Re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s, ‘The Tipping Point,’ brought me back to some core truths that I believe in:
- Best advice of the past 18 months (by Ron Conway): “Give it to me pre-digested.” Why? Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I often fall in love with the details and nuances behind my thoughts, but others are busy and shouldn’t have to 'work for it.' By pre-digesting the message, you strip down to the core essence for your target audience. In the media business, the analog is, “Don’t bury the lead.”
- It’s about “Who, Then What.” Period. Picking the right team is the single most important decision you can make. Everything is subordinate to that, even strategy. This is a construct from 'Good to Great,' and I have endured no small amount of pain when I have forgotten this fact.
- Nothing is free, especially when it comes to the decisions you make around team-building. Hence, it is important to define and tap into people’s aspirations, and be clear on what a given decision path costs (in terms of lost alternatives, time, money).
- Eliminate Psychic Energy 'Vampires.' No team member, no matter how skilled or how long tenured, should be allowed to cost the team and organization a disproportionate amount of psychic energy. I have never for a minute regretted squeezing these psychic energy ‘vampires’ out of the business.
- Product design and product marketing should be designed from the ground up to be synergistic. The reminder here was a great article by Gladwell on Ron Popeil of Ronco, the consummate pitchman and pioneer of the infomercial.
- Related to this is the importance of not confusing attributes with outcomes. People hire your product or service to get a job done relative to their outcome goals and the constraints they face. Don't confuse ingredients with the recipe or the dining experience.
- Now more than ever, I believe in the ‘Seed,’ ‘Select,’ and then ‘Amplify’ model espoused many years ago by the authors of 'Blur;' namely, plant a lot of low cost seeds, select the seedlings that sprout, discard the rest and then amplify your strategy around the winners.
- If you can’t measure it, then it must not matter. Because you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
- Extrapolating on Gladwell’s theme of contagiousness, I would argue that the financial meltdown resulted from a kind of thought virus that spread globally to buyers and sellers, masking its virulence very well. By contrast, Obama’s message of 'Change You Can Believe' in is a kind of positive virus – a meme – that has become a mantra driving people to aspire to a new kind of leadership.
- Rhetoric provides a narrative that sets the context for a given topic by breathing life into a metaphorical stage, defining its players and the schema that they operate within. It’s the ultimate definition of the situation.
- True engagement and 'focused attention' is a primary bit of currency in the age of information-overload. Measuring, monetizing and making engagement more efficient and more systematic feels like the big “what’s next” after impressions and clicks.
- Business networking is about maximizing your reachm whereas social networking is about connecting with like minds. Therefore, be 'promiscuous' in accepting LinkedIn Connection requests, but be a 'prude' when it comes to accepting friends requests in services like Facebook, and design your online presence accordingly in each sandbox.
- So much of the way that we think about risk and risk mitigation is predicated on the belief that game-changing calamities can be managed and avoided. But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb compellingly argues in “The Black Swan” and “Fooled by Randomness” it is specifically the game-changing event that is both impossible to predict and the greatest mover of the needle, so maybe more of our macro thought-process has to be about being ready for big delta events versus pretending that they can be prevented. Arguably, on a personally level recognizing and executing on such game changing moments is inseparable from being slow and steady -- unless you have coupon clipper discipline. It’s about embracing the paradox of being both the tortoise AND the hare.
