Seth Godin
The theory of the case
Here's a way to get more strategic.
Instead of arguing for a course of action based on the status quo or your emotional gut, describe the theory of the case.
A is true.
B is true.
If we do C, then A and B should permit us to get D.
The method of this strategic analysis is that you expose your assumptions, you describe your actions and your posit the results. This permits your teammates to supply facts that might change your analysis.
Wait, A isn't true.
Wait, we're not capable of doing C.
Wait, if we did C, it's not clear we would get D. Tell us how that would work...
This is far more useful than saying, "I hate you, you're an idiot." By making your assumptions and logic clear, you allow a more productive conversation to take place at the same time get buy in from your teammates who might be coming from a different worldview than you do.
Even better, you can then weave the case into a story, a vivid one that resonates.
If any of your steps involve doing something that's never been done before, you'll know where you need to focus your energy.
Too often, people fixate on a result they want and presume that if they just try really hard (with good intent) then maybe it'll happen.
PS if one of the steps is, "and then a miracle happens," you probably need to work on your case a bit.
The non-optimized life
The non-optimized life
When you measure an activity, you can improve it. Computers make it easy to optimize just about every portion of your life.
Surely, you can optimize a website or a blog for traffic. You can optimize ads to make them yield more results. You can optimize your presentation style to close more sales or change more minds. You can optimize your workout to get faster and stronger. You can optimize your diet to lose weight and gain muscle. You can optimize your sleeping patterns to get more rest in less time. Cosmo even says you can optimize your sex life...
And then, at some point, you realize you're spending your best energy on optimization, not on creation.
This is a fine line to walk, because of course you can optimize your creation time as well! You can develop habits to amplify your best thoughts and make it likely you'll ship work that matters. I get that. But I also worry that a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization. While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.
That's one reason I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I'd rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead.
The difference between running and managing a project
The difference between running and managing a project
If you choose to manage a project, it's pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what's happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.
If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you're on the hook. It's an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.
Running a project requires a level of commitment that's absent from someone who is managing one. Who would you rather hire, a manager or a runner?
The 200 slide solution
The 200 slide solution
The next time you find yourself on the hook for a 40 minute presentation (with slides!) consider, at least for a moment, a radical idea:
A slide every 12 seconds. 200 slides in all.
You're used to putting three or four bullet points on a slide. That's at least four distinct ideas, but more often, each of those ideas has three or four sub ideas to it. In other words, you're cramming 32 ideas on a slide, and you're sitting on that slide as you drone on and on. Perhaps you spice it up with some reveals or animated bullets, but it's still 32 ideas going stale before our eyes.
What if you blew it up? Just one word on a slide. Or, perhaps just one image (no cheesy stock please). Maybe you write, "Cheaper" on one slide and, "More durable" on the next...
Slides create action. When did you decide that the appropriate amount of action was six or twelve times every half hour?
How would your pace change if you had 200 slides? How much better would the integration of slides and talk be?
I don't honestly expect you to do your presentation with 200 slides. I'm hoping this exercise will help you realize that you might not need any slides. Or that 50 or 100 slides will pick up your energy and make your argument more coherent.
But please, don't do that presentation you did last time.
The sugar cane machine
The sugar cane machine
A small island grows sugar cane. Many people harvest it, and one guy owns the machine that can process the cane and turn it into juice.
Who wins?
The guy with the machine, of course. It gives him leverage, and since he's the only one, he can pay the pickers whatever he likes--people will either sell it to him or stop picking. No fun being the cane picker. He can also charge whatever he likes to the people who need the cane juice, because without him, there's no juice. No fun being a baker or cook.
But now, a second machine comes to the island, and then three more. There are five processors.
Who wins?
Certainly not the guy with the first machine. He has competitors for the cane. He can optimize and work on efficiency, but pretty soon he's going to be in a price war for his raw materials (and a price war for the finished product.) Not so much fun to be the factory owner.
And then! And then one cane processor starts creating a series of collectible containers, starts interacting with his customers and providing them with custom blends, starts offering long-term contracts and benefits to his biggest customers, and yes, even begins to pay his growers more if they're willing to bring him particularly sweet and organic materials, on time. In short, he becomes a master of the art of processing and marketing cane. He earns permission, he treats different customers differently and he refuses to act like a faceless factory...
Who are you?
Winning
Winning
A toddler wants what she wants, now. That's a win.
A little later, when we're more mature, we might define winning as getting what we want at the expense of someone else. I win when you lose. And yes, winning still means now, not later.
A demagogue cares so much about winning that he'd rather wreck the system itself than lose. It's okay, he believes, to root for the failure of the republic or to destroy civility or democracy if it leads to something that could be called a win.
