Tag - work

Eric Cupp: Touching hearts, changing minds

April 6, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This is the first in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.

Before I begin this one, here are all four:

  1. Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
  2. Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
  3. Jon Gordon: the energy addict
  4. Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Eric’s seminar was one of the best ones at NAESP – maybe the best. He’s a product of divorce, abuse, and neglect … and the love of just one teacher who loved him, gave him opportunities, and made him believe there might be something he could do with his life.

Some of my notes from his session:

What he tells kids he works with in schools
“Why do you do the right thing? Because that’s who you are!”

On communication
You cannot not communicate.

On helping kids who need it the most
Kids who get attention are the top few and the bottom few … the top few because they’re successful and smart and popular, the bottom few because they’re always in trouble for something.

Kids who get missed are the tweeners … the kids in between. And yet, if you look at successful people in the world, most of them are in this tweener area: success in school does not reliably predict success in life.

So: how do you help the tweeners?

  1. Meaningful touch
    Unloved and unpopular kids don’t get touched. Researchers studied what happened to people who didn’t get touched – looked at Vietnam war prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton. If you’re not touched for weeks and months, you start to feel you’re a dream. You doubt your reality. You doubt your validity. (My note: maybe this is why so many street people go a little crazy and start talking to themselves … who touches them?) So: appropriate and meaningful touch is important, even in this day of sickos and a resultant over-reaction.

  2. Spoken message
    Eric was talking to a class that was being plagued by disruptive kids, and he wanted to get positive peer pressure to help fix it. So he held up a $20 bill and asked kids, if it was theirs, and someone stole it, what they would do to get it back. Responses escalated from getting friends to help them, to teachers, to principals, to their parents. But they wanted it back.

    So, he said: these people who are disrupting the class are stealing from you to. What do you think is the difference in lifetime income between people who graduate from high school and those who don’t? $250,000. They’re stealing a quarter of a million dollars from you. What are you going to do about it?

  3. Honor
    Honor is wanting to know your world more than my own. It’s valuing you and what you think and what you like and what you’re interested in more that myself, and what I think and what I like and what I’m interested in. Honoring people – truly honoring people – is something you can’t pretend, but when you really do it, makes a huge difference in your relationships

  4. Picturing a special future
    The one thing that gets people through tough situations is hope. Hope is a candle on the far side of a dark cave, that can get people through a day, a year, a decade which they know is going to be tough. Picturing a special future is saying: “Wow, you’re great at singing. I think people will pay to hear you sing someday.” Or, “you really paint well. I think you could get a job as a graphic artist.”

  5. Active commitment
    Active commitment is sticking with people who need help. It’s actually doing something tangible. Eric told the story of a 16-year old girl who, only a few years ago, had never been to a mall. Never gotten any new clothes. Was dropped off by her mother at her grandmother’s home. Was hated by her grandmother. Was teased unmercifully at school.

    He took her to a store and they went clothes shopping – for the first time in her life. And she knew, maybe also for the first time in her life, that someone cared, that there was the possibility for a better future, that there was hope.

Great seminar. Eric speaks at schools all over the US and I highly recommend him.

Business blogging: it’s not what you do, it’s who you become

March 28, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’ve been thinking about business blogging lately.

Partly because of a months-old post on Hugh McLeod’s blog about what comes after the Cluetrain, and a post he references on Marketing Hub.

But mostly because of a need in my present business venture to spend more time listening to real people in real jobs in real organizations that we think will buy/use/promote the products and services we’re creating.

Here’s the key piece from the Marketing Hub post:

“The value may not be the immediate impact of their [bloggers’] words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it’s more about creating real engagement – where you are changed too. And the thing about good conversations is that more goes on than just an exchange of information. Something more energising takes place. I think that’s the deeper insight of the whole ‘markets are conversations’ meme.”

In other words, business blogging is not something you do, it’s something you are.

It’s not operational but ontological.

It’s not economical but epistemological.

