Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (40 page)

You don’t have to like competition in order to understand that it exists. Your fair share isn’t going to be yours unless you give the public a reason to pick you.

I visited a favorite restaurant last week, a place that, alas, I hadn’t been to in months. The waiter remembered that I don’t like cilantro. Unasked, she brought it up. Incredible. This was uncalled for, unnecessary, and totally delightful.

Scott Adams writes about the cyborg tool that is coming momentarily, a device that will remember names, find connections, bring all sorts of external data to us the moment we meet someone. “Oh, Bob, sure, that’s the guy who’s friends with Tracy … and Tim just tweeted about him a few minutes ago.”

The first time someone does this to you in conversation (no matter how subtly), you’re going to be blown away and flabbergasted. The tenth time, it’ll be ordinary, and the twentieth time, boring.

Hotels used to get a lot of mileage out of remembering what you liked, but it was merely a database trick, not emotional labor on the part of the staff.

Today, if you go to an important meeting and the other people haven’t bothered to Google you and your company, it’s practically an offense. We’re about to spend an hour together and you couldn’t be bothered to look me up?
It’s expected, no longer amazing.

On the other hand, consider Dolores, a clerk at a 7-Eleven, who broke all sorts of coffee sales records because she remembered the name of every customer who came in every morning. Unexpected and amazing.

You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless.

[Irrelevant aside:
Linchpin
made the
New York Times
bestseller list yesterday. The list is hand tweaked, unreliable, and often wrong, but it’s still a great thing to have happen the first week a book is out. Thank you to each of you who pitched in and spread the word. Unexpected and amazing, both.]

People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame.

It’s precisely the wrong way to succeed.

Lots of journalists take significant detours in their careers and their writing in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe not to actually win one, but to be in that class, to have peers that have won one. Mystery novelists stick to the center of the road, because that’s where the road is. Movies are written and released in order to win an Oscar. Once there’s a category, a ranking, a place to battle for supremacy, we run for it.

Do you go to trade shows or enter markets or submit RFPs or push for a GPA or even gross ratings points because there’s a list of winners or because it’s what you actually want to do? Most bestseller lists and prizes measure popularity, not effectiveness.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet.

I love this definition from Wikipedia:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and reused the type.

Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose. Now, you can say “Festivus” or “There is no I in team …” or “that took real courage” when describing a golf shot, and we immediately get it. Monty Python took a cliché about the Spanish Inquisition and made it funny by making it real. The comfy chair!

The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.
Juxtapose the cliché with the unexpected truth of what you have to offer. Apple does this all the time. They point out the cliché of a laptop or a desktop or an MP3 player and then they turn it upside down. Richard Branson takes the expected boredom of a CEO and turns it upside down by doing things you don’t expect.

I often use the
Encyclopedia of Clichés
to find clichés that then inspire opposites. It’s a secret weapon and it’s all yours now. Have fun.

I got an email from someone who had hired a consulting firm to help his company find its true brand self. They failed. He failed. He asked me if I could recommend a better consulting firm.

My answer: the problem isn’t the consultant; it’s the fact that if you have to search for a brand essence, you’re unlikely to find one.

Standing for something means giving up a lot of other things and opening yourself to criticism. Most people in the financial services industry (or any industry, actually) aren’t willing to do that, which is why there are so few Charles Schwabs in the world.

First, decide that it’s okay to fail and to make a ruckus while failing. THEN go searching for the way to capture that energy and share it with the world.

Clothes don’t make the man; the man makes the man. Clothes (and the brand) just amplify that.

In most fields, there’s an awful lot of work put into the last 10% of quality.

Getting your golf score from 77 to 70 is far more difficult than getting it from 120 to 113 or even from 84 to 77.

Answering the phone on the first ring costs twice as much as letting the call go into the queue.

Making pastries the way they do at a fancy restaurant is a lot more work than making brownies at home.

Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same.

Except it’s not. Of course not. The message is not the same.

The last 10% is the signal we look for, the way we communicate care and expertise and professionalism. If all you’re doing is the standard amount, all you’re going to get is the standard compensation. The hard part is the last 10%, sure, or even the last 1%, but it’s the hard part because everyone is busy doing the easy part already.

The secret is to seek out the work that most people believe isn’t worth the effort. That’s what you get paid for.

And this is the problem with just about every lame speech, every overlooked memo, every worthless bit of boilerplate foisted on the world: you write and write and talk and talk and bullet and bullet, but no, you’re not really saying anything.

