Subtitled “10 Things You Nee to Know About Everthing That Matters”, it’s a fun read with lists on all those things you really know you should do – managing money better, finding hobbies, decluttering. Their 10 ways to increase your circle of friends includes online social networks, yes, that works, I’ll be meeting a woman for the first time next Monday whom I’ve known online for 3 years.
The Word of Mouth Manual
Dave Balter
This is going to be interesting, it’s about word-of-mouth marketing, which is probably the most powerful form of marketing but which may lose all of its power if the consumer feels that he’s being manipulated. I’m curious to see what advice the writer has.
Tribes
Seth Godin
I’ve already read this, and I think it’s a bit thin. I like “Small is the new Big” but having read “The Dip” and now “Tribes” I’m wondering if Seth Godin’s talent is for riffs and rants, where you are provoked to think, rather than for the deeper analysis that I’d normally expect in a book. With “Small is the New Big” it left me curious and hungry for more, with this it’s just disappointing.
This week’s task for the Apprentice is a sort of reverse treasure hunt, the teams are given identical sets of 10 items and they have to research the value and sell them.
Two tricks to this; sell everything, and sell it at a profit – so your research better be good.
Unfortunately I’ll be out of the country and won’t be able to see the show – yes, I am that sad. But I’ve already made my prediction on thrusites, for Noorul to be fired. With only 5 in each team it’s no longer possible to freeload or hide and since the task involves selling I don’t like his chances. In addition Sir Alan has been itching to fire him for the last two weeks. So his team are likely to lose and all the losing leader has to do is take him into the board room.
I may get to see the show (recorded version) on Sunday. In the meantime this made me laugh this week;
Postscript:
I saw the re-run last night. Un-be-liev-able. I said above that your research should be good, neither team did particularly good research particularly in relation to the rug (which turned out to be the hidden gem of the ten items they were given to sell). I also said to sell everything at a profit – and not only did Ben rush to sell things at a loss, in the boardroom Noorul rushed to take credit for it! It’s very simple maths; you’ve started the task with a set of assets with a known value, you cannot got back to Sir Alan with a lower sum of cash, you’re better off taking the assets back to him.
But neither team figured that out, neither team asked – and both teams made a loss.
The board rooms squabbles were incredible, but my prediction was right, and after much shouting Noorul was fired.
Career paths are often described in terms of a corporate ladder, climbing up, steps in your career, or even succession planning. There’s a strong idea that each move we make in our careers should be a step up. That we should be testing ourselves and chasing our boss’s job.
That’s not really a suitable metaphor anymore, as Drucker said in 1993 “There is no longer any corporate career ladder; there isn’t even a rope ladder It is more like jungle vines and you bring your own machete.”
Companies have a need for skilled people, and will provide training and set up career paths for them. But market pressures can undo the best plans of companies – financial downturns can kill a career path with ease. Even in the best of times you’re competing with others for the next opportunity.
Some companies have taken innovative steps with their training schemes, providing “mobility budgets” which allow the employee to make a training choice based on a very broad interpretation of progress in their career plans. One woman at the financial services company I work for used hers to train as a swimming coach, and now does that full time.
On the whole a persons career, or employability or mobility – choose your term, is up to the individual; here are 25 tips to kick-off with. And if all that fails you can always adapt to unemploymentality.
Views of Susan Boyle’s performance on the show “Britain’s Got Talent” topped 50,000,000 on YouTube this week (view video). The hype around her performance has been good for the show generally, other acts are heading for high millions in viewing numbers as well.
It sounds like Youtube is a fantastic success, a powerful new vehicle in popular culture, proof that social media works.
Money Video, with Google Ad overlay.
Except for one thing, it’s losing money, in the order of 470 Million in 2009. While revenue from advertising has grown, and is predicted to grow further, costs are still high and growing – with more than 50% of the cost base of YouTube being bandwidth. So it’s somewhat a victim of it’s own success.
Few videos get enough visitors to generate significant revenue – videos I’ve posted have rocketed up to a mere 300 views for example, and although there is some money from branded channels (costs reported to be around 30K) the business model is pretty weak on revenue generation.
So what could YouTube do? The most obvious is to charge subscription, but Wikinomics states that Google will avoid this if at all possible. And suggests that they will invent their way out of it – finding a solution to the bandwidth problem, or accept it as a loss leader (for now), or start working on other revenue streams – and point to a fee-based download option.
Also this week Yahoo announced the end of GeoCities, current sites will be continued but you can no longer sign up for a GeoCities site. Free blog services probably fill the same need that GeoCities once filled. I admit that my first thought on this news was “they still exist?”. It’s a measure of the pace of today’s world that something started 15 years ago already seems so quaint.
The current business model for many of the social media sites is user generated content (read free), viewers not paying and unwilling to pay, and the business struggling to find advertising to cover their operational costs let alone make a profit. Given that Twitter is also not making money, how long will it be before the current favoured business model falls over?
