The Obvious Choices

Linchpin by Seth Godin.

The Little BIG Things by Tom Peters

Switch by the Heath brothers.

Rather than review/gush all over these individually, I will just say that Seth and Tom have become institutions. Seth has finally written the book he was always hinting at in all his others (message: stop following my instructions and just figure it out! It’s a mystery, but it’s not impossible to figure out). Which may or may not be a killing of the golden goose for him (he could have spent his life pounding out books that walk you through marketing ideas until he was too senile to write them himself; he could have become the Dear Abby of the marketing world. Instead he threw the curtain back, revealed that you were your own wizard, so stop your bitching and get to work). Seth, I know you read this (I attended your seminar in Chicago), so let me say this: keep writing these big books! Stupid like pamphlets and workbooks are for the lesser minions to write. You need to to write bigimportantthoughtprovoking books! Pease!

Tom is coasting, but Tom coasting is like most of us sprinting for miles. He has lived at this level so long, it doesn’t even look revelatory anymore. I mean, can anyone ever top the simple idea that The Work Matters? Not going to happen. He reminds us that we are people and that they way we spend our time should not be about personal profit in the financial sense, but more about pride and love and passion, out of which financial success will come. The press release, the blog post, the web page, the memo, the spreadsheet, the project sheet, all these things we make can be more than just following the rules, it can be magic and love and excitement and interest. If the work really matters, then why the he’ll are you doing this crap?

The Heath brothers, who made a name for themselves with the “this is how a lay person should think like a marketer” book Stick, have switched to a new word: Switch. How to change. Yourself, your office, your coworkers, your relationships, your habits, the nature of how we make changes is that minor topic they cover. They cover it well, with a smattering of persuasion psychology, lizard-brain neurobiology, and rules of thumb. The remind us yet again that work like is part of life, not some separate thing that happens eight-ten hours a day we would like to forget after it’s done, but that it’s all connected, so take the lessons you learn outside work and use them inside it and vice versa.

Books I Loved This Year That I’m Too Lazy to Look at what Date They Were Published

How Did That Happen? By the guys who brought you the “set expectations and validate them” books Oz and Emerald City, comes a book with a lot less gimmick and a lot more real. No need and reread the first two, just skip to this one which summarizes the first two in about ten pages (re-confirming that most business books are 90% filler to part you from your money). The main idea is that we need to stop blaming and start working. Ironically, the person who suggested the books to me is probably most in need of adopting the lesson. Of course, who knows what some of you would say about my book suggestions.

Reread Art of Possibility and Three Laws of Performance. I think I’ll read these annually. I need to re-hear these messages constantly.

Tribal Leadership. The book Logan and team wrote before three laws of performance. More case studies, smaller ideas, but more “doable.”. It’s the book I would recommend to pele who weren’t ready for the big ideas in three laws.

Winning by Jack Welch. I agree with every nasty thing Tom peters has ever said about jack welch. He’s the devil’s project leader, as far as I can tell (sorry Jack Donaghy). But this is a peek inside his warped mind. The tools can and should be used for good, not evil. I expected to scan it, but instead read every word. Totally not the self-aggrandizing crap the first book was, this one is really a workbook on how to get the most of of teams, assuming you don’t care about them as people.

Rework. I suggested this to my boss and he seems to have missed the point. To paraphrase his response: if you’ve started a small business, this is all 100% obvious. Yes, but if you are a cubicle worker, and haven’t learned these lessons, they are invaluable.

The idea of cool, pretty much invented out of whole cloth in the sixties to reflect the fire that burned inside disaffected youth growing up in England after the war is old.  The first ones found their own path, and that aura migrated across the pond to America in the shape of fashion and music to combine with Andy Warhol and a clear hatred of the grey-flannel suit /organization man crowd. Thus, rock and roll, hippies, punks, slackers and hipsters.

The second companies realized people in that age group desired cool, it was marketers’ job to make everything appear cool.  Airplane travel, sunglasses, books, German cars, comedy variety hours, jeans, the list goes on.

The end is near

Then Gen X got a whiff of it, cried “bullshit” in their day (remember Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything not wanting to making anything processed or sold) and spend their youth avoiding it.  Their younger siblings learned that yes, all that crap sucked, but that nothing they did was going to change the commercialization of cool, so they might as well dance, so to speak.

This world has entered a phase where Toyota is doing a great job trying to sell Cool Minivans (aka swagger wagons) to grown up gen x-ers now that Dennis Hopper has died selling his kin on income planning and investment.

