Book Review: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

You probably think you’re pretty special, having moved up steadily in your career—unstoppable, you’re going places.  And maybe you’re right; maybe you are special.  But the specialness that has brought you so much success up until now may have blinded you to the things you’re not so good at.  You’ve succeeded on your skills, despite your shortcomings.  But executive coach and author Marshall Goldsmith is here to say that if you want to keep moving up, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

So, what’s wrong with you? Well, if you’re like most people, you’ve got one, two, maybe three of Goldsmith’s handy Twenty Habits That Hold You Back. Things like your uncontrollable need to always win, to always be right, to pass judgment on others, to make destructive comments, to be negative, to not control your temper—you get the picture.  And if you want to take the next step up, you’re going to have to work on your issues.

Of course no one has all these bad habits.  In fact, some of us have these habits but not to a degree that it really hurts us—our co-workers don’t mind them, even if we are occasionally annoying. But, just about everyone has one or two that are serious enough to affect their success at work.  Those are the ones to figure out and start working on.

(Personally, I’m a little too much of a know-it-all and I have poor listening skills. My wife says I’m also negative. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.)

It’s important that you realize your shortcomings, because those around you already know them.  Saying “that’s just who I am” isn’t going to cut it, unless you want someone else to get the promotion.

So, how do you find out your weaknesses and go about fixing them?  Goldsmith has a number of ideas, none earth-shattering but all important.  You have to elicit feedback, apologize for your screw-ups, commit to being better, and continually follow up to see how you’re doing. It wouldn’t hurt to thank people, either, Mr. or Ms. Ungrateful.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is self help for the business class, telling you what you already know but pounding the ideas in hard enough that you might actually use them.  If your career is important to you, you’ll at least give them a try.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Zink – A Life Changer?

Most new ideas are small, incremental steps forward, or built for a limited audience. This is especially true of many of the Web 2.0 stuff being launched these days, most no more than “widgets” that a relatively small band of hardcore techies have interest in.

Zink is different.

Zink stands for “zero ink.” It lets you print color digital images without ink cartridges or ribbons.

Here’s how it works: Zink is really a special paper that has dye crystals embedded into it. The printer then heats up the paper in a way that it brings out the colors in the shape of the images on your photo. You have to buy the Zink paper for it to work and I think you need a special printer that is compatible with the paper.

This isn’t all ready for you to go out and use, but the point is the technology is there. Now it’s just a matter of getting it into the market. And there’s absolutely no doubt that people want printers that don’t force you to continually buy ink—everyone knows that’s where the real cost of printing lies.

I have no idea about the quality of the Zink images. It might suck. But, even if it does, if the technology has reached this point, it will continue to be refined until it’s the standard. So, no more ink for printing your photos.

Now, when are they going to make this happen for my document printer?

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Which Search Engine Has the Most Human Intervention?

The premise of Bessed is that the best search results are generated from a real person doing critical thinking about what a searcher would most want to see for a given search. In general, where appropriate, we feel a searcher would like a number of different types of sites put together in one quick yet complete package. Therefore, where appropriate, we try to offer in our top links these type of sites: an overview site, a link or two of recent news on the topic/keyword, recent blog posts, seminal historical events, videos of interest, photographs. Our thought is that if you are researching a topic, you could use our first 10 or so links and get a pretty complete picture.

In discovering sites, we obviously use the major search engines in addition to suggestions from site visitors. In doing so, I’m always interested to see which search engine I feel spends the most time manipulating results with the help of human editors.

While Google is the most accurate for the most searches, in my experience Ask does the best job of providing the greatest variety of sites that might satisfy a searcher’s desires. I have to believe that Ask uses a good number of humans in massaging search results, at least for more common searches. It’s amazing how good Ask’s results can sometimes be—and then even more amazing how devoid of links Ask can be at other times. The fact that their results for common searches are usually so good, while their results for more obscure searches can be so bad, is evidence to me that it’s not a purely robot-based operation like Google. (Google may do a bit of human intervention, but I think they’re much more focused on their algorithms.)

