My thanks to Guy Kawasaki for putting this on his Holy Kaw. He thanked Buzzfeed. And the original chart appeared here, on BBspot.com. Great stuff. Just look at the flow from “Are you rich” to “Own a Mac” to “Sure you’re not rich?” If you don’t know how to read a flow chart, well, take a look, and now you do.
Every so often I’m struck with the beauty and eloquence of simplicity. Like this blog, this post, this simple look and feel:
I particularly liked this post, but it reminded me that the blog itself, zenhabits, is a wonderful example of how well focus actually works within a real business, small business, context. As the tag line suggests, it’s about “simple productivity.” I love how much both the design and the actual content reinforce the “simple” focus. It’s surprising how rarely that kind of deep conceptual integration actually happens.
This is a great example. You might also try 30 Things to Do to Keep From Getting Bored Out of Your Skull at Work, or 20 Things I Wish I Had Known Starting Out in Life. Or any of the other posts on this blog.
I liked Sonia Simone’s refreshingly put The Surprising Old-School Secret to Blogging Success on Copyblogger yesterday. She’s talking about blogging, specifically, but the lesson applies all over the new world. I liked it when she starts with this…
About 80% of your blog’s success comes from “ass in chair” time. That’s the time you spend writing posts, editing posts, finding the perfect image, connecting with fellow bloggers, answering comments, and shaping up your SEO…
… because that’s my style. I don’t mind working long hours, particularly doing stuff I like, such as — on the good days — writing stuff on this blog. Give me a keyboard and an empty room and I’m happy to be the life of the hypothetical not-really-there party.
But real people, in real conversation? I don’t like it when Sonia reveals her hidden message:
Believe it or not, you can actually replicate this phenomenon by physically locating yourself in close proximity to another person, with each of you taking turns speaking. This is called a conversation.
Ugh. Where’s my keyboard? And, to make it worse, she rubs salt on that wound with this:
Spend enough time in these “real world” conversations, and you actually trigger the growth of new neural connections. You come up with new ideas. You challenge your existing ideas and take them in new directions. You learn.
This phenomenon is improved by another old-school technique, called listening. It’s like lurking, except the other person can see you standing there, so at some point you should probably say something.
I have to admit, I liked it better when success was 90% just showing up. I’m good at showing up. But listening? You’re asking a lot.
One of the funniest – and, like it or not – truest pieces I’ve read lately was Call Me! But Not on Skype or Any Other Videophone in Time Magazine a few weeks ago (and, happily, also posted online, which is why I linked to it here). Joel Stein nails it on what’s wrong with Skype: you have to pay attention to the other person. He says:
Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we’re talking and zone out while you are.
As soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking.
How embarrassingly true that is. And now we have experts on Copyblogger, one of the best blogs about blogging, telling us the secret to blogging success might be actual real conversations with live people instead of keyboards. And listening?
Brave new world? Maybe not. Maybe just that same old world, but with more people than ever.
This is disturbing on several levels. No, I don’t know Joel Spolsky but I feel like I do because I’ve been reading his work for years. He’s not just an expert on software development, he’s a very good writer and thinker. I’ve quoted him a lot.
So what’s disturbing? In Let’s Take This Offline Joel’s saying he’s going to stop blogging. That’s bad enough, because there aren’t that many thoughtful eloquent software developers around. But what’s worse is his reason (quoting):
The truth is, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, blogging has become increasingly impossible to do the way I want to as Fog Creek has become a larger company. We now have 32 employees and at least six substantial product lines. We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them. And my daily duties now take so much time that it has become a major effort to post something thoughtful even once or twice a month.
The best evidence also suggests that there are many other effective ways to market Fog Creek’s products — and that our historical overreliance on blogging as a marketing channel has meant that we’ve ignored them. I realize now that blogging made me, and Fog Creek, a big fish in a very small pond. As a result, we have the undisputed No. 1 product among the 5 percent to 10 percent of programmers who regularly read blogs about programming. Meanwhile, we’re almost unknown in every other demographic.
I think that’s a real business mistake. As I write this and as you read it, of course, we should both recognize that I know absolutely nothing about the specific business of Fog Creek software, so I’m probably way off base here. But then, in defense of what I’m about to say, I am relying on Joel’s own words. I’m taking him at his word.
The mistake here is related to one of my favorite quotes: “I don’t know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.”
