In Folk wisdom and proofiness on his blog yesterday, Seth Godin concludes:
Data is not information, and confusing numbers with truth can help you make some bad decisions.
Well said.
Tag Archives: Seth Godin
10 Blogging Tips. My 1,000th Post on This Blog
Last night I was halfway through a draft post patting myself on the back, illustrated with champagne glasses, when my youngest daughter, Megan, called from San Francisco, where she lives now. That’s @MeganBerry to you, blogger and social media expert, marketing manager of Klout.com. So I asked her this: “What do I do with my 1,000th post?”
“Do something that matters,” Megan answered. “Do something special.” She talked about favorites, lessons, advice, and reflections.
So, about 12 hours later, this is it, number 1,000. Gulp.
I started in 2006, but did only a dozen posts in the first year. I really started in April 2007, with reflections on family business, a personal note about passing the torch to a second generation. I changed jobs then – my choice – from owner-entrepreneur-president to blogger president of Palo Alto Software.
My personal favorite posts are on the sidebar here to the right. My favorite search is the one for fundamentals, particularly the series of 5 posts on planning fundamentals. My favorite categories come straight from the blog title: planning, startups, and stories: that’s specifically the categories planning fundamentals, true stories, and starting a business. And I also really like advice, reflections, and business mistakes. But I like most of my posts here. You kind of have to, to keep doing it.
Here are 10 blogging lessons I’ve learned:
- Imitation isn’t just flattery, it’s learning. When I said I wasn’t a blogger, Sabrina Parsons said “you will be. Just start reading blogs.” So I did. And I imitate a lot of other bloggers I like to read. So many that I can’t name them all here; but my thanks to Guy, John, Pam, Anita, Ann, Steve, Seth, Matthew, Ramon, and so many others. Every blog on my blogroll here to the right.
- Titles make a huge difference. That’s not just blogging. It’s been true for a long time. My daughter Andrea Breanna, CTO at Huffington Post, teamed up with his younger sister Megan to teach me titles. And Ironically, what they taught me was a lot of what I learned at UPI plus the power of questions, and lists of 5 and 10.
- Short and simple: short sentences, short posts. Short thoughts? I like one-word sentences, and one-sentence paragraphs. And short posts, in theory: despite how much I admire Seth Godin’s short posts, I try, and usually fail.
- Break grammar rules. Carefully. Rarely. Like right here. There’s no verb in either of the previous two sentences, so this post would have gotten me an F in Brother Salvatore’s 12th grade English class. 30-some years later, I’m glad he gave me that F on a 10-page paper for using “it’s” instead of “its” once. That lesson was worth it. But jeez!
- Pictures add meaning. Thanks to John Jantsch for that one. And to Shutterstock for supplying me with the bulk of the pictures I’ve used on this blog for the last year. And don’t ask me to explain the illustration on this one. I didn’t want champagne glasses or cakes and candles.
- Write Often, and keep writing. Find your pace. Honor consistency. Once a month doesn’t feel like a blog, but three good posts weekly is better than two good and three not so good. Break your routine occasionally for mental health. I write a lot and like it. I’ve done 1,000 posts here in three years. Plus 700 on Up and Running, and another 200 or so on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, Amex Open, Industry Word, and Planning Demystified. Plus some guest posts on others. It’s easier to maintain momentum than overcome inertia.
- Love the comments. Thank you. Not you spammers. But even you critics with annoying comments. Especially you critics with smart well written disagreements. Not the dumb generic praise intended only for your own SEO benefit, which I delete. But I love the comments, they make it live.
- Love Twitter. Twitter has done wonders for my blogging, my daily work flow, and my growing satisfaction with web 2.0 or social media or whatever you call it. If you don’t get twitter, it’s not clutter, it’s not what they had for lunch, it’s blog posts and links and what’s going on in the world, as shared by people you like, now. My 18-point Twitter Primer feels as valid today as when I posted it.
