Have you seen these people? Are you these people?
A few months ago, I showed my friend Dave a poster I had in my basement. I thought it was astonishing that so many of the people that were at the top of their game in 2000 appeared to have disappeared.
Well, Dave ran with the idea and came up with an entire site devoted to the poster, the Dip and the hunt for the missing people.
He asked me for some advice, but it’s his gig. I hope you enjoy it. Get your friends to help and let’s see if we can figure the whole thing out.
May 2, 2007
Why doesn’t someone make a wireless bluetooth lavaliere microphone? It would be perfect for Skype calls, and also make it easy to give a speech. The bluetooth would magically hook up to your laptop, the laptop could jack out to the speakers. If it exists, I can’t find it.
While we’re at it, I really need a TypePad plug in that would highlight relevant archival posts automatically. If you look to the left, there, in little teeny tiny print you’ll find all the archives for the last several years worth of posts on this blog. But most of you will never read any of them, even though a few are sort of good. One or two are even great posts. So, without completely interrupting the discussion with extraneous links, how do I point deep into the archives?
Depends on what you mean by good.
If you read a lot of literary fiction, probably not. If you read a lot of thrillers, even then, probably not the best you’ve ever read. But if you are a marketer measuring return on investment, then sure, it was better than good. It was fantastic. One of the bestselling books of the last twenty years…
The Dip that Dan Brown got through had not a lot to do with some objective measure of the quality of his work and everything to do with good fortune, hard work, excellent timing and the power of the right ideavirus. The short version: The DaVinci Code was popular because it was popular.
The last 75% of its sales were made to people who never ever buy books. They bought it because ‘everyone else was buying it.’
I don’t believe that this is a Dip you can easily seek out or set yourself up for. But I think it’s a fascinating lesson in the power of being the best in the world. There is a pot of gold at the end of most rainbows, except most people never get there. The mistake, of course, is to believe that following the path of the person that went before is the way to get through this Dip. It doesn’t work that way when it comes to culture. Just like old jokes, what worked yesterday probably isn’t going to work tomorrow.
Pop hits work precisely because they are hits. And marketers can work hard to create an environment where the book or movie or song or restaurant they create moves through the most challenging part of the Dip… the gulf between the organic, natural audience for a product and the much bigger, hyper-excited pop audience.
Every year, more than a thousand new ‘business’ books get published in the US. Not textbooks or manuals, but general interest books about how to do business better.
Some sell a few hundred copies. Some sell a few hundred thousand. One or two might sell a million. Out of a potential audience of 30 or 40 million white collar workers in the US.
Do they work or are they an utter waste of time?
I’ll admit to being biased (wow), but my mail is an interesting barometer. Here’s a self-selected group of people, a fairly large one, fortunately, that takes the time to write in and tell me what helped and how. Not only do my books seem to help, but the general consensus from this group is that many different books from many different authors help. There are plenty of clunkers, lots of dramatically overwritten brochures masquerading as books. But mixed in with the drek are books that change everything.
If we’re going to be honest about it, we should agree that the best business books are either useless (in which case rational business people should avoid them) or they’re useful.
So here’s my real question:
If you went to a doctor who told you that she hadn’t read a scholarly article or taken any training since med school, would you stick around? What about a lawyer who doesn’t read law journals or a dentist who never bothered to read up on the newest case studies?
Never mind the professions. What about the machine shop down the street? Think the $18 an hour machine operator is supposed to read the manual that came with the new machine? Who cares if he doesn’t like to read?
Why does our bizarre national fear of reading have anything to do with this? We read stuff all the time (email, stop signs, the comics) but for some reason, people think it’s fine to draw the line at books. (Typical annual per capita purchase rate for hardcover books in the US: one).
True story: I was doing a speech for a bunch of twenty-something campus reps for a clothing company. One young lady raised her hand. She pointed to Purple Cow (about 160 pages long) and said, "If we only have time to read twenty pages, which twenty pages should we read?"
Fortune 1,000 companies have literally hundreds (or thousands) of salespeople. Why aren’t each of these salespeople required to read the latest sales book from Jeffrey Gitomer? Compared to the cost of training, it’s almost free. Compared to the cost of not doing anything, it’s a bargain.
Can you imagine web designers who proudly proclaim that they never read up on Ruby on Rails or metatags? So how come so many marketers are comfortable announcing that they’ve never read anything by Guy?
Now, repeat the entire post substituting ‘business blog’ for ‘business book’.
May 1, 2007
