EMBA的小眼睛

The perfect crime

Sometimes, marketing enables a pickpocket to steal a wallet--and be thanked for it.

Marketers are responsible for what we do, it's not an activity without effects.

Last year, just one of the big fast food companies made more than $1,300,000,000 in profit (billion with a 'b'). They've also paid their CEO nearly $200 million in salary in the last five years. Sometimes, a big profit is the sign that you're doing something right, creating real value for people able to pay. Sometimes, though, it means you're exploiting a weakness in the system.

The big food companies are brilliant, relentless, focused marketers. Marketing works. It gets people to take action, to change their minds, and most of all, to do more of what they might have had an inkling to do in the first place. Sometimes a lot more. When the ideas of marketing (and the products are part of the marketing, optimized for high consumption) are weaponized like this, they are extraordinarily effective at achieving their goals.

Perfection or exploration

In an organization built around perfection, you need to push people to say, "Bad news, I made a mistake." Only by surfacing mistakes can the organization stamp them out.

In an organization built around exploration, on the other hand, people need to say, "Good news, I made a mistake." Only by seeking things that don't work will the group end up exploring.

In both situations, people don't want to speak up, because we've been taught that mistakes should be hidden. In both situations, though, hiding them is the very worst option.

Less for less

In the long run, there are only two sustainable positions--you sell less for less or you sell more for more.

It's tempting to think that you can pull a Wal-mart and appear to deliver more for less, but that's far more rare than it appears. And the market is smart (and getting smarter) so delivering less for more, while apparently a great gig, doesn't last.

People are going to figure out what's on offer, and they're going to seek out real value. For some, that means getting a little less (less service, less quality, less panache) and paying less, or getting a lot more (more meaning, more insight, more joy) and paying a bit more.

Time to pick.

Worst one ever

Forty years ago today was my first bout of speaking in front of an audience. (And as I remember it, I approached it as a fight, not an opportunity.) I was distracted, nervous and not particularly well received.

It was an epic fail. Friends and relatives agreed that I wasn't engaged or engaging, certainly a performance not to be repeated.

I ignored the part about not repeating it, but I definitely learned some valuable lessons about confidence and engagement.

Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better, which means, of course, that (at least at first) there will be failure. That's not a problem (in the long run), it's merely a step along the way.

Almost everything I don't know about social media...

I just finished Gary Vaynerchuk's new book. It comes out next week, and I recommend you spend some time with it.

Also! Here's a list of my most popular blog posts of 2012, together with a link to a bound collection of the best of my blog and ebooks from the last seven years...

A handful of tools

Here are some online tools I've been using with a lot of satisfaction. Of course, your mileage may vary:

Feedblitz is a reliable, handmade alternative to Feedburner and other corporate solutions. They handle the email and RSS feeds to this blog, and Phil is just a pleasure to work with.

Ziggeo is the tool I used to preview thousands of applications for my summer internship. Used correctly, this is an extraordinary way to get insight on a large number of people in a very short period of time. I could see it being a great screening device for anyone running ads on Craigslist, for example.

Typepad hosts this blog, and always has. People ask me why I don't switch, and my simple answer: it's not broken. I like having a service I can pay for, because when you buy something, you're the customer, not the product.

In search of the obvious answer

The obvious answer to your problem isn't obvious yet, but once someone finds it, it will be.

That's the way obvious answers work. They're not obvious because they're easy to find, they're obvious because, in fact, there's an answer.

Most problems don't have obvious answers, which is why you should demote them from the list of things worth obsessing over. Gravity, for example, is a problem with no obvious answer. You're never going to be able to fly like Superman, and the sooner you let that one go, the quicker you'll be able to work on something productive.

America's Favorite Mushroom

That's what it said on the side of the semi roaring down the highway.

Does America even have a favorite mushroom? As in, "no, I don't want those mushrooms on my pizza... they're not my favorite brand."

Empty slogans, carefully constructed brags, assertions that don't matter—this is not effective marketing.

There's no question that people respond to safety and mass acceptance. The #1 seller often stays number one merely because it's already number one. But no, you don't need to add emotion when there is none, because to do so, you often have to sacrifice trust.

The sound of a small bell during a dark night

...is louder than the din of traffic outside your window during rush hour.

Surprise and differentiation have far more impact than noise does.

Sure, but that's not a plan

The most common thing people ask me about is how to get picked, a shortcut to success, a way to spread an idea or build a platform without doing a particularly large amount of hard work.

Getting picked is fine if it happens to you. But it's not a plan. It's a version of waiting and hoping.

We're quick to claim credit for the good fortune fairy when she randomly shows up and picks us. The thing is, the good fortune fairy has to pick someone, and this time, (if you were lucky) it was you. But that's not a plan.

We can't help but amplify the stories of Hollywood and Vine, of being plucked out of obscurity, of the seventeen-year-old with talent who yes, indeed, got picked and cashed out. We blog about and talk about the one in a million YouTube viral sensation, the breakthrough that came out of nowhere overnight. But that's not a plan.

Angry is a habit

It's easy to imagine habits like a scotch after dinner, biting your nails or saying, "you know" after every sentence. An event or a time of day triggers us, and we go with the habit. It's easier than exploring new territory--it's merely a thoughtless response to an incoming trigger.

But emotions can become habits as well.

Distrustful is a habit.

