Little things with big impacts
As I was prepping for a marathon of flights in the Austin airport, I took notice of a bottled water vendor (Thunder Cloud) that had a small bowl of neatly cut lemon wedges at the register. They were perfectly sized for the bottles they sell and probably cost the vendor a couple of dollars a day and about 5 minutes to prepare, but was I ever thankful for them. That tiny little lemon wedge made the water so much better for the 7 hours of flying time ahead.
Little thing, big impact. Am I likely to do business with them again? You bet. Even if the stand across the hall is a few cents cheaper, they don’t have lemon wedges at their register. I’ll go buy another bottle of water at Thunder Cloud instead.
What little things do you do in your business that offer quality of life improvements for your customers but take very little to do on your part?
What little things could you be doing that you aren’t?
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Dark economic times ahead?
Are you good at putting together the pieces? There’s a lot going on in the world, and individual pieces may not seem like much, but put together they can create an attention-getting picture. Here are a few pieces you need to put together right now.
1. Europe’s financial system is crumbling. Specifically, the European Union’s interstate monetary system is on the verge of a meltdown the likes of which we have never seen before. Tune into any financial news network for the latest. I prefer Bloomberg, personally.
2. The United States economic recovery is slowing down because the Federal Reserve has stopped pumping trillions of dollars into the economy for free. (incidentally, this is a great article that explains what the banks did with the money)
3. Our biggest export markets include China and Europe. China has already put the brakes on its economy to stem inflation. That’s one of the many reasons why the “recovery” hasn’t really felt like one, and why so many of your friends and colleagues are still looking for work – without a healthy increase in exports, US companies aren’t selling as much, which means we aren’t making as much, which means we aren’t hiring as much.
4. The fractional reserve rate requirements in the US are about 1%; in Europe, about 2%.
The bad news is this: because the world’s economies are so interlinked, because our financial systems are so interdependent on each other, the house of economic cards is extremely vulnerable. Not only that, but between banks leveraging themselves out the wazoo and consumers not experiencing any meaningful wage growth (which means no increased consumer spending), all it takes for a massive financial crisis (bigger than 2008) is one solid system shock.
How solid a shock are we in for? We’ve never seen an entire continent unified under one monetary system like the EU, which means we’ve never seen a system failure of that magnitude in modern times. That appears to be in the cards in the next year or so, unless the EU volunteers to break itself apart, which seems fairly unlikely. How big does the shock need to be? Just enough to overwhelm the fractional reserve requirements.
What should you be doing personally? Whether you’re a citizen of the US, the Americas, the Eurozone, or anywhere else, realize that we are all (for good or ill) in this together, and when things go south with the European financial crisis, the shockwaves will be felt everywhere in the industrialized world.
- Cash is your friend for operational expenses like daily life.
- Reduce the amount of debt you carry if you’re financially able to do so.
- Things like gold for long term capital preservation aren’t bad if you have the ability to buy some.
I’d stay away from investments at this point for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that high frequency trading makes the market exceptionally vulnerable to system shocks. Consult a financial planner who has their fingers on the pulse of the world economy to get an idea of how you should diversify.
Are you running a business? Get ready for a slowdown. Beef up your database, beef up your lead generation, go full tilt on customer retention and be as flexible as you can with payments because your customers will be suffering as well. Treating them as well as you can (while not endangering your own finances) during rough times will earn loyalty that’s unshakeable.
If you’re thinking of making a career change, don’t you dare leap before you have something lined up. A miserable job that pays the rent is preferable to no job at all, and with the world economy on the edge, a system shock will make everyone go into turtle mode; hiring for anything except essentials is likely to dry up.
Always, always, always be building up your network. Grow it as strong as you can, because it’s the only thing that will save you if things go really badly. Jeff Pulver is fond of saying that we live or die on our databases, and that may literally be true in a very bad case scenario. You owe it to yourself and anyone you have responsibility for to be building like crazy right now.
I’ll take this moment to practice what I preach. Get connected:
What if things don’t go as badly as the predictions seem? What if things turn around? All this preparatory work will leave you with…
- a solid network you can rely on
- diversified financial investments
- employment
- cash to operate with
So even if these dire predictions are 100% wrong, you’ll still benefit from most of them. The only place you might lose out on is opportunity cost for not investing in the stock market.
I am not optimistic at all right now about the second half of 2011 and first half of 2012. There are far too many indicators that suggest rough seas ahead. Batten down the hatches.
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The nuances of strategy
One of the topics discussed at the recent MARCOM forum which there was great confusion about was the entire concept of marketing strategy. Marketers are genuinely confused at this point about strategy from a company perspective vs. strategy for specific marketing objectives.
