When we come to a fork in our personal or professional or civic life, we get to make a choice. And often that choice is easier when we have a benchmark, a model to follow.
You can decide to get an advanced degree in physics to be more like Elon. Or go to RISD to become the next Deborah Berke.
Your company can offer open books and a sense of mission to employees to become more like Askinosie. Or create a professional work environment to be more like USHG. Or choose to level up your design chops to be seen as more like Ideo.
Environmentally, who do we seek to emulate? A gas spill in Alabama that goes unreported and sickens people for a decade? Or a cleanup that leads to new jobs?
Politically, which countries do we seek to emulate? When it comes to free speech, net neutrality or the FDA or EPA, who are we trying to follow? More like or less like what outcomes?
Once we see where we're headed, in every one of these decisions, we could choose to be more like us.
To get back to first principles, to understand why we bothered showing up in the first place.
To become the one we always wanted to be.
December 11, 2017
That's the difference between saying, "what would you like me to do," and "I think we should do this, not that."
A point of view is the difference between a job and a career.
It's the difference between being a cog and making an impact.
Having a point of view is different from always being correct. No one is always correct.
Hiding because you're not sure merely makes you invisible.
December 10, 2017
Don’t hide your work
Offer help
Ask for help
Tell the truth
Upgrade your tools
Don’t hide your mistakes
Add energy, don’t subtract it
Share
If you’re not proud of it, don’t ship it
Know the rules of your craft
Break the rules of your craft with intention
Make big promises
Keep them
Add positivity
Let others run, ever faster
Take responsibility
Learn something new
Offer credit
Criticize the work, not the artist
Power isn’t as important as productivity
Honor the schedule
You are not your work, embrace criticism
Go faster
Sign your work
Walk lightly
Change something
Obsess about appropriate quality, ignore perfection
A studio isn’t a factory. It’s when peers come together to do creative work, to amplify each other and to make change happen. That can happen in any organization, but it takes commitment.
December 9, 2017
Failure (and the fear of failure) gives you a chance to have a voice….
Because failure frightens people who care less than you do.
December 8, 2017
The original kind of lazy avoids hard physical work. Too lazy to dig a ditch, organize a warehouse or clean the garage.
Modern lazy avoids emotional labor. This is the laziness of not raising your hand to ask the key question, not caring about those in need or not digging in to ship something that might not work. Lazy is having an argument instead of a thoughtful conversation. Lazy is waiting until the last minute. And lazy is avoiding what we fear.
Lazy feels okay in the short run, but eats at us over time.
Laziness is often an option, and it's worth labelling it for what it is.
December 7, 2017
For your idea to spread, your app to go viral, your restaurant to be the place, it's likely you'll need to hit critical mass.
This is a term from physics, describing the amount of plutonium you need in a certain amount of space before a nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining.
Once enough people start driving your new brand of motorcycle around town, it's seen by enough people that it becomes accepted, and sales take off from there.
Once enough people who know enough people start talking about your new app, the touchpoints multiply and organic growth kicks in.
Once enough readers read and engage with your book, it's no longer up to the bookstore to push it… people talking to people are the engine for your growth.
It's sort of the opposite of Yogi Berra saying, "No one goes there, it's too crowded." When you hit the right number of conversations, the buzz creates its own buzz, popularity and usage creates more popularity and usage.
The thing is, though, most marketers are fooling themselves. They imagine that the audience size necessary for critical mass is right around the corner, but it's actually closer to infinity. That, like a boat with a leak, you always have to keep bailing to keep it afloat. If you don't design for a low critical mass, you're unlikely to get one.
This is why most apps don't ever take off. Not because they weren't launched with enough fanfare, not because the developers didn't buy enough promotion or installs—because the r0 of virality is less than one. Because every time you add 10 users, you don't get a cycle that goes up in scale, you get one that gradually decays instead.
The hard work of marketing, then, isn't promoting that thing you made. It's in building something where the Minimum Critical Mass is a low enough number that you can actually reach it.
Facebook, one of the finest examples available, only needed 100 users in one Harvard social circle for it to gain enough traction to take the campus, and then jump to the Ivy League, and then, eventually, to you.
My book Purple Cow was seeded to about 5,000 readers. That was all the direct promotion it needed to eventually make its way to millions of readers around the world.
