EMBA的小眼睛

How do you want to die?

Let's assert that you're almost certainly not going to be the very first person to live forever.

Also worth noting that you're probably going to die of natural causes.

The expectations we have for medical care are derived directly from marketing and popular culture. Marcus Welby and a host of medical shows taught us about the heroic doctor, and more than that, about the power of technology and intervention to reliably deliver a cure.

It's not a conspiracy--it's just the result of many industries that all profit from the herculean effort and expense designed to extend human life, sometimes at great personal cost.

Hoarding information

If your project or organization depends on knowing things that other people don't know (but could find out if they wanted to), your days are probably numbered. Ask a travel agent.

Agents and brokers of any kind, in fact. Anyone who thrives when people are in the dark is in ever more danger of working in the bright light of transparent information.

Pretending that you offer the lowest price on a commodity, for example, is a lot more difficult when anyone who cares about the price can easily look it up. Fighting to keep the content of your course a secret, to pick another example, isn't sufficient when a similar course is available online. The minute real estate listings went online was the minute that it was no longer sufficient that a real estate broker merely had information about real estate listings...

Information is in a hurry to flow, and if someone comes up with a better, more direct, faster and cheaper way for information to get from one place to another, they will eliminate your reason for being.

Blueberry pancakes and battleships

The typical industrial-era organization is like a battleship. Hundreds or thousands of people onboard, and most of them are essential--but most of them aren't actually directly responsible for the work that we hired the battleship to do. Without the fuel people, the navigation team, the folks in the med corps and on and on, it doesn't work.

The battleship can go far, with impact, and change the course of history. While it has exactly one captain, it's the synchronized work of more than a million people (when you think about all the machinists and support folks back home) and it works. It does what we ask it to do.

One more thing about the people on the battleship: just about everyone has a punchlist, an itemized inventory of what they need to get done. And many of them are rewarded for doing that set of tasks more efficiently, more elegantly and with better quality than expected. Great people means the system works even better, but it's designed to survive with people who are merely good at what they do.

The typical professional services company, on the other hand, is a lot like a blueberry pancake. While there's an essential support team, the firm is all about blueberries working in parallel. Each blueberry can work independently, and sometimes they even work on projects that might have conflicting outcomes or views of the world. I don't care how many people report to you. I care about how connected and how brave you are.

Reality is not a show

The media-pundit-advertiser industrial cycle has discovered that turning life into a sporting event (with winners and losers, villians and heroes and most of all, black and white issues) is profitable.

By turning our life into a game and our issues into drama, the punditocracy and the media-industrial complex profits. And the rest of us lose.

Politics get this treatment, but so do natural disasters, poverty and even technology.

How long does it take after an event occurs before the spinning starts? And because we've seen the spinning acted out on such a large scale, we begin to do it ourselves. We create office drama that replaces the real-life nuance of difficult decisions, and we seek out wins in our personal life when life is always about compromise.

Life is full of holes

Every scrutinized historical event fails to hold up to serious inspection.

There's missing evidence. How did he get from point A to point B? Where's the document or the eyewitness or the proof?

Your future opportunities are like this as well. Even at the hottest part of the 1998 Internet run up, skeptics wanted more proof that the internet wasn't merely a waste of time. They wanted all the dots connected, and were happy to keep collecting dots until they were.

For a train to get from one city to another, it makes countless tiny leaps, crossing microscopic chasms that would easily show up if you looked closely enough. That doesn't keep you from getting there, though.

Miscommunication

The challenge of communication isn't to never miscommunicate, it's to cut down the time between the interaction and the realization that the communication didn't get through. Because the sooner we know we're not connecting, the sooner we can fix it.

Phone calls, for example, lead to less miscommunication than instructions sent by mail. A cycle of clarity is built into the medium. "Huh?" is a perfectly appropriate way to ask someone to refine a message. Conversations are more clear than marching orders, because conversations have built-in error detection and correction.

