In movies, that’s obvious. It costs far less to make The Big Lebowski than a Marvel movie.
But the metaphor applies to just about any sort of creative project.
We often err on the side of ‘special effects’. It’s easier to staff it up, to spend the money, to aim for slightly-above average. Committees and corporations are happy to pay extra for reassurance and consistency. It trends toward mediocre, because mediocre feels predictable and manageable.
But the race to spend more and more on special effects, on promo, on hype, on industrial might–it might be worth more to take the time and invest the effort to design something great instead.
July 11, 2021
The wind gets all the attention. The wind howls and the wind gusts… But the wind is light.
The current, on the other hand is persistent and heavy.
On a river, it’s the current that will move the canoe far more than the wind will. But the wind distracts us.
Back on land, the current looks like the educational industrial complex, or the network effect or the ratchet of Moore’s Law and the cultural trends that last for decades. The current is our persistent systems of class and race and gender, and the powerful industrial economy. It can be overcome, but it takes focused effort.
On the other hand, the wind is the breaking news of the moment, the latest social media sensation and the thin layer of hype that surrounds us. It might be a useful distraction, but our real work lies in overcoming the current, or changing it.
It helps to see it first, and to ignore the wind when we can.
July 10, 2021
The word is thousands of years old, and it probably comes from the Aramaic: “I will create it as I speak.”
We’re much more likely to believe what we say than the other way around.
Outline, illustrate and argue and you will make it more likely that you believe what you’re saying.
Which is a great reason to be really careful about the arguments we make, because we might end up believing them.
July 9, 2021
Two centuries ago, shoemakers in England were called snobs. (It sort of rhymes with cobbler).
Good ones combined care with quality. They put in the effort to make a shoe that exceeded expectations, and leaned into the possibility of their craft. The others were simply hacks, trying to get by with little effort.
In an ironic and cruel twist, the term “snob” was taken from these committed craftspeople and used to describe someone who looked down on others, particularly those with fewer resources. A hard-working cobbler was viewed with disdain, because they had no silver spoon. It was also used to describe someone who gave those with more money or caste a persistent benefit of the doubt that they might not deserve.
And for a century the term has been pushed beyond cultural economics to describe someone who is a defender of scarcity and the status quo. A wine snob, for example, insisted on an expensive vintage, preferably from certain parts of Europe.
The circle comes around, as it often does. The best kind of snob is a throwback to that original cobbler and their customers, someone who can see past appearances or the traditional approaches and instead looks for care and quality. Which can happen regardless of where someone comes from. It’s not enough to be a cobbler. You need to be one who cares.
Effort and good judgment lead to good taste and cultural leadership.
We shouldn’t settle.
July 8, 2021
It always seemed like a silly question–school is for doing what you’re told, summer vacation was for discovering all the things that were worth caring about.
As adults though, regardless of our hemisphere, we’re always on vacation from school. No tests or diplomas, simply a huge array of choices.
And in a world that keeps changing, regardless of how much we might want it to slow down, learning is the attribute that is often overlooked.
The folks at Linkedin asked me to create a short video series on how organizations can become more creative. You can check it out here.
And Akimbo, proudly an independent B corp, has a bunch of effective workshops coming up, all of which you can find out more about today:
The Regular Decision Deadline is July 27 for altMBA’s October 2021 session
The ninth (!) session of the Podcasting Workshop with Alex DiPalma is now open for pre-enrollment (starts July 20th).
The sixth session of the Freelancer’s Workshop starts in about a month. Nothing will transform your work as a soloist as much as this workshop.
Bestselling author Bernadette Jiwa’s powerful Storytelling Workshop starts in August as well. You can sign up today.
And we’re around the corner from their breakthrough Real Skills Conference. Check out the details so you don’t miss out.
July 7, 2021
The play before time ran out. The last speech of the campaign. The typo on your resume or the spot on your tie. The final decision before the company declared bankruptcy.
We focus on the thing that happened just before the end. And that’s almost always an unimportant moment.
Things went wrong (or things went right) because of a long series of decisions and implementations. A misguided strategy, a bad hire, a brilliant insight about network effects–these are the acts with leverage, not the obvious thing that all the pundits would like to talk about.
