Are you keeping the Magic?

Next month I will be writing about this subject in relation to websites and your online presence. In the meantime, here's our Sunday Seth:

Lousy tomatoes and the rare search for wonder

My local supermarket stocks waxy, tasteless tomatoes from Chile and Mexico and Florida. They even do this in early September, when local tomatoes are delicious, plentiful and ought to be a bargain.

Are they clueless, evil or incompetent?

Perhaps none of these. This supermarket, like most supermarkets, is a checklist institution, one that is in the business of providing good enough, in quantity, at a price that's both cheap and profitable. You need a staple, they have it. They have flour and salt and eggs and macaroni and cheese. They've trained their customers to see them as an invisible vendor, as an organization that satisfices demand. It's too much work, too demanding and too risky to do the alternative...

They could program the store instead.

Program it the way a great theater programs the stage. No one goes to the theatre two or three times a week, expecting a good enough show. No, we only go when we hear there's something magical or terrific happening.

Over time, as institutions create habits and earn subscribers, they often switch, gradually making the move from magical (worth a trip, worth a conversation) to good (there when you need it). Most TV is just good. Magazines, too. When was the last time People magazine did something that made you sit up and say, "wow"? Of course, you could argue that they're not in the wow business, and you might be right.

One of the disrupting forces of the new media is that it makes harder and harder to succeed without wow. Since you have to earn the conversation regularly, phone it in too often and in fact, attention disappears.

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Shake It Up

This weeks Sunday Seth:

The warning signs of defending the status quo

When confronted with a new idea, do you:

• Consider the cost of switching before you consider the benefits?
• Highlight the pain to a few instead of the benefits for the many?
• Exaggerate how good things are now in order to reduce your fear of change?
• Undercut the credibility, authority or experience of people behind the change?
• Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right?
• Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short-term is more vivid for you?
• Fight to retain benefits and status earned only through tenure and longevity?
• Embrace an instinct to accept consistent ongoing costs instead of swallowing a one-time expense?
• Slow implementation and decision making down instead of speeding it up?
• Embrace sunk costs?
• Imagine that your competition is going to be as afraid of change as you are? Even the competition that hasn't entered the market yet and has nothing to lose...
• Emphasize emergency preparation and the expense of a chronic and degenerative condition?

Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.

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Beyond 9/11

Today is a day of reflection for many of us in the United States. Most of us know where we were 10 years ago when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

We look back on the monumental occasions and often let the other, less noticeable events fade away.

Last weekend as I was skimming my emails I found a piece from Seth Godin that reminds us to pay more attention.

May it motivate both of us to make some positive changes in the week ahead:

The Sunday Seth:

Not fade away

Most partnerships don't end up in court.

Most friendships don't end in a fight.

Most customers don't leave in a huff.

Instead, when one party feels underappreciated, or perhaps taken advantage of, she stops showing up as often. Stops investing. Begins to move on.

No, I'm not going to sue you. Yes, I'll probably put my best efforts somewhere else.

Just because there are no firestorms on the porch doesn't mean you're doing okay. More likely, there are relationships out there that need more investment, quiet customers who are unhappy but not making a big deal out of it. They're worth a lot more than the angry ones.

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Measure the Right Numbers

My Sunday Seth:

Twice as much doesn't always mean twice as much

How expensive do you think it is for a fast food chain to switch to sea salt on its french fries? Even if we assert that sea salt costs twice as much as the competitor (dirt salt?), it's easy to see that the impact on the cost of making each order of fries is tiny, since salt is probably 1% of the cost of the item.

That means that upgrading a high-leverage component of your product might not have any real impact on your costs. It just feels that way to the purchasing department.

On the other side of the 'twice' coin, you might discover that you're falling behind the competition. So you spend twice as much on ads, or twice as much time on social media, or devote twice as many of your resources to a problem.

The challenge, of course, is that twice as much of your time or money is irrelevant. Who cares where you started? The correct comparison is to what the competition is investing, and how well.

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2 Approaches

One is an opportunity.

So is the other, but from a different angle.

From Seth Godin:

Unbetterable

The two best ways to break through a rut and to make an impact:

• Find things that others have accepted as the status quo and make them significantly, noticeably and remarkably better.
• Find things that you're attached to that are slowing you down, realize that they are broken beyond repair and eliminate them. Toss them away and refuse to use them any longer.

When a not-so-good software tool or a habit or an agency or a policy has too much inertia to be fixed, when it's unbetterable, you're better off without it. Eliminating it will create a void, fertile territory for something much better to arrive.

