My latest book, Your Turn, just went back for its third and fourth printings, bringing the total to more than 100,000 copies in print.
I did some math on the orders and discovered that more than 70% of them were going to people who had previously ordered a copy.
This never happens.
It never happens because the book industry is built on the idea of inventing desire and then destroying it by selling the reader a copy. You never need two copies of a book, after all, and so there's an insatiable need for new readers.
In the case of Your Turn, though, the book is intentionally built and sold as a way of spreading an idea… once people see the benefit in spreading the idea, many of them decide to spread it more. Most people buy the 5 pack.
It occurs to me that 70% is almost a magic number for re-orders in just about any business. It means that new people are hearing about your work and showing up to try it, and it also signifies that there's a base audience that's counting on you to do what you promised.
How would your project change if you re-organized what you do to get to a sweet spot of re-orders? I had to take a leap in the creation, distribution and pricing of my book to create that dynamic. What would you need to do?
PS To celebrate the new print run, I just added a long lost video of me launching Linchpin in NYC in 2010. It's on the Your Turn page, about a third of the way down. Read the copy near the top to get the password.
Thanks for the work you do and the impact you make.
October 26, 2015
The best way to tell if your speech is going to go well is to give your speech.
The best way to find out if your new product has market appeal is to try to sell it.
The best way to become a teacher is to teach.
There's a huge need for study, refinement and revision. No question about it.
None of it means anything, though, if you are hiding from the market.
There used to be a dangerous myth: the genius in an attic, who arrives one day, fully formed, with a grant, a Pulitzer and a string of accolades, out of nowhere.
Great work doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of interactions with the people you seek to change.
More interesting than you realize.
An interesting person is interesting to us because she combines two things: Truth and surprise.
The truth: Not necessarily a law of physics, not necessarily a measurable truth in nature, but merely the truth of experience. "I believe this," or "I see that."
And surprise. Note that surprise is always local. Surprising to me, the audience. That's one reason that it's said that interesting people are interested—they are empathetic enough to realize what might be surprising to the person in the room, and they care enough to deliver on that insight.
Everyone is capable of telling the truth. And everyone has been surprising at least once.
Which means that being an interesting person is a choice. We can choose to show up, to care enough to contribute our humanity to the next interaction.
It's a choice, but a difficult one, because being interesting feels risky. People are afraid to be interesting, not unable to be interesting.
You're not born uninteresting. But it's entirely possible you've persuaded yourself to be so frightened of the consequences that you no longer have the passion, the generosity or the guts to be interesting any longer.
Without a doubt, we need your interesting.
[HT Austin]
October 25, 2015
Have you thought about the fact that just about every time Steve Jobs appeared in public, he was selling us something?
And yet few rolled their eyes and said, "oh, here comes another sales pitch."
Jobs sold us expensive, high margin hardware that we knew would eventually become obsolete, and yet people lined up to hear the pitch. How come?
I think it's because he was saying:
"Here, I made this. It might be worth talking about."
Inherent in this statement is the flip side, "it might not work."
And in almost every case, he was right. That it might be worth talking about, and that it might not work.
In almost every case, skeptics pounced. People discussed his work.
Sometimes he was early, but he was usually interesting. That's a slot that's available to more people than ever before, regardless of industry or audience.
Average stuff for average people is getting ever more difficult to sell. If that's all you've got, get something else.
October 24, 2015
The 747 is a very large plane. But that doesn't mean it's easier to get off the ground–in fact, it's more difficult.
As your project and your organization grows in size, it's tempting to hope that at some point it will take care of itself. That customer service will get better without a herculean effort to keep it un-industrialized. That quality will be consistent, without extraordinary efforts from truly committed people.
Alas, that's not what happens. Gravity sets in with scale, and almost all the forces push in one direction–away from amazing.
Danny Meyer runs more than a dozen well-known restaurants, and the reason that they're well known is that he and his staff act like they own one restaurant, a brand new one, one with something to prove. It's tonight or never.
Also! As your project and your organization develop over time, randomness and unpredictability occurs. Entropy is a force of nature… over time, stuff gets more scrambled, not more orderly. Things decay. Left alone, just about anything we create fades to mediocrity or instability.
Which is why we can't leave it alone.
If you want to dream, it's fun to talk about self-managed teams, crowd-built organizations, autonomous excellence. And if you can find it, by all means, congratulations. For the rest of us, though, the challenges of scale and time will always involve extraordinary effort from dedicated people, doing the heavy lifting to fight off the almost unstoppable forces of mediocrity.
Don't scale because you think there's a pot of gold over that rainbow. Scale because you're ready and eager to do heroic work, every day, forever.
Once you know what you're in for, like the engineers at Boeing, you can invest in bigger jets and make sure they're working.
October 23, 2015
As you work on your project (your presentation, your plan, your speech, your recipe, your…) imagine that it's the sort of thing that could be reviewed on Amazon.
Now, write (actually write down) two different reviews:
First, a 5 star review, a review by someone who gets it, who is moved, who is eager to applaud your guts and vision.
And then, a 1 star review, an angry screed, not from the usual flyby troll, but from someone who actually experienced your work and hated it.
Okay, you've got two reviews, here's the question:
Are you working to make it more likely that the 5 star reviews are more intense, more numerous and more truthful than ever, or…
Are you working to minimize the number of 1 star reviews?
Very hard to obsess about both, since they tend to happen together.
