Author Archive

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Jim Collins or Seth Godin. Take your pick.

The small stuff matters, and it’s what makes change. I’ve even blogged about it before.

Ever thought that this law works across many other areas in life and work? Is this idea like gravity?

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Every now and then we’re reminded that the Niwot, Colorado-based fashion company Crocs is about to die. On their last legs in 2009, a failed brand 2010. This comes around every now and then for Crocs. I guess the remarkable aesthetic of their first shoe has polarized them in our minds. Which is a good thing for a brand if you want people to talk about it.

We respond to these predictions of Croc’s demise predictably. Like any other kind of polarizing thing. Sara Palin has nothing or everything to offer. Nothing in between.

Crocs isn’t dying at all, of course. They weren’t in 2009 and they aren’t today. Seems like they’re kinda like their namesake. One of the more adaptable companies around.

Business strategy, it’s been said, is like working with hypotheses. You do research before you try something, but in a market-driven context there’s no real way to test it very thoroughly until the market gives your hypothesis some feedback.

I wrinkle my brow a bit when branding and marketing experts craft brand strategies that they claim will cause action. Ideas that don’t just sound good on paper, but can be executed toward causing an action.

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Feelin all rainbow-y today.

I nursed a cold in front of the TV Friday night. Given the election season in Colorado, this was an exercise for the mute button.

I wonder how it would feel knowing you’ve achieved something in your life by primarily bringing down the competition instead of proving your own worth? Would you consider that an achievement?

This, even more than the general nastiness of the ads, was depressing. Due to the onslaught of negativity, I’m feeling a strange urge to contribute something positive to the morass. My part to counter the vibe as it were. After all, there so many more people dedicated to (as a client of mine put it) staying focused on the we’ve never been here before as opposed to the this isn’t working.

People with a profound awareness of this reality are all around me. I’m a lucky guy. A few examples from the work side of my life that’s keeping me hopeful:

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There are many places in the world that have regular “load shedding,” or rolling blackouts. It’s a fact of daily life.

When I travel with my wife and in-laws to India, we stay in a small townhouse in Nashik, Maharashtra. Load shedding is as much a part of our daily planning as what we need to get at market. It effects shower schedules (water is heated by an individual, portable “geyser” that runs on electricity), which cascades into breakfast schedules, which cascades into when we can leave the house, which cascades into when we’ll be able to meet with a visiting relative, which cascades into where we need to be for lunch (the main meal of the day), which inevitably bumps into the next scheduled load shedding.

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Not that anyone who knows me or reads this blog (both of you) needs another rant about people who rant about the stupid and irritating client. I’ve done that before.

But I was recently face-to-face with a few consultants and business owners who’ve motivated to write a bit more about this. I not sure why this is still in my craw, but here it is.

If your client isn’t doing something that is painfully obvious to you, it’s a sign that your client has a leadership maturity to be admired. That you know about their stupid actions or doltish inactions at all – that is, that they called you in the first place – is a signal that they realize they have a weakness and are serious enough in what they do to put their ego aside and call in someone to help.

Would that it were me.

We shouldn’t be dismayed or amazed at what they aren’t doing or don’t know. I’m quite sure that every one of us would seem like a child in the presence of certain experts who’d point out our inadequacies and how dangerously close to the edge we are in either missing a huge opportunity or screwing something up for good. An intellectual property lawyer (that image on my blog isn’t Creative Commons licensed?), a leadership expert (there’s more to social capital beyond my Twitter follower count?), an accountant (I can’t defend that in an audit?), a finance strategist (a traunch? leveraged growth?), an employment lawyer (I can get sued for that?), an innovation consultant (innovation is a discipline, not just big ideas?).

I for one am exceedingly unimpressed by a consultant who asks me to be astonished at their stupid client. Yeah, I get that. They called you, right?

It’s much more fulfilling to have a conversation with someone who’s willing to share how they went about solving the problem. And maybe even admiring the client for calling them in the first place.

True story: A guy robs several Pittsburgh banks fully undisguised. His face is recognized clearly on video surveillance, and he is caught. When asked by investigators why he didn’t wear a mask, he said “I wore the juice.”

The bank robber was convinced that lemon juice, when applied to the face, makes you invisible to cameras.

This is a leading example in a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” In essence, the paper suggests that this bank robber wasn’t just too stupid to be a bank robber. He was too stupid to know he is too stupid to be a bank robber.

The paper actually generated a term for this dynamic. Which I just love. When you’re too incompetent to know you’re incompetent, you’re exercising The Dunning-Kruger Effect. Here’s how they put it:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like [the bank robber], they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.

This has to be my favorite research paper. It came back across my radar not long ago, but in a strange way. In a guest blog post, I casually used the term “agnostic” when trying to describe people who refuse to believe in personal branding: “I am not a brand, spiel the brand agnostics. Don’t commoditize me.”

I was slightly uncomfortable with this line, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that I didn’t have a very deep understanding of what an agnostic really is, or how it’s different from atheism. So I did some casual searching about agnosticism and the paper turned up.

Turns out I was right about not knowing. What a gem of an insight for managing brands.

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I’m guest blog posting again. This time with The Redhead, Erika Napoletano. One of my favorite people on the social web because she’s herself to the end. Without apologies. Love her style or hate it, you know what’cher gettin. She builds trust, proving that authenticity rules in today’s world.

What better place, I figured, to write a bit more about personal branding. Because what Erika does can be called Personal Branding, but it might be something more.

You can check out my post here. And by all means: add Readhead Writing to your RSS feed. Rants writing and musings that will make your day better. And maybe make you re-think about what authenticity really means. I know she did for me.

It was my pleasure to write a guest post for a fairly new and very cool blog called Sundayed.com. You can check out my post here.

The post is a reflection of my ongoing interest in bridging the left and right-directed minds. I try to use the trumpet and improvisation as a way to illustrate how even in creative pursuits, we all deal with context and in fact it can create greatness. This is something the creative mind understands very deeply. But sometimes when context is presented in a business setting, creatives find the constraints instead of the inspiration. Or least mine did for long time.

Thanks for checking it out. Consider adding Sundayed to your RSS feed: a good site to feed the brain.

Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

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Only a few days after my post on branding re-framed as leadership (which had a short stab at personal branding) my lodestar on this topic Doc Searls linked to a few more posts that he (and now I) found apropos.

I wanted to point people to this one in particular because (a) I love it, and (b) I agree. Big kudos to you, Maureen Johnson. (And you should have whispered it, btw.) We are not brands. We are, indeed, weird. And layered. And multitudinous.

I’m actually working through a brand platform for a client that pivots around an eclectic, multi-layered experience. I turn to New Belgium Brewery as a model for this – a great brand that captures their layered experience. It can be done.

But people aren’t experiences. We experience. People aren’t work. We work.

And people aren’t results. People aren’t products. People aren’t services. We make, and yes, brand those things.