Do you think Karl Benz could have iterated the automobile, and released a half-driveable concept to the public? Do you think Apple could have iterated the iPhone, and released a smartphone that only sometimes works?
If you have one shot to create outsized success, an iterative process is not the way to go.
In a crisis, there is a very thin line between crashing and soaring.
Sometimes it’s the industry itself, and that’s not the fault of the company. No airline or hotel business model exactly thrives in a global lockdown.
But outside those specific hammered industries, you can look around at other industries: businesses in the same field either seeing record profits or going flat broke.
Money helps people.
Due to many factors – decreased violence, technological advancements, increased education, charitable aid, foreign investment – the amount of poverty in the developing world has decreased drastically over the past few decades. In 1990, over 36% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. By 2015, that figure was under 10%.
Regardless of how the folks got the money, having it is clearly positive.
I have a blanket policy of turning down all sales meetings.
The tricky part comes when you don’t know it’s a sales meeting.
We’d recently announced that Discosloth was hiring. I was looking for a paid search specialist, and it took me a few months to find the right fit. Those few months brought an onslaught of inquiries and emails and phone calls – people looking for a job, people trying to sell outsourcing services, people selling software.
I was sitting in this fellow’s office, and he was absolutely lording it over me, and I wasn’t even sure why.
I’d gotten to know the owner of a small media company in Little Rock, and he’d wanted me to meet his director of production. I went over to the studio, got introduced, and then sat down in the fellow’s office to get to know him.
Here I was, the naive 24-year-old freelancer, confused as heck.
I was just a camera guy. I made websites on the side. I was broke, had a lot of acne, weighed 145 pounds, and just wanted to hang out around some other media nerds. I was no threat.
Yet somehow that didn’t matter – I was fresh meat and this guy was out for the kill.
Have you ever noticed that whenever a profession is slipping out of first place, tactics get a little more desperate? Whenever something is falling out of favor, and the former experts are getting a little grey around the temples, suddenly there’s a last-ditch grab for control.
I’ve seen it in countless situations. It happened with old-school barbers. It happened with film vs digital photographers. I’m even seeing it start to happen with online marketers.
Here’s how it plays out in real life.
A few days ago I wrote a post over on the Discosloth blog about Shakeup 2.0, and what it’s going to mean to agencies.
I like to prophesy, and like all contemporary prophecies everyone else should take them with a fat grain of salt.
In this case, my musings were about the state of digital marketing agencies. I created a list of 5 things that would be the make/break factors of survival in an economic downturn. For an agency, the winning factors are:
Would you go to the gym and hire a 400-pound man as a physical trainer?
No, of course not.
I wonder about the mentors, the gurus, the life coaches, the business strategists, the financial advisors. They fill my inbox and ring my phone, every single day. I can show you hundreds of my LinkedIn messages proving that these folks can do everything. Increase your sales, wealth, happiness, productivity, peace, health, profits.
I once worked in a cubicle across from a really nice guy. He was truly a caring, calm, and level-headed person in all regards, and spent most of his time doing work on his high-end desktop.
Back then, computers made noise when they worked, and you actually had to wait for things to happen when you clicked somewhere. A particularly large project locked the computer up. The fan whirred. His cursor froze, an eternal hourglass.
I have spent a good deal of time in the past week speaking with artists about an upcoming book project. After finding a dozen or so artists and designers I liked, I sent inquiries along with specifications. The responses were things like:
These are actually portions of responses that I received.
If these methods actually work, it is all well and good. But I suspect things aren’t working quite so well for these artists.