For example, Ask is the best at getting news headlines into their search results. Do a search on sports teams or politicians in the news, and Ask has jumped on it much quicker than Google. You might track it down via Google News, but one of Google’s weaknesses as an engine is that it takes longer to get newsworthy items into its main index and it often doesn’t give them much weight—unless, of course, they’ve been linked to a lot. But even with bloggers linking like crazy, a news item that would be of interest to a searcher often ends up nowhere in Google, while Ask will often pick it up. This again makes me believe that there is an editorial team at Ask doing some thinking about this stuff.

I could be wrong. It might just be that Ask gives a certain number of news sites high ratings in its algorithm and if they have a story that pertains to search term, it shows up. But Ask has shown me enough variety in search results and other idiosyncracies— for example, a search for Bill Gates brings up a 1994 Playboy interview in which Gates discusses the impending “information highway”—that it seems clear someone smarter than a computer is thinking about this stuff. Or maybe they’ve perfected artificial intelligence, and if they can get their robot working a little faster they might just be able to challenge Google.

I think Ask.com is the second-best search engine out there now, and wouldn’t be surprised if they challenge for the #2 spot in searches conducted over the next 5 years or so.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

GoodStorm’s MeCommerce

In thinking about the business model for Bessed, I’ve been considering alternative revenue sources in addition to advertising. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is teaming with retailers and doing the affiliate-type situation in which ads are placed and you’re only paid if a click-through results in a direct sale. I’m not a fan of doing this, but the strict ad model is somewhat difficult, so I’ve been thinking that if a partnership presented itself that would result in a decent enough cut of sales, it could be worthwhile.

I read today on TechCrunch about GoodStorm’s new service which is actually not relevant to us, but the post did lead to a mention of their earlier announced service MeCommerce.

To some extent MeCommerce is just like those Amazon ads you see left and right on content sites, but the promise is that you would get paid a greater percentage of the sale—half of the profit on each item, although I don’t know exactly what the profit itself is in order to figure that. Regardless, I’m assuming it would be a better % than Amazon.

In addition, MeCommerce is supposed to let visitors buy an item without leaving your site, which is neat.

So I signed up today to test it out and see if it might be worth exploring.

I couldn’t get anything to work. It told me that I could zero in on keywords that would then produce products suited to those keywords, but when I put in the keywords, it told me there were no results. Even for the keywords that they themselves suggested as possibilities, I got no results. I was using Firefox—is it maybe an IE product only?

All I know is, it didn’t inspire confidence. I would want the revenue share, but also greater reliability. Maybe someone from GoodStorm will see this and give me a heads-up on what I was doing wrong. For now, though, it doesn’t seem to be an option.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Making It Relevant

Seth Godin, who I link to often enough that I’m entering stalker territory, has a post that’s simple yet worth remembering, titled Who Wants a Prize Like That? The basic message is that in promoting your work it makes sense to market in a way that is relevant to your target audience—in his example, the Thriller Readers Newsletter has a sweepstakes to win 150 “thriller” books signed by their authors if you sign up for their newsletter. Not cash, not an iPod, but a prize that that particular audience would crave.

There’s nothing colossal about that point, but it’s still worth noting.

Of course some businesses lend themselves to this point better than others. If you sell snowboards, it’s not hard to figure out what some relevant marketing angles might be. You think about what snowboarders might be interested in and follow the trail, so to speak.

But use that same logic for auto insurance—if you sell auto insurance, go where the drivers go? Hmmm… driving isn’t exactly a niche activity. Everyone needs auto insurance, but no one likes it and it’s not like marketing to auto enthusiasts would really be targeting your audience. Car enthusiasts like driving, not buying insurance in case of an accident. They want sleek design, not an insurance statement.

So what could companies that serve a general interest (or necessity) do to stand out, to be relevant? That’s a tougher question. Maybe they target their most profitable potential customers first? For instance, would Allstate or Progressive be wise to target Mommy drivers who are less likely to drive recklessly by offering free car seats to new Moms if they choose their particular insurance? That’s one way to go about it. Find out who are generally your most profitable or most loyal customers and target them first, with advertising or giveaways relevant to them. Do this in a few niches and your big general-interest business can be relevant in your most important customer markets.

By the way I have no idea if mommies are really safer drivers than anyone else, just guessing.

What can your company do to market relevantly to your potential customers? (By the way I have no idea if “relevantly” is a word.)

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Know-How by Ram Charan

When a sports team is going bad, you’ll often hear the manager talk about going “back to the fundamentals.” In baseball, for example, that means see the ball, hit the ball, see the ball, catch the ball.  In football it might mean reminding a receiver that you can’t run with the ball until you’ve actually caught it. It’s not as if the players don’t know the fundamentals, it’s more that they get distracted, or try to do too much at once, or lose focus when the pressure is on.

So it is in business.  I can just imagine a manager at some level of a company being taken aside by his boss who says, “Things haven’t been going well lately. We need to get back to the fundamentals. Read this.”  And the manager receives a copy of Ram Charan’s latest book, Know-How.

Know-How is a book that does a nice job of boiling down success as a business leader into eight skills, things you must “know how” to do to be effective.  None of the skills Charan highlights is going to give you an “a-ha!” moment, but they give you an “oh yeah” moment, as in, “Oh, yeah, I knew I should have been doing that all along, but got so caught up with X and Y that I forgot Z.” In this way, it’s a good book to keep around to gauge how your leadership is progressing against these bedrock benchmarks.

Here’s what I mean by the fundamentals.  In a (long) sentence, Know-How teaches that in order to succeed, a leader must position a business or department correctly, must set priorities well in order to reach correct goals that are attainable, must manage people well in order to keep them motivated and “with the program”, and must be alert to outside factors that present both risks and opportunities.

I probably didn’t teach you anything you didn’t know there. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it. And if Charan left it at that, it would obviously be a short book. But, of course, he doesn’t.

While Charan can’t tell you exactly how these fundamentals apply in your unique situation,  he does offer a wealth of stories that illustrate how real-life leaders have successfully used them (along with a few stories of those who did not). Among the leaders Charan discusses in more detail: Blockbuster’s John Antioco, Steve Jobs of Apple, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, GE’s Jeff Immelt, and others, including many anonymous leaders who did or did not make the necessary adjustments. (Charan also uses Home Depot’s newly ex-CEO Bob Nardelli as an example of an adept leader. Whether he would take that back considering more recent developments is unknown.)

As the last paragraph suggests, most of Charan’s examples center around larger organizations with multiple layers of management and large teams. He uses a few smaller company examples, but much of the book is devoted to big companies.  That doesn’t make the advice any less valid, and it makes sense in that smaller companies with a good product/service can often thrive in the short term even with poor or inexperienced leaders, while bigger, more diversified companies usually face more sophisticated challenges.

But, whether your business is big or small, whether you manage one person or 100, the fundamentals are still fundamental.  Having Know-How on your shelf to remind you to see the ball, catch the ball, run with the ball can help you stay focused on the key skills that will drive your business and your career.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Should Disney Open the Floodgates?

Steve Rubel has a post today about Disney overhauling the Disney.com site. Rubel’s reaction is that Disney should be opening up more of its content to be hacked and mashed up if it really wants to take its interaction with online customers to a new level.

I think this is an interesting question for both Disney and other companies that own content that others want to mess with. On the one hand, sure, you want your audience to use your content in new and interesting ways. But, at the same time, you created that content, it has value, and giving it over to those who did not create it but want to use it as raw materials for their own works may not be easy, and it may not be wise.

This isn’t necessarily a new question. The Grateful Dead encouraged concert bootlegs when the recording industry wanted only official releases. Rap used samples from both hit songs and obscure songs as spare parts in creating a new style of music.

But just as artists like the late great James Brown felt that they weren’t getting paid for having their work sampled, media companies aren’t necessarily keen on giving away their content to be monkeyed with, especially if the result is something that someone else profits from while they don’t.

The arguments for opening the floodgates and allowing greater sharing of copyrighted work is that it enhances the brand, possibly bringing your content to an audience that wasn’t aware of it, or giving stale content new life. These arguments make sense, but everyone’s pretty familiar with Winnie the Pooh. He doesn’t really need brand extension, or need to have new life breathed into his brand. The kids are still feeling him. So, what would be in it for Disney in allowing someone to mashup Pooh eating some yummy hunny with the voice of Brad Pitt in Fight Club saying “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” I’d find that funny, but it’s hard to make the case that it makes me feel more fondly toward Pooh Bear.