And in the end, business blogging is not something you are, it’s something you become.

The traditional company is an organization defined by barriers. These people are in; these people are out. Employees know certain things; customers know other things; non-clients know other things: all separate domains of knowledge.

(And sometimes keeping those domains of knowledge separate is facilitated, even encouraged.)

Blogging is just one thing that can turn this beast inside out … making the surface area outside greater than the surface area inside. The more surface, the more touch. The more touch, the more influence.

And the more you touch, the more you are influenced.

Barriers are defined by what they keep out – and what they keep in. Business blogging is one way of turning an impermeable barrier into a permeable barrier – if a barrier at all.

What kind of company would result?

Perhaps one that ‘gets it.’ Perhaps one that is (not just understands) its market. Perhaps even one that doubles its sales.

10 Rules of Great Voicemails: The art of leaving good voicemails

March 2, 2006
John Koetsier
news

You never know how stupid you are until you have to leave lots of voicemail messages.

Sheesh.

I’ve had to call a large number of principals (school principals) over the past week or so, and like most busy leaders, at least three quarters of them were unavailable. Which means that a voicemail is usually the best option to get a message through.

There’s a reason that leaving moronic voicemails is a comedic sitcom staple – leaving a good voicemail is harder than it seems. Especially for those of us who prefer to email, skype, IM, or talk in person, and usually shy away ancient telephonic technology.

Fortunately, most voicemail systems these days are smart enough to let you erase and re-record you message. And double fortunately, once you’ve done it a couple of times, you get your facts straight and get used to speaking to a machine.

The really odd thing is that you need to pace yourself. Your message has to be short, or it won’t get listened to. But it has to be long enough to get the reason for your call across. The critical thing is not spitting it out like a machine gun, but pausing for breath – as if you were talking to a human being – even though you’re actually talking to a machine.

Now that I’m an instant voicemail expert, here’s John’s 10 Rules of Great Voicemails™:

  1. Keep it short: less than 90 seconds long
  2. Get the good stuff out first: 15 seconds in, if you haven’t gotten her attention, her finger’s on the delete key
  3. Pace yourself: speak in short phrases, with pauses for breath and thought
  4. Edit to the essentials: you don’t have to say as much as you think you do
  5. Repeat your number: nothing is worse than having to replay a voicemail three times because the person – who knows his own number like the back of his hand – spit it out in three seconds flat
  6. Reference a relationship: if you can, explain how you and the person you’re leaving a message for are connected … e.g., when we met at the conference. If you can’t do this, at least …
  7. Reference a commonality: mention a common friend, or the contact who directed you to this person, or the package you just sent
  8. Answer the WIIFM: as they listen to your voicemail, busy people will be asking themselves: what’s in it for me? why should I bother returning this call?
  9. Be loud: better to be a little loud than too soft (within reason!)
  10. And finally, SMILE: yes, you do talk differently when you’re smiling

Outsider insight, insider outsight

March 1, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’m more convinced now than ever before that insiders are not the best people to explain a product or service that they’ve created. They’re not the best people to write about it; they’re not the best people to market it.

I rediscovered this recently when feeding our CEO some information for a PowerPoint.

I went full-bore and gave him 5-6 chunks of data to use. He selected 3 of them, elaborated on one, and killed 3. I gave him too much. I was so close to the project, so close to the data, that I could not simplify it adequately for him.

(Or, as I just to believe, it’s not that I could not. It’s that I did not.)

In other words, I was in the forest. I could see lots of trees, but I didn’t see the edges. And the edges, the boundaries, are where the definition takes place … where is-X and is-not-X becomes obvious.

Knowing those boundaries is essential to knowing your product. Knowing your service. Only by knowing them can you define what you are and what you’re not.

This is irritating, because this is something I believe I’m good at.

Lesson of the day:
Find ways to abstract myself from the problem/project/product/situation. Get perspective, then define it, explain it, market it, hype it.

