Master of none
Paul sends us this classic example of committee thinking at work.
Thanks
The Dip is now the fastest-selling book I’ve ever published. Amazon just lowered the price to $7.77 (at least for now). I appreciate the support. Thanks. (other versions and stores are here).
[More] or (Less)
Many people are arguing for a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the world. This isn’t a post about whether or not we need smaller cars, local produce, smaller footprints and less consumption. It’s a post about how deeply entrenched the desire for more is.
More has been around for thousands of years. Kings ate more than peasants. Winning armies had more weapons than losing ones. Elizabeth Taylor had more husbands than you.
Car dealers are temples of more. The local Ford dealership lists four different models… by decreasing horsepower. Car magazines feature Bugattis, not Priuses on the cover. Restaurants usually serve more food (and more calories) than a normal person could and should eat.
Is this some sort of character flaw? A defective meme in the system of mankind? Or is it an evil plot dreamed up by marketers?
There’s no doubt that marketers amplify this desire, but I’m certain it’s been around a lot longer than Jell-O.
One reason that the litter campaign of the 1960s worked so well is that ‘not littering’ didn’t require doing less, it just required enough self control to hold on to your garbage for an hour or two. The achilles heel of the movement to limit carbon is the word ‘limit.’
It’s a campaign about less, not more. Even worse, there’s no orthodoxy. There’s argument about whether x or y is a better approach. Argument about how much is enough. As long as there’s wiggle room, our desire for more will trump peer pressure to do less. “Fight global warming” is a fine slogan, except it’s meaningless. That’s like dieters everywhere shouting, “eat less” while they stand in line to get bleu cheese dressing from the salad bar.
As a marketer, my best advice is this: let’s figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there’s an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we’re on the right track.
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Images from the book
Dip listeners were promised that this site would have the images from the book. So, here they are!
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Confronting the Dip at church
Here’s an interesting series of posts about churches stuck in the Dip.
J.A.M. (Just another meeting)
It was so typical. Eight people, the regular bunch. New client kick-off, business as usual. And it showed.
You’ve done it before, and before that and before that. A dozen or a hundred or perhaps a thousand times before. The typical meeting, with everyone in their typical roles. Often, people even sit in the same spot.
Why are we surprised, then, when the outcome is usually the same as well?
Instead of approaching that moment as JAM, maybe there’s a different way. Instead of focusing on how similar this time is to last time, instead of realizing that the similiarities demand similar approaches, maybe, just maybe, the team could focus on the differences. How is this opportunity different? What could we try that might have a radically better outcome?
Different isn’t always better, but if all you want is the same, send a memo.
Blow up your home page
Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?
Human beings don’t have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don’t have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.
The problem with home page thinking is that it’s a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it’s not your ‘home’. It’s not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn’t match, they flee.
You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.
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Sharp, not a spoon
Here’s a great riff from Derek:
Imagine the world’s attention as a big foggy cloud. So thick you could cut it with a knife.
You want to cut through that foggy cloud, to call attention to your music.
Only problem is, if you’re well-rounded, you can’t cut through anything. You need to be sharp as a knife. Sharply defined.
Example: Your name is Mary and you put out an album called “My Songs”, and the cover is a picture of your face. The music is good quality, songs about your life, and when people ask what kind of music you do, you say “Oh, everything. All styles.”. You send the album out to be reviewed and nothing much happens. Doors aren’t opening.
Imagine instead: Your name is Mary and you write 9 songs about food. You put out an album called “Sushi, Souffle, and Seven Other Songs about Food”. Maybe you recorded your vocals in the kitchen. Maybe you quit cooking school to be a musician. Yes it’s a silly example, you see how this would be MUCH easier to promote.
You may be thinking, “But I have so much to offer the world, I can’t just limit myself like that!” If you want to increase your chances of the world hearing your music at all, though, strongly consider stretching-out your musicial offerings to the world, and keeping each album focused clearly on one aspect of your music.
Notice the long careers of David Bowie, Madonna, Miles Davis, Paul Simon, and Elvis Costello to name a few. Each went through sharply-defined phases, treating each album as a project with a defined mission.
Here’s some top-sellers at CD Baby:
Eileen Quinn. She’s a full-time sailor. She writes songs about sailing. That’s it. Five albums of them. And sailors LOVE it. She gets written-up in sailing magazines all the time.
Rondellus. Sabbatum. A traditional medieval music group from Estonia doing an album of Black Sabbath songs played on medieval instruments and sung in Latin.
4th25. American soldiers in Iraq wrote and recorded an album in their barracks on a cheap computer with a $100 mic, about what it’s like to be over there at war.
Each of these albums got a LOT of press and a lot of sales, because they were sharply-defined, newsworthy, interesting to write about, easy to tell friends about.
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Jidoka
The punchline of the Dip book is that it’s not about quitting at all. It’s about mastery. Hal has a great blog about production thinking. He taught me the phrase Jidoka, which describes part of how Toyota creates mastery and high quality. I’ll quote something he sent me:
[Toyota calls] stop and fix the problem “jidoka”. It’s a process where people are asked to identify every instance where the situation doesn’t match the expectation. They do that by “pulling the cord” to activate an “andon” — a signal. There are three signals: green (all fine), yellow (come look at this), and red (I need help). Operators in the Georgetown, KY plant pull the cord up to 1000 times/day. But the line only fully stops about a handful of times each day.
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Tour update
The event in Philadelphia yesterday was a milestone for me. The crowd was amazing… energized, smart and focused. It was a speaker’s/author’s dream. Thanks to everyone who came and to helped make it happen. I’m delighted (but not surprised) that people are finding things in the Dip that I didn’t even realize were there. One more reason to write a short book.
The Chicago event is now officially sold out. There will be some tickets at the door, but not many. All details on the rest of the tour are here. Then I’m going to need a long, long nap.