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Passed a store the other day. The sign read 99 CENTS! And the subtitle was, "Everything $1 and up".

The 99 cent store was never popular because there's some magical power about the price that is a penny less than a dollar. No, it's because it represents an attitude, that this stuff is CHEAP. Not absolute cheap, just relatively cheap. Not even a good value, just cheap. Cheap compared to its non-cheap competition.

At the other end of the spectrum, the prices at the Hermes store appear to be missing a decimal point or two. The attitude is, "wow, this stuff is expensive." It's not about what you get, it's about how it feels to pay that much.

One way to start every morning with your team is to have them check in. Go around in a circle and let people update and contribute. It's not a silly exercise, in that it helps people speak up and it communicates forward motion.

Another way, probably a better one, is to have each member of the team announce what they're afraid of. Two kinds of afraid, actually. Things that might fail and things that might work.

What are you, chicken?

Yes, we're chicken. We're afraid. The lizard has us by the claws.

So, tell us. What are you afraid might happen that would destroy, disintegrate, or dissuade--that would take us down? And what are you afraid of that might work, thus changing everything and opening up entirely new areas of scariness?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read an article on Mashable today about Facebook unfriending.

It talks about whether this is ‘socially acceptable’’ and how some people can click the ‘remove from friends’ button far more easily than others.

The article states doing this is just a normal development, just like offline relationships. You grow and change, sometimes finding yourself miles away from the people you once knew.

When I first joined Facebook I accepted every request under the sun, it just seemed the done thing.

I eventually found myself reading reams of updates from people I’ve not seen for 10 years and probably never will again.

(FYI, so much so I was reading updates about the bully who pushed me down a flight of stairs when I was 13!")

So, I took it upon myself to unfriend anyone who I wouldn’t be happy talking to over a glass of wine if I bumped into them.

To be honest, having a’ ‘Facebook cull’ is very liberating. However, if you’re a big softie, there’s always the ‘hide’ button.. the biggest salvation to boring news feeds ever!

How do you manage your Facebook friends? Are you confident to have a cull or do you chicken out when it comes to the crunch?

Six months ago, I put together a workbook that would help Linchpin readers ship.

After testing it out on hundreds of people, it's now ready for retail sale. [UPDATE on 9/2--yesterday, the workbook was so popular it went to the top 10 of all books on Amazon. And they sold all the warehouse could take. So it's sold out... I have shipped more to them, but they probably won't go on sale until the 8th. I'll update this post then. Thanks guys.]

You can find details here, or jump right to the buy page. The goal? To make you uncomfortable at the beginning of a project (and successful at the end).

Here's the core idea: it's weird to write in a book. When you do, you're making a commitment. You're combining the open-mindedness that reading brings with the physical action of writing. If you do that at every step in a project--and if your co-workers do too--the seemingly slippery decisions that get made appear a lot more solid.

The ShipIt workbook is designed to be worked on in groups (hence the five pack) and it delivers. If you can confront the mechanics or the fear that's slowing down (or even killing) your project, it's easy to fix it now, before it's too late.

There's no digital version, because without writing things down, it can't work. But there is an mp3 interview that will help you get your arms around how each page works. I'm pricing this first batch at $3.20 each in a pack of five just for the launch. [PS Amazon is having trouble shipping to Canadians right now. It may take a while to figure this out, and all I can do is apologize...]

I hope you'll give it a try.

Most of the time, particulary in b2b and luxury sales, the competition is nothing.

"I will buy this treat or I will buy nothing, because I don't really need anything."

"I will buy your consulting services, or I'll continue doing what I'm doing now on that front, which is nothing."

None of the above.

"I will vote for you or I'll do what I usually do, which is not vote."

"I'll hire you or I'll hire no one."

While you think your competition is that woman across town, it's probably apathy, sitting still, ignoring the problem... nothing.

