The Cowen Group reminds me of this piece I wrote about five years ago:
I just got back from lunch with my friend Doug Jacobs.
Doug just got another promotion. He works for a software company in Indiana, and over the last 14 years, he’s had a wide range of jobs. For the first seven or eight years, Doug was in business development and sales. He handled the Microsoft account for a while, flying to Redmond, Washington, every six weeks or so. It was hard on his family, but he’s really focused — and really good.
Two years ago, Doug got a huge promotion. He was put in charge of his entire division — 150 people, the second-biggest group in the company. Doug attacked the job with relish. In addition to spending even more time on the road, he did a great job of handling internal management issues.
A month ago, for a variety of good reasons, Doug got a sideways promotion. Same level, but a new team of analysts report to him. Now he’s in charge of strategic alliances. He’s well-respected, he’s done just about every job and he makes a lot of money.
So, of course, I told him to quit.
“You’ve been there a long time, my friend.”
Doug wasn’t buying it: “Yes, I’ve been here 14 years, but I’ve had seven jobs. When I got here, we were a startup, but now we’re a division of Cisco. I’ve got new challenges, and the commute is great –”
I interrupted him before he could go on. I couldn’t help myself.
Doug needs to leave for a very simple reason. He’s been branded. Everyone at the company has an expectation of who Doug is and what he can do. Working your way up from the mailroom sounds sexy, but in fact, it’s entirely unlikely. Doug has hit a plateau. He’s not going to be challenged, pushed or promoted to president. Doug, regardless of what he could actually accomplish, has stopped evolving — at least in the eyes of the people who matter.
If he leaves and joins another company, he gets to reinvent himself. No one in the new company will remember young Doug from 10 years ago. No, they’ll treat Doug as the new Doug, the Doug with endless upside and little past.
Let’s look at it from the perspective of evolution: Species that evolve the fastest are the ones that don’t mate for life. By switching mates, swapping genes with someone new, you continually reshuffle the gene pool, making it more likely you’ll create something new and neat and novel and useful.
Our parents and grandparents believed you should stay at a job for five years, 10 years or even your whole life. But in a world where companies come and go — where they grow from nothing to the Fortune 500 and then disappear, all in a few years — that’s just not possible.
Here’s the deal, and here’s what I told Doug: The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable. Go. Switch. Challenge yourself; get yourself a raise and a promotion. You owe it to your career and your skills.
No word back from Doug yet. How about you?
[this is post #1505 for my blog (I missed the milestone earlier in the week.) No plans to quit any time soon, I’m afraid].
June 21, 2006
I got a cold call on my cell phone yesterday. Someone was looking for me, trying to sell me something. Typical cost of a call like this (not from a boiler room)–perhaps $100 when you add it all up.
When I explained to the person what I did and where I did it, she realized that I had no interest at all in what she had to sell and politely hung up.
She followed up by email asking for a referral and I asked her why she didn’t Google me before calling. Her answer, (ellipses are hers) "It depends… you came recommended by more than one source (confidentially). If I trust someone I make the call right away… if someone is interested in talking, then I dig deeper."
So, it’s okay to waste my time (and by extension, hers) and she’ll do some research after she’s got a warm lead.
Ouch.
Twenty seconds in Google would have saved both of us a lot of time. More important for her, that twenty seconds could have turned a "no" call into a decent shot at a referral.
A lot of search engine optimization writing passes by my desk, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a simple distinction made.
PASSIVE SEO is the idea that you can do things to your site (metatags, phrases, even the articles you choose to write) that will be warmly received by the search engines. As we all know, the best passive strategy is to make great stuff, but beyond that it’s pretty clear that architecting your site properly is smart. There are people far better at this than I am.
ACTIVE SEO is the act of going outside of your site to build other sites (blogs, Squidoo lenses, delicious tags) or influence other sites (links and directories) to point to you. Not just you doing it, of course, but your readers and fans and employees as well. I wrote an ebook about part of this (download for free: flippingpro.pdf).
There’s no doubt that these two activities need to be closely coordinated. But I’m not sure they should be done by the same person. Sometimes, dividing a task increases your ability to get it done…
[updated] Peter Bell writes in to amplify:
In the SEO industry, it’s often referred to as "on page" vs. "link building".
Not only should on page and link building be done by different people, on page should also be divided between technical and content.
A technical person should follow best coding practices to optimize site tags (including proper use of CSS and headers) for SEO (and accessibility). It’s about 2-8 hours of work to redesign most site templates and then whatever it takes to load that into your content management system.
A writer and/or subject domain expert should create the great content to drive traffic.
A top SEO guru should ADVISE you on how to do the link building with the latest hints and tips (2 hrs at $300/hr – high rate, low hours).
Someone between your sales/marketing team, an intern and a college kid in Vilnius should then actually implement the various recommendations depending upon the skills required for each.
Robin writes to me about an experience at Papyrus, the dramatically expensive card shop chain in New York (and probably elsewhere.) She bought some cards, got back to her office, a card was missing from the bag.
She was on deadline, called them and they hand delivered (by messenger) a replacement card.
Now, of course, if that was a stated policy, it would be abused and taken for granted.
What makes it over the top and remarkable was that it came, out of the blue, just when it was needed.
June 20, 2006
and antibiotic-free eggs.
Well, the thing is, all swordfish is line caught. The long lines they use catch a whole bunch of other things as well, leading to significant depletion. That’s a big part of the reason you should never buy it. (the other reason is that it’s got poisonous mercury in it). And all eggs are raised without antibiotics.
And no, it doesn’t matter if the swordfish is "Atlantic" or "Pacific". Yet another clever modifier. My current favorite is "Ahi" tuna, a cool word that describes a less desirable kind of tuna!
Sometimes, marketers add a label where no label is needed. And that label is an effective way to highlight something about the product (or hide something).
This blog, by the way, is organic.
From Brian: How to Sell RSS. I don’t think there’s an easy solution in terms of renaming RSS… instead, I think we’ll see it become invisible, built in to browsers and such. You’ll "subscribe" to something, but the technique and technology will be nameless and transparent. Or not.
When I was a kid, a bad bike cost $39 and a great bike, a really great bike, cost $99. Maybe an adult could figure out how to spend $300 on a Campy or something, but a 10:1 premium was considered pretty extreme.
Today, a bad bike costs $69. A really great bike costs $3,000 and a superduper bike costs $8,000 or so. Figure the premium for the best is up from 10:1 to 100:1.
Same thing is true for restaurants (McDonald’s is still cheap, but Alain Ducasse is not.) And for cars, management consulting, coaching, charitable donations and wine.
The gap is getting wider and wider. In a lot of categories online, the bottom has gone to … free. Shopping online, in fact, is largely about the edges, and the people who are premium are at the edge.
June 19, 2006
Luke over at Big Sky Brands just sent over a mini case of their new Jones Soda Carbonated Candy (with "tongue-tingling flavor boosters" of course).
The boomers have even taken candy away from the kids, now.
Thanks to John Dodds: We now have far more silly store names to chuckle over: Shop Horror – Funny Shop Names.
June 18, 2006
Here’s a giveaway I got by email from Continental.
While appreciated, it was a total surprise. So, I have no idea why they did it… clearly not to induce me to buy something.
Second problem: the wording, from the subject line on, seems designed to keep me from actually opening and then redeeming the code. My guess is that they don’t have to pay for the unredeemed ones, but it seems silly to do a promotion that you don’t want to actually work.
P.S. trademark symbols are a legal tool, not a marketing one. No one ever lost a trademark because they left the ® out of an email. Or, in this case, almost a dozen of them.
