luni, 5 decembrie 2016

Seth's Blog : The myth of quick

In his day job, The Wizard of Oz sold hokum. Patent medicines guaranteed to cure what ailed you. And none of them worked. Deep within each of us is the yearning for the pill, the neck crack, the organizational re-do...

The myth of quick

In his day job, The Wizard of Oz sold hokum. Patent medicines guaranteed to cure what ailed you. And none of them worked.

Deep within each of us is the yearning for the pill, the neck crack, the organizational re-do that will fix everything.

Sometimes, it even happens. Sometimes, once in a very rare while, there actually is a stone in our shoe, easy to remove. And this rare occurrence serves to encourage our dreams that all of our problems have such a simple diagnosis and an even simpler remedy.

Alas, it's not true.

Culture takes years to create and years to change.

Illnesses rarely respond in days to a treatment.

Organizations that are drowning need to learn to swim.

Habits beat interventions every time.

Consider these boundaries...

Avoid the crash diet.

Fear the stock that's a sure thing to double overnight.

Be skeptical of a new technology that's surely revolutionary.

Walk away from a consultant who can transform your organization in one fell swoop.

Your project (and your health) is too valuable to depend on lottery tickets.

There are innovations and moments that lead to change. But that change happens over time, with new rules causing new outputs that compound. The instant win is largely a myth.

The essential elements of a miracle are that it is rare and unpredictable. Not quite the reliable path you were seeking.

       

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duminică, 4 decembrie 2016

Seth's Blog : Pushiness

Deliberate, focused, generous, confident, thoughtful, these are all good things. Being pushy isn't. Imagine you had a check for $100,000 made out to someone else. Someone you don't know but can reach out to. How hard would it be for...

Pushiness

Deliberate, focused, generous, confident, thoughtful, these are all good things. Being pushy isn't.

Imagine you had a check for $100,000 made out to someone else. Someone you don't know but can reach out to. How hard would it be for you to cajole this person to take the check from you and cash it?

We call someone pushy when they are trying harder for forward motion than we are. We call them pushy when they have more at stake, or more to gain, than we think we do.

It's easy to rationalize your pushiness, imagining that the other person really wants to do this project. And it's just as easy to minimize the value you add, hiding in a corner instead of bringing your value forward.

Pushiness is in the eye of the beholder. Generosity requires that we be aware of how the other person is feeling about the forward motion we're trying to make. 

       

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sâmbătă, 3 decembrie 2016

Seth's Blog : Understanding the backlist (for everything, including books)

It really ought to be called the core list, because it's fundamentally misunderstood as something in the background, an afterthought. The backlist is the stuff you sell long after you've forgotten all the drama that went into making it. Book...

Understanding the backlist (for everything, including books)

It really ought to be called the core list, because it's fundamentally misunderstood as something in the background, an afterthought.

The backlist is the stuff you sell long after you've forgotten all the drama that went into making it.

Book publishers make more than 90% of their profit from books they published more than six months ago. And yet they put 2% of their effort into promoting and selling those books. Editors, agents, salespeople all focus on what's new, instead of what works.

It's more exciting, more fun and more hopeful to seek out and launch new books. It's the culture of many industries, particularly ones that are seen as creative.

Nike and General Mills and the local freelancer all generate a bigger contribution with their classic stuff.

It turns out that time spent on packaging, promoting and spreading the ideas in the core list is almost always a solid investment.

There's a simple explanation:

Successful backlist products have crossed the chasm and are selling to the mass market, the largest chunk of any market. These are people who don't buy a lot of books (or sneakers, or cereals) a year, but when they do buy one, they buy a popular one. And so, every year, year after year, millions of copies of Dr. Seuss books are sold. Not because they're new, but because that's what people buy.

On the other hand, frontlist products, the new stuff, are bought by a smaller group, the early adopters, the people who like buying new books. These people are easier to reach, probably more fun to work with, but because they seek variety, they rarely all align and buy the same product.

[FWIW, the readers of this blog and followers of my work are almost all in this category--focusing on early adopters is a fine way to build a platform for work you care about—it's something that I do on purpose. But it doesn't always make economic sense.]

The way for an enterprise to build a core list, then, is to latch onto those frontlist titles that have proven themselves, to persistently and consistently work with the retail channel and the existing customer base to make them into classics—useful, reliable products or services that the masses can rely on.

This takes discipline and effort—product creators like me find this difficult. But publishers of all stripes, the organizations that exist to bring new ideas and useful technologies to the world, need to dig in and do this work. 

[Expiring today, Saturday: For the first time ever, Linchpin, one of my backlist books, is on promo on the Kindle. It's less than $2.]

       

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