Tone deaf. Squidthanks. Nine years ago last month, a few of us sat down in my office and started working on Squidoo. Since then, there have been billions of visits to our site, and many of you have clicked, written, and contributed to what we've built. We've been able to pay people from around the world for great content and donate to dozens of charities.
Thanks. Squidoo was launched before Pinterest, Twitter and Medium were the platforms of the day. It arrived just in time to remind people that in fact they could share what they cared about with people who were interested in hearing about it. Last week, we announced that HubPages is acquiring the key assets of Squidoo and HugDug, creating the largest site of its kind. Like most projects, this one is coming to a close, and we hope that the combined platform that we're giving to our users will allow them to do more than ever before. I want to point you to the team that built (and even more arduously, improved) Squidoo for all of these years. Totally and completely out of my control. This is ours. Last night on the bike path I passed a well-dressed citizen, walking along with a bottle of water. I was stunned to see him finish his water and hurl the bottle into the woods.
I stopped and said, "Hey, please don't do that. " He looked at me with complete surprise and said, "what? " as if he didn't understand what 'that' was. The challenge we have in the connection economy, in a world built on ever more shared resources and public digital spaces is that some people persist in acting like it belongs to someone else. Too often, we accept this vandalism as if it's a law of nature, like dealing with the termites that will inevitably chew exposed wood on a house's foundation. If you can't sell it, you can't build it. Back to the drawing board. Doing the hard things. One model of organization is to find something that you're good at and that's easy and straightforward and get paid for that. The other model is to seek out things that are insanely difficult and do those instead.
Dave Ramsey does a three hour radio show every day. He books theaters and has a traveling road show. He has the discipline to only publish a new book quite rarely, and to stick with it for years and years as it moves through the marketplace. He has scores of employees. Rick Toone makes guitars that others would never attempt. Henry Ford did the same thing with the relentless scale and efficiency he built at Ford. "How do we do something so difficult that others can't imagine doing it? " The easy ride. Trading favors. Two new videos. Discretion. How much do you trust your people to do the right thing? Consider giving every person on your team a budget—$1000 a year?
$200 an incident? And challenging them to spend the money to make things right, to create efficiency, to delight. If the CFO freaks out, invite her to meet with each employee at the end of the year to hear how they chose to spend the money. $5 extra to park close enough to the airport to not miss a flight. Giving an unhappy customer a refund on the spot. Buying a subscription to an inexpensive web app that dramatically decreases customer service time... At the Ritz-Carlton, every single employee (even the maintenance folks) has a budget of $2,000 per guest to make things right. Without a doubt, the guest is blown away by this rapid response.
The self-driving reset of just about everything in our cities. Self-driving cars are going to be a huge transformational disruption, and they're probably going to happen faster than most people expect. Starting in cities, starting with car-sharing, the economics and safety implications are too big to avoid: Few traffic jams--cars will have a slower top speed, but rarely stopNo traffic lights--cars talk to each otherDramatically less pollutionPedestrians are far safer, bicycling becomes fun againNo parking issues--the car drives away and comes back when you need itLower costs and more access for more people more oftenInstant and efficient carpooling, since the car knows who's going where Most of the physical world around us is organized around traditional cars.
Not just roads, but the priority they get, the roadside malls, fast food restaurants, the fact that in many cities, more space is devoted to parking lots than just about anything else. Like all innovations, the death of the non-autonomous vehicle is not all upside. The existential crisis (and the other kind) Self assurance checklist for the anxious traveler. Travel has always meant possibility and change, and for some people, that means anxiety. Add to this non-refundable fares, tight connections and security theater courtesy of the TSA, and it's easy for the fun to turn into a literal nightmare. There are people who will tell you to just get over it and enjoy travelling, but for some people, the real benefit happens if they can eliminate the things that trigger the biggest issues. Some prophylactic measures to consider, extreme steps to transform your internal dialogue: Five days before you travel, lay out everything you intend to bring with you, all in a special section of your room.
You're not going to be checking bags (that's my dad's first law of travel), so, first, relentlessly trim what you laid out. Second, if it still won't fit in a manageable, small, wheeled bag, ship it ahead of time. Get the name of the person at the bell desk at your hotel, and ship the things you can't live without via UPS or Fedex Ground.
So, there you go. The handyman, the genius and the mad scientist. How to draw an owl. The problem with most business and leadership advice is that it's a little like this: The two circles aren't the point. Getting the two circles right is a good idea, but lots of people manage that part. No, the difficult part is learning to see what an owl looks like. Drawing an owl involves thousands of small decisions, each based on the answer to just one question, "what does the owl look like? " If you can't see it (in your mind, not with your eyes), you can't draw it. There are hundreds of thousands of bullet points and rules of thumb about how to lead people, how to start and run a company, how to market, how to sell and how to do work that matters. Most of them involve drawing two circles. Before any of these step by step approaches work, it helps a lot to learn to see.
Incubator programs and coaching work their best not when they teach people which circles to draw, but when they engage in interactive learning after you've gone ahead and drawn your circle. "But what if I fail?" The feedback you've been waiting for. "Our biggest problem is awareness" If that's your mantra, you're working to solve the wrong problem. If your startup, your non-profit or your event is suffering because of a lack of awareness, the solution isn't to figure out some way to get more hype, more publicity or more traffic. Those are funnel solutions, designed to fix an ailing process by dumping more attention at the top, hoping more conversion comes out the bottom. The challenge with this approach is that it doesn't scale. Soon, you'll have no luck at all getting more attention, even with ever more stunts or funding. No, the solution lies in re-organizing your systems, in re-creating your product or service so that it becomes worth talking about.
