Thinking More: About Marketing, Thinking, 2025 Trends, Management Myths and more

In this Issue

1. Investing in Marketing 2025
2. Dinner with?Dr. Kahneman
3. Thinking More about Thinking
4. C-Level Trends (Part 2):??Social and Workplace Trends
5. Top 5?Employment Law Myths
6. Econ Recon

Investing in Marketing 2025

As you plan for your 2025 marketing spend, take some advice from Loraine Kasprzak, MBA , founder and managing director of?Advantage Marketing Consulting Services LLC .? In this article, she offers ideas about how to budget for marketing and what to include.

• Peg your marketing budget to a percentage of your projected revenues. Why? It can make it easier to evaluate marketing ROI based on sales lift and you can adjust quarterly as you track revenue.? She includes general guidelines for B2B and B2C companies
• Your marketing objectives should drive your budget
• Consider how vertical markets, competition, and your customer's journey affect spend
• Use various channels and cross-channels for marketing dollars in 2025

Read her article, Planning Ahead: What to Include in Your Annual Marketing Budget .

Dinner with Dr. Kahneman

Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate in Economics

Earlier this year,?the only?psychologist?to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics passed away. Dr. Daniel Kahneman wrote a ground-breaking book?“Thinking Fast and Slow” ?that represent ground-breaking insights into how we think about everything.

Tim Koller, a principal at McKinsey Consulting had the great privilege of a dinner with Dr. Kahneman before the latter passed away. During that dinner, Dr. Kahneman suggested?“I’m much more optimistic about organizations than individuals…Organizations can put systems in place to help them.”

What are those systems, and can you put them in place for your organization?? Here’s a brief recap of?Mr. Koller’s dinner with Dr. Kahneman.

Thinking More about Thinking

The philosopher Socrates advised his followers to “know thyself.” Truly great executives need to be able to self-assess their strengths and weakness, in general,?and in?particular regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their own thought processes. In short, they know how to “think about their own thinking. “ ?

You can get insights into the mental processes of today’s successful entrepreneurs from biographies of people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. But we should also look at those in the scientific realm who were also successful “entrepreneurs” in the sense that their achievements changed how scientists, and we, ultimately think about the world. Newton, Pasteur, and Einstein all come to mind. That’s entrepreneurship at its highest level.

Fortunately, one great scientist took time?to assess his own mental capacity: ?Charles Darwin. His “Origin of Species” laid the groundwork for the theory of evolution by natural selection?that prompted a biologist writing a century after Darwin passed: ?“Nothing in biology makes senses except in the light of evolution.”

But success is not always about raw intellectual power. Charlie Munger?of Berkshire Hathaway studied Darwin’s thought processes and concluded that?“Darwin?would have placed somewhere in the?middle?of a good private?high school?class.”???

So, if it wasn’t about his IQ, what accounts for Darwin’s massive contribution to human knowledge? A short article from the Farnam Street blog provides an explanation ?Find out?How Charles Darwin Mentally Overachieved his Starting IQ . Maybe you’ll start to think, and succeed, differently.

C-Level Trends for 2025: Part 2

Social & workplace trends for 2025 and beyond

This is the second installment of an annual 4-part series on the trends impacting small and midsize businesses provided by Vistage Speaker and Strategy Consulting Marc Emmer .?This week, Mr. Emmer looks at social and workplace trends for 2025 .

Check out his analysis of?societal, demographic, housing, health care and related trends before you sit down to plan.? If you missed the first installment, here is the link: Ecological Trends for 2025 and Beyond .

Top Five Employment Law Myths

Mark Twain once said,??“It's not what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”

Vistage speaker and employment law expert Hunter Lott would agree and in his latest “Take 5 with Hunter” video he says, “I speak to a large number of organizations and people each year, and it always amazes me as to how many talent managers operate under false information.”

Here are his Top 5 Management Myths:

1.???? Loyalty

2.???? Consistency

3.???? Probationary Periods

4.???? Never Re-Hire

5.???? Command Control

How many of these?Top Five myth-conceptions ?are you laboring under? Be sure to share with your top team, especially HR.

Econ Recon

Good news from the service sector:? A key aspect of the economy is the service sector constituting 77% of GDP.?The best known measure of this sector is the ISM Non-Manufacturing Index?which, according to economist Brian Wesbury, increased to 56.0 in October ,?easily beating the consensus expected 53.8. (Levels above 50 signal expansion.)

A Busy Week.. a new administration, another interest rate drop.? Will there be more inflation, more interest rate cuts?? ITR Economics Eric Post provides a great summary of why rates won’t get back to pre-pandemic levels…and? some specific advice about the maximum time horizon ?you should allow for a business investment. ??

It's Veterans Day. Take a moment to honor those you know who served and all who served. It may be a short work week for some. As always, I value your time and appreciate you as readers and subscribers. Feel free to share.

Sue Tinnish, PhD,?Vistage Chair, Facilitator, & Executive Coach

Find me easily at: 847.404.7325, [email protected] , Twitter:?@STinnish, LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/suetinnish , Website: https://vistage.com/chairs/sue.tinnish