EMBA的小眼睛

Shouting into the wind

Anything worth shouting about is worth shouting into the wind.

Because if enough people care, often enough, the word spreads, the standards change, the wind dies down. If enough people care, the culture changes.

It's easy to persuade ourselves that the right time to make change happen is when it's time. But that's never true. The right time to make it happen is before it's time. Because this is what 'making' means.

The most devastating thing we can learn about our power is how much of it we have. How much change we could make if we would only speak up first, not last. How much influence we can have if we're willing to to look someone in the eye and say, "yes." Or, "this is our problem, too." Or, "this must stop."

The patina of books and the magic thrill of a new idea

Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you've collected one by one over the years, the changes you've made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share.

Every bookshelf tells a story. You can't build one in a day or even a week... it's a lifetime of collected changes. On the shelf over there I see an Isaac Asimov collection I bought when I was 12, right next to a yet-to-be-published galley by a friend of mine. Each of them changed my life.

It's thrilling to juxtapose this look backwards with the feeling I get when a great new book arrives. It hasn't been read yet (at least not by me) and it it offers unlimited promise, new possibilities and perhaps the chance to share it with someone else after I'm done.

This week, Portfolio is publishing four new editions of books I wrote or helped publish. These are books that your friends and colleagues and competitors may have seen already, and they each offer a chance to leap, an open door to change that matters:

Ad blocking

By most accounts, more and more people are automatically blocking the ads in their browser.

Of course, people have been blocking ads forever. By ignoring them.

Fifteen years ago, when I began writing about Permission Marketing, I pointed out that when ads are optional, it's only anticipated, personal and relevant ones that will pay off.

And advertisers have had fifteen years to show self restraint. They've had the chance to not secretly track people, set cookies for their own benefit, insert popunders and popovers and poparounds, and mostly, deliver us ads we actually want to see.

Special orders

You can look forward to them, the weirder the better.

Or you can push customers to make them as uncustom and unspecial as possible, because, of course, these are easier to handle.

If you embrace special orders, you're doing something difficult, scarce and worth seeking out.

If you handle them begrudgingly, you're likely to undo the very goodwill you sought to create.

On doing your best

It's a pretty easy way to let ourselves (or someone else) off the hook. "Hey, you did your best."

But it fails to explain the improvement in the 100-meter dash. Or the way we're able to somehow summon more energy and more insight when there's a lot on the line. Or the tremendous amount of care and love we can bring to a fellow human who needs it.

By defining "our best" as the thing we did when we merely put a lot of effort into a task, I fear we're letting ourselves off the hook.

In fact, it might not require a lot of effort, but a ridiculous amount of effort, an unreasonable amount of preparation, a silly amount of focus... and even then, there might be a little bit left to give.

Rearranging our prejudices

Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.

Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.

It's also the only place to start.

It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it's urgent.