- Tell the damn truth. You can’t fake it for long. Keeping track of all your various personae is exhausting. Write as yourself, or maybe (just maybe) who you really want to be. I know this is a lame old quote, but I heard it first from Chris Guilleabeau and I like it: “I have to be myself. All the other people are already taken.”
- Tell don’t sell. Lots of us blog for business. Much as I sincerely love the books and software I’ve done, I don’t blog about them here. Sure, the sidebar sells, I hope, but my posts don’t.
Here’s advice, in honor of this being post number 1,000:
- Anything anybody can believe is an image of truth (paraphrasing William Blake).
- Time is the scarcest resource. Time, not money.
- Your relationships with the people you love are WAY more important than proving that you were right.
Dear reader: thank you.
(image credit: Arsgera/Shutterstock)
Goodbye Office Hello Metrics, Tracking & Accountability
In his recent post Goodbye to the office, Seth Godin list a lot of good reasons for working virtually, remotely, or whatever you want to call that. He summarizes:
“If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘the Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.
When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.”
One thing he doesn’t mention there is accountability. Traditionally people were accountable for physical presence: butts in seats (and pardon the expression). I’m not in favor of that old-fashioned metric. Technology gives us a lot of options. And meanwhile we suffer the ills of commuting, overcrowding, energy use, and all the rest.
However, as old-style accountability fades, we need new management, with planning, tracking, and metrics. Not just people in seats, people in workstations, or people at desks. People getting things done.
(Image: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock)
I Think Seth’s Slick is, Sadly, Too Optimistic
I don’t think the world is as easy to deal with as Seth Godin suggests in Slick, posted on his blog a few hours ago. He says that now even small-time individuals can have big-time production values, “gloss for not much money,” by using Kinko’s and Moo cards and so forth. He concludes:
So I guess instead of slick we’re now seeking transparency and reputation and guts.
I wish that were true, but I doubt it. What actually happens is that the bar goes up, as in my invention is the mother of necessity post from a couple of months ago. As gloss becomes available for not much money, everybody has to have gloss. The bar goes up. When slick becomes more accessible, the unslick looks even worse.
If you’re old enough, think back to the middle to late 1980s when desktop publishing became easy: Did we think typed was better? No. We all adopted desktop publishing standards for every damn letter.
Seth Godin on Rethinking Business Plans
It’s about time that business writers, assorted experts, entrepreneurs, academic and the rest start focusing on the huge damaging and wasteful misunderstanding that most of us have contributed to: that completely out-of-date idea that a business plan is a document, done once, related to raising money.
So I’m delighted to see Seth Godin jumping onto this issue with a good restatement of the problem and an infusion of new ideas to shake us up. His modern business plan post on his blog Monday starts with a quick but very real problem:
It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations.
The most important word there is “misused.” Because that’s the myth of the business plan. Case in point: last week a journalist asked me if we had “an official business plan” for Palo Alto Software. That was his phrase, not mine: “official.” As in formal. Static. Left somewhere in the drawer.
Somebody on Twitter asked me what I thought of Seth’s post, thinking, I’m only guessing, that I’m in favor of the more traditional business plan. No way. I love the new thinking. It’s right in line with what I’ve been posting for several years now.
There’s no such thing as an official business plan, but the idea highlights the misuse. People spending months developing documents instead of businesses. That’s waste.
It should be business planning, a process, reviewed and revised regularly, a tool for managing and steering a real business.
Seth’s recommendation is excellent. Let’s shake the old expectations up, change the expectations, change the arrangement… and what he recommends doesn’t do anything but enhance the real business purpose of business planning.
His recommendation? A new standard order of plan documents:
I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections:
* Truth
* Assertions
* Alternatives
* People
* Money
He goes on, in the post, to talk about each of those sections. Excellent suggestions. His new order would make a great business plan.
From my point of view, this suggested reordering is nothing but positive. The business plan is just step one of planning; it’s about managing change. It’s not a sales brochure. It’s not a pitch to investors. It’s not even a plan; it’s planning. It’s about managing change. It’s about optimizing, prioritizing, setting long-term goals and short-term steps, with metrics and tracking. Why not put it in this order?
