In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.
Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.
Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.
And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.
The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.
One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.
When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn.
I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.
Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.
One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That's actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.
No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… what's the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.
Of course, there's a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.
Radically overdeliver.
Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.
I think there's a killer app version of this for the iPad, and I hope someone will build it. The talking pad is an interactive presentation tool for smart people.
Overview
It's a very simple concept: a collection of pages (slides, images, type, let's call them pages) that are easy to navigate in a non-linear way. Along with the standard zoom features, I'd like to be able to write on any of them in real time using my finger. I can also call up, on demand, a calculator or a blank drawing pad.
Creation
I can create the talking pad files on my Mac or on the iPad using a builder app, and sync both ways. The builder is really simple, just the ability to organize pages I create in other apps, with simple navigation, scale and type tools.
Navigation
Instead of it being linear (like Powerpoint or Keynote), the pages are arranged in a grid or checkerboard. From any page, then, I can go back, forward, up or down, and the four diagonals as well. So depending on the conversation I'm having with my audience, my 'next' page can be any of 8.
In addition, the app supports an external monitor. When I'm hooked up to the projector or screen, I see twenty or thirty of my pages in thumbnails on my ipad screen, and I can click any of them to instantly bring that page up on the projector.
In essence, I want to be able to play a presentation the same way some people play jazz piano.
As a prompt, each corner and side of the page can have little keyword reminders, so I can easily remember, for example, that pressing the bottom left corner of the page about dogs will display the page about tigers.
So now, someone asks a question and I can just jump to the slide that answers that question. If I want to circle something or zoom in, I just put my finger on the screen and do that.
Bonuses:
1. the ability to have one of the pages be a web browser with address already loaded, so if I want, without leaving the talking pad app, I can jump to this.
2. the ability to embed links within the pages, so I can actually have a page that points to other pages (this is currently built into keynote and powerpoint, but people don't use it because those programs are so linear). In essence, a page becomes a piano keyboard with each key pointing to another page.
Reporting
The app can keep track of which pages I used the most, and for how long. This is useful in a corporate setting. Imagine that the sales manager dreams up a talking pad file and offers it to 100 salespeople. Every day, when they re-sync, we can see how often the pad was used and which slides got used the most often.
The Killer App
A killer app is a program that all by itself is good enough to justify the price of the hardware. The killer app for the PC was Lotus 1-2-3. The killer app for the iPod was iTunes. This is reason enough to pay $500, I think.
PS I've received so much interest in this I've started a wiki on this topic so you can find fellow travelers.
If you've ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.
People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."
We're traveling around, finding interesting people and asking them to riff for a minute or two about what makes someone indispensable. Kicking off the weekly series is Gary Vee. Click the picture to view it. We'll do four for February and see how it goes.
If you're a hunter, are you wasting your gift chasing shiny but ultimately worthless objects?
And if you're a farmer, are you wasting your resources by planting and nurturing a crop that's fashionable but without real value?
It might be fun to win a Grammy or dominate your category in terms of market share, but what's it worth if it doesn't support the actual goal?
Marketing is more powerful than ever. We have more leverage than ever before. Which makes picking your milestones and your goals more critical than it has ever been.
I visited a favorite restaurant last week, a place that, alas, I hadn’t been to in months. The waiter remembered that I don’t like cilantro. Unasked, she brought it up. Incredible. This was uncalled for, unnecessary and totally delightful.
Scott Adams writes about the cyborg tool that is coming momentarily, a device that will remember names, find connections, bring all sorts of external data to us the moment we meet someone. “Oh, Bob, sure, that’s the guy who’s friends with Tracy… and Tim just tweeted about him a few minutes ago.”
The first time someone does this to you in conversation (no matter how subtly), you’re going to be blown away and flabbergasted. The tenth time, it’ll be ordinary, and the 20th, boring.
Hotels used to get a lot of mileage out of remembering what you liked, but it was merely a database trick, not emotional labor on the part of the staff.
Today, if you go to an important meeting and the other people haven’t bothered to Google you and your company, it’s practically an offense. We’re about to spend an hour together and you couldn’t be bothered to look me up? It’s expected, no longer amazing.
On the other hand, consider Dolores, a clerk with kidney problems at a 7 Eleven, who broke all sorts of coffee sales records because she remembered the name of every customer who came in every morning. Unexpected and amazing.
You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless.
[Irrelevant aside: Linchpin made the New York Times bestseller list yesterday. The list is hand tweaked, unreliable and often wrong, but it’s still a great thing to have happen the first week a book is out. Thank you to each of you who pitched in and spread the word. Unexpected and amazing, both.]
10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she's farming.
Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).
Some ways to think about this:
George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.
The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you've probably already seen it. If not, here it is.
Todd Sattersten has written a free ebook about pricing that's well worth the time it takes to review. It will change the way you think about pricing.
And if you can, take a look at this poetry video from Gabrielle Bouliane. She left us a very powerful message before she left. It might change your life. (Thanks Paul).
If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.
If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys," then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don't worry. It doesn't need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don't have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.
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On the other hand, consider Dolores, a clerk with kidney problems at a 7 Eleven, who broke all sorts of coffee sales records because she remembered the name of every customer who came in every morning. Unexpected and amazing.