Lunch with Mike Panaggio, DME CEO

February 28, 2006
John Koetsier
news

It’s always rewarding to meet entrepreneurial people who started something tiny and grew it to an enormous enterprise.

So it was great to meet Mike Panaggio for lunch a few weeks ago …

Mike is the founder and CEO of DME, a direct marketing firm in Daytona Beach, Florida. In 1982, he started it as a small printing company. Today, they have probably one of the largest concentration of digital presses in North America. But their business isn’t printing – it’s direct marketing.

The technology they’ve assembled for creating, managing, and tracking marketing campaigns via mail, phone, web, email, etc. is, frankly, amazing. I was impressed by Mike’s strategic thinking – and by how much money he was willing to invest to win accounts like Microsoft and Harrah’s.

There’s something about how really successful people carry themselves that I find fascinating. Really successful people have no need to impress anyone. Nor do they need your business. Rather, they have something really, really good that, if you’re interested, you can get in on.

Some people try to portray themselves this way, and some just are. Mike just is.

. . .
. . .

On a related note, this is my first real close-up experience with direct marketing, and it’s a different industry than I thought it was. Direct marketing as an industry may bring to mind all the junk mail that we recycle every day … but nothing could be farther from the state-of-the-art that DME has refined it to.

. . .
. . .

I have to say, this is one of the biggest benefits of my job: meeting cool smart people.

Comma stupid phrases

February 10, 2006
John Koetsier
news

What’s the “comma-stupid phrase” for your business? job? department?

Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.

The “comma-stupid” phrase popped into american culture in 1992, with the political message, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

To be really frighteningly nakedly honest, for at least half of the projects I’ve been involved in over the past decade, I didn’t have a bloody clue what the comma stupid phrase should have been.

Scary!

Fighting The Tyranny of Too Much: Radical Simplicity

February 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

There’s something interesting about most “web 2.0” services.

Most of them, like Basecamp and delicious are not about more options/features/capabilities. They’re actually about less. And that’s exactly why they’re successful.

I was reminded of that when I saw this article by Blackfriars (a branding firm) about Too Much Stuff™.

How much? Too much:

Need proof? Let’s just look at the statistics around that trip to the grocery store. In The Paradox Of Choice, sociology professor Barry Schwartz takes his readers on a trip to a small supermarket and finds that shoppers there must select from 285 varieties of cookies, 85 flavors and brands of juices, and 95 varieties of chips. They face 230 soup offerings, 120 different pasta sauces, 275 varieties of cereal, and 175 types of tea bags. Supermarkets today carry more than 30,000 items, and 20,000 new products are introduced each year — and almost all of them fail.

And yet this plethora of choice doesn’t make us any happier. In fact, exactly the opposite:

In one experiment, when researchers asked subjects to compare chocolate chip cookies from a jar of 10 cookies and a jar of two cookies, the subjects rated the cookie from the smaller jar better than the one from the larger jar. And the cookie wasn’t just better. It was rated more valuable, more desirable to eat in the future, and more attractive as a consumer item, despite the fact the cookies were identical. More choice made the subjects feel that their sample was less desirable.

The authors of the article go on to talk about radical simplicity being the solution. They’re approaching it from the perspective of marketers and brand managers.

I’m wondering about it from the point of view of my own life. The only problem? Simplicity is hard!

Resume-killing words

February 2, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I recently updated my resume. I’m not looking for a new job or anything like that, but the missing last 9 months of my career experience was starting to bother me.

So I happened to notice this CNN story on words that kill your resume. Apparently the top 5 nonsense words are:

Aggressive
Ambitious
Competent
Creative
Detail-oriented

What a shock – they’ve been so over-used that they’re virtually meaningless to hiring managers.

To Henk, updated

January 25, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I recently posted a tribute to Henk Berends, the retiring chairman of our company.

Today I actually delivered the speech, after making some changes, and I’m really, really, really relieved to say it went over extremely well.

