EMBA的小眼睛

People who like this stuff...

like this stuff.

When you work in a genre (any genre), break all the rules at your own peril. Sure, you need to break some rules, need to do something worth talking about. But please understand who the work is for.

If it's for people outside the genre, you have a lot of evangelizing to do. And if it's for those that are already in it, you can't push too far, because they like the genre. That's why they're here.

Those who have walked away probably aren't just waiting around for you to fix it. Those who have never been don't think the genre has a problem they need solved. Blue sky thinking isn't really blue sky thinking. It's a slightly different shade of the blue that's already popular.

"How was your bike ride?"

The answer has evolved over the last century...

It was great, I pushed myself and feel fabulous.

It was okay, I came in fourth place in the race, but those other guys beat me again.

I did fine. My speed was 15.6 miles per hour, not my best average.

Three marketing lessons from Broadway

Understand who it's for.

Almost all the casting, play selection and advertising done for Broadway shows is designed to appeal to tourists and to those that rarely come to the theater. After all, there are a lot more of them than there are the diehard fans who see three or four of nine shows a year.

And so the producers focus on celebrities and popular topics. They run bus ads and reach out to hotel concierge staff. Makes sense.

Until you do the math. The math makes it clear that the people who go to the theater regularly are often the ones who fill the seats, pay the bills and spread the word. It turns out that activating people who already like you is far more productive and profitable than it is to spend time and money yelling at people who are ignoring you.

References available upon request

(and other things to leave off your resume)

Resumes are overrated.

Of course your references are available upon request. What are you going to do, refuse?

If your references are amazing, don't offer them on request, include them. If they're not stellar, do better work and get some stellar references. Give me names and phone numbers and actual testimonies.

There are Kracos

Thirty years ago, I used to work the booth at CES. The software company where I was a brand manager launched its products at the Consumer Electronics Show, which was, at the time, the biggest trade show in the world.

You can imagine that a huge stream of people were constantly walking by, and making our pitch to each and every one of them was exhausting. We were there to get mass merchants to sell our stuff--getting into Target or Lechmere was a victory we needed.

A few hours into the first show, I noticed that some of the people walking by had little creatures on their shoulders. Kraco, the low-cost stereo company, had a huge booth, and they were giving visitors these little stick-on humanoids, made of some sort of wool, to ride along on their shoulder. They were about two-inches high and they looked precisely as ridiculous as you are imagining.

I loved this. These people, these lookers, not buyers, were identifying themselves to us from a distance. The little Kraco man on the shoulder meant, "I am here to waste your time, I am not a professional, what will you give me that's free?" We quickly began identifying anyone with one of these on their shoulder as a Kraco, someone not worth an investment of focus and energy or free stuff.

In search of meaningful

From the individual who needs to get her idea in front of the right people, to the New York Times, which faces a ticking clock to figure out the digital landscape, all of us are in the media business. There's a gold rush for attention going on, and, given how much the media likes to cover the media, we hear about winners and losers, those doing it right and wrong, and most of all, the template for what we ought to be doing if we want to succeed.

I fear that right now, many are laboring under Buzzfeed Envy.

Since 1989, when I first started doing online media, people have been transfixed by scale, by numbers, by rankings. "How many eyeballs, how big is the audience, what's the passalong, how many likes, friends, followers, how many hits?"

You cannot win this game and I want to persuade you (and Dean Baquet at the Times) to stop trying.

The panda and the bicycle

Many tribes gain in power and connection by finding their opposite, by identifying the choices that members won't make.

"People like us don't do things like that."

So the vegan tribe obviously chooses to not eat meat. And during the key formative years, the Apple tribe wouldn't deign to buy Microsoft products. The Amish build solidarity and define themselves by the machines they choose not to use, and for a long time, many professional photographers wouldn't use digital cameras.

The smart choice is to understand that tribal identity is based on choices, not on facts, based on allegiances, not the intentional disregard of the rest of the world. Some sects of the motorcycle tribe don't wear helments... not because they believe it's safer (and thus denying the obvious) but because it's a choice they want to make.

Escalators, elevators and the ferry

Escalators make people happy. They're ready when you are, there is almost never a line, and you can see progress happening the entire time.

Elevators are faster, particularly for long distances, but we get frustrated when we just miss one, and we often wonder when the next one is coming, even after a few seconds. (That's why lobbies have mirrors, to give you something to do when you're waiting).

The ferry schedule, invented by Cornelius Vanderbilt, is a third way to deal with transport. Instead of having each boat turn around the minute it arrived, he guaranteed when it would leave. We can build our day around a schedule...

What do you offer your clients?

Worldview and stories

Why did McDonald's post signs saying, "More than a billion sold"?

Why do some people pay big money to go to galas that support charities, but not donate otherwise?

Why was the guy on the plane yesterday reading The Fault is in Our Stars, years after it came out?

Why are some hipsters getting their tattoos removed?

Skinny, sad and pale

On the first 100 pages of the new, thick issue of Vanity Fair, there are about 95 full page ads. Those ads feature, best I can count, 108 people. Of these, 24 of the people are some combination of not-sad and not-ghostly and not-skinny. The other 84 send precisely the same signal: Brands like ours feature people like this.

Here's the thing: green lights aren't green because there's something inherently go-ful about the color green. A long time ago, green got assigned to go, red to stop, and that's the semiotics of traffic.

