Seth Godin's Blog, page 37

Business/busyness

Our time is worth something. Too often, though, we’re guilty of spending it foolishly or out of habit, or without intention… despite our lousy track record, though, it is possible to spend it wisely, just as we try to spend or invest anything valuable.

We wouldn’t buy medicine that we knew didn’t work, or invest in ads that never ran. It seems, though, that time doesn’t have to meet the same bar.

If you had a factory job, it wasn’t your job to worry about productivity. Somebody else was in charge. You did what you were told, all day, every day.

Now, more than ever, you’re likely to be running a team, managing a project or deciding on your own agenda as a free agent. Time is just about all you’ve got to spend.

And yet, we hardly talk about productivity.

Productivity is the amount of useful output created for every hour of work we do.

You can measure that output in money if you want to (it makes the math easier) but in fact, it’s everything from lives changed to knowledge shared. What matters is the answer to a simple question: did I spend my day producing enough benefit for all the time invested?

A teacher has a class for 160 days—an hour a day … How to spend that time, how to spend today, how to spend the next five minutes? What’s the most productive choice?

Henry Ford and the other productivity pioneers of the industrial revolution understood this to their bones. He designed the Model T to be efficient to build. As a result, each of his workers produced far more value per day than they could working at a competitor down the street on a car that wasn’t as thoughtfully engineered.

Since his workers were more productive, he could charge less for the car. Since they were more productive, he could pay them more and thus get better workers. And since they were more productive, he could invest in advertising and brand building. The end result is that the car industry went from 2,300 companies (!) to a dozen or so.

It’s worth pausing there for a second. The competitors didn’t have workers who tried less, or who took more breaks or who were weaker, less skilled or lazy. The other companies lost because Ford focused on productivity in a way that they didn’t.

The internet has opened the door for more people to organize and plan their day than ever before. And we’re bad at it.

Because we associate busyness with business with productivity.

Here are some useful ways to think about it:

1. The best way to improve productivity is to measure it. That means identifying the inputs (how much is your time worth? Is there anyone beside you who is working for free, trading favors, burning all the candles?) and identifying the outputs (what’s the worthy final output of all your effort?)

Hint: likes and friends are not an output. Social media might offer metrics that tell you if you’re moving toward what you hope to produce, but don’t confuse the map with the territory. As soon as you try to make a temporary metric go up at the expense of the real goal, you’re on your way to mere busyness.

2. Once you know what you seek to produce (not an easy task), add up all the time you spent to create it. That’s your current productivity. So, for example, if you’re a musician and you have to work 60 hours on the side to organize, prepare for and run a gig that makes you $600 in revenue, your productivity is $10 of value created per hour. Given that your time is finite, the objective is to compare time spent on that project with time spent on an alternative one. If you need 120 hours to write, mix and launch a track on SoundCloud that earns you $3 in royalties, it’s pretty clear which path created more value (if you’re using money as a metric). Of course, once you decide that being popular on SoundCloud makes those tickets easier to sell, it gets complicated again…

3. Get focused on the challenges and benefits of connection. Imagine two buildings under construction. Both have 25 well-trained, well-paid, hard-working construction workers. One building, though, was built in half the time of the other. What happened? It turns out that construction almost always slows down because people are waiting. Waiting for the waterproofing to get done (while they wait for the specialist) or waiting for parts or waiting for another part of the project. The internet is the home of the connection economy, which means that this challenge is multiplied by 100. What are you waiting for? When you’re waiting, what are you doing to create value?

4. Unlike factories (which are very special cases) our productivity varies wildly. It depends on the project, on the connections, on where we are in the process. If you’re working the same number of hours every day and getting very different amounts of output each day, it is definitely worth figuring out why. What happens to your output if you quit when you’re done, not at 6 pm? What happens if you take on more of the high-output projects and choose to walk away from the low output ones?

5. And finally, embrace the fact that trained people are more productive than untrained ones. That skill matters. That leaning into what you don’t know makes you more productive… that hiring someone who knows what you don’t know makes you more productive as well.

Busy is not your job. Busy doesn’t get you what you seek. Busy isn’t the point. Value creation is.

You only get today once. Your team does too. How will you spend it?

            

The time/decision gap

Six years ago, I wrote, "You don't need more time, you just need to decide."

Easy to say, but hard to embrace.

Here's what I meant:

Deciding is difficult, because decisions bring responsibility. It's better to not decide, the lizard brain says.

How to not decide?

Ask for more time.

If you have more time, you can move away from the decision. Maybe someone else will make it for you. Maybe it won't need to be made at all.

But…

That's our work.

We don't make stuff as much as we make decisions.

            

Two ways to solve a problem and provide a service

With drama. Make sure the customer knows just how hard you’re working, what extent you’re going to in order to serve. Make a big deal out of the special order, the additional cost, the sweat and the tears.

Without drama. Make it look effortless.

Either can work. Depends on the customer and the situation.

But it’s a choice. We can make it with intention.

            

The problem with puffery

Muhammad Ali was his own hype man, a poet of puff.

And it worked. For a few reasons:

For a long time, it was true. He was the greatest.

It was fun to watch, part of the deal.

And, when it ended, and it usually does, the audience was okay with that.

Lazy marketers and their copywriters are often tempted to go down the same road. To claim something they don’t have, to do it in advance. The problem is the question it creates in those you seek to change: if you’ll lie about that, what else will you lie about?

            

Beyond posturing, placebos or belief

Statistics, well done, are astounding.

They tell us, clearly and completely, what is actually happening.

Ignaz Semmelweis saved a million lives (eventually) with his approach to statistics, despite the fact that he was arguing for a significant change and was not at all well liked.