How many people needed to start carrying a Moleskine or selfie stick or a pair of Grados before you decided you needed one too?
Yes, of course, sometimes the route to popular is random, or accidental. And betting on lucky is fine, as long as you know that's what you're doing. But the best marketers do three things to increase their chances:
- They engineer the product itself to be worth talking about. They create a virtuous cycle where the product works better for existing users when their friends are also using it, or a cultural imperative where users feel better when they recommend it.
- They choose their seed market carefully. They focus on groups that are not only easy to reach, but important to reach. This might be a tightly-knit group (like Harvard) or a group that shares a similar demographic (like the early readers of Fast Company) or a group that's itching to take action…
- They're hyper-aware of the MCM and know whether or not they have the time and the budget to reach it.
Making your MCM a manageable number is the secret to creating a hit.
December 6, 2017
There are more truck drivers in the US than just about any other occupation.
For a long time, unionized truck drivers benefitted from work rules, healthcare, vacations, etc. It wasn't an easy job to get, but it was a career.
Companies started to realize that if they offloaded the work to freelance truckers, people with their own rigs, they could take advantage of a free market. As a result, more and more of the work ended up with independent operators, who got to be their own boss, paying for their own equipment, finding their own work. (HT)
The problem, exacerbated by the speed and power of the internet, is that there's always someone cheaper and hungrier than you are. That if you do undifferentiated work, the market will squeeze you to do it cheaper.
We get (slightly) cheaper trucking. The millions of drivers get exhausted while living right on the edge. They work too many hours, carry too much weight, burn themselves out.
And the same thing is true for anyone who signs up to be a cog in a digital marketplace. Uber drivers, freelance bottom-fishers, hard-working people cranking things out by the pound…
Any market that seems to offer an easy in to the undifferentiated will eventually squeeze them.
December 5, 2017
Most organizations think nothing of having twenty valuable employees spend an hour in a meeting that's only tangentially related to their productive output.
But if you're sitting at your desk reading a book that changes your perspective, your productivity or your contribution, it somehow feels like slacking off…
What would happen if the next all hands meeting got cancelled and instead the organization had an all hands-on read instead?
Of course, I'm biased. I think if you read Your Turn or The Dip, your work would change for the better. But I'm fine if you read any of 100 or 1,000 other books about work, the market, contributions, marketing or anything else that will help you leap.
Here are more than twenty books you might want to read at work today. You and ten co-workers reading together… it might change everything:
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Body of Work
The True Believer
Secrets of Closing the Sale
The Art of Possibility
On Self Reliance
The Coaching Habit
Software Project Survival Guide
The Mythical Man Month
Creating Customer Evangelists
The Tom Peters Seminar
Tribe of Mentors
A Beautiful Constraint
The Mesh
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Impro
To Sell is Human
The Art of Work
Do the Work
Hunch
Whiplash
Start with Why
Resonate
Web Analytics 2.0
December 4, 2017
"Follow through."
That's the advice you'll hear in golf, in tennis and in baseball. That your follow through changes everything.
But how can it? After all, the ball is long gone by the time you're done with your swing.
Here's the thing: In order to not follow through, you need to start slowing down before you're done hitting the ball. The follow through isn't the goal, it's the symptom that you did something right.
And of course, the same thing is true of that conference you run, or the customer service you provide, or the way you engage with a class or a job… if you begin slowing down before the last moment, the last moment is going to suffer.
December 3, 2017
The annual review is a waste. It's not particularly useful for employee or boss, it's stressful and it doesn't happen often enough to make much of an impact.
If you choose to, though, you can do your own review. Weekly or monthly, you can sit down with yourself (or, more powerfully, with a small circle of peers) and review how you're shifting your posture to make more of an impact.
Some of the things to ask:
What am I better at?
Have I asked a difficult question lately?
Do people trust me more than they did?
Am I hiding more (or less) than I did the last time I checked?
Is my list of insightful, useful and frightening stats about my work, my budgets and my challenges complete? And have I shared it with someone I trust?
If selling ideas is a skill, am I more skilled at it than I was?
Who have I developed?
Have I had any significant failures (learning opportunities) lately, and what have I learned?
What predictions have I made that have come to pass? Am I better at seeing what's going to happen next?
Who have I helped? Especially when there was no upside for me…
Am I more likely to be leading or following?
December 2, 2017
