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Good luck with that, there aren't any.

If you hesitate when leaping from rope to another, you're not going to last very long.

And this is at the heart of what makes innovation work in organizations, why industries die, and how painful it is to try to maintain the status quo while also participating in a revolution.

Gather up as much speed as you can, find a path and let go. You can't get to the next rope if you're still holding on to this one.

It's clear that the consumption of energy has external effects that impact more than just the person who is paying for it. Geopolitical, health and economic issues come to the neighbors and nearby citizens of entities that are using a lot of power.

It was always straightforward to see who was burning a lot of wood or drove a huge car. It's easy to see when a company has a huge smokestake belching carbon. What happens when sensors make it easy to see how efficient a machine is, how much of a resource is being consumed and how much exhaust is being spewed? What happens when Google maps shows you the block or the building that consumes the most electricity, or makes it easy to compare across industries?

When we have the opportunity to rank consumption by industry or by neighborhood, will we? We already watch our neighbors litter or have loud parties or paint (or fail to paint) their house...

A significant byproduct of the connection revolution is that things that were private because they were difficult to measure will no longer be private. When devices can talk to each other, the information rarely remains private. It's not going to stop with energy, of course. Just about all our buying decisions are going to be shared, and that changes the marketers job.

In a world of horizontal marketing, where tribes are aware of what their members are up to, I think it's going to happen quicker than most people expect.

[Updates! How's this for sooner than expected?]

Excitement about goals is often diminished by our fear of failure or the drudgery of work.

If you’re short on passion, it might be because your goals are too small or the fear is too big.

Do a job for a long time and achieve what you set out to achieve, and suddenly, the dream job becomes a trudge instead. The job hasn't changed--your dreams have.

Mostly, though, it's about our fear. Fear is the dream killer, the silent voice that pushes us to lose our passion in a vain attempt to seek safety.

While you can work hard to dream smaller dreams, I think it's better to embrace the fear and find bigger goals instead.

If you’re calming down for the weekend, take a look at what Wolfstar has gathered together for our social media round up.

Is Obama more social media savvy than you?

We all know President Obama’s a pretty smooth customer when it comes to his public profile and here’s five reasons why he’s bang up to date when it comes to all things social media. From Google+ hangouts at the White House to instagramming his way through a campaign trail, Obama’s got it well and truly sussed.

Smartphone carved out of organic Bamboo

If you’re getting bored of the typical plastic phones, try out these cool ones made out of organic bamboo – and they’re coming to the UK!

Facebook to be floated on the stock market

All you need to know, here.

Higher education and social media

An interesting infographic to demonstrate social media usage in higher education.

Twitter recruitment

If this doesn’t make you want to work for Twitter, then we’re not sure what will…

Flying people in New York

Have you ever seen a person fly? These RC planes are a great illusion.

That’s it for this week, enjoy.

Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment?

Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done.

The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in a log or find some other way to keep track.

The first thing is more difficult: If the work you do isn't worth collating and highlighting, you probably need to be doing better work.

SOLD OUT. Thanks.

The bestselling ShipIt journal has surprised me in how much impact it has had on the teams that have used it. I ended up selling tens of thousands of them.

I have about 600 left and rather than pay warehousing fees, I lowered the price a whole bunch and will leave it that way until they are sold out. (The rest of the inventory is here). I don't expect to reprint them, sorry.

Also, Jess Bachman's Death and Taxes poster is available at a great bulk price for the next 28 hours at an already funded Kickstarter. I think every classroom and office ought to have one.

The latest news coming from the social media giant has revealed that the company is to be floated on the stock market, seeking to raise $5bn (£3.16bn).

At just eight years old, Facebook has been hugely successful and many financiers have waited on tenterhooks for this opportunity to have a snoop at its books. With phenomenal growth, profits of the company quadrupled to $1bn in 2011 with over 845 million users registered worldwide.

What’s interesting to see are the comments from the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. In a letter released to the media, Zuckerberg states: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

“We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do.”

A nice quote and cute mission statement, but is it realistic to ask this? Surely those looking to invest serious cash will be big players in the investment sector holding little regard as to what the company’s aim is, but more so for how much money it’s likely to make them.

Many are sceptical of Facebook’s decisions to float, the so-called ‘dot com bubble’ still comes under heavy scrutiny and you only have to look at other networking sites such as MySpace and Friends Reunited to see that this success may not last forever.

One thing that could potentially affect Facebook’s popularity is its decision to make the ‘timeline’ feature compulsory for all its users. With only a few days left for people to delete all the moments of their past they thought were buried deep in their Facebook history, it’s going to be interesting to see what impact the change will have.

One thing’s for sure, if the stock market launch goes ahead at the rumoured price then Zuckerberg’s share would be worth around $24bn, making him the 14th richest person in the world…

…next round’s on you then Mark?

 

 

Sooner or later, you'll ask for something or read something or expect something and you won't like what you get. You'll feel like I wasted your time, wasted your money or didn't meet your expectations.

Not just me, of course. Everyone. Even you. You will disappoint someone, and the organizations you depend on will disappoint you. Expectations keep rising, and promises keep being made. We keep bringing more magic into the world, but rising expectations mean that there's more disappointment as well.

