Seth Godin's Blog, page 297

Losing Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie apparently said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors......Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?

Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual... that's king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

It turns out that success is...

Spring reading list--big ideas for idea people

Readers have told me that they enjoy my off-the-wall book lists. Here's another. Science fiction, Tom Peters, Krista Tippett and even a book for touring musicians.

Enjoy them. And don't forget it's okay to share books. They don't wear out.

Pulitzer Prizefighting

People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame.

It's precisely the wrong way to succeed.

Lots of journalists take significant detours in their careers and their writing in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe not to actually win one, but to be in that class, to have peers that have won one. Mystery novelists stick to the center of the road, because that's where the road is. Movies are written and released in order to win an Oscar. Once there's a category, a ranking, a place to...

On self determination

I posted this eight years ago (!) but a reader asked for an encore.

...are we stuck in High School?

I had two brushes with higher education this week.

The first was at a speech I gave in New York. There were several

Harvard Business School students there, invited because of their

interest in marketing and exceptional promise (that's what I was

told... I think they came because they had heard that Maury Rubin would

make a great lunch!).

Anyway, they asked for my advice...

Open buying and open selling

If I can sell you something without a sales call or expensive ad campaign, I can sell it cheaper.

If you want to buy a business development relationship but you're not willing to negotiate, do contracts and invest a lot of time, you're going to get a lesser deal.

It seems like a paradox, but it's not.

Firefox is free, largely because it doesn't cost anything for them to 'sell' it to you. If they had to meet with your IT guys and build case studies and fly people out to conferences and take you t...

Try different

The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different.

Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

No ...

"Be what losers call a loser."

Think about that for a minute or two... Sort of turns the whole idea of 'cool' upside down. From an interview with David Horvath.

And my favorite new blog in ages (from an old friend and sage): Alan Webber.

Sprezzatura

This is an Italian word for being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort. It's a combination of elan and grace and class, sort of the opposite of loud grunts while you play tennis or a lot of whining and fuss when you help out a customer.

Many people are unable to put their finger on it, but this is a magnetic trait for many of us. We want our lawyer, dentist and waiter to demonstrate sprezzatura, but of course, not particularly try to. This is one of the secrets of Danny...

I don't feel like it

What's it?

Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it's difficult, not because it's something you need to feel like.

Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don't usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they've pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.

Of course, your feelings are irrelevant to whether or not the...

Everyone's model of work is a job

That's is the conclusion of a very long essay on startups by Paul Graham, and it's an insightful quote.

The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority--a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things...