Business Insight Zone

Not much to add to Matt Linderman’s post at Signal vs. Noise, except to point out how the language of Hulu CEO Jason Kilar contrasts to the language of Gerard Arpey of American Airlines — which, you may recall, I critiqued last year.

Hulu:

. . . this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. . . . We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. . . . The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here.

American:

We are doing everything we possibly can to re-accommodate our customers impacted on either other American Airlines flights, or other airline flights, to the extent other airlines are operating in markets where we can get our customers.

The sentiment’s the same, best I can tell, and Arpey wasn’t totally horrible. But it’s always better to sound like a person talking — talking seriously, to be sure, but talking.

Talk like a real person, because you are one and your customer is one. Business shouldn’t turn us into robots spouting jargon, legalese, or passive-aggressive hogwash.

Your human customers will appreciate the gesture.

What examples of good or bad apology language can you point out?

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Original post:

• Signal vs. Noise — Hulu CEO: “We screwed up royally”

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Image by spud murphy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Yesterday I was too preoccupied with my own nonsense to give much attention to the presidential inauguration, but today I’ve been catching up on some of the headlines and commentary about it. (A favorite: the 48 images from The Big Picture blog at the Boston Globe.)

Here’s what I’m mulling: The new president had to wait two months after he won the election to take office. When the Constitution lays out the schedule, you stick with it. But you and I don’t have those constraints.

Must you wait to inaugurate your next plan? What Constitutional item (assumption, habit, bit of folk wisdom) tells you that you have to wait?

I say that a random Wednesday in January is a fine time to inaugurate new plans.

What say you?

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Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin.

. . . With Special Reference to Long Weekends Punctuated by Cub Scout Campouts in Near-Freezing Conditions that Come on the Heels of Weeks Featuring Long Car Trips for Work in a General Environment of Too Many Non-Work, Non-Family Obligations:

When confronting your . . .

• To-do list,
• Project list,
• Money budget,
• Time budget,
• List of nice-to-do’s, or
• List of want-to-do’s,

. . . you THINK you need this . . .

. . . when in fact you need THIS:

The moral of this story:

Be ruthless in guarding your time.

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Related posts:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• Productivity tip: Parse ruthlessly.
• William James on uncompleted tasks.
• Productivity tip: Throw away something on your To-Do list.
• What if you spent one day FINISHING?

(Is it obvious that this has been a source of struggle for me? I wear my heart on my sleeve . . . )

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Tweezers image source. Machete image source is unknown.

Someone was nice enough to nominate me for the Texas Social Media Awards that are being sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman. I’m pleased as punch to be listed alongside many of my friends from Austin’s white-hot social-media scene, including . . .

• Aaron Strout
• Lani Rosales
• Bryan Person
• Connie Reece
• Kyle Flaherty
• Michelle Greer
• Mike Chapman

No pressure at all from this end, but if you’re so inclined to share your thoughts about my social-media doings with the Statesman folks, you can do so at this page.

(Here endeth the self-promotion.)

One slide that almost made the cut for my talk on Twitter would have held nothing but this image:

After I made this comment online, someone asked me if How to Win Friends and Influence People isn’t too old-school for 21st century business.

My reply: People haven’t changed that much since HTWFAIP came out in 1936. The technology is much different, but people are much the same.

• We still like to hear the sound of our own names (and our own voices).
• We still like the other person to say they’re sorry if they’ve stepped on our toes — even accidentally.
• We still don’t like to have our motives questioned.
• Et cetera.

Some people want to say that the technology is SO different that it makes sense to distinguish between Twitter (or other social media) and real life. This is why the acronym IRL — “in real life” — is used online. But in fact Twitter is mostly just people talking to people. That makes it a part of real life.

And for real-life situations, Carnegie’s guidance remains invaluable. This is one reason why Carnegie’s company [ their site / Hoover's record ] lives on. Take, for instance, Carnegie “Six Ways to Make People Like You” from the book:

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a [person]‘s Name is to [them] the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in the terms of the other [person]‘s interest.
6. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

All 100% accurate and useful today. All 100% accurate and useful on Twitter. And all of Carnegie’s guidelines (he loves making lists of them) apply whether you’re using Twitter for your own amusement, for career-building, on your company’s behalf, or all three.

In other words, if Carnegie were still around today, he’d be quoting Shannon Paul: “Don’t be THAT guy.”

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Related posts:

• Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.
• Social media communities: Keep bringing it back to USERS.
• Social media makes merchants of us all.
• Social media breaches barriers.

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Image source.

The page on which Fermat scribbled about his Last Theorem.

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What are the most important problems you face in your business?

Not necessarily the most urgent. Not necessarily the most complicated — or the most obvious — but the most important problems. What are they?

A while back I talked about the “Hilbert Problems” of business: the huge, permanent, pervasive issues that are attacked by big-idea business thinkers like Ram Charan, Michael Porter, and the late Peter Drucker.

Questions like “How do we deal with the unlimited availability of information?” fascinate me, and I use this blog to help me think through them in concrete ways that relate to our daily working lives. But each of us should define our own Big Problems of business — the ones affect us from day to day and year to year as we try to grow our businesses and build our careers.

These are the problems that matter to you not because (or not only because) they’re interesting to think about in the abstract, but because you have a real burning need to figure them out for the sake of your commercial standing.

Take a Cue from Prof. Feynman

The mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, who taught at MIT for many years, had the opportunity to observe the working methods of Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in physics. Here’s what Rota said about him:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

(This passage comes from Prof. Rota’s lecture, “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” which is well worth reading even if you don’t work in academia.)

The Challenge to Us Both

My challenge to you — one that I’m taking up myself — is this: Come up with a specific list of YOUR big problems. Think through the persistent issues you face in terms of . . .