When you get to the thing before the last thing, don’t sweat it. It’s almost certainly too late to make the outcome change. On the other hand, when you’re quietly discussing the thing before that before that before that before that, it might pay to bring more attention to it than the circumstances seem to demand. Because that’s the key moment.
Organizations grow when they develop a base of customers.
Companies find profits, non-profits serve their cause, political ideas become movements for just one reason: they develop a group of people who are changed by what they do. For ease, let’s call them ‘customers.’
Once you see that, it becomes pretty clear that this is the most difficult and important thing that the organization does, and in fact is the only one you can’t outsource or work your way around.
It’s possible but unlikely that the first product or service you develop will be exactly what potential customers were already hoping for. That’s why failure is the fuel that moves new projects forward. Failure is a way of discovering one more thing that customers didn’t want, and perhaps, learning a bit about what they might want. By iterating without tears or fears, organizations are able to discover things about their future customers.
Sometimes (actually, almost every time) the innovation an organization brings to the market isn’t instantly and universally adopted. While there are people who get satisfaction and status and results by going first (early adopters), most customers would prefer to wait. These customers see little upside in investing the time to be a pioneer or in taking the risk to go first.
[And to be clear, that’s true for non-profit donors, voters and any other sort of ‘customer’].
And so you see the paradox: on one hand, organizations need to be agile and eager to pivot as they engage with a market that’s invisible or skeptical, but on the other hand, ideas don’t spread through a marketplace instantly.
That’s one reason why it’s so important to identify your smallest viable audience. The smallest group of customers that will enable you to thrive. By seeing them, obsessing about them and serving them, you can refine your product at the very same time that you establish the conditions for growth.
At this stage, growth can come from one of two places:
It could be that your core audience begins to tell the others. That you’ve built the network effect into your offering, so that it works even better when people tell their friends and colleagues. This is Tom’s shoes or Starbucks coffee. This is Twitter and the ice bucket challenge as well. When you create a purple cow, the remarkable nature of your product or service is in fact part of the reason people buy it, and the reason they talk about it. Not because it helps you, but because it helps them.
Or, just as powerful, it could be that your success at serving this small but viable audience gives you the team, the cash flow and most of all, the social proof to begin to find a different set of customers. Customers that might want a different set of benefits, a different story, a different way to change.
Often, this shift to a different customer set is difficult, because now you might feel stretched, you might even have to leave behind the people who originally embraced you and your offering. Patagonia doesn’t spend a lot of time selling removable pitons to hard-core rock climbers anymore. As they shifted to become the organization they are now, they probably got a lot of push back from people who said, “no one buys from them anymore, it’s too popular.”
Both approaches share two underlying principles:
You’re telling a story.
You’re making a change.
Being clear about ‘who’s it for?’ and ‘what’s it for?’ is the actual hard work of developing customers. And if you’re not gaining traction, deciding to hype harder is not the right choice. Traction doesn’t come from more social posting or working your network and asking for favors. Traction comes from accompanying the customers you’ve chosen on a journey that they’re eager to go on.
And the hard work of customer development is finding a reason for your customers to bring in new customers, or discovering a path where you can help non-customers discover what you offer and eagerly engage with it.
Further Reading: Blank & Dorf, Purple Cow, Crossing the Chasm, Story Driven, This is Marketing
July 6, 2021
They sound the same but work in opposite directions. They both began as Latin terms for stiff and unyielding, but now, they’ve diverged.
A rigid approach is easy to describe, but it’s brittle. Being rigid takes little imagination and a fair amount of fear.
On the other hand, approaching our craft with rigor means that we’re able to eagerly shift in the face of reality. We have rules for ourselves, but one of the rules is to adapt.
Rigor is a combination of expertise, awareness and flexibility. And it’s often in short supply.
July 5, 2021
Freedom has a partner, and its name is responsibility.
It’s easy to insist on all the things we should be free from.
But then we realize that we also have the freedom to act, to lead and to confront our fear and our selfishness. Once we realize our own agency, freedom begins to feel like a responsibility.
The freedom to make a difference.
July 4, 2021
Working with a ruler is pretty straightforward. Just about anyone can extend a line, or fix something straight if it breaks. It’s on the line or it’s not.
But curves? Curves are complex and hard to get right.
It turns out that humans bring curves with them, wherever we go.
July 3, 2021