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No Regrets

That's the life you want to live.

Sure, you may have a few moments of doubt.

Or sheer terror and panic when you realize that there is no other way.

No other way than to move forward.

It's like the decision I made June 1st when I signed the paperwork to leave me job and take a new one.

I walked away from 8+ years with the same group of radio stations to venture into a new field.

Seth Godin sums it up:

Dig yourself a hole

Make big promises.

Burn your boats.

Set yourself up in a place where you have few options and the stakes are high.

Focused energy and serious intent will push you to do your best work. You have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. (Better than the alternative).

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Little Niche's

My Sunday Seth:

Consumers and creators

Fifty years ago, the ratio was a million to one.

For every person on the news or on primetime, there were a million viewers.

The explosion of magazines brought the ratio to 100,000:1. If you wrote for a major magazine, you were going to impact a lot of people. Most of us were consumers, not creators.

Cable TV and zines made it 10,000 to one. You could have a show about underwater spearfishing or you could teach people to make hamburgers on donuts. The little star is born.

And now of course, when it's easy to have a blog, or an Youtube account or to push your ideas to the world through social media, the ratio might be 100:1. For every person who sells on Etsy, there are a hundred buyers. For every person who actively tweets, there are a hundred people who mostly consume those tweets. For every hundred visitors to Squidoo, there is one new person building pages.

What does the world look like when we get to the next zero?

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Push the Limits

Our Sunday Seth:

Easy vs. do-able vs. impossible

Often we consider an opportunity based on how easy it is. The problem with this analysis is that if it's easy, it's often not worth doing. It's easy to start a blog, but of course, starting a blog doesn't really deliver a lot of value. Posting 4,100 blog posts in a row, though, isn't easy. It's do-able, clearly do-able, and might just be worth it.

Successful organizations seek out the do-able. When Amazon went after the big bookstore chains, analysts ridiculed them for doing something insanely difficult. But it was clearly do-able. Persistence and talent and a bit of luck, sure, but do-able.

Sometimes we seek out things that are actually impossible. Building a search engine that's just like Google but better is impossible (if your goal is to dominate the market with it). It's fun to do impossible projects because then you don't have to worry about what happens if you succeed... you have a safety net, because you're dreaming the impossible dream.

Do-able, though, is within our reach. Ignore easy.

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Quality Questions

My Sunday Seth:

Defining quality

Given how much we talk about it, it's surprising that there's a lot of confusion about what quality is.

What's a higher quality car: a one-year old Honda Civic or a brand new top of the line Bentley?

It turns out that there are at least two useful ways to describe quality, and the conflict between them leads to the confusion...

Quality of design: Thoughtfulness and processes that lead to user delight, that make it likely that someone will seek out a product, pay extra for it or tell a friend.

Quality of manufacture: Removing any variation in tolerances that a user will notice or care about.

In the case of the Civic, the quality of manufacture is clearly higher by any measure. The manufacturing is more exact, the likelihood that the car will perform (or not perform) in a way you don't expect is tiny.

On the other hand, we can probably agree that the design of the Bentley is more bespoke, luxurious and worthy of comment.

Let's think about manufacturing variation for a second: Fedex promises overnight delivery. 10:20 vs 10:15 is not something the recipient cares about. Tomorrow vs. Thursday, they care about a lot. The goal of the manufacturing process isn't to reach the perfection of infinity. It's to drive tolerances so hard that the consumer doesn't care about the variation. Spending an extra million dollars to get five minutes faster isn't as important to the Fedex brand as spending a million dollars to make the website delightful.

Dropbox is a company that got both right. The design of the service is so useful it now seems obvious. At the same time, though, and most critically, the manufacture of the service is to a very high tolerance. Great design in a backup service would be useless if one in a thousand files were corrupted.

Microsoft struggles (when they struggle) because sometimes they get both wrong. Software that has a user interface that's a pain to use rarely leads to delight, and bugs represent significant manufacturing defects, because sometimes (usually just before a presentation), the software doesn't work as expected--a noticed variation.

The Shake Shack, many New York burger fans would argue, is a higher quality fast food experience than McDonald's, as evidenced by lines out the door and higher prices. Except from a production point of view. The factory that is McDonald's far outperforms the small chain in terms of efficient production of the designed goods within certain tolerances. It's faster and more reliable. And yet, many people choose to pay extra to eat at Shake Shack. Because it's "better." Faster doesn't matter as much to the Shake Shack customer.

The balance, then, is to understand that marketers want both. A short-sighted CFO might want neither.