I just read Wikinomics (review here) and was glad to see this issue brought up. Because I think it’s great if content creators want to let their audiences interact with their work in new ways, but there also seems to be a feeling by some that they should, as if to defend your right to keep your content in the form that you created it is somehow wrong or pigheaded.

I’m talking about this from a business perspective, but even from an artistic perspective I think it’s important. If an artist has created a work that he/she is proud of, and if that artwork is somehow the realization of a vision that the artist feels he/she successfully brought to life, isn’t it natural that the artist might feel unhappy if it is twisted into a new shape? Should the Rolling Stones really desire to see Sympathy for the Devil mashed up with a Carrie Underwood song just because someone who may be a fan of theirs thinks it would be cool (or ridiculous, which itself can be cool)?

I’m all for social media and using old things in new ways, but I think the whole “content wants to be free” thing is at times simply justification for stealing. If companies and artists want to share, great. If they think it can help their bottom line, super. But should they feel compelled to share? I don’t think so.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

iPhone Awesome, Too Expensive

By now you probably have heard all about the new iPhone that Steve Jobs announced today at Macworld. (If not, go here to see the keynote speech or learn more about the phone.)  I’m not a huge cell phone user, but this one makes me want to become one.  It’s small and slick, awesome features and appears to be easy to use.  They’re not out for sale until June, so I don’t know that for sure, but Apple is good at making things look good and work easy. And Jobs’ presentation sold us on the idea that everything could be done with a finger on a touchscreen—sounds pretty easy.

But I can’t see paying $499 (for a 4GB phone) or $599 (for a 8GB phone) to have one.  A couple reasons why.

First, cell phones get lost.  That’s a pretty damn expensive piece of equipment to carry around everywhere with the possibility of it getting lost. It’s small size is almost too small, making it even easier to misplace or have it fall out of a bag or pocket without noticing it.

Second, as easy as it looks to use, I still don’t particularly care if I have a combination iPod/phone/camera.  I use my iPod mainly when I exercise, although I have a speaker thingy to dock it into that I use occasionally.  But I don’t necessarily want my iPod to make phone calls or my phone to play music.  Maybe that’s just me.  Maybe the phone is built for a younger crowd that does want these features.  But can that young crowd afford a $499 or $599 cell phone?  Well, probably a lot of them can, actually.  But still, it will be interesting to see if that price point scares people away or not.

One more thought.  Human nature being what it is, how long will it be before people get mugged for their iPhone?  Or how long until kids start bringing them to school and getting beat up and robbed of them?  It’s happened with high-end sneakers, and I think it even happened when the iPods first appeared.  I’m sure we’ll hear stories about it happening with the iPhone.  (I should note, however, that the media likes to find a story like that and blow it out of proportion, as if people are knocking each other over the head left and right to steal each other’s stuff.)

So I won’t be an early adopter, but if Apple wants to drop one in my lap to reach the influential blogger/startup CEO crowd, I can be bought.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Future, Inc.

One of the biggest business lessons of the late 1990s and early 2000s came from teenagers using the Internet to trade music digitally, costing record companies millions of dollars. Caught off guard, the record companies ended up having 15-year-old kids arrested—not exactly the ideal way to interact with your target demographic.

In his new book Future, Inc., futurist Eric Garland says the record companies should have seen it coming, but they were too interested in working their traditional business model to notice a threat coming from a seemingly unrelated industry (computers). Similar (although less publicized) situations happen all the time in business, and the companies that avoid getting caught flat-footed are the ones who know enough to make educated guesses about the future. By doing so, they stay ahead of the curve, revamping their business models in advance to meet the changes head-on, or using the knowledge to launch new products or services that fill a coming need.

With Future, Inc., Garland gives you a double-dip toward predicting the future and getting out in front of it. First, he offers a wealth of ideas on how you can predict the future of your particular industry. Second, he offers his own take on today’s biggest trends and where those trends might be leading us.