That's part of the deal of being in the world.

The alternative, I'm afraid, isn't to choose a path where we make everyone happy and always exceed their expectations. Nope. The alternative is to hide, to fail to engage and to produce nothing.

A pretty easy choice.

Lightning rarely strikes. Instead, achievement is often the result of stepwise progress, of doing something increasingly difficult until you get the result you seek.

For a comedian to get on the Tonight Show in 1980 was a triumph. How to get there? A series of steps… open mike nights, sleeping in vans, gigging, polishing, working up the ladder until the booker both saw you and liked you.

Same thing goes for the CEO job, the TED talk on the main stage, the line outside the restaurant after a great review in the local paper.

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

Just about all of the stuck projects and failed endeavors I see are the result of poor hill choices. I still remember meeting a guy 30 years ago with a new kind of controller for the Atari game system. He told me that he had raised $500,000 and was going to spend it all (every penny) on a single ad during the Cosby show. His exact words, "my product will be on fire, like a thresher through a wheat field, like a hot knife through butter!" He was praying for lightning, and of course, it didn't strike.

There are plenty of obvious reasons why we avoid picking the right interim steps, why we either settle for too little or foolishly shoot for too much. Mostly it comes down to fear and impatience.

The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.

One way for a candidate to change the conversation around her candidacy: have her followers pelt the opposition with waffles at every public appearance. Eggos in particular are lightweight and their shape makes them easy to toss.

Particularly in primaries, simplicity and certainty are rewarded. The waffling candidate, the one who hesitates to give a clear yes or no answer to every question is seen as weak.

(Worth noting that the word "waffling" didn't start appearing in books much until after the 1960 elections).

Of course, this post isn't about politics at all. Customers and employees and vendors and regulators almost always prefer simplicity and certainty.

There are two ways to begin an answer to most questions we face in organizations:

"It's simple" and

"It's complicated."

Both are usually true. At 10,000 feet, most challenges are simple. But actually making something work is quite complicated.

Nuance is the sign of an intelligent observer. Nuance shows restaint and maturity and an understanding of the underlying mechanics of whatever problem we're wrestling with. After all, if the solution was simple, we would have solved it already.

On the other hand, resorting to nuance early and often can also be a sign of fear, of an unwillingness to go out on a limb and make a difference. Hence the reactions of boards hiring consultants and CEOs, or of passionate primary voters. "Don't tell me it's complicated. Just show me the guts to make something happen."

My vote: your goals and your strategy must be simple. You must have passion and certainty in order to make a difference as a leader. Your tactics, on the other hand, should be layered, multi-dimensional and reflect the patience of someone who cares about reaching a goal.

When Howard Schultz talks about coffee or Jill Greenberg talks about lighting or Cory Booker talks about education, they can impatiently demand clear and simple results. At the same time, successful leaders see the nuance they'll need in executing to get there.

The paradox is that the simplicity we often seek in search of solutions rarely leads to the patient leadership we need to get them.

The irony is not lost on me... the decision on when to be bold is a nuanced one.

timbailey: @iCoo Would be interested in the responses you get, I need something similar...

This might be the simplest possible explanation of customer satisfaction.

Dissatisfaction occurs when salespeople and marketers tend to try to amplify the first part (what you're promised) while neglecting the second.

The ability to delight and surprise is at the core of every beloved brand (product, politician, teenager...). Overhype and shady promises will undercut that before it even has a chance to get started. Yes, of course you have to make promises to earn attention and trial. The mistake is when you put more effort into the promises and less into what you deliver. Promise a lot but deliver even more.

[One really important amplification: Research shows us that what people remember is far more important than what they experience. What's remembered:

--the peak of the experience (bad or good) and,

--the last part of the experience.

The easiest way to amplify customer satisfaction, then, is to underpromise, then increase the positive peak and make sure it happens near the end of the experience you provide. Easy to say, but rarely done.]

timbailey: @mymimsicle Sit back, relax, take it easy, stare out of the window... It's just like the 80s :-)

timbailey: RT @beccacaddy: Looking for a place to live in London from mid Feb - let me know if anyone hears of a (fairly cheap) spare room :)

"We're hoping to succeed; we're okay with failure. We just don't want to land in between."

--David Chang

He's serious. Lots of people say this, but few are willing to put themselves at risk, which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of in between.

Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile.

But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little.

Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues are obvious to even the untrained eye--typefaces that don't match, references that don't make sense, and most of all, the weird disconnect we get when we think we're supposed to know someone and can't remember who they are. That's a lousy mood to get your prospect in, I think.

timbailey: @iCoo sounds like good times.;)

timbailey: Off to the @redlione11 for a friends birthday this evening. Our party might push the average age up a bit...

timbailey: @stephvhosny looking forward to meeting you in person - at last.

It really is a choice, one or the other.

Either you happily recommend the best option for your customer, or you give preference to your own items first.

Either you believe in what you sell, or you don't.

Either you treat your best partners better, or you treat everyone the same.

Either you shade the truth when it's painful to do otherwise, or you consistently share what's important.

Either you always keep your promises or you don't.

Either you give me the best price the first time, or you make me jump through hoops to get there.

Earning the position of the honest broker is time-consuming and expensive. Losing it takes just a moment.