Hints are free.
You're welcome to take them and use them to do better work.
Often, the real truth is wrapped in a hint, because a direct statement is too difficult, it feels too risky. Unwrapping the hint to find the truth is a life skill.
Sometimes, you might try to take a hint when none was offered. Sometimes, we imagine that people are telling us something that they're not. If you have that experience often, it's totally okay to ask for clarification.
The rest of the time, if someone offers you a hint, take it.
(And if you're working closely with someone, it's probably worth skipping the hints and choosing to communicate with clarity instead).
April 12, 2018
You can't be thoughtful about culture without thinking about media, and you can't think about media without thinking about who's paying for it.
Advertisers (mostly) want mass. They'd like the SuperBowl, the home page of Google, the shortest route to the largest number of people. It's easier that way. It's more fun. It requires less risk.
But of course, it costs too much.
Hence data. Data's a way of getting mass, but just the mass they're hoping for. It's a way of spending less in total (but more per person) in the hope that the yield will go up. It's also the trend, and advertisers love trends.
The march toward data has been going on since the early online days, at least 1999, the dawn of internet advertising, because the internet can't be a mass medium. Too many channels, too much interaction. And as it splinters further but requires ever more money to run, the race for data is on.
In this week's Akimbo, I talk about being there at the beginning of the surveillance race, as well as the option that advertisers and the public can (surprisingly) agree on: limits. Limits give advertisers the guardrails to go back to what they actually want to do, and they give the rest of us a chance to feel safe in a non-commercialized, non-invasive space.
If we don't push for meaningful legal limits on ad encroachment, hyper-targeting and surveillance, there aren't going to be any. The ratchet will keep turning.
April 11, 2018
There’s confusion between tactics and strategy. It’s easy to get tied up in semantic knots as you work to figure out the distinction. It’s worth it, though, because strategy can save you when tactics fail.
If a tactic fails, you should consider abandoning it.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with your strategy. Your strategy is what you keep doing even after you walk away from a tactic.
A real estate broker could decide that her goal is to get more listings.
And her strategy is to achieve that by becoming the most trusted person in town.
There are then 100 tactics she can use to earn that trust. She can coordinate events, sponsor teams, host community meetings in her office, sponsor the local baseball team, be transparent about her earnings, hire countless summer interns at a fair wage, run seminars at the local library, etc. …
It doesn’t matter if one or two or five of the tactics aren’t home runs. They add up.
But if once, just once, she violates someone’s trust and expectations, the entire strategy goes out the window.
Tactics are disposable.
Strategy is for the long haul.
April 10, 2018
Solving interesting problems is the best work we can do.
It's a practice that has built the very best parts of our culture.
Solving interesting problems begins with posing them–which means being willing to speak up about what could be better before we know how to make it better.
We see these problems, all of us do. But they're easy to ignore if we're hoping for a quick win. Instead, patience and empathy define us as the humans we seek to be.
Too often we get trapped believing we need:
Certainty
Quick answers
A guarantee
If you want those three things, you're missing the path. The search for quick, guaranteed and certain results will almost always undermine the creativity you're after.
Creativity is a step on the way to making things better.
As we've built the altMBA (more than 2,000 students so far), the need for creativity has become ever more urgent.
The web is littered with easy promises and simple call & response patterns. It's antithetical to creativity. Instead, our social networks have turned us into unpaid factory workers, toiling in a giant system, one that pushes us to feel shame, to be in a hurry, to worry about nothing but the surface.
That's not where creativity comes from and that's not what creativity is for.
Possibility and responsibility are available to anyone who wants them. That could be us, any of us.
Seeing the world as it is, offering people dignity, choosing to make a difference… none of these are fast and easy paths, but we do them anyway.
Will you?
Please consider joining us for the altMBA. The work matters.
April 9, 2018
How do we work with someone who doesn't seem to care?
I have a hard time believing that people can't care. I think that they often don't see. They don't see what we see, or interpret it differently. Or if they see, they see something you don't see. But if they saw what you saw, and it was related to how they saw themselves, they'd act differently.
The gap is usually in the difficulty of getting the non-owner to see a path to happiness that comes as a result of acting like an owner. Most people are taught to avoid that feeling. Because it always comes with another feeling–the dread of responsibility.
[PS I'm told that Typepad, where this blog is hosted, is doing some technical work. As a result, publishing and uptime may be funky and unpredictable for a time. On their behalf, my apologies.]
April 8, 2018
We often have a choice: speak up or leave.
In commerce, if we don't like a brand, we leave. The always-present choice to stay or to go drives bosses, marketers and organizations to continually be focused on earning (and re-earning) the attention and patronage of their constituents.
Sometimes, instead of leaving, people speak up.
For most of my life, the biggest separation between government and economics was this distinction.
In many cases, government has generally taken the idea of exit off the table. If you don't like your country, you could consider leaving it, but that's an extraordinarily disruptive act. Not voting may express your apathy or disgust, but you're still a member of the society.
Capitalism ceases to be an efficient choice when those served have no ability to exit. For-profit prisons, for example, or cable monopolies. If you can't exit, you're not really the customer, and you are deprived, as a result, of voice.