Deming defined quality as: (result of work effort)/(total costs). Unless you understand both parts of that fraction, you'll have a hard time allocating your resources.

Consider what Phillip Crosby realized a generation ago: Quality is free.

It's cheaper to design marketing quality into the product than it is to advertise the product.

It's cheaper to design manufacturing quality into a factory than it is to inspect it in after the product has already been built.

These go hand in hand. Don't tell me about server uptime if your interface is lame or the attitude of the people answering the phone is obnoxious. Don't promise me a brilliant new service if you're unable to show up for the meeting. Don't show me a boring manuscript with no typos in it, and don't try to sell me a brilliant book so filled with errors that I'm too distracted to finish it.

There are two reasons that quality of manufacture is diminishing in importance as a competitive tool:

a. incremental advances in this sort of quality get increasingly more expensive. Going from one defect in a thousand to one in a million is relatively cheap. Going from one in a million to one in a billion, though, costs a fortune.

b. As manufacturing skills increase (and information about them is exchanged) it means that your competition has as much ability to manufacture with quality as you do.

On the other hand, quality of design remains a fast-moving, judgment-based process where supremacy is hard to reach and harder to maintain.

And yet organizations often focus obsessively on manufacturing quality. Easier to describe, easier to measure, easier to take on as a group. It's essential, it's just not as important as it used to be.

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Use the Fear

Our Sunday Seth:

Waiting for the fear to subside

There are two problems with this strategy:

A. By the time the fear subsides, it will be too late. By the time you're not afraid of what you were planning to start/say/do, someone else will have already done it, it will already be said or it will be irrelevant. The reason you're afraid is that there's leverage here, something might happen. Which is exactly the signal you're looking for.

B. The fear certainly helps you do it better. The fear-less one might sleep better, but sleeping well doesn't always lead to your best work. The fear can be your compass, it can set you on the right path and actually improve the quality of what you do.

Listen to your fear but don't obey it.

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Why I Switched Careers

It has now been a full month since I walked away from 8+ years working for a group of radio stations in Fort Wayne Indiana.

All together I have spent 25+ years in the radio business with a couple of breaks. I started as a teenage disc-jockey and moved into the advertising and marketing world which I found fascinating.

Radio uses push marketing methods. In order to get the free music, they will push advertising messages out too.

Television broadcasting works this way too. Newspapers also use push marketing methods... you want to read the news, then you have to page thru the ads too.

Yellow Pages is not push marketing. I don't know of anyone who has casually paged thru the phone book as a source of entertainment.

The selling point for yellow pages sales reps was, the book was the place people go to find a business to spend money with to solve problems. Once you pick up the book, you are ready to spend.

Technology however has made the phone book and the yellow pages outdated. When we want an answer, we Google it. The web and search engines are replacing the yellow pages as the source for finding information and answers.

The other reason I switched careers, I believe in the methods used by my team at Cirrus ABS which combines sound technology, solid strategic planning and analytics to measure the results.

Our Sunday Seth talks more about this:

Paying attention to the attention economy

Most of us are happily obsessed with the economy of money. We earn it and we spend it and we generally pay attention to what things cost.

Certainly, salespeople and marketers are truly focused on the price of things, on commissions and shelving allowances and net margin and the cost of goods sold.

With all of these easily measured activity, it's easy to overlook the fast-growing and ever more important economy based around attention.

"If I alert my entire customer base, how much will this cost me in permission?"

"How much time do we save our customers with a better written manual?"

"When we fail to ask for (and reward) the privilege of following up, are we wasting permission?"

"Does launching this product to an audience of stangers waste the attention we're going to have to buy?"

Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

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Make it Special

My Sunday Seth:

Every successful case is a special case

It's easy to dismiss strategies or plans or people who succeed by pointing out how they have something special, something irreproducible, some sort of advantage that makes their success special.

Special as in, "not available to me."

They went to Harvard, they're public, they're not public, they have a great fundraising team, they have a powerful partner, they didn't go to Harvard, they already have a reputation, they have no reputation to risk...

This is silly, as all success is special. That's what makes it success. We don't consider breathing a success, since, fortunately, we all can breathe.

The trick is learning about what the special cases have in common, in understanding how maybe, just maybe, you have some of the very same attributes that others have used in a new way.

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Two Approaches

One is an opportunity.

So is the other, but from a different angle.

From Seth Godin:

Unbetterable

The two best ways to break through a rut and to make an impact:

• Find things that others have accepted as the status quo and make them significantly, noticably and remarkably better.
• Find things that you're attached to that are slowing you down, realize that they are broken beyond repair and eliminate them. Toss them away and refuse to use them any longer.

