term “survival of the fittest”?

When he published “The Origin of Species” in 1859, he used the term “natural selection”.

His book is probably one of the most groundbreaking works in science that completely revolutionized the field of biology but its biggest influence might be due to the help of someone else.

Darwin’s book immediately spread in the scientific community. But it wasn’t until five years later when Herbert Spencer crafted the term “survival of the fittest” that the idea really took off.

Charles Darwin was quick to adapt it for the fifth edition of his book and I think the rest is history.

It might feel like just a small change, but the four words make a huge difference.

While “natural selection” is a rather abstract term that needs to be filled with meaning, “survival of the fittest” is very concrete.

You can almost see it as a mental picture, can’t you? It has a very tangible meaning, which means it’s easy to understand. And that makes it memorable. On top of that, it’s a statement made in plain and simple English. 

It’s these three traits, simple to understand, memorable, and in plain and simple English that make it easy to pass along.

Herbert Spencer has essentially crafted the pass along phrase for the theory of “natural selection”, the phrase that people used to spread the idea.

Perhaps, the evolutionary theory would have found its influence regardless. But that pass along phrase has likely helped it spread faster.

Which is a good reminder that if you want your ideas to spread, it’s useful to make this as easy for your audience as possible.

So, what’s the pass along phrase for your idea, your product, or your service?

You’ve got my attention

I give you permission to use a chunk of my attention.
However, you must choose between two options:

Option #1:
You can get 30 minutes but you have to fill it with 30 ideas of one minute each. 

Option #2:
You can get 10 minutes but you have to fill it with one idea and one idea only. 

Many businesses instinctively pick option 1. 
But is this a smart choice?

Which of the two do you think has a better chance of intriguing me?
Which one is more likely to get me to engage in a conversation?
Which one will stick with me for longer?

What would you pick?

Never delegate the hard part to your audience

I’ve just visited a business website but quickly left it utterly frustrated by the confusing messaging.

Certainly, you’ve had similar experiences with some presentations, websites, brochures, or pitches that were so overloaded with information that you just couldn’t find the point.

The business spoke about a bunch of customer problems. They mentioned a bunch of products with a bunch of features and then a bunch of ideas that they are working on. They elaborated on the company’s history, the mission, the vision, fact, stats, awards, you name it.

Basically what they did was throw all that information at you and hope that something sticks.

Essentially, they delegated the hard work of figuring out what their core message is to you.

To their audience, to their customers.

What a bad choice!

That’s work you should never delegate.

A great tool that helps you avoid this is what I like to call the “pass along phrase”. After someone listens to you or visits your website, what would they pass along to their colleagues?

That’s always short and to the point. It’s never 30 features, it’s one or max. two things.

When you have clarity on what you would like your pass along phrase to be, you can arrange your story to actually deliver it. You can decide which info is essential and which isn’t. You also know how to arrange the info cohesively so it all leads to that message.

What would your audience pass along from your communication?

The point of a presentation

What’s the point of a presentation if not to lead your audience to see something they didn’t see before?

Why even go through the hassle of preparing a presentation plus gathering everyone in a room if there’s nothing to see?

So many presentations fail because they don’t ask the questions that follow from this:

  1. What actually is that thing that you need your audience to see?
  2. Why don’t they see it already?
  3. What do they see?

When you have answers to these questions, you can build a path from where they are now to where they can see what you need them to see.

To me, the ultimate goal of a presentation is to lead your audience to the point of no return, a point where you’ve shown it to them in such a profound way that they can’t unsee it anymore.

Good news!

Your audience has agreed to do the hard work for you.

If you think that you can’t boil your talk down to a simple core message, your audience will happily do it for you.

After your talk, when someone asks them what it was about, they will gladly provide an answer. Let’s call it the pass along phrase.

Here’s the thing:
That pass along phrase is always short.

If you can’t decide which of the 10 features was most important, they’ll pick one for you.

If you can’t focus on what it’s actually for, they’ll pick a focus for you.

And if the talk was somewhat confusing, they might just choose that fact: “I honestly don’t know what the talk was really about. It was somewhat confusing.”

Also:
The pass along phrase is always in their words.

They won’t bother with fancy language, tech jargon and the likes. They will choose language they are familiar with.

Let’s say it straight: You might not like their choice.

Which means that you might want to make your audience’s work of figuring out a pass along phrase as easy as possible.

You might want to pick a focus and use language your audience is familiar with.

Now, how do you make that task easier for your audience?

Aligned on a common path

This week, I’m asking one simple but important question each day for you to ponder (on your own or with your team):

As a CEO, it’s important that you find simple answers to all of these four questions about your business:

  • What you do
  • For whom you do it
  • Why you do it
  • How you do it

Now, if you asked every member on your team for their answer, how many different answers would you get?

After the pitch

After your pitch what happens?

Often a pitch doesn’t lead to an immediate decision: “Thank you very much, we’ll think about it.”

That’s why great pitches make it easy for the decision makers to speak about your idea as they try to make the decision. A great pitch has a very clear take away message that’s easy to pass along among the decision makers during that process or when they bring in others into the decision loop.

What’s your pass along message?

Getting likes

Speaking of what you want to be known for: Make content around that, not what your audience is giving you likes for.

What works in social media is not necessarily what works for your business.

What works for your competitor is not necessarily what works for you.

What works for the audience you had is not necessarily what works for the audience you want.

Spread the Word

Picture of Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz