Tag Archives: life lessons

June 26, 2014 · 8:26 am

Gnats

It’s summertime and I’m sure you’ve already had your first run in with a swarm of gnats.

English: A female Black Fungus Gnat.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are lots of different types of them and you can almost see clouds of them at time during summer evenings.  You might not realize that business has gnats too and those are our topic today.   We create these business gnats ourselves – they don’t hatch from egg clusters as do the bugs.  I want us to think about why we do so.

Gnats are little bugs and I find them very annoying.  Yes, they’re harmless but they’re unpleasant.  They can also be a distraction – let’s see you read at the beach with a gnat buzzing around you.  Business gnats are the same way.  These are the little problems which serve as distractions from the things we ought to be doing.  Instead of worrying about big questions – what are our business goals and how do we align everything that’s going on in our enterprise with those goals – we focus on little stuff.  How many Facebook “likes” did we get this week and how can we get more?

Making things complicated is akin to creating optimal conditions for hatching gnats.  Yes, I’m an advocate for things like A/B testing to improve conversion rates but only after we’ve dealt with the business fundamentals that make conversions necessary.  Moreover, what are we measuring and why is a much bigger and important issue and the gnats of tweaking our Instagram strategy.

How does one get rid of gnats?  For the flying kind one good thing to do is find their food sources and cut them off from it.  For the business kind doing that is easy – go look in the mirror or around the table at a staff meeting – there’s the food source.  Discourage people from finding little problems – or even worse, making them up – so there aren’t distractions flying around.  Maybe you could hand out fly swatters to everyone in order to remind them to kill the business gnats around them.  Make sense?

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June 24, 2014 · 9:13 am

Skills

One of my clients has a few of their summer interns starting this week.

Film poster for Napoleon Dynamite - Copyright ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If they’re like most of the interns I’ve ever met, they’re eager to start learning about the business world because they feel a bit like Napoleon Dynamite.  While in his case he’s concerned that no girl is ever going to date him, they are concerned that no one will hire them for the same reason:

Napoleon Dynamite: Well, nobody’s going to go out with *me*!
Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?
Napoleon Dynamite: No, but who would? I don’t even have any good skills.
Pedro: What do you mean?
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

OK, maybe the interns aren’t worried about THOSE skills, but a recent survey by the Econsultancy folks asked about the skills necessary to succeed as a modern marketer.   You can read a summary of the report here.  I found it encouraging because in addition to the specific technical skills the job requires, many top marketers are now emphasizing the “soft” skills I’ve always advocated as being the most important set of requirements in any job.

When respondents to our survey were given a pre-selected list and asked to rate which softer skills were most significant, those that scored most highly as being ‘very important’ included the ability to embrace change, to spot opportunities and adapt strategies quickly, and also being passionate, curious and hungry to learn.

In other words, the “skills” you can’t teach.  It’s not about a high IQ (although that’s not necessarily a bad thing) but about an ability to learn.  Scratch that.  It’s about a candidate having a passion to learn – the ability to be a self-motivated learner.   The key softer skill mentioned most by interviewees was articulation and persuasion but I don’t think you can be either of those two things unless you can ingest and digest the raw information you need to make cogent, coherent arguments.

I’m looking forward to working with the interns and to teaching them some of the technical skills they’ll need as they begin their business lives.  Hopefully their parents and teachers have already done the hard part by nurturing their natural curiosity about the world and getting them to be open to new ideas and information.

Do you have interns working with you this summer?  What skills have they brought?  What are you bringing?

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June 23, 2014 · 10:42 am

Don’t Be Famous

Over the weekend I came across a video of a graduation speech given by comedian Mike Myers. The fact that I watched it at all is a tribute to the concept of social proof. I normally don’t watch graduation speeches unless they’re by someone in whom I have a great interest. While I like many of his films and his SNL work, Mr. Myers normally wouldn’t pass that test. However, it was posted by a guy whose thinking I respect and he said it was worth a few minutes.  I’m posting the video below – it is worth the almost 8 minutes and you can probably skip the first 1:30 if you’re that pressed for time – and then I have a few thoughts.

 

“Legendary” is being known for something that you do and “famous” is just being known.  Being known has become an end in itself, free from the prerequisite of achievement.  Celebrity used to mean being celebrated for something that you did; celebrity has become a devalued currency.

That is brilliant, and a fantastic business lesson for all of us.  We can spend great sums of money becoming famous – getting our brand and company names out there via earned, owned, and paid media. What happens once the customers interact with us, having found us through those channels, is what can make us legendary.   It means we need to pay as much attention to execution as we do to attraction.

Napoleon has been quoted as saying “Fame is fleeting. Obscurity is forever.”  He was advocating for the permanence of obscurity, because it endures, while fame is weak and lasts only a small amount of time.   I think Mr. Myers is getting at the same point.  We can’t build our businesses on making loud noises or the marketing equivalent of screaming “fire” in a theater.  Sure, that gets attention (fame) but we’re in an era when anyone has access to the noisemaking tools (witness the screed!).

We need to build something more substantial if we’re to remain in business for a long time.  We need to become legendary. I’m trying each day – you?

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