There’s no secret information

You have as much information as senior execs. Embrace it.

There’s very little information that the CMO of your company has access to that you don’t. And it doesn’t matter what level you are in the organization.

- You have the same access to public information, about markets, competitors, etc.

- You have access to all the public information about your own company (website, earnings, etc).

- You have likely similar access to internal company documents and data.

There is only a small percentage of information that is typically not transparent within an organization. And that data is typically niche. Transactions that are being considered. Fully transparent financial data.

And this is intentional. Most executives don’t want to be information bottlenecks. Instead, they prefer their team to operate with the same shared context that they have.

Most people don’t appreciate all the implications of this. Not really.

The most common place I see it manifest is when people get promoted into management or executive roles and don’t find themselves with access to files, meetings and slack channels that materially change their understanding of the company.

There’s no special, protected knowledge that senior executives have that you can’t obtain through effort.

The reason this is important is that there are really two ways to approach work:

- Expect management to share very clear strategy, goals and tasks so that you know what is expected of you.

- Become someone that creates strategy, goals and tasks with little or no direction from management.

The latter approach is possible because of the information parity that exists within companies. Everyone has enough access to information to do this.

And it should be obvious, but the latter group is also the group that gets promoted to increasingly senior levels of management. They get promoted because they increase the leverage of their managers. If a Director has to define every aspect of the work of a Manager on their team, what is the purpose of that Manager?

At every level of a company, you are delegating bigger missions. And you are expecting that leader to own the mission. Not execute some list of tasks.

The most important thing to understand is that this is a capability you can develop.

I had a formative moment about 6 years into my career where I was working closely with the digital team of an acquired company. I’m sure I’ll write about it in more detail later, but the important thing to know is that I walked away feeling like a fraud. Like I didn’t know what I was talking about.

That meeting changed the way I worked. I read a book a week about business, tech, marketing and every channel for 4 or 5 years. I still read about the industry for 2 or 3 hours a day, although not always books.

People often ask me for lists of books. Websites. People to follow on Twitter.

Sometimes I’ll share but sometimes I won’t.

The most important thing I learned, and one of the things I value the most in people I hire, is information self-sufficiency. Or more simply, curiosity. Can you find out all these answers yourself without someone handing it to you? And more importantly, can figure out what questions to ask?

Everything you could possibly want to know about the world is out there. And it’s more accessible than ever.

I remember talking with one of our product leaders and asked him this hypothetical.

You have two product managers. One regularly meets with customers but never reads anything on the internet. The other never meets with customers but reads the internet cover to cover. Who knows more about the market?

“The latter, for sure.”

There’s no secret information.

Sometimes I have career conversations with people outside my group or company. They feel like they aren’t getting what they need from their manager. Whether that is support or direction.

And what I tell them is that no manager has ever stopped me from doing what I was going to do.

I share this perspective with people because I believe deeply in personal agency.

And I think if you want to a great career, you don’t want to be someone that is waiting for direction.

Every time you say you didn’t have enough direction is just an admission you wanted your manager to do even more of your job for you.

Instead, you want to be the opposite. You want to be someone with a vision, someone that can’t be stopped.

And that starts with whether you do the work to learn about business, your industry, your company, about marketing and about the channels you manage.

Choice is yours whether you will do that work or not. But the exciting thing is that it is in your control.

It is also a behavior that compounds. If you stick with it long enough, you might find yourself operating with an information advantage relative to people that should, on paper, know more than you.

And that’s a very good place to be.