If nothing else, at least it shakes up that mythological business plan that so many people are tempted to misunderstand and misuse. And there’s no downside to it.
Read his post. See what you think. And if you read my stuff on business planning, I think you’ll find I’ve always been in favor of flexible one-of-a-kind business plans, as part of planning process. It fits perfectly with my work on business planning, including the two highlights of my recent work: Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan and Business Plan Pro.
Jonathan’s 7 Extraordinary Moments
Jonathan calls this collection The 7 Keynote MBA: How to Save 2 Years and $100,000. 
A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but there’s certainly a lot of education here. And if some posts are great reading, this one is great watching.
Jonathan has collected seven of the best-ever videos about small business, small business marketing, work, and life, and put them into a single post.
It starts with Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start video, and goes on from there. That one and two others have appeared on this blog before. All seven of them are golden.
Jonathan calls them “seven extraordinary moments with seven great visionaries.” I agree.
The first one, Guy Kawasaki, takes the better part of an hour. The others are all 15-20 minutes.
Is Education Missing its Target or Just Aiming at the Wrong Target?
I’d like to think that business education should be about education more than business. It should be about leadership, perspective, and vision, more than about analysis, buzzwords, jobs, and salaries. But is it? Or is that just the kind of high-sounding stuff we write when looking back, years later?
I’ve seen two important pieces on higher education and business education in the last week, one questioning the idea of the MBA, the other questioning higher education in general. While the Harvard Business School writes about a glass half full in The Future of MBA Education, Seth Godin writes about what he calls The coming melt-down in higher education on his blog.
The Harvard post summarizes a new book called Rethinking the MBA, by David Garvin, Srikant Datar, and Partick Cullen. It’s about six cases of well-known business schools (including Stanford, my personal favorite) revising their programs to deal with a changing world. In the interview, Garvin says:
Yet rebalancing from the current focus on “knowing” or analytical knowledge to more of what we call “doing” (skills) and “being” (a sense of purpose and identity) must occur. Business schools need to think innovatively about how best to use the resources available to them. For example, there are many exciting opportunities to engage alumni in the learning process.
Seth Godin calls his bleak picture “as seen by a marketer.” He predicts “meltdown” in higher education for five reasons:
- Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
- College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
- The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.
- The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
- Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
He makes several very good points. This observation seems all too true:
College wasn’t originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that’s what it has become. The data I’m seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn’t translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.
In both cases, to me, it’s about confusing education with job training and job placement. If you measure success by average salaries and job placements, then as a society you substitute job training for education. The target is growth of the person, not growth of the income.
I have to admit that I started thinking about getting an MBA degree when my dad showed me a newspaper story about MBAs getting high-paying jobs. So now years later, I write about education first; but for me it was about changing careers, from journalist to business.
That worked for me. I did change jobs. However the real value, as I look back, was in the classroom, what I learned, much more than the step up to the next job. Years later, what I expect from somebody with an MBA degree is a better view of the whole business, from finance to marketing to operations, human resources, and so forth. You might work in one functional area, but you have basic understanding of the whole, not just your specific part. And you have a sense of what business analysis is like, how and when it’s useful.
Or at least, that’s what I hope. I’ve also posted on this blog my thoughts on what business schools can teach, what they don’t teach, and questions to ask before getting an MBA.
Humility, Leadership, and Self Promotion, Oh My
What happens if you make light of your achievements, shun the spotlight, and pass the microphone on to the next person in line? Will this stunt your career growth?
I’ve worried about this for years. I used to deal with a guy who did very well as a professional expert, while knowing not much more than what he’d read the in a trade journal or two the night before a presentation. That never bothered him. And he did very well. And it kind of bothered me.
And then we have the new world order of personal branding, led by experts like Dan Schawbel, Jonathan Fields, Pam Slim, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, John Jantsch, and many others. Dan is the leading expert as defined by Google. Those others are great personal brands, acknowledged experts. What does personal branding say about humility? Can you get there with humility? (hint: some do, some don’t.)
