Seth Godin's Blog, page 287

The distraction, the tail and the dog

Your business has a core, a goal, a challenge and a deliverable. There is probably one thing that would transform your project, one

success that changes things, one hurdle that's tougher than the others. What's difficult, what would respond to

overwhelming attention? That's the core.

Getting from here to there involves making sales, delivering on promises, overcoming the Dip and shipping.

Along the way, there are supporting tasks you can engage in, things you can do to make the goal...

We're the same, we're the same, we're...

Take a look at just about any industry with many competitors--colleges, hotels, sedans, accounting firms (especially accounting firms)...

The websites bend over backwards to be just like all the others. You can't identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there's a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).

Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not ...

Made by Hand

Mark Fraunfelder, a leading voice of the post-industrial age, has a new book out today.

It's not what you expect, and it provoked quite a few thoughts.

The book is about the increasing insulation between modern life and the idea of actually making/growing/fixing things. As Mark chronicles his journey into the world of tinkering, I realized that this is a spiritual journey, not merely a hobby. Tweaking, making and building are human acts, ones that are very easy to forget about as we sign up...

iPad killer app #2: fixing meetings

Here's an app that pays for 12 iPads the very first time you use it. Buy one iPad for every single chair in your meeting room... like the projector and the table, it's part of the room.

I recently sat through a 17 hour meeting with 40 people in it (there were actually 40 people, but it only felt like 17 hours.). That's a huge waste of attention and resources.

Here's what the app does (I hope someone will build it): (I know some of these features require a lot of work, and some might require...

Pfffft, the danger of premature shipment

The old economy demanded a flurry of hard work, obsessive focus, and a charrette before launch. Launches were expensive and rare, and managers and co-workers would push to get everything just right before hitting the big red button to announce, ship and launch. The attention demanded by this scarcity raised the game, overcame fear and pushed things from one level to another.

A big reason for the push is to ameliorate risk. Launching is risky business, and one way to diminish that risk in a...

Simple five step plan for just about everyone and everything

The number of people you need to ask for permission keeps going down:

1. Go, make something happen.

2. Do work you're proud of.

3. Treat people with respect.

4. Make big promises and keep them.

5. Ship it out the door.

When in doubt, see #1.

The modern business plan

It's not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they're often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations. If I want the real truth about a business and where it's going, I'd rather see something else. I'd divide the modern business plan into five sections:

Truth

Assertions

Alternatives

People

Money

The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs...

Linchpins are everywhere (raise the flag)

Announcing worldwide-meet-the-tribe-of-Linchpins day on June 14, 2010. In as many as 500 cities worldwide, here's your chance to find some folks just like you.

One of the first linchpins I ever knew was my 3rd grade teacher. His daughter was born on flag day, and for some reason, I've never forgotten that. So in her honor, it's Linchpin day on June 14.

Here's a simple, fast and free way to find other Seth fans in your community. Meet other people who talk about this blog, read the books...

On finding referrals

The people who work the hardest to get referrals, it seems to me, are the people who least deserve them.

If you make average stuff for average people, why exactly will someone refer you? If you are busy selling standard insurance policies to standard insurance clients, why will someone refer you? Because you're good at golf?

In fact, the best way to get referrals is to change what you do, what you sell, how you act when times are difficult, how generous you are when you don't need to be.

Yes...

Multiple dumbnesses

About twenty five years ago, Howard Gardner taught us his theory of multiple intelligences. He described the fact that there's not just one kind of intelligence, in fact there are at least seven (1 Bodily-kinesthetic,  2 Interpersonal,  3 Verbal-linguistic,  4 Logical-mathematical,  5 Intrapersonal,  6 Visual-spatial,  7 Musical,  8 Naturalistic). This makes perfect sense—people are good at different things.

The flip side of this occurred to me the other day, as I was busy judging someone for ...