The thing is, if you work to minimize criticism, you have surrendered the beauty and greatness of what you've set out to build.
October 22, 2015
As of now, there are more minutes produced by the podcasts I listen to each day than there is time to listen to them.
I can't listen to something new without not listening to something else. Which makes it challenging to find the energy to seek out new ones. Rebroadcasts of radio shows rarely keep my attention any more, because the podcast-focused audio is so much more focused (but they are still popular on most lists, because they're initially more well known).
Blogging has worked for so long for two reasons: A. it's really easy to subscribe and to scan for the posts you like, and B. The good posts get shared.
Both of these are a challenge for podcasters now.
The New York Times says it prints "All the News That's Fit to Print" but it actually prints what fits, and what fits is what advertisers will support and readers have time to consume. Stories have to fight to get a spot.
Podcasts have the opposite problem–there's room for an infinity of stories, from an infinity of podcasters. But we're crossing a line and from now on, the game is less infinite than it was, because our time is finite.
Now, it's difficult to get on someone's list, and hard to stay there. The game is becoming zero sum.
[Here's a list of some of my favorites, by the way:]
99% Invisible, On Being, The Moment with Brian Koppelman, Mystery Show (particularly episode 3), The Gist, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Bullseye, Radiolab (of course), SDCF Masters of the Stage, and Cool Tools. There's also a fun Gastropod episode about my aversion to cilantro. And I just found out Christopher Lydon is doing a podcast, so that's now on the list.
The magic of Overcast is that they magically appear, one after another.
And the curse is that I'll never again be caught up. I'm okay with that, but it changes everything.
October 21, 2015
Selling change to organizations is difficult. One reason is that change represents a threat, a chance for things to go wrong. It's no wonder that many people avoid anything that smells of change.
Another reason is that different people in the organization have different worldviews, different narratives.
Consider the difference between "offense" and "defense" when confronting a new idea.
The person who is playing offense wants to get ahead. Grow market share. Get promoted. She wants to bring in new ideas, help more customers, teach the people around her. Change is an opportunity to further the agenda, change is a chance to reshuffle the deck.
The person who is playing defense, though, wants to be sure not to disappoint the boss. Not to drop a ball, break what's working or be on the spot for something that didn't happen.
Either posture, surprisingly, can lead to significant purchases and change.
Defensive purchases are things like a better insurance policy, or a more reliable auditor. Offensive purchases include sophisticated new data mining tools and a course in public speaking.
The defensive purchaser switches to a supplier that offers the same thing for less money. The offensive posture demands a better thing, even if it costs more.
Not only are people divided in their posture related to change, they're also in different camps when it comes to going first. For some, buying something first is a thrill and an opportunity, for others, it's merely a threat.
While we often associate defense with late adoption, that's not always true. The military, for example, frequently pushes to buy things before 'the bad guys' do. For example, the internet was pioneered and supported by the defense establishment.
And while you can imagine that some people seeking to make change happen are eager geeks of whatever is new, it's very common for a proven success (a titan) to wait until an idea is proven, then overinvest in putting it to use in order to continue to steamroll the competition. Trader Joe's did this with laser scanners… They like change, as long as that change is proven to help them win even more than they already are.
Play with the graph a little bit and consider who you are contacting and what story you're telling…
October 20, 2015
Why do most restaurants use an unhealthy amount of salt in the food they serve? I'm talking three to five times as much salt as the typical home chef might use.
For the same reason that lazy marketers spam people and unsophisticated comic book writers use exclamation points.
1. Because it works (for a while).
Salt is a cheap and reliable way to persuade people that the food is tasty. Over time, it merely makes us ill, but in the moment, it amplifies the flavors. It's way cheaper than using herbs or technique.
And that's why marketers under pressure push the limits in terms of spamming people or offering urgent discounts. And why Batman is so easily caricatured with the word: POW!
Cheap thrills. Shortcuts. Lazy.
2. Because they've been desensitized.
Cook with enough salt long enough, and nothing tastes salty after a while. And so the lazy shortcut becomes more than a habit, because it's not even noticed.
And so the marketer figures that everyone is used to being treated this way, so he ups the ante. And the other marketers around him are used to it too, so no one says anything.
The solution to all of these problems is to zero out. Play for the long haul. Take the more difficult route. Surround yourself with people who insist you avoid the shortcut.
Back to the basic principles, so you can learn to cook again.
October 19, 2015
The purpose of a company is to serve its customers.
Its obligation is to not harm everyone else.
And its opportunity is to enrich the lives of its employees.
Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that maximizing investor return was the point. It shouldn't be. That's not what democracies ought to seek in chartering corporations to participate in our society.
The great corporations of a generation ago, the ones that built key elements of our culture, were run by individuals who had more on their mind than driving the value of their options up.
The problem with short-term stock price maximization is that it's not particularly difficult. If you have market power, if the cost of switching is high or consumer knowledge is low, there are all sorts of ways that a well-motivated management team can hurt its customers, its community and its employees on the way to boosting what the investors say they want.
It's not difficult for Dell to squeeze a little more junkware into a laptop, or Fedex to lower its customer service standards, or Verizon to deliver less bandwidth than they promised. But just because it works doesn't mean that they're doing their jobs, or keeping their promise, or doing work that they can be proud of.
Profits and stock price aren't the point (with customers as a side project). It's the other way around.
October 18, 2015