Stop worrying so much about comparing yourself to every other possible competitor you can imagine and start comparing yourself to nothing. Are you really worth the hassle, the risk, the time, the money? Or can't the prospect just wait until tomorrow?

Many people struggle at work because they want more authority.

It turns out you can get a lot done if you just take more responsibility instead. It's often offered, rarely taken.

(And you can get even more done if you give away credit, relentlessly).

The details are right here. Created by Vook, based on the hardcover.

Includes new video and interviews with some interesting folks...

The long tail challenge of the iPad store is getting more and more obvious to people. The ratio of "shelf space" to inventory is about the worst of any retail experience in the world. There are more than 24,000 apps listed in the iPad store, and yet the front window (equivalent to the window of a bookstore) shows the user six choices. The spotlight coverflow up top shows another sixteen, fairly randomly. Meaning there's a little worse than a one in a thousand chance that your app will appear in front of someone interacting with the store at the first level.

I have no doubt that as Apple sees revenue increase from this source, they'll do a much better job of crosslinks and browsing. But, once again, the lesson of the long tail is this: you can't count on the gatekeeper to do your promotion for you. Getting picked feels like a needle in a haystack, and the value of permission, of connecting directly to people who care instead of ceding control to a middle man, is at the heart of building an asset. Someone is going to be the gatekeeper, and it should be you.

There isn't one.

Corporations don't have a conscience, people do.

That means that every time you say, "It's just my job," or "My department has a policy," or "All I do is work here," what you've done is abdicated responsibility--to no one.

It's convenient and even comfortable to blame the anonymous actions of many working in concert on a evanescent brand or organization, but that starts you on an inevitable race to the bottom. Organizations have more power than ever before. They are better synchronized, faster, and possess more tools to change the economy and the people in it than ever before. And the only option available to the rest of us is for individuals to take responsibility (it's not given) for what they do and how they do it.

The very same tools that permit organizations to synchronize their efforts are now available to you and to me. I guess the question is: will we use that power to humanize the systems we've created?

PS It's not just about being a good citizen: when bad behavior comes back to hurt the company, it hurts you, too.

If you want something done, perhaps you would ask a professional to do it. Someone who costs a lot but is worth more than they charge. Someone who shows up even when she doesn't feel like it. Someone who stands behind her work, gets better over time and is quite serious indeed about the transaction.

Or perhaps you could hire a passionate amateur. That's a forum leader doing it for love, not money. An obsessive in love with the craft. A talented person willing to trade income for the chance to do what he loves, with freedom.

Please, though, don't hire someone who just thinks it's a job. This category represents the majority of your options, and this category is what gives work a bad name.

The airport in Minneapolis is expensive and reasonably thoughtful in its design.

But the signs are monochromatic. As a result, the tired traveler wanders in circles, looking for her destination. Imagine how much easier it would be to find out where you were going if every sign with the word TAXI on it had it in yellow instead of white. Once you knew the color of where you were going, you'd just naturally scan for it.

Google and our text-based low-res online world seems to argue against color as a signal, but it's extraordinarily powerful. You don't need to make a big deal of of it, subtle is enough. Make the button you want pressed green on every page. Soon, your users will naturally gravitate to green buttons...

This works in Powerpoint presentations and even contracts. A little goes a long way.

All those devices in your bag make it easier than ever to stay in sync. You can reap what you sow in Farmville, keep up with your email, know what's going on on every important blog, be in the right... Seth Godin

All those devices in your bag make it easier than ever to stay in sync.

You can reap what you sow in Farmville, keep up with your email, know what's going on on every important blog, be in the right room at the right time earning badges, etc. You can synchronized at all times.

And if you get a little out of sync, just a little, it's painful. One more reason you might want to stop reading this and check your feeds.

Building your success on being more in sync than everyone else is a sharp edge to walk on. You'll always be near the edge of perfect sync, but never there.

The alternative is to be a lot out of sync.

People who are way out of sync with the digital maelstrom of the moment aren't always bad followers. They might be great leaders.