Cool is dead. It went comatose decades ago, but the marketing world kept it on life support for as long as it could because it had just learned how to leverage cool for their own uses. But we’re pulling the plug.

So what comes after cool? Before cool, there was conformity, before that there was loyalty and patriotism, and before that fear, and before that reckless abandon.

My guess? Freedom.

Freedom

This isn’t just about marketing or capturing a hindsight zeitgeist (like I did two paragraphs ago), but about thinking what will the world (more to the point, my world, the internet and capitalistic worlds) will desire.  It’s not about 40-yo dads at Wilco shows because they are terrified about growing old and uncool, but about looking at a broad sweep of anything and choosing what to believe in and what to enjoy.

Patton Oswalt penned an interesting article in Wired about the death of geekery and pop culture otaku nerdery.  He says the wide horizon of anything and everything being available to you at a moment’s notice to dive into deeply is actually destroying pop culture.  That as he was writing the article, someone was already writing the version of the same article in LOL speak and another as if written by the Hulk and another spoken over a Korean cover of a journey song. That was what was going to ruin pop culture.

Yes, maybe, and, no. His argument relies on cool as the primary currency. You can’t be cool outside of the Lost fan group if you know who Jack’s dad is, but you can’t be cool inside the group if you don’t.  Cool is the currency that determines the value of that knowledge. What if the currency devalues? Who cares if you know or don’t know a factoid. You can google (sure, I’ll just lower-case that word) it, right? If anything is available 24/7, there’s no cache is knowing or not. You’ve printed so much money, no one cares how much you have.

Hacking Is the New Cool

Freedom to choose your life is the new goal.  Look at the rise of hacking culture (not the g33ks in black t-shirts, but the people who are teaching us how to be better eaters, exercisers, workers, thinkers, time managers, completers, anything). Look at Tim Ferriss and his two books that challenge you to rethink everything you know about jobs and health.  Both NYT bestsellers. Or Getting Things Done and the cult that has formed around that. The garage tinkerers who love buying Ikea furniture and turning it into other prices of furniture that better fit their lifestyles.

This isn’t self help, who’s primary goal is to make you feel better, but about being better. The hacker has learned that they can lose weight if they stand at their desk in their day job, but can’t afford a $600-$1,000 standing desk, so they learn how to hack their existing desk for less than $50. They learn how to use existing tools to ditch their cable account and still watch Top Chef. They trade credit score secrets.

Hacking is the first step to understanding freedom. You can’t choose a thing if you can’t build, use, or change a thing.  We value the choices we make more if we have to work a little to make them happen.

Freedom to select your love and your job and your lifestyle is the new cool. It’s the kind of trend that will define the post-post-industrial age more than any other.

Proof: name the Internet meme that captured more awareness than the 2010 Iranian protests. Sure, you can, but there are only a handful, and they are all designed around kids. Turning your twitter icon green got people who don’t care about Bed Intruders to care about something that was happening on the other side of the planet.  Choice and freedom is good, getting more people to feel that choice and freedom is even better. Look at the fury over iPod assemblers having a bizarrely high suicide rate.  Look at the coverage over the Sudan, which, for the first time in a decade, is making the front page of the papers.

Cool is dead. Freedom grows up.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick of Fast Company. Not the web site, but the magazine. What once was a glorious beacon to those work 2.0′ers who understood the weight of Tom Peter’s “The Work Matters” manifesto, one that discussed new models in working, new ideas in getting things done, and trying to cross-pollenate ideas from one industry to the other is now In Style for the laptop-and-business-class set.

Recent covers: McGee, director of Terminator. Sure, he’s got an interesting history but… shouldn’t that be on movie magazine? Skater/surfer kid Shawn White? The current issue some cleavage-bearing woman with hair bigger than Montana. Skin on the cover of Fast Company? This is the same magazine (technically) who’s August 1997 cover was simply “Brand You,” a model just getting traction (And note that the magazine really fell down hard when it stopped putting just typography on the cover and started finding pretty people for the cover… Ning anyone?).

Ask any pro in the publication world and you’ll hear the same thing over and over again: in order to cover the sunk costs of starting up and the hard costs of printing and delivering a magazine, a magazine must sell X number of copies to justify the real engine: subscribers. A magazine doesn’t make money because you buy it, it makes money because it call sell your eyeballs to someone else.

Thus, magazines are a numbers game. If you can’t keep your circulation above certain point, it almost makes more sense to mail all the subscribers a booklet of ads.

But why buy a magaine? Is it for the ads? (Maybe it is for Vogue, but not why I used to buy Wired, Spin, Business Week, Fast Company, The Industry Standard or the Red Herring.) No.