• your company
• your clients
• your career
• your industry
• your profession

Jot down at least one or two Big Problems in each category. Think them through, rephrase them better, sleep on them. Then jot them down again on an index card that you can carry in your pocket. Return to them regularly, and look for lessons that apply to them as you go through your working life.

No matter how hectic your day gets, give at least a few minutes each day to thinking through your Big Problems.

Feel free to share your results — I’ll do the same.

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Related posts:

• Commit to having better problems in 2009.
• What are the “Hilbert Problems” of business?

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The image is of the page of Diophantus upon which Fermat made the marginal notation known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. Source: Wikipedia.

Consider two old-school titans of American high-tech business — Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.

Imagine that exactly ten years ago, in the run-up of the tech/dot-com boom, you had bought equal amounts of each stock, figuring that both of them would benefit from the burgeoning activity in the tech sector, and that both of them provided you with the sort of “margin of safety” that Warren Buffett has always sought, thanks to their standing in American industry, the strength of their brands, their patent portfolios, etc.

The more dramatic of the two companies in the intervening ten years, I would argue, has been Hewlett-Packard, especially with its 1999 spinoff of Agilent (regarded skeptically by some at the time) and its 2002 acquisition of Compaq (regarded more than skeptically by many at the time). Compared to those moves, and even considering its 2004 spinoff of Freescale Semiconductor, Motorola’s trajectory has been tame.

But disastrous. Compare this 10-year chart of HP . . .

To this 10-year chart of Motorola . . .

This chain of thinking is inspired by this morning’s headlines about Motorola:

• MarketWatch: Motorola to post loss, cut 4,000 jobs: Wireless-phone sales fall even sharper than expected
• Reuters via the IHT: Motorola to cut more jobs as sales decline

It’s time (or past time) to dismember the company. Motorola’s long, distinguished history can’t save it from market irrelevance under its current configuration. What shape it needs to take, I don’t know. But it’s not this.

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Related posts:

• When do you kill a business? (See the last item in the post.)
• Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.
• Phase A and Phase B.
• Zander’s departure at Motorola.

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The social network Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds, but is it useful for businesspeople?

On Tuesday, I had the pleasant task of explaining the potential and pitfalls of Twitter for business at the monthly meeting of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (current site / new site). This post is to share an annotated version of my slide deck from the presentation. (You can find photos of the event here, and a short video recap here.)

Although I’ve written about Twitter and business before (for example here and here), and although I’ve spoken for groups many times, this was my first time to speak on this topic, so I followed my usual M.O. and collected, oh, five times as much material as I could have used during the 45 minutes of the talk. In subsequent posts, I’ll use that background material to flesh out more thoughts in this vein; for now, these slides can serve as a stake in the ground for some of the issues that I think are most important when it comes to using Twitter for business.

(If the embedded player doesn’t work for you, check out the deck on SlideShare.)
My style is to use a lot of slides an go through them rapidly — there are 99 slides here for a 45-minute presentation. If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, you can read short annotations of the slides after the jump.

[UPDATE, 11:10 a.m. -- Neat: SlideShare is featuring this deck in its Business & Marketing category.]

Read more

One of the simplest productivity tips in the world — one you probably already know — is well worth repeating:

When work HAS to get done, book a conference room just for yourself.

Make it even better: go in without your phone or your laptop. Don’t use the computer or anything else that’s more complicated than a whiteboard.

Seems like I’ve known this trick forever, yet for days now I’ve wrestled with getting several big things organized. I just couldn’t seem to get a handle on them . . . until I sequestered myself in a quiet conference room, spread out all my papers, and spent one hour getting my act together.

That hour was worth three, or maybe ten. It achieved all of these good things:

• broke conceptual logjams;
• eliminated a wad of paper notes that I boiled down into one whiteboard diagram;
• left the remaining notes arranged in better categories; and
• gave me a simple set of marching orders — tasks I can do immediately.

You can guess the bigger umbrella outcome: it energized me. And in my experience, if you can keep your energy up, you can take a crack at just about anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a stack of marching orders to attend to . . .

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Do you use the conference-room trick?
What other methods do you use to break your logjams?

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Photo by James Long.

As I mentioned last week, I’m the speaker for tomorrow’s Houston Interactive Marketing Association lunch. Couldn’t be more stoked about it, since the prep-work is giving me the chance to sharpen my thoughts on the various ways that Twitter can be used for business. Details at this link:

Twittering Your Way Through the Economic Storm

Silly me, I was going to prepare a follow-up e-mail to send out to HIMA members so they wouldn’t have to scribble down URLs and the like while I talked, but then it dawned on me . . . why not use Twitter to achieve this very function, and in a much more useful way?

(I’m slow on the uptake sometimes.)

So yesterday I set up the Twitter account @HIMAtalk. That gave me a chance to take lots of screenshots to give people an idea of what the (easy-peasy) Twitter setup process is like. Then I followed a bunch of great Twitterites who are involved in social-media marketing, plus started tweeting links to useful articles and blog posts related to the topic of tomorrow’s talk. (I also have a tag on my Delicious feed dedicated to collecting articles on the topic — help yourself.)

The idea is that HIMA members (or you!) who are just warming up to Twitter can sign on, follow @HIMAtalk, and have a nice starting point in terms of both people to follow and a model of how you might like to proceed with using Twitter for business.

Twitter’s a great tool, and it’s a kick to see how easy it’s been to use it for this purpose and how dynamic the results already are. No sooner did I get the thing started than HIMA members and other interested Houstonians and marketers started following back — on a Sunday night!

Look for updates (and an audio or video archive, if we can swing it) after tomorrow’s meeting.

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Photo by Jeff Turner.