Seth Godin's Blog, page 201

Pest control

Your doctor now spends more of her time doing more non-medical tasks than ever before. Dealing with insurance companies, lawsuits, other doctors, partners and yes, marketing. My doctor's office probably has a special button on the phone system for each of these (okay, not lawyers, but you get the idea).

Just about all of us face the same thing when we engage with the world. The world wants to engage back!

Every interaction leads to a response, maybe three. Every marketing effort leads to the expectation that there will be other efforts. The next thing you know, there's no time left to actually get work done.

That's not news to you. What might be surprising is the logical conclusion:

A big part of doing your work is defending your time and your attention so you can do your work.

No one is going to do it for you and it's not easy or fun. It's work. But worth it.

Winning today (vs. winning tomorrow)

Look around. You're not number one on that bestseller list, or chosen for this RFP or invited to give that talk.

It's frustrating. There are engagements you ought to have, sales you ought to be making, clients that ought to understand you...

One choice is to spend today frustrated that you're not winning with the product you have for the market you've chosen.

The other choice is to focus on what you need to do today to win tomorrow.

The Milgram extension

In his famous experiment, Stanley Milgram gave his subjects a switch and then encouraged them to give (fake) electric shocks to his confederates if they were slow to follow instructions.

The internet has become a giant version of this, except the shocks are real.

You give people a switch and they can shock you whenever they choose, disrupt your day, cloud your horizons and generally make you feel like a failure.

Of course, that switch has always been given to certain members of your family or co-workers or teachers. But now, thanks to the ability of a total stranger to dump his anxiety or anger on you, the switch is easily handed to hundreds or thousands of people.

Extending the circle of people who are able to zap you is human nature. It's easy to do and tempting, too (because it feels as though you're gaining the ability to have others approve of you). On balance, my guess is that a large number of strangers holding on to electric shock buttons is a dangerous situation. But it's up to you.

Understanding stuck

Is there a human being alive who is capable of getting to an airplane who doesn't know how to buckle his seatbelt?

Given that we have 100% seatbelt understanding among the flying population, why do flight attendants repeat the instructions literally millions of times a year? (Low and flat across the waist...)

It's stuck.

Like so many policies, beliefs and procedures in our organizations, this is a ritual that's stuck. To get unstuck, organizations need two things:

a. a vacuum and,

b. a willingness to ignore dissent

Change gets made by people who care, who have some sort of authority and are willing to take responsibility. Often, though, finding all three is tough, particularly when faced with the immovable object of the stuck organization.

One approach to getting unstuck is the clean sheet of paper. Dictate that the speech before flight is going to change, that the menu will be redone, that the qualifications are going to start over, from zero.

Now, instead of needing an unanimous vote to remove something, merely demand that you need a passionate voice to add something.

For years, the Yahoo home page was stuck, with literally hundreds of links on it. No one could take a link off the page, because unanimous consent was impossible. Once Google decided to start with a completely blank page, a different approach was possible.

Move your team across the street, open a new location, completely rewrite the employee handbook, throw out the standard sales script--by creating a vacuum, you give your team permission to invent.

Is more always better?

Sometimes, only better is better.

Where does this blog come from?

A friend asked me today how many people work for me helping me write my books and blog.

I write every word of this blog (more than 2,000,000 words so far). If you see a book or an email that's from me, I wrote it.

I don't actively use Twitter (not because it's not a useful tool for some people, it just doesn't work for me) so I don't need a staff to pretend to be me there. (You can read this blog at @thisissethsblog).

I don't actively use Facebook either, though I have a page there.

If I blurb a book, it's because I've read it and thought it was worth highlighting. I don't endorse companies or other projects.

I don't take pitches to be on my blog, and no one can pay me to endorse them. I don't directly own private or public equity in companies I write about, except for Squidoo.com, which I founded, and use because I like what we built, not because I'm trying to persuade you to use it.

And those are my boundaries. They might not be for everyone, and I'm sure that others have other systems that work for them, but there you go. If I fail to respond to an email from you, or read something you send me, it's simply because I've made the choice to be a soloist than to farm out the thing I love to do to someone else.

Thanks for reading.

Getting serious about experimentation

Here's what doesn't work: hacking around and ignoring what doesn't work.

Here's what also doesn't work: doing your best with your work and then dismissing the elements that don't work as experiments.

The best experiments are experiments on purpose. They are done with rigor and intent. They are measured. They are designed to either fail or create an approach that can be scaled.

Great experimenters measure their results. They probe. They fail on purpose. And when they find something that works, they hand the knowledge over to operators and executors who can scale their work.

You don't get to call it an experiment after it fails.

"Perhaps your anxiety is specific to magicians"

I found that quote in a strangely-translated instruction manual for an obscure but beautiful trick.

But it has wide applicability.

Perhaps your anxiety is specific to artists or musicians or to anyone who has to stand up and stand out and stand for something.

It turns out that your anxiety isn't specific at all. Perhaps it is due to the fact that you're trying to control things that you can't possibly control.

Your anxiety might merely be a sign that you care deeply about your work.

Anxiety is almost never a useful emotion to carry around. Even for magicians.

Now that you've been reminded that you care, it pays to let the anxiety go. Good riddance.

A hierarchy of business to business needs

If you're selling a product or service to a business--to a non-owner--consider this hierarchy, from primary needs on down:

Avoiding risk

Avoiding hassle

Gaining praise

Gaining power

Having fun

Making a profit

In most large organizations, nothing happens unless at least one of these needs are met, and in just about every organization big enough and profitable enough to buy from you, the order of needs starts with the first one and works its way down the list.

That means that a sales pitch that begins with how much money the organization will make is pretty unlikely to work. Instead, the amount of profit has to be tied in to one of the other more primary needs of the person sitting across the table from you (as well as the committee or boss she reports to).

B2B selling is just like regular sales, except the customer (who might not be the person you're meeting with) is spending someone else's money (and wants to please the boss).

Thriving in a wet environment

If you've ever fixed any kind of machinery, you know that a device that's exposed to the elements is incredibly difficult to maintain. A washing machine or the underside of a car gets grungy, fast.

On the other hand, the dryest, cleanest environment of all is the digital one. Code stays code. If it works today, it's probably going to work tomorrow.

The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating--it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.

No software design survives a collision with the user.