Lonely is a habit.

How to draw an owl

The problem with most business and leadership advice is that it's a little like this:

How to draw an owl

The two circles aren't the point. Getting the two circles right is a good idea, but lots of people manage that part. No, the difficult part is learning to see what an owl looks like. Drawing an owl involves thousands of small decisions, each based on the answer to just one question, "what does the owl look like?" If you can't see it (in your mind, not with your eyes), you can't draw it.

There are hundreds of thousands of bullet points and rules of thumb about how to lead people, how to start and run a company, how to market, how to sell and how to do work that matters. Most of them involve drawing two circles. (HT to Stefano for the owl).

Eight email failures (and questions for those that want to do better)

A friend sent out an email blast (I hate that word, for good reason) to his ample address book to promote a new project and got a lot of blowback for it. He asked me for my feedback...

Just because you have had a previous relationship with someone doesn't mean you have permission to email them. Permission marketing is anticipated, personal and relevant messaging. The simple measure is this: Would they miss you if you didn't mail them? If not, then you're fooling yourself into thinking you have something you don't.
Blaming the tool. There are a wealth of powerful email tools out there (like Mailchimp). If your email campaign isn't working, it's almost certainly not their fault. Don't waste time looking for a better pencil--learn to write better.
Your mailmerge is broken. Dear is far worse than no mailmerge at all. Here's the simple test: if you're not willing to spend fifteen seconds per name reviewing the list and cleaning it up (why did you email me six times?), then don't expect that we have fifteen seconds to read what you wrote. If you have 4,000 names, that's 1,000 minutes. Don't have 1,000 minutes? Don't send the mail.

Trapped by tl;dr

TL;DR is internet talk for "too long; didn't read". It's also a sad, dangerous symptom of the malfunctions caused by the internet tsunami. (Here's a most ironic example of this paradox...)

The triathlete doesn't look for the coldest bottle of water as she jogs by... she wants it fast and now. That mindset, of focusing merely on what's fast, is now a common reaction to many online options. I think it works great for runners, not so well for learners.

There's a checklist, punchline mentality that's dangerous and easy to adopt. Enough with the build up, wrap this up, let me check it off, categorize it and quickly get to the next thing... c'mon, c'mon, too late, TL;DR...

Let's agree on two things:

Memo to the modern COO

Our upside-down confusion about fairness

Our society tolerates gross unfairness every day. It tolerates misogyny, racism and the callous indifference to those born without privilege.

But we manage to find endless umbrage for petty slights and small-time favoritism.

When a teacher gives one student a far better grade than he deserves, and does it without shame, we're outraged. When the flight attendant hands that last chicken meal to our seatmate, wow, that's a slight worth seething over for hours.

When Bull Connor directed fire hoses and attack dogs on innocent kinds in Birmingham, it conflated the two, the collision of the large and the small. Viewers didn't witness the centuries of implicit and explicit racism, they saw a small, vivid act, moving in its obvious unfairness. It was the small act that focused our attention on the larger injustice.

Is there a reason for the friction?

If you want to visit DisneyWorld, you'll need to buy a ticket and wait in line.

If you want to see the full moon, you can go outside and look up in the sky.

Often, we're tempted to create friction, barriers and turnstiles. We try to limit access, require a login, charge a fee... sometimes, that's because we want control, other times we believe we can accomplish more by collecting money. Clearly, people value the moments that they spend at Disney--with hundreds of dollars on the line and just a few hours to spend, there's an urgency and the feeling of an event occurring.

On the other hand, far more people look at the moon. Just about everyone, in fact.

Polishing perfect

Perfect doesn't mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do. A vacation can be perfect even if the nuts on the plane weren't warmed before serving.

Any project that's held up in revisions and meetings and general fear-based polishing is the victim of a crime. It's a crime because you're stealing that perfect work from a customer who will benefit from it. You're holding back the good stuff from the people who need it, afraid of what the people who don't will say.

Stop polishing and ship instead. Polished perfect isn't better than perfect, it's merely shinier. And late.

"Our biggest problem is awareness"

If that's your mantra, you're working to solve the wrong problem.

If your startup, your non-profit or your event is suffering because of a lack of awareness, the solution isn't to figure out some way to get more hype, more publicity or more traffic. Those are funnel solutions, designed to fix an ailing process by dumping more attention at the top, hoping more conversion comes out the bottom.

The challenge with this approach is that it doesn't scale. Soon, you'll have no luck at all getting more attention, even with ever more stunts or funding.

No, the solution lies in re-organizing your systems, in re-creating your product or service so that it becomes worth talking about. When you do that, your customers do the work of getting you more noticed. When you produce something remarkable, more use leads to more conversation which leads to more use.

Gradually and then suddenly

This is how companies die, how brands wither and, more cheefully in the other direction, how careers are made.

Gradually, because every day opportunities are missed, little bits of value are lost, customers become unentranced. We don't notice so much, because hey, there's a profit. Profit covers many sins. Of course, one day, once the foundation is rotted and the support is gone, so is the profit. Suddenly, apparently quite suddenly, it all falls apart.

It didn't happen suddenly, you just noticed it suddenly.

The flipside works the same way. Trust is earned, value is delivered, concepts are learned. Day by day we improve and build an asset, but none of it seems to be paying off. Until one day, quite suddenly, we become the ten-year overnight success.