What happens when you define a win as getting closer to someone who wants the same thing? Or when you define it as improvement over time? Or in creating trust?
What if the win is the ability to give a true gift?
BACO and your career
BACO and your career
Brian Trelstad and his team at Acumen have had great success using a metric they call BACO (the best alternative charitable option). They can compare the results of the development and investment work they do to the results that direct aid or charity would generate instead. In short: when you understand the alternative, it's far easier to not only measure your work, but value it.
If you are familiar with a great restaurant just down the street, that raises the bar for a new restaurant to get your business...
If you live in a one-company town and have but one skill, you don't have a lot of options. The boss tells you what to do and you do it. On the other hand, if you're a world-class Ruby on Rails programmer with a reputation on Stack Overflow, you have plenty of options, and as a result, your boss treats you with more respect... and you can be a lot more choosy about which projects you take on (realizing, of course, that you stake your reputation on everything you do.)
Call it your BAPO... best alternative professional option. It changes your posture when you have an option. If you've got another client more interesting or better paying than this one, you can confidently act that way--it raises the bar in the way people treat you. When St. Luke's was the hottest ad agency in the UK, they made the decision not to grow--in order to take a new client, they had to fire an old one. What do you think that did to the behavior of the current clients?
Corporations and organizations brainwashed generations of people to believe that they had no option. Go to school, go to the placement office, get a job, do what you're told. The amazing reality of our time is this is no longer true. And yet. And yet few people are developing their alternative, building an external reputation and yes, even moonlighting on the weekends. When you have the option, not only does your confidence change, your work does as well.
Validation is overrated
Validation is overrated
If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.
We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.
Feedback is important, selling is important, getting the market to recognize your offering and make a sale--all important. But there's a difference between achieving your goals and realizing your work matters.
If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy.
Do you have the right to be heard?
Do you have the right to be heard?
I'm not talking about the ability to be heard... we solved that problem a few years ago. It used to be logistically impossible to make it easy for the masses to speak up and to sort and respond to the feedback. Now, though, that part is easy.
I'm wondering whether marketers, politicians and leaders have an obligation to treat everyone's input equally. Sure, you have the right to speak, but what does it take to be listened to?
Does the CEO of HP have the obligation to listen to a loony one-share shareholder with the same attention he focuses on a significant investor? Does a consulting firm have an obligation to study every RFP that comes along?
In most situations, I'd argue, you earn the right to be heard. If there's a sick person on the plane, the doctor in 3b has the right to speak up, the hysterical person behind her does not.
So, here's a quick list of a few ways to earn that right:
- Be informed
- Be rational
- Pay your dues
- Have a platform where a lot of people can hear you
- Be an impacted constituent, not a gadfly
- Represent a tribe of people with similar concerns
- You've been right before
- You're not anonymous
- You have a previous relationship and permission to interrupt
- Listening to you earns something of value
On a tangential point for the recipients of this incoming flood of noise, you are not a punching bag. Some people will become your customer (or a prospect) merely because it gives them the power to complain. To be heard. To be paid attention to. I'm not sure you need customers like that.
A bias for scamminess
A bias for scamminess
Avoid stamps.com.
How is that a sleepy, conservative organization like the postal service ends up licensing its brand to a company that can't resist every honey pot scheme and opt out technique in the book?
I needed to send a package today and figured I'd try them out. Visited the site on my Mac, got all the way through registration, entered my card to pay for stamps and then (and only then) did I find out their software doesn't work on a Mac. Of course, they knew I was on a Mac but didn't bother to alert me early on.
Now they have my card, but hey, it's the USPS, so I trust them. Just for kicks, I call in to ask about the Mac compatibility issue. It turns out that by entering my card to pay for stamps, I've agreed to pay them $15.95 a month. Forever. And ever. Or until I notice.
I go online to cancel my account and discover that you can't cancel your account online. You have to call them. Oh. (The people on the phone are friendly, for what it's worth...)
Can you imagine this sort of thing happening at a store? Or in a sleepy government office?
They told me that they have 400,000 paying customers. I wonder how many of them are paying a monthly fee without realizing it...
Can I suggest three simple principles for ethical dealings online:
- When charging someone, tell them exactly what you're charging them for, on the page itself, not buried in a link.
- If you're billing someone monthly, send them an email every month to tell them you're doing so. If that's going to lead to people quitting, the answer isn't to avoid the email, the answer is to make your service more valuable.
- It should be as easy to quit something (even a free service) as it is to join it.
There's something about the mechanics and arms-length nature of the web that just begs companies that know better to treat people in a way that they'd be humiliated to try face to face.