The same is true for this class of luxury goods. There's nothing about too thin, too pale and really sad that implies that people will want to buy an expensive good, and in fact, there is probably data that shows that happy people actually lead to more sales. But these ads are about labeling and fitting in and sending a coherent signal. "Brands like ours advertise in places like this with ads like this."

In the tech world, ads featuring fonts like Myriad Pro and Helvetica send a similar signal. Creative people fall into the trap/use this shortcut of fitting in all the time, because so many other elements of their work feel risky, they choose to do what feels safe when the committee starts making ads.

Your arms race

If you're engaging in a neck and neck battle for supremacy, it's entirely possible you've lost track of the purpose of the work you set out to do in the first place.

Consider recent stats about college sports:

A coach who makes $6.9 million dollars a year
A weight training coach who makes more than $6,000 a week

Self assurance checklist for the anxious traveler

Travel has always meant possibility and change, and for some people, that means anxiety. Add to this non-refundable fares, tight connections and security theater courtesy of the TSA, and it's easy for the fun to turn into a literal nightmare.

There are people who will tell you to just get over it and enjoy travelling, but for some people, the real benefit happens if they can eliminate the things that trigger the biggest issues.

Some prophylactic measures to consider, extreme steps to transform your internal dialogue:

Five days before you travel, lay out everything you intend to bring with you, all in a special section of your room.

Just leave me to do my work!

I need a sales rep (or ten) to do the selling so I can do my work.

And investors to put up the money so I can do my work.

And an accounting staff so I won't have to think about inflows and outflows so I can do my work.

And an admin to process and answer all my email and my paperwork...

Conventions and expectations

When you launch something new, you're almost certainly placing it into a section of the world that already has expectations about how things like this are supposed to work. A university gives diplomas. Restaurant waiters take tips. Software ought to have a 'save as' button.

It can be far more subtle than that. An emergency room waiting area looks very different from the waiting area at the chiropractor's office, even though both have the same function (waiting). The sound quality and background noise on a personal phone call sounds subtly different from one that's coming from a call center. A well-published book has chapters that start on the right-hand page.

Challenging conventions is precisely what makes your thing new. Hence unconventional. The difficulty comes when you challenge conventions and defy expectations that you weren't planning on upsetting. The inadvertent skipping of what we expect causes you to frustrate us, or to appear as an uncaring, unprepared amateur, or both.

Polish comes from domain knowledge, from having an intimate understanding of what people like your customers expect when they encounter something like the thing you just built. Sure, violate those expectations when they serve your needs. The rest of the time, though, it's smart to play along.

More people saying less (and a few more people saying more)

"Ditto!"

Opening the doors for the masses to speak, giving everyone who cares to have one a microphone--it has led to an explosion in people speaking. And most people, most of the time, are saying virtually nothing. Nothing worth reading, nothing worth repeating, certainly nothing worth remembering.

They're speaking, not speaking up.

But a few people...

What got you here...

Without a doubt, your hard work in test prep led to better SAT scores, which got you into college. It's not clear, though, that SAT prep skills are going to help you ever again.

I know that all those years of practicing (8 hours a day!) got you plenty of praise and allowed you to reach a high level on the bassoon. It's not clear, though, that practicing even more is going to be the thing that takes your career where you want it to go.

Of course you needed a very special set of skills to raise all that money for your company. But now, you've raised it. Those same skills aren't what you need to actually build your company into something that matters, though.

Successful people develop a winning strategy. It's the work and focus and tactics that they get rewarded for, the stuff they do that others often don't, and it works. Until it doesn't.

Sharing and celebrating your favorite authors...

One of the biggest benefits we've found in the way people use Hugdug is their ability to share the work of people they respect. Today more than ever, ideas spread horizontally, from person to person, not from the top down, not from an ad or from a talk show or from a promotion.

On a regular basis, I hand sell the work of Tom Peters, introducing his classics to people who didn't grow up with him. This one is my favorite.

The Hugdug team has hand-built some curation pages that make it easy for people to find a book they love and review and share it. Here are some authors who are doing amazing work... do you care enough to share it?

Ideas that spread, win. If you speak up about an idea or an artist you care about, the word spreads, the world changes. Find a favorite and tell someone...

The tyranny of lowest price

Lowering the price is a one-directional, single-axis choice. Either it's cheaper or it's not.

At first, the process of lowering your price involves smart efficiencies. It forces hard choices that lead to better outcomes.

Over time, though, in a competitive market, the quest for the bottom leads to brutality. The brutality of harming your suppliers, the brutality of compromising your morals and your mission. Someone else is always willing to go a penny lower than you are, and to compete, your choices get ever more limited.

The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. Even worse, you might come in second.

You could wreck this (if you want to)

Which is more satisfying: Breaking something or watching someone else break it?

When we sense a job is going wrong, it's easy to act out and make things worse... in the moment, it might feel like it's better to get fired for something we did than to get laid off.

When a partnership hits some bumps, it might be tempting to keep score, push back on everything and get ready to fight... actually causing the change that you fear.

A challenging project, employee or situation sometimes is easier to avoid than it is to work on.

"But I might get rejected"

Indeed, you might.

You might get your hopes up only to find them dashed.

You might decide on where you want to go, and then not get there.

You might fall in love with a vision of the future and then discover it doesn't happen.