Something I learned today (not by myself): When you invite three candidates for a pitch (or job interview or…) and two totally screw up, making the obvious choice to pick the one that didn’t may feel like you’re picking the next best one — which is obviously a different choice than picking the best, and not as easy. Hint: Merely raising the number of people invited won’t necessarily cut it.
February 3, 2011
January 29, 2011
Protection Won’t Save You For Good
When Amazon released its numbers for the last quarter of 2010 last week, it was a small surprise for me that in the US e-books are already ourselling paperback books, after they have already done that with hardcovers last summer.
In the country considered the origin of press printing it’s easy to forget that the book market is not a free one in terms of pricing. Every vendor of new books is bound to the price the publisher sets, and this applies to e-books as well, there’s just a little catch: Print books are being sold with a VAT of 7%, whereas e-books have the regular VAT of 19%, making them even more expensive than their physical cousins. Not only has this regulated protection served the publishers, it’s also the reason Ye Olde Bookstore hasn’t yet had to surrender to discount retailers.
If you’ve being living in the real world for the last decade, it won’t be too hard for you to guess that this model is not set up to endure the future we’re heading to. What we have learned from the desastrous decline of the coal and steel industry in the last century is that a country can’t protect its perceived vital industries for good, because sooner or later global competition will have taken over, and you’re an anachronism, far behind the pack.
What not only Germany’s politicians and leaders of protected industries (let’s coin the term LOPIs now) need to understand:
- trying to protect anything from competition does more harm than help in the long run
- the business of physical products is steadily decreasing, at least in consumer markets
- you need the courage to sacrifice your sacred cow in favour of a new not-yet-beyond-risk one or you’re going down
- what’s more important: you need to have people you can encourage to come up with fresh ideas that take your business to the future, even better if they do it by themselves.
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January 27, 2011
Always a Day Away
Recently a Slideshow by Microsoft showed up in which they try to persuade business partners to prefer Windows tablets over the iPad — there’s just one catch. If you’ve ever tried to sell something to a client, what’s working better? Showing ten slides or giving them the actual item and say “Go ahead, give it a try. … Doesn’t it feel great?”
Microsoft would have a better chance of getting some market share if they had a real, tangible product, not just a better idea of “That how it is. How it is going to be, tomorrow, one day. Maybe.” The former is how Apple did it with the iPad, once they knew the iPhone was working and the way of interacting with the device was accepted, they took the next step they’d been preparing for years in secrecy, not boasting about an idea of a future that would maybe never come.
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January 25, 2011
The Second Impression
We’ve been told for years that one never gets a second chance to make a first impression. Is this why nobody tries to give a second one?
After all, it’s much easier to come up with excuse after excuse instead of straightening up and take responsibility. It takes more guts to say “We might have given you the impression of being a bit jerkish at the time we first met, but that’s not what we are, and you can rest assured we’ll continue working hard on getting better, being aware of the consequences” instead of “Y’know, it’s always a bit chaotic with us, but we’ll get it done somehow”. It might be easier to sympathize the second way, but you’re not giving a good example a all. Muddling your way through is hardly a reliable long term strategy.
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January 19, 2011
Voilà, Promotion
The other day it just occured to me why Twitter is a better means of promotion than Facebook, not meaning advertising but “spreading the word”. The key is the default action, so to speak.
When someone posts something on Facebook, the default action to show your appreciation is to click the “Like” button. But this doesn’t create a movement (so it’s no literal ”pro-motion”), it’s a popularity feedback for the originator of the post because it stays within the boundaries of his circle of friends. The promotion happens when people click “Share”, so the post translates to their own circle — but that happens very rarely in comparison.
This is where Twitter does better, because it makes no sense to reply “I like your tweet” to the author. The only sensible thing you can do is re-tweet the original tweet (Twitter word for post), so now your followers will read it. Voilà, promotion.
January 7, 2011
Island Thinking
In one of his last year’s Linchpin Sessions, Seth Godin riffed on business using a model of sugar cane processing on an island. It’s worth adding that not only everyone has a sugar cane machine today — the islands (in the developed world) are gone too. Of course you can choose to only offer your services locally, but that doesn’t mean no one will enter your market area. There’s no more barrier to protect you.
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January 5, 2011
Different vs Better
One year back, I was creating a TV trailer for a crime thriller feature, and when discussing the concept with the feature editor she insisted on having a certain shot in the trailer: “These wooden stick figures, they’re like the ones in The Blair Witch Project, that’ll help sell the thing.”
Except that the whole feature had nothing else in common with The Blair Witch Project. Whenever there’s something in your product that’s a reference to another product, you really need to question hard if that reference will do any good, because people can easily distinguish between “same but different” and “same but better”. And they choose accordingly.
[Just to tell the end: For me the only selling point were the two main actors. I’ll leave it to you to make up why the feature went successful.]
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January 3, 2011
Coming in Second
There are two ways of looking at competitive settings: One has it that you either win or don’t win, and numerous people interpret the latter as losing. Which is why they tend to be dissatisfied quite often, because every time they come in second, no matter if there are only two or a thousand more competitors, they feel they have lost.
The other way means to look at the way things are: No matter how many competitors there are, you only “lose” compared to those who come in before you. Which makes coming in second a success more often than not.
The point is that focusing on the downside of your results rarely leads to improvement because it takes away your verve because you feel you’re still too weak, not good enough, a dilettante, which in result makes you even more afraid and hesitant the next time you’re facing the challenge — whereas focusing on the upside makes it easy to tackle the points where you can improve, because you feel you’re already good, but not the best. Not yet. But maybe next time, which you are looking forward to.
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December 31, 2010
The Best Part of the New Job
Every day, somebody somewhere gets a new job, and they talk about it with their peers. The only problem is what they’re talking about, because it’s rarely “There’s a lot of responsibility to take, tough decisions about risky endeavours, emotional labour, going out on a limb, but I enjoy all the freedom it’s giving me”. Instead, it’s “And everyone gets a Macbook!” which is no source of inspiration whatsoever.
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December 12, 2010
The Product Is You
As Hugh wrote in his newsletter, “If you look at products as amplifiers of human potential, they look a lot less like commodities.” When you reverse the logic, what does the way products look tell you about human potential? It’s not about intelligence as much as it is about taking risks, not to blindly follow the manual and only do what you’re told.
This does not only apply to physical products in the store, but also to soft products that affect which way the company will go in the future by the criteria they’re selecting their employees and managers: Do they play it safe by choosing people who can be considered a safe bet or go out on a limb by picking those who go out on a limb? Or how people inside the company interact: Do they respect each other and look for the best solution or bow to the top-down structure which needs predictable results? How do they interact with the outside world? And so forth.
Every tiny bit adds to the outcome, and that’s why the aforementioned reversal of Hugh’s remark concludes that whenever a product looks like a commodity, the less risk the ones who contributed to make it so were willing to take. A commodity product is the result of mediocrity in the process of its becoming.