Business Insight Zone

Pardon me for making the career of Will Smith into a pet topic, but I’m fascinated by his approach to the movie business: he doesn’t think of himself as particularly talented, but aims to continue being the biggest box-office draw in the world thanks to a “sickening” work ethic.

This 2006 Premiere article does a good job of capturing his mindset:

Triumph of the Will

In the piece, Smith talks about the motivation he derives from wanting to be admirable for his loved ones, and from the idea that we are each fully responsible for what happens to us.

But in the business context I want to focus on the idea — possibly the most important root of his incredible work ethic — that “99 percent is the same as zero.” Or, as he put it to the Premiere reporter:

“[Y]ou’ll never achieve 100 percent if 99 percent is okay.”

This puts me in mind of something that Seth Godin wrote earlier this month in a post titled “The sad lie of mediocrity”:

Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.

Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.

That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.

This matches all of my experience. Warren Buffett isn’t twice as smart or twice as disciplined or twice as hard-working as the average successful investor: but he’s made himself enough more smart and disciplined and hard-working — that critical incremental effort — to put all of his would-be competitors in the shade.

The same applies in area after area: think of Tiger Woods or Martina Navratilova or a great musician or a great surgeon and you’ll come away with the same lesson.

Back to the workaday world for you and me:

• What partway-done projects do you have lying around?
• What almost-there customer interactions are you in the middle of?
• Is there something on your docket for which you have more excuses than results?
• Are you almost a great seller / marketer / programmer / writer / manager / whatever?

What’s the missing increment — the missing 1% — the missing last mile?

What would it take to cover that last bit of terrain? How soon can you get started?

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Related posts:

• The Talented Mr. Smith and His Money-Making Ways.
• The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?

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Photo by Amanda Slater, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Without question, I’m spoiled by my working environment. Hoover’s is one of those rare companies where virtually everyone is nice, to the point that crabby or Machiavellian people never last here. (There’s a reason we rate so high in “best places to work” polls.) So no doubt my perspective is skewed when I consider the tale of “Bob” in this Chris Brogan post:

Shut Up — You’re Helping the Customer!

The basic issue: “Bob” was using social media to talk to his company’s customers online. Despite enthusiastic engagement from the customers, some managers within Bob’s company didn’t like this online interaction and told him to shut it down. But Bob’s enthusiasm for engaging with customers — or else his unwisdom in disobeying direct orders — kept him from obeying.

Now Bob’s job is at risk. But should it be?

Especially because of the complex responses that Chris’s post have drawn, my Saturday-morning thoughts on this issue have grown long, so I’ll leave the rest of the post after the jump. Join me, won’t you? Read more

We’ve talked about it before. I’ve dedicated an omnibus post to collecting links about it. Now Geoff Colvin, the Fortune writer whose 2006 article first introduced me to the concept has boiled down the idea of “deliberate practice” into this new article:

Why Talent Is Overrated

. . . If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and no one could distinguish the best from the rest.

The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more . . .

Thanks to Thomas Hanson for pointing me to it. (I’ll be coming back to his writing on deliberate practice as well.)

For now, no further commentary on Colvin’s article but this: Go read it.

More soon.

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Photo by chelseagirl, used under a CC-No Derivative Works license.

Kids’ stuff, right? Put the ball in the hole. Simple.

Okay, try these:

• What’s your company’s #1 goal for this year? For 2009? For ever?
• What are your career goals? What do they imply for how you spend the next six months?

Not the boilerplate of mission statements. (”We strive to provide the most comprehensive solutions . . .”) Not the ambiguities that would satisfy your high-school counselor. (”I like working with people and with words . . .”)

I mean the real, scary, deep-dish, CLEAR goals that will make a difference.

You don’t have to tell me. Ideas like this can be dangerous when released in the wild. But you’d better be able to tell yourself.

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Related entries:

• The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.”
• The Basic Basics: Run to the Point of Contact.
• The Basic Basics: Solve someone’s problem.

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Photo by playhockeyeh, used under a CC-No Derivative Works license.

This photo — taken by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson — captures the Milky Way from the vantage of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the darkest area in the United States.

From the typical suburban backyard, you can’t see anywhere near this clearly. From most any city, the only time you’d see the Milky Way would be during a blackout. Too much light pollution.

(Metaphor alert!)

From the typical business desk, you can’t get a clear picture of your dreams — for yourself, your team, your projects, your company. There’s too much information pollution, in the form of e-mails, IMs, phone calls, Web pages, RSS articles, printouts, magazines, colleagues dropping by, et cetera.

Each of these things is fine in its place. I like my suburban backyard.

But sometimes we need to head out to our own personal version of the Black Rock Desert. One of my colleagues finds his at the coffee shop near his house. I’ve made great hay in the stacks of the Life Science Library at UT. Kathy Sierra has her Airstream.

Chances are, you’re not going to come up with many Big Thoughts that could reinvent your business or career while you sit in your cubicle. You may get a lot of tasks done, yes, but you won’t be devising a visionary explanation for your personal universe.

Maybe you don’t need Big Thoughts to do business better, but I do. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m headed out for the Black Rock Desert . . .

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Photo by Jurvetson (flickr) .

That sentence, taken from the Marc Levinson article that I quoted yesterday, stuck in my mind after I read it.

Sure, it’s as simple as can be. Economics 101. But how many of us let inventories pile up in our working lives, in our companies, for ourselves personally?

Forget, for a minute, the literal inventories that sit in warehouses and stockrooms. When you stockpile papers on your desk, or e-mails in your inbox, or ideas in your head, you create needless “inventories” that cost you something — time, attention, maintenance — but don’t return you anything.

What would your work look like . . . what would your COMPANY look like . . . if you cleared out the backlogged inventories of communications, ideas, projects, plans?