The difficult thing about this particular speech is that I wanted to imitate his fairly inimitable speaking style, and so had to actually act out the delivery, rather than just doing it naturally. Which is what … surprisingly … comes most naturally to me.

In any case, it was extremely well-received, and I’m grateful.

We’ll miss you, Henk!

Uncontested market space

January 23, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I ran across this quote recently:

“Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space. Beating the competition within the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create profitable growth.”

It’s from this book: Blue Ocean Strategy, and it’s on its way from Amazon to my office right now.

To Henk

January 23, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Henk Berends, the chairman of Premier, is retiring this month. Here’s something I wrote for a memory book that we are presenting to him on Wednesday.

(I can post it here two days in advance fearlessly, since he is something of a technophobe, and “blog” would likely sound as alien to him as “blickfarx.”)

Without further ado, my tribute …

Note: I updated this (January 25), since I made some changes in the actual speech.

To Henk on the occasion of your retirement,

When a person retires, many things are said. Some of them are true and some of them are not. But this … well, you can judge for yourself.

Mr. Berends, it has been a pleasure working for you and working with you over the last 10 years. Many people are pleasant to work with. But not all give something that lasts – a gift of enduring value and worth. The gift I have received from you has been counsel.

Advice, one-on-one, about what to do – and what not to do. Delivered personally and powerfully, sometimes painfully, but always with care and compassion.

Some say that advice is easy to give but hard to take. I am not sure that this is true. Good advice, at any rate, is not so easy to give – because good advice is not only the result of wisdom, but also and particularly and especially, personal knowledge of the one to whom you are delivering the advice.

Really knowing people is difficult. Knowing their circumstances takes time. And if I dare say the words, it takes a species of love, because only people who care, care to spend the time that must be spent to acquire this knowledge. I thank you for that. I thank God for that. And I ask that you do not let retirement interfere with this particular exercise of your very keen faculties.

And now, since I know you love quotes, I have a few that may (or may not) be appropriate to the situation:

On retirement:

I hope that you will not get too exhausted, because, as Abe Lemons has observed, “the trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.” That could be a challenge – I advise you to be careful. Perhaps an occasional visit to Premier would be in order. You could view it as a holiday.

I must also say, Mr. Berends, that I worry for Mrs. Berends, since as the well-known philosopher Chi Chi Rodriguez has observed, “when a man retires, his wife gets twice the husband – but only half the income.” It is my earnest hope and desire that Joanne will consider this to be a good bargain. Otherwise, we may be seeing more of you here in Premier than we currently expect.

There’s no question, however, but that your retirement is coming at a good time. As you undoubtedly know, the best time to start thinking about your retirement is before the boss does. While in your case that would be difficult – since you are the boss – NOW is always the best time to put family first, and to attend to those things that matter most. Though your work might (and should) matter just a wee bit less, if we would occasionally see you here at Premier, we would not mind even a bit.

I know that your retirement will be a busy retirement, as you have many commitments in your church and family life, but I hope that you will remember what the worthy J. Lubbock has said, namely that “rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” And if that does not keep you busy enough, perhaps you will occasionally drop by to see us here, as we continue the work that you started at Premier.

Well.

Now that I have sufficiently blunted my nose by poking it where it does not belong, and rewarded good advice with bad, I’ll close.

Thank you, Henk, and God bless you and your family all your days, and may your days be long. We will see you, occasionally, will we not, in the halls and offices and cubicles of Premier?

John Koetsier
January 23, 2006

Doing what you love, loving what you do

January 21, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.

It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.

I personally, because I’m a Christian, try to fit that together with the concept of a calling, which is idea that each and every person is called to fill a certain role, maybe meet certain needs, or be in a certain place socially or spiritually.

(I ran across this inventory tool while checking that out. It says I’m good at writing and teaching and administration.)

Here’s the real question: am I, by doing what I’m doing right now, “being the best I can be?”

