Seth Godin's Blog, page 258

The shell game of delight

Let's try a challenging thought experiment.

I'm going to pick a number between one and five, inclusive. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Now, try to guess. Focus hard, sharpen your senses, and see if you can guess what I'm thinking of...

Click on your guess (just one, please): one, two, three, four, five.

Cynics have already become annoyed at me. But most people, particularly if I added a little spin, would be delighted at their sensitivity and psi-power.

The point: you can easily create similar interactions in the way you do business with people. Setting up prospects, customers and bosses to be right is almost always worth the effort. It's so much more useful than setting people up to fail.

Why then, do we organize interfaces, manuals, contracts and relationships to have people fail merely because they didn't guess what we had in mind? When in doubt, make it so people succeed.

Eight Lessons from the life and work of Jack LaLanne

He bootstrapped himself. A scrawny little kid at 15, he decided to change who he was and how he was perceived, and then he did. The deciding was as important as the doing.

He went to the edges. He didn't merely open a small gym, a more pleasant version of a boxing gym, for instance. Instead, he created the entire idea of a health club, including the juice bar. He did this 70 years ago.

He started small. No venture money, no big media partners.

He understood the power of the media. If it weren't for TV, we never would have heard of Jack. Jack used access to the media to earn trust and to teach. And most of what Jack had to offer he offered for free. He understood the value of attention.

He was willing to avoid prime time. Jack never had a variety show on CBS. He was able to change the culture from the fringes of TV.

He owned the rights. 3,000 shows worth.

He stuck with the brand. He didn't worry about it getting stale or having to reinvent it into something fresh. Jack stood for something, which is rare, and he was smart enough to keep standing for it.

Jack lived the story. He followed his own regimen, even when no one was watching. In is words, "I can't die, it would ruin my image."

He died last week at 96. I don't think he has to worry about ruining his image, though.

Three ways to help people get things done

A friend sent me a copy of a new book about basketball coach Don Meyer. Don was one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, apparently. It's quite a sad book—sad because of his tragic accident, but also sad because it's a vivid story about a misguided management technque.

Meyer's belief was that he could become an external compass and taskmaster to his players. By yelling louder, pushing harder and relentlessly riding his players, his plan was to generate excellence by bullying them. The hope was that over time, people would start pushing themselves, incorporating Don's voice inside their head, but in fact, this often turns out to be untrue. People can be pushed, but the minute you stop, they stop. If the habit you've taught is to achieve in order to avoid getting chewed out, once the chewing out stops, so does the achievement.

It might win basketball games, but it doesn't scale and it doesn't last. When Don left the room (or the players graduated), the team stopped winning.

A second way to manage people is to create competition. Pit people against one another and many of them will respond. Post all the grades on a test, with names, and watch people try to outdo each other next time. Promise a group of six managers that one of them will get promoted in six months and watch the energy level rise. Want to see little league players raise their game? Just let them know the playoffs are in two weeks and they're one game out of contention.

Again, there's human nature at work here, and this can work in the short run. The problem, of course, is that in every competition most competitors lose. Some people use that losing to try harder next time, but others merely give up. Worse, it's hard to create the cooperative environment that fosters creativity when everyone in the room knows that someone else is out to defeat them.

Both the first message (the bully with the heart of gold) and the second (creating scarce prizes) are based on a factory model, one of scarcity. It's my factory, my basketball, my gallery and I'm going to manipulate whatever I need to do to get the results I need. If there's only room for one winner, it seems these approaches make sense.

The third method, the one that I prefer, is to open the door. Give people a platform, not a ceiling. Set expectations, not to manipulate but to encourage. And then get out of the way, helping when asked but not yelling from the back of the bus.

When people learn to embrace achievement, they get hooked on it. Take a look at the incredible achievements the alumni of some organizations achieve after they move on. When adults (and kids) see the power of self-direction and realize the benefits of mutual support, they tend to seek it out over and over again.

In a non-factory mindset, one where many people have the opportunity to use the platform (I count the web and most of the arts in this category), there are always achievers eager to take the opportunity. No, most people can't manage themselves well enough to excel in the way you need them to, certainly not immediately. But those that can (or those that can learn to) are able to produce amazing results, far better than we ever could have bullied them into. They turn into linchpins, solving problems you didn't even realize you had. A new generation of leaders is created...

And it lasts a lifetime.

The pleasant reassurance of new words

It's a lot easier for an organization to adopt new words than it is to actually change anything.

Real change is uncomfortable. If it's not feeling that way, you've probably just adopted new words.

