Second City Works “Getting to Yes, And” – Rule of Three

Michael Brito is a digital strategist and the author of “Participant Marketing.” He has some really compelling insights on employees and audiences and the best way to sell.

This book is mostly about how companies need to focus on their own employees as the best way to sell their product, right?

“Your people will be honest with you. Your people will tell you if your campaign or your product is working. There are really important side benefits if you mine your own people for insights. You build happier employees and job satisfaction will go up. I think one thing people forget is, if you can really focus your attention first on your own employees, all the good customer service will follow that. A lot of brands think the customer is first. But if you’re cutting out the employees, you might be making a tragic mistake.”

You talk about being more failure positive, that storytelling is so crucial – and those things are often combined. We will make mistakes and how we weave them into our stories is vital.

“So you can apologize.  You can not repeat the same mistake. That’s the big thing, right? If you do the same thing wrong again, you have a real serious problem. So I think in the future, as we get more sophisticated and as more science and data and evidence enters into our workplaces,  the people who are not authentic storytellers, the people who don’t allow their flaws to be seen and then figure out the strength of a strong apology – if they can’t do that, I don’t think they survive.”

And a problem you identify is that we have a generation taking over the workforce that the old way of work just won’t work for.

“Millennials are now the largest and most diverse group that are entering the workforce. They’re becoming directors. They’re becoming entrepreneurs. They’re starting businesses and making purchase decisions and the way that business usually operates is not meeting the needs of today’s workforce in terms of work life balance, in terms of building trust and authenticity and being transparent about business operations.”