I was talking with a shop assistant recently - her job was not secure and her mother was worried that "at nineteen you'll lose the only job you've ever had".
Why would someone cling to a job where they sit alone in an empty store? If it appears foolish it's because we can see possibilities for her that she can't. But from her perspective she's safe inside her small world - the outside world offers only fear.
The key is to realize that we're all in the same situation - no matter how large our world, it's all we know. You'll never know what possibilities lie outside it unless you step out and take a look.
Times are tough for many businesses and will likely get worse. If you needed proof, however, that adding value to customers generates profit in any economic climate, consider Apple's earnings for Q4 08 - Apple sold 6.8 million iPhones last quarter, has USD25B in the bank and zero debt.
It's easy to blame the economic climate, recalcitrant customers or the phases of the moon for poor profitability. What's hard is to accept responsibility for poor results and to start creating real value for your prospective customers.
Near my office is a cafe that has practically no foot traffic, is almost always empty and changes hands every year or so. For each new owner the temptation is obvious - a fully fitted kitchen & cafe with low rent. There's also a conceit - 'I can run this business better than the last guy'.
Sadly each of the three owners I've met ran the cafe in exactly the same way - as a completely conventional cafe inviting passers-by to drop in for a coffee or light snack. It's a business model that requires plentiful prospective customers and a scarcity of competition. Funnily enough, that kind of location doesn't come with low rent.
"Build it and they will come" doesn't apply for any business - you need to give people a good reason to visit. A reason worth stopping what they were doing, traveling at their cost to your business and giving you their hard-earned cash. If you don't know what that reason is, your prospective customers certainly don't.
Recently my brother and I visited a high street, high-end audio equipment retailer. In the hushed tones of faux luxury we browsed under the gaze of a self-important salesman. My brother didn't need him - he knew all the models, the specs, comparison prices and that some of these very expensive hi-fi units were already superceded. We walked out without conversation or purchase.
The concept of a middleman as a gatekeeper - someone you must go through to purchase - died several years ago. The only way to survive as a middleman now is to add value that a customer needs and can't obtain on their own. Be an advisor, simplifier, connector, risk carrier, troubleshooter ... whatever your prospective customers need.
If customers purchase your products through a tender process, they're giving you a stern warning - you sell a commodity.
Commodities are good products. Jim Collins taught us, however, that 'good is the enemy of great'. Make something great and customers won't waste time and money shopping around, they'll come straight to you and buy.
The employed labor market is about potential, based on prior success. A low risk form of potential, if you like. But in the self-reliant, self-starting, self-employed world, no one's interested in what you could do if you actually did it. They're interested in what you're already doing or have already done. It's an easy lesson to understand but a hard one to learn / unlearn.
Kudos to Seth Godin and his blog musings for helping me to understand this.
Elegant ideas are so powerful that to know them is to fully understand them. To understand them is to forget what life was like beforehand - their designed simplicity belies their value.
Here's a simple idea that I appreciate every week - shopping trolley?wheels that are self-arresting on an inclined moving walkway:
Here's how they work - on normal flooring, the metal wheels roll normally. On the moving walkway, however, the metal wheels fall into the tread, resting the trolley on its rubber stops and allowing me to let go of my heavy shopping trolley. It's effortless, automatic and the arresting function has no moving parts.
It's so simple it's obvious. Anyone could have thought of it, right? Wrong. As a sober reminder, here is?a moving walkway travesty from Melbourne domestic airport:
As you enter the walkway you see this sign, telling you to release your handle. Then a smaller warning sign with the same info. Then an emergency stop button to arrest boths walkways if needed. When you reach the other end, there's yet another sign &?emergency stop. Finally - just moments from?disaster -?you hear a looped recording telling you to now ignore all the signs and depress the handle before?exiting the walkway. I can see it now?- crowds piled up at both ends of the walkway for failing to release and depress their handles at the critical moment.
Why? They fixed the wrong problem. They satisficed on their trolley design, burdening users with?the?responsibility of protecting life and limb by performing?a counter-intuitive task. They didn't push through the complexity to find the simple solution.
Never underestimate the value of elegant ideas, nor those who generate them.
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How do you pitch a product that's buried on a web server and noticed only when it fails? By creating a campaign that's different+good - being different gets you attention, being good sells your product.
IMO this campaign largely fails by being only kinda different and kinda good - apart from taking 2 minutes to say 1 minutes' worth of info, it adds nothing but Sophos knowledge to the viewer. That's what we call an advertisement - just another interruption. Instead, Sophos needed to understand their audience to create something they want to see, and then fully commit to delivering it.
Here's two videos that demonstrate this well. Firstly, here's a Virgin America safety video that 200,000 people have voluntarily watched on YouTube, when they're nowhere near a plane. Its designers clearly understand travelers, creating appropriate humor to capture their interest:
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Secondly, here's a video demonstrating the benefits of committing fully to pretty much anything, with almost 8 million views to date:
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Having said all that, being kinda different + kinda good is better than not being different or good at all - I am, after all, one person bothering to blog about Sophos' video. So take risks, try, fail & learn - in world full of noise, the biggest risk of all is to play it safe.
Today Seth points us to senseless precision that muddies the distinction between what's important and what's not. Don Norman points out overstating precision can also be lethal in his lecture on the perils of intelligent devices. The entire 90 minute lecture is fascinating, but his comments on precision start at 33 minutes:
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