b Hard Skills Archives - Page 12 of 13

Confronting the Buffet Dilemma

June 2, 2009 by Matt Perman

Seth Godin had a good post the other day on the dilemma faced by any organization that wants to grow the base that it serves:

If you want to grow the size of your customer base, you need to confront the buffet dilemma.
Any decent buffet has foods that please 85% of the population. Meats, cheeses, potatoes… the typical fare.
Once your business hits a natural plateau, it’s tempting to invest in getting more people to come. And what most buffets do is double down. Now, they have bacon, plus they have beans with bacon and turkey-wrapped bacon. Now, instead of one chocolate cake, they have three.
This is essentially useless. You haven’t done anything to grow your audience. The base might be a little more pleased, but not enough to bring in any new business. And the disenfranchised (the vegans, the weight watchers, the healthy eaters, the kosher crowd) remain unmoved and uninterested. And one person like this out of a party of six is enough to keep all six away.

What does work? Going much deeper or a bit wider:

Deeper would mean a bacon-focused buffet, a dozen bacon dishes, including chocolate-covered bacon. Deeper would mean a chocolate-obsessed dessert bar, ten cakes, fondue, everything.
Deeper gets you people willing to drive across town to visit you. It’s remarkable. It’s not like every other buffet but a little bit bigger. It’s insanely over the top. People will bully their friends in order to get them to come.
The other choice is wider. Instead of adding a handful of dishes that mildly please the people you already have, why not add brown rice and tofu and vegetarian chili? Now you’ve opened the doors to that last 15%.

Make a "Best Of" Twitter List

June 1, 2009 by Matt Perman

Squidoo has just launched a way to create a “best of” list of your favorite tweets on a specific topic. Godin writes:

Twitter is immersive. It washes over you. But what happens when a great link or clever post goes by? Squidoo just launched a promotion around the new TwttrList tool. The power of this tool is that it turns the momentary stream of tweets into a permanent sign post. A curated best of instead of a random time-based river. You can chronicle a conference, or highlight great posts about your brand or event.
This lets other people find your collection of the best tweets on Google, or see a series of messages without the noise in between. Here are a few good ones.

Don't Try to be the "Next" Something

June 1, 2009 by Matt Perman

From Seth Godin on why it’s a bad idea for Microsoft to attempt to be “the next Google” with its relaunched search:

Microsoft, home of the Zune, has just announced that they’re going to launch Bing, a rebranding and reformatting of their search engine. So far, they’ve earmarked $100 million just for the marketing.
Bing, of course, stands for But It’s Not Google. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It’s called Google.
Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:
Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.

Read the whole thing.

(By the way, this does not deny that there is wisdom in the words “geniuses copy.” Most new things are not wholly original — and shouldn’t be. The key is to take what is indeed excellent from what has been done before — and relevant to what you are doing — but to do it in your own way, integrating it with other excellent ideas [some of which may be unique to you] such that you are creating a new synthesis. That’s how you create something new.)

Advice For Those Starting Anything

May 20, 2009 by Matt Perman

Read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything.

Whether you are starting a business, non-profit, division within your company, or church plant; or if you are launching a new product or service within your company, this book will be worth your time and help improve your chance of getting off the ground well.

I regard it as one of those extra-useful books because, when reading it, I felt like I was reading about a lot of my own mistakes. That was a humbling experience — especially because it actually took a second read for the lights to really come on.

So maybe read it twice.

Key Notes from the Art of Project Management

March 31, 2009 by Matt Perman

Scott Berkun’s book The Art of Project Management (now issued in a new edition and renamed Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice)) is the best book I’ve read on project management. It is fantastically helpful.

The other day I came across these brief notes I had jotted down a while ago from the book. They are very incomplete, hitting on just a few of the key things that stood out to me.

But sometimes, that’s what can be most helpful. So here they are, in case they might be timely for you as well:

Requirements vs. specifications. Requirements are the what, and specifications the how.
The three perspectives: Business (including marketing), technology, and user. User is most important but also most often neglected.
The importance of planning: “Plans provide an opportunity to review decisions, expose assumptions, and clarify agreements between people and organizations. Plans act as a forcing function against all kinds of stupidity because they demand the important issues be resolved while there is time to consider other options. As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend four hours sharpening the axe,’ which I take to mean that smart preparation minimizes work.” (p. 41)
On thinking outside the box. It’s not always best to say “think outside the box.” Eliminating boxes is not necessarily the hard part—it’s knowing which boxes to use and when to use them. Constraints are ever present. Art of Project Management, 93. “Do whatever you want with the box. Think in the box, out of the box, on the box, under the box, tear apart and make a fire out of the box, whatever, as long as you manage to solve the problems identified as the goals for the project” (p. 94).
Where good ideas come from. To generate good ideas, ask good questions.
Open issues list: “An open issue is anything that needs to be decided or figured out but hasn’t happened yet. It’s essentially a list of questions, and it should encompass anything that needs to be done, prioritized by its potential impact on engineering” (123).
Different types of requirements and specs: Requirements, feature spec, technical specs, work-item list (the description of each programming assignment needed to fulfill the feature spec), and test criteria and milestone exit criteria (prioritized cases for the new functionality, along with goals for how well the code needs to perform on those cases to meet the quality goals for the milestone).