Organizations that are good at flagging the misunderstood internal messages are far more likely to move quickly, in sync, than the ones that assume that messages from on high are never to be questioned. When in doubt, ask.

How to write copy that goes viral

The best thing is to not try to write things that will go viral.

The best thing is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can't sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them.

The rest will take care of itself.

Competence vs. possibility

As we get more experienced, we get better, more competent, more able to do our thing.

And it's easy to fall in love with that competence, to appreciate it and protect it. The pitfall? We close ourselves off from possibility.

Possibility, innovation, art--these are endeavors that not only bring the whiff of failure, they also require us to do something we're not proven to be good at. After all, if we were so good at it that the outcome was assured, there'd be no sense of possibility.

We often stop surprising ourselves (and the market) not because we're no good anymore, but because we are good. So good that we avoid opportunities that bring possibility.

Self service requires information, which requires design

Consider travel as an example:

If you've arranged the flights on the monitor in order of flight time, not destination, requiring me to stop and take out my ticket, you have failed.

If you've hidden the room numbers (or given them fancy names) so that only an employee can find the right spot, you've failed as well.

The label on prescription drugs, the instructions post-doctor visit, the manual for using software or putting together furniture--if we're getting rid of service and turning it into self-service, we owe it to our newly deputized employees (our customers) to give them the tools they need to not need us.

On teaching people a lesson

You're actually not teaching them a lesson, because the people who most need to learn a lesson haven't, and won't. What you're actually doing is diverting yourself from your path as well as ruining your day in a quixotic quest for fairness, fairness you're unlikely to find.

Sure, you can shut someone down, excoriate them, sue them or refuse to let them win, but odds are they're just going to go try their game on someone else.

When you fire a customer and politely ask them to move on, you are withdrawing yourself from their trollish dance. When, instead, you focus on the good student, the worthwhile investor, the delighted vendor, you improve things for both of you. The sooner you get back to work (your work), the sooner you can move toward your best outcome, which is achieving what you set out to achieve in the first place.

The real tragedy of the person who dumps on you is that you pay twice. The second time is when you get bent out of shape trying to get even.

On adding a zero

What happens if, instead of one sales call a day, you make ten?

Or if instead of 3 freelancers working on scaling your work, you have thirty?

What happens if you add a zero in places where it feels impossible to handle... what then?

Scale isn't always the answer, but if it is, then scale. Build the systems necessary to dramatically change your impact. Halfway gets you nowhere.

How big is critical mass?

It's classified.

There's a certain mass and size of plutonium that you need to create in order to start a nuclear reaction... a reaction that tips, that spreads, that cycles out of control.

In the idea business, critical mass is minimum size of the excited audience that leads to a wildfire. People start embracing your idea because, "everyone else is..."

For every idea that spreads, it turns out that the critical mass is different. For example, if I want to start a yo-yo craze at the local elementary school, critical mass might be as small as a dozen of the right kids yo-yo-ing during lunch. In an environment that small and tightly knit, it's sufficient.

Is this spam?

If you have to ask, it probably is.

The essential truth is that spam is always in the eye of the recipient. If you think it's spam, it's spam (if you're the recipient. If you're the sender, your opinion is worthless.) I don't care what the privacy policy fine print says, if someone thinks it's spam, it is.

The best definition of permission marketing used to be messages that were anticipated, personal and relevant. If this is going to be an asset of your organization (and it should be), let's take it to the next, easily measured level: would people miss it if it didn't arrive?

Once you have people looking forward to what you have to say, no more worries about spam. You've built an asset worth owning.

Setting type used to have just one function: is it readable? Then, to save money, a new question: Can we get a lot of words on a page?

The third question, though, is the most dominant for most people making a presentation, designing a website, scoping out a logo or otherwise using type to deliver a message: How does it look?

The answer is not absolute. In some situations, some cultures, some usages, one type looks fine and another looks garish or silly or just wrong. And the reason is that whether we realize it or not, type reminds us of something we've seen before.

