EMBA的小眼睛

A little more than a bushel, a little bit less

Marketing works best when the effort you put into it is a little more than you think you need and a lot more than the market expects from your project.

And projects work best when the amount you need to get done is a little less than the resources you have available.

Marketing rewards a taut system, a show of confidence, the ability to be where you need to be with a true story that works.

Projects reward slack, the ability to keep your schedule and your quality, to watch the critical path and to make smart decisions.

"Let's go around the room"

If you say that in a meeting, you've failed. You've abdicated responsibility and just multiplied the time wasted by the number of people in the room.

When we go around the room, everyone in the room spends the entire time before their turn thinking about what to say, and working to say something fairly unmemorable. And of course, this endless litany of 'saying' leads to little in the way of listening or response or interaction or action of any kind.

The worst example I ever saw of this was when Barry Diller did it in a meeting with 220 attendees. More than two hours later, everyone in the room was bleeding from their ears in boredom.

Leaders of meetings can do better. Call on people. Shape the conversation. Do your homework in advance and figure out who has something to say, and work hard to create interactions. Either that or just send a memo and cancel the whole thing. It's easier and probably more effective.

Handshakes and contracts, the future and the past

If you lease a car, borrow money for school or engage in some other complex transaction, there's a contract to sign. It's filled with rules and obligations, and the profit-maximizing finance organization does everything it can to do as little as it can (and make you responsible for as much as it can). This sort of contract has evolved into a battle, an effort to get something now and deliver as little as possible later. Loopholes and fine print are there for a reason, and it's not to make you happy. Contracts like this are about the past. "We agreed on this, go read your copy, we don't care so much that you're annoyed, goodbye."

A handshake deal, on the other hand, is about the future. Either side can claim loopholes or wriggle out of a commitment, but the consequence is clear—if you disappoint us, we won't be back for more. The participant in a handshake deal is investing in the future, doing more now in exchange for the benefits that trust and delight and consistency bring going forward.

It might pay to write your handshake deal down, to memorialize the key promises in an email. If your goal is to delight and to exceed expectations, the more clear you are about the expectations, the more likely it is you'll exceed them.

But it also pays to hesitate when you (or your advisors) start pushing to transform the handshake about the future into a contract about the past. "I'm hoping to do this again with you," evokes a very different reaction than, "but you said..."

Pitchcraft

When you present to a board, to potential investors, they ask themselves some questions about your new project:

Is there a problem?

Do I like the solution—is it free, instant and certain, or at least close enough to be interesting?

Are you the one to take this problem on and create this solution?

The dorm-room startup mindset

"Selling enough records to make another record."

Rick Rubin started DefJam in his NYU dorm. Steve and I built TSR in Curtis Hall, and I went on to build my publishing business in my wife's dorm at NYU. It happens more than you might guess, and the reason it works is something you can use, even if you're not in college or living in a dorm...

You sell enough records to make another record.

You're not trying to sell the company or to make a huge payroll or to make sure the stock options are in place. You're building something.

"Google it!"

The job is no longer to recite facts, to read the bio out loud, to explain something better found or watched online.

No, the job is to personally and passionately make us care enough to look up the facts for ourselves.

When you introduce a concept, or a speaker, or an opportunity, skip the reading of facts. Instead, make a passionate pitch that drives inquiry. In the audience, in your employees, in your customers...

The only reason people don't look it up is that they don't care, not that they're unable. So, your job is to get them to care enough.

Famous to the family

There is famous and there is famous to the family. Cousin Aaron is famous to my family. Or, to be less literal, the family of people like us might understand that Satya the milliner or perhaps Sarma Melngailis or Peter Olotka are famous.

And famous to the family is precisely the goal of just about all marketing now. You don't need to be Nike or Apple or GE. You need to be famous to the small circle of people you are hoping will admire and trust you. Your shoe store needs to be famous to the 300 shoe shoppers in your town. Your retail consulting practice needs to be famous to 100 people at ten major corporations. Your Wordpress consulting practice needs to be famous to 650 veterinarians or chiropractors. Famous the way George Clooney and George Washington are famous, but to fewer people.

By famous, I means admired, trusted, given the benefit of the doubt. By famous, I mean seen as irreplaceable or best in the world.

Here's how to tell if you're famous: If I ask someone in your community to name the person who is known for X, will they name you? If I ask about which store or freelancer is the best place, hands down, to get Y, will they name you? If we played 20 questions, could I guess you?

Biggest vs. best

There's not much overlap.

Regardless of how you measure 'best' (elegance, deluxeness, impact, profitability, ROI, meaningfulness, memorability), it's almost never present in the thing that is the most popular.

The best restaurant, Seinfeld episode, political candidate, brand of beer, ski slope, NASDAQ stock, you name it. Compare them to the most popular.

Big is a choice. So is best.

Munchausen by Proxy by Media

MBP is a particularly tragic form of child abuse. Parents or caregivers induce illness in their kids to get more attention.

The thing is, the media does this to us all the time. (Actually, we've been doing it to ourselves, by rewarding the media for making us panic.)

It started a century ago with the Spanish American War. Disasters sell newspapers. And a moment-by-moment crisis gooses cable ratings, and horrible surprises are reliable clickbait. The media rarely seeks out people or incidents that encourage us to be calm, rational or optimistic.

Even when they're not actually causing unfortunate events, they're working to get us to believe that things are on the brink of disaster. People who are confident, happy and secure rarely stay glued to the news.

A new book, you're invited...

I've spent the last two years teaching and speaking and writing about doing work that matters, engaging with our lizard brain and finding the ability to dance with uncertainty.

