Seth Godin's Blog, page 138

The joy of whining

Before starting, a question: Will it help?

Like holding a grudge, or like panicking, whining rarely helps. If anything, any of the three make it far less likely that you'll make progress solving the problem that has presented itself.

And, like knuckle cracking, it's best enjoyed alone.

            

Why scale?

Why add new products, hire new people, increase distribution?

Is it to please the shareholders?

The board?

Or your customers?

Investment costs money and it wants a return. But your customers don't care about that.

Use capital wisely, because sooner or later, you work for it, not the people you set out to serve or the market you sought to change.

            

Expecting the unexpected

Are you doing your work for an ordered market? A region where there is stability and rules and predictable outcomes? Some examples: selling to people who have purchased before, entering a market with established competitors, contributing to a media ecosystem that works in mostly predictable ways...

The alternative are blue sky arenas where unpredictability is the rule, not the exception.

Most of us don't live and work on the frontier, and we plan our lives accordingly.

Life on the frontier brings its own rewards (and risks) but there's never an advantage in imagining that it's stable. It's hard to be surprised if you establish up front that you're likely to be surprised.

It helps to know the rules of physics in the universe where you are choosing to live. 

            

Understanding the doublings

If you seek to please 90% of your potential customers, all you need to do is the usual thing.

To please half the remaining potential market, you're going to need to work at least twice as hard.

And to please the next half, twice as hard again. It's Zeno's paradox, an endless road to getting to the end.

So, a letter with a stamp gets you on time deliverability 90% of the time.

Priority mail gets you the next 5%, and if you want to be sure of reaching just about everyone in a trackable, reliable way, you're going to have to step up and pay for a courier service. (And note the expensive part... you often don't know which people need to be couriered, so you have to pay to do it for everyone).

The rules apply to more than fulfillment. They apply to bedside manner, to customer service, to effort and originality in the kitchen as well.

Cheap food, quickly served, will please 90% of the audience. You'll have to invest in quality, preparation and service to get the next half, and then double it again for the half after that... etc.

Health care works the same way. 90% of the patients will respond to a treatment, but the next 5% will cost twice as much, and on and on...

The very end of the curve, the .5%, might be unpleasable, uncurable, unreachable without insane effort. Which is why organizations that please everyone are so extraordinarily rare.

One approach, which some organizations use, is to redefine your usual systems so you are able to please most people without your team going through a Herculean sprint every day, and then (this is a key element as well), eagerly and regularly apologizing and giving refunds to the one in 150 where it just can't be done.

Perfect is nice, but you can't afford it. None of us can. 

            

Just passing through

Older guy walks into the service area on the parkway and asks one of the staff, "do you have a pay phone? My car broke down and I need to call my daughter." 

The staff person, killing time by checking his cell phone, is confused. He's not sure what a pay phone is, then he figures it out, and says, "no," before going back to his phone.

It never occurs to him to hand the phone to the man so he can make a call.

Part of it is the boss's fault. He's not paying much attention to hiring or training or incentives. He's paying as little as he can, and turnover is high. After all, every one of his customers is just passing through, no need to care.

And that message comes through to the staff, loud and clear.

Of course, at one level, all of us are just passing through.

From a more practical, business level, the ease of digital connection means that it's more and more unlikely that you can be uncaring or mistreat people and not be noticed. 

But most of all, life is better when we act like we might see someone again soon, isn't it?

            

Running out of room (length vs. density)

A reporter recently hacked an interview he did with me, turning 17 emailed sentences into two and changing both the message and the way it was delivered.

That used to make sense, when papers involved column inches, but it was for an online article.

Why make things shorter than necessary if you're not paying for paper?

Why make make a podcast or a talk 18 minutes long... the internet isn't going to run out of reels of tape.

As we've moved from books to posts to tweets to thumbs up, we keep making messages shorter. In a world with infinite choice, where there's always something better and more urgent a click away, it's tempting to go for shorter.

In fact, if you seek to make a difference (as opposed to gather a temporary crowd), shorter isn't what's important: Dense is.

Density is difficult to create. It's about boiling out all the surplus, getting to the heart of it, creating impact. Too much and you're boring. Not enough and you're boring.

The formula is simple to describe: make it compelling, then deliver impact. Repeat. Your speech can be two hours long if you can keep this up.

And if you can't, make it shorter!

Long isn't the problem. Boring is.

If someone cares, they'll stick around. If they don't care, they don't matter to you anyway.

(PS Hal points out that Roger Ebert had a great line on this: "No good movie is too long! No bad movie is short enough!")

            

The paradox of popular

Most things are liked because they're popular.

I know that seems to be a redundancy, but it's worth decoding.

Pop music, for example, is a must-listen among certain populations because that's what "everyone else" is listening to, and being in sync is the primary benefit on offer.

The paradox, of course, is that you have to walk through a huge valley of unpopular before you arrive at the population that will embrace you because that's the thing to do.

The focus on mass acceptance, on the big company or the mass market embracing you, distracts from the difficult work of being embraced by people who lead, not follow.

            

What does branded look like?

The vast majority of products that are sold are treated as generic by just about everyone except the naive producer, who believes he has a brand of value.

A branded object or service has two components, one required, one desired:

1. Someone who isn't even using it can tell, from a distance, who made it. It appears that it could only be made by that producer (or it's an illegal knock off). 

Ralph Lauren certainly got our attention when he started making his logo bigger and bigger, but we also see this in the shape of a Paloma Picasso pin, or the label on a pair of Tom's shoes, or the red soles of Louboutin or the sound of a Harley or the cadence of Sarah Kay or ...

If we (the user or the observer) can't tell who made it, then there's no brand. That's the distinction between generic and specific...

2. In the long haul, successfully branded items succeed because the user likes that the brand is noticed in daily use, either by others or even by themselves.

That's subtle but crucial. Does the very existence of the logo or the identifier or the distinction make the user happier?

Can you imagine how crestfallen the debutante would be if her date didn't even know what a Birkin bag was?

            

About to be

The only way to become the writer who has written a book is to write one.

The only way to become the runner who has just finished a run is to go running.

You might dread the writing or the running or the leading, but it's the key step on the road to becoming.

If it's easier, remind yourself what you're about to be.

            

Past performance is not indicative of future results

This is clearly and demonstrably true of mutual funds. It's easy to confirm.

And yet...

We are very uncomfortable with randomness. So the newspaper does a 12 page section of mutual funds, filled with articles and ads and charts, all touting past performance. 

Superstition is what we call the belief in causation due to a mistaken correlation of unrelated data. A broken mirror doesn't actually cause seven years of bad luck, and cheering in a certain way isn't going to help the Yankees, sorry.

Of course, we don't live in a completely random world. The scientific method and statistics make it more likely than ever that you can find trends that actually matter. 

The hard part is accepting that the random things actually are unpredictable, and refusing to spend time or money guessing on what can't be reliably guessed. It frees up a lot of time and resources to focus on the things that are actually worth measuring.