Seth Godin's Blog, page 181

Soft and hard

The hard stuff is measurable, quantifiable and easy to put into a spreadsheet. This concrete stuff gives you an easy way to demand a bonus or track progress.

The soft stuff is merely essential, the real reason you do what you do.

Ironically, then, hard is easy and soft is difficult.

The question, I guess, is whether or not you and your team spend most of your time on the hard stuff, merely because it's easier to measure, to argue about and to hide behind?

The cycle of customers who care

Organizations that grow start by selling their services and products to people who care.

These organizations are staffed by people who care making something that demands "caring-about" for people who have chosen to care.

It can be colored shoelaces or vinyl records or handmade medicine balls. These aren't for everyone, and they require effort to find, to buy and to maintain, but for those that care about the cutting edge or innovation or style, they're perfect.

Then, over time, many of these organizations start to make products and services that are carefree. The people who produce them care so much about what they're making that they get good at it, the design becomes simpler, the pricing becomes better, and more people use it. The result is efficiency and distribution.

Until soon, the product or service is used by people who don't care so much about the original intent, they just want something easy and functional and available and cheap.

This is the classic diffusion of innovations process. (Learn more about this key concept here, here and here). Those in the mass market choose to be the mass market because they're too busy or distracted or bored to be the innovators and the geeks. They don't care enough to be on the edge.

Some examples: ebooks were first sold to just a few people. They were tricky to download, they weren't cheap and they required more effort. Over time, the price of the reader comes down, more books are available and it becomes more attractive to the mass market.

Or the car transforms from something for millionaires and hobbyists into the Honda Civic. You don't buy a Civic because you want to do your own tune ups. You just want it to work, and to be inexpensive.

Or the charity that starts out on the bleeding edge of technology, raising speculative money from a few philanthropists, but then moves into the mainstream and becomes an easy cause to explain and support.

Or the musician and his band and his label who goes from hand-crafting music to mass-producing live spectacles.

Apple, of course, is the classic example. The Mac was, for the longest time, only bought by people who cared a lot about which computer they bought. And the iPhone transformed the market because it became a phone for people who wanted to care about their phone.

The recent launch of the iPhone5 disappointed the geeks, but that was on purpose. Apple introduced a phone for their target market, which is people who don't care as much about the phone as the geeks do. They introduced a phone that worked, not one that was fascinating because it was loaded with untested new features.

But here's where it gets interesting...

The first step is people who care making a product for people who care.

The second step is people who care making a product for people who don't care.

And the third step, so difficult to avoid, is that the growing organization starts hiring people, not necessarily people who care, to grow their ever-industrializing company. And since they are servicing customers who don't care, those employees who don't care can get away with it (for a while).

Think General Motors, 1986. No one pushed back on the horrid design and build quality of the Cadillac. No, the people who cared all bought a Mercedes instead, and those that didn't care, didn't care. Until it was too late.

You're not going to have hordes of disappointed mass market customers cursing you out about quality or design. They don't care enough to do that.

It's totally okay for an organization to have the mission of making a carefree, ubiquitous product or service for people too busy or focused elsewhere. Totally fine to make something that's popular largely because it's popular. The danger creeps in when your team listens to their (mass) market and stops caring as well. When that happens, a new company comes along to care again.

Non-profits have a charter to be innovators

The biggest, best-funded non profits have an obligation to be leaders in innovation, but sometimes they hesitate.

One reason: "We're doing important work. Our funders count on us to be reasonable and cautious and proven, because the work we're doing is too important to risk failure."

One alternative: "We're doing important work. Our funders count on us to be daring and bold and brave, because the work we're doing is too important to play it safe."

The thing about most cause/welfare non-profits is that they haven't figured out how to solve the problem they're working on (yet). Yes, they often offer effective aid, or a palliative. But no, too many don't have a method for getting at the root cause of the problem and creating permanent change. That's because it's hard (incredibly hard) to solve these problems.

The magic of their status is that no one is expecting a check back, or a quarterly dividend. They're expecting a new, insightful method that will solve the problem once and for all.

Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don't.

Anticipation vs. anxiety

If we define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance, we can also understand its antonym, anticipation.

When you work with anticipation, you will highlight the highs. You'll double down on the things that will delight and push yourself even harder to be bold and to create your version of art. If this is going to work, might as well build something that's going to be truly worth building.

If you work with anxiety, on the other hand, you'll be covering the possible lost bets, you'll be insuring against disaster and most of all, building deniability into everything you do. When you work under the cloud of anxiety, the best strategy is to play it safe, because if (when!) it fails, you'll be blameless.

Not only is it more fun to work with anticipation, it's often a self-fulfilling point of view.

Thank you, Zig

My teacher Zig Ziglar died this morning. He was 86. 

Thanks for teaching me how to sell and why it mattered.

Thanks for reminding me how much it mattered to care.

Thanks for telling us a fifteen-minute story about Johnny the Shoe Shine Genius, so compelling that I flew to the airport just to meet him.

Thanks for 72 hours of audiotapes, listened to so many times I wore out the cassettes twice.

Thanks for that one day we spent backstage together in Milwaukee.

Thanks for making goal setting so clear.