There are volumes of detailed and verified statistics about carbon and other emissions. They’re easy to find if we care to look at them and understand them.

More banal but simpler to visualize, it’s easy to dispense with hype and claims from a running shoe company like Nike, but impossible to dismiss this extraordinary report from the Times. They addressed the possible self-selection and placebo effects and still came up with a massive performance shift in an industry where I thought it was impossible to deliver a massive performance shift.

[If you’ve been putting off stats because the math is intimidating, spend thirty minutes with the Nike article and the Semmelweis story. It’s worth learning what they did, because it will help with your work and the way you see the world when you make decisions.]

Every once in a while, we can see a significant effect in the world, one that’s caused by engineering and can be measured. It’s rare, but it’s worth seeking out. Not everything is simply a matter of belief.

Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics, but quite gratifying and insightful to tell the truth with them.

Statistics never work as well as we might hope. Since we’re humans, statistics don’t change minds. It’s the story we tell ourselves (and others) that do. Statistics are merely a consistent and reliable way to tell yourself a story that’s actually useful and resilient.

            

Doing it completely and totally wrong

Sriracha hot sauce does it all wrong, of course.

The label contains more than five identifiable typefaces.

The distribution method was sort of odd.

The pricing is way too low.

Trademark protection is non-existent.

Line extensions were avoided.

The market was crowded.

And on and on.

It’s possible to do everything wrong and do very well. In fact, sometimes that’s the only way to do very well.

            

Avoiding the GIGO trap

“Garbage in, garbage out.”

It has a nice ring to it. And engineers have long embraced it as a mantra. If you don’t put the right stuff in, don’t expect to get good results.

And so, when we banned leaded gasoline, the car industry complained that they’d never be able to make cars run well again.

And when HP started making printers for consumers, they were eager to point out that you needed to use special paper, and definitely not labels.

And if you’re using the command line on a computer, well, don’t spell anything wrong or whatever happens is your fault.

And if you’re a patient, be sure to take the precise amount of medicine, on time, and follow all the doctor’s instructions.

The thing is, “garbage in, garbage out” is lazy.

It’s lazy because it puts all the onus on the user or the environment. It lets the device off the hook, and puts the focus on the system, which, the device creator points out, is out of his control.

It’s one thing to make a sports car that runs beautifully on smooth roads, perfect tires and premium gas, but it’s a triumph of engineering to make one that runs beautifully all the time.

It’s one thing to organize the DMV so it works well when every person reads all the instructions, fills out the forms perfectly and patiently waits their turn, but it’s a generous act of customer service and organization when the system is resilient enough to work with actual human beings.

The extraordinary teacher adds value to every student, no matter what their home is like. She sees possibility and refuses to settle or blame the inputs. Isn’t that the way we’d like every professional to see the world?

You don’t need to measure the flatness of your bread to use a toaster. And the persistence of the car and printer industries means that the type of gas or the paper we use matters a whole lot less than it used to.

The better mantra is, “garbage in, gorgeous out.”

That’s what we hired you for.

            

Batting average is a trap

Baseball is not an accurate representation of life.

In baseball, batting average matters because the outcome of the game is directly related to the percentage of times each batter gets on base.

But in life, we’re not keeping track of how many times you get up to bat, or how many times you strike out.

We’re keeping track of the impact you make.

If you’re working on a project that needs just one funder, one publisher, one partner, it doesn’t matter how many other people didn’t like your idea.

And there’s no extra credit (zero) for getting a ‘yes’ from the first person you ask.

Of course, it’s foolish to spam the world, to make yourself a glutton for “no”, to hustle and hassle and learn nothing from all the feedback you’ve gotten. Sooner or later, you’ll use up your welcome and run out of at bats.

But that’s an extreme, and it’s probably not your challenge.

The challenge is to find the resolve to bring your work to someone who will benefit from it. To learn from what doesn’t work and then to do the work again.

For the right project, one in a hundred is as good as Ted Williams.

[Hat tip to medical researcher and scholar Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein. His work saves lives.]

            

Five ways to make your presentation better

Make it shorter. No extra points for filling your time.
Be really clear about what it’s for. If the presentation works, what will change? Who will be changed? Will people take a different course of action because of your work? If not, then why do you do a presentation?
Don’t use slides as a teleprompter. If you have details, write them up in a short memo and give it to us after the presentation.
Don’t sing, don’t dance, don’t tell jokes. If those three skills are foreign to you, this is not a good time to try them out.
Be here now. The reason you’re giving a presentation and not sending us a memo is that your personal presence, your energy and your humanity add value. Don’t hide them. Don’t use a prescribed format if that format doesn’t match the best version of you.

And a bonus: the best presentation is one you actually give. Don’t hide. Don’t postpone it. We need to hear from you.

A presentation is expensive. It’s many of us, in real time, in sync, all watching you do your thing. If you’re going to do it live, make it worth it. For us and for you.

            

We’re still clueless about lifetime value

If an Apple upgrade breaks your phone and you switch to Android, it costs Apple more than $10,000.

If you switch supermarkets because a clerk was snide with you, it removes $50,000 from the store’s ongoing revenue.

If a kid has a lousy first grade teacher or is bullied throughout middle school, it might decrease his productivity for the rest of us by a million dollars.

Torrents are made of drips.

The short-term impact (plus or minus) of our work or our errors is dwarfed by the long-term effects. Compounded over time, little things become big things. [I riff on some of this in the new interview I did with Larry King.]

 

PS Today is the early decision deadline for fall’s session of the altMBA. It’s a thirty-day workshop that will pay dividends.