Three months ago I wrote about farming and hunting. It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.
Talk to surfers and they'll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.
This makes for a great sport (for some people, anyway) but until recently, it wasn't much of a career path. (aside: Aimless web surfing is a waste of time, and that's not the sort of surfing I'm referring to). That feeling of freedom and risk in equal measure was difficult to find at work, so we sought it out on the slopes or the ocean.
Once we figured out how to get thrills from waves, we could switch to snow, or to stand up paddling, or kiteboarding. Different terrain, same cycle.
More people, though, are finding a way to surf and get paid for it. Freelance projects, joint ventures, entrepreneurial startups are all paying off for people who are hooked on this feeling of plan, launch, cowabunga, repeat. Each time you do it, you get to take on a bigger project, a bigger wave. The cost of wiping out is low (if you plan for it) and so you can do it again and again. You don't even have to be solo… now there are teams and corporations that seek out people who want to surf their way through fundraising or product development or customer delight.
We see successful musicians and writers do this all the time. Now, though, it's not unusual to watch someone surf in their development of shareware, or in the videos they post online or risks they take in their personal blog.
So many of the conversations I have every day could easily be replaced with, "so, where's the next wave? Tell me about your last one…"
May 10, 2010
Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?
If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?
The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught. And yet we waste billions of dollars in time looking for them where they're not.
A practical tip: buy a big box of real wooden blocks. Write a key factor/asset/strategy on each block in big letters. Play with the blocks. Build concrete things out of non-concrete concepts. Uninvite the devil's advocate, since the devil doesn't need one, he's doing fine.
Have fun. Why not? It works.
May 9, 2010
We all have a vision of the typical bus company, slowly moving people from place to place, going through the motions and showing a lot of fatigue.
Some of the elements that make an organization feel like a bus company:
- Aging equipment in need of a functional and design refresh
- Tired staff, punching the time clock
- By the book mentality, with no room for humanity or initiative
- Treating all customers the same (poorly) and knowing (and caring) little or nothing about them
- Acting like a monopoly, with no easy substitutes in sight
- Lack of eye contact (between employees or customers)
- Attitude that tomorrow will be just like today
- No one to complain to, and if you persist, you'll get a form letter
American Airlines has officially become a bus company, without a doubt. On a recent non-flight (it got canceled) all of these elements occurred. Only one (1) act of human initiative would have made a huge difference.
More and more, I'm seeing bus company behavior from previously great organizations. It's a symptom of companies (and cultures) under long-term stress. These are all traits that occur when you allow standards to erode, when you embrace the status quo and when management gives up. You don't need lots of money or squadrons of people to change this, you just need to care.
Ironically, there are new bus companies that are proving that there's always a way to avoid this fate.
May 8, 2010
How much support does someone need (or get, or deserve, you pick) before they ship their art?
The fearful lizard brain demands reassurance and coaching and even a push before it is quiet enough to permit us to do the difficult work our economy demands, before it will allow us to create art that changes others.
So it's logical to wonder how to build systems that encourage legions of people to find that reassurance, and it's encouraging to imagine that we could build a school or a coaching program or other external forces that would create more artists.
And yet most mentors and coaches and teachers will tell you that few of their students ever do, not in comparison with their potential. A few break through and change everything, and we celebrate them, but what about everyone else?
The artists are different. They took a leap.
They weren't pushed. They jumped.
May 7, 2010
Does anyone read Time or Newsweek (being sold to anyone who will take them) any more? And when they disappear, who will really miss them?
The problem is that they are both slow and general. The world, on the other hand, is fast and specific.
Is there a business here?
While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that's awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me. They have elements that make them very attractive to advertisers and readers.
I'll define one as:
- Being digital (probably a PDF), that's free to 'print', fast to make and easy to share. (Newsweek spends seventeen million dollars a year on paper.)
- Having subscribers, either by email or RSS
- Focused on issues that appeal to some, but not all
- Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
- Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
- Containing ads that are relevant to that audience
- Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail
There's room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines. Why not have one about Aruba, for example? If all the people who vacation in Aruba could read about the island in detail every month, read about restaurants, resorts and politics, for free, in an easy to share format… Multiply this by every destination, every interest group, every type of profession (how about a micro-magazine for ethnobiologists?)
