Most of the time, particulary in b2b and luxury sales, the competition is nothing. “I will buy this treat or I will buy nothing, because I don’t really need anything.” “I will buy your consulting services, or I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now on that front, which is nothing.” None of the above
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Better than nothing (is harder than you think)
Six months ago, I put together a workbook that would help Linchpin readers ship. After testing it out on hundreds of people, it’s now ready for retail sale. [ UPDATE on 9/2--yesterday, the workbook was so popular it went to the top 10 of all books on Amazon
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Launching the ShipIt Workbook
Autism is a top news story causing debates in health care, education, childhood development and scientific research, but it’s a condition that’s been affecting people for possibly centuries. While experts argue over the causes of autism, other researchers are speculating over certain cases that may mean some of history’s brightest thinkers were autistic at some level
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30 Famous Thinkers Believed to Be Autistic
“I’ll be out of bed in five minutes,” is not a true statement because it’s a promise not meant to be kept. It actually means, “go away, I’m sleeping, I’ll say what I need to get rid of you.” “Your call is very important to us,” is not a true statement either. The truth is self-evident
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Little lies and small promises
Critics and fans, passersby and the media crave a battle, a scandal and heroic stories of winning and losing. Want to get written up on a tech blog? Just post a really angry rant about your competition
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Drop everything, we need you to perform in our circus
One approach to innovation and brainstorming is to wait for the muse to appear, to hope that it alights on your shoulder, to be ready to write down whatever comes to you. The other is to seek it out, will it to appear, train it to arrive on time and on command.
It’s easy to think of celebrities as people who luck into careers and wealth, but the truth is far more interesting: Most of the famous people you know started out working hard in school, pursuing other passions before becoming famous or else returning years later to complete the schooling they’d missed in the first place.
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25 Celebs Who Have Graduate Degrees
If you work out on a weight machine that has a limit–where you have to push the bar until it stops–you’re far more likely to to hit that limit than if you had left it to your own initiative to figure out how far is far enough. People enjoy going to the max (or in the case of Spinal Tap, a little farther than max, to 11). But if there is no max, no limit, it’s much easier to satisfy yourself and declare that you’ve done enough
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The problem with unlimited
Defenders of the status quo at newspapers, book publishers and the magazine industry are in a panic. Some are even misguidedly asking for government regulation or a bailout. All three industries are doomed (if doomed means that they will be unrecognizable in ten–probably three–years).
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But who will speak for the trees?
Click to listen or Download mp3 In May, I did a talk for the Independent Book Publishers ( site ). The link above gives you a free and slightly abridged recording of the talk, probably of interest if you are focused on how industries are making (or not) the shift to the new rules of a digital age.
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The new dynamics of book publishing
Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. “I see you.” “Hello.” “Greetings.” Then, we moved on to, “how are you?” or even, “how’s business?” Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, “please list everything going on in your life that isn’t as perfect as it should be.” In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions
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Is everything perfect?
The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you can be worth more than the item itself. Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model
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Information about information
Not sure why you would want to reinforce the noise in your head that tells you not to speak up, stand out and do work that matters, but if you do, a surefire way to do it is to focus your attention on every piece of negative feedback in your environment. Or to imagine every possible disaster that could befall you, and to do it repeatedly. Or to carefully study anonymous comments, tweets and online reviews from people who don’t like the work you’re doing
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Amplifying the lizard brain
Many of this blog’s readers live in India, but I’ve never been able to do a live event there. Today I’m excited to announce that I’m doing a benefit for Acumen Fund on July 7 in Hyderabad India. All proceeds go to Acumen Fund.
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Benefit event/help wanted in Hyderabad, India
When Blythe and her partners started Lula’s Apothecary , the best vegan ice cream stand in this hemisphere, they didn’t have enough money to afford the letters to put “Dairy free” on the sign in their window. They couldn’t even afford “vegan.” So the signage says nothing about what they don’t put in their ice cream. What they discovered was that word among the tribe of vegans in the East Village of New York City (an even bigger group than you might imagine) spread fast.
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Lula’s logic
And this is the problem with just about every lame speech, every overlooked memo, every worthless bit of boilerplate foisted on the world: you write and write and talk and talk and bullet and bullet but no, you’re not really saying anything. It took me two minutes to find a million examples. Here’s one, “The firm will remain competitive in the constantly changing market for defense legal services by creating and implementing innovative and effective methods of providing cost-effective, quality representation and services for our clients.” Write nothing instead
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But you’re not saying anything
Not just my head, but your customer’s head and yes… yours. Everyone has multiple conversations and priorities going on, competing agendas that come into play every time we make a choice about doing, buying, creating or interacting
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Is this noise inside my head bothering you?
Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.
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But what have you shipped?
It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations. If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d rather see something else. I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections: Truth Assertions Alternatives People Money The truth section describes the world as it is.
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The modern business plan
In most fields, there’s an awful lot of work put into the last ten percent of quality. Getting your golf score from 77 to 70 is far more difficult than getting it from 120 to 113 or even from 84 to 77. Answering the phone on the first ring costs twice as much as letting it go into the queue
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Hardly worth the effort