Seth Godin's Blog, page 77

Whose business are you minding?

Industries have rules. Rules and benefits.

Hollywood requires agents, casting calls, big budgets and content aimed at a certain part of a certain market. If you follow enough of the rules, the thinking goes, you get a multi-million dollar budget and the red carpet.

Broadway requires a certain length, certain compromises, certain deals. This creates scalpers and hangers on and small audiences filling small theaters. And, if you follow just enough of the rules, you might end up with Hamilton. Perhaps one in 10,000 pull this off.

Publishing requires a fealty to the book and to the bookstore, alliances with the right cultural forces and a willingness to create scarcity. If you're persistent and very, very good, you can get picked by the New Yorker and you get picked by Little, Brown and you end up with The Tipping Point. Perhaps one in 100,000 pull this off.

Outsiders who want in, who want to make their mark in movies or investment banking or in politics often decide that minding the business of their industry is the way to reach their goals. After all, it's the insiders that win the awards and get the benefits that go to people who are by and for their industry.

But what if instead of focusing on the industry, you focused on the change you seek to make? On the audience you seek to serve. On doing your customers' business, not the industry's...

It's not in any of the manuals, but the door is wide open, the path is far wider and you can start today.

            

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

It might be a market you can enter, but that doesn't mean it will reward your time and effort.

It might be an all-you-can-eat situation, but there's a difference between all you can eat and all you care to eat.

You might be kindly invited to participate, to weigh in or to engage...

But that doesn't require you to change your priorities, to exchange the important for the urgent.

            

Your Bob Dylan story

I know dozens of people who have a story about meeting, or nearly meeting, or somehow engaging with Bob Dylan.

And just about everyone they know has questions about him, about those encounters, about what it was like.

My guess is that these stories began to spring up long before he was a Nobel Prize winning legend.

The question, then: Who has a story about you?

            

Two confusions

Those things you're bad at? You're not nearly as bad at them as you fear.

And those things you're great at? Probably not nearly as good as you hope.

We beat ourselves up a lot, but often focus on the wrong areas, avoiding the soft spots and doubling down on the places where we are well armored.

Mirrors are a fairly new invention. For millennia, we had little idea what we looked like. And only in the last two generations have people had any clue about what they sounded like. Today, even though we're surrounded by sound, video and light reflecting on us, not to mention comments and the social media maelstrom, we're still quite bad at self-judgment.

You're better than you think you are.

            

Four ways to improve customer service

Delegate it to your customers. Let them give feedback, good and bad, early and often.
Delegate it to your managers. Build in close monitoring, training and feedback. Have them walk the floor, co-creating with their teams.
Use technology. Monitor digital footprints, sales per square foot, visible customer actions.
Create a culture where peers inspire peers, in which each employee acts like a leader, pushing the culture forward. People like us do things like this. People like us, care.

You've probably guessed that the most valuable one, the fourth, is also far and away the most difficult to create. Culture is a posture that lasts. It's corroded by shortcuts and by inattention, and fed by constant investment and care.

Big company or small, it doesn't matter. There are government agencies and tiny non-profits that have a culture of care and service. And then there are the rest...

            

Creating discomfort

If you're seeking to create positive change in your community, it's almost certain you'll be creating discomfort as well.

Want to upgrade the local playground? It sounds like it will be universally embraced by parents and everyone who cares about kids. Except that you now bring up issues of money, of how much is enough, of safety. Change is uncomfortable.

It's way easier to talk about today's weather, or what you had for lunch.

Usually, when we're ready to launch something, we say, "this is going to help people, this is well crafted, I'm proud of it."

What's a lot more difficult (but useful) is to say all of that plus, "and this is going to make (some) people uncomfortable."

            

Worth reconsidering?

The status quo is powerful indeed. We add layers, patches and small improvisations, all to shore up something we don't want to reconsider.

If we had a clean sheet of paper, and could design something that actually worked, what would we do about:

Big-time college sports
School taxes based on location, and school spending based on income
Development costs, transparency and patents related to pharmaceuticals
The Electoral College and gerrymandering
Allocation of electromagnetic spectrum
Stagnant oligopolies
What's taxed and what's not
School curriculum
Online identity
Infrastructure priorities

The free market doesn't always do things as well as an enlightened institution can. And institutions often need our help to become more enlightened.

Sometimes, we need to take a deep breath and decide to do it again, better. 

            

Training customers

If you frequently run last-minute sales, don't be surprised if your customers stop buying things in advance. You're training them to wait.

If you announce things six or seven times, getting louder each time, don't be surprised if your customers ignore the first few announcements. You've trained them to expect you'll yell if it's important.

If you don't offer someone a raise until they find a new job and quit, don't be surprised if your employees start looking for new jobs.

The way you engage with your customers (students/bosses/peers) trains them on what to expect from interactions with you.

Drip, drip, drip.

            

Better than it needs to be

Why not?

Why not make it more generous, more fair, more insightful than it needs to be? Why not deliver the service with more flair, more care and more urgency?

Why not do it because you can, not because you have to...

            

You are more powerful than you think

Highlights from an annotated list of 17 rules for the new world of work:

You are more powerful than you think
It’s bigger than you
Leaders are made, not born
Leveling up is a choice
They say you can’t, we know you can
Dance with fear
See, assert, change
Overwhelmed is temporary
Out loud, in public
Hard work is far better than busy work
The crowd is wrong. The critics are wrong. Useful feedback is precious...
Management matters. So does leadership...
“Here, I made this.” Or possibly, “Here, we made this.”
See the end before you begin the journey
Culture defeats everything
It’s personal

Applications are now open for the next two sessions of the proven altMBA workshop. It's time to level up.