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How to grow ideas
I was thoroughly taken with a post Chris Brogan put up on his blog today about seeds in a wild garden—about having and sharing ideas and watching them grow.
But how do you grow ideas? What do you need? Here’s my take, which I posted there….
To be an excellent “sower of seeds” you need certain things—or have the desire and capacity to learn or acquire them as you go along:
1. Fertile ground, and the ability to recognize it. Is this a group of people, an organization, a market that has the potential for growth and change? Remove the rocks, pull the weeds.
2. Fertilizer. If the ground isn’t ready as-is, what needs to happen for change to take root?
3. Lots and lots of seeds. Never underestimate the power of luck, both good and bad. You may have perfect seeds, and a perfect environment, but some might just not grow. More seeds = higher probability of success.
4. Time. You don’t get from seed to plant without all the in-between steps. Some plants grow faster than others, but they all have to break from the shell, put down roots, push up to the soil, and grow. And that takes time—and patience.
5. Attention. Another word for this might be care. You have to tend your garden. If the environment is drying up, you need to give water. And you need to know when to lay off and let mother nature do her work.
6. Tolerance for failure. I’d rather plant 100 seeds and have 25 fail than plant only 10 with complete assurance they’d all survive. In one case I have a 25% failure rate—but 75 plants. In the other, nothing dies, but there’s only 10 to keep growing….
7. For any of the above, know someone who can do it better than you, if you can’t. Most of us aren’t great at all of these things. But you probably know enough people that when you all work together, you can accomplish great things.
What else do you need to make an (idea) garden grow?
Categories: Strategy and Management
Spreading the word
We need to spread the word about garbarge trucks. Why? Because THEY. SCARE. ME.
I might look similar to a Rottweiler, which is supposed to mean I’m tougher than Fifi (and trust me, I AM tougher than Fifi)…except when it comes to garbage trucks. They’re loud! Big! Can run me over! Why aren’t more dogs scared of these things??
I want to spread the word. How, though? Taking to the streets barking hasn’t worked out so well, ’cause garbage days are WAY too frequent in the South End. Posting fliers at the MSPCA might be okay, but that seems sort of old school, and the whole lack of opposable thumbs also presents an issue.
Hmmm…I need something fresh. New.
I work hard each day (okay, okay, I come to work each day—maybe working hard is not quite accurate). But what I do hear from under the table in these meetings is that this whole social media thing seems to be the cat’s pajamas…the bees knees, if you will.
They say that with the right message and approach I can quickly spread my thoughts around and even get instant feedback from my peers.
That’s it! I’m taking to the social media superhighway:
Dogs of the world! I bark out loud! Online! Come join me in my social media revolution! Let’s see how fast we can warn our species of these dang garbage trucks! Twittering, Facebooking, blogging—oh my, this is exciting!
(Cats, well, you can fend for yourselves. Go find some week old sushi scraps or find new layouts for each others Myspace pages.)
Categories: Quadrupedal Posts
3 keys to success—no matter who (or what) you are
Success comes down to three things: ability, attitude, and access.
Ever since the PodCamp Boston 4 un-conference this past weekend, there’s been a lot of discussion kicking around about how to be successful in social media—and what role gender may or may not play in that.
Chris Penn‘s response that day, and afterward, was to “be awesome.” But “awesome” comes in two parts: what you do that’s awesome (ability) and how you do it (attitude).
Those two will, I think, bring you a fair amount of success on their own. If you do great things—and enough people like how you do them—you’ll succeed.
But the real issue on the table, I think, is access. To be successful, you need access to the people who care, to the influencers who can open doors for you—access to opportunities in the first place.
Barriers to that access are both internal (you create them) and external (they are created around you). There are inarguably doors that are quite simply closed because you are female (or male or transgender or…), are black (or white or Asian or…), are gay (or straight or bisexual or…). There are always barriers between groups. And even within them.
But the doors are relative; they depend on the situation. Being female, or any of the above, does not universally put you at a disadvantage. There are times when being female (or whatever you are) puts you in the majority or gives you attributes that other simply don’t have, and therefore in a position of power. That’s why I put no stock in labels.
