Be Still
July 28th, 2008Our culture is suffering from an overdose of action and a shortage of contemplation.
– Piero Ferrucci
Lightpierce Night at the Movies: October Sky
May 19th, 2008Homer Hickam’s guide to achieving hilarious goals? Years of passion, planning, and perseverance.
Enjoy the movie and be inspired.
A firm grip on the market
April 21st, 2008Church of the Customer blog makes some good points about “free marketing” with the following video,
Jackie uses this video to make a compelling argument for giving away stuff to build an audience. However, I think basically the same thing would have occurred if the hugs were being sold for profit at a reasonable cost.
- Find a favorable market for your product (in this case, a mall safe enough to approach strangers for a hug)
- Employ a safe, approachable and friendly marketing strategy — hugs are intimate things, after all
- Be persistent
- Have an unyielding belief your product is what the market needs and wants
- Get lucky in finding the one person who will trust in you and your product and influence others to do the same
If there was one thought I’ve ever pulled from Jim Collin’s book, “From Good to Great” it was the idea of building momentum, or what he referred to as the flywheel effect,
…picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
This is the Flywheel Effect. It’s what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great.
If anything, the free hug video is, to me, more of an example of pure marketing gaining momentum than it is in the power of free.
Hilarious Goals: The Joke’s on Them
March 25th, 2008There’s a good deal of attention being paid to a 1995 Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll these days.
From the article,
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney.
Of course with these thoughts, Stoll soon became the punchline of the then hilarious goals of visionaries who were bold enough to swim upstream through the prevailing laughter and ridicule of inadequate knowledge, unproven experience and unavailable technology of the day, to completely change the tide of our experiences.
Want to achieve hilarious goals? Stop measuring your vision against the known of today and the proven of yesterday. Pursue your passion and do it. Finally, understand that while they may laugh at you today, the joke will be on them tomorrow.
Fruit Salad, the great connector
March 4th, 2008Tonight’s the first time I’ve caught the show “Carpoolers” on ABC. I’ve always been aware of the show, but never found any motivation to watch — until tonight’s episode.
While channel surfing earlier this evening to just have some ambient noise while doing some work, I stopped momentarily on ABC for no real reason other than my attention being diverted away from the television remote. In that moment of time, a scene came on where one of the characters, Aubrey, is taking his little girl to take you daughter to work day, and she is riding along with the other adult members of the carpool.
The moment that caught my attention was the little girl singing the “fruit salad, yummy yummy” song by the Wiggles. I was instantly hooked, and now totally diverted from what I was doing, to focus on the show.
I have two small children, and they love the Wiggles. Additionally, the Wiggles are the one child-based act that doesn’t disturb me with their content or just annoy the tar out of me with cuteness. That connection with the familiar, hooked me into the show. It wasn’t my familiarity with the product, nor the design of the packaging. I didn’t care about any of the industry reviews and reviews by my peers didn’t sway any interest in me.
It was a moment in a scene that played a snippet of a goofy song about fruit salad that brought back fun memories of my children growing up. The show connected with me.
There’s an important lesson to be learned in there, somewhere.