Treat different customers differently

This is difficult if you also insist on treating every customer the same. Or treating every customer the best, which is a better way to describe a similar idea.

No, the only way you can treat different customers differently is if you understand that their values (and their value to you) vary. It's easier than ever to discern and test these values, and you do everyone a service when you differentiate.

Misjudging risk (and bad decisions)

The perception of risk is skewed when bad outcomes are vivid, personal and immediate.

Given the choice between working on the important and the urgent, the urgent almost always wins.

Given the choice between avoiding the rare but grisly outcome or doing the hard work to avoid the equally nasty, more subtle but more common outcome, we usually go for the grisly.

We do this sort of miscalculation all the time at work. We avoid the hard work on the long-term project in order to panic and rush about to avoid the possible vivid, immediate and personal risk on the short-term project, even if it's far less important.

(Think about this the next time you're in the security line at the airport).

This is one reason why the media is so complicit in many of the issues of the day... they take concepts that were previously abstract and relentlessly make them vivid, personal and immediate. It amplifies the risks around us and easily sells us on a cycle of dissatisfaction.

If you want to create action on the important, figure out how to make it vivid, personal and immediate.

Timing rewards

We can agree that promising a three-year old a new car when he graduates from college is probably an ineffective way to get him to stop sucking his thumb.

As we mature, it gets easier to trade satisfaction now for a prize later. However, the more risk involved in getting the prize, the less we value it. Frequent flyer miles, for example, began with the promise that if you flew an airline regularly for months (or even years) you'd get a free flight. The airlines oversold the miles and undelivered on the free flights, though, so the reward started to lose its perceived value--too much risk that you wouldn't get the prize you wanted. Many of the frequent flyers I know have ceased to 'save up' and now use their miles for upgrades, moving the benefit closer in time.

One of the many things the web is changing is our focus on now. It's increasing. Offering a reward in three months just isn't going to cut it. If you want me to get out of bed or brush my teeth or click on your link, there better be something waiting for me on the other side.

Launch it like Google

About a year after they were founded, Google was first mentioned in the New York Times. As an aside, in a non-news column.

Today of course, it seems like everything they do is instantly news. It's easy to forget that just about every major online service (eBay, Amazon, Paypal, Twitter, Facebook) launched in obscurity. Same with classic books, pop musicians and political careers.

The big splash might feel good, but it's clearly not necessary.

One way to look at the internet, mobile, web and tablets

It might be about the size of the screen and whether or not you're standing up.

Start at the bottom. For the first five years of the Internet, the most used function was email. Email remains a bedrock of every device and system that's been built on top of the internet, though sometimes it looks like a text message or a mobile check in. This is the layer for asynchronous person to person connection, over time.

Moving from left to right, we see how the way we use the thing we call the internet has evolved over time. We also see how devices and technology and bandwidth have changed the uses of the net and, interestingly, how a growth in mass has led to a growth in self-motivated behavior.

Early online projects were things like Archie and Veronica and checking in changes to the Linux code base. You needed patience, a big screen and a sense of contribution.

Layer on top of this a practice that is getting ever more professional, which is creating content for others to consume. Sometimes in groups, sometimes using sophisticated software and talented cohorts.

As we move to the right (and through time) we see the birth of online shopping. Still to this day, most online shopping happens on traditional devices, often sitting down.

The sitting down part is not a silly aside. Ted Leonsis theorized twenty years ago that the giant difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

Moving over in time and device and intent, we see the idea of consuming content. While tablets get their share of shopping, this is where they really shine. I think 2011 is going to be the year of the tablet, from the Kindle to the iPad to the thing we used to call a phone.

It's in the last two categories that these other devices, things that don't involve sitting down, are superior, not just a mobile substitute. The social graph is a very low bandwidth, peripheral attention interaction, perfect for this audience and this medium. And the last category--tell me where I am, where to eat, who's near me, what's the weather, get me a cab right now--is all about me and now and here.

I don't believe this is a winner take all situation, any more than one bestselling book makes all other books obsolete. I think different pillars work for different devices, and there will continue to be winners in all of them.

Cashing the check

A check in your wallet does you very little good. It represents opportunity, sure, but not action.

Most of us are carrying around a check, an opportunity to make an impact, to do the work we're capapble of, to ship the art that would make a difference.

No, the world isn't fair, and most people don't get all the chances they deserve. There are barriers due to income, to race, to social standing and to education, and they are inexcusable and must fall. But the check remains, now more than ever. The opportunity to step up and to fail (and then to fail again, and to fail again) and to continue failing until we succeed is greater now than it has ever been.

As Martin Luther King Junior spoke about a half a lifetime ago,

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."