No, it won't be a perfect virus, starting with ten people and infecting the world. Who are your customers? The buffet problem keeps getting worse. Here's the thinking that leads just about every all-you-can-eat buffet to trend to mediocrity: "Oh, don't worry about how fresh the mashed potatoes are, after all, they're free. " Indeed, as far as the kitchen is concerned, each individual item on the buffet is 'free' in the sense that the customer didn't spend anything extra to get that item.
The problem is obvious, of course. Once you start thinking that way, then every single item on the buffet gets pretty lousy, and the next thing you know, the customers you seek don't come. So, the hotel that says, "With this sort of volume... we do tend to encounter a slower pace with our free wireless internet," has completely misunderstood how to think about the free internet they offer. It's not free. In fact, it might be the one and only reason someone picked your $400 hotel room over that hotel down the street. Successful organizations often beat the competition by turning the buffet problem upside down. Gradually and then suddenly.
This is how companies die, how brands wither and, more cheefully in the other direction, how careers are made. Gradually, because every day opportunities are missed, little bits of value are lost, customers become unentranced. We don't notice so much, because hey, there's a profit. Profit covers many sins. Of course, one day, once the foundation is rotted and the support is gone, so is the profit. Suddenly, apparently quite suddenly, it all falls apart.
It didn't happen suddenly, you just noticed it suddenly. The flipside works the same way. This is the way it works, but we too often make the mistake of focusing on the 'suddenly' part. That doesn't mean that gradually isn't important. HT to Hemingway for the riff. Micro marketing and the called bluff. Just ten years ago, what difference could you possibly be expected to make? How could you make music without getting picked by a record label, or help the local community garden more than showing up on Saturday to pull weeds? How could anyone expect you to change a conversation, or raise enough cash or move the needle more than a little? Today, armed with Mailchimp and Indiegogo and Vimeo and Meetup and a dozen other nearly free tools, you can make quite a ruckus. You can organize a hundred or a thousand people and get them in sync with a weekly newsletter. You can tailor goods or services or a cause to a small group of people that really want to hear about it and really want to spread the word.
You can self publish to your thousand true fans, you can host an event or a dozen events, you can enable your work to become famous to the crowd that matters. Pick yourself. If you care enough. ...different people differently. Don't teach your students as if they are a monolithic population of learners. They learn differently, they have different goals, different skills, different backgrounds. Don't sell to your customers as if they are a fungible commodity, a walking ATM waiting for you to punch. Six of one are not like half a dozen of the other.
They tell themselves different stories, have different needs and demand something different from you. Different voters, different donors, different employees--we have the choice to treat them as individuals. We used to have no choice. One of the biggest unfilled promises of the digital age is the opportunity to go beyond demographics and census data.
It's a no-brainer to treat the quarterback of the football team differently from the head of the chess club. The long tail of everything means that there's something for everyone--a blog to read, a charity to donate to, a skill to learn. Conference call hygiene. On behalf of the many who have suffered through pointless and painful conference calls, some general principles: When in doubt, don't have one.Everyone now knows precisely what time it is. Show up ten seconds early; one minute late is too late.If you can't live with rule 1, can we live with this one? 10 minutes is the maximum length of a conference call. In, out, over.If the meeting is only ten minutes long, good news, you have time to pull over, time to let the dog out, and time to give us your undivided attention.If you're not planning on speaking, no need to attend.
You can listen to the recording later if you need to, or we can send you 8 bullet points and save us all time.While we're on the topic, audio is a truly powerful means of communication, and if you want to record your message and send it to all of us, I'm totally in favor of this. If we work in the plant, we make widgets. This video is funny, because it's true. On doing the work. I'll be blunt: There's virtually no chance I will ever learn to play the bass, or even the harmonica. It's not because there isn't a huge range of useful instruction available.
There is. No, it's because even though I love glancing at this stuff, I'm just not persistent and driven enough to practice, to dig in, to get through the dip and yes, to do the work. We used to live in an industrial age, a Smithian-Marxist world where the worker sought to do as little as possible and the boss tried to get the worker to do as much as possible. In our self-serve economy, though, that's just not true. Almost eight thousand people have taken my Skillshare course so far, and the ones that got the most out of it all had two things in common: They did the project worksheets and they actively contributed to the online discussions.
"I'll just watch and take notes," is inconsistent with, "I'm here to learn. " PS a great place to start is with this modern classic from Steve Pressfield. The answer to, "is that the best you can do..." The four horsemen of mediocrity. Groundhog day and the Super Bowl. One way the tribe identifies is through the observance of a holiday, of a group custom, of the thing we all do together that proves we are in sync.
People thrive on mass celebration, but as our culture has fragmented, these universal observances are harder to find. We used to watch the same TV shows at the same time, eat the same foods, drive the same car. Given a choice, though, many people take the choice—and so, as the culture fragments, we move away from the center and to the edges. Halloween and the Super Bowl are the new secular holidays, the group-mania events that prove we're able to stay in sync. Every year, signed up for it or not, each of us is expected to survive the relentless hype. We see almost a month's worth of never-ending media about the Super Bowl—business articles, travel articles, legal articles, cooking articles—a huge onslaught of content-free noise. And yet we do it again and again. Do you love your customers?
The smart CEO's guide to social justice. Meandering toward nowhere special. You are not the lowest common denominator. Micro marketing and the called bluff. The number #1 reason to focus. "But I might get rejected" No is essential. The proven way to add value. Good advice... Set a date. Power, policy and public perception. Good at the beginning. Origin stories. Embracing the power user. The short game, the long game and the infinite game. Get rich (quick) Taking your time doesn't scale. What got you here... Steal, don't invent. The right moment.