Max writes:
There are a gazillion things, a gazillion truly different and differentiated thing, a gazillion things of genuine value, to be the best in the world at.
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say. Best in the world just refers to the world of the consumer in that moment, and best means the thing that most appropriately fits his worldview. In other words, I don’t think you have to be the best in the world at classical violin. I think you can do great by making the best espresso on this particular block of downtown Chicago, or being the politician with the best stance on immigration (the one I agree with the most).
Compromise is the enemy of that. So is fear. So is the desire to fit in or be average. Overreaching is possible, but talent is almost never the problem.
April 19, 2007
I had breakfast today with a senior executive who estimates she spends more than 30% of her time in internal meetings.
My guess is that many marketers (who seem to go to more meetings than most people) might envy a number that low.
Despite the time spent, most people don’t seem particularly happy with the results the meetings create. In that spirit, I want to share some radical thoughts on how you could completely change the meeting dynamic in your organization.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEETINGS. It’s a huge mistake to just show up in a conference room and have a meeting. If the expectation is ‘yet another meeting’, then the odds are, you’ll have yet another meeting.
Here are a few very distinct types of meetings:
- Just so everyone knows: This is a meeting in which one person or small group tells other people what’s already been decided and is about to happen. These meetings should always have a written piece to go with them, and in many cases, it should be distributed a day before the meeting. The meeting should be very short, take place in an auditorium type setting, not a circle, and have focused Q&A at the end. Even a quiz. It’s the football huddle, and the running back isn’t supposed to challenge the very premises the quarterback is using to call the play.
- What are you up to: This is a meeting in which every participant needs to present the state of their situation. It probably happens on a regular basis and each person should have a strict time limit. Like two minutes (with an egg timer). After presenting the situation, each attendee can send their summary in an email to one person, who can sum it up and send it out to everyone.
- What does everyone think? In third place, a meeting where anyone can speak up. People who don’t speak up on a regular basis should not be invited back. It’s obvious they are good at some other function in the office, so you’re wasting their time if they sit there.
- We need a decision right now. These are ad hoc meetings that have a specific agenda and should end with a decision. A final decision that doesn’t get reviewed.
- Hanging out meetings. These are meetings with no real agenda, lots of side conversations, bored people, people instant messaging and just sort of hanging out. Sometimes these are fun, but I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t been to one in three years.
- To hear myself talk meetings. You get the idea.
There are more, of course, and your situation is special, but in general, you ought to be able to clearly delineate what an ideal meeting is like, and then make it happen.
TIPS: I think most of the time, most meetings should be held without chairs. People standing up think more quickly and get distracted less often. And the meetings don’t last as long.
All day meetings should be banned. Meetings that attempt to accomplish more than one of the tasks above should be banned.
Bonus tip: Last person to walk in the door pays $10 to the coffee fund.
Extra bonus tip: hire someone to come in and videotape a few of your standard meetings. Watch what happens.
Last tip: if there’s someone senior in the group who comes to meetings, spouts off and then either changes his mind or doesn’t take action, start asking people to sign in to meetings (with a pen) and then, when the meeting is over, sign out (with a pen) on a document that you create in the meeting that says what you did and what’s going to happen next.
If it’s not worth doing this stuff, then I guess it’s worth wasting 30% of your day.
Channel 4 in the UK claims they shut down a magazine after a week because it didn’t sell well enough. Either there’s some bigger political agenda at work or they are totally clueless. The myth of the overnight sensation is a dangerous one. Marketers are starting to learn that staying power is probably more important than weekend gross. Pop magazine axed after one week. Thanks, Ken, for the link.
At 5, the clock radio at the hotel started playing Steely Dan. I knew it in less than a second. Two notes.
Same thing happens when I see just the edge of the New Yorker sitting in the pile of mail or the formatting of an email from a friend. I could probably tell a Starbucks just from the sound and the smell of the store. They all have brand DNA.
Do you? Does your blog? Your company? I don’t think it happens by accident.
By popular request, you can subscribe to this blog by email now. Once a day, it just shows up in your inbox. Same low, low price as our regular blog, just more convenient for the easily forgetful.
April 18, 2007
I just left Dave Balter’s very cool office at Bzzagent. One highlight: the work of his artist in residence.
Seth goes to work and makes paintings. The paintings hang throughout the offices, and in May he’s doing a show.
What a great idea for a mid-sized or big company. What a great idea for a real estate agency… put the paintings in houses for sale, put them in your offices, have regular shows. Give the community (and your staff) some art and the benefits are significant.
Why not?
I’m looking for a few roommates for our very cool office near the train station in Irvington, NY.
