From Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive:
They are too busy on the tasks of yesterday.
Drucker:
There is no lack of ideas in any organization I know. “Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas. Everybody is much too busy on the tasks of yesterday….
The need to slough off the outworn old to make possible the productive new is universal. It is reasonably certain that we would still have stagecoaches — nationalized, to be sure, heavily subsided, and with a fantastic research program to “retrain the horse” — had there been ministries of transportation around 1825.
This is an excellent, insightful, enjoyable, and easy to follow slideshare from Gary Vaynerchuk.
Here are a few key points I took down:
Most marketers simply treat social media as a distribution channel—as another form of mass marketing. Big mistake! You lose all the benefits.
This forgets that what’s unique about social platforms is that they are a two-way conversation, not one-way. That’s what distinguishes them from mass marketing.
Social media is like a cocktail party. And a good cocktail party doesn’t come from talking about yourself the whole time (that’s one-way marketing), but from talking about others and interacting.
You bring value by engaging with users. That means replying to them—not just shooting stuff out there.
The trick is to learn the uniqueness of each platform and tell your story in a way that syncs with why and how people use that platform.
“Those who don’t learn how to tell their stories on today’s platforms are the ones who will go out of business.”
This has taken down some very smart, rich, and well-supported companies (for ex: Blackberry; AOL).
That’s the title of an excellent interview at the Gallup Management Journal with Jim Clifton on his book The Coming Jobs War.
Here are a few excerpts that are especially worth noting:
The U.S. has no shortage of great ideas and innovations. What the country needs now are highly motivated entrepreneurs who can turn those ideas into great businesses, says Gallup’s chairman. [But]…by concentrating on innovators and neglecting entrepreneurs, we may be making it harder to create the jobs the world wants and needs.
…The country that invents the future wins the jobs war, and inventing the future is what great entrepreneurs do.
…Businesses like the one Steve Jobs created and businesses like Intel and Microsoft and Amazon and Groupon and Facebook and eBay — nobody else sees that stuff coming. Nobody else says, “Hey, we need a site where we can post pictures from the weekend. We need a site that’s basically a 24/7 garage sale.” That wouldn’t have market tested well. But look at Facebook and eBay — they’re multibillion-dollar companies that created jobs for thousands of people.
We’ve got to accelerate that. To imagine that we’ll compete with China and those manufacturing jobs will come back is hallucination — or at best, wishful thinking.
…Engagement is a precondition for the state of mind that creates entrepreneurs. Miserable workgroups chase customers away. Miserable workforces don’t create any economic energy, so those companies are always cutting jobs. America will not come back and win the world unless we have the most spirited workforce. Spirited workforces create new customers. New customers create new jobs.
My other post for The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics this month. In it, I once again take issue with the increasingly common view that “follow your passion” is bad advice.
The most important point in the post is that we need to recognize that our passions are actually activities, not abstract generalizations. Recognizing that point alone will bring amazing clarity to all of your career decisions.
Here’s the start:
We often hear the advice “follow your passion” or “do what you love and the money will follow.” Is that good advice?
A few business thinkers have recently been saying that it is not. Even the author of the popular Dilbert comic, Scott Adams, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, where he argued that “follow your passion” is bad advice.
Adams gives an example from when he worked as a commercial lender. The person who came in and said, “I want to open a sporting goods store because I really like watching sports on television,” was not the kind of guy who tended to be a good investment. Hence, “following your passion,” he argues, is not usually good advice.
But what’s the real problem here? I would argue that following your passion is, in fact, good advice—as long as you understand what that actually means.
My guest post at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics blog.
I would also encourage you to check out their blog in general. It is truly fantastic — and especially the last few days have some interesting posts.
This has been my experience, and it’s good to hear that science may be bearing this out. Here’s a key quote from a brief article on this subject:
“Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols,” writes Carr. “The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space. If you’ve ever picked up a book that you read long ago and discovered that your hands were able to locate a particular passage quickly, you’ve experienced this phenomenon.”
The question for me is whether there’s a way to be able to replicate this phenomena with e-books. I haven’t found one yet, but perhaps there is.
I’m not blogging this because my editor tried to reduce the number of sentences I started with “but” and “and” in What’s Best Next (though that did happen). I’ve had this down on my list to post for over a year; but I suppose this truth is not as appreciated as I perhaps thought it was.
So, here are two great words on this from two important books on writing.
From On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” But that’s wrong—there’s no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast.
From Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing:
Starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction is an informal style; it makes your writing sound conversational. In addition, a conjunction at the beginning usually draws attention to the sentence and adds punch.
Marketing does not exist to make up for inadequacies in a mediocre product. The first job of marketing is to create an excellent product.
The best marketers have always understood this. Consider two quotes.
Guy Kawasaki: “The best brands never start out with the intent of building a great brand. They focus on building a great — and profitable — product or service and an organization that can sustain it.”
Emmanuel Rosen, in The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing
: “The flow of information about a product cannot be separate from the quality of the product itself.”
I would suggest that this is a very Christian view of marketing. We often think of marketing as creating fluff and puffery about a product, trying to get people to think better of a product than it really deserves. Can there be a Christian view of marketing? Certainly not if we call that marketing.
But that’s not real marketing. Real marketing is about telling the truth. And that’s good, because that’s what a Christian view of marketing is, too: tell the truth about a product, and do it in a way that is remarkable, engaging, and that spreads. A Christian view of marketing has truth at it’s center, and makes truth the central and defining point of any marketing strategy.
Can you actually do marketing that way? Yes. In fact, it’s really the only kind of marketing that actually works. For no matter how great of a marketing campaign you create, if customers are disappointed with your product, they will not spread the word. But within the domain of actually telling the truth about a product, there are some amazing things you can do.
In fact, one of the most intriguing things about this perspective is that it means that good marketing has its beginning all the way back in product design.
In other words, marketing is not something “added on,” that you do after you’ve created your product or service. Rather, it begins in the product development phase itself. Good marketing is always organic to the product itself, because good marketing is about spreading the word about excellent products that are truly worth knowing about.
A great article at the 99U. The five characteristics are:
And for those who want to go deeper on how ideas spread, I would recommend:
, by Seth Godin (a classic and still the best).
, which you need to read carefully in order to truly get, but adds important details not in Godin’s book. It’s by Greg Stielstra, who oversaw marketing for numerous best sellers at Zondervan, including The Purpose Driven Life, and clearly knows what he is talking about.