It’s the content, stupid.

You build a customer base by having good ideas, well written and well-presented. That creates fans, increases the circulation base to justify ads. (I swear, the ad model makes as much sense as owning a grocery store not to sell produce put to collect coupons.)

But everyone seems hell-bent on skipping steps 1-5 that they make nothing but crap magazines.

So here’s the solution.

Web-based magazine (duh!).  But it’s more than that. It’s turning the model around.  Instead of building a print magazine that makes money and you build a seperate website to remind people how much they love the printed magazine, make the web site first.  Create great content. Open submissions to anyone. The crowd picks the best articles (and helps copy-edit it), adds great comments and you pick the best stuff (and the comments), package it up with ads (yes, you have to re-write the ad contract to say you are buying web ads, and that the paper ads come free) and ship it to newstands and people who are willing to buy a paper-based subscription.

How does that work? Well, everyone gets the content for free (plus ads). But in the process, everyone helps build the magazine. Crowd sourcing determines the best ideas (you know, the ones that would sell best on a newstand). You only pay for stories that make it to press. Ad buyers will pay a higher web rate knowing that their ads are also in the print peice. 

The best part is this: if you want it on the newstand or a subscription, each issue is $30. An annual subscription is $200. No one would buy it?  Wait. Who buys magazines on a newstand? People in airports waiting to fly business-class. People who can afford it. People who don’t have time to read a whole community site. People who buy subscriptions to summerized business books. Execs who have more money than time. If it’s an amazing magazine that’s built a reputation for bringing new ideas to light first in a well-managed forum (and that’s exactly what the website would be), they’ll pay for it.

The best part? Costs are like nothing. Server space and a couple of drupal managers and a team of copy-editors and designers with an editorial lead. You pay per word relative to the sales, so if no one buys the first few issues, you don’t pay the writers much. But if sales go crazy, writers get paid big bucks, thus drawing more people and ideas out of the woodwork. Print costs are unit-based just like writing, and you can even say that the first year the magazine will be web-only just to get things going.

It’s already been said: Journalism isn’t dead, newspaper are. The model must change.

Which is why seeing this is so cool: http://stealourideas.tumblr.com/

I’ve been mulling and talking internally (quietly) for a while about this idea I think could be a killer. But I’m not getting the interest I was expecting. So I haven’t started to try and sell it up the chain until I get more people on my level enthused about it.

So I’m looking for help on trying to find a way to pitch this project.  Allow me to explain:

We are a staid, structured web site.  I have spent two years trying to integrate social media tools into the site: load your own photos, comments on most pages, contests, games, etc. My feeling is that it doesn’t take because people don’t really think about us when it comes to web 2.0 type-stuff. We are a reference site: when you want to learn about events or to look up alums, we are your site.  Otherwise, there’s no reason to visit for any length of time.

So my solution is that instead of trying to push this rock up a hill, we change the rules: we make a seperate site that is 100% web 2.0 (details: i’m thinking drupal for a Fast Company-based thing), that doesn’t have to worry about being the “main site,” it can be a seperate thing. In fact, I’m recommending that this rogue site have no connection to our “main site.”

The site would be about agregating content form all over, regardless of the politics (in our position, we have to be very sensitive to our place on campus), regardless of source, to have controversial conversations, to be more anonymous, to be more of itself.

Push back comes in the form of “Why wouldn’t we want ‘credit’ for building this site?” and “Why does it have to be unconnected to the main site?” And I’m just having a heck of a time convincing people that this makes sense.  I’m guessing it’s because I’m too close to things that I’m not shaping the message properly, so I’m looking for ideas.  Even ideas about other sites/companies who have been able to make seperate fan sites like this would be helpful.

So I’m asking.  Help?

I thought we’d all learned our lessosn in 2001: cool/sweet/hot/attractive flash interfaces are not with the money spent on them.  You know who this impresses? People who don’t buy paper.

This isn’t a technical failure as much as it is a marketing one. 

Let’s start by trying to look at paper. Well, if I don’t already know the name of the type of paper, you’re starting at a loss.  Let’s click on the “Paper Selection Process” and I can select the shade, grade, finish, weight of the paper.  But then things get weird. It starts to put crosses into boxes for “Windpower” without me asking for it. Does that mean you are elminating Windpower from my options or that you only have Windpower? And what the hell is Windpower, anyway?  Once you’ve blindly selected some things that sound good, you are presented with a grid of… something.  Paper types? Brands? Clicking on them shows me 50-word desciptions of the paper (note to masochist copy-writers: try and explain the differences between two papers with words that anyone can understand. Can’t be done). No way for me to buy paper, even if I liked what I see… except I have nothing to see.  No paper samples or pictures. The only image is the cover of a brochure which is clickable but doesn’t actually do anything when clicked. One of them says “Null” at the top so… maybe they don’t make that paper anymore? Then why display it?

