4 books for fresh thinking

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 22, 2010 in Awakening, Books, Marketing | View Comments

Julien wrote a great blog post the other day about putting better stuff in your brain, stuff that will feed your brain and take it in new directions. Here are a few suggestions for things you can add to your virtual or real bookshelf, should you be so inclined.

Full disclosure: everything’s an affiliate link, probably to Amazon. Fair warning.

New Thinking

The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. This very hard to find classic is a life lessons book disguised as a book about architecture. A great deal of it talks about qualities of building (web pages, marketing materials, houses, careers, whatever) in ways that put words to things you’ve been wanting to express all your life but never quite found. Alexandar’s book is wonderfully refreshing and helps you to develop a language of patterns for anything you’re doing in creative work.

Awakening

Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trunpga. Trungpa’s Shambhala will wake you up. It will literally deliver a swift kick to your head and also explain why some things that should make you happy instead sometimes evoke sadness. It’s not depression – it’s an inherent quality of beauty, an understanding that what you’re looking at isn’t going to last. Very worthwhile. If you read, study, and master this book, you will make huge strides towards freeing yourself of many of your self-imposed limitations.

Strategy

The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s military classic has been translated and retranslated more times than you can count, and most of the translations are based on the old 1910 Lionel Giles translation. While workable, Giles didn’t necessarily capture the flavor of Chinese idioms or the language as well. Wee Chow Hou’s translation does a great job of this. Even if you’ve read other translations, get this one.

Fresh Eyes

The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman. This is THE book I recommend to anyone who’s just gotten a digital camera. While it’s easy to get started with basic photography ideas like the Rule of Thirds, Freeman’s book takes you to another level. He teaches you how to SEE, how to look for photographic opportunities, recognize patterns, use built-in human tendencies for eye movement, and see life through your lens in new and different ways. Freeman’s book is a game changer, not just for a photographer, but for anyone who has to do any kind of visual work – web design, WordPress themes, marketing collateral, whatever.

Notice something else here? None of these books are sales or marketing books. There’s a reason for that. If you’re looking for brain changing, game changing books, chances are the thinking you’re looking for isn’t going to come from the sales and marketing section of your bookstore. You have to dig into much more primal stuff in order to get to those breakthroughs – art, photography, architecture, war, belief. Marketing books can interpret some of these primal things and transform them into actionable materials, but you first have to have a well to drawn on, and no marketing book I’ve ever read can provide that.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

The sale is better because the sign is bigger

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 19, 2010 in Marketing | View Comments

At the grocery store, a husband and wife were arguing over a $3 bag of crackers while I tried to vanish in plain sight.

Husband: Look, there’s the crackers we want. And they’re on sale, 10% off.
Wife: I have a coupon for $1 off, let’s use that instead.
Husband: You can’t use both. The 10% sale is better.
Wife: How would you know? The coupon is for a dollar. I think that’s better.
Husband: No! The sale is better!
Wife: No it isn’t! I’m pretty sure the coupon is better!
Husband: The sale is better, you stupid [expletive]!
Wife: Why?
Husband: The sale is better because the sign is bigger!

The power of marketing is such that a bigger sign can defy the laws of mathematics to the computationally challenged.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

The trouble with innovation

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 18, 2010 in Marketing, Sales | View Comments

Take a look at the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor!

It’s amazing – it’s got the ability to transform any free state element into crystallized elements! Cloud of fog? No problem – the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor will convert it into incredibly handy Crystallized Air. Steam cloud? Crystallized Water and Crystallized Fire are just a button’s press away! Contact a local 305+ engineer to buy yours today!

What do you mean you don’t want one?

This is the greatest dilemma of innovation – when you’ve got something that is authentically new and innovative, you will have incredible difficulty helping people to understand even what it is, much less why they want one. Most of the things we call innovative are spins on existing things, and for good reason – it’s easier to sell someone on an idea they understand already.

• Email was innovative for its delivery speed and cost, but the idea of sending a message to someone else in the written word was not new, and thus it was adopted with relative speed because everyone understood what it did.
• A DSLR camera is exactly the same conceptual device as a film camera, minus the film part.
• The iPad isn’t innovative at all, which is what makes it sell so well – it’s a very large iPod Touch, and anyone who has used the iPhone OS immediately understands and gets it.

True innovation requires your brain to first comprehend what something is, figure out if it’s useful to you, and only then finally decide whether or not you’re going to purchase it.

