If you’ve ever joined more than three people on a Skype or Zoom conference call, I hope you’ll appreciate these tips, and perhaps share them:
Sit close to the screen. Your face should fill most of it.
Use an external microphone or headset.
When you’re not talking, hit mute.
Don’t eat during the meeting.
When you’re on mute during an audio call, you can do whatever you want. But when you’re on mute on a video call, you need to act like you’re truly engaged. Nod your head. Focus on the screen. Don’t get up and feed your dog.
Don’t sit with the window behind you. A little effort on lighting goes a very long way.
When you’re talking, spend some time looking at the camera, not the screen. You’ll appear more earnest and honest this way.
When you’re talking, go slow. No one is going to steal your slot.
Don’t walk if you’re using a phone. And if you’re using a laptop, don’t put it on your lap.
These are obvious. They are generous. They’re effective.
And almost no one puts in the effort to consistently deliver on them. It’s worth it.
Apple became the first company to be worth a trillion dollars. They did that by spending five years single-mindedly focusing on doing profitable work. They’ve consistently pushed themselves toward high margin luxury goods and avoided just about everything else. Belying their first two decades, when they focused on breakthrough work that was difficult and perhaps important, nothing they’ve done recently has been either. Tim Cook made a promise to the shareholders and he kept it.
Amazon became the second company to be worth a trillion dollars. And just about everything they focus on is difficult. They carry more than a million products, ship on a moment’s notice, rarely have a glitch, host a bulk of the internet’s traffic and disrupt one industry after another. Tons of tiny details, many leaps. Investors have patiently waited for them to be incredibly profitable, but the company focuses on the relentless, incremental work of the difficult instead. A totally different promise, kept.
But the most daring and generous, those that are often overlooked and never hit a trillion dollars in the stock market, are left to do the important work. The work of helping others be seen, or building safe spaces. The work of creating opportunity or teaching and modelling new ways forward. The work of changing things for the better.
Changing things for the better is rarely applauded by Wall Street, but Wall Street might not be the point of your work. It might simply be to do work you’re proud of, to contribute, and to leave things a little better than you found them.
Profitable, difficult, or important—each is an option. A choice we get to make every day. ‘None of the above’ is also available, but I’m confident we can seek to do better than that.
The new Samsung phone has a hardware button on it that goes straight to their digital assistant.
The good news is that adding a hotline/dedicated button/clear signpost is a dramatic and effective way to influence customer behavior. “Pull rope to stop train” is much more efficient than navigating three pages of menus. It also communicates your point of view and confidence to the user.
The problem is that Bixby buttons are also stepping stones on the way to cruft. Once you create a dedicated sign or button or resource, it’s very difficult to uncreate it. The few who count on it will scream if you try to take it away. The elegance and efficiency of the tool you built will forever be hampered by the fact that you have to support a Bixby button.
Your microwave has 26 buttons on it now. Each one seemed like a good idea at the time.
Once you put up a stoplight at the intersection, or build a new exit, your highway ceases to be what it used to be. Forever.
For a hundred years, we organized the means of production. How do we get the right people, the right machines, the right materials and get this thing built.
Many of us still do this. It’s important and difficult work.
For thirty years, most of the profit has been made by the people who organize money. How do we float an offer, manipulate a currency, bring the right money to the right project on the right day.
The return on organizing money is huge, and it’s not going away.
But now, now there’s a third kind of organization going on, one that’s even more leveraged, because it isn’t easily replaced: Organizing an audience.
How do we find the right people on the right day in a way that creates value for them and for us? How do we deliver the right service to the right audience in the right way? The rising stars of our economy are in this business now, even more than production or finance.
If you’re seeking to build awareness, consider building a community instead.
If you’re working to sell your average stuff to average people (and working overtime to make it cheaper or faster), consider an alternative: serving the most dedicated people with something remarkable.
When someone tries to engage you with a pitch that’s simple, visceral and more direct than you’re used to, it may be that their vitriol is hiding the fact that they’re afraid.
We race to the bottom, or we climb forward.
Stereotypes, shortcuts and shallow invective are effective in the short run, but they’re not useful, important or the best we can do.
When a project appears to be in limbo, in a permanent holding pattern, where sunk costs meet opportunity costs, where no one can figure out what to do…
Cancel it.
Cancel it with a week’s notice.
One of two things will happen:
A. A surge of support and innovation will arrive, and it won’t be stuck any more.
B. You’ll follow through and cancel it, and you won’t be stuck any more.
It costs focus and momentum to carry around the stalled. Let it go.
When David and Bill cancelled my brand-in-development in 1983 at Spinnaker, it ended up being the catalyst to turn it into our most successful launch. We ended up launching a line of five software products that were each certified a gold-selling hit.
The ability to do your work, but without the hassle of someone telling you what to do.
The thing is, finding a well-paying job without a boss used to be a lot easier than it is now. The race to the bottom is fierce, and the only way to avoid it is to create projects, innovate on strategy and build something worth seeking out.
It seems as though people now spend more time with their smartphones than they spend with other people, and the smartphone and app makers are working hard to make every interaction we make online ever more convenient.
Convenience sells.
It’s the dominant driver of our culture, and has been since the 60s. How can I get something that’s just good enough in exchange for it being more convenient? Hence the drive through fast food window, the microwave oven, the remote control, shrinkwrap licenses and 140 characters as a stand in for exchanging ideas.
It turns out that the quest for convenience also drives many of the choices we make about education. It’s more convenient to have standardized tests and rigid curricula, so we don’t have to treat every student differently. And it’s more convenient to imagine that continuing education for adults might involve reading a summary of something instead of actually doing it.
Alas, we’re confusing the convenience of physical time-saving with the convenience of not extending ourselves in the quest for something better.
Education needs to be inconvenient because it relies on effort and discomfort to move us from where we were to where we want to be. The internet gives us more access than ever, and if we care enough, we can use that convenient access to explore the inconvenient places that we know we should be exploring.
And here’s the 18 minute video, which is a little more convenient.
And here’s a new viral video on the topic. Related to Ted Dintersmith’s new book.
The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is a decidedly inconvenient program we’re running now, one that challenges each participant to engage and experience and connect. You can save a few dollars this weekend if you click the purple circle on the sign up page. Then it’s gone.
If someone offers you a compliment by mistake, or gives you the benefit of the doubt, or lets you into traffic… my hunch is that you accept. You might not totally deserve it, but hey, they might see something in you that's worthy.
On the other hand, when we're unfairly blamed, harshly judged or cut off, well, that's completely unacceptable. That's enough to ruin a whole day. That's reason for revenge or at the very least, the blowing off of steam.
Useful modern education is not the work of rote. When you tell someone the answer and then give them a test to see if they remember what you told them, that’s not education, it’s incented memorization.
On the other hand, if you can ask someone a question that causes them to think about something unexamined, that challenges them to explore new ways of seeing the world or making connections, you’ve actually caused a change to happen.
The second time you ask them that question, it won’t work as well. Now it’s just rote. That’s why people call it a trick question. Because they learned something. They learned the trick.
We need more trick questions.
September 6, 2018
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