Winning the competition for time
Principles for how Jewish organizations can evolve superior products in an age of abundant choice
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My Dad is a founding member of the Jewish musical group “Safam”. For 40+ years Safam has been writing and performing seminal hits such as Just Another Foreigner, Leaving Mother Russia, Nachamu Ami, World of Our Fathers, and countless others. These songs describe components of the Jewish experience set to modern music. In the 80s, 90s, and 00s the group played to large audiences all over the US, Canada, and the UK (some live videos here from the 90s). For some Jews of that era Safam’s music was a way to identify with and feel proud to be Jewish. Its lyrics and the draw of its music created a means of feeling connected to the Jews around them and those that came before them.
Among the many unique traits that made Safam resonate was its songwriting. My Dad, Joel, and his songwriting partner Robbie Solomon, architected pieces of music that were dissimilar from the typical formula of Jewish music at the time. Instead of classic Jewish genres like Klezmer or Chassidic music and lyrics that primarily pulled from liturgy, my Dad and Robbie were drawn to more modern sources of inspiration. Their influences included groups like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Simon & Garfunkel instead of any of the forebears of traditional Jewish music.
What drove Safam’s consistent popularity was its insistent focus on the craft of its product. The standard they held themselves to had nothing to do with what was going on around them in Jewish music, but was more so reflective of what their audience would think was high quality for ANY genre of music. My Dad took pride in the ingenuity of the lyrics, melodies, and chord patterns and constantly tried to raise the bar on his previous work. For years the band obsessed over the quality of their recorded and live work to create experiences that competed for people’s time in the broader marketplace, Jewish or not.
The playbook Safam followed is only more important today than at the height of their popularity. In the ultimate competition for people’s time Safam’s popularity mainly coincided with an era that offered limited choice relative to today. Weekend plans were harder to craft in an era of landlines. New music was harder to come by in a world of physical tapes and CDs without the array of choices offered by online music services like Spotify.
Today the competition for constituent time is steep. The internet presents an endless dopamine drip that tends to suck up spare time. When organizations earn in-person interactions the quality of average experiences is substantially elevated from those of my childhood. Coffee shop menus have exploded, and decor and options for seating border on luxurious. Restaurants have increasingly added innovative experiential components to their products. Even seemingly simple experiences like the driving range and mini golf (check out Topgolf and Puttshack) have received a sophisticated experience makeover.
In order for Jewish non profits to compete in this marketplace their bar for quality needs to extend past their Jewish peers and into secular for-profit businesses. Families with young children, teens, and college students in particular have grown up in this time of abundant choice and demand Jewish options that compete with the best secular options.
A recent example of an organization who has upheld a particularly high bar for excellence is Boston’s Lehrhaus. Described as a tavern and house of learning, Lehrhaus, founded by Charlie Schwartz and Josh Foer, obsesses over its product and holds a bar for excellence that cuts across Jewish and non-Jewish institutions. Reading reviews online, including Esquires list of 50 best new restaurants (a national index!), one quickly realizes that Lehrhaus is winning at earning constituent time through the meticulous creation and refinement of its product on the broader stage. It has recruited top local area chefs, screened for the most compelling local programming, and thoughtfully constructed a compelling end to end experience. As a result, its popularity has been driven through well deserved word of mouth and its ascendent brand has the opportunity to expand far beyond that of a delicious restaurant into a more powerful mechanism to drive Jewish identity and learning.
Principles for product success
These are just two examples of Jewish institutions that had success in particular domains, but there may be common elements in how they evolved their products that could be applied to other spaces.
Demographic focus
The higher the bar we hold for quality the harder it becomes to curate great experiences. When my Dad and his partners started Safam they wrote music for themselves and their own 20 something demographic. The music turned out to eventually appeal to a broader swath of the population, but they were writing it for a narrower audience that they felt uniquely qualified to serve.