It took me two minutes to find a million examples. Here’s one: “The firm will remain competitive in the constantly changing market for defense legal services by creating and implementing innovative and effective methods of providing cost-effective, quality representation and services for our clients.”

Write nothing instead. It’s shorter.

Most people work hard to find artful ways to say very little. Instead
of polishing that turd, why not work harder to think of something remarkable or important to say in the first place?

There’s a gulf between hourly work and linchpin work.

You should pay people by the hour when there are available substitutes. When you rely on freelancers, you can put a value on their time based on what the market is paying. If there are six podiatrists in town and all can heal your foot, the going rate is based on their time and effort, not on the lifetime use of your foot.

On the other hand, if there are no short-term substitutes, then you don’t pay what the market will bear; instead, you pay what someone is worth. Big difference.

Consider, for example, someone putting together a series of concerts for which they intend to sell subscriptions, or even have the musicians sell tickets.

They could seek out pretty good musicians and imagine that paying them $500 or more per hour is very fair compensation. After all, that’s more than a podiatrist gets, and she gives you back the use of your foot.

But when they find a linchpin, someone who either will make it easier for them to sell subscriptions or will bring an audience with them, the question isn’t how much time it took for the musician to do her set; the question is “what did she bring in terms of value,” right? An indispensable person, someone with a rare asset, has few substitutes, and an hourly rate makes a lot less sense.

So, if a musician is going to sell 300 subscriptions for you and you earn $200 a subscription from that effort, that person just added $60,000 worth of value. Who cares if it took a minute or a day? What’s on the table is who gets what portion of the value added.

I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand-new office tower in Boston had a serious problem—there was a brown stain coming through the drywall (
all
of the drywall), no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty-story building, if you have to rip
out all the drywall, this is a multimillion-dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired Henry in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, “I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed.” They instantly signed on because if he succeeded, the project would be saved.

Henry asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware-store chemical and handed it to them. “Here, this will work.” And then he billed them $45,000. That’s quite an hourly wage. It’s also quite a bargain.

When Blythe and her partners started Lula’s Sweet Apothecary, the best vegan ice cream stand in this hemisphere, they didn’t have enough money to afford the letters to put “dairy free” on the sign in their window. They couldn’t even afford “vegan.” So the signage says nothing about what they
don’t
put in their ice cream.

What they discovered was that word among the tribe of vegans in the East Village of New York City (an even bigger group than you might imagine) spread fast. The product was remarkable enough that just a few happy customers were enough to spread the word.

The other thing they discovered is that non-vegans were willing to walk on in if the place looked cool enough. In fact, the lack of ingredient declaration on their window actually helped them reach out to people who might have been scared away at the lack of milk.

Ink on the website is free, so they use the v-word there, but even though they can now afford lettering, the window is still proudly mute on their rigor regarding ingredients. No sense scaring away customers who don’t care (and the customers who do care probably heard the news from their friends in advance).

Marketers fall into one of two categories:

A few marketers benefit when they make their customers
smarter
.
The more the people they sell to know, the more informed, inquisitive, freethinking, and alert they are, the better these marketers do.

And most marketers benefit when they work to make their customers
dumber
. The less they know about options, the easier they are to manipulate, the more helpless they are, the better these marketers do.

Tim O’Reilly doesn’t sell books. He sells smarts. The smarter the world gets, the better he does.

The vast majority of marketers, though, take the opposite tack. Ask them for advice about their competitors, and they turn away and say, “I really wouldn’t know.” Ask them for details about their suppliers, and they don’t want to tell you. Ask them to show you a recipe for how to make what they make on your own, and “it’s a trade secret.” Their perfect customer is someone in a hurry, with plenty of money and not a lot of knowledge about their options.

You’ve already guessed the punch line—if just one player enters the field and works to make people smarter, the competition has a hard time responding with a dumbness offensive. They can obfuscate and run confusing ads, but sooner or later, the inevitability of information spreading works in favor of those that bet on it.

When it comes to art, to human work that changes people, the mass market is a fool. A dolt. Stupid.

If you wait for the market to tell you that you’re great, you’ll merely end up wasting time. Or perhaps instead you will persuade yourself to ship the merely good, and settle for the tepid embrace of the uninvolved.

Great work is always shunned at first.

Would we (the market) benefit from more pandering by marketers churning out average stuff that gets a quick glance, or would we all be better off with passionate renegades on a mission to fulfill their vision?

Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart above).