Now that offices are no longer about housing machinery and all about finding energy and creativity, I’m looking for a few people that can add both. A clean, dry space, out of the rain, with weekly cross-pollination brainstorming sessions to keep everyone’s juices flowing. Drop me a line with your how and why, though I can’t promise instant turnaround.
Do a google search for Bob Ray, and you’ll end up with this page as the first match. This is as it should be. If you already know you want to buy some Bob and Ray recordings, you’re motivated enough to poke around and find what you want.
What makes something a good page for the motivated searcher doesn’t necessarily translate into a page that can pay for itself with offers.
Do a search on ‘comedy’ and if you’re in the right part of the world, you might encounter the ad on the left (in a black box) for an Andrew Dice Clay concert that’s taking place in New Jersey.
The organization running this ad is hoping that a big enough percentage of those clicking on it will convert so they can run the ad more often.
The problem with this offer is that it is slapped on top of a page that was never intended to convert someone who had responded to an offer. The page it links to looks like this.
So, what happens when an advertiser runs an offer and connects to a page like this? They blame the offer. They blame the medium. They complain that it just doesn’t work for them.
Of course it doesn’t work!
Not because of the offer but because of the page the offer connected to. And even if the page was perfectly formatted, it’s unlikely it would work. Why? Because it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to turn someone from a stranger (pre-offer) into a loyal customer with a single page.
Smart internet marketers have learned that it’s a step by step process, not an event.
Instead of this:
offer —> sale
it works like this:
offer—> sample —> permission —> learning —> sample —> sale —> subscription.
If you can’t embrace this, I think you need to walk away from the medium entirely. On the other hand, this is the engine that is capable of growing businesses in a predictable, straightforward way.
I call it an ‘offer culture.’ The same way Lillian Vernon and LL Bean developed a direct mail culture, some organizations are developing an offer culture. They search out new places to run their offers, test them quickly, adjust their landing pages, experiment with how many steps they need between first contact and closed sale… these organizations really understand the value of a long-term customer, because they’ve earned them.
In working with the early advertisers in Squidoo offers, there has been a clear dichotomy between marketers and those making offers. The same thing is obviously true among regular Google adwords buyers. Are you on the bus?
[Chad points us to this article from five years ago…]
This guy quit his (amazing) job and ended up starting his well-known company at the age of 48. Never too late to confront your Dip. Free hardcover for the first person to send me a note with his name.
[boy, that was quick. It’s Enzo Ferrari. I am amazed at how many of you were willing to use the file name of the jpg in an effort to give yourself an unfair advantage. Don’t forget, I used to be a game designer. It’s a lot harder to cheat on me than that…]
April 17, 2007
Stefan Stern who writes for the Financial Times wrote this review for Accounting and Business, a UK journal found here:
Vince Lombardi is one of the most venerated American football coaches in history. The team he built, the Green Bay Packers, won the NFL championship five times in the nine years he was coaching them. And Lombardi came up with one of the world’s most famous motivational commands of all, beloved of managers everywhere: “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.”
Seth Godin, the marketing guru, blogger and best-selling author of Purple Cow, quotes Lombardi at the start of this slim new book. And Godin’s verdict on the great Lombardi’s views? “Bad advice.”
That is typical Godin, who possesses one of the cheekiest and most energetic voices in business today. That is partly why his latest offering is worth a look even though, at nearly £7 for 100 pages, it might not appear to offer the best value for money. (Well, I did say he was cheeky, didn’t I?)
Godin’s counter-intuitive insight is simply this: winners do quit, they quit all the time, it’s just that they pick the right moment and the right place to quit, so that they can concentrate their fire on an area where winning is a much more likely (and indeed more profitable) outcome.
The book’s title refers to that low point in any task or project where we have to decide whether to carry on with what we are doing – in the hope of overcoming a dip – or whether we should in fact abandon the work in hand and move on. One of our biggest problems, Godin says, is that we fail to recognise when a dip is in fact a cul-de-sac, a dead end. He hails Jack Welch, former chief executive of General Electric, as a boss who knew when certain business units were coming up against a dead end. “Be number one or number two in a sector, or get out of it,” was the Welch doctrine.
Quitting is important because winning is important, Godin says. “Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny majority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most,” he writes. “Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.”
Godin is the enemy of muddling through, making do, and coping. Either get through the dip and reach for the stars, or find something else to do, he advises. But don’t mess with “Mr Inbetween”.
“The most common response to the dip is to play it safe,” Godin says. “To do ordinary, blameless work, work that’s beyond reproach. When faced with the dip most people ‘suck it up’ and try to average their way to success. Which is precisely why so few people end up the best in the world… The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance,” he adds. “Mediocre work is rarely because of a lack of talent and often because of the cul-de-sac. All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you’re better off quitting.”
So that’s us told then. Sounds like a good place to stop!