Here's an obvious example:

The hard parts

In an industrial setting, the obvious plan is to seek out the easy work. You're more likely to get it done with less effort and then move on. The easy customer, the easy gig, the easy assembly line.

Today, though, it's the difficult work that's worth doing. It's worth doing because difficult work allows you to stand out, create value and become the one worth choosing.

Seek out the difficult, because you can. Because it's worth it.

[An aside for entrepreneurs and anyone starting a new project: if you can't describe the hard parts, how will you focus on them? And if there are no difficulties ahead, what makes you think your project is valuable? When I meet an entrepreneur, I always ask this question first--which part of your project is hard?]

Urgency and accountability are two sides of the innovation coin

As organizations and individuals succeed, it gets more difficult to innovate. There are issues of coordination, sure, but mostly it's about fear. The fear of failing is greater, because it seems as though you've got more to lose.

So urgency disappears first. Why ship it today if you can ship it next week instead? There are a myriad of excuses, but ultimately it comes down to this: if every innovation is likely to fail, or at the very least, be criticized, why be in such a hurry? Go to some more meetings, socialize it, polish it and then, one day, you can ship it.

Part of the loss of urgency comes from a desire to avoid accountability. Many meetings are events in which an organization sits in a room until someone finally says, "okay, I'll take responsibility for this." If you're willing to own it, do you actually need a meeting, or can you just email a question or two to the people you need information from?

Thus, we see the two symptoms of the organization unable to move forward with alacrity, the two warning signs of the person in the grip of the resistance. "I can take my time, and if I'm lucky, I can get you to wonder who to blame."

Writing tip: say it backwards

If your writing feels like nothing but easily defensible aphorisms, as if you're saying things that are obvious, it's entirely possible that no one is going to eagerly keep reading. Your real estate brochure or the ad copy you've written--if it's merely posturing or bragging, better to not say it at all. We already know you think you did something great.

Consider the alternative. Say the opposite. That your condo isn't right for everyone. That your software might be overpriced. That this new model car is in fact quite difficult to use.

And then tell us why. We'd love to know how you're going to wriggle out of that. And along the way, if your story is a good one, we might even give it a try.

Getting picked (need to vs. want to)

Sure, it's fun to be picked, anointed, given social approval for what you do—the newspaper writes you up, you get invited to speak at graduation, your product gets featured on the front page of a website or blog...

The thing is, it's really difficult to get picked, and those doing the picking don't have nearly the power they used to. (Pause for a second to consider that double math problem: there are way more offerings, creators and choices, and, at the same time, an order of magnitude more media outlets, each with far less power than Oprah or Johnny ever had).

More than twenty years ago, at what he then believed was the high point of his career, Marc Maron auditioned for Saturday Night Live. Lorne wasn't impressed, nor was he kind, and Marc didn't get picked to become a cast member.

Today, of course, Marc's podcast is popular, lucrative and fun. Marc didn't get there because someone picked him, he picked himself (in fact, now he's the one getting pitched).

Lead up

What you were trained to do: wait for a good, generous, munificent, tasteful, smart boss or client to tell you what to do.

If that doesn't happen, blame the system, blame the boss, blame the client. If the work is lousy, it's the client's fault. If the boss doesn't see or understand your insight, that's his fault. You are here to serve, and if they don't get it, well, that's too bad for all concerned.

What you might consider: Lead up.

A great designer gets great clients because she deserves them. One of the ways that she became a great designer was by leading her clients to make good decisions, to have better taste, to understand her insight and have the guts to back it. That doesn't happen randomly. It happens when someone leads up.

You should buy the book

Mitch Joel is a generous and perceptive blogger. Well worth the daily read. He has a new book. You should buy it.

David Meerman Scott writes an essential blog, daily. His book is a classic. You should buy it.

Tom Asacker writes a very thoughtful blog about marketing. Worth the read. He has a new book. You should buy it, too.

Every day, Mark Frauenfelder and Cory Doctorow blog tons of goodness at Boingboing. They each have books. You should buy them and share them.