Tag Archives: advice

January 21, 2014 · 9:30 am

Long Black Road

This TunesDay we’re going to look at an old song that’s actually new.  Recorded back in 2001 it wasn’t in wide release until recently when it was featured in the soundtrack to American Hustle.  The movie is very good; the soundtrack is excellent.  The song is Long Black Road which was recorded on ELO‘s last album (Zoom) and only issued in the Japanese version of the record as a bonus track.  Pretty obscure, but to those of us who’ve long  admired Jeff Lynne it was sort of familiar.  Here it is for your listening pleasure:

What makes this song of interest to us today is the message contained in the lyrics.  What I like about this song is it makes the same point in three different ways.  A directionless musician pursues his dreams in the first verse despite being told to get, in essence, a real job.  “Face reality” as the song puts it.  I’m sure every entrepreneur and every start-up has heard that at some point.

The second verse is the core message for anyone in business:

So I drifted for a while down the road to ruin
I couldn’t find my way, I didn’t know what I was doin’
I saw a lot of people coming back the other way
So I kept on goin’ when I heard them say,

“You gotta get up in the morning, take your heavy load
And you gotta keep goin’ down the long black road.”

How many businesses are caught up doing the same kind of drifting?  How often do we wonder if we’re lost?  In this case, despite the number of people coming back, the singer keeps going, having heard the message to persist.  Quitting is easy – taking the load down the long black road isn’t.   By the third verse, the singer is a success, but gets reminded that money won’t bring happiness.  The journey – overcoming the obstacles, facing “trouble and strife” are every bit as important as the end goal.  Three great business points.

Funny how much one can learn in three verses over three minutes if we’ll just listen…

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January 20, 2014 · 11:09 am

The Content That Matters

Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deuts...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There has been a lot written about content marketing.

Some seers have even proclaimed 2014 as the year of content marketing, and as Google adjusts their search algorithms to make content more important in determining search rank, one can understand why “content” is on everyone’s lips here in digital business land.  Since I’m never one to miss a large bandwagon, let me jump right on to talk about the only content that matters.  I have a particular reason for doing so today.

We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday today.  As I’ve written in past years on this occasion, I remember him and his struggles well from my childhood.  The quote that stuck is from the “I Have A Dream” speech about the importance of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.  That is the content that matters – the ONLY content that really matters – as we do business.

What, for example, does it say about the character of those retailers who run sales tied to “the MLK event.”  What it says to me is that they are tone-deaf, as was the cognac brand that sent out an email with drink recipes “MLK Jr. would be proud of.”  Really?  This is not about Dr. King or his principles or his legacy.  It’s about a brand trying to sell something and is, in the word Dr. King’s daughter used to describe similar activities, “appalling.”  That describes the character of their content just as it does the content of their character.

I don’t know about you, but I try to do business with people, not brands.  There are restaurants and other businesses I frequent almost solely because I like and trust the people with whom I deal.  I hope that many of my clients have hired me not just for what and who I know but also because they have a sense of the business person I try to be.  You can be sure that many of the people with whom you do business are looking at you and your company in the same way.

A business’ success or customer service isn’t about the store; it’s about the person on the other side of the counter or the desk or who answers the phone.  The content of their character will determine the brand’s success or failure.  You can choose those people wisely and support them as they let the content of that character show.  You can choose to market as did the brands above which also reveals a lot about the content of brand’s character.  It’s the only content that matters.  What’s your choice?

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January 16, 2014 · 11:10 am

The Life In Your Time

I know it’s not TunesDay but today’s screen has a bit of a musical bent.  As Robert Hunter wrote: “Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”  That’s what happened to me the other night and I thought it would provide some food for thought today.

English: King of the Castle Living life on the...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My enduring affection for The Boss is no secret to any of you who read this mess regularly.  He was on the Jimmy Fallon show and at the very end of his interview he said something that resonated:

It’s not the time in your life, it’s the life in your time.

Coming from a musician, that can mean a lot.  After all, Janis, Jimi, Kurt, and too many others put a LOT of life into their brief time and one wonders how much more great music they would have created had they not done so.  As it turns out, Bruce‘s quote wasn’t quite original.  In fact, a similar saying has been attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Adlai Stevenson:

“However else you live your life, live it freely. It is not the years in your life that count, it is the life in your years.”

That was to a group of students in 1952 and he used it repeatedly thereafter.  With whom the saying originated is unimportant.  What is says is.  Stop and think about the last time you put down the smartphone, turned off the computer and had a meaningful conversation about something other than work.  Maybe you love and feel passionately about your work and that’s great but perhaps that passion should be spread out a little to give you a break?

We’ve all had friends and others we’ve known die young (and as I get older “young” is an evolving concept).  I doubt any of them wanted another day at work or to play a video game or to post silly photos to the web.  I suspect they’d all want the time back they wasted worrying about things that didn’t matter or holding grudges or being afraid.  We all know people who live their business lives that way and it may extend beyond business.  Too bad.

None of this is news, I know.  We’ve all been told to come up for air, to live in the moment, and to participate in our lives instead of being a spectator.  As with most things in life and in business, the challenge isn’t to identify the things we ought to do; it’s to do them.  Do you agree?

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