This is the biggest disconnect I know of.
It happens all the time in B2B sales, in service marketing, in getting along with your boss and even in hiring someone.
One side thinks they have figured out a solution. They spend a long time talking about the solution, architecting it, refining it, pricing it, pitching it, delivering it. The other side ends up not liking what they get. The disconnect: the first side says, "this solution is exactly as we described it!" the other side says, "it doesn't work right."
The disconnect is caused because people focus on the solution instead of the problem you were given to solve. It's a lot easier to talk about features and hours spent and someone's resume and a lot more difficult to dig into the problem itself.
This is where the obligating question becomes so critical. "If we can deliver a dam that stops the water flow, will you be delighted?" "If I can hire someone who can answer ten calls an hour and keep customers coming back, will that work?" "If this book cover receives an award for best design, will that be a win?"
The difficult conversation about the problem is far more useful than the endless effort on solutions. The reason is that people don't tell themselves (or you) about the problem they're actually solving. Sure, they'd like an employee that does x, y or z, but you know what, they'd also like that person to be really good looking and willing to do our bidding, waiting on us hand and foot. Sure, we'd like a personal computer with a lot of computing power, but we'd also like it to be light and sexy and covetable…
The more clarity you can get about what a successful solution looks like, the more likely you will be to have a delighted customer when you're done.
August 6, 2009
Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.
Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.
On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).
Up and down, I've charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there's audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.
To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they're high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there's not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it's 400 years old.
So, what can you learn here?
- There's a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can't have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.
- The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It's hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there's not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren't interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.
- The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.
If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?
August 5, 2009
Am I the only person who wants a Hi Def telephone?
A headset that sounds better than the handheld receiver, and a handheld receiver that delivers the kind of quality calls we had back in the day…
I want to have a phone call where I don't have to strain to hear the other person, apologize for static, call people back because they went through a dandelion storm…
I'm happy to trade weight or transportability for this device.
I'm betting there are a dozen other items where the market would love a high definition alternative. Maybe a thousand. We're in such a rush for convenience, sometimes we forget the market will pay for high def as well.
August 4, 2009
Global warming a problem? Just shave the bears.
Let's define "bear shaving" as the efforts we go to do deal with the symptoms of a problem instead of addressing the cause of the problem. A rare Japanese PSA (now long lost to the copyright gods) showed a girl shaving a bear so it could deal with global warming (here's a lesser one)…
Example: putting a sophisticated queue management system into the Department of Motor Vehicles so that people waiting in line feel like it's less of a mob. This is bear shaving. The productive approach would be to redefine what actually happens in that building so the line itself disappears.
Example: iPhones come locked so they can't be used with other carriers, so people spend hours and plenty of money to 'unlock' them. That's bear shaving. Better to figure out an easy way to pay AT&T their tribute so they can be truly unlocked…
Example: You have emotional issues associated with eating. You shave the bear by getting bariatric surgery instead of dealing with the issue that caused the problem in the first place.
Example: You have a leaky roof and you shave the bear by buying buckets.
Step one to eliminating bear shaving: call it when you see it.
August 3, 2009
That's what makes them storms.
When someone describes a situation as a perfect storm ("two different backup servers failed, plus there was a blackout, no one could have predicted this, it was a perfect storm,") it's important to remember that if the backup server hadn't failed, there wouldn't have been a problem at all.
Just because a storm is perfect doesn't mean you shouldn't have anticipated it.
August 2, 2009
Kevin Maney has a book out in September about the trade off between delivering extraordinary experiences (which he calls fidelity) and doing it in a way that's cheap and easy (convenience). The book takes this simple idea and supports it with dozens of examples.
The simplest example is movies. You pay to go to a theatre when you want the fidelity of the big screen and the crowd and the speakers. You stay home when you want the convenience of Netflix and the pause button. Vinyl records and live concerts offer fidelity, MP3 on your iPod is convenient.
In the words of Bill Gross, in order to win with a new product, you need to be on one axis or another, and ten times better than what you're aiming to replace. Which means ten times more high impact or ten times cheaper and easier.
A refrigerator is ten times more convenient than an icebox. A cell phone is ten times more convenient than a pay phone. A private jet is ten times more joyful/fidelity than first class for the executive that can afford it. A backstage pass at a Cat Power concert is ten times higher fidelity than a ripped MP3.