Paul Graham puts it extremely well in his must-read essay on how to do what you love. Prestige and money can’t compete, when it comes right down to it, with the incredible quality of life that those who love what they do and do what they love enjoy.

Nor, if I might add, with the quality of life that those who know that they are focusing on the maximal inflection point in the cosmos to accomplish the greatest good – for them.

That’s what I want. I think that’s what we all want. And I think that’s what we all need.

Or else little pieces of us start dying, day by day, and before we know it, we’re zombies. Walking, talking, dead people, dying for the weekend.

Which is double plus uncool.

Talking to clients and other scary things

January 16, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Had an interesting email conversation with Rastin Mehr today.

He had shot me a link to Nature.com’s article about web design. A writer is reporting on a Canadian study that suggests that users make snap decisions about websites they visit. In addition to this stunning scientific advance, the article offers some conclusions about site structure and design.

Me to Rastin:

Take a look at the content area on the website this article is published on … I think it violates almost all the rules it advocates!

Rastin’s reply:

True! I guess they wouldn’t consider redesigning the whole site because of a submitted article.

:- )

Which motivated me to say … because I couldn’t state the above sentiment on the website …

You know it’s interesting, but articles without a place to comment on them, and see others’ comments, are just less and less interesting to me.

To which Rastin wrote in heavily sarcastic shock:

You mean to take the control from the site owner and handing it to the users? But what if users write stuff that the author didn’t like?

My turn:

Could be bad. Tell you what’s worse: they lose interest and go away.

Rastin:

Good let’s do that then.

:- )

Me:

🙂

There’s gotta be a lesson in there somewhere. If you don’t want to allow full client interaction with your site, at least put a blog on there somewhere. You’ll be smarter for it.

This is what competition teaches you . . .

January 14, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’m reading My golden rule, a compilation of words of wisdom from business giants.

This one reallyresonates with me. Love it:

I always have an eye on the competition, but it’s not to do what they’re doing. It’s to see where the holes are.

That’s from Geraldine Laybourne, the “Chairman” (at least according to Biz 2.0) and CEO of Oxygen Media.

That’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard about why you maintain competitive intelligence.

Tagging, fuzzy data, & fuzzy surveys

January 11, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’m engaged in a fairly major research effort right now. We’re trying to understand some business conditions a little better, and are using a variety of tools to try get a handle on it.

Oddly enough, I also happen to be taking a graduate course in research at the moment.

And I’m wondering about research methods, mostly because I’m investigating something that I don’t want to assume that I know anything about. And when you’re doing that, the standard survey will not work.

Think about it: a standard survey has questions and lists of potential answers. To create that, you need to know (or think you know) at least a large fraction of the possible universe of answers. In my case, I don’t want to assume any of the answers.

So I’ve constructed three one-page “surveys.” They’re basically short-answer questions. And I’m wondering if I can apply a sort of fuzzy analysis to the answers that I get.

My inspiration comes from tagging. Tagging is the opposite of taxonomy. Taxonomy is a science of classification: phylae, categories, rows, matrices. Slots that you create and slots that you fill. A place for everything and everything in its place.

To me, tagging is a much more organic beast. It grows exponentially. It accepts that fact that something things don’t fit into just one category. In fact, many things fit into many categories. It’s an inherently scalable way of dealing with complexity – because in the tagging world, you don’t have to manage that complexity. You don’t have to beat it into intellectual submission, understand it, categorize it, or make it all make sense.

You just do it … and “it” builds “itself.”

I’m wondering if we need to develop new ways of analyzing and modelling datasets that are (self)organized by tags. Maybe they already exist. Maybe a hundred postdocs are already hot on the case.

I hope so, because I’m going to be getting a lot of fuzzy data. And I’m planning on tagging it and putting it in a shaker and seeing what comes out.

Intrapreneur

January 11, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Guy Kawasaki is good. I mean really, really, really good.