How can you predict the future of your business? Garland offers a number of factors for you to analyze, and then suggests ways to put them together and make educated guesses. The issues that affect your business are not just about your current competitors. New technologies, government regulations, economic trends, environmental factors, politics, your company’s local community—any or all of these could affect what happens to your company.

As an example, Garland picks the chocolate industry. What if, thanks to the trends of increasing litigiousness and the epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, the chocolate industry found itself increasingly under attack, thus damaging sales while costing companies millions in legal fees? How would those companies react? What could they do to get ahead of that trend?

(Another example that comes to my mind would be the fact that some companies that had long enjoyed their treatment by the Republican majority in Congress should have been preparing for expected changes if the Democrats were to take control. )

While Garland suggests ways to predict the future, he also cautions companies not to get caught up in media hype. Carefully analyzing what is happening through the use of multiple, reliable sources can help you better assess the market of today and tomorrow.

To help you on your predictive path, Garland uses the second half of the book to point out current trends, where they may be headed, and what risks/opportunities each presents. Among the issues he raises:

• the effects of an aging population
• rising costs of health care
• ever-increasing computing power with ever-smaller chips
• biotechnology breakthroughs and the ethical questions they raise
• energy
• media
• the environment

You can probably easily cite some issues around these topics. The need for alternative energy sources, cloning controversies, people living longer and longer but the costs to keep them alive growing larger and larger—Garland discusses these and more, but offers thoughts on consequences you may not have considered.

Garland’s writing style is accessible and easily understood, not overly scholarly as books of this nature sometmes are. And, by combining his research on macro trends with a detailed plan for do-it-yourself futurism, Garland goes beyond telling you what’s coming—he makes the book a resource that you can return to repeatedly. Even when the trends he speaks of become dated, the methods used to make smart choices about the future will remain relevant.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success

It’s no news that companies that “go the extra mile” are more successful than those who do the minimum, but I love to hear different ideas or stories on how that concept can be put into action.

Here’s one from Jeff Burrows at The Trump Blog. In it Burrows talks about not just fulfilling your promise to a customer, but doing the extra one percent that your competitors do not:

Let me return to the example of a company that installs swimming pools. If that is your business, you know that deciding to have a swimming pool installed is a very big moment in your customers’ lives. But it is also a dangerous moment for you, because your customers are so focused on the idea of having a pool, they will forget that you are going to have to dig a big ditch first. They will forget that your trucks are going to back up and make a mess of the yard. They never stop to think that they are going to be scared silly because their kids are going to want to run around in the work area.

If you can identify and manage that extra one percent of issues, you are going to stand out as a company and make profits.

You can add that extra one percent of value by explaining the whole construction process to your customers, so they will know what to expect. You can introduce all your workers to your customers, so they will not be alarmed to see strangers on their property. You can take extra measures to ensure their kids’ safety. And you can complete your work in a way so that when your pools are installed, your customers will say, “Wow, my yard and landscaping look even nicer now than when the pool company came!”

Yes, obviously we’re not all installing pools. No example works for everyone. But this example stuck with me because I can remember hiring people to do things at my home who have technically done what I paid for, but made me never want to use them again.

In each of the last two homes I’ve owned, we’ve had fairly large earth-moving equipment have to come in, once to remove a retaining wall, once to take a large rotting tree down. In both cases, the weight of the equipment smashed the sidewalk, so that afterward when it rained, large pools of water would collect where the sidewalk squares had gone from level to a serious slant. No one from either company ever mentioned the problem, no one offered to do anything about it. And each time it took us a little while to realize the problem, so we couldn’t really pin it on the companies, even though it was obvious they’d done it.

A better company would have said to us, “We’re bringing in heavy equipment and sometimes it can cause some damage to your walks. We’ll do our best to avoid it, but I have to tell you in advance that we’re not responsible for that type of damage.” Or of course they could offer to pay for/fix any damage. But even if they wouldn’t fix it, being told in advance would’ve kept me from crossing them off my list if further work had been needed.

I don’t know if there’s something we can all take from the swimming pool example or not, but it’s a reminder to always be thinking from the customer’s perspective instead from your own profit-and-loss perspective.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.