As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal. The experience I... Seth Godin

As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal.

The experience I have with you as a customer or a friend is far more important than a few random bits flying by on the screen. The incredible surplus of digital data means that human actions, generosity and sacrifice are more important than they ever were before.

A line in Amelia Torode’s latest blog post got me thinking about how social media and social networks could have an important role to play in improving equality in the workplace.

Despite a raft of legislation the UK’s employment landscape is far from equal and the gap between pay and opportunities between men and women remains far too great.

There are lots of reasons why there aren’t enough women at senior levels and those that are there don’t earn as much, on average, as men. One reason is that at the moment women are disadvantaged because they have gaps in their careers because of maternity leave. I’ve long advocated that one way to improve this is not just to make paid paternity leave available to fathers, but to make it compulsory. That way you equalise the career gaps and as a massive bonus dads get to spend more time with their children.

What Amelia said that made me think was this:

“Through Twitter I feel plugged in and connected to the advertising – digital – comms community that I am a part of so although motherhood is all consuming at the moment I don’t feel cut off. This has to be a fairly new phenomena – the way that social platforms enable non-working mothers to stay in the loop professionally.”

She’s right. Through social media and social networks, both external such as Twitter and internal like Yammer, you can enjoy your family life and stay plugged into your career. Through online trade media you can stay on top of what’s happening in your industry when you’re no longer seeing the magazines that used to come round the office.

I know some people will start complaining about work/life balance and work intruding into family life. But there’s a lot of nonsense about work/life balance with most ‘experts’ putting far more emphasis on work or life, when the really important emphasis is balance. New communications tools let me enjoy more family time, not less. They are not intrusive, but liberating.

So the question is can the internet and social web help to improve the disgraceful inequality in our workplaces?

A newly-retired executive takes a job as an adjunct professor and really shakes things up. Both the school and the students are blown away by her fresh thinking and new approaches. A forty-year old internet executive who has been running... Seth Godin

A newly-retired executive takes a job as an adjunct professor and really shakes things up. Both the school and the students are blown away by her fresh thinking and new approaches.

A forty-year old internet executive who has been running his company for decades misses one new trend after another, because he's still living in 1998.

One thing that happens to management when they get senior is that they get stuck. (As we saw with the new professor, senior isn't about old, it's about how long you've been there).

If you've been doing it forever, you discover (but may not realize) that the things that got you this power are no longer dependable.

Reliance on the tried and true can backfire (Rupert keeps missing one opportunity after another, and keeps misunderstanding the medium he works in) or it can (rarely) pay off (Steve Jobs keeps repeating the same business model again and again--it's not an accident that Apple has no real online or social media footprint. Steve believes in beautifully designed objects, closed systems and evangelizing to developers and creatives).

Worth quoting--one of Arthur C. Clarke's lesser known three laws:  "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior...

No business buys a solution for a problem they don't have. And yet, most business to business marketers jump right into features and benefits, without taking the time to understand if the person on the other end of the conversation/call/letter... Seth Godin

No business buys a solution for a problem they don't have.

And yet, most business to business marketers jump right into features and benefits, without taking the time to understand if the person on the other end of the conversation/call/letter believes they even have a problem.

My friend Marcia (we've advised each other on various projects) has a very cool idea for large professional firms. As an architect, she realized the firms were wasting time and money and efficiency in the way they use their space. Roomtag is her answer. 

The challenge is this: if your big law firm or accounting firm doesn't think it has a space allocation/stuff tracking/office mapping problem, you won't be looking for a solution. You won't wake up in the morning dreaming about how to solve it, or go to bed wondering how much it's costing you to ignore it.

And so the marketing challenge is to sell the problem.

(Interesting paradox: a lot of people aren't willing to embrace that they have a problem unless they also believe that there's a solution... so part of selling a problem is hinting that there's a solution that others are using, or is right around the corner.)