I started reading his blog almost as soon as he started writing it because … well, the Kawasaki chic, right? The ineffable aura of Apple coolness, even ex post facto. And the attractive seductiveness of a venture capitalist, one of those magical beings that bestow money on mere mortals.

Then, of course, my hard drive crashed, and I lost all my RSS feeds, bookmarks, etc., and I kind of forgot about Guy. (I sure hope he pronounces that as rhyming with bee, by the way. That’s the Only Right Way™.) That was a mistake.

He recently hit my radar screen again, just as I was starting a revisioning process in Premier home & family, my baby. And he’s not going to drop off it, this time.

Today I spent a chunk of time on his blog, and what really caught my eye this time was this article about intrapreneurship … being an entrepreneur within a large organization.

It’s not easy, you know. Those Aerons aren’t nearly as comfortable as they’re cracked up to be. (Umm … small joke. I only wish …)

Here’s his list of to-do’s for intrapreneurs:

  • kill the cash cows
  • reboot your brain
  • find a separate building
  • hire infected people
  • put the company first
  • stay under the radar
  • collect and share data
  • dismantle when done

Read his post for details – it’s worth your time.

The toughest one, of course, is killing the cash cows. This is the standard innovator’s dilemma: I’m making millions from buggy whips … how can I go to making thousands on automobile tires?

The reality is that somehow, most companies have to transition their mainline showcase products every decade or so as time and technology obsolete them. The hardest part is going from being the ultimately adapted lean mean king of your (diminishing but still very profitable) space to being just one of the contenders, not too well adapted, not lean, not mean, and probably not even as profitable – at least at first. The urge to protect is so strong and so (seemingly) natural that most companies never make it onto the next curve.

Intrapreneurship might just be the way for dinosaurs to evolve.

The alternative is Sony-fication. Walkman, anyone?

Removing titles from OmniOutliner printed documents

January 9, 2006
John Koetsier
news

OmniOutliner is an excellent Mac OS X app for outlining and organizing just about any kind of information.

It’s intuitive, powerful, and elegant, but there’s one thing that annoyed me about it: it insisted on printing the title of each document at the top of the document.

This totally violates the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) principle, since the title, of course, does not appear on the screen while you’re building your document.

After trying in vain to find a way to undo this via the app’s preferences, and then searching in vain for support information on this, I emailed support, and (after a couple of iterations) got this answer:

If you’d like all new documents to print without headers & footers do the following:

* open the preferences
* Press Edit New Document Template
* Open Page Setup in the document that appears
* Select the OmniOutliner option from the Settings pull-down
* uncheck the headers & footers option
* Press Ok and save the template

Now all new documents will have that options disabled. Follow the same instructions for any existing documents and that option will be saved with them. Let me know if you have any more questions.

OK.

Now, I’m happy that my document titles, which are intended for my view and my use, primarily to help me find them back on my computer, etc., are not appearing on the public, printed, presented final form of my work.

But should you really have to go through that much labor to take something off that shouldn’t be there in the first place?

In any case, if anyone else searches Google in frustration after trying to rid OmniOutliner of its omnipresent titles in printed form, hopefully they’ll find this article and be able to do it!

The Linguist Update

January 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This is months out-of-date, but I figured I should mention that I’m no longer affiliated with The Linguist.

I did some work for Mark and Steve Kaufmann as a consultant, operating under my Sparkplug corporation.

But about 4 months ago, it just became too much: work, family, home, blog, and business. Plus, I’m working on my masters in Educational Technology at UBC. So I simply told Mark I was too busy, and finished out the month contract I was working on.

My name still appears in some places on the blog I created for The Linguist … but it looks like Mark has changed my account information and all the articles that I wrote are now “posted by Mark Kaufmann.” My guess is that this was simply to not confuse visitors to the site with the name of a person who no longer does any work for The Linguist. Still, it leads to some interesting combinations of post author and post body.