If you’re a marketer who is trying to market something that is legitimately innovative, this is one of the few times that I’ll strongly recommend a case study, or multiple case studies, so that you can get over the first two hurdles with a prospective customer as quickly as possible. Without those examples of how something innovative can be used, you’re leaving it up to the mind and imagination of the prospect to create value for themselves, and your sales will deeply suffer as a result.

That said, if you can create something truly innovative and valuable, the landscape is yours for as long as you can hold onto it.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Strengths, weaknesses, tanks, DPS

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 15, 2010 in Marketing, World of Warcraft | View Comments

Strengths, weaknesses, tanks, DPS

I asked on Twitter the other day:

“Assume you can do only one. Do you enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses? Why?”

The responses were amazing and overwhelming.

BrianneVillano: @cspenn Enhance strengths so you can excel@something. Otherwise, you are working towards mediocrity.
bryanrhoads: @cspenn Strengths! analogy – Jordan would always be avg baseball player – his strength is basketball – be the best!
bryanwp: @cspenn I prefer to mitigate weakness. Its the weakness that can bring you down. Strength can only help you. What about you?
bryanwp: @cspenn mitigate weakness. The weakness is what can bring you down in a time need. What about you?
christinainge: @cspenn Enhance strengths-no one is without weaknesses, and many times, they lead to growth, if your strengths are there.
djwaldow: @cspenn Easy. Enhance strengths. Bigger payoff to be best at something than so-so. I’m a big believer in focusing on what you are good at
dvautier: @cspenn Mitigate weaknesses. Strengths will shine no matter what, weaknesses are opportunities to learn, change & create a new strength
EQGal: @cspenn Enhance your Strengths! For me the Gallup research supports what just seems to make sense…the positive way to BE!
findenlake: @cspenn Weaknesses. It’s all about working from a solid foundation. A weakness can hurt you more than An average attribute.
hoovers: @jsandford @cspenn Enhance your strengths. But context is key. (I wrote on this here: http://is.gd/cLwj9 (expand) )
jayjaboneta: @cspenn focus on enhancing my strengths according to Marcus Buckingham.
jeremymeyers: @tamadear @teresabasich @cspenn but strengthening strengths implies that they’re not yet good enough, no?
joeshartzer: Stronger strengths make you better. RT @cspenn: Assume you can do only one. Do you enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses? Why?
jsandford: @cspenn Def. mitigate weaknesses; that doesn’t imply “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”, though. Your strengths will still be just that.
kimjinwhan: @cspenn I will stronger than before, if I enhence my strength. And it will covers my weakness.
LeanneStewart: RT @RobHatch: @cspenn Strengths, always strengths. Focus on those for yourself and others, they are the means for addressing weaknesses.
mckra1g: @cspenn Enhance strengths bc what we focus on expands. Knowledge of our weaknesses *is* a strength FWIW. Most r oblivious to theirs.
MKMartin: @cspenn Focus on mitigating weaknesses. “The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”
pammcallister: Strengths. Works better, easier. RT @cspenn Assume you can do only one. Do you enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses? Why?
RobHatch: @cspenn Strengths, always strengths. Focus on those for yourself and others, they are the means for addressing weaknesses.
sandrapakosh: @cspenn I build on my strengths… even the lesser ones… while learning lessons.
smallbizhowto: RT @cspenn: Assume you can do only one. Do you enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses? Why?
StevenSchlagel: RT @cspenn: Assume you can do only one. Do you enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses? Why?
tamadear: @cspenn Strengthening strengths almost always mitigates weaknesses by default. The reverse, however, is not often so.
tamadear: @TeresaBasich @cspenn Strengthening strengths is an action of building. Mitigation is patching and filling holes….
TeresaBasich: @cspenn Enhance your strengths. Positive focus and effort into what you’re good at helps mitigate weaknesses by default.
TeresaBasich: @cspenn Interesting observation: Men seem to be about weakness mitigation; women seem to be about focusing on strengths. Biology?

Here’s the catch: the question is somewhat false, or at the very least has a catch. Let me introduce you to two concepts from World of Warcraft, tanks and DPS. (for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll group healers in with DPS, for those that know the game)

In the video game, tanks are a type of character that stand in front of packs of monsters and get beaten up so that other players on the team don’t. They protect spellcasters and healers, letting them do their jobs. As a result, tanks have to balance their survivability – a measure of how resilient they are to getting beaten up – and threat, or how much attention they can generate from bad guys, so that the bad guys don’t turn their attention elsewhere.