Advice to Startups: How to Build Companies that Matter

March 28, 2009 by Matt Perman

Eric Ries has a great article on how to build companies that matter, based on a model that he calls the lean startup.

The way for the lean startup approach has been paved by recent technological innovations such as web 2.0 and has been made even more relevant by the current economic crisis.

Here’s the intro:

We’re living in a time of renewed possibility for startups. Major trends – from the pain of the economic crisis to the disruption of web 2.0 – are breaking the old models and paving the way for a new breed of company. I call it the Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to building companies that matter. It’s designed to dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning. It requires dramatically less capital than older models, and can find profitability sooner. Most importantly, it breaks down the artificial dichotomy between pursuing the company’s vision and creating profitable value. Instead, it harnesses the power of the market in support of the company’s long-term mission.
Tim O’Reilly has recently been advocating that as an industry we focus on building stuff that matters. In response, I want to try and present a way of building startups that can realize that dream. In particular, he as articulated three principles:
(1) Work on something that matters to you more than money, (2) Create more value than you capture, and (3) Take the long view.

Ries then goes on to present an approach for startups that builds on those principles.

Upside Downturn

February 12, 2009 by Matt Perman

Creativity Online has a helpful and engaging interview with some folks on where creativity stands and the role it can play during these challenging economic times. Here are three key excerpts:

Sure, times are tough, but history has shown that recessions can lead to innovation and enlightened ways of thinking. Here, creatives reflect on opportunities to be mined on the tough road ahead. Additionally, we present some of the most brilliant breakthroughs to come out during financial slumps.
….
The campaigns that I am most proud of had little or no budget. When you have no money, the idea has to be fantastic.
….
Lots of marketers will be under pressure to reduce their budgets. Now, that’s not a great idea because, as The Economist and many others have pointed out: (a) you still have to sell into a down economy (probably harder) and (b) if the competition is pulling back it’s an opportunity to take more of the conversation. But let’s take budget pressure as a reality. You’re a big marketer and you can spend $3 million dollars on 30 seconds in the season finale of Lost. Or you can spend $1.5 million doing something digital that provides conversation value, social value, function. You can do something as or more effective with a lot less money, because digital doesn’t usually carry the same cost of production process and bloat that big splash TV does. That doesn’t mean that spending half as much online makes you twice as smart. You have to use that half of your budget thoughtfully. That’s where creativity and innovation comes in.

How to Negotiate in a Way that Produces Two Winners, and No Losers

February 11, 2009 by Matt Perman

Alex Chediak has written a very helpful article on negotiation which has just been posted at Boundless. Alex points out that the goal is to pursue a win-win agreement — that is, two winners, and no losers. This means that we should pursue principled negotiation rather than positional negotiation.

Here are his four main points:

Separate the people from the problem.
Negotiation on the basis of objective merits, not subjective preferences.
Brainstorm creatively to identify mutually beneficial solutions.
Know when to walk away.

A helpful source for the article was the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which I highly recommend. If you read one book on negotiation, that’s the book to read.

And, with this, remember that negotiation is not only a “big event” that happens only once in a while, such as when you buy a car or a house. These principles are relevant every day in many different ways. And we are often participating in “mini-negotiations” throughout the day without even knowing it.

Don’t Skip that Page

February 10, 2009 by Matt Perman

Excellent thoughts today from Seth Godin. In an era where all the highlights from everything are so easily available, it can be very, very easy to forget this:

The top of a mountain is rarely the best part.
You can watch “the good parts” of a baseball game in about six minutes. The web has become a giant highlights reel… the best parts of SNL, the best parts of a speech, the best parts of a book.
We can skim really fast now. This is a problem for marketers, because it means that if they don’t make the good parts easily findable and accessible (and bold and loud and memorable) then the whole product becomes invisible.
As consumers of information, though, I wonder if the best parts are really the best parts. Yes, you can read a summary of a book instead of a book, or watch the trailer instead of the movie, or read the executive summary of the consultant’s report instead of the whole thing… but the parts you miss are there for a reason.
Real change is rarely caused by the good parts. Real change and impact and joy come from the foundation and the transitions and the little messages that sneak in when you least expect them. The highlights of the baseball game are highlights largely because the rest of the game got you ready for them.
Don’t skip that page, it’s there for a reason.

One more thought: In his management book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham talks about how there are several stages to building an excellent work environment. Here’s what’s interesting: you can’t just skip to the final stage. If you do, you will fail. The stages leading up to that are the necessary preparation.

Mountain climbers know this well. As Buckingham states: “To reach the summit you have to pay your dues — if you just helicopter to camp 3 and rise to the summit, experienced guides know you will never make it. Mountain sickness will sap your energy and slow your progress to a crawl.”

The same is true with information and most things in life: If all we ever seek out and engage with are the highlights, the end result is going to be mountain sickness.

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