An Interview Do-Over

During an interview last year for a product marketing position, a salesperson asked me what I was reading in my spare time. I assumed they were making small talk before delving into the tough questions.

So much for my ability to read a room.

My answer wasn't what they were looking for: they wanted a directly relevant, business/marketing/growth reading list. At the time, I was reading this. Next up was Glenn Tucker's Dawn Like Thunder, a thrilling account of the Barbary Wars. And the follow-up caught me off guard.

"But how is that relevant for marketing?"

It was a totally fair question. Through a combination of nerves and surprise, I botched my answer. It's gnawed at me for some time now. Not because I didn't get the job--I doubt this was a factor anyways--but because I did a disservice to the incredible value of interdisciplinary self-education.

Understanding your business is table stakes for any profession. I am not arguing that one shouldn't read the trades, stay abreast of industry news, etc. There's also something to be said for business-specific deep dives: corporate histories and longitudinal studies especially are best expressed in long form rather than quick articles. Finally, I am absolutely biased: I majored in political science and had no formal marketing education prior to starting my career. So there's clearly some ex post facto justification here.

Caveats aside, here is what I wish I had said in that interview.

Business writing usually takes a distinct form: it's brief, direct, and comprised of fairly simple syntax. It's great for email. But it's awful for conveying complicated, multifaceted concepts. It also gets very dry very fast. So how do you diversify your writing chops? Well, you can take a writing composition course, or you can learn by osmosis. For most of us, the latter is both more effective and entertaining.

Here, I find histories like Tucker's work invaluable. He took a series of disparate events from the late 18th and early 19th centuries and tied them all together in an accurate, thrilling manner. He somehow made sense of a decades-long, incoherent series of conflagrations, and managed to both entertain and inform the reader about a subject that couldn't be more byzantine. Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy is another sterling example of how to organize and disseminate massive quantities of information while still keeping your audience's attention. Sound relevant for marketers?

Of course, before you articulate something complex, you must be able to understand it. Factually, the philosophy books I've read have taught me nothing. But they've vastly improved my reading comprehension skills. There's nothing quite like looking at a half-page long sentence, rife with qualifiers, for over 20 minutes...and being utterly confused.

I'd hope that none of your colleagues write like Plato, but most information in the business world doesn't come packaged to us in listicles. We're gathering data and anecdotes from numerous sources, reconciling inconsistencies, and trying to make sense of it all. Reading tough philosophy and political theory works will bolster your ability to see through complexity, whether it originates from deliberate obfuscation or clumsy wording. Of course, IQ will place an immovable ceiling on this skill. But you can undeniably make crucial marginal improvements.

Finally, reading substantive non-business works helps reduce your vulnerability to group-think. If everyone is reading the same books and citing the same articles, they’re also going to have the same blind spots. Not every problem calls for a SWOT analysis or design thinking. Getting a fresh perspective will help you apply new frameworks for existing challenges, ones that may be far more effective.

To really get on-the-nose here: Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence is ostensibly about the history of US foreign policy. But it has taught me this exact point. Rather than claim that one school of thought is better than the other three, Mead argues that each one has its rightful place; applying Jeffersonian tactics during World War II would have likely gotten America conquered, but a Hamiltonian approach to the Middle East has proved disastrous. An ability and willingness to seek out knowledge and insights from across the intellectual gamut is crucial, whether you’re Henry Kissinger or a product marketer.

Next time, I’ll be ready for this question.