Surely you can think of a group of people that share a demo- or psychographic, that are appealing to an advertiser base and want to learn and share what they learn… for free.
Take a look at Clay and Ishita's new magazine, Fearless. It's jammed with good stuff, it's engaging and it begs to be shared. While the audience for Fearless isn't as vertical as some, it clearly should resonate with some advertisers, the sort that might pay for an ad in the soon to be irrelevant newsweeklies. And the big difference is that instead of paying for an office building and paper and overhead, the money for an ad in a micro-magazine can go directly to the people who write and promote it and the ad itself will be seen by exactly the right audience… (Aside: Newsweek has 427 employees and a guaranteed circulation of 1.5
million. Fearless will probably end up reaching 100,000 people with 2 employees.)
Don't expect overnight successes in this form of media, but certainly expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.
May 6, 2010
Here's a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, every dollar you make in profit is multiplied.
That's very different from the consumer version of this lesson: borrow money to buy things that go down in value. This is wrongheaded, short-term and irrational.
A few decades ago, mass marketers had a problem: American consumers had bought all they could buy. It was hard to grow because dispensable income was spoken for. The only way to grow was to steal market share, and that's difficult. Enter consumer debt.
Why fight for a bigger piece of pie when you can make the whole pie bigger, the marketers think. Charge it, they say. Put it on your card. Pay now, why not, it's like it's free, because you don't have to repay it until later. Why buy a Honda for cash when you can buy a Lexus with credit?
One argument is income shifting: you're going to make a lot of money later, so borrow now so you can have a nicer car, etc. Then, when money is worth less to you, you can pay it back. This idea is actually reasonably new–fifty years or so–and it's not borne out by what actually happens. Debt creates stress, stress creates behaviors that don't lead to happiness…
The other argument is that it's been around so long, it's like a trusted friend. Debt seems like fun for a long time, until it's not. And everyone does it. We've been sold very hard on acquisition = happiness, and consumer debt is the engine that permits this. Until it doesn't.
The thing is, debt has become a marketed product in and of itself. It's not a free service or a convenience, it's a massive industry. And that industry works with all the other players in the system to grow, because (at least for now) when they grow, other marketers benefit as well. As soon as you get into serious consumer debt, you work for them, not for you.
It's simple: when the utility of what you want (however you measure it)
is less than the cost of the debt, don't buy it.
Go read Dave Ramsey's post: The truth about debt.
Dave has spent his career teaching people a lesson that many marketers are afraid of: debt is expensive, it compounds, it punishes you. Stuff now is rarely better than stuff later, because stuff now costs you forever if you go into debt to purchase it. He's persistent and persuasive.
It takes discipline to forego pleasure now to avoid a lifetime of pain and fees. Many people, especially when confronted with a blizzard of debt marketing, can't resist.
Resist. Smart people work at keeping their monthly consumer debt burden to zero. Borrow only for things that go up in value. Easy to say, hard to do. Worth it.
May 5, 2010
After years of reading newspapers, I've never seen a paper that said, "sorry, not much happened yesterday, so today's paper is shorter than usual." In fact, the length of the paper is virtually always driven by the number of ads, not by the amount of news (wars, elections and disasters are the exception). Editors are told how many pages of stories they can run by the publisher, who bases it on ads sold.
The web, of course, doesn't have the problem of paying for paper, so the length of a website isn't driven by ads, it's driven by reader attention and writer fatigue. If you run less material, then readers with attention to spare will just go read more on someone else's site. Hence the temptation to write more and more and more and try to milk pageviews.
The same math works for direct marketers and brochures. Since it's free to keep writing or to make that video ever longer, it's tempting to do so. Might as well keep talking until the reader surrenders and buys something.
Here's the problem with that math: people like to be done.
Sure, there will always be a few who want more, but you're often better off giving the majority a sense of mastery and a platform to take action.
Just because you can write more doesn't mean you should.