I think every company needs to recognize its strengths and weaknesses. Sure, you try to bolster the weaknesses over time, but never give up a strength. Here’s my message to Joel:
Joel, your blogging is your stronghold. It’s all about focus. You can’t do everything. Having a clear and well-identified strength is really important. Keep it. Use it to defend your business while you expand elsewhere. You don’t have to give that up in order to broaden channels. You’ve got a business going, you have revenue, you can hire people to do those other things, open those other channels. If you look, you’ll find people who know how to do that, and can do it better than you will. Keep your writing and build on it.
It seems so simple: punctuality is a matter of respecting other people’s time. Be on time for meetings and appointments. This is obvious. Right?
Still, in many organizations it’s a cascading problem. Lag times creep up from five to 10 to 15 minutes. 
People hang back, composing one more email, because they know the meeting will start late and they have a lot to do. Nobody wants to be on time and then sit in a conference room waiting while others tick off their to-do lists.
I learned a good lesson from an experienced teacher years ago, when I was a tour guide during vacations from my real job. I took groups around the world (yes, a stroke of luck for a 25-year-old working stiff, but how that happened is a different story).
The trips I did took a month each. I traveled with the group and connected with local guides for local tours in each destination. The advice I got was:
On the morning of the first day in the first destination city, with the very first city tour, leave a few people behind. If you do, your group will be on time for the rest of the month. If you don’t, they’ll get later and later throughout the month.
And that advice turned out to be spot on. I know, because I did it wrong the first time around. Once I’d waited five minutes on the first day, there was no way to not wait five, 10, 15 minutes on other days. I’d waited for so-and-so, why not for this other one too? And the second time I did it right. I left without four of about 70 people for the first city tour because they weren’t in the lobby at 9 a.m. Bingo. Everybody was on time for all the other tours.
Realistically, how do you apply this simple lesson to a business environment?
If you can follow these steps, you’ll have a more productive work environment. Think about it: if everybody is waiting for a few minutes after the specified meeting time, and nobody is on time, how much time is lost? Why not just schedule the meeting for 9:15 then, instead of 9 a.m.?
By the way, if you happen to be a consultant or outside expert, you obviously have less control over the meeting style at the client company. But you can talk about your meeting punctuality policy with the main client. You might find that she or he is grateful for a chance to introduce this topic into the organization.
(Image: Ebtikar/Shutterstock)
If your business plan is finished, your business is finished.
I’d like to think that this is obvious, but a lot of people don’t get it. A business plan isn’t supposed to be finished, ever. If it’s useful to your business, then you keep it alive. You review it regularly. You check assumptions and how they’ve changed. You compare plan versus actual results and make course corrections.
It’s supposed to be like the farmer’s axe: the handle’s been replaced 10 times and the blade three times, but it’s still the same axe.
Like that axe changing its parts, expect your business plan to change. Parts of it will be replaced as reality rears up its ugly head and messes with assumptions. But the plan goes on and on.
For example, Palo Alto Software is 22 years old. The business plan has never been finished. We take a fresh look at it once a year, and review plan versus actual results every month. When we discover that assumptions have changed, we review the changes and the impact of the changes, and adjust the plan.
Maybe 10 or 15 times in 22 years, we’ve had to dress up the plan and send it to somebody outside the company. We did that to get the merchant account initially, to set up a commercial line of credit with a bank, and when we were looking at possibly taking on investors. Each time we needed to present a plan, we took the real plan — the live plan — and we reviewed, edited, formatted, and produced a document. And that document, once produced, is no longer the plan. It’s just the dressed-up view of the plan as it existed that particular day.
So the plan lives on. Unfinished. 22 years later.
That’s not a misspelling in my title; it’s on purpose. The play on words: morning because Mexico City is usually smoggiest in the mornings; and mourning because it used to be such a great place to live, and isn’t at all anymore. Sure, everything changes, but Mexico City has gone from being a delightful place to live, in the early 1970s — safe, manageable, full of trees and music and good food and friendly people — to being very dirty and downright dangerous.
It’s a night-and-day change. Who would believe it, but when I first moved there as a young man in 1971, Mexico City was safer than any major U.S. city. It was almost like Tokyo in that respect.
My wife and I used to go out for dinner and a movie on a Friday night and take the freeway (periferico) 15 miles in 15 minutes to get to a movie theater in the north of the city. We’d watch the movie, go to dinner in the downtown area, 10 or so miles and another 10 or so minutes away, and then get home (another five or so miles) in 10-15 minutes.
