That used to involve putting film or paper into a chemical bath. You could have a small influence over what happened, but almost all the work involved setting up the shot in the first place. The goal of the bath was to uncover what was already on the film.
Developing today has a totally different meaning. We’re not simply uncovering, we’re building. Software, careers, our culture–we develop them daily, adding a little bit at a time, toward the future we seek to create.
(Or your logo, your house, your tie, your business card, your website…)
Like a suit or a skirt, it needs to fit. You’re going to be looking at it for a long time.
And you’re certainly going to look at it more than any other human will, so if it’s not perfect, don’t sweat it, that’s mostly a personal challenge.
The book cover should work at any size, because most people will see it before they buy it, and they will see it online, at just a one inch square size.
The book cover should not only reflect the genre it’s in, it should send a powerful signal within that genre.
One signal might be: It fits! I get the joke! This is what works, for example, in romance novels. If you’re looking for a book like this, this is a book like that.
Another signal might be: I know what sophisticated books look like, but this one is deliberately not that. It’s for people who don’t buy a lot of books. Something like The One Minute Manager belongs here.
And a third signal, my favorite, is: I know what the genre looks like, AND this book is in that genre, BUT, this book is a bestseller and so it is stretching the boundaries in a way that only an important new book can.
It’s worth noting that your cover will almost certainly NOT sell even one copy of the book, but it can certainly unsell someone who might have considered your cover. So there’s not a lot of room for risky, daring maneuvers. You don’t need them.
When in doubt, check out this gallery of movie posters
A lot of people spent a lot of time arguing at the meeting, but it doesn’t change how people engage with the movie. Unless you go too far away from the genre.
Once you’re in a slot, it’s harder and harder to move out of it. The status quo is here because it’s good at persisting.
One option, particularly if you’re on your own, is to take your development seriously. Instead of simply clearing the incoming and reacting to what’s knocking on your door, you can invest the time to learn and the effort to practice.
My friends at Akimbo have a few workshops that are worth considering:
The Freelancer’s Workshop begins tomorrow. It’s about one simple idea: becoming the sort of freelancer who gets better clients. Because better clients change your work and your standing as well.
Bernadette Jiwa’s Story Skills Workshop is back beginning tomorrow as well. The story we tell ourselves (and others) drives how we spend our days and who responds to us.
The breakthrough Real Skills Conference (truly a conference, no speeches!) is back on August 19th but you’ll need to get tickets in advance.
And, if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider the altMBA. Six years in, it’s proven itself, and now it’s your turn to leap.
If you’re at the station, sitting on a train about to leave, you might notice that the train next to you is moving.
But, perhaps, that train is sitting still and you’re moving. It’s hard to tell. Without the lurch of sudden acceleration, the only clue we have is that our relative position is changing.
For most of us, it’s disconcerting–we know something is moving, but we’re not sure exactly what’s happening.
Do we stay where we are… does anyone?
Whether or not we commit to movement, the world never stays precisely as it was. Insisting that it does is simply a waste of time and a source of frustration.
Neil Postman pointed out that bureaucracies control the flow of information. A form, for example, has no room for all the information, just the stuff that’s requested. It’s impossible to share all the information about anything, particularly at scale.
The deluge that is the internet is an opportunity and a problem. With a few clicks, we’re able to get more data. And there’s no end in sight, since new data is posted faster than we can consume it.
If you want to get better at astronomy, it doesn’t pay to get up to speed on all the books about gardening that you can find. Or texts on gambling, posts on the stock market or tweets about today’s political gambits. They won’t help you learn what you seek.
It’s easy to be in favor of more data. After all, until we reach a certain point, more data is the best way to make a better decision. But then, fairly suddenly, more isn’t better. It’s simply a way to become confused or to stall.
If you want more information, be careful about the data you seek out.
That doesn’t happen very often.
When someone combines generosity, insight and bravery to provide something before we know that’s what we need, we are particularly grateful.
It’s a special form of leadership.
The office is a fairly modern phenomenon. We got by for millenia without them.
For a century, the office was simply a small room next to the factory or the store. The office was upstairs from the bakery, or next to the stockyard or the foundry. Proximity to the worksite was its primary attribute.
