EMBA的小眼睛

The people who started Staples didn't do it...

because they love office supplies.

They did it because they love organizing and running profitable retail businesses. They love hiring and leasing and telling a story that converts prospects into customers. Postits are sort of irrelevant.

You shouldn't become a middle school math teacher because you love math. You should do it because you love teaching.

I hope Staples has a senior buyer who actually does love office supplies. I hope that textbooks get written by people who love, really love, the topic they're writing about. It's easy, though, to fool ourselves into believing that going up the ladder means we get to do more of the thing we started out doing.

Three kinds of advertising

Direct response ads pay for themselves (at least they do when they work). Socially acceptable paid-for interruption leads to response, and the response (a sale, generally) generates revenue and you can run the ad again. Google's business is driven by direct response advertising.

Trust ads are generally unmeasurable. "I've heard of these guys, somewhere." Without consciously realizing it, we often choose to do business with the familiar, and ads increase familiarity. Particularly the right ad that runs in the right place. This is old school advertising, the first kind that appeared on TV. This is advertising that tells a story, advertising about belief, not necessarily action.

Demand enhancement ads remind us that on a hot day, we'd like a cold drink. They are ads designed to tickle and provoke, to increase the number of people in the market for what it is you sell. This is the best kind of billboard, the one that says, "next exit."

Every once in a while, an ad does all three things, but that's a foolish thing to hope for. Budget appropriately, because the very worst thing you can do with an ad is spend too little--it will get you the same results as spending nothing.

"You can buy this from anyone, and we're anyone"

That's not going to get you very far when you sell stuff, raise money, look for a job...

What if instead, you created a reputation as the person or organization that can honestly say, "you can't get this from anyone but me?"

Clarity vs. impact

Sometimes you can have both, sure, but often, being crystal clear about categorization, topic sentences and the deliverable get in the way of actually making an impact.

If you can make change with a memo containing three bullet points, then by all means, do so.

The rest of the time, you might have to sacrifice the easy ride of clarity for the dense fog of telling stories, using inferences, understanding worldviews and most of all, engaging in action, not outlining the details. of a hypothetical interaction.

It turns out, humans don't use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it.

Asking or announcing...

When you ask someone if they would use your new product, buy your new widget or participate in your new service once it's ready, you will get a lie in response.

It might be a generous lie ("sure, I love this") or it might be a fearful lie ("here are the six reasons I would never use this"). The fearful lies cause us to scale back, to shave off, to go for mediocre. And the generous lies push us to launch stuff that's just not very good.

People don't mean to mess you up, but you've made the error of asking them to imagine a future they have trouble imagining. It's incredibly different than asking them to justify what they already do. "Why did you buy that particular car?" queries a completely different part of the brain than, "would you buy this new kind of car?"

Imagine the early focus groups for an early modern car. "Why does the transmission say 'd' instead of 'f'? F means forward!" "Why doesn't the window work the way the windows in my house work?" "There should be a lot of warnings on this thing, it could kill someone." "There's a radio? Why don't you make the car good at just one thing..."

The benefit of the doubt

Wouldn't it be nice if your work stood on its own?

That design, that bit of writing, that piece of craft--what if what you did was judged solely on the merits, if the people engaging with your work saw it for precisely what it was...

Or consider the doctor, able to heal people merely by providing precisely the right treatment on just the right day.

To be seen

A recent article outlines how NFL cheerleaders are paid less than minimum wage, disrespected and treated quite poorly. So why do they put up with this lousy behavior?

In many ways, the appeal is an extension of what we were taught in high school. To be seen, to be noticed, to be picked. Even more than that, it's part of the human condition: To be part of something, in a small way, to matter.

Despite the obvious inequity of working for free for billionaires to celebrate players paid millions on behalf of advertisers earning even more, despite the conditions and the insults, people keep trying out to be picked by the team. For now.

The shift that's happening due to the long-tail open nature of new media, though, is that it's easier than ever to pick yourself and to be seen (even if it's not on national TV). It's easier than ever to start your own dance troupe, to build a group that will travel to cheer enthusiastically, for hire. It's easier than ever for anyone to be seen in videos or heard in podcasts or read online.

Who says go?

You can pretty easily find people who will work with you or for you or advise you if you tell them what you want to do, if you are the person who says, "let's go."

It turns out that finding the employee/partner/consultant who says, "this is what we should do, follow me," is rare and precious. More valuable than just about anything that's printed on a resume.

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.

Small differences, looming large

As we get more technologically advanced, more civilized and more refined, differences get smaller.

The Nikon SLR was in a different universe than the Instamatic. Just about anyone could instantly see the differences between pictures taken with these cameras. Taking pictures for online use with the Sony RX1 and the 80% less Canon pocket camera--not so much.