Flash windows on top of flash windows make reading things or moving around impossible. More than once I landed on… a vast field of gray with nothing on it. Which was fine because this was the fifth browser window Mohawk opened for me in five minutes and I’m thrilled to get rid of it, too.

I’m lost.  Let’s start over.

Paper selection, try some things, click on the “Find Paper” button I didn’t see before. Now I get “results” but I’m not sure what results you were giving me before. I see six different Cool White opens of paper.  If I put my cursor over one of the options, I get a  .5″x.5″ square of scanned paper to show me what this paper looks like. It was scanned with the contrast turned up high so I can see how much texture the paper has, but in so doing, I wouldn’t want to buy this paper. I have no idea what these papers actually look , but what does it matter when they are all Cool White? 

(Note: An email sent one week ago to info@mohawkpaper.com asking if a certain brand itpaper was still made there got no responce. Don’t bother publishing your email address if you aren’t going to bother answering emails.)

This is a site that’s supposed to market “superior runability” to printers. Well, they get sample books and order through local distributors, so they don’t actually need this web site.  Congrats! You’ve built a website for people who don’t need a website.

What should Mohawk have done? Well, pick an audience, for one. Let’s say you want to focus on selling your slightly-cooler-than-your-standard-copy-paper (why? Well, because its impossible to compete against all the other paper companies on the basis that your white copy paper isn’t exactly the same as everyone else’s copy paper, so you might as well differentiate your products). Who’s gonna buy it? Well, lots of people. People who want to print their letters and correspondence on paper that’s cooler than “Parchment White” but isn’t covered with ladybugs and sunflowers (see: scrapbooks stores).

Who is that, you ask? How about people who are looking for a job and would like to stand out? Hmm… does that sound like a market to serve? Can you already picture the ads where you help someone pick a superior paper with some clout and style, making them stand out from the pack of resume jockeys who all went to Staples for Parchment White?  If you can’t you should get out of the marketing game.

Congrats! You’ve just created a new market segment and are currently the only people talking to them: start printing your money.

Building a site with too much money to the wrong audience was a lesson I thought we all learned years ago.  I guess the paper industry hasn’t been keeping up.

I wish I knew how alumni travel started. Like the first guy to eat an oyster, it doesn’t seem obvious: why would 10-50 people from the same school (different backgrounds, different ages, different travel wants, etc) get lumped together. Often alumni travel groups get lumped in with other alumni groups (competing schools) or just non-alumni travellers. That trip you took to Paris through a travel agency had a bunch of Gophers or Sooners or Ducks along for the ride. They didnt know each other from Adam and aside from where they bought their ticket, you wouldn’t have any clue they were alumni travellers.

Travel companies build trips. They say, “We’re going from Chicago to Europe. We’ll put together airfare, a tour bus, hotels at each stop, a few meals, and the occasional feature, package it up with a little overhead to pay for the tour manager and a little on the top for the company and sell them to whomever.” Travel agents around the world try and sell that trip to people who come up and say, “Do you have a trip from Chicago to Europe where the details are handled for me? Yes? Do you have a brochure I can look at? Great, sold.”

Alumni associations are acting like travel agents in this instance. They send brochures (taken from the travel company with an alumni association logo slapped on) to alumni who have stated a preference for European travel and hope to sign them up in a bundle. The price is usually the same as registering through a travel agent, though an alumni travel agent will have a more limited number of trips to sell than a travel agent.

The value to the alumni association is that they get a percentage of the sale, and if enough travel pakages are sold, free trips are thrown in. Commonly, these free trips are given to management or university faculty and staff the alumni association is trying to curry favor with. The person taking the free trip is to act as an alumni travel liason, helping the alumni travellers however they can, and bringing issues up to the tour manager. The make sure that the alumni needs are met. While this seems like extra value that the alumni association is providing the alumni travellers, the tour managers usually do the heavy lifting: the alumni tour helper-person is there to make the alumni traveller feel good.

So how in the world does an alumni association sell a trip?  The cost is the same but the selection is less. Alumni associations add some value in sending an extra person, but that seems negligible.  The reason why alumni travel in these groups thorugh alumni associations is because of the connection they feel to the university. Alumni feel that no matter when you graduated, you went through the same things as every other graduate, and thus you have a common groud. On a more base level, it helps travellers feel like they won’t be travelling with the riff-raff, that these are people who went to the same school, thus have similar beliefs, though in practice, this isn’t at all the case.