We’re often encouraged to look for the “win-win” outcome, or a situation will be described as “win-win”. Generally it’s used to point teams to look for outcomes where all parties will benefit.
It’s common parlance now but it comes from game theory, specifically from “non-zero-sum” theory. That is a game some outcomes have a total greater or less than zero, best illustrated by the prisoners dilemma.
Imagine that two prisoners can either betray the other or remain silent with the following potential outcomes.
Prisoner B silent
Prisoner B betrays
Prisoner A silent
Each serves 6 months
Prisoner A: 10 years
Prisoner B: goes free
Prisoner A betrays
Prisoner A: goes free
Prisoner B: 10 years
Each serves 5 years
Rationally prisoners will betray, since that gives them the best outcome when they don’t know how the other will behave. Which gives you an indication of how hard it is to get to a win-win situation between two parties with competing interests.
The above table becomes abstracted and generalised to the following;
B co-operates
B defects
A co-operates
win-win
A loses much/B wins much
A defects
B loses much/A wins much
lose – lose
Given that there is a rational advantage in defecting, and often in defecting early, it can take tricky negotiation to get both parties to co-operate.
In addition the win-win should be a new solution that delivers postive outcomes to both parties, in practice a compromise can be called a win-win when it delivers less to each party and is in fact a lose-lose, but with both parties losing less than in a dual defect situation.
The fifth task for the candidates was to develop an advertisement for breakfast cereal for kids.
They need to create a name, design a box, choose a cartoon character to promote the product and then film an advertisement.
The big risk in this task is in taking yourself too seriously, do not make anything with any kind of style or finesse, and make sure that the name of the product is mentioned a lot and make sure that the box is front and centre – particularly in the end shot.
Ignite, led by Kimberly was hijacked by Philip who came up with possibly the worst idea in advertising history “Pantsman” to sell breakfast cereal. I kept having flashbacks to Ren and Stimpy. The team were all over the place, infighting and backbiting. They didn’t give the designer enough input so the box was only printed on one side, and it was green. Green is my favourite colour but it doesn’t belong on a cereal box, for proof look at the cereal boxes in your supermarket. But the ad came off as pacey and funny.
Empire took a better strategy in terms of branding, they used a pirate theme and carried it through all aspects. Their character was a pirate’s parrot, the box included a treasure map. The ad was a bit lame, but got the point across really well. The team work was really miles better.
There were both tough teams; Kate got Ben and Debra to work well, but Kimberly failed with Lorraine and Philip. That’s the key difference – Ignite took too long to make bad decisions.
So should the leader who couldn’t lead go? Or should the guy who sabotaged the leader and forced his bad idea on the team go? Or is the fault at the door of Lorraine as Sir Alan said in his summary?
For me firing Lorraine would have been a mistake, she fought against a very bad idea – that doesn’t seem fair.
Apparently Sir Alan agreed; he wants her to come back and be team leader and told her so.
Just before turning to Kimberly and saying “you’re fired!”
Personally I think Philip should have gone, it was his terrible idea. But he’s unlikely to last much longer.
I write this blog, and another one about Amsterdam, for fun. I don’t earn any money from it, so I get a little annoyed when I find that articles I’ve written here are picked up, copied or syndicated, and appear on a “splog” (spam blog), often without giving me any credit.
For companies in the business of creating content, it’s more than annoying, it’s expensive. But going after content syndicators is impossible, there are thousands and the cost and effort of pursuing each of them through the legal channels is prohibitive. Until now.
Attributor has started a new consortium, the Fair Syndication Consortium, of content creators to push ad networks to pay publishers a portion of the revenue generated from ads placed alongside stolen content.
They’ve analysed splogs and state that most of the ads are delivered via google adsense, doubleclick or yahoo so their theory is that going after these three will kill the sloggers.
Some of the comments on the TechCrunch article, and some of the comments I heard at a workshop today are along the lines of “copyright is dead”, “the Net Gen is different”, and the rather lame “game’s over for oldies!”
Reluctant as I am to class myself as an oldie I’m not so sure that copyright is dead yet. It’s a simple economic question. Content has a value to the producer and to the consumer so there is some level of transaction. There is plenty of user generated content; blogs videos and youtube. But plenty of that content is created by professionals, highly paid professionals. And those paying for content creation will ultimately find a way to protect their “asset”.
It’s clear that everything is in a state of flux, much is being made of the demise of newspapers – the paper version, while our hunger for information grows each year. It’s clear that many of the legal models we’ve taken for granted aren’t going to work in the “borderless” world of today, not because the legal principles are wrong, but because laws themselves are almost impossible to enforce.
There is one ray of hope amongst all the doom laden articles; Creative Commons. This is an easy way to share and re-use content that gives credit to the creators but doesn’t relinquish control. It formalises the “play nice” rules that content creators would like to live by. It doesn’t offer much in the discovery and enforcement of content theft though.