The rough peasant wine available on your table at a local restaurant was a totally different experience than a vintage Burgundy. Thirty years after that vacation, it's pretty tough (in a blind tasting) to tell the difference between a bottle that costs ten dollars at the local store and one that costs $200...

The speed difference between a Mac IIfx and a Commodore 64 was no contest. One was for professionals, one was a game for kids. Today, there's no dramatic functional difference for most users between the speed of the cheap Android tablet and the Mac Pro.

Set a date

If you haven't announced a date, you're not serious.

Pick a date. It can be far in the future. Too far, and we'll all know that you're merely stalling. A real date, a date we can live with and a date you can deliver on.

If your project can't pass this incredibly simple test, it's not a project.

Deliver whatever it is you say you're working on on the date you said you would, regardless of what external factors interfere. Deliver it even if you don't think it's perfect. You picked the date.

Why drafting works

The other day, a speedster on a bike passed me as I rode along the bike path. For the next ten minutes, I rode right behind him, drafting his progress.

Sure, there's an aerodynamic reason that this works--there's less wind resistance when you ride closely.

But the real reason is mental, not based on physics. Drafting works because, right in front of you is proof that you can go faster.

Without knowing it, you do this at work every day. We set our pace based on what competitors or co-workers are doing. One secret to making more of an impact, then, is figuring out who you intend to follow. Don't 'pace yourself,' instead, find someone to unknowningly pace you.

What's on your agenda (a summer seminar)

If you're about to leap, working on something important and generous, perhaps it makes sense to come to my office for a week this summer.

I'm hosting a seminar for 15 people in late July. You can find out all the details right here.

It's for people early in their career, people with a proven track record of standing up and picking themselves, of doing work that matters. Tuition is free.

Applications are due right away.

Speedometer confusion

The number on the speedometer isn't always an indication of how fast you're getting to where you're going.

You might, after all, be driving in circles, really quickly.

Campbell's Law tells us that as soon as a number is used as the measurement for something, someone will get confused and start gaming the number, believing that they're also improving the underlying metric, when, in actuallity, they're merely making the number go up.

Here are a few numbers that often the result of speedometer confusion:

The problem with hit radio

When you only listen to the top 40, you're letting the crowd decide what you hear.

And if you consume nothing but the most liked, the most upvoted, the most viral, the most popular, you've abdicated responsibility for your incoming. Most people only read bestselling books. That's what makes them bestsellers, after all.

The web keeps pushing the top 40 on us. It defaults to 'sort by popular,' surfacing the hits, over and over.

Mass markets and math being what they are, it's likely that many of the ideas and products you consume in your life are in fact, consumed because they're the most popular. It takes a conscious effort to seek out the thing that's a little less obvious, the choice that's a little more risky.

Cognitive load

While reading this sentence, hum your favorite pop tune while writing down the first 15 prime numbers, in order.

Those are three tasks, easy to do separately, basically impossible to do at the same time. If you try, you'll just end up slicing each one into little bits and alternating, almost certainly decreasing the speed and quality of work of each.

Cognitive load slows us down, distracts us and diminishes the quality of the work we do.

We can certainly handle some distraction, in fact, in many cases, a little distraction actually makes things better. Going for a walk, for example, can prompt better ideation than sitting in a dark, silent room might.

The generosity boomerang

Here's conventional wisdom:

Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous.

In fact, it actually works like this:

Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful.

Thanks, Jack

Jack Covert is retiring tomorrow. You can see some of his work here and here and here.

Jack Covert is one of the most important people in my little village of book publishing, a single individual outside the normal circles of New York, someone who cares and does something about it.

Jack Covert relentlessly sees possibility when other people are ready to shrug their shoulders and walk away.

Jack Covert is a role model for all the people who care. Not just who do their job, but who actually show up, every single day, eager to make a difference, eager to connect, eager to find something special.

"How do I get rid of the fear?"

Alas, this is the wrong question.

The only way to get rid of the fear is to stop doing things that might not work, to stop putting yourself out there, to stop doing work that matters.

No, the right question is, "How do I dance with the fear?"

Fear is not the enemy. Paralysis is the enemy.

 Tribal organizing (right and wrong, slow and fast)

Where do community organizers fall off the rails?

Crisis—They communicate to their audience with invented urgency. Everything is an emergency, a crisis that must be dealt with now, or it's all over. This boosts short-term response, of course, but destroys attention and trust. The boy shouted wolf, but the villagers didn't come.

Cash—They fundraise. All the time. Everything that isn't a crisis is a pitch for money, or sometimes it's both. They justify this by pointing out that without money, the other other side will win.

Cliffs—Most pernicious of all is a focus on today, not tomorrow. One campaign manager said to me, "I don't care a bit about what happens to this list a week from now. If we don't win the election, it doesn't matter. Burn em if you need to, we go out of business on election day." What a selfish, antisocial, cynical way to view the world.