Tag Archives: life lessons

March 20, 2012 · 8:32 am

The Dylan Test

Yesterday marked an anniversary that I could not let pass without comment.  On March 19, 1962, 50 years ago yesterday, Bob Dylan released his first album, or LP (to signify a long-playing record rather than a single) as they were called at the time.

Bob Dylan performing in Rotterdam, June 23 1978

Bob Dylan performing in Rotterdam, June 23 1978 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This piece from Rolling Stone does a nice job of summing up the album and how it got made.  I’m a long-time fan of the man and his music and while I can’t say I love everything he’s ever done, it’s all really interesting and in many cases his music went beyond popular culture to become transformative (start with “Blowin’ In The Wind“) for an entire generation and country.  I’ve heard so many people dismiss his music and yet when I give them the Dylan Test, they can’t deny his impact.  What, you ask, is the Dylan Test?  Something I think we should apply to way more stuff than Bob’s music – any business could benefit.  Let me explain.

The Dylan test is simple:  I know my grandchildren will hear the music of Bob Dylan.  They may not like it, they might not ever buy it, but they’ll hear it and they’ll know who the guy was that recorded it.  Not because I’m going to ram it down their throats:  I’d make the same statement about my great-grandchildren.  It’s because Dylan’s music is that important, just like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Springsteen and The Beatles.  And that’s the test.  Can you make that same statement about whatever music you believe to be “great?”  That ought to be our business objective.  To pass the Dylan Test.

I wrote in this piece a while back that we ought to be creating things that are built to last.  While the tools are temporary – Dylan’s first disc was pressed in vinyl – the content and the core of the business endures, or we should hope it will.  So ask yourself the Dylan Test question as you’re contemplating investing your time, effort, and money on a project.  While very few things pass, it’s not a bad standard to keep in mind.

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March 15, 2012 · 11:18 am

Planning For Perfect

Anyone who has ever dealt with large numbers knows that near perfection still gives a few exceptions to a standard. If you deal with 100,000 customers in a year and 99.999% of them are happy, there’s still one guy who is dissatisfied. The problem is this: we don’t think about that one guy often enough – we plan for perfect. In an extreme case, some folks won’t even acknowledge that imperfect is possible. That sort of thinking precipitates crises like the oil rig problem in the Gulf.  Workers didn’t raise safety issues out of fear.  The Italian cruise ship didn’t take the safety drills seriously.
What got me thinking about this is the discussion over the Keystone Pipeline as well as some of the reporting on the Japanese nuclear problem.  Putting aside politics (maybe an impossible request, but let’s try), it seems to me that the people involved had been (or are) planning for perfect.  Emergency plans were paid lip-service but not much more and the true impact of a problem is exacerbated by the lack of preparation.

We don’t ask what can go wrong often enough, and when we do we sometimes fall into the “but that will never happen” trap.  If something can go wrong, we should assume it will.  Servers fail.  So does power, including back-up units.  Things get lost in the mail, inclusive of private shippers with full package tracking.  We arrive on business trips without luggage.  No one plans to screw things up and yet things very often end up that way.People don’t always behave honorably even though we might always try to do so ourselves.

If we always plan for perfect, we’re not optimists.  We’re idiots.

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March 1, 2012 · 10:23 am

Straight Talk

There generally aren’t a lot of laughs available while reading the Sports Business Journal. On occasion there’s head-shaking; other times there’s amazement. Laughter? Not so much. Yesterday, however, I got a great laugh out of Terry Lefton’s column. Terry writes about sports marketing and is always a good read. His column entitled Time for some straight talk on marketing jargon – isn’t it? struck a topic that’s near and dear to me and makes a great point whether you’re in the sports business or not.

Every business has a vocabulary.  Doctors ask for forceps, not the “scissor-thingee”.  A short-order cook would respond to “two ruined with breath” and deliver 2 scrambled eggs with onions.  Obviously the language of the web – servers, routers, HTML, CSS, etc. is not widely understood outside of the digital world but makes communication possible within it.

That said, Terry does a great job of pointing out often the language that is used to provide clarity can also be used to obfuscate.  Whether it’s listening to a vendor pitch a product or to someone explaining why their strategy is a great idea, I’m always concerned when a lot of the language is the inbred vernacular that has neither real meaning nor for which there is a need.  I guess they’re just trying to establish their bona fides by using it, although I can rattle off legal language but it doesn’t make me a lawyer.

You must learn the language of business – that of your specific field as well as business in general.  However, learning how and when to use it is just as important as the vocabulary itself.  Otherwise, we end up with a situation like the one below, that Terry lays out far better than I can:

Even though the thicket of vernacular has become a pandemic problem, that doesn’t mean we’re ready to punt. After all, this could be a new benchmark. Still, optimization could be mission critical, since we’re a bit above our pay grade here.  Holistically speaking, if we can monetize this, it could be the best cross-platform paradigm since disintermediation.  Actually, it’s unclear that we have a clear line of sight on this, but ping me; we’ll calendar some time, ideate some scenarios, and hopefully move the needle. And we’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the obvious need for consumer-facing synergies.  So let’s add some bandwidth and let time be the variable; that’s the only way to ensure that this goes three-deep. At the end of the day, it is what it is.

So now that I’ve run that up the flagpole, are you saluting?

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