Internal barriers are more insidious, because we often don’t even see them. Because they dictate our worldview, they create the truth we experience. The challenge, then, is to search and destroy whatever barriers we’ve created, as those are the only ones we can directly control.
Here’s the thing: whatever you give attention to grows stronger. And attention is a finite, zero-sum resource. The more attention you give to the barriers in front of you—no matter where they come from—the less attention you have to give to yourself. When you focus on barriers, you give them your power.
Take. It. Back.
When faced with a door, you have three options:
- Find a different door.
- Go somewhere with open doors.
- Open the damn door.
Don’t find your path. Make it.
Categories: Outside the Square
It ain’t about authenticity, people
Authenticity. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
In fact, I’m pretty sure a lot of us are confusing authenticity with integrity. Or even if we’re not, we’re putting the emphasis on the wrong quality.
Authenticity is about being real. But real-ness isn’t the issue. When we’re going around urging people to be authentic, we’re not asking them to be real. People, and the organizations they run and serve, are real.
We just might not like them or the way they operate very much. In those cases, “be authentic” means “be different”—and therefore, not authentic. You are authentic, no matter what you do. So let’s take that one off the table, shall we?
What about transparency? Transparency itself used to be a choice: you either were or you weren’t transparent. But now the choice is between active and passive transparency: Will you reveal your code of operations, or will it be revealed for you? We may wish for someone (or something) to make a different choice there, but really, that one’s all about making it easier on us.
What I think we really want is for people and organizations to act with integrity. Integrity is about honesty. Or at the very least, it’s about consistently following a (predictable) moral or ethical code.
And that, I think, is what we’re after: we want people and organizations to behave predictably. But the tricky thing is, we want people and organizations to act predictably in a way we agree with. When faced with a code we don’t agree with, it makes us uncomfortable, even angry, and rightly so.
So how do these three interact? I can’t say it better than @SueSpaight already did:
You can be transparent and authentic, and still have no integrity. Integrity is the highest order.
Now the question is, are we comfortable with the judgment that entails?
Categories: Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
Brand math
Here’s a little idea I’ve been working on:
Purpose: why are you here? what need does your organization fulfill? what would be lost if you weren’t here?
Personality: what do you vaue? what’s your organizational style? tone of voice? level of transparency?
Position: what you do and how you do it.
Pursuit: what are you trying to achieve? what’s your goal?
Platform: the content of your communications, as shaped by your position and pursuit.
Publication: putting your platform out there.
Perception: how people view you and what you stand for—your brand.
What do you think?
Categories: Branding
Don’t “lipstick,” and 25 other lessons of management
In my first job out of grad school I was told, in a performance evaluation, to “do my hair and wear more lipstick.”
When it comes to management, that definitely goes in the “don’t” column.
Over the years, that lesson and a number of others have made their way into my consciousness as a (previously unwritten) set of “rules” I use to guide my behavior as a manager.
But why a post on management when our stock in trade is branding? Because people are at the heart of any change. To make change happen, you have to have people who can make change happen.
So consider this a tribute to all of those people I’ve known—whether as manager or the one managed. This is what you’ve taught me:
- Understand that your primary job is to remove obstacles from your staff’s path. That includes you. If you’re in the way, move.
- Empower them. Give them authority, give them confidence, give them space to do their job.
- Be their best advocate. Your staff always gets the credit for a job well done. You take the blame when things don’t go well. This is a conscious decision. Never throw your staff under the bus.
- Be empathic. Empathy is required, and can’t be taught. Improved, yes. Taught, no.
- Don’t give anyone a task you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself. And if it’s a real crap task, make sure you acknowledge that. Bonus points if you apologize for it, too.
- A corollary: Don’t establish (or enforce) rules you don’t follow yourself. What’s good for you is good for them, and vice versa. Different sets of rules for management and staff breed discontent.
- People will reach the bar wherever you set it. If you set the bar low, don’t be surprised when they don’t aim higher.
- Set expectations, not executions. Your way is not the only way—and their way could be better.
- If there’s a problem, address it. Right away. Privately. Problems don’t just go away. Respect your staff enough to give them a chance to correct what’s wrong. Shame doesn’t motivate.