All those interactions have led to: What to Do When It's Your Turn.

This new book is about leaping and fear and doing work that challenges. It echoes many of the ideas I've been writing about here for the last year or two, but it's completely original work, all illustrated in four-color, in a new format that I haven't seen used to create a book. Mostly, I wrote it to make it easier for my readers to encourage the change they'd like to see in the people around them (and in ourselves). I wrote it for you, and I wrote it for me, too, to help me get straight about what matters in doing work that makes a difference.

I'm trying to capture some of the energy I'm able to bring to a live engagement, and so far, the people who have read it have found it opens doors for them and pushes them to think differently about their work. And everyone has asked if they can have copies for friends. Hence this pre-order opportunity for my most loyal readers and those seeking to make a ruckus.

You're right, they're wrong, but they won

Why is that? Is the world so unfair?

Actually, it might be because the other guys took the time and invested the effort to build a movement. They showed up, every time, again and again. They never contemplated that they might lose, even though they're wrong, sub-par or not as good as you are. Their operating system, corporate structure, political ideas or economic approach won.

Perhaps they told a story that resonated, one that resonated not with the better angels of our nature, but with our urgent desires. And most probably, they built a tribe, not one in their image, but in the image (and dreams) of those that wanted to belong.

But mostly, it's because they were prepared to spend a decade (or two or three) to change the culture of their part of the world in the direction that mattered to them.

Solving the popular problem

"Do you know the head of FIFA?"

"I have come up with a way to speed up airport security dramatically..."

"How come the people in script development at Warner won't get back to me about my Matrix idea?"

If you're intent on making an impact by developing and marketing a big idea, two things to keep in mind:

But what do *you* do?

Do you make your own paper? Do you start with wood pulp and mix and bleach and set and produce the sheets you use? My guess is that you save time (and a lot of money) and just go to Staples and buy a ream or two.

The theory of the firm shows us that when people work together in an institution, they are able to produce more than if they work separately. Pareto optimality makes it obvious that if one person mixes the dough while the other bakes the loaves, they'll get more done than if each did the whole job.

This explains one reason why big companies keep getting bigger. They gain economies of production and marketing as they specialize their workforce.

But what about the small enterprise, the freelancer, the soloist?

Cassandra and Pollyanna

You will often hear from people who will announce that it's all over, that this is the crisis that ends it, once and for all. The Cassandra sees the end of the road for the project or the brand or the culture. It's the end, now.

Cassandra is countered by the Pollyanna, who thinks everything is fine, will be fine and always is fine.

The thing is: failure almost always arrives in a whimper. It is almost always the result of missed opportunities, a series of bad choices and the rust that comes from things gradually getting worse.

Things don't usually explode. They melt.

Learning from the State Department

Ambassadors do two things that are really difficult for most people within organizations:

1. They listen and send the notes up the chain. They're at the front line, and they listen to what's happening and figure out how to get the right people back home to hear what's being said.

2. They apologize. Not for things they did wrong, but for things that others did wrong.

If you work for a company that you don't own, if you interact with customers, you're a brand ambassador. The person who runs the cash register or answers the phone or makes sales calls is a brand ambassador, in the world on behalf of the amorphous brand, whatever that is.

Avoiding magical thinking

There's a relationship that's easy to imagine but actually incorrect: We often come to the conclusion that in order to make something magical, we'll need magical events to occur to get there.

Building a startup is hard. Publishing a great book successfully is quite difficult. Launching a non-profit that matters is a Herculean task. I hope you will do all three, and more, often.

But while your intent is pure and your goal is to create magic, the most common mistake is to believe that the marketplace will agree with your good intent and support you. More specifically, that media intermediaries will clearly, loudly and accurately tell your story, that this story will be heard by an eager and interested public and that the public will take action (three strikes).

Or, more tempting, that ten people will tell ten people to the eighth power, leading to truly exponential growth (some day). Because right now, you've told ten people and they have told no one.

We can't talk about it

We can't talk about how we could do things better around here

We can't talk about what isn't working

We can't talk about the countless opportunties we ignore

We can't talk about what hurts

Dumb down and scale up

Small businesses rule our economy, and each successful small businesses is expected to get bigger.

Many successful small businesses are easily scaled. The owner has created something that can be repeated, a product that can mass produced, a process that can be franchised. Scaling up serves more customers and benefits the founder.

But some businesses, maybe yours, are built around new decisions and new work on a regular basis. Those businesses are also under pressure to scale, and that might be a mistake.

To get bigger, the small business that's based on the insight, energy and passion of a few people might have to dumb down. It has to standardize, itemize and rationalize, so that it can hire people who care a little less, know a little less and work a little less, because, after all, they just work here.

Put a frame around it

Wrap it in a bow

Serve it on ice

What's worth more, the frame or the poster? It turns out that a well-framed bit of graphics is often transformed, at least in the eyes of the person engaging with it. It might be the very same beautiful object that was thumbtacked to the wall, but it sure feels different.

And an unwrapped piece of jewelry is worth far less without the blue box, isn't it?

"You're right, we were wrong"

This is the most difficult sentence for companies that stumble in doing effective customer service.

By effective, I mean customer service that pays for itself, that is a rational expense on the way to building a loyal brand following and generating positive word of mouth.

When someone in your organization says, "You're right, we were wrong," they're not saying that you're always wrong, or that you were completely wrong, or even that, in a court of law with a sympathetic jury, you would lose. It certainly doesn't mean you didn't try.

No, all you're saying is that you made a promise or set an expectation and then failed to live up to it.