Thanks for elevating the art of public speaking, and making it personal, not something to be copied.

Thanks for believing in us, the people you almost never met in person, for supporting us with your voice and your stories and your enthusiasm.

Thanks for teaching so many people, people who will continue to remember you and to teach as well.

You'll be missed.

Avoiding "I'll know it when I see it"

This is a waste for the buyer and the seller.

When you have a business or individual waiting for you to bring them custom work, it can lead to an endless cycle of, "hmmmm not quite right." If the architectural drawings, high-heeled shoes or ad campaign doesn't meet their unstated standards, you're back to doing it again.

Sometimes you can make a handsome profit on all the fees you charge to redo things that indulge the ego of the customer, but more likely than not, your time is wasted until they're happy. If you have a client who feels the same way, you can work together to save time and money by being clear with each other about what's wanted.

I think helping a client say what they want before they see it is a worthy endeavor.

Do it on purpose. When engaging with a new client, intentionally create an environment where personal taste is described in advance, and as much boundary-building as possible is done when it's cheap to iterate, not at the end when it's expensive.

Demand benchmarks. The world is filled with things that are a lot like what you've been asked to create. So mutually identify them. Show me three other websites that feel like what you're hoping to feel like. Hand me a hardcover book that has type that reads the way you want yours to read. Walk me through a building that has the vibe you're looking for...

Describe the assignment before you start. Using your words and the words of the client, precisely state what problem you're trying to solve. "We're trying to build something that does a, b and c, and not d..."

Then, before you show off your proposal, before you hand in your work, restate the problem again. "You asked us to do a, b and c at a cost of under X. What I'm about to show you does a, it does b and it does c... and it costs half of X." This sort of intentional restatement of the scope of work respects your client by honoring their stated intent, at the same time it focuses your work on the stated goals.

Make a decision about whether you want a reputation for doing this sort of focused work. If you do, don't work for clients who don't buy into the process. Over time, you'll earn the kind of clients you want.

Of course, this isn't going to work every time. Sometimes the client loves the power of saying no. Sometimes the client isn't articulate enough to describe what she wants. And sometimes the goal is magic, and no one knows how to describe that in advance.

Broken events

People who don't want to listen, being forced to sit through speeches that the speakers don't want to give.

If that sounds like a graduation or gala or corporate event you recently attended, I feel your pain.

If someone starts by telling a joke that they know is lame or starts going through all the tribulations they had finding something to say, if the audience is checking the time or secretly tweeting, then the event itself is broken. The speaker who discharges an obligation is not a speaker you are hoping to hear. 

Maybe obligatory speeches used to have a point, maybe they used to serve a vital function, but they no longer do.

Here's a thought: Let the students run their own graduation. Cancel any speeches that could easily be delivered instead via an interactive website. Put the credits and the thank yous into a beautiful document that you hand to everyone and switch the entire dynamic to:

People thrilled to be listening to people who are excited to be speaking.

Why not?

Four questions worth answering

Who is your next customer? (Conceptually, not specifically. Describe his outlook, his tribe, his hopes and dreams and needs and wants...)

What is the story he told himself (about the world, about his situation, about his perceptions) before he met you?

How do you encounter him in a way that he trusts the story you tell him about what you have to offer?

What change are you trying to make in him, his life, or his story?

Start with this before you spend time on tactics, technology or scalability.

Persuade vs. convince

An anonymous copyeditor working on my new book unilaterally changed each usage of "persuade" to "convince."

I had to change them all back.

Marketers don't convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to the imagination. Convincing requires a spreadsheet or some other rational device.

It's much easier to persuade someone if they're already convinced, if they already know the facts. But it's impossible to change someone's mind merely by convincing them of your point.

If you're spending a lot of your time trying to convince people, it's no wonder it's not working.

More here.

The decline of fascination and the rise in ennui

A generation ago, a clever idea could run and run. We talked about Space Food Sticks and Tang and Gilligan's Island and the Batmobile for years, even though there certainly wasn't a lot of depth. Hit movies and books stayed on the bestseller lists for months or even years (!)

Today, an internet video or an investment philosophy or a political moment might last for weeks or even a few days. It's not unusual for a movie or a book or even a TV series to come and go before most people notice it. Neophilia has fundamentally changed the culture.

The result is that there's an increasing desire, almost a panic, for something new. Yesterday was a million years ago, and tomorrow is already here. The rush for new continues to increase, and it is now surpassing our ability to satisfy it.

When that need can't be filled (which is not surprising, if you think about it) then we're inclined to declare that it's the end, the end of new ideas, the end of progress, the end of everything that's interesting. Spend a week or two watching TED videos and once you catch up, you might find yourself saying, "sure, but what's new now?"

If you're in the business of making a new thing, this churn may be an opportunity, because it's easier now than ever to send a hit up the pop charts, whatever sort of pop you make. But it comes at a price, which is that it won't last, and you'll quickly have to go back and make another one.

The real opportunity, I think, is in trying to build longer arcs. Now that the cycle of new is eating itself in a race to ever-faster, there's a bigger chance to make long term change by consistently focusing on what works (and what's important), not what's new and merely shiny.

What's important, what's always important, is useful change.