In any case, it was a lot of fun, and I wish Mark and Steve nothing but the best. They’re quality people, and The Linguist is a great way to learn English.

Third Cardinal Sin of Project Management

January 4, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This is the third (what was your first clue) in an oft-interrupted series of articles on project management.

(The first cardinal sin is starting before you’re ready. The second cardinal sin is doing the right things at the wrong time.)

It’s a truism in military matters that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Well, almost no plan. It should also be a truism in project management that no plan survives contact with reality.

Reality is hard. It has sharp edges. It comes fast. From above you, or behind. It comes when you least expect it. It will mangle your plan – and mangle you – unless you’re prepared.

As you manage and run a project, you need to have a continuous grasp of what is happening in all aspects of the plan. Not at the micro level – you’ll be overwhelmed. But certainly at the macro level, and in many cases much deeper than that.

Generals and military historians call this grip. It’s having your fingers on all the strings – knowing what’s going on in all areas of the project.

You know you have grip when you can answer questions without referring to your notes. If you have to look up an email to answer a quick question about a vital part of your project, you don’t have grip. If your answer is “I’ll get back to you on that” when your boss wonders what’s happening with the production facilities for Newfangled Widget Number 9, no grip.

Grip means that you’re closely in touch with co-workers and associates who have roles to play in the successful completion of your project. Grip means that you are collecting and analyzing at least some metrics about the progress of your project. And grip means that you are maintaining a fairly detailed situational awareness of every major aspect of your project – even (or especially) those that you’ve entrusted to others.

Losing grip is the the third cardinal error of project management, and losing grip means that you are in danger of losing your grip, which has entirely different (and not at all positive) connotations.

. . .
. . .

In the spirit of Guy Kawasaki’s blog motto (“Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do”) I should add the following …

I am the ultimate expert on project management since I’ve managed well over 3524 projects, all wildly successful, on time, under budget, and above minimum spec.

Yeah right!

Realistically, I’ve had my share of setbacks. Real boats rock.

Hopefully, I’ve learned from my failures, as well as my successes. That’s all that anyone can ask of you, too.

Learning increases resolution

January 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Very good post here by Kathy Siera on how learning about something increases not only our understanding of it but also our potential enjoyment of it.

Excerpt:

Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products–we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn.

Interesting corollary: learning more about something also increases our ability to absolutely loathe it. Like Microsoft Word, for example.

Mantras versus missions

January 2, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I am just now going through an exercise of visioning what the next phase of Premier home & family is going to look like. And I’ve been wanted to find the 2-5 words that will really describe us.

Talk about good timing: Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple evangelist, is now blogging, and wrote about mantras versus missions.

An excerpt:

I give up trying to get people to create short, different, and meaningful mission statements, so go ahead and spend the $25,000 for the offsite, facilitator, and consultants to create one. However, you should also create a mantra for your organization. A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.

If I were the CEO of Wendy’s, I would establish a corporate mantra of “healthy fast food.” End of story. Here are more examples of corporate mantras to inspire you:

Federal Express: “Peace of mind”
Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”
Target: “Democratize design”
Mary Kay “Enriching women’s lives”

Perfect!

My only problem: the one I have in mind (“educational products for families that support schools”) is three words too long, according to Guy.

Yikes. How can I reduce it?

. . .

. . .

Note, I’ve talked about some of our revisioning previously.

Opening wine with a hammer

December 24, 2005
John Koetsier
news

It’s not too often you see someone opening a bottle of wine with a hammer.

However, that’s precisely what I had to do on Tuesday this week. We had a pizza lunch at our Langley, BC office to celebrate Christmas, and someone had a bottle of wine.

The first corkscrew just broke as we tried to pull the cork out. The second – a small portable model, just separated. The handle pulled out and the metal screw part stayed embedded, with the first one, in the cork.

Desperate measures were called for. Not finding a pair of pliers in the office toolbox, I used a hammer to bend the exposed metal part of the corkscrew, and then grabbed it in the claw and, over the course of about 2 minutes, pulled out the cork.

