The most effective way to sell the execution of an idea is to describe the use case first. And before you can do that, you need to have both the trust of your client and enough information to figure out what would delight them.
Then, describe what a great solution would do. “If we could use 10,000 square feet of space to profitably service 100 customers an hour…” or “If we built a website that could convert x percent of …” or “If we could blend a wine that would appeal to this type of diner…”
After the use case is agreed on, then feel free to share your sketches, brainstorms and mockups. At that point, the only question is, “does this execution support the use case we agreed on?”
Tag: seth godin
Seth Godin offers 20 often surprising thoughts about “Where ideas come from?” Which did he miss (via Seth’s blog).
Where do ideas come from?
- Ideas don’t come from watching television
- Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture
- Ideas often come while reading a book
- Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
- Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
- Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
- Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
- Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner’s mind. A little awareness is a good thing
- Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
- Ideas come from trouble
- Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they’re generous and selfless
- Ideas come from nature
- Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
- Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
- Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we’re asleep and too numb to be afraid
- Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we’re not trying
- Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
- Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
- Ideas don’t need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
- An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn’t join us here, it’s hidden. And hidden ideas don’t ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.
A leader looks for the hard stuff and does not hide from it. Check out “Sure, but what’s the hard part?” (via Seth Godin)
Hard is not about sweat or time, hard is about finishing the rare, valuable, risky task that few complete.
Don’t tell me you want to launch a line of spices but don’t want to make sales calls to supermarket buyers. That’s the hard part.
Don’t tell me you are a great chef but can’t deal with cranky customers. That’s the hard part.
Don’t tell me you have a good heart but don’t want to raise money. That’s the hard part.
Identifying which part of your project is hard is, paradoxically, not so easy, because we work to hide the hard parts. They frighten us.
You can do more, you can go faster. How about do it better? (via Seth Godin)
The easiest form of management is to encourage or demand that people do more. The other translation of this phrase is to go faster.
The most important and difficult form of management (verging on leadership) is to encourage people to do better.
Better is trickier than more because people have trouble visualizing themselves doing better. It requires education and coaching and patience to create a team of people who are better.
You have to risk alienating the 2% in order to please the 98%, btw they will be alienated anyway (via Seth Godin)
When a popular rock group comes to town, some of their fans won’t get great tickets. Not enough room in the front row. Now they’re annoyed. 2% of them are angry enough to speak up or badmouth or write an angry letter.
When Disney changes a policy and offers a great new feature or benefit to the most dedicated fans, 2% of them won’t be able to use it… timing or transport or resources or whatever. They’re angry and they let the brand know it.
Do the math. Every time Apple delights 10,000 people, they hear from 200 angry customers, people who don’t like the change or the opportunity or the risk it represents.
If you have fans or followers or customers, no matter what you do, you’ll annoy or disappoint two percent of them. And you’ll probably hear a lot more from the unhappy 2% than from the delighted 98.
It seems as though there are only two ways to deal with this: Stop innovating, just stagnate. Or go ahead and delight the vast majority.
Sure, you can try to minimize the cost of change, and you might even get the number to 1%. But if you try to delight everyone, all the time, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Or become boring.
Change: the fearful loudly resist, the hopeful quietly disbelieve, inertia results (via Seth Godin)
People who fear they will be hurt by a change speak up immediately, loudly and without regard for the odds or reality.
People who will benefit from a change don’t believe it (until it happens), so they sit quietly.
And that’s why change in an organization is difficult.
Instead of quitting, why not try quilting. I am thinking of the artful quilts my wife creates.
“I quilt”
When you’ve had enough, can’t tolerate your job any longer and are ready to quit, perhaps you could try one last thing.
Quilt instead.
You’ve got nothing to lose, right? I mean, you’re going to quit anyway, so what’s the worst that could happen to you?
So quilt. Spend hours every day integrating the people you work with into a cohesive group. Weave in your customers as well. Take every scrap, even the people you don’t like, and sew them together. Spend far less time than you should on the ‘real’ work and instead focus on creating genuine connections with the people you work with. Including your boss. After all, once you quit, you’re never going to see them again anyway, right? Might as well give it a try.
Careful… it might change everything.
Seth Godin challenges us to expose ourselves … its not what you are thinking.
Expose yourself…
With so many options in media, interaction and venues, you now get to choose what you expose yourself to.
Expose yourself to art, and you’ll come to appreciate it and aspire to make it.
Expose yourself to anonymous scathing critics and you will begin to believe them (or flinch in anticipation of their next appearance.)