May 4, 2010
As mentioned before, I'm bringing my New York seminar on the road. I've found that people can really benefit from direct and personal interactions, and so I'm bringing the seminar to a select group of cities over the next year (more if people show up).
My favorite concerts have always been the acoustic tours. Instead of fancy production, dancing rabbits and lip syncing, it's one person, one microphone and a human-scaled interaction. (Or sometimes five people plus Jerry).
So that's the way I'm approaching this tour. No slides, not so many carefully rehearsed bits, just me and a focused audience, talking through issues that matter. The goal isn't to deliver twitter-sized sound bites, but instead to immerse participants in a different way of thinking about the work we do and how we spread our ideas. I want to urgently and persistently change the way you do your work.
This is the one and only public seminar I'm going to be offering in any of these cities, so I hope you'll let people who might be interested know.
- First goal is a lot of Q&A. Sometimes my answer won't be about your question, but most of the time it will. I've found that hearing what other people are puzzling over (and seeing how it might be addressed) is actually a great way to find the insights you might be looking for.
- Second goal is to make it easy to find each other. All attendees in each city will have the option of being listed in a digital directory that all attendees will receive. Hooking up with others on the same road you are on can prove really valuable. New resources, new business. In addition, everyone gets an invite to the closed triiibe online group as a way of continuing the conversation.
- The nature of the economics makes it impossible for these events to be as small as we'd like and still include everyone who wants to attend. To make up for it, they're off the record, intense and fast-moving. I've run sessions like this in New York and people leave satisfied and more than a little overwhelmed with how much there is to think about and do.
Today, we're announcing events for the next four months, one a month beginning in June. I built a page with all the details: Boston, Washington DC, Minnesota and Chicago. The one after that is Atlanta (details to follow).
If we get a great response to these five, in coming months, we'll announce LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Austin, Nashville and some other cities. (So even if it's not your city, I hope you'll tell people who might be interested). The goal isn't to be cheap, it's to give you more than you pay for and to create a new lens on how you look at the world. Hope you can join me.
Read the link carefully for student seats as well as a chance to volunteer and get a free seat. And for anyone who is a truly regular reader of my blog, there's a $100 discount for the full day seat if you type the discount code Linchpin when you book a ticket, but it's only valid for twenty four hours from the time this post goes live.
May 3, 2010
What if a rift in the time-space continuum changed the universe and it was suddenly impossible to get new customers, new readers, new donors or new viewers?
How would that change what you do all day and how you spend your money and what you measure?
What if you tried acting that way now?
[What I meant: if you can't get new customers or new friends or new colleagues, perhaps you could take really good care of the ones you've got? Cherish them, in fact.]
Twenty years ago, only big companies and TV stars worried about media channels.
Oprah was on TV, then she added radio. Two channels. Then a magazine.
Pepsi set out to dominate TV with their message, and billboards and vending machines. Newspapers, not so much. The media you chose to spread your message mattered. In fact, it could change what you made and how you made it. [Stop for a second and consider that… the media channel often drove the product and pricing and distribution].
Today, of course, everyone has access to a media channel. You can create a series of YouTube videos, or have a blog. You can be a big-time tweeter, or lead a significant tribe on Facebook.
Harder to grapple with is the idea that the media channel you choose changes who you are and what you do. Tom Peters gives a hundred or more speeches a year, around the world, for good money (and well earned). But this channel, this place where he can spread his message, determines what he does all day, impacts the pace of the work he does, informs all of his decisions.
Oprah lives a life that revolves around a daily TV show. Of course it would be difficult for her to write a book… that's a life dictated by a different channel. And she's a lapsed twitter user because it demands a different staffing and mindset than she has now.
This applies to non-celebs, to people with jobs, to entrepreneurs, to job seekers. We all spread our ideas, at least a little, and the medium you choose will change your ideas. If you only pay attention to the world when you need a new job (your channel is stamps and your message is your resume) you'll spend your day differently than if you are leading a tribe, participating in organizations or giving local speeches all the time.
We've come a long way from a worker having just two channels (a resume and a few references) to having the choice of a dozen or more significant ways to spread her ideas. Choose or lose.
May 2, 2010