In this economy, we don’t have money to waste, much less the truly irreplaceable commodities of time and attention. So what could YOU do to eliminate the “inventories” in your work?

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Here’s a related idea, taken from Paul Graham’s essay, “The Other Road Ahead”:

Being able to release software immediately is a big motivator. Often as I was walking to work I would think of some change I wanted to make to the software, and do it that day. This worked for bigger features as well. Even if something was going to take two weeks to write (few projects took longer), I knew I could see the effect in the software as soon as it was done.

If I’d had to wait a year for the next release, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a while at least. The thing about ideas, though, is that they lead to more ideas. Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing it? The same thing happens with software. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. So shelving an idea costs you not only that delay in implementing it, but also all the ideas that implementing it would have led to.

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Related post:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by Valerie Everett, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

A new month is a good time for having a fresh look at things.

Pull out a fresh sheet of paper. Make a list of the projects and problems that are taking up your attention.

Now pretend that you’re an outside auditor, brought in to review your job (or your career or your department or your company — or, for that matter, your life). You-the-auditor are friendly, but you won’t put up with nonsense. So you start asking awkward questions:

“If we weren’t already doing it this way, would this be the way we’d choose to start doing it?”

“If we could afford only one of these options — regardless of what we’ve been doing so far — which one would it be? Which one would it certainly not be?”

“How does this item [project, technology, product, subsidiary, etc.] make us more profitable?”

“If Warren Buffett had just bought this company, how would you justify this expense to him?”

“If we wrote this software from scratch, would it have this subroutine?”

“If I were building that team from scratch, would I hire him to be on it? To run it?”

Here’s the kicker: this little exercise in fantasy is actually a great way to get back in touch with reality. We get so accustomed to looking at things just one way that we have a hard time seeing them as they are.

This is why some businesses use zero-based budgeting as a self-disciplining mechanism: instead of assuming that last year’s budget is a good starting point, they zero out every line item, then force themselves to think through the ramifications of whatever numbers they put in place of those zeroes.

The process hurts. But it’s worth it.

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(Photo of the zero mileage post in the York railway station by Redvers.)

Halloween already? How’d that happen?

The Big Holidays are just around the corner, so you probably have about six weeks of productive work left in this year. That’s not long to fulfill your 2008 ambitions, for yourself or your company.

What will YOU achieve with what’s left of 2008?

(Oh, and happy Halloween!)

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(Photo by sth.)

When a non-runner takes up jogging, everything feels bad. Lungs burn, legs get sore, feet hurt. There’s no way around it, really, and the best you can do is to ease into the running workload gradually, taking plenty of time and rest to recover from each run. (Steady doses of ibuprofen can help, too.)

Over time, it gets easier, but not uniformly. Within a few weeks, you may find that you’re not winded at all from the same three-mile course that killed you at first. So you get a little ambitious and try to up your distance . . . only to find that your legs won’t cooperate.

While healthy lungs can improve quickly, the muscles in your legs take time — several months, at least — to grow enough to accommodate a serious running workload. Along the way, they must form countless new capillaries. They need these vessels so that the muscles can take in oxygen and expel wastes more efficiently, which is crucial when the muscles are taxed over long distances. This tiny network of connections, invisible and ignored, is in fact vital to progress as a runner.

A year later, it’s a lot easier. You can go on longer runs without pain, and you can plot the future progress of your training much more predictably. The groundwork has been laid, and now you can build on it methodically.

I think the same thing applies to the “capillary growth” of our social and professional networks. It’s tempting to jump onto a social-media platform like Facebook and collect “friends” as fast as you can, just like it’s tempting to go to industry events and trade as many business cards as you can, even when you don’t learn anything substantial about the person with whom you’re making contact.

Building a real personal network takes more than an occasional burst of energy, though, just like training to finish a marathon in under three hours requires more than an occasional hard bout of training. It takes the steady application of effort, week in and week out, over the long haul. You have to get to know people, do things for them, keep in touch with them, and do it sincerely but unobtrusively.

After a year or two of this type of effort, it’s easy to use your network for all kinds of good things. Examples:

• finding new clients
• helping a friend find a new job
• helping yourself find a new job
• meeting new people who share your interests
• meeting “aspirational contacts” — top people in your field
• harvesting good advice from experts

But you have to build those capillaries first, and there’s no way to do it quickly.

If you haven’t started the process of capillary growth that is the foundation of a good professional network, now is the time to start.

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Further reading:

• Tahl Raz in Inc. Magazine: The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker

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(Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.)

(Note: Blog Action Day 2008 — which is dedicated to raising awareness about poverty — is as good a day as any to re-start the Company of the Day tradition. See the CotD archive page for previous installments.)

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Living in Austin, it seems like you can’t turn around without running across yet another Goodwill store. We have big ones, small ones, and in-between ones in every corner of the city. In all, Goodwill Industries has more than 2,100 thrift stores spread across 185 local chapters throughout the world.

While 60% of Goodwill’s revenues come from its retail outlets, the organization also brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year through industrial and service contract work and other services to people living with poverty, mental or physical disabilities, or other potential impediments to employment. In all, the not-for-profit enterprise generates more than $3 billion in annual revenues, all while helping underprivileged and underserved folks to learn job skills and enjoy the dignity of steady, meaningful work. The organization’s outlets also do other bits of community service: the Central Texas branch, for example, works with local sponsor Dell to collect old computer hardware so that it can be recycled safely.

Goodwill Industries was founded in Boston in 1902 by a Methodist minister named Edgar Helms. He built the bones of the modern organization — collecting donations and giving jobs to the poor — around the motto of “a hand up, not a hand out.” Many years later, Helms issued this challenge to Goodwill’s supporters:

“Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living.”

More than 100 years on, Goodwill seems to be fulfilling this role better than ever.