When a not-so-good software tool or a habit or an agency or a policy has too much inertia to be fixed, when it's unbetterable, you're better off without it. Eliminating it will create a void, fertile territory for something much better to arrive.

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The Press

You never know what you might have a microphone & camera shoved in your face.

Well, if you want that to happen, I'll have a tip for you after the Sunday Seth:

How to be interviewed

The explosion of media channels and public events means that more people are being interviewed about more topics than ever before. It might even happen to you... and soon.

1. They call it giving an interview, not taking one, and for good reason. If you're not eager to share your perspective, don't bother showing up.
2. Questions shouldn't be taken literally. The purpose of the question is to give you a chance to talk about something you care about. The audience wants to hear what you have to say, and if the question isn't right on point, answer a different one instead.
3. In all but the most formal media settings, it's totally appropriate to talk with the interviewer in advance, to give her some clues about what you're interested in discussing. It makes you both look good.
4. The interviewer is not your friend, and everything you say is on the record. If you don't want it to be in print, don't say it.
5. If you get asked the same question from interview to interview, there's probably a good reason. Saying, "I get asked that question all the time," and then grimacing in pain is disrespectful to the interviewer and the audience. See rule 1.
6. If your answers aren't interesting, exciting or engaging, that's your fault, not the interviewer's. See rule 2.

Recently while having dinner with some Twitter friends, HARO was mentioned.

I used to subscribe, quit for awhile, but am doing it again. Click here.

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This Is the Information Age...

So there is no reason to be left in the dark.

My Sunday Seth:

"Why wasn't I informed?"

Information is tricky. Sometimes it's delivered to you. Often, you need to go find it.

There's no blame in not being aware of something you had no idea you ought to be looking for. If you've been using the same brand of aftershave for five years, you're forgiven for not Googling it regularly to find out if it contains a carcinogen. That's information we'd like to come find us, not something we need to be on the alert for.

On the other hand, I'm stunned when someone enters new territory without doing a modicum of research. Consider the yutz who goes on vacation to a foreign land, only to discover on arrival that they're in the middle of monsoon season (happens every year around this time!) or that there's a civil war going on.

Or perhaps the small businessperson who launches an expensive marketing campaign without investing a few hours in reading up on what works and what doesn't.

Or the email novice who forwards an incredible email to her entire address list without checking Snopes first.

The rules are now clear: no one is going to inform you, but it's easier than ever to inform yourself. Before you spend the money, the time or the attention of your friends, look it up.

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Are You Ready to Risk It?

Our Sunday Seth:

Dangerous (in a good way)

A path on the way to building a reputation:

• When someone asks you a question, they get an answer bigger than they ever expected.
• When someone gives you a project, they get a plan scarier than they hoped for.
• When you take on a project, you finish it.

If this is your reputation, what sort of projects and gigs will you find yourself getting? Not a good way to fit in, but an excellent way to be the one people seek out.

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The Truth about Excuses

from Seth Godin:

Excuses are easy to find (but worthless)

Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.

Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.

And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless.

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Paying for It

Forgive the length of this Sunday Seth.

Or skip it, you probably didn't pay for this article.

(I say probably because you can pay for a Kindle subscription to this site.)

Tomorrow I officially make the move from Free to Paid Internet Guy.

I was offered and accepted a position as a Solutions Consultant with Cirrus ABS on June 1, and the transition from my career in radio advertising is now complete.

Oh, I'm not a newbie to this internet stuff, but now I get to make it my full time occupation.

I used to think why pay for websites, when you can create your own? Then I discovered that there was so much more value in some of the paid sites, especially when I learned the brains, marketing, and capabilities that Cirrus ABS offers their clients, I saw the light.

Enough to walk away from a really nice career for an even better one.

Seth talks about paying for it tonight:

The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap

It all started because of the discovery problem.

Too many things to choose from, more every day. No efficient way to alert the world about your service, your music, your book. How about giving it away to help the idea spread?

The simplest old school examples are radio (songs to hear for free, in in the hope that someone will buy them) and Oprah (give away all the secrets in your book in the hope that many will buy.)

There's a line out the door of people eager to spread their ideas, because in a crowded marketplace, being ignored is the same as failure.

Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. A hundred million people hear a pop song on the radio and less than 1 percent will buy a copy. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in their homes. (In the former case, the purchased music is better--quality and convenience--than the free version, in the latter, the print is merely more accessible, but the math is the same--lots of visits, not a lot of conversion).

