If you’ve got a pretty good job (and I assume you do) that probably means that you get to do a fair amount of self-management. If you’re installing eyelets at a Nike factory, they measure your output to the tenth of a second. I’m not talking about that. I’m writing this for people who are given the freedom to solve problems or create opportunities at work.
Like most things, there’s a spectrum of approaches. In this case, I think the two ends of the spectrum are an approach of Abundance and an approach I call Technically Beyond Reproach (TBR).
Abundance means that you look at every problem spec and figure out how to make it bigger.
TBR tries to make it smaller.
Abundance means that you spend a lot of time imagining how you will overdeliver.
TBR means you start from the beginning making sure that the work you do will either meet spec or you’ll have a really good excuse.
Entrepeneurs have a hard time with the TBR approach, because it has never ever worked for them. VCs and customers and competitors give few bonus points for excuses, even really good ones, so the only approach that wins is the abundance one.
An abundant-approach employee shows up early so she won’t need the "train was late" excuse on the day of the presentation. The TBR employee gets a note from the Metro. (true story).
An abundant-approach minister grows his church from 200 families to 3,000 by constantly reinventing what he does all day. A TBR minister does a very good job of consoling the sick and writing sermons.
Is there something wrong with the TBR approach? It depends what you want. If you want to grow, TBR won’t get you there. (The Purple Cow was not about being garish or outlandish. It was, I know realize, about thinking abundantly). Yes, I probably want my airline pilot to be TBR, at least most of the time. But no, not the chef at the restaurant.
There are whole industries built around TBR thinking. The wedding business for example, charges extra so the bride and her mom will be blameless. The "top" colleges offer an expensive degree that is also beyond reproach, "Hey, it’s not my fault… I paid my dues, went to a great school…"
The fascinating thing about the transparency of the Net is that it makes it easy to measure the differences between the two approaches. There are a bazillion blogs, and technorati makes it easy to see which ones have popped. And those are? Those are the ones that didn’t follow the blogging manual, that didn’t diligently do what they were supposed to do, but instead, they were run with an abundance mindset. The blogger chose to answer a bigger question, in a bigger way.
I think what it comes down to is the first question you ask yourself when you see an opportunity or a challenge.
Is it, "How can I make this bigger, do it faster and change the outcome for all of us?"
or is it
"If this doesn’t work, will I get in trouble or will I be okay?"
October 6, 2005
Link: OnlyOnce: Book Shorts
It has some great reminders about how easy and inexpensive it can be to be remarkable in business. Wisdom like "Criticism? Internalize it," and "Get great ideas about your business from new employees," and "How would you run your business if you relied on donations from your customers in order to survive?" are all insightful and thought provoking.
Well, the slide has been viewed more than 18,000 times so far, but here are some highlights in text:
Tim O’Reilly, in summarizing a brainstorming session at Foo, lists the following attributes of a classic Web 2.0 company:
Attitude, not technology
The Long Tail
Data is the "intel inside"
Hackability
Perpetual Beta
Right to Remix (some rights reserved)
Software that gets better the more people use it
Emergent user behavior not predetermined
Play
Granular addressability of content
Rich user experience
Small pieces loosely joined (web as components)
Trust your users
This is by no means a complete list, but it represents a way to think about what you build online (and, imho, offline as well.) And it reminds me of big thinkers like David Weinberger and Lisa Gansky. Web 2.0 isn’t new, but it’s now.
October 5, 2005
Another review of The Big Moo. Blogcritics.org: Review: The Big Moo. (second in a series.)
The book does what it sets out to do: motivate the reader to get out there to put ideas to work to develop a remarkable organization that gets everyone buzzing.
October 4, 2005
Aaron points us to Amazon.com: Music: Ocean’s 12 [SOUNDTRACK].
Notice that the soundtrack has 71 reviews… and that the best loved review has 588 positive votes.
And that almost all the reviews are about a song that isn’t even on the album!
Every day for the next couple weeks, I’m going to feature a blogged review of The Big Moo. So, the easiest way to get on my blog, if that’s your life dream, is to write a review and send me the link. The book is by 33 of us and all author proceeds go to charity, so I’m breaking my blog rule and actually flogging something on my blog. But gently.
We’ll start at at the top with a review from the president of the biggest business book seller in the US: 800-CEO-READ Blog: Jack Covert Selects: The Big Moo.
You need to read all the stories. Some of my favorites are “Tuesday with Shecky: a Play in Three Jokes” and “Panic at Inappropriate Times” which contains one of my favorite last lines, “Panic early, not late, and your fire drills will actually pay off.” I believe in this book enough to issue my second “I guarantee you will like this book or your money back” promise. I know I’ll be rereading this book.
"Six kinds of cereal isn’t enough?"
I can hear your grandmother now.
Of course it’s enough. Six varieties of cereal is more than enough to cover our breakfast needs.
But what about our wants? Our fancy? Our desire to be overwhelmed with specialness?
Here’s a hotel, working hard to turn the most profitable meal of the day (breakfast, by a longshot) into something even more profitable.
They get pretty good turnover. The cereal is sealed. So why offer only six choices as part of the $17 "buffet"? Why offer just one kind of tea? One kind of bread that you toast yourself?
The cost of offering 40 kinds of cereal is close to zero. The cost to offering 100 kinds of tea is about the same. No, we don’t need it, but we don’t need to eat in the hotel either. And yes, you’d be sure to tell people about it. "Hey, you know what I had for breakfast? A mixture of Cap’n Crunch, Quisp (who knew they even made Quisp any more! and Honeycomb!! And I had it with chocolate soymilk and M & Ms on top."
You get to be a kid again for less than twenty bucks.
Of course, once everyone starts using variety as a tool to be remarkable, it won’t be remarkable any more. But for now, and for a while to come, buy more cereal.
October 3, 2005
The folks at eComXpo have been incredibly flexible about dealing with my travel schedule this week. My talk online is now scheduled for Friday, October 7 at 10:20 CST. This, as far as I can tell, is 8:20 am in Arizona and California and 11:20 in New York and 4:20 in London, UK, because they are still on British Summer Time.
Remind me one day to tell you the amazing history of time zones.
Anyway, find out details, free tickets, etc. at: Seth’s Blog: Live online. You’ll need fast access, IE and a PC.
Via boingboing, here’s the movie West Side Story, remixed.
Link: westsidestorytrailer_small.mov
What could you remix?
October 1, 2005
