Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 99

Iron Chef, Truffles and Surviving Clueless Criticism

Imagine you’re a chef. You have spent the last twenty years learning your craft. Studying ingredients and cooking techniques. Working for sometimes maladjusted and dictatorial restaurant owners or lead chefs. And now you’ve made it. You have your own kitchen that you lead – and you’re recognized. Your food has made it onto the plates of celebrities and maybe even world leaders.

Sounds good, right? Not so fast.

Now imagine you accept an invitation to appear on one of the most popular reality coo...

5 Tragic Ways To Lose An Audience Despite Telling Great Stories

There is plenty of advice out there on how to create a great presentation. Most of it centers on two pretty common pieces of advice:

Tell more stories.
Use bigger fonts.

Neither is always easy to do, but the more events I attend – the more I realize a single fact that still manages to surprise me about why people do (or don’t) connect with you as a speaker.

Having a good story or great visuals is not enough.

Presenting in front of an audience (whether it happens to be 3 potential investors or 3000...

The Underappreciated Reason SXSW Matters (In A Word)

It is tempting to search for the next big thing. There were no shortage of journalists sent to SXSW this past weekend for their annual quest to answer exactly that question. And this year many came up empty — or at least indifferent. Some even skipped the event completely. Of course we like to see winners and losers. And SXSW certainly has the track record of a kingmaking conference (Twitter and Foursquare both launched there).

The reason SXSW actually matters, though, has almost nothing to d...

How Men Can Change The Business World For Women

About four years ago I started getting a lot of unsolicited emails from women. My first book, Personality Not Included, had just come out and readers were emailing me with their own stories of how having a personality had made a difference in their own careers. While school often teaches us that we must remove our personality from “professional” communication – the truth is, faceless companies simply don’t work.

Forgettable people tend to have forgettable careers.

The thing I didn’t predict was...

Why Snow Days Make Us MORE Productive

Today was the first snow day of the year for those of us living in the Washington DC area. And though theamountof snow that caused schools and businesses to shut their doors for the day would make any of our Northern neighbors laugh out loud … it was still a big day. As much as kids love being able to stay home from school, snow days can seem like something of aninconveniencefor the rest of us – causing work to pile up like the snow on our driveways.

What if snow days actually make us MORE pro...

14 Lessons From The Best and Worst Websites In The Travel Industry

I’m going to break one of my own rules today. Usually, my philosophy for sharing marketing insights is to always use a positive tone. Even when a strategy is executed poorly, I would rather focus on missed opportunities than write about the negative. That usually works for me … but not this time.

What doesn’t work is when a brand is proudlybad. Successful brands don’t offer their customers bad experiences and pretend they are great.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what United Airlines has done o...

Do You Have The Snowflake Mindset?

There are exceptions to every rule. That’s what we like to think, isn’t it? We are all unique in our own way. No two people (or snowflakes!) are alike. There’s no shortage of cliches to describe the same thing.

The Snowflake Mindset says that everything is unique and we should never forget our differences.

The mindset works particularly when when you are teaching or encouraging someone to grow self esteem. It is why we often hear this advice directed at children. The Snowflake Mindset works to...

The Script Of Improv – What Is (And Isn’t) Real Time Marketing

A theater show happens in real time. It’s live on stage and the actors are actually saying the lines as you watch them. And if it’s well done, it can seem spontaneous and real and unscripted. But of course, it is scripted. They are memorizing lines and performing them.

Improv, on the other hand is completely UNscripted. It is based on themes and constructions, but the actors follow the scene. They react to one another, and build a story before the eyes of the audience. Sometimes it works – and...

How The Oscars Remind Us To Fix Our Dysfunctional Relationship With Human Resources

Daniel Radcliffe never auditioned to become Harry Potter. At least, not at first. Instead, it was a fateful moment during intermission at a theater show in London where Producer David Heyman spotted Radcliffe sitting in the audience and asked his father about letting Radcliffe join auditions.

Of course, he did – and was eventually chosen. Isn’t that how we like to think casting always works? A visionary Director or Producer looks at a crowd of people, magically points one actor out and boldly...

Why Being REAL Matters More Than Being Perfect

Logically speaking, it shouldn’t really matter whether Dr. Seuss is still alive or he isn’t. But it does. Yesterday my five year old asked me about him. It’s the sort of thing kids always ask. Is this real, or isn’t it? Wondering whether or not something is real is a commonoccurrence In fact, it’s a filter that we sometimes use for trust and believability as well. Last week on the reality show the Shark Tank, one of the sharks (Barbara) decided not to invest in a company because their present...