I’m not applying to positions that could be filled just by good captains. I’m looking for organizations that call for great generals. A captain has the charisma and the motivation she or he needs to lead a team of troops toward a given objective. A general sets forth the objectives, procures the means to achieve victory, and lays down the law for how to proceed.

The typical business objective is characterized as success. You reach success, a million or so self-help guides tell you, when you set a reasonable goal for yourself and you skillfully attain that goal. My objective is victory. There are a thousand objectives a campaign must fulfill before victory can be declared. A captain accepts the victory strategy on the ground and goes with it, usually with faith in its outcome. A general conceives and implements the victory strategy, and assumes responsibility for it, whatever that outcome may be.

A general deeply comprehends the requirements for victory, because a general has experienced defeat — humiliating, spectacular, historic failure. The kinds of events that get scrubbed from résumés — even the long ones. Everyone whose career, in whatever he or she does, is defined by a long litany of achievements, has a keen memory for all the failures. The true quality of a leader can be observed in how that person recovers from failure, because the direction that leader takes towards recovery, resuming the course of victory, is the direction in which an organization needs to be led regardless of whether the mission actually failed.

If you could get by with a captain or a major or a colonel, you wouldn’t be reading this now. The times in front of us call for a Supreme Allied Commander. I am that person.

Your job posting refers to a mission. That mission is to render permanent the visibility and accessibility of the content that delivers your narrative. This is your mission, regardless of whether you’re a marketing agency, a service or product provider, or a news publication.

The methodology for achieving this mission is the same as for any other industry. You offer a narrative that may be interesting to someone whose eyeballs you want to attract. You need that attention in order to have the opportunity to spark engagement. Anyone whose business utilizes information, has this mission and this principal goal. And if we’re being honest, this has always been the case, ever since “publications” were sprayed through straws onto cave walls.

I’ve fulfilled every aspect and every role pertaining to the achievement of the main mission: driving engagement. The people you will need to maintain this engagement as you move forward, will all have these seemingly varying roles. I can lead them all, and lead them together, because I’ve been where they are.

I’m both, which is a stance that has always gotten me into trouble, but later gets me out of it.

Your organization’s narrative needs to be disseminated by means of news publications. People don’t become aware of who you are and what you do, until they see you in the context of where they are and what they do. So when promoting yourself online, you must begin by placing yourself and your narrative in a news context, to be explored and disseminated by journalists.

A good journalist requires the perspectives of multiple biased sources. If she does her job well, she often balances them against each other. For such stories where balance is achievable, no single perspective may stand out over the other.

However, for other good stories where the appearance of balance between opposing viewpoints would be false (e.g., the spherical nature of the planet, the need for political consensus, how nice it is to be nice to people), a good journalist presents multiple perspectives in such a light that the imbalance, and the repercussions of that imbalance, become a story in and of itself. That’s a situation where the journalist may be accused of bias — for illuminating the facts in such a way that the outcome is not a toss-up. In situations where the obvious truth is successfully illuminated, the journalist should be expected to lean towards truth.

A marketer has a native bias, as does any singular source of truth. A marketer’s objective is to present his narrative in such a manner that it becomes accepted as the obvious truth. If that narrative is crafted properly, a good journalist will objectively, and in good conscience, present that narrative in the context of competing narratives, in such a way that the obviousness of its truth isn’t occluded by its competition.

At a symposium one day, Dan Rather told me his thoughts about the duality of the journalist / marketer relationship. Because I’m a journalist, I kept Rather’s quote, and here it is: “News is what is important for people to know that somebody, somewhere — particularly people in power — don’t want them to know. That’s news. All the rest is pretty much propaganda and publicity.”

The usual tactics of a marketer, a campaign advisor, or anyone with a biased perspective, includes withholding information from the press that this person doesn’t want spread. The journalist’s job, therefore, is to go after the information that other person is withholding, Rather told me, because that’s the story.

Indeed, this does describe the typical relationship. But it’s not a healthy one, and it shouldn’t be the one we settle for. If a marketer can present a true story of the people and businesses his organization serves, then a journalist should be able to make use of that information. That journalist may, and should, search for information that’s being withheld. If the marketer is truly doing his job, anything incidental to what the journalist has already been told, will be inconsequential to the story.

