Monthly Archives: October 2016

October 7, 2016 · 10:12 am

Dues And Don’ts

This Foodie Friday, it’s some words from Curtis Stone that are our topic today. If you’re any kind of foodie you’ve seen Curtis on any number of cooking shows. You might also think that he’s there (as are any number of people on various food shows) because he is a pretty face. Probably not, since he has serious cooking chops, having worked in some of the best kitchens around the world as well as under Chef Marco Pierre White for many years.

I was listening to an interview with him on Eater (link here) and while much of what he had to say was fascinating, one quote caught my ear and I think it’s relevant to any of us in business:

Seen with camera crew at the Indian Market, Sa...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you think about celebrity chefs, television competition shows, all this stuff that has happened — it’s shining this big light on our industry, which has made it famous somehow. And suddenly cooks are cool. And it’s amazing because it means we have people coming into our industry. But, to your point, they’re coming in for sometimes the wrong reason, and they get in there and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to peel those bags of onions,” like I was complaining about earlier. But you don’t just get given the gift of being able to use a knife properly. You get it from practice. Kitchens are historically a really tough place to work, and you have these kids coming through that want to be the next contestant on Top Chef, but what they’ve got to realize first is that there’s all these steps to it.

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be the best but you must be prepared to pay your dues. Every business has a set of fundamental skills that serve as the foundation for everything else. Learning those skills isn’t optional. Ask, for example, any lawyer about law school and they’ll tell you that what they learned in law school has little to do with being a lawyer. They’ll also tell you that they’re better off for having gone to prepare for the more applicable skills they learned next. Doctors leave medical school but aren’t allowed to practice on their own. There are many skills they need to hone and to develop before they’re ready for that.

Compare that with business. I’ve had the experience of a kid with a couple of years’ experience under their belts wondering why they’re not being made vice presidents. I’ve worked with founders who are younger than my own children wondering why people might have some qualms about investing in their venture. It’s fine to aspire as long as you recognize that patience is required while you learn your craft and pay your dues. Hey – I’m 40 years into my business life and I’m still learning and honing. Care to join me?

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October 5, 2016 · 10:50 am

Sport At The Service of Humanity

I’ve spent many years in the sports business. Having grown up playing many sports and spending many hours watching them when I wasn’t playing, working in the business was a dream come true. As with many businesses, however, I and many of my colleagues sometimes lost sight of the basic appeal of the product. It’s taken the Pope to help remind me, and hopefully many others, of that. Let me explain.

Any product needs to solve a basic need. Identifying that need and building products that serve it are the basis for any business. What often happens, however, is that we get focused on our own needs and not those of the customer. We worry about profits and supply chains and staffing, and we’d be insane not to focus on those things too. We can’t, however, let them blind us to the fundamental purpose of solving the problem and servicing the need of the customer.

What does the Pope have to do with this? He is running a conference which began today called Sport At The Service of Humanity. It’s billed as the first global conference on faith and sport. No, it’s not about getting every player to thank some higher power every time they score. It’s intended to launch a “movement” to develop ­­life skills through sports ­­ and characteristics across six principles: compassion, respect, love, enlightenment, balance and joy. You should check out the conference’s website here.

There are a couple of things stated in the “declaration of principles” that resonated:

  • Sport has the power to teach positive values and enrich lives. Every one of us, who plays, organises and supports sport, has the opportunity to be transformed by it and to transform others.
  • Sport challenges us to stretch ourselves further than we thought possible.

I liked to hire people who were athletes, and not just because it was the sports business. It was precisely for the reasons stated above. Moreover, ex-athletes “got it.” They understood the sheer joy of sports, and that joy is a big part of the reason why fans watch them.

The Pope’s conference is about using sports to make us better human beings, but I think it can also serve to remind us of a fundamental business principle too. Your product needs to serve people and not just investors. Using your product to make people’s lives better – in this case, to teach life skills – is really the goal of business in my mind. Yours?

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October 3, 2016 · 11:12 am

The Coming Vast Wasteland

Back in 1961, a man by the name of Newton Minnow was appointed to run the FCC. He gave a speech soon thereafter called “Television and the Public Interest” in which he coined a phrase with which he described commercial television, calling it a “vast wasteland.” He urged us to tune in our favorite station for a day and watch from sign on until sign off:

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few.

Fast forward 55 years. One can see something similar happening in our new media landscape. The public networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and others – are becoming vast wastelands. You might not be aware of it, but in the last year, more content is being posted on private networks such as Snapchat, Messenger, and WhatsApp than on the public networks. That private content tends to be what’s meaningful to people. What’s left is increasingly clickbait, corporate shouting, or, worst of all, content generated by bots. In short, a vast wasteland.

All of this is happening at a time when many companies are pushing hard to create and distribute content yet something like 80% of the content we publish is never seen by the intended audience. We are increasingly reliant as the shift moves to untrackable (by anyone other than the platform owners themselves) places on the folks who run the platforms for data. We can’t listen and respond to things that we can’t hear, and unless the consumer reaches out (vs. complaining to everyone they know in private), we’re deaf and blind with respect to being proactive and customer friendly.

The challenge for all of us is to foster engagement and to be proactively supportive. The expanse of the coming vast wasteland in the public networks is going to make that much harder, and subject to the will (and business models) of the walled garden gatekeepers. How do we address thins? Thoughts?

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