EMBA的小眼睛

Two kinds of loyalty

The first kind of loyalty is the loyalty of convenience.

I'm going to look around, sure, but probably won't switch. Switching is risky, it's time consuming. Switching means a new account manager or moving my software or reprinting something. Switching means I might make a mistake or lose my miles or have to defend a new decision.

Corporations are getting ever better at building this sort of loyalty.

Then there's the other kind of loyalty. This is the loyalty of, "I'm not even looking."

Entrepreneurship => impact

Innovation is something else entirely. Many entrepreneurs use an innovation to make an impact, but the hard part, the part that we're rewarded for, is engaging with the user, the audience, the market. Bringing something to people who didn't think they wanted it, know about it or initially welcome it, and make a difference.

One reason it's so difficult to teach entrepreneurship is that we're not teaching tactics or skills. We're not teaching spreadsheets or finance or even marketing. No, when we encourage entrepreneurship, we're actually trying to get people to the place where they care enough and where they are confident enough to stand up and try to make things change.

Don't tell me what you invented. Tell me about who you changed.

"How deep is this water?"

If it's over your head, does it really matter?

At some point, when the stakes are high enough and your skills and desires are ready, you will swim.

And when you swim, who cares how deep the water is?

[You might find that deeper water is actually calmer and easier to swim in...]

But it only works sometimes

A glimpse is often more compelling than a certainty. For a minute or two, the drum solo on Monk's Dream is totally and completely alive. It even makes the neighbor's dog turn his head and stare at the speakers.

If all recorded music sounded this good all the time, it would lose its magic for me. I certainly wouldn't spend hours trying to get my stereo just right (one more time).

Word of mouth comes from intermittent delight. Things that work all the time are harder to talk about.

Random reinforcement drives people to focus their attention and effort, because it's worth sifting through many to find the one that's worth it.

Patrons and assistants wanted

Wouldn't it be great if you had a patron who would pay for you to have the time to be your best creative self?

And assistants to worry about all the details of your messy life?

This is the business school model of success. The industrial age taught executives that patrons (bosses, shareholders, large banks) would pick us and pay us, and that workers (cogs, assistants, functionaries) would do what we told them to do. All you had to do was find the first and you could hire the second.

Victims of the Hollywood Paradox

The studios spend ever more on the blockbusters they make because that demonstrates their power and pays everyone in the chain more money, which creates more (apparent) power for those in charge.
But since they pay so much, they have no choice, they think, but to say, “This must work!” So they polish off the edges, follow the widely-known secret formula and create banality. No glory, it seems, with guts.

Every meeting is about avoiding coming anywhere near the sentence, "this might not work," and instead giving ammunition to the groupthink belief that this must work.

And as soon as you do that, you’ve guaranteed it won’t.

#BlackFriday = media trap

Black Friday was a deliberate invention of the National Association of Retailers. It was not only the perfect way to promote stores during a super slow news day, but had the side benefit of creating a new cultural norm.

Any media outlet that talks about Black Friday as an actually important phenomenon is either ignorant or working hard to please their advertisers. Retailers offer very little in the way of actual discounts, they expose human panic and greed, and it's all sort of ridiculous if not soul-robbing.

Sixteen years ago, my friend Jerry Shereshewsky helped invent 'cyber Monday' as a further expansion of the media/shopping complex mania. It was amazingly easy to find people eager to embrace and talk about the idea of developing yet another holiday devoted to buying stuff.

Here are some of the steps involved in creating a marketing phenomena like this:

The truth about the war for talent

Does anger follow the laws of thermodynamics?

I have no idea what caused the guy in front of me in traffic to be having a bad day.

Maybe he has a stressful meeting coming up, or his butler burned his bacon at breakfast. Maybe he's having trouble paying his rent, or his industry is under seige. All I know is that he's weaving in and out, giving people the finger and yelling at other cars, all at the same time.

Unlike cupcakes, anger isn't conserved.

The conservation of drama

Marketing good...

or good good?

Marketing good is the McMansion that looks good at an open house but isn't particularly well built or designed for actual living.

Marketing good is the catalog of gimcracks and doodads that entices the casual shopper but sells stuff that ends up in a closet.

Marketing good is the cover of a magazine decreed by the number crunchers in the newsstand sales group, not the editors and the readers they care about.

Understanding critical path

The longest string of dependent, non-compressible tasks is the critical path.

Every complicated project is the same. Many people working on many elements, some of which are dependent on others. I want a garden, which means I need grading, a bulldozer, a permit, seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, weeding, planting, maintenance and time for everything to grow. Do those steps in the wrong order, nothing happens. Try to grow corn in a week by giving it a bonus or threatening to fire it, nothing happens...

Critical path analysis works backward, looking at the calendar and success and at each step from the end to the start, determining what you'll be waiting on.

For example, in your mind's eye, the garden has a nice sign in front. The nice sign takes about a week to get made by the sign guy, and it depends on nothing. You can order the sign any time until a week before you need it. On the other hand, you can't plant until you grade and you can't grade until you get the delivery of soil and you can't get the delivery until you've got a permit from the local town.

Who is this marketing for?

Before you spend a minute or a dollar on marketing, perhaps you could answer some questions:

Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?
What change are you trying to make?
How will you know if it's working?

Q&A What's the problem with weird?

Every day is an investment

You're not lucky to have this job, they're lucky to have you. Every day, you invest a little bit of yourself into your work, and one of the biggest choices available to you is where you'll be making that investment.

That project that you're working on, or that boss you report to... worth it?

Investing in the wrong place for a week or a month won't kill you. But spending ten years contributing to something that you don't care about, or working with someone who doesn't care about you... you can do better.

Innumeracy and the power of choice

This video about income distribution in the USA is extraordinary. First, because it's so well produced, well researched and calm. Second, because it does a beautiful job of making statistics come to life. There's a story behind the numbers, and the producers bring the story to life.

There are two lessons to be learned about communicating about (as opposed to with) numbers here:

As the data from the Harvard study shows, people are incredibly, almost willfully, bad at visualizing and understanding anything beyond really simple distributions.
Giving people the appearance of choice, "if you could organize this, how would you," is a significantly better question than, "what's fair?" By reminding people that they actually do have a voice, you open the discussion wider.

The opposite of 'defenseless'

It might be defended, or defensive.

If you're asking for feedback or coaching or an education, neither is going to help you very much.

The person who has ideas that are well defended isn't going to be able to listen carefully for the lessons that can help him change those ideas.

And the person who is defensive not only won't hear the ideas, but he'll push away anyone generous enough to share them.

Q&A: All Marketers... and the challenge of telling the right story

Is Google jumping the shark?

Ron Howard explained that while they were shooting the notorious episode where Fonzie jumped the shark, he knew the show had turned a corner. In the case of Happy Days, the corner was the chasing of ratings at the cost of integrity. In the case of corporations, the corner is usually the chasing of profit at the expense of the original mission.

These places don't run out of creativity. You don't jump the shark because you're empty, you do it because there's pressure to be greedy.

Google has been found to have hacked and stolen user data, circumventing privacy settings. They've recently announced that without asking first or sharing the upside, they may be selling the names and faces of people who use Google + to advertisers, to be included in endorsement ads. People expressing themselves online might soon find themselves starring in ads as unpaid, unwilling endorsers.

How does this happen? Public companies almost inevitably seek to grow profits faster than expected, which means beyond the organic growth that comes from doing what made them great in the first place. In order to gain that profit, it's typical to hire people and reward them for measuring and increasing profits, even at the expense of what the company originally set out to do.

Decoding "art"