We were always safe taking a walk after dinner. There were some rumored neighborhoods where that might not have been true, but just about anywhere in the main areas of the city were safe. We never worried.
Often, at night as I drifted off to sleep, I would hear the distant wistful sound of a camote vendor who used a distinctive whistle to attract customers to his rolling baked sweet potato cart. And on weekends we might find a rolling corn on the cob (elote) vendor, with a different whistle, selling boiled corn on the cob served bathed in lemon, salt, and powdered chile. Those are great memories.
When I first arrived in Mexico City there was no word in the vernacular for smog. They had some on particularly bad days, but it was nothing like, say, Los Angeles.
Boy, has that all changed. Today, that Friday night itinerary would be about three hours’ driving time. People are very careful about where they choose to take an evening walk. Most of the trees are gone. Restaurants are still spectacularly good in Mexico City, but they’re a lot harder to get to. And the smog and traffic are terrible.
Not long ago, Forbes.com published a list of the 25 dirtiest cities in the world. Mexico City placed fifth in that category.
And this is not just idle criticism of somewhere far away. I earned the right to say this. I lived in Mexico City for 10 years. It’s my city-in-law, in a sense, because my wife was born and raised there. We have three children who were born there.
And for anybody out there who thinks this is the natural result of some sort of social inferiority, forget that please. It’s not just corruption, although that’s a factor. And it’s not just the drug cartels, although they too are a serious factor. No, it’s a combination of disadvantaged economic development for centuries, an unlevel playing field, plus corruption and drugs. And don’t forget what causes the drug problem: the people who create the market by buying and using the drugs. The providers wouldn’t be there if the market weren’t there.
Presidents’ Day today in the USA. When I was a kid, we used to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on Feb. 12 and George Washington’s birthday on Feb. 22. Somebody switched us two holidays for one, which we now call Presidents’ Day instead. Bad deal, I suppose, except the poor kids growing up now in the USA get so much less schooling than we did in the 1950s, the last thing they need is another holiday.
I try to post here on working days, and today’s a holiday, not a working day. But even so, here are some of my favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln:
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
(Image credit: wikipedia commons)
Speaking of paradox and contradictions (as I did with my post here last month), how about the good news/bad news mess of mixed-up emotions with the increasing personalization of advertising.
The good news (well, sort of) is less of the traditional shouting and interrupting types of advertising we all grew up with. Nobody really likes the ads that interrupt the flow of television and radio shows. We tolerate ads where we can just not click, or turn the page.
I’d like to think that this is happening because of the gradual growth of the business impact of social media and similar phenomena, in which word of mouth multiplies organically, replacing advertising with relationships and authenticity. That seems like a relatively pleasant scenario.
The bad news is more of the personalization that smacks a bit of 1984 and Big Brother and paranoia. This is what the New York Times called Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal:
“The result is a sea change in the way consumers encounter the Web. Not only will people see customized advertising, they will see different versions of Web sites from other consumers and even receive different discount offers while shopping — all based on information from their offline history. Two women in adjoining offices could go to the same cosmetic site, but one might see a $300 Missoni perfume, the other the house-brand lipstick on sale for $2.”
I have mixed feelings about privacy, particularly when it’s “Privacy” as political motivator and campaign slogan. I’ve seen it used as justification for all kinds of crazy ideas, such as somebody ringing my phone in my house being able to block caller ID (if you don’t want to be identified when you intrude, don’t intrude. Seems simple to me). By the way, have you asked yourself the relationship between privacy and authenticity? In social media?
I also have mixed feelings about our national confusion between ideas, speech, and commerce. I don’t think commercial messages (much less corporations, but that’s a different matter) need to be protected by the Constitution. I don’t think the Constitution gives a damn about which perfume the women see on the commercial site.
And this 1984 queasy feeling… does it still hold when it’s not an evil government controlling thought, but a cosmetics vendor optimizing sales?
Which brings us to the simple discussion of business. Is it good business to customize messages, even business offerings, to match very carefully defined and tracked consumer characteristics?
Of all the “best of” blog posts I’ve seen this month, Bob Sutton’s Work Matters: The Best of 2009 posts is the best.
No coincidence, I suppose, that he writes very well and has a great blog, teaches at Stanford, and is author of several important books. But there are other great blogs around.
What I really like about Bob’s best list is that he goes month by month, specifies one particular post for each month, and — really nice touch — he also comments on the comments.
So his list is a great read. Bob writes about work matters, the whole no A**hole thread, and smart business.
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