Never Mind Marketing

Lately, I have been nearly consumed with identifying the correct calling, job title, etc for a number of people. Society, in general, views people as a commodity and places “it” (an individual) in an area of need without much thought to the fit of that person.

Managers, or the ones in my circle, are realizing that one size does not fit all; and that people have gifts and talents that are not universal to all job descriptions.

I’ve found two pieces lately that encapsulate this concept well:

SCHOOL FOR ANIMALS
by George Reavis

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world” so they organized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming. In fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school so nobody worried about that, except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of the treetop down. He also developed a “charlie horse” from overexertion and then got a C in climbing and D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class, he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceeding well and also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

FARMERS vs HUNTERS
by Seth Godin

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

How you can help the victims of the Haiti earthquake:

World Vision: http://www.worldvision.org
Mercy Corps: http://www.mercycorps.org
American Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org
World Concern: http://www.worldconcern.org/
Donate $10 to the Red Cross relief effort by texting HAITI to 90999.

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

For most products and services, most of the time, people sign up for the cheapest reliable alternative plan.

If everything appears to be the same, then of course they’re going to pick the cheapest one that’s “good enough”.

In the face of this understandable strategy, you have a few choices:

• You can be cheapest (difficult to sustain).
• You can be more reliable (great if you can figure this out).
• You can be redefine the playing the field to be the only one (most preferred).

Buying a new microphone or lights for your DJ business doesn’t do any of these three to your competitive status, it merely makes you feel good. Same with re-organizing your office, painting the parking spaces or buying a new laptop. They merely keep you where you were.

The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.

I’m getting tired of hearing, especially lately, that Facebook is responsible for 20% of divorces.

Let me make this very clear:

NO IT’S NOT!

The U.K. firm making the claim says that spouses uncover their partner is cheating via Facebook’s private messaging tool (how exactly they do that is up for debate). Cheating, and the following divorce is not the fault of Facebook. It is the fault of individuals with a questionable moral compass.

Stop looking for blame and start looking in a mirror.

From Guy Kingston “The Dog Ate My Business Plan”

Failed businesses need to learn to stop looking for someone else to blame. Business is risk. Sometimes those risks do not pay off. Accept it. When a business fails, make no excuses. No one is listening. No one cares. Instead, turn failure into a positive experience. Be honest about what you did wrong. Perhaps the whole thing was a bad idea from the start. Perhaps the idea was good but you handled it badly. Either way, once you have identified your error, move on to your next business, knowing that you are stronger because you will not make that same mistake again.

Recession on its own should not destroy a business. It merely exposes the weakness of its existing strategy.

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote about Facebook’s recent valuation based on common stock purchase by DST. The original share buyback was oversubscribed at a $14.77 per share price (roughly $6.5 billion valuation). This most recent sales were done at $25/share, which values Facebook at roughly $11 billion.

What is interesting, other than the fact that we are again looking down the barrel of a dot com bubble, is that I was working on a social networking project a few years ago and our wildest dreams pegged the project at a billion dollar valuation.

At that time, MySpace had just sold to News Corp for about $5.8 million and a billion dollars seemed like the most logical – yet ambitious – price ceiling to break through.

Here we are, 5 years later, looking at an $11 billion dollar valuation of Facebook and they haven’t implemented the elements that made our product different. Are we sitting on the next $100 billion dollar social project?

Only time will tell.

Riffing off Donald Keough’s book The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, Risk Capital Partners investor Luke Johnson pens his own steps for killing your company for the Financial Times. If you want to survive, he advises avoiding the following:

• taking on too much debt
• becoming overly dependent on one customer
• making a mess of a major IT project
• signing a costly/long-term property lease, or
• forgetting your customers.

“In case you’re wondering: yes, over the years I’ve backed companies guilty of all these mistakes,” says Johnson. (Hat tip, peHUB)

Is an iTunes model for magazines just around the corner? According to the New York Times, several magazine publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, and Hearst, have reportedly joined forces to form a new company that will run the online newsstand, dubbed “iTunes for magazines.” With flagging sales in print, the publishing houses hope to gain some control over digital readership, and the new Web presence is rumored to offer publications in multiple digital formats.

Inc Magazine

I recall suggesting this concept about a year ago. =)

Next idea, develop an iPhone app that allows you to scan the cover or bar code of a magazine to purchase the issue or subscribe electronically.

Two different people with the same amount of smarts can take the same communications plan and derive very different results. That’s because exceeding your goals doesn’t always mean doing things that no one else can do. It often means doing the things that anyone can do, but doesn’t. That’s where hustle wins the day.

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We had to laugh. From BusinessIdeas.net:

Winding up before a judge in court is never a good sign for your business . . . unless you’re in the legal profession. It can happen to anyone: the underdog, the top cat, the genius, the idiot, the slimy or the squeaky clean. Sometimes you can get sued just for being successful. Here are 10 business ideas (along with real life examples) across the spectrum of possibilities that can pretty much guarantee to land your ass in court.

1. Copy someone else’s idea and name it after them.

This is quite possibly the biggest “duh” in the history of business, but even commercial giants fall prey to the trap. In an effort to capitalize on the success of Pixar, Disney thought it would be a novel idea to sell a lamp that looked just like the famous Luxo lamp that serves as the I in the Pixar logo. They copied the design of the Norwegian company’s lamp and even named it the Luxo, Jr.

2. Innovate

As several items in this list will show, some of the most successful business ideas and entrepreneurs become instant targets for frivolous lawsuits. One of the surest ways to get sued is to come up with an idea with broad appeal and wild success—there’s only so much money to be gained from suing poor people.

Facebook and Twitter have both been sued in separate cases by business claiming to hold patents over the technology and procedures that make the social networks successful. The suit against Facebook is far flimsier than the one against Twitter, but the problem plaguing both defendants is the same: the world of patents is so overwhelmingly flooded, it’s virtually impossible to know if your entrepreneurial genius overlaps with someone else’s half-baked plans.

The lesson: as long as you do your due diligence and don’t steal anyone else’s ideas, you’re probably safe.

3. Ride the coattails of someone else’s success.

When someone makes it colossally big, there are always thousands of underlings who bathe in the excess fame and fortune trickling down. So when J. K. Rowling began selling millions upon millions of books (and raking in millions more in film and merchandising deals) there was plenty of attention to share between fan sites like The Leaky Cauldron. But after the final showdown between Harry Potter and He-Who Must Not Be Named hit bookshelves, She Who Must Not Be Plagiarized filed an injunction to stop The Leaky Cauldron authors from publishing a printed version of their site.

Ms. Rowling had no qualms about the extra promotion and anticipation drummed up by Potter-obsessed sites, but the book that served essentially as a Who’s Who in the Potterverse put a hex on Rowling’s patience. Her counter jinx attempting to block publication of the book, which she viewed as a “regurgitation” of her own work, ultimately won out as RDR Books revised the content drastically under the title, The Lexicon.

Be careful when you ride Ms. Rowling’s coattails (or that of any creative mind). If you come too close to stealing the whole coat, you might get turned into a newt.

9. Change the World with Photoshop

One of the most indelible images of Obama’s ascent to the White House was, according to the Associated Press, a blatant example of copyright theft. The notorious lawsuits—the artist Shepard Fairey filed a preemptive suit of his own—raised an important legal issue in the age of Photoshop: what exactly constitutes fair use of an image?

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