Some Jewish organizations of today have demographic narrowness built into their model while others have hard choices to make. Summer camps, Hillels, and Day Schools have built in limitations on the populations they serve. Other organizations like JCCs or synagogues are expected by the community to service a broader range of the populace. The challenge these organizations face is how to instill excellence across a large range of customer wants and needs. What my parents want and need out of synagogue is different than what I want. How my kids want to interact with the JCC is different from the set of interactions I desire to have.
Institutions that serve a broader population have an intentional choice to make - they can attempt to build out their product to serve everyone or they can deliberately focus. If a JCC has a fixed amount of budget to hire programmers they can choose to concentrate that talent on the demographic they wish to serve or they can decide to spread it across talent and programming to serve every age. If that same JCC has a choice of whether to invest in a capital campaign to further the interests of its camping division vs its fitness business that caters to an older demographic that is also an intentional decision. Talent and capital are inputs to a superior product, and in an environment of scarcity they need to be thoughtfully allocated.
Elevate talent
As with many Jewish communal challenges, talent is often the hardest deficiency to overcome. Creating compelling experiences is hard and requires specific types of expertise and a level of dedication to honing the craft (whatever craft it may be). Safam and Lehrhaus had the benefit of founders who had innate drive and a capacity to expand their craft as needed to create a superior product. Safam self financed a venture that had relatively low overhead and relied on the fact that the band members had weekday jobs that supported their families.
Lehrhaus entered into a lower profit margin food business that required overhead in the form of a building and full time salaries and thus required significant philanthropic financing. While it’s possible that entrepreneurs could create weekend time to build superior experiences, it’s far more likely to expect that philanthropy will be required to prop up the work of talented entrepreneurs.
It’s up to executives and philanthropists to know how to scout great talent and give them the autonomy to develop their expertise. Venture capitalists who focus on financing early stage businesses will tell you that they invest in people more than they invest in businesses. Yes, they do look at the macro environment that a business will exist in, but they are more so scouts looking for superior talent. They look for situations of “founder market fit” where the founder’s life story and set of professional experiences are a strong match for the new kind of problem they are pursuing.
While the pool of available talent is certainly narrower in Jewish markets, it’s up to leadership and philanthropists to hone their abilities to spot and develop talent. It requires a steep time investment to seek out alternative types of talent and note unique circumstances of “programmer/founder market fit”. It also requires a concerted effort to offer opportunities to evolve that talent and create the tools for evolution. Our broader community is lucky to have quite a few leadership development institutions and we can complement these investments through hands-on coaching which I wrote about in this previous piece.
Amplify analogies
While talent and product focus are the core ingredients for product success there are many strategies that can be deployed to enhance that product including but not limited to the use of analogies. The best entrepreneurs I’ve experienced, Jewish or non Jewish, are voracious observers of analogies. They constantly pay attention to what is going around them and creatively use their intuition to think of its applications for their customer base. Similar to the way Safam closely followed contemporary trends and Lehrhaus undoubtedly pays attention to the local and national restaurant scene in addition to best in class programming techniques, Jewish programmers and entrepreneurs should seek inspiration well beyond their own communities. Funders and institutional leaders can help by scouting analogies themselves in their professional and personal lives and sending them on to Jewish professionals to continue to power their work.
Conclusion
Like it or not the bar for successful Jewish products has been raised. In a world of assimilated Jews with open access to a wide array of experiences, locally and online, most Jewish organizations compete against Jewish and non-Jewish alternatives. The monopoly that non-orthodox synagogues and community centers of old had over constituent time has been wiped away in favor of a world with abundant choice. As a result, Jewish organizations will be forced to adopt some of the experiential playbook of for-profit institutions.
Given the amount of non-Jewish capital allocated to these experiences the competition will continue to get steeper. This puts even more of an onus on Jewish capital allocators to fund entrepreneurs who focus, leverage analogies, and adopt other best practice techniques used in the for-profit world. As a community our capital allocators and entrepreneurs would be well served to look around and focus on a competitive set broader than what they have done historically and seek to create experiences that adequately compete for constituent time.
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