In the video game, DPS (damage per second) are a type of character that zap, shoot, burn, freeze, or otherwise cause damage to the bad guys. Their sole job is to kill the bad guys as fast as possible before the tank succumbs to the bad guys.

When it comes to managing the various attributes of these character archetypes, DPS have it easy. They MUST emphasize their strength – the amount of damage they can do – to the exclusion of nearly everything else. If DPS are bad at what they do, the bad guys will win because the tank will die, and then the bad guys will beat up the DPS and kill them off quickly, spectacularly, and humorously.

When it comes to managing the various attributes of tanks – that’s a different story. For tanking, you have to balance and mitigate your weaknesses first and foremost because yours is a job of endurance. If your armor is weak, if your gear isn’t up to scratch, you have low stamina, which means you die faster. If your weapons are weak and you don’t know what you’re doing with all the buttons to press, you don’t generate enough threat, and the DPS get eaten first. Whichever is your weakest area is the area you must address first in order to provide maximum survivability to your group. (those who are tanks know all about defense cap, melee hit cap, stamina, avoidance, EH, dodge, parry, block, etc.)

The answer, to the extent that there is an answer, about whether to emphasize strength or mitigate weakness depends on what you have to do. If you’re in a marketing department and your job is to generate content, then you have a very focused function to perform and everything and anything you can do to make yourself a better content generator will show very quickly. The results you generate will dramatically improve even with just a few small improvements. You’re effectively in a DPS role.

Suppose, however, you’re in a marketing department and your job is defensive SEO, protecting your web properties from competitors. Suddenly it’s not just about generating content – now you’re mitigating weaknesses in page structure, managing keyword lists, trying to build links, and trying to steal away link juice from competitors. Rather than aggressively go after one small area, you have to mitigate the weakest areas of your SEO strategy first, then slowly build up strength across the board. Too much strength in any one area inherently leaves other areas weak and open to competitors to attack you. You’re effectively in a tanking role.

Which is best? Neither. Any experienced World of Warcraft player will tell you that a bad tank leads to failure, and bad DPS leads to failure just as easily. They’re symbiotic and collaborative. The toughest part for you as a Warcraft player or business person is knowing which role you’re in and doing it well.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Do you own your home city?

Posted by Christopher S. Penn on Jun 10, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing | View Comments

Do you own your home city?

What do I mean? Let’s say you’re a business. Wherever you’re based, somewhere you are a local business. You might be in Baltimore, Cedar Rapids, Topeka, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Tokyo, Stockholm, or London. Somewhere, you’re local. Do you own that market?

If you’re jetting all over the country/world to speak at different conferences, you might want to take a few minutes to check out your own backyard as well. You’d be surprised at what’s available. What shows are at your local convention center? Most major venues even in small cities have a visitor’s bureau that knows what’s happening in town. Are you taking advantages of all those events for exhibiting, sponsoring, and speaking? They’d sure cut down on the wear and tear you subject yourself to on airplanes and hotels, wouldn’t it? (not to mention your wallet)

How about your customer base? Have you dominated your home city? If not, why not? Unlike your national and global competitors, your prospects are literally a walk, bus, or car ride away. You have the local, home-team advantage when you can show up in person to call on someone rather than rely on a webinar or email. If you’re lucky enough to have branches in multiple cities, do you own those cities? Are the people in those cities out and about visiting customers and prospects, since you don’t need to subject your staff to the TSA just to say hello?

We overlook the home-team, home-turf advantage precisely because it’s our backyard. We take it for granted. We don’t even see it, walking by the storefronts and offices every day on our shuffle to our own offices. We overlook the power of leaving the office for a few hours because it’s too convenient. “I’ll get around to it, it’s not far away” kills more local business opportunities than you think.

How many pots of gold are there in your home city that you haven’t found yet?

Try this. Go into your LinkedIn network right now and just browse – without any specific focus in mind for prospects or customers – your local geographic area. See what’s in there right now. Go to Twitter search, select Advanced Search, type in your ZIP code and see who’s tweeting within 5, 10, and 50 miles. Go to Facebook and see who’s in the area, who’s a member of the local geographic network. Reach out to those people. Reach out and say hello.

That’s the first step towards winning the game – recognizing and capitalizing on the home-team advantage.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.