We don't hesitate to ask a consultant or doctor or writer for free advice, but often hesitate when it involves a payment. ("Oh, I'm not asking for consulting, I just wanted you to answer a question...") And yes, I'm told that some people cut their own hair instead of paying someone a few bucks to do it.

None of this is news. Two things have changed, though:

1. As more commercial activity involves digital goods (websites, ebooks, music, etc.), the temptation to spread the idea for free (to aid discovery) is actually economically possible--if you believe that the free spread will lead to more revenue in the long run. The cost of a single copy is zero, so you can choose to set the digital item loose without bankrupting yourself.

2. A culture of free digital consumption has evolved and is being adopted by a huge segment of the most coveted consumers (teenagers, the educated, the upper middle class).

The bet a creator makes, then, is that when she gives away something for free, it will be discovered, attract attention, spread and then, as we saw in radio in 1969, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something.

What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it.

Radio thirty years ago was simple: everyone hears it for free and a few buy it.

For a time, one could use free to promote an idea and have leverage to turn that attention into paid sales of a similar item (either because free went away or because the similar item offered convenience or souvenir value).

I think that might be changing. As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish when they pay for something when the free substitute is easily available and perhaps more convenient.

Think about that--buying things now makes some people feel foolish. Few felt foolish buying a Creedence album in the 1970s. They felt good about it, not stupid.

This new default to free means that people with something to sell are going to have to push ever harder to invent things that can't possibly have a free substitute. Patronage, live events, membership, the benefits of connection--all of these things are outside the scope we used to associate with the creative business model, but that's changing, fast.

Lada Gaga's music is basically free. It's the concerts that cost money. McKinsey's consulting philosophy is free in the library, it's the bespoke work that costs money. Watching a movie on Netflix is free--once you pay to belong. Playing golf at the local public course is pretty cheap, it's membership in the fancy club that costs money...

There's a growing disconnect between making something worthwhile and getting paid for it. The digital artifact is heading toward free faster and faster, and the inevitable leap to a paid version of the same item is going to get more difficult.

Creators don't have to like it, but free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive. The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.

[Worth a side note to talk about the 'shoulds'. Some commentators have argued quite forcibly that things shouldn't be free, that creators should always be paid, that 47% of our economy is based on intellectual property...

Of course, free has always been part of the equation. These commentators, the ones arguing in interviews or in blog posts, are already sharing their ideas for free. The bestselling book of all time has no copyright and has been shared freely for thousands of years. Musicians gladly show up to play for virtually free on American Bandstand or the Tonight Show.

Most ideas have never been something one could monetize. The inventor of the knock knock joke, for example, or the two college kids who coined Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon have put ideas into the ideastream, and they spread without much thought for cash compensation.

I'm certainly not arguing that content should be free, it's clear that the argument on the either side isn't absolute. My argument is that the line for using free as a discovery tool is shifting, and the best (and perhaps only) way to monetize in the future is for the idea to be encased in something that could never realistically be free. Prorducts and services with a marginal cost of more than zero, for example.

Should consumers be willing to pay for great content? You bet. In fact, paying for content is a great way to ensure that more of it gets made.

Does the game theory of the market make it likely that those in search of discovery will accelerate the use of free to get attention? Of course.

Creators have trained the most coveted, biggest spending and intelligent portion of the market to expect that many digital items will be free. Now it's up to us to wrap those items in such a way that they're worth paying for again.

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What's the Worst that could Happen?

When I went thru my Dale Carnegie training a few years ago, one of the exercises was to imagine the worst that could happen and what would be the result.

Seth Godin talks about that subject:

Disaster tolerance

Not all disasters can be avoided.

Not all disasters are fatal.

If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change. If you build a disaster-tolerant nation or project or lifestyle, you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won't hide out.

The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst possible outcome. And once you do that, the upside is more likely to occur.

If your hard drive has backups, you don't have to be as careful in buying hard drives. It's okay if a cheap one breaks. If your portfolio of artistic or financial endeavors isn't wrapped up in one project or one gallery, it's okay to do something a bit more daring, because one critic can't cripple you.

That outcome you were so afraid of isn't so bad, and once you realize you can tolerate it, it's (amazingly, perversely and ironically) less likely to happen.

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1 of 4

Our Sunday Seth:

Which of the four are getting the way?

You don't know what to do

You don't know how to do it

You don't have the authority or the resources to do it

You're afraid

Once you figure out what's getting in the way, it's far easier to find the answer (or decide to work on a different problem).

Stuck is a state of mind, and it's curable.

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