1: Send generic email to an old, dirty, busted, bad list of names, which has yours truly still working for a company that’s been defunct for going on 4 years.
2: Declare that you specialize in “generating a continuous stream of daily leads for [a company's] sales force.”
3: Profit… wait. No. Face-palm. Yep. Face-palm.
Google launched Sidewiki, an add-on to their ubiquitous toolbar, which lets you “contribute helpful information to any page.” You’d think they grew horns, a tail, and started carrying a pitchfork.
Does anyone else see the irony here? Blogs & other social media tools move control of the collective conversation away from established players (corporations, governments, etc.) and give it to the individual. Now we have as much reach and influence as as multi-billion dollar corporation… in theory anyway.
But look out! Here comes Google Sidewiki!
Jeff Jarvis warns: “I have no control over the content associated with my site, essentially on my site.” He worries that someone will post negative comments. And he’s right– that will happen. But that’s beside the point.
You may own the URL, but the user owns the browser.
How about an analogy? I’ve been picketed. Seriously. The company I used to work for ran out of money and couldn’t pay vendors. Some of those vendors decided to picket. They hooted, hollered, jumped up and down, waved their signs at passing cars. It sucked.But it was a conversation that was happening about our company, right outside our doors, on public property– and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. Think of that failed business as your website, and the sidewalk as the user’s web browser. The picketers are obviously comments in Sidewiki. Not a perfect analogy, I know. But you get the idea.
So, to those of you worried about losing control of the conversation on your websites, I suggest you heed your own advice: join the conversation and be authentic.
You never truly had control anyway.
Data + Intuition = Awesomeness
I used to read BusinessWeek religiously. And there are some great people there. But now it’s for sale and Bruce Nussbaum blames culture. He says that they lost touch with their readers. Oh, sure they tried to understand what their readers wanted… with surveys. Don’t get me wrong. Surveys have a place in market research– they’re great for confirming hypotheses. But they only give you answers to the questions you think to ask. And that is not how to be awesome.
All of this reminds me of a question I asked last year: at what point does a company shift from its original entrepreneurial culture to corporate incrementalism?
I think it happens when the company falls out of love with its customers.
Starting a business is hard. Really hard. And most new businesses fail. So, you’d better be really friggin passionate about that need you’re trying to fill in the marketplace, and you’d better understand the hell out of your customers. It’s a romantic comedy of sorts. The first few years are great! Passionate! You understand each other. Then, gradually (naturally) the passion fades. So does the understanding. And when you lose that empathy, that deep understanding, you lose your intuition. Intuition is what helped get your business started. But what got you started won’t keep you going. It won’t take you to the next level of awesome.
How can you avoid taking home the blue ribbon for being mediocre?
So. Time for a new question: is it possible for Public companies to be truly passionate about their customers? I’m not sure. Ultimately, they serve Wall Street’s relentless, short-sighted demand for growth and profit. Public companies trade integrity for capital. What do you think? Fire away in the comments.
There’s a cultural shift underway, and this “Great Disruption” is acting as a catalyst to speed the change.
We work hard, we work long hours, and we earn ridiculous amounts of money. “We have generally taken the proceeds of our productivity in–you guessed it–increased consumption.” Big house. Big car. Big TV. But as our nest eggs get scrambled, we’re realizing that Stuff doesn’t matter as much as we thought it did. It’s people (and experiences) that matter: our friends and family that fill our big empty houses. But why? Why are we collectively realizing that now?
What if we’ve gotten so fast, so connected, so frenetic, that we’re burning out? We’ve been on a crusade to cram more and more activities into a finite amount of time. And in the tug-o-war between us and time, we lose. Unless someone does for time what the Manhattan project did for e=MC2. Anyway, we’re always out of time. Never enough.
So what effect does a perpetual time famine have on a society, and what does that mean for business? (Warning, this is about to get thick & crunchy) According to this study, we either view our time as limited or expansive. If we perceive time as limited, we tend to focus on the present– more specifically, we tend to avoid negative emotional experiences and use more schema-based decision making. Combine the present-focus with the natural tendency to protect (and desire to be protected during a crisis), and bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, we move away from “bettering” ourselves and collecting things.
We start to “simplify.” We start to focus on positive emotional experiences. We start to ask for quality over quantity. Great example in advertising: this VISA commercial asks the question “when was the last time you went to the aquarium with your daughter… on a Tuesday?”
If this is happening, it’s not enough to make the coolest gadget, or the nicest house, or the invisible hover car that grooms your dog while you eat pizza… although that last one would make for an interesting experience.
What do you think? Anyone have examples and/or counter-examples?
Uyuni Salt Flats
I work for a big corporation. As with most big companies, the corporate hierachy is pretty tall. That makes it a bit tough to create and/or maintain a culture of innovation: politics and title are usually more influential than a good idea. But blaming management for not accepting your brilliant idea is a cop-out. What if Al Gore gave up on inventing the Internet “because his boss said no?” You don’t want to be a cop-out, so you work the system to make friends, and influence people. But that’s a little like pushing spaghetti uphill. Instead, you could sidestep that whole mess and at least get a running start.