In the case of effective government, voice is built in on behalf of those that have no ability to exit. A well-functioning representative democracy opens the door for people to be heard and action to be taken.
Suddenly, it's easier than ever for rich people to exit instead of speak up. They can wire funds (when wealth was held only in real estate, that wasn't an option, you can't take land with you) and they can live an almost post-national existence. As a result, since they're not tied down and often pay little or nothing in taxes, they're less inclined to work hard to make their place better for everyone. The same applies to private school (for the few) compared to public school (for the rest).
Voice matters.
Loyalty, then, could be defined as the emotion that sways us to speak up when we're tempted to walk away instead.
When your loyal customers speak up, how do you respond? When you have a chance to speak up but walk away instead, what does it cost you? What about those groups you used to be part of? I've had the experience several times where, when my voice ceased to be heard, I decided it was easier to walk away instead.
Voice is an expression of loyalty. Voice is not merely criticism, it might be the contribution of someone who has the option to walk away but doesn't.
In Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Albert Hirschman explains how this overlooked mechanism of the world works.
April 7, 2018
If you use Powerpoint, a few principles and tips to keep in mind when using type on a slide:
- Don't read the words. It's bad enough that people use Powerpoint as a sort of teleprompter. Much worse that you don't trust the audience enough to read what you wrote. If you want them to read the precise words, stand quietly until they do. If you want to paraphrase the words, that can work.
- But even better, remember that slides are free. You can have as many as you like. That means that instead of three bullet points (with two sentences each) on a slide, you can make 6 slides. Or more. The energy you create by advancing from slide to slide will seduce most of the people in your audience to read along to keep up. Slides that people read are worth five times more than slides that you read to them.
- Better still, don't use words. Or, at the most, one or two keywords, in huge type. The rest of the slide is a picture, which I'm told is worth 1,000 words. That way, the image burns itself into one part of the brain while your narrative is received by the other part. The keyword gives you an anchor, and now you're hitting in three places, not just one.
- When in doubt, re-read rule 1. Don't read the slides.
- Many organizations use decks as a fancy sort of memo, a leave-behind that provides proof that you actually said what you said. "Can you send me the deck?" A smart presenter will have two decks. One deck has plenty of text, but then those pages are hidden when the presentation is performed live.
- Reconsider the memo. They're underrated when it comes to educating numbers of people in an efficient way. Follow up with a test if you're worried about compliance. Live meetings attended in sync are a luxury. Don't waste them.
If you're interested, I'm happy to read this blog post to you if you want to meet me in room 6-A at 2 pm today.
[Here's the full post from 11 (!) years ago.]
April 6, 2018
Every day, we shoot for unlikely outcomes. We send out our resume, pitch our book, ask for a donation, swipe right on a social network…
There are two ways you can go:
ONE: Realize that the odds are against you, and go for volume. This means that you should spray and pray, putting as little effort into each interaction as possible, giving you the resources to have as many interactions as you can. This is hiring a virtual assistant to spam your contacts, or sending out 200 resumes, or pounding your email list again and again for orders. This is your reaction to an unfair world, in which you deal with the noise by making more noise.
TWO: Invest far more in each interaction than any rational human would advise. Do your homework. Invest more time in creating your offer than you expect the recipient will spend in replying to it. Don't personalize, be personal. Create an imbalance of effort and care. Show up. Don't spam, in any form.
The thing is, people can tell. And they're significantly more likely to give you an interview, make a donation, answer your question or do that other thing you're hoping for if you've signalled that you're actually a caring, focused, generous human.
[PS Today's the last day to sign up for The Marketing Seminar. More than a hundred days of peer-to-peer interaction designed to help you spread your ideas and make an impact.]
April 5, 2018
Well, that’s over. Google AI now sounds indistinguishable from a human. And it’ll only get more nuanced and more flexible.
It can read aloud better than you can.
Which means that anything that’s ever been written can be perfectly read to you. Which means that anything a computer figures out or computes can be delivered to you with audio quality that meets spec.
That’s what AI keeps doing… things we said were impossible.
Most of us shrugged when computers could drill holes or assemble machines with more accuracy and speed than a person can.
And we avoided the topic when we discovered that computers could read x-rays with great skill as well.
But now, it ought to make you shudder to discover that something as basic as speech is now better than the typical human’s. Any speed, fully customized, in clear tones with great pronunciation.
Once it’s done a little, it will quickly become commonplace.
And as we all know, when you do something that’s commonplace, it’s not worth that much.
The goal can’t be quality, not for people anyway. It needs to be humanity. The rough edges of caring, of improv and of connection.
If all you can do is meet spec, better be sure you can do that faster and cheaper than an AI can.
Here’s this week’s episode of Akimbo, my new podcast. Coincidentally, about quality. And rough edges.
April 4, 2018
Failure or fear of failure?
Fear or fear of fear?
Trying and failing or not trying at all?
Speaking up and not being heard, or suffering in silence?
Caring and losing, or not caring at all?
Doing or wondering?
April 3, 2018
