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Next time you register and pay good money for a conference, try this experiment.
Skip all the sessions and speaches. Assume that you can learn anything you missed by watching video replays or reading the speakers' books or blogs.
Stay in the hallways and mingling areas and connect with the people there. You'll come out of that conference having enjoyed yourself more than any previous conference. You'll also have learned more.
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We're entrepreneurs. We give our lives creating value, growing people and organizations, and changing the world. While in the arena, we fight the good fight, make promises, throw the dice when it feels uncomfortable, make decisions and shake hands on faith. We play a game many want to play.
Lawyers don't play this game. They sort of make sure our armor is put on the right way. But they shouldn't be allowed to tell us whether or not to get into the ring.
Never let your lawyer talk you out of doing something. They don't get fired for saying no. It's always safer for his career to advise you against doing anything. Status quo is the best friend of status quo.
Good lawyers don't say no. They figure out what your goals are and put your armor on the right way so you can go win the game.
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There are a lot of reasons to kill a startup. Chief among them is that no one wants to be your customer. Another might be that despite how hard you try, you can only be average and not one of the best.
Running out of money is not one of these valid reasons. A broke company is only a temporary condition. There are a million ways to get money to feed your company. Go sell your own brand of cereal to keep the company alive. Go do some consulting. Wait on tables if you have to. So long as you can generate your own money to feed your fledgling dreams, you never have to say die.
Paradoxically, when you raise money from outside investors by selling equity, even though you have more money as a resource than ever before, the clock starts ticking. Now your monthly burn becomes very meaningful. Now you have a board of advisors driving you to make decisions you would have patiently addressed otherwise. And when you run out of cash after raising outside capital, you probably have to say goodbye.
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When negotiating, figure out what your top priorities are. Then focus on those.
If you negotiate everything, point by point, as if everything is important to you, you come off as a rookie and you're bound to lose the big points.
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You only need one Linchpin. That's all you need to start. And if you can spot him and support him, he'll make waves in your organization. If you can find her and give her the leverage to make change, she'll infect everyone else with Linchpin goodness.
But guess what? If you can recognize the Linchpin and bring yourself to backing him, you're a Linchpin too. And so it grows. Recognition is the key here. So be on the lookout.
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Borders is just the first casualty. It's sad, we all love bookstores. But did you know that a huge swath of Americans never buy even one book per year? If you read this blog, you're likely not one of those Americans. You read books by the dozens. But then you buy most your books on Amazon.
Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble is next. And then some publishers who rely on these two bookstore chains to sell their products will go the way of the dinosaurs. It's just a matter of time.
Imagine a world where future books look nothing like books today. How will you stay engaged? How will you collect ideas? I suspect you're already solving this for yourself in a haphazard and experimental way. But who is solving this for everyone else?
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If you find yourself jumping through hoops merely to look like the average specimen in an established profession, that Dip is almost certainly not worth leaning into.
If you're facing the prospect of jumping through hoops to emerge where no one has gone before, where there is no average specimen, then that Dip is almost certainly worth leaning into.
So the real question is:
How many others have jumped through these hoops?
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I don't think that there is a journaling class out there so it isn't like we're taught to journal in some conventional way.
Do you just write lines upon line, paragraph upon paragraph of what happened to you?
Do you write about ideas that you could attempt in the near future?
Do you draw or sketch?
Blogging has sort of replaced journaling. The problem with blogging is that sketching isn't as easy as just typing your thoughts. So we replace sketching with just finding and inserting some open-source or free image somewhere that approximates what we're trying to illustrate. Sometimes we're lucky and find a perfect picture. Most times, we're settling for a real stretch of the imagination.
Blogging platforms should take the iPad and other touch tablet devices as an opportunity to usher in a new era of blogging. Make it easy for us to sketch our ideas. No attaching images. No linking of image URLs. Just sketch it and forget it.
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When you hire someone or form a partnership, you would be wise to set some milestones to shoot for.
But I've seen a lot of people misuse milestones. You should use milestones to reward. You shouldn't use milestones to punish.
Organizations that value linchpins seem to be focused on this reward aspect of meeting milestones.
Organizations with a lot of turnover and no room for linchpins punish people for falling short of milestones.
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Equal treatment is a myth.
Of course fair treatment goes without saying, but equal is silly. People have different skills, talents, different opinions, motivations and track records.
If you're a manager and two of your employees are underperforming, don't hesitate to treat them differently. If you know one responds better to the stick, and the other to the carrot...feel free to reprimand one and encourage the other.
You have to remember that your primary job as a leader is to get your people to achieve the mission, to get them to the promise land, to help them do work that matters.
If you're a manager and you're treating all your employees equally you're probably being unfair.
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This is definitely the new hot flavor that everyone is playing with. According to its proponents, everything can be gamified.
Will it work?
If you make it fun, I think it will work. If you make me jump through hoops, then I'll think you're playing with me.
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Geocities, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, have only just barely scratched the surface. Everyone is talking about how Facebook has won. They used to say that about Myspace. They sort of said that about Friendster. Geocities was the greatest thing when it appeared. There are infinite ways to connect people, organizations, groups, content, and data. So there are infinite opportunities to provide platforms for connectivity.
Ning didn't work because it was just a blend of Facebook and Myspace applied to smaller niche networks. Creating niche networks is actually a winning idea. Creating niche networks with a template tool is what hindered the winning idea. Templates don't work for communities with divergent tastes. No two communities are alike.