This is where social networking can be more than just an interesting sideshow. There’s a great tool called Yammer. It’s like Twitter for private networks. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, or maybe I just have a profound grasp of the obvious… but one thing I’ve noticed is that Yammer is (relatively) flat– it completely sidesteps all the day-to-day corporate hierarchies. The CEO and I are somewhere around 6,269 levels removed in the official corporate structure (not to mention half the land mass of the US and then the Atlantic ocean). But on Yammer, we have the opportunity to interact as equals. Most innovation articles I’ve read suggest that flat is good. Flat means that the best ideas– not politics or title– attract the best people. What company wouldn’t want the best people working on the best ideas?
Now, moving the ideas from this ephemeral channel into the real world? That’s another story. But don’t be a phony! Learn some sweet moves and go get something done.
Take a look at this microwave.
Notice the letters around the dial?
Now, take a look at this iron.
Notice how you hold the iron flat and lift up the flap to fill the water reservoir?
What glaring difference do you see–other than one cooks, and one irons? What were they thinking?
I’d venture that the microwave people thought about how to make their own lives simpler. Letters take up less space than numbers around that dial. A nice clean interface, right? Nope. We don’t think like that about cooking times: “Hmm, I’m going to cook my soup for F, stir, and cook for an additional U.” So they had to add the legend next to the actual cook time. Now it’s cluttered and confusing.
I bet the iron people thought about how to make their customer’s lives simpler. By orienting the opening for the water reservoir so it flips up when the iron is flat, it was much easier to fill using the sink instead of a cup or a funnel… or making a huge mess.
So, when you’re designing your next product/service/experience/ad/press release/story/joke/dinner, whatever you do, don’t imagine a mini devil-me on your shoulder asking: “what are you thinking?!”
Like coffee? Don’t like spending exactly $1,539 a day on a single cup of the good stuff? Then brew your own!
Step 1: buy coffee and keep it in your desk.
Added bonus? It'll act like a coffee air freshener for your cubicle
Step 2: buy a single cup coffee filter cone and some tiny little coffee filters***.
Best $3 I've ever spent.
Step 3: Profit! Oh, wait. This isn’t the Digg.com comments section.
Step 4: Place your Step 2 over a mug of your choice
Step 5: Put two big scoops of your Step 1 into your Step 2. Add really really hot water.
Step 6: enjoy.
***If you’re really cheap (or really broke): use a pen to poke a hole in the bottom of a styrofoam cup instead of buying the shiny Melitta thing, and substitute a folded-up paper towel for the coffee filters.
This post, over at The Planning Lab, reminded me of a sketch I did last year.
Businesses Should Be More Like Flubber
Yesterday a coworker asked a great question: ”Quick Poll: What do you think is the most valuable productivity goal in terms of employee-to-employer contribution — A) units of profitable new ideas per employee, B) units of work per hour, C) both, or D) something else?”
My answer? None of the above. I’m not sure yet what would be better, though. And here’s why: current corporate structure and measurement is essentially based on Henry Ford’s “they can have any color they want, as long as it’s black” assembly line process innovation, where manual laborers were interchangeable. That still basically works in a physical labor/manufacturing setting. Maybe. But, according to “the Support Economy,” people are now looking for “psychological self-determination.” We want something other than a black Model T now. Also, good chunk of our economy is now built around “knowledge workers,” who are significantly less interchangeable. That framework is self-limiting.
People (employees and consumers) are forced into a box. That box doesn’t recognize or capitalize on the parts of the person outside the box. We need a new paradigm. IDEO calls it looking for “T-Shaped people.” David Armano, from Critical Mass, calls it the “Fuzzy Tail.”
We need something less like a Rubik’s Cube, and more like Flubber. Once we have the structure, then we can measure.
What do you think?
On this historic day, I’m not wearing any red. Or white. Or blue.
Don’t get me wrong– I still pledge allegiance to the Flag, and to the Republic for which it stands.
I’m just hoping that my kids and grandkids think it’s weird that today is such a big deal. I hope that today is the day we can finally look past what seems to make us different, and look at what brings us together. I hope that today we can stop being a near-sighted nation and look ahead to a better future.
I Hope. So, today, I’m not wearing red, white, or blue. I’m wearing all three.
Today, I’m wearing purple.
appeal arbitrage assumptions big branding Chrysler context design thinking el guapo entrepreneur ethics Fuzzy Tail GM groundswell hope IDEO impact inauguration innovation intrapreneur joseph campbell Karate Kid Kentucky Fried Movie marketing music not-so-big-house obama organizational structure Pearson politics product management purple small small is beautiful social media strategy stupidity T-Shaped People texas public radio the Internet the support economy the three amigos visual thinking Wallstreet web 3.0
