Following up on my previous post, “Better & Lighter Ways to Deliver Your Message”, Seth Godin posted recently on a chart he thought up about the delivery mechanism of your message:
The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about – Interesting graph from Seth Godin that at first glance made me think of Gartner’s magic quandrant. Except that in his chart the sweet spot for a market isn’t the upper-right quadrant. Then I noticed only 3 of the communcation forms had company names attached to them – Twitter, YouTube and Cisco Telepresence. Cisco? How’d they get to be in the upper-right hand corner? Hardly a ubiqituos communication method. And where’s Skype? Where’s all the social networks? I’d put Skype in the sweet spot but higher than telephone. And I’d put social networks in sweet spot, too, and to the right of blogs. And take off Cisco.
From Adrian Miller, author of “The Blatant Truth”, 10 Ways to Suck at Networking. I was at the New England Networkers event last night and am going to the Cambridge Business Development Group event tonight so a quick referesher on what NOT to do was timely.
I was just reading Mark Cuban’s blog and he has some sage-like advice. He’s made a ton of money, dedicated to speaking his mind and ticking people off. Plus he’s smart. So I take note.
His latest piece on the economy resonated me like tin drum. He gives a broad list of scary facts about the U.S. economy (and I won’t go into it but just say, you should read it)– the end result is… with respect to the economy, no one knows squat. No one knows where it’s going: up, down, sideways. And these are the experts, the pundits, the people in charge. With mounting stress, your average U.S. citizen that holds a job, pays into a 401K, saves for their kids college and holds a mortgage is like a deer in the headlights. We are at an economic psycho-social paralytic standstill. What do we do?
We all need to find our inner Hustler. We need to start doin’ the Hustle.
Before you click off, think about it. The real definition of a “Hustler” is less 70’s Pimp, Disco and dirty magazines and more about attitude. So where one might see visions of Starsky and Hutches’ friend (and Snoop Dogg Doppelgänger) Huggy Bear, I see the people, and more importantly, personalities that will not only survive life’s rotten episodes but thrive. Classic examples? Rhett Butler AND Scarlett O’Hara, The Wright Brothers, The Greatest Generation (who survived Depression AND won WWII AND brought the atomic age…,) Oprah, Post-WWII Japan, Martin Luther King, Estée Lauder, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela,Thomas Edison, James Bond,The Founding Fathers, MacGyver, Tina Turner, Madonna, and the list goes on and on…
The one thing all these people (real or fictional) had is that they refused to be hindered. Their progress (professional, personal, economic, political) was not going to be halted by anything. Not the economy. Not politics. Not tragedy. They looked at the issue from the perspective of “there is success to be made and the path to it might be different than expected.” So they got creative, they rewrote the rules, they re-invented themselves/their company/their country, and they SOUGHT OUT NEW WAYS of doing things. The new opportunity is always out there, you just have to seek it.
So how does this apply to you? We are in tough and uncertain times, no arguments there. It is time for you to tap your inner “Hustler” and “hustle” for new ways to do business. Your business. New products and services that can affect your company’s bottom line by either saving you money or helping you make money faster or (even better) DO BOTH. The old way of doing things is exactly what everyone else is doing, and that doesn’t make it right, it only means you’ll all be (sinking) in the same boat. Seth Godin, in his new book Tribes (read it if you haven’t yet) subscribes that playing it safe isn’t exactly safe. He believes the world is ever-changing and new rules apply. The Hustler learns how to play them. Or else get played.
And just because, under the you-know-you-thinking-about-it file:
I met Seth Godin years ago at one of those kids activity centers where parents host their pre-schooler’s birthday parties. If you have kids, then you know that pre-school birthday parties means “no drop-off” thus you can’t run a few errands or stop by Dunkin Donuts. I was reading his “Permission Based Marketing” book amongst the happy screams of little kids and I notice out of the corner of my eye that 2 people keep walking past me and smiling. One of them finally approaches me and says, “My husband wrote that book!” The other person walking past me turned out to be her husband, Seth. You’d think that I’d recognize him since his handsome dome was right on the front cover of my book!
I was reading this while my kid was here
Seth’s recent post is about how intangibles are what allows you to charge more for your service vs the commodity-oriented competition. Some of his ideas include participation, enthusiasm, speed, focus, generosity and hope.
Hope? No, not “I hope this deal will close” as that’s not an viable or effective tactic for beating the competition. Instead, “is your offering going to be something great.”
As I’m reading this blog, it struck me that I consider all these intangibles to be my reputation. Just like an intangible, it’s hard to quantify reputation. You either have it or you don’t. Your reputation with your customer is what keeps them coming back to you instead of saving money with your competitor. Your reputation is what gets you the warm welcome when you meet with prospects.
Here’s a few suggestions of mine on ensuring you have the intangibles, the reputation, it takes to compete and win.