Are they the same? Yes and no. The reason there’s so much confusion is that strategy is layered. Let’s look at its origins. The entire concept of strategy in the sense we’re trying to use it comes from the art of war. There are two kinds of strategy in warfare: grand strategy and campaign strategy.
Grand strategy is the “what” of the entire war. Beat the Nazis. Stop Attila’s invading force. Dismantle Al-Qaeda. Grand strategy is the ultimate goal of the war, created by the military leaders. In marketing terms, grand strategy is interchangeable with your organizational mission. It’s the entire reason you wake up in the morning. It’s the reason you happily work late into the night. It’s the what of your entire marketing focus, what the ultimate victory condition is.
Campaign strategy is the “what” of any individual campaign. Seize Little Round Top. Kill Osama bin Laden. Capture Iwo Jima. Campaign strategy defines the goals and objectives of any one portion of your campaign, telling you what you need to win. In marketing terms, campaign strategy is the what of a defined marketing effort. You’ve got a new shirt coming to market. What is the sales goal, and what will marketing do to promote the shirt? What resources do you have available? What timeframe must you achieve victory by?
Finally, tactics detail the “how” of any campaign strategy. How will you take Iwo Jima? How will you take Little Round Top? How will you kill Osama bin Laden? The same is true in marketing. How will you use social media to promote the shirt? How will you use email marketing to drive interest? How will you spend your monthly budget?
The reason that there’s so much confusion about strategy is that we’re trying to lump two very different things together under one label. Grand strategy and campaign strategy aren’t the same. Certainly, campaign strategy must be wholly aligned with the grand strategy, but the grand strategy needs to be defined first, and generally does not have any specific tactics associated with it. Grand strategy is composed of campaigns, which are in turn composed of tactics. Trying to match tactics to grand strategy is akin to trying to build the third floor of the house after the first without building the second floor.
In the example I cite of a road trip, grand strategy is where you want to go. Campaign strategy is what you’ll do to get there. Tactics are how you’ll implement the campaign strategy. If the grand strategy is to get from New York to Los Angeles, the campaign strategy might be doing so on $10/day and what route to take, and the tactics would be driving, deciding how often to switch drivers, how fast you should go, how many rest areas you should hit, etc.
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of why strategy can seem so confusing at times. Separate out grand strategy, start with that, then work your way down until you’re defining tactics. Grand strategy is where you start.
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Abdicating responsibility, losing power
The old saying from Spiderman goes like this, from Uncle Ben to Peter Parker:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
We know that power and responsibility go hand in hand. Irresponsible use of power eventually destroys both the power and the wielder – that’s just the natural order of things. Only with vision, care, responsible use, and unwavering ethics can power be maintained or grown long-term.
We know that power is attracted to responsibility. Mitch Joel has a great expression: “money flows through responsibility”. People who have resources want them to be used well and to benefit them, not to be squandered. Even the most altruistic use of resources does provide some net benefit to the donor, though that may not be their reason for donating.
Here’s where it gets interesting to me: what happens when people willfully shirk responsibility? I’d suppose that Uncle Ben would say that as you choose to forfeit responsibility, power will leave you, too.
We see this reflected in commerce: those unwilling to take on the responsibility of risks (owning a company, for example) will not accrue the material rewards for doing so.
We see this reflected in government: as more people choose to willfully turn over their responsibilities for their own welfare and the welfare of their neighbors to the government, they give away their personal power until they have none and their governments control their lives. Some of the most famous dictators and despots in history were democratically elected.
We even see this reflected in the microcosm of social media. People willfully choose to give away their responsibility to grow, becoming acolytes and followers in the truest sense of the word rather than leaders in their own right. “Social media experts” would not exist at all had we not chosen to turn over our responsibilities to learn, explore, and grow to others, preferring to have someone else do the hard work and just retweet the infographic afterwards.
If you want power, take on responsibility. Take charge of your life, take charge of your career. Take ownership of your mistakes and work to repair them as best as you can, or at the very least inoculate yourself against repeat performances.
There’s a wonderful exercise taught by Stephen K. Hayes in which you recall from your past someone betraying you, letting you down, disappointing you, stabbing you in the back, etc. and all of the implications of that. The exercise flips around in the second half of the mediation to have you retell the betrayal story, but make it seem as if it were your own fault that someone else took advantage of you. It’s a powerful exercise in reversing our abdication of responsibility, and an important first step on reclaiming your responsibilities – the first step on your path towards greater personal power.
What things in your life have you abdicated responsibility for?
What things in your life can you reclaim responsibility for?
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