For the last fifty years, though, more and more office workers never actually saw the factory floor.
Office culture became a thing onto itself, with layers of workers supporting other workers who supported workers who helped improve the productivity of the factory, whatever sort of factory that was.
And office culture was based on physical proximity. With most written communication taking far too long (a week for a letter!) and electronic communication insufficient in resolution, we built office towers to house the layers of office hierarchy that were evolving. We even named ‘the corner office’ after an executive’s physical location in the flow of information and power.
But then the factory was moved even further away–most big company CEOs have never even visited all of their factories, retail outlets or development centers. And if you have more than a few, it means that no matter where you are, you’re not at most of them.
And then email turned written communication into something instant and high resolution. Asynchronous messaging eliminates time.
And then Zoom meant that location didn’t matter much either.
Over the last 18 months, many of us have felt isolation as part of the dislocation from the office. Easily overlooked, though, is how much faster and more efficient so many systems became. Now, it’s not the communications system that’s holding us back, it’s our unwillingness to make change happen in concert with our peers.
Some organizations dealt with enforced work-from-home by using endless Zoom meetings as a form of compliance… a high-tech way to take attendance. But others leaned into the opportunity to create nimble, task-oriented decision making and communications hubs, ones that were no longer constrained by physical proximity.
The last forty years have taught us that the technology that most disrupts established industries is speed. The speed of connection to peers, to suppliers and most of all, to customers. The speed of decision making, of ignoring sunk costs and of coordinated action. The internet has pushed all of these things forward, and we’ve just discovered, the office was holding all of them back.
As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems.
When a change arrives, some people embrace it. And because it’s new, they have to be specific about why. They can talk clearly about the benefits it offers and why they feel drawn to the change it can produce.
But many people don’t embrace the change. And more often than not, their objections are diffuse. They change their story over time, sometimes within the same conversation. When one objection is overcome, they switch to another one. They embrace mutually exclusive arguments and generally appear vague in their discomfort.
That’s because the people who say yes are seeing and embracing what’s possible.
There are definitely specific nos as well. People who have considered the details and implications of a new technology or cultural shift and then declined to use it.
But that’s not a meandering no.
While some people reject a new idea simply because it doesn’t work for them, often the people who are saying no are afraid. They’re afraid of what change may bring, and they’re not sure they trust the innovation and the system enough to go forward. But we’ve been conditioned to avoid saying, “I’m afraid,” so if we’re uninformed and afraid, we make up objections instead. And even add angry bravado to our objections, simply as a way of hiding what’s really going on.
A meandering no doesn’t turn into a yes because someone with a good idea listened very carefully to every spoken objection and rationally and clearly countered it. Because the objections aren’t real, and the naysayer isn’t listening very hard to the responses.
Instead, the culture changes when a combination of two things happens:
The last fifty years of technology adoption show that this happens every single time a shift spreads across the culture. Every time.
Demetri Martin tells the story of seeing a necklace for sale. It says, “Diana” on it.
“Wait,” he says to the owner of the jewelry store, “you’d probably sell more if it said ‘Not Diana’ on it.” After all, just about everyone isn’t named Diana.
The absurdity of this story is precisely why focusing on the smallest viable audience makes so much more sense than trying to make average stuff for average people.
Feet on the street.
At the same time that air travel is becoming less favored by businesses, the world is more connected than ever before.
There are lots of organizations that want to do business internationally but might not be as eager to fly across the world to visit a factory or meet with a supplier. And so the pharmaceuticals, the software, the fabrics, the call centers, the chips—it becomes ever more difficult to truly understand how to source and produce the components that world-based products demand.
The expediter is local talent. They speak the language. They are retained by the company to join in on zoom calls and to do site visits if needed. The modern expediter provides something that’s more useful than ever: insight.
My friend Jojo does this in China. I’m guessing that there are others who do it in many other countries around the world, but they’re not easy to find.
In the original post, I offered to put together a list of expediters suggested by my readers. I got more than 200 responses. Here’s the very lightly edited, unvetted list.