- Go for “no surprises.” Just like a performance review shouldn’t be the first time your staff hears about a problem, the day of a deadline should not be the first time you hear something’s not getting done. Don’t blindside them, and they won’t blindside you. But set this expectation up early.
- When hiring, temperament is more important than experience. Typically, we hire for skills and fire for personality. But skills can be taught, fit can’t.
- Your staff don’t belong to you. You have succeeded as a manager when you coach someone into a higher and better position—whether in your organization or out of it. Don’t be selfish.
- 99% of the time people do the right thing without being told. Don’t manage to the 1%. Trust people to do the right thing. They will.
- Tell them what you know. Tell them what you don’t know. And tell them what you know but can’t tell—and why. Overcommunicate. Lack of information causes many more problems than too much.
- Praise in public. Critique in private.
- Only critique the professional, not the personal. Yes, that’s hard to do when you’re addressing a personal behavior, but you have to do the work of figuring out how to relate that to the professional environment. Otherwise you’re in the realm of telling people to “wear more lipstick.” Not acceptable.
- Respect their time. Especially when they’re meeting with you. Be punctual. Be relevant. Be useful. If you meet over lunch, feed them. If you ask them to work late, let them have that time somewhere else.
- Let them vent.
- You don’t have to know how to do what your staff does. But you do need to know what they need from you, what they care about, what gets in their way, and what their goals are. And you need to know why they consider what they do important.
- Don’t micromanage. Goldfish will grow as big as their tank can accommodate. Give your staff an ocean, not a teacup.
- They don’t have to like you, but they do have to respect you. But you have to earn respect. You can’t legislate it. Oppression breeds rebellion, especially if it seems arbitrary. You’ll get as much respect as you give.
- Mistakes are fine. Just not the same mistake, and not more than once. The first mistake is usually your fault. The second is theirs. Or yours, if you didn’t address the first one.
- When something goes wrong, blame is useless. Find out what happened only so you can help your staff figure out how to avoid repeating the mistake. If you use the discovery process to lay the basis for punishment, you’ll never, ever get the real story again.
- Your staff will do what you do, not what you say. Your staff is a reflection of you. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, look to yourself.
- You are nothing without them.
What’s on your list? What would you add?
Categories: Strategy and Management
TrueType Crime Beat: What the font does this say anyway?
Headlines are naturally and obviously considerably shorter then the text that follows them—which allows for greater freedom of expression. They present an opportunity to entice readers not only with their words, but also with how those words are rendered. They should also consciously or subliminally set up the reader for what’s in store.
Why then do so many “graphic designers” blow this opportunity by choosing some trendy, new font that does nothing to enhance the story—or worse, makes it difficult to even comprehend?
With freedom comes responsibility. Next time you step up to the plate to design a headline, stop and think first. Don’t just pull open your virtual drawer of type fonts and blindly pick one.
And, just a suggestion: it may be time to clean out that drawer.
To report any flagrant violations of type please contact us immediately. Together we can slow and possibly even reverse the proliferation of senseless and profane type choices simply by exposing it for what it is – criminal.
Categories: Design
More than words
You humans talk a lot. I see you on your computers, your phones, in conference rooms or in hallways. You also talk to me (I think it’s strange that you think that I understand you or something… when really the only words that come through loud and clear are “cookie” or “treat”).
I might not understand your words, but I understand your body movements. Some parts of your human communication are just like our dog communications. Your bodies say a lot. I know I’m in trouble when Jessica crosses her arms and her body gets tense. She doesn’t even have to tell me to “lie down” because I know it’s coming. But crossed arms aren’t the norm for her. When I’m around people, especially new people, I look for a relaxed and open body position. People who look relaxed make me relaxed too. And when I’m relaxed, it makes it easier for me to pay attention to the other words I know, like “sit” or “paw.” I’ve learned lots of new things since being adopted, because I’ve taught my owners how to communicate with me. (I’m a good trainer like that.)
I can’t imagine having to understand you humans through a machine. I guess you are better at that since you don’t communicate through only barks and whines and body movements (though I have definitely heard you both bark and whine on occasion). But I like being face-to-face with you. I can read you that way, and I bet other humans can too. Just don’t forget, it’s not just what you say.
Sometimes how you say it is so much more important when you want to be heard.
Categories: Quadrupedal Posts
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