Expose yourself to get-rich-quick stories and you’ll want to become one.
Expose yourself to fast food ads and you’ll crave french fries.
Expose yourself to angry mobs of uninformed, easily manipulated protesters and you’ll want to join a mob.
Expose yourself to metrics about your brand or business or performance and you’ll work to improve them.
Expose yourself to anger and you might get angry too.
Expose yourself to people making smart decisions and you’ll probably learn how to do it as well.
Expose yourself to eager long-term investors (of every kind) and you’ll likely to start making what they want to support.
It’s a choice if you want it to be.
Seth Godin asks 8 questions that are appropriate in every season, especially as we approach the new year.
Who are you trying to please?
What are you promising?
How much money are you trying to make?
How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?
What are you trying to change?
What do you want people to say about you?
Which people?
Do we care about you?
(and after each answer, ask ‘why?’)
So What Are Tribes and How Are We Like Them?
Len Sweet in a recent tweet asked “what if church ad councils or “sessions” or “deacon boards” were reinvented as “Tribal Councils” (twitter.com/lensweet, October 1, 2009)? The question prompted me to investigate what others are saying about tribes.
I turned first to Seth Godin who recently wrote TRIBES: We Need You to Lead Us. He gave an preview to his book at TED Talks on “The Tribes We Lead” (May 2009). Seth suggests that in our time there is a new way of making change. The change we seek is lived out by changing life through the tribes we are part of, and more importantly, the tribes we create. The process unfolds as we tell the story of what is wrong with the status quo, gather others who share our discontent, and then lead this “tribe” to a better future.
So three questions I’d offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that’s what they’re in it for. The connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you’re building, but the who, and the leading part is where change comes.
So how do leaders respond to these challenges?
So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what’s currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven second handshake. A way of knowing that you’re in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe. Curiosity about outsiders. They’re asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It’s fascinating because all tribe leaders have charisma. But you don’t need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.
Enjoy the full video. Seth make a great presentation.
David Logan, a USC faculty member and consultant, added clarity to me investigation in a TED talks on Tribal Leadership. The following are the different stages of tribe development and his insights on how to lead the tribe forward:
Stage 1: LIFE SUCKS! This tribe is formed from folks who have systematically rejected traditional tribes and gathered together with other likeminded people in gangs. The prison yard is literally full of tribes of this type. Logan’s further insight is that people behave the way they see the world, e.g. if they assume that life sucks, they will behave as if life sucks (and it should for you as well).
Stage 2: MY LIFE SUCKS! This tribe is characterized by the line to renew your driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The culture makes people dumb and we react with anger at our participation in the ritual of standing in line. But many organizations have people within them that react with despair about their situation and no work or innovation can emerge from this kind of tribe.
Stage 3: I’M GREAT (and your not)! This is the stage that many of us will move to and unfortunately stay at. In this kind of tribe every member is constantly trying to one up each other. These tribes are formed from gatherings of smart and successful people.
Stage 4: WE’RE GREAT! At this point tribes of motivated people gather around a larger mission and vision to become innovative as they celebrate their corporate identity. (e.g. Zappos values fun, creativity, and being a little bit weird).
Stage 5: LIFE IS GREAT! The tribe that demonstrates this is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others rallied others to find common ground so that South Africa was able to avoid the fate of other nations like Rwanda.
There are three possibly counter-intuitive things that leaders of tribes know:
1. Leaders are fluent in all five stages of tribal development. The Declaration of Independence highlights the stage five goals of “inalienable rights,” but most of the document makes references to stage two complaints about life under the rule of a tyrant. Martin Luther King’s most famous statement “I have a dream” was a stage three comment from a leader of a stage five movement. We have to speak to where our people are even as we nudge them forward. (Organizational tribes break down along these lines: Stage 1 – 2%, Stage 2 – 25%, Stage 3 – 48%, Stage 4 – 22%, Stage 5 – 2%. Stage 5 tribes will change the world!)
Leaders are not content to leave people where they found them! So the following learnings are paired:
2. Tribes can only hear one stage above and below where they are.
3. Leaders nudge people and their tribe to the next stage.
Logan close his talk with a challenge to form triadic relationships. Our typical response to networking is to become a hub of connection. Logan suggests we introduce ourselves to another person and then help them make another connection in order to build a innovative movement. World-changing tribes connect not just to a leader but to each other so the momentum continues at all levels of an organization.
We all form tribes, but what kind of an impact are the tribes you are part of making? Will your tribe change the world?
Front Porch Reflections 
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