I’d like to think that the world rewards people who let others tell their achievements. But does it? Can someone who doesn’t love the spotlight be a leader? A leader is defined by followers. What if you never take credit and stick in the background? Will your would-be followers ever find you? Will they give you credit?
I was happy to see this note included in Startup lessons learned from Warren Buffett published on VentureBeat over the weekend:
Like self-deprecation, humor has a disarming effect.
In context that’s more about humor than self deprecation, but the quote itself, coming from Warren Buffett, has some power. Right?
I also like Humility as a Leadership Trait by John Baldoni at HarvardBusiness.org. He writes:
A sense of humility is essential to leadership because it authenticates a person’s humanity. We humans are frail creatures; we have our faults. Recognizing what we do well, as well as what we do not do so well, is vital to self-awareness and paramount to humility.
He goes on, in that post, to list ways to demonstrate humility in the workplace. Temper authority, look to promote others, acknowledge what others do.
And yet, much as I like this idea, I think it has to be tempered with reality. People are busy. People need to be told what they think. If you don’t take credit, somebody else will. Baldoni says:
Can you be too humble in the workplace? Yes. If you fail to put yourself, or more importantly your ideas, forward, you will be overlooked. Chances for promotion will evaporate, but worse you will not give anyone a reason to believe in you. All of us need not lead others, but those who do seek to influence, to change, to guide, and to lead their organizations, need to find ways to get noticed. Again humility comes to the rescue. That is, if you celebrate team first, self second, people will notice what you and your team have achieved.
Damn: paradox. Lack of a general rule. All of it case by case. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a conclusion there about doing the right things in moderation. What do you think?
(Image: Marie C. Fields/Shutterstock)
Bad Research is Worse Than No Research at All
A couple of weeks ago I posted “bad research is worse than no research at all” on Twitter. Some thoughts, like that one, fit perfectly well in 140 characters. And it seems like a useful one too. And true.
The reasons for that statement seem pretty obvious to me. Better to know what you don’t know than to make business decisions based on false information and false conclusions. If the focus group said red is better than green, nobody dares to argue for green. Even if green is really better, and the focus group was off, distorted by one very articulate and engaging green hater. Red it is.
Seth Godin gave a great example on his blog a few days ago. He called it Learning from bad graphs and weak analysis. He takes some business charts and analysis from the New York Times and shows why it doesn’t actually show what it is supposed to show.
(Image: istockphoto.com)
Why Men With Pens is Written by a Woman. And Why That Matters.
Honestly, except for the name itself, I’ve never cared or wondered whether the author of Men With Pens was man or woman. It’s a good blog for writers. I did assume man, of course, because of the name of the blog, and the byline. This isn’t something I think about.
But I was shocked to read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants as a post in CopyBlogger yesterday. It turns out that James Chartrand, author of the Men With Pens blog, @menwithpens on Twitter, is a woman, not a man.
Why do I care? I don’t care that she’s a woman and not a man. It makes no difference to the value of the content. But I do care about the story she (James Chartrand) tells, and why she uses a man’s name.
Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.
No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.
Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.
Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.
I do believe that the difference between genders is the most interesting thing in creation. But I don’t believe in gender differences in jobs or opportunity and particularly not in writing. My favorite bloggers are about half and half, men and women. I just want the posts to be useful, interesting, amusing, and good. I’m as likely to read Pamela Slim or Anita Campbell as I am to read Seth Godin or John Jantsch. I like to think the world has come a long way since I was born in 1948. That the chauvinism we took for granted without even thinking about it in the 1950s and 1960s has given way to a better, more equal world.
Maybe so; but “more equal” isn’t the same as “equal.” Damn. Ask James Chartrand about that.
Everybody should read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. And everybody who cares about writing and blogging should subscribe to her blog – not because of her gender, or her surprising revelation about gender disguised, but, rather, because it’s got a lot of good content.
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