Every niche social circle will have its own cultural set of requirements and idiosyncracies. This will require custom approaches for aspiring tribe leaders to produce. If you're setting up a community, you should focus less on the technical tools available to you and focus more on what the unique needs and wants are of that community. If you're willing to customize the network just to fit that niche, you win.
The trick is in clearly articulating what those differentiated needs and desires are. You have to actually understand the cultural behavior of that tribe and how it differs from every other tribe. Articulate. Not so easy.
What community are you trying to build? Please share so we can point to why your community needs a tribe leader that's willing to sweat the details and make something remarkably unique.
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Does every new opportunity eventually result in a couple of winners?
For example, there used to be dozens of American car companies. Now there are only three major companies and the winner has actually been Japanese.
There used to scores of search engines but now you have Google as the big winner with Bing and Yahoo as distant alternatives.
I think it's possible that we get even more "winner-take-all" type outcomes as we become more digital. When you compete primarily through the Internet and have no physical component to your strategy, you can win and dominate a super-majority share of your market.
Customers don't need to travel anywhere to get to your product. You don't need to open up stores or showrooms all across the world.
If you're planning the next real-time social media location based group buying game mechanics sliced bread revolution, plan on winning the whole enchilada.
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"How do you possibly compete against Google?"
"I don't think you can go up against Walmart."
"You should try to stay off Coca-Cola's radar."
The trouble isn't in competing against bigger companies. When the market and consumers actually perceive you as competing against bigger fish, this is a good thing. There is always at least a small segment of us who want an alternative.
The problem is in actually getting the market to perceive you as a competitive alternative to established big brands. The problem is you're too small to get noticed. So set a big target and passionately tell anyone who'll listen that you're aiming for the big guys. Don't be shy.
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Sometimes, good enough is good enough. This is usually when everyone is exhausted. So price becomes the primary consideration. Give me something good enough at the lowest cost possible. Like in the middle of a recession.
The tricky thing though? Marketers are even worse prognosticators about where the economy is going than economists or financial analysts. We can't call the bottom. When things turn, people start to look for remarkable. You don't want to be the person holding inventory that is just good enough when that happens.
The safest choice is to never be just good enough.
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Teaching is the best way to learn.
Here are some things you should teach as soon as you get the chance.
1. Teach your grandmother how to play a social or casual game on Facebook. Seriously. Pay attention to how the game creators try to get you to keep playing longer than you should. Pay attention to how the game creators try and get you to shell out some real money and make you feel good about it in the process.
2. Teach your younger cousin how to make and buy ads on Google or Facebook. Work together to pick a product or something to advertise. It could be as simple as his best comic book. Put it up on eBay or run a manual auction on Squidoo. Think through the process. Who are you trying to reach with these ads? Are they searching for your product? Do they fit within certain age, income, geographic, or gender categories?
3. Teach a friend how to be a Linchpin. Share your copy of Linchpin. Take on the role of coach. Transfer emotion and logic. Be persuasive. What are your friend's strengths? What makes her unique and remarkable? How do they come to see that in themselves and what do they need to ship?
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When you release a new web app - keep the features lean.
When you publish a blog post - keep it short and sweet.
When you hit send on an email - keep it brief.
When you throw a party - keep the invitation list short and exclusive.
If you can only choose one thing your software does, what would that be?
If you can only write a few short paragraphs, what will you write?
If you can only compose a two sentence email, what do you want to get across?
If you can only invite your best friends, who are they?
Constraining your choices forces you to make very focused decisions.
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This is what Google claims to do. It's one of the corporate mottos.
But it's sort of a white lie. There is only so much organizing Google can do. Indexing and ranking by popularity or "page rank" is only one form of organizing. The world's data is growing too fast. The rate with which we produce information in all its forms is increasing so rapidly that Google will not be able to keep up. It could be an abrupt realization - we wake up one day and googling a term returns nothing but junk and irrelevance. It could be slow and almost imperceptible.
Full circle back to when humans curated and organized information based on taste. Tribe leaders will organize people and information in new and unexpected ways.
No algorithm can universally provide good taste.
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Common wisdom says that in any negotiation, you have to be willing to just walk away. This is true but some of us take it to the extreme. The trick is in knowing when to walk away. It's obviously not true early on in the discussion. When you haven't made an emotional transfer, when the other side hasn't even begun to sniff the taste of winning, when it doesn't hurt just a little to walk away.
What's really happening when you "walk away" early in the game of negotiation? You're rationalizing that you're merely sticking to the golden rule of negotiation. So the lizard brain has got you once again. This time, you don't have to go through the difficult work of selling yourself, your organization, your deal, your side of the story. You don't have to get intimately familiar with the other side's wants and needs and dreams. You don't have to become vulnerable to scrutiny. You don't have to commit to exploring change.
You have to be willing to walk away...after you've done all the hard work.
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We're all publishers now. If you have a Facebook account and you push the like button, or update your status, or comment on your friend's photo, you've published something. Yes this is a form of publishing. So is pushing a tweet out into the universe. You don't even have to sit down to write a long form blog post.
Used to be that publishers needed to own printing presses and delivery trucks. You needed to pay a staff of writers and editors. Now you can publish and move public opinion with an Internet connection and a laptop.
So if you're going to be a publisher in a digital world what should you do?
1. Publish often. It's next to free.
2. Nurture a small audience. You'll never start off with an audience the size of Huffington Post.
3. Keep publishing. People interested in your subject matter will find you. You just need to be patient.
4. Have an opinion.
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