Seth Godin's Blog, page 283

The 200 slide solution

The next time you find yourself on the hook for a 40 minute presentation (with slides!) consider, at least for a moment, a radical idea:

A slide every 12 seconds. 200 slides in all.

You're used to putting three or four bullet points on a slide. That's at least four distinct ideas, but more often, each of those ideas has three or four sub ideas to it. In other words, you're cramming 32 ideas on a slide, and you're sitting on that slide as you drone on and on. Perhaps you spice it up with some r...

The sugar cane machine

A small island grows sugar cane. Many people harvest it, and one guy owns the machine that can process the cane and turn it into juice.

Who wins?

The guy with the machine, of course. It gives him leverage, and since he's the only one, he can pay the pickers whatever he likes--people will either sell it to him or stop picking. No fun being the cane picker. He can also charge whatever he likes to the people who need the cane juice, because without him, there's no juice. No fun being a baker or...

Winning

A toddler wants what she wants, now. That's a win.

A little later, when we're more mature, we might define winning as getting what we want at the expense of someone else. I win when you lose. And yes, winning still means now, not later.

A demagogue cares so much about winning that he'd rather wreck the system itself than lose. It's okay, he believes, to root for the failure of the republic or to destroy civility or democracy if it leads to something that could be called a win.

What happens when ...

BACO and your career

Brian Trelstad and his team at Acumen have had great success using a metric they call BACO (the best alternative charitable option). They can compare the results of the development and investment work they do to the results that direct aid or charity would generate instead. In short: when you understand the alternative, it's far easier to not only measure your work, but value it.

If you are familiar with a great restaurant just down the street, that raises the bar for a new restaurant to get y...

Validation is overrated

If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.

We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.

Feedback is important, selling is important, getting the market to recognize your offering and make a sale--all important. But there's a difference between achieving your goals and...

Do you have the right to be heard?

I'm not talking about the ability to be heard... we solved that problem a few years ago. It used to be logistically impossible to make it easy for the masses to speak up and to sort and respond to the feedback. Now, though, that part is easy.

I'm wondering whether marketers, politicians and leaders have an obligation to treat everyone's input equally. Sure, you have the right to speak, but what does it take to be listened to?

Does the CEO of HP have the obligation to listen to a loony...

A bias for scamminess

Avoid stamps.com.

How is that a sleepy, conservative organization like the postal service ends up licensing its brand to a company that can't resist every honey pot scheme and opt out technique in the book?

I needed to send a package today and figured I'd try them out. Visited the site on my Mac, got all the way through registration, entered my card to pay for stamps and then (and only then) did I find out their software doesn't work on a Mac. Of course, they knew I was on a Mac but didn't...

What's included?

This is the pricing question of our time.

First, from the buyer's point of view: when I buy this car/boiler/phone, how much are the services that come with it going to cost me every month, forever?

We stand at the Verizon store agonizing about the extra $34 in posted price for one phone over the other, then sign a contract for $2400 in fees.

We are attracted to a car with a rebate, not caring about the $2000 extra in lifetime gas costs.

More and more, the thing we buy isn't a thing, it's a...

You're already self employed

When are you going to start acting like it?

The idea that you are a faceless cog in a benevolent system that cares about you and can't tell particularly whether you are worth a day's pay or not, is, like it or not, over.

In the long run, we're all dead. In the medium-long run, though, we're all self-employed. In the medium-long run, the decisions and actions we take each day determine what we'll be doing next.

And yet, it's so easy to revert to, "I just work here."

A car is not merely a faster horse

And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex.

Play a new game, not the older game but faster.