EMBA的小眼睛

The 2% who misunderstand you
Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here.
But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is.
Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much.

For less than it's worth
The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost.
The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated:
Believe, worth and cost.

For less than it's worth
The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost.
The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated:
Believe, worth and cost.

Another chance to start over
Every day that you begin with a colleague, a partner, a customer... it might was well be a fresh start.
There's little upside in two strikes, a grudge, probation. When we give people the benefit of the doubt, we have a chance to engage with their best selves.
If someone can't earn that fresh start, by all means, make the choice not to work with them again. Ask your customer to move on, recommend someone who might serve them better.

Shouting into the wind
Anything worth shouting about is worth shouting into the wind.
Because if enough people care, often enough, the word spreads, the standards change, the wind dies down. If enough people care, the culture changes.
It's easy to persuade ourselves that the right time to make change happen is when it's time. But that's never true. The right time to make it happen is before it's time. Because this is what 'making' means.

The patina of books and the magic thrill of a new idea
Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you've collected one by one over the years, the changes you've made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share.
Every bookshelf tells a story. You can't build one in a day or even a week... it's a lifetime of collected changes. On the shelf over there I see an Isaac Asimov collection I bought when I was 12, right next to a yet-to-be-published galley by a friend of mine. Each of them changed my life.
It's thrilling to juxtapose this look backwards with the feeling I get when a great new book arrives. It hasn't been read yet (at least not by me) and it it offers unlimited promise, new possibilities and perhaps the chance to share it with someone else after I'm done.

Ad blocking
By most accounts, more and more people are automatically blocking the ads in their browser.
Of course, people have been blocking ads forever. By ignoring them.
Fifteen years ago, when I began writing about Permission Marketing, I pointed out that when ads are optional, it's only anticipated, personal and relevant ones that will pay off.

Special orders
You can look forward to them, the weirder the better.
Or you can push customers to make them as uncustom and unspecial as possible, because, of course, these are easier to handle.
If you embrace special orders, you're doing something difficult, scarce and worth seeking out.

On doing your best
It's a pretty easy way to let ourselves (or someone else) off the hook. "Hey, you did your best."
But it fails to explain the improvement in the 100-meter dash. Or the way we're able to somehow summon more energy and more insight when there's a lot on the line. Or the tremendous amount of care and love we can bring to a fellow human who needs it.
By defining "our best" as the thing we did when we merely put a lot of effort into a task, I fear we're letting ourselves off the hook.

Rearranging our prejudices
Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.
Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.
It's also the only place to start.