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
Sometimes (and too often) marketers work to manipulate people. I define manipulation as working to spread an idea or generate an action that is not in a person’s long-term best interest. The easiest people to manipulate are those that don’t demand a lot of information, are open to messages from authority figures and are willing to make decisions on a hunch, particularly if there’s a promise of short-term gains.
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Who is easily manipulated?
I always took the position that my boss (when I had a job) worked for me. My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way
Society makes heroes out of entrepreneurs and adventurers that tilt at windmills and succeed. Napster slays the music industry! Twitter comes out of nowhere! The thing about taking on the biggest giants is that most of the time (so often as to be all of the time if you’re willing to do some rounding) you fail. You don’t just fail at the end, you often fail long before the end
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Don Quijote didn’t ship
If you know someone who does great work, who brings passion and humanity with them instead of leaving it at the door of the factory, I’d like to help you celebrate them. Read on for three ways you can do that–fast and free. Here are the three options, from most involved to least
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Will you miss them if they leave? (Call for linchpins)
Here’s a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, every dollar you make in profit is multiplied.
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Consumer debt is not your friend
After years of reading newspapers, I’ve never seen a paper that said, “sorry, not much happened yesterday, so today’s paper is shorter than usual.” In fact, the length of the paper is virtually always driven by the number of ads, not by the amount of news (wars, elections and disasters are the exception). Editors are told how many pages of stories they can run by the publisher, who bases it on ads sold. The web, of course, doesn’t have the problem of paying for paper, so the length of a website isn’t driven by ads, it’s driven by reader attention and writer fatigue.
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All the news that fits
As mentioned before, I’m bringing my New York seminar on the road. I’ve found that people can really benefit from direct and personal interactions, and so I’m bringing the seminar to a select group of cities over the next year (more if people show up).
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Announcing first dates for the road trip (Boston, DC, MN and Chicago)
I recently bumped into David (he of Talking Heads fame) at a conference. Our paths have crossed before, we share a few friends, I’m a big fan and he uses permission marketing to sell his records now. I said “hi.” David’s eyes flashed, he turned his shoulders, muttered something and rushed away.
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David Byrne is angry with me
For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing. I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn
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The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)
The US Army reports that misuse of Powerpoint (in other words, using Powerpoint the way most people use it, the way it was designed to be used) is a huge issue. I first wrote a popular short free ebook about this seven years ago and the problem hasn’t gone away
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"Powerpoint makes us stupid"–these bullets can kill
There aren’t just a few options open to you, there are thousands (or more). You can spend your marketing money in more ways than ever, live in more places while still working electronically, contact different people, launch different initiatives, hire different freelancers..
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The paralysis of unlimited opportunity
Here’s the mistake we make in high school: We let anyone, just anyone, judge our work (and by extension, judge us.) Sue, the airheaded but long-legged girl in Spanish class gets the right to judge our appearance. Bill, the bitter former-poet English teacher gets the power to tell us if we’re good at writing.
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Who judges your work?