So how can this be resolved? Individuals cannot monitor this, legal systems and governments can’t cope with the cross-border aspects for single cases. Businesses can monitor, and afterall it’s cases where their content is stolen that there might be a big enough economic threat to make pursuing the theft worthwhile. But they have resources to go after someone.
I predict a much greater responsibility being put on service providers from ISPs to domain name registrars to ad servers. Creative Commons, Fair Syndication Consortium and CADNA are just the first steps.
Mid-crisis the pressure to cut costs was huge, and in a lot of companies (including mine), the result was a round of layoffs.
There are a lot of costs associated with a round of layoffs that go well beyond the costs of the actual redundancy payout. BNET lists 5.
The indirect costs of layoffs are often ignored.
Significant indirect costs often wipe out the direct savings of layoffs.
The short term effect is positive, a reduction of costs. But if necessary work is not being done you’ll be rehiring within 6 months with hiring and training costs that wipe out your savings.
Your best employees might bolt after a round of cuts.
Research shows that in an environment of repeat downsizing your best employees will jump. That’s a loss of talent and expertise you can’t afford in a crisis but are more or less powerless to stop.
The best types of workplaces often suffer the most.
If you’ve built a workplace that prioritises personal development any shock to the personnel systems will be more unsettling than in a more cynical workplace.
Layoffs decrease organisational performance.
As you lose expertise, and the psychological effects ripple through the organisation performance will suffer.
Employee retention is linked with customer retention.
Customers may become disillusioned as their service levels drop.
I would add a sixth one; when the recessions passes (and they do) it will take you longer and cost you more to ramp up to new market demands.
So with all that in mind I wondered if anyone had steered their way through a crisis avoiding the layoff decision. I found one case; Alexander Kjerulf reports on a small company (2800 employees) called Xilinx. Rather than cut jobs the then-CEO Wim Roelandt cut salaries, starting with taking a 20% cut himself. He devised a series of strategies under the umbrella of “share the pain” and he communicated with employees – including using employee focus groups in developing the recovery strategies.
Although it was never promised Xilinx, a software company, survived the dot.com crash of 2001 without making anyone redundant.
Recent research shows that 94% of employees would consider a different pay/work structure rather than go through layoffs. So employees can see alternatives even if companies aren’t there yet.
It’s clear cost cutting needs to be done in a downturn, but given the costs of building a great team and the benefits to the company, layoffs should not be the automatic solution.
In designing websites, buildings, business cards, kitchens, hospitals and pretty much everything else the user/visitor should be central in the decision making. In our current project to relaunch our corporate site we’ve named the visitor, and decision deadlocks are often broken by asking “What would Iris think?”
Paul Bennett from IDEO takes it further step, and discusses designers really going through the visitor experience.
He covers four broad themes in his talk.
1 A Binding Glimpse of the Bleeding Obvious
Sometimes the right idea is so staring you in the face that you miss it. In the case he gives showing hospital staff footage of the ceiling (as seen by a patient) gave the staff a better understanding of the patient’s experience than any amount of data or any fancy graphical representation would have done.
In our case seeing an analysis of the search terms actually used on our site told us that people visiting were looking for content that’s just not there, and (due to legal and organisational reasons) won’t ever be there. (We’ll solve this with an enterprise search engine, which can search across all company websites. We’re working on it, Shell’s already done it.)
2 Finding Yourself in The Margins
Notice the small things at the edge of the experience, these details make a difference. Look at how people subconsciously design their own experience.
This sort of thinking meant that his team noticed that nurses will often comfort a patient by holding their hand as they go through a diagnosis step – so a two-handed diagnosis-palm-pilot was not going to be a solution. They designed a less sexy device that can be used in one hand.
For us a random email set of a small but cool change. There is a glossary on our site, that covers technical financial terms, it’s good, but it’s probably not enough to help the consumer. A rewrite was already planned. And then I got an email, from someone who missed a term, suggested we add it. So our “Word of the Day” will include the possibility of suggesting a term, suggesting a definition, and adding your email address so we can tell you when it’s added. It’s a tiny thing, and we’re not expecting a huge response, but it’s something on the margins that invites visitors to engage.
3 Having a Beginner’s Mind
Getting to new design solutions requires that you consciously start as if you know nothing; you need to unlearn.
His example is a project with IKEA, for children’s storage. It’s a cool solution from a kid’s perspective but probably not a solution from a parent’s perspective – and it’s not in the IKEA catalogue as far as I can tell.
Having a new person in our team has helped provide that fresh outside perspective.
4 Pick Battles Big Enough to Matter and Small Enough to Win
His example of this was a lightweight portable water pump, not very designer-y, but incredibly practical for the African communities it was designed for, and went on to get on to win design awards.
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