So how does an alumni travel program grow? Here’s what I would propose:

1) The Web 2.0 Fairy Dust: Social Network. Some white label social network will be fine (Ning, etc), so long as it can be admin-ed by a 10-year-old and has the ability to add events. Nothing fancy, nothing crazy, no need to connect it to Facebook or authenticate it to your alumni database. It has to be a stand-along site, with a seperate domain and seperate name. Yes, stick the alumni association logo all over it to show it’s a legit site, but don’t feel like it has to have the exact same look and feel (trust me, this is a plus: alumni associations have to build sites that are all things to all people, making them examples of decision-by-compromise —  a stand-alone site will be able to specialize and focus). Let travellers set up their own regsitration and look around.

2) Don’t Be Lazy. Alumni travel departments are spread thin, so they slap logos on other people’s brochures and copy the text to the web sites.  If they get the time, they add postage stamp-sized photos. They do a great job making Paris, Istanbul, Dubai and London look like Akron. It’s a miracle someone plunks down $3,000 for these trips with this kind of info. Every trip needs to be re-written. Take the text and re-write it to focus on what the alumni will get. Focus on the destination, yes, but what the alumni will experience and with whom (basic differentiation). Trips are spent trapped in boats and busses with strangers — make alumni feel like these are people they’d want to be trapped with.

3) Get Social. Add upcoming trips as events.  The site should allow people to express interest in the trip, ask for a brochure, as well as show who else is interested in the trip (popular trips breed interest). Encourage previous travellers to upload photos and tell their stories (10% discount for the best photo every month or a free t-shirt or a free poster-print of the photo). You want the crappy snap-shots someone took with their $150 2-megapixel Panascony camera becaus eit looks more real. You want people who talk about the funny stories of travelling (even if, and especially if they are bad stories: travel is about the experience) and what they did.  Not just a paragraph of “I loved it. I would do it again and again. It was better than Cats.” You need real stories. Print out business cards with the URL and remind travellers to stop by the computer in the hotel lobby to post their day’s experiences.  The system should encourge them to send their diaries and photos to friends and families through the system. Encourage them to get together and talk about the trip ad which trip they want to go on next. Let them be advisors to future travellers on what to expect, what to pack and when to do.  Let new prospective travellers ask questions.

4) Document Like A Freakin’ Pro. For most trips, the alumni travel department shouldn’t give trips away to staff and faculty, they should go to professional photgraphers, journalists, journellers, poets, artists, writers and reporters. What you want isn’t a fleshed-out itinerary of stops and sights, but a capturing of the feeling of the new. When you are thinking about spending $4,000 (per person) on a trip to the Middle East, wouldn’t you like to read about the person before who stood in the footsteps of Jesus and Mohammad? The photo of local kids playing? The poem about the Mona Lisa? The stories of the travellers themselves, why they chose to travel to Italy/Panama/Moscow/Antactica? The pictures of travellers on a Japanese bullet train or seeing the remains of the Berlin Wall for the first time? The movie of a walkthrough of Notre Dame with a voiceover that’s a little more than “This church is pretty?”

Travel is about experience. If your prospective traveller can’t put themselves in the picture orthe story or the movie, they aren’t pulling out their checkbooks. If they don’t feel emotion about the re-telling of how the last time a traveller was in this place, they were wearing camo and carrying a gun. If you can’t document the trips for sale to the next people, you are commoditized to the point of non-existance. Even if your next trip is to Norway and you have no Nroway pictures and stories, people visiting your site will see the experiences of past travellers and be able to extrapolate.

5) Tell a Friend Program. If one traveller comes back and tells their friends, and one of them books with you, there needs to be an incentive. It doesn’t matter what, but the first traveller has to know that their story is wanted and that it helps the organization and the business and that it is appreciated. If a discount is applied, let them apply it to the trip they make with that friend. Share share share.

So I am going to kick-start off a series of posts (I hope — blogs are the refuge of the “good idea without follow-through” crowd sometimes) where I take a project, program, site, business or model and say what I would do with it.  Is this back-seat strategizing? Yes. But the point is that the best solutions don’t come from one source (i.e. “Let’s sprinkle a little Web 2.0 dust on it!” or “Let’s make it open source!”), but from a system change. One change works because it is supposed by other changes.

My first one is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: alumni travel, which is actually a bit more interesting that it’s title suggests.