What was your question again? Oh, yeah.

What I’ve worked toward, both as a journalist and a marketer, is a system that nurtures and encourages this positive journalist/marketer relationship. The marketer can tell a story that the journalist can use, so what’s eventually published is actually interesting enough for people to want to read. This way, when the journalist takes the initiative and probes for information she doesn’t have, what she’s likely to find will be illuminating and exciting enough for her that she’ll share that thrill of discovery with the reader. Take a look at the publications I’ve worked on and worked with that are successful (not the ones you can only find on archives.org) and you’ll see evidence of this positive business relationship.

Which one am I? I’m both.

It was during the author review process for my second published book, Visual Basic By Example, for Que Publishing in 1991. Author review is when a development editor has the opportunity to share her honest opinion about the direction and flow of my text. I truly enjoyed authoring a book, because I like to think on big topics and construct big narratives on big platforms. And I had a chapter going that I thought was particularly big and especially beautiful, and I thought my development editor would be wild about it.

Her query to me was essentially, why are you consuming so much space to arrive at a very simple point? Isn’t what you said at the end of this long passage, something that would have been more valuable at the beginning?

And I’m thinking, what does this lady know about content strategy? I’m about to give her a big lesson, become Mr. Mansplainer. Anyway, author review is designed to be an adversarial process. It can trigger a back-and-forth with the editor, and in these days before “live” documents, we conducted this discussion via e-mail. And in the third or fourth round, my editor challenged me: Am I afraid to get to the point of things? Afraid of losing my audience’s attention? If I’m not my students’ favorite professor, will I lose confidence in myself as an author?

Well, I’d convinced myself I have self-confidence the size of Mars. I told her, we’re not all here to be Yellow Pages for the right answers, simply reciting summaries of little truths that will be forgotten tomorrow. We’re here to teach, and the way to teach well is to give our students, or our audiences, mental associations with which they can connect the processes they’re learning with the environment they know. A brain is a network, I said, and the way to maintain and nurture that network is to cultivate connections.

She was ready for this, and I wasn’t expecting it. If a brain is a network, she argued, then isn’t our goal to attain efficiency in that network? Isn’t a well-organized network one with fewer, more optimal, more direct connections? It’s the mind, not a sock drawer.

I was one-upped, and I knew it. I had to meet this person, because I knew there would be a long, intellectual discussion emerging from this meeting, and at the very least I’d have an opportunity to regain my position on the pedestal. There was a COMDEX conference in Chicago, I could cover it for a magazine, and she was slated to drive up from Indianapolis.

Fast-forward to the end: We’ve been married 30 years now.

I find that, in the course of business, when I stage the competitive landscape in terms of warfare, I win. Backyard skirmishes don’t yield victories. Mutual standoffs and de facto duopolies don’t enable conquests.

We can leave the bloodiness and the hatred out of warfare, of course. As the Pentagon has proven (though occasionally forgets), a successful campaign can be executed with minimal bloodshed and with limited terror. What needs to remain among our battlefield assets are strategic thinking, gaming theory, and competitive logistics. In online content strategy, many active competitors have been vanquished years ago, and don’t even know it. They can’t read their competitive situation, because they refuse to acknowledge the existence of a battlefield — even though that’s where they’re being buried.

Today, if I’m addressing you online with words, it’s with the objective of capturing and holding your attention, especially so it doesn’t drift away into someone else’s possession. Words are weapons. Ideas are territories. Realizations and discoveries are objectives. Actions are conversions. Maybe things would be more pleasant if we likened the emerging science of content strategy to a friendly game of football or Stratego, rather than a battlefield with fronts, objectives, and obstacles. Problem is, when we lose sight of the battle as a battle and we play too nicely with the rest of the world, the results almost always include pain, which hurts. Look at the recent tidal wave of layoffs in the information technology industry, and tell me those layoffs were part of a well-conceived master plan. Couldn’t that bloodshed have been avoided?

If we let ourselves become too complacent about the business we’re in, we find ourselves defeated. Nothing smells more like war than loss. And I don’t like to lose.