Imagine, for example, getting the data and publishing a list of the top 50 firms, ranked by efficiency of space use. All of a sudden, the bottom half of the list realizes that yes, in fact, they have something that they need to work on. If you knew that your firm was paying twice as much per associate as the competition, you'd realize that there's a problem.

When a prospect comes to the table and says, "we have a problem," then you're both on the same side of the table when it comes time to solve it. On the other hand, if they're at the table because you're persistent or charming, the only problem they have is, "how do I get out of here."

Linchpin will be the last book I publish in a traditional way.

One of the poxes on an author's otherwise blessed life is people who ask, "what's your next book," even if some of them haven't read the last one. (Jeff did, of course). To answer your question, this book is my next book. I think the ideas in Linchpin are my life's work, and I'm going to figure out the best way to spread those ideas, in whatever form they take. I also have some new, smaller projects in the works, and no doubt some bigger ones around the corner. [PS the best analysis of this whole thing, particularly the punchline is by Mitch.]

A little background: For ten years or so, beginning in 1986, I was a book packager. Sort of like a movie producer, but for books. My team and I created 120 published books and pitched another 600 ideas, all of which were summarily rejected. Some of the published books were flops, others were huge bestsellers. It was a lot of fun. As a book packager, you wake up in the morning and say, "what sort of book can I invent/sell/organize/write/produce today?"

It took a year or so, but I finally figured out that my customer wasn't the reader or the book buyer, it was the publisher. If the editor didn't buy my book, it didn't get published. Here's the thing: I liked having editors as my customers. These are smart, motivated and really nice people who are happy to talk with you about what they want and what they believe. Good customers to have. (In all of those years, only one publisher stole any of my ideas, no check ever bounced, and no publisher ever broke a promise to me).

When I decided to become focused on being an author, the logical thing to do was to sell to that same group of people. And it worked. I've been lucky enough to work with some great editors, and my current publisher, Portfolio, has been patient, flexible and, did I mention, patient. Adrian Zackheim, who runs the imprint, is exactly what you'd hope for, even if the architecture of his industry is fundamentally broken.

Authors need publishers because they need a customer. Readers have been separated from authors by many levels--stores, distributors, media outlets, printers, publishers--there were lots of layers for many generations, and the editor with a checkbook made the process palatable to the writer. For ten years, I had a publisher as a client (with some fun self-published adventures along the way). Twelve bestsellers later, I've thought hard about what it means to have a traditional publisher.

Traditional book publishers use techniques perfected a hundred years ago to help authors reach unknown readers, using a stable technology (books) and an antique and expensive distribution system.

The thing is--now I know who my readers are. Adding layers or faux scarcity doesn't help me or you. As the medium changes, publishers are on the defensive.... I honestly can't think of a single traditional book publisher who has led the development of a successful marketplace/marketing innovation in the last decade. The question asked by the corporate suits always seems to be, "how is this change in the marketplace going to hurt our core business?" To be succinct: I'm not sure that I serve my audience (you) by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.

My audience does things like buy five or ten copies at a time and distribute them to friends and co-workers. They (you) forward blog posts and PDFs. They join online discussion forums. None of these things are supported by the core of the current corporate publishing model.

Since February, I've shared my thoughts about the future of publishing in both public forums and in private brainstorming sessions with various friends in top jobs in the publishing industry. Other than one or two insightful mavericks, most of them looked at me like I was nuts for being an optimist. One CEO worked as hard as she could to restrain herself, but failed and almost threw me out of her office by the end. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't heartbroken at the fear I saw.

All a long way of saying that as the methods for spreading ideas and engaging with people keep changing, I can't think of a good reason to be on the defensive. It's been years since I woke up in the morning saying, "I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about." Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it's not a traditionally published book.

If you're among the majority reading this that has never bought one of my books in a bookstore, not much will change. But I thought I'd share with you this fork in the road. Thanks for reading, in whatever form you choose.