There are interesting ways to define 'fidelity'. Wikipedia is certainly more convenient, and the presence of a million articles that aren't even in the Brittanica makes it higher fidelity as well. At the start, though, they were neither. It took a (relatively) tiny group of passionate people to create enough content and enough quality that they could be high enough fidelity to be considered an alternative to the printed encyclopedia. It's interesting to watch Luddite teachers refuse to accept it as a source, claiming that convenience shouldn't trump their definition of fidelity…
The mistake that's so easy to make is to be a little bit higher fidelity and a little bit more convenient. Incumbents fall into this trap all the time, assuming that you'll stick with what you've got because they're sorta both. And insurgents almost always fail because as geeky insiders they think that twice the convenience is enough to persuade anyone who cares. Not going to work.
August 1, 2009
"I'm just here to learn."
Learning is fine. Listening is good. Consensus is natural.
But initiating is rare and valuable and essential.
How often do you or your brand initiate rather than react? How often do you tweet instead of retweet? Invent rather than exploit?
July 31, 2009
If it's worth doing, it's probably worth paying to do it very well. If you're going to do a presentation or write an eBook, spend the money to do it right.
Paul Durban created this example of motion graphics. It's a lot easier to do now than it used to be, so you get a lot for the energy and money you invest. If you can't be there in person (with an eBook, for example), the energy you get from great design really matters.
If someone sends me a PDF that's just a word file, I rarely make it past the first page any longer. Time to raise your bar.
Over the past few months, I've had quite a few interactions with several people who work at a (previously great) brand.
One person will email to ask me for a favor or a connection, and I'll point out that just yesterday, I got three emails, all spam, from three different people at the organization either selling me something irrelevant or sending me a press release I didn't ask for. And the unsubscribe button doesn't work. And I've unsubscribed ten times before. When I pointed this out, he said, "Oh, that's those guys. I'm not related to them, all I do is work here. If you don't like getting that stuff, you should take it up with them."
Then, a few days ago, I heard from someone in a different group at the same company, asking for help with a project she was working on. I explained that the last time I helped someone in her group with a project, I was misquoted, my time was wasted and they violated whatever trust we had. Susan said, and I'm quoting precisely the same line, "All I do is work here. They pay my salary, but I'm me, not them."
No, Susan, you are them.
The reason your brand is falling apart is because so many of your colleagues are saying the same thing, denying the same responsibility. Consumers don't believe (or care) that there are warrens and fiefdoms and monarchies within your company. All they know is that you leverage that brand name every day, as you have for decades, but now, instead of using that brand to polish your reputation as an individual, you're being forced to accept responsibility for the actions of others.
Do you really think someone who worked for Bernie Madoff will go far with this line? "I'm not Bernie, I just worked with him every day and took a great salary when times were good…" Not sure what the difference is. It's even worse in your case, because you know what's happening. You know, but you don't want to do anything about it.
If you're not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. You don't get the benefit of the brand when it's hot without accepting the blame of the brand when it's wrong.
July 30, 2009
One of the biggest brands in the world is getting ready to go online, and they're aiming to not win.
Sure, they've been online all along, but now it's become clear to them that the web is a real thing, and that a placeholder website and a few gimmicks aren''t sufficient. They're trying to generate online income and respect and audience.
Now, the choice: The safe thing is to organize to show. Showing up without glaring error and a major meltdown is something you can organize for. You say, "well, if everything goes well, we'll be in the top ten in our industry, and perhaps we'll hit the top three." In our industry. That means that when the overall global winners online are tallied up in a list at the end of the year, there's no way you're going to be on it. It means that the very things that made you one of the most powerful brands in the world will be missing, because all you're striving for is pretty good.
The challenge of shooting for a win is that it brings apparent risk with it. Not actual risk (the actual risk is in being mediocre, overlooked and on a slow death spiral) but apparent risk. The thing is that you overcame that risk when you built the original brand. You didn't set out then to be pretty good, good for your category, sort of important. You set out to matter.
So, Mr. Big Brand: organize to win. To do anything else is a waste of your time, your talent and your momentum. Ignore apparent risk, buy the assets you need to matter, avoid the compromises that your competitors have made and do something worth doing.
July 29, 2009