Having gone to such extreme lengths for a glass (read: styrofoam cup) of wine, we had to capture the moment for posterity. Here’s Rastin re-creating the scenario:

wine with a hammer

The results of the process, perhaps less than salubrious for some:

wine, hammer, effects

Client-developer-marketer: friend?

December 20, 2005
John Koetsier
news

I’m leading a new business initiative for my company that has potential for huge and almost instant scale due to our massive installed base in education.

But only if we do it right.

And I’m wondering how/if we can do something like this: inviting our clients to be part of our product development department, marketing department: partners. The challenge that I’m facing is that we can only really do what we really are, and the reality is that we are a traditional company that makes stuff, markets stuff, and sells stuff.

We’re trying hard to bring customers into the product development loop, and that’s a good thing.

But my dream is to take that farther. Way farther.

The success of a Flickr, Delicious, Google Base, you name it, is that the company/service/product invites you to add to it, modify it, use it, adapt it. To make it yours.

Perhaps it’s the difference between making a platform and an application. An application is optimized for defined purposes. A platform is too, but to a much lesser degree. Rather, it’s optimized to enable all kinds of purposes, including, and perhaps especially, those that the developers haven’t even thought of yet.

Hence APIs. Hence customizable, flexible tools. Hence beta versions. Hence an adventurous, daring sense of what-the-heck, let’s try it.

That’s what I want. That would make our clients our developers. Our marketers. Our partners, in a sense.

But not in the sense that they would do our work for us, or that we would co-opt them, or somehow coerce their cooperation.

Rather, this would only happen if people in their own legitimate self-interest did things that benefited them however they wanted … and we provided tools, bases, platforms to enable that. But as individuals created value for themselves, they would contribute to the value of the ecosystem.

Which would build more value for them, more value for new clients, and more value for us.

OK. That’s the theory. Now … how to do that?

. . .
. . .

Hugh at gapingvoid gets this. The people behind the cluetrain get this. Can somewhat traditional companies get it?

Google AdWords down

December 14, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Umm … this is uncool:

google adwords down for maintenance

When I need to adjust my ads, I need to adjust my ads!

[ update ]

Just got in now (a few minutes later). See this notice once you log in:

On December 16, 2005, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. PST [?] due to system maintenance. Please note that your campaigns will continue to run normally during this short downtime. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Connected?

Rainmakers don’t sell products

December 13, 2005
John Koetsier
news

I was in a portion of a workshop yesterday with Steve Matteson, a consultant from Simpler Consulting when he made an interesting comment about rainmakers … salespeople who sell more, make more, bring in more.


Rainmakers don’t sell the product.

Rainmakers sell what customers get out of buying the product.

I’ve heard it before in different contexts and words, but I like this formulation.

Reality is, most salespeople sell the product. It’s this big. It’s that powerful. It’s got such-and-such features. It’s comes in these three colors.

So what?

Find out what the client needs and wants. Show how your product/service/solution/widget meets them. Count your cash.

Now that’s how to sabotage a project

December 12, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Some people, when there’s a project at their company that they think is a complete disaster but for political reasons cannot openly oppose, adopt sabotage tactics.

In other words, they become an active participant, then find excellent reasons why the company can’t proceed. But, and this is an important but, they always couch them in positive language.

I’ve persevered on a number of projects in spite of well-meaning (but fortunately amateur) saboteurs. Most times their negative energies are so well disguised you can’t root them out. But here’s an excellent – and public – example:

According to Internet News, the US Commerce department has commissioned a study saying that transitioning to IPv6 will cost $25-$75 billion.

Unbelievable. That’s more than it will cost to rebuild New Orleans!

Now that’s how to conduct sabotage operations: release a report showing how to complete a project. Then, on the last page, add one tiny little detail: an absolutely stupendous, enormous, ridiculous price tag.

Mission accomplished!

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