The Garden is Everywhere

I don’t understand people who can steal from their companies or their clients. Can you imagine waking up in the morning and knowing you have nothing in yourself that’s real and genuine by which you can live? This is what you’ve got - what you’re made of - this is the fruit of your character? A fakery? Can you imagine waking up knowing that your life depends on your ability to scam, to fudge, to be anything other than real?

What must it be like to look in the mirror? What do such people see in their mind’s eyes, thinking of themselves? They’ve denied the world of meaning, and are looking at life as a cold crypt. I can’t imagine.

I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. I watch people who get by or pad their bank accounts and their lifestyles by ripping other people off, and I just get sick to my stomach trying to imagine myself in their place. I’m partly in business for myself because it frees me to live ethically. It doesn’t make me superior - it just makes me more human in that way than I would be otherwise. It keeps me from getting sick.

The thing I learned from a friend that has consistently inspired my business endeavours is: if you can’t find the good in what you’re being asked to do, then do what you need to yourself, for yourself, make it yourself, start it yourself - begin with you, and only then can you move out from there to each person you can include who wants the same thing. But if it doesn’t begin with you, it won’t happen anywhere else in the world that you’ll ever find. “For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.” To me, that translates into a business.

Sometimes I think that people who derisively apply the term “small” simply can’t see the landscape at all.

Two Great Threes

With initial product reviews, I think it’s generally a good idea to revisit a while later, and see if the glamour has worn off, or if the product is still showing it’s value.

Two products I’ve mentioned here have been the Motofone F3 and the Mazda 3. So how are they holding up?

M3: There are four key things I love about my Mazda 3:

• leanness: I get over 30mpg in mixed driving, It takes up very little room, and it’s big on the inside.
• response: Stick shift, so it moves with me - no waiting for it - it keeps pace like a lover.
• air: The moon-roof is the ultimate accessory. It’s all about airflow. The brain needs O2, for thought, for recuperation, and for pleasure. With the windows down and the roof open, you get a lot of the pleasure of a convertible w/o the drawbacks. Driving home is a form of rejuvenation.
• black: Did I mention it’s black inside and out? I look good in this car. What’s more, I feel good in it. It’s a kind of portable, comfortable, womb of steel and leather with instruments and wheels.

F3: The Motophone F3 is still the best phone ever:

• leanness: It’s super thin, super light, and does only what I need - one key control, and it’s $40 free and clear - no dotted line.
• response: It’s got the loudest ring (but gentle at first), the loudest volume, the best reception, clearest screen in direct light (it’s e-paper), and super-long battery life. It’s also ultra-portable (slam in a sim card and go). Meters (battery & reception) are external and always on. Suitable for your primary phone. It doesn’t do music and photos, but neither does a landline, and this goes anywhere. Goes great with a Mazda3.
• black: Seems like a fine suit. It’s equipment, not a toy.

That’s it. Both of the above products are going strong. Excellent purchases, and I recommend them highly.

We Did It!

You’ll remember that back in April I told you about the New Futures Orphanage. Money was coming in so slowly that they had to eat it (as rice) and, especially with food costs being what they now are, they could never get together enough at once to buy farm animals and start sustainable agriculture. Their goal was $1000 to buy chickens and other sustainable food sources.

This goal has been met, and you can read about the resulting New Futures Farm here. Similarly, I mentioned the Sharing Foundation’s Khmer School in Cambodia, which is now fully funded.

It is entirely possible and really not very hard to give money directly. Direct giving means the money goes directly to the orphanage or micro-charity, and is not used up in advertising or overhead or administrative costs. A small processing fee is used to cover your payment transaction (just like a merchant is charged at a convenience store), and the rest, in its entirety, goes right to the micro-charity that uses it to feed, educate, and give a future to people who may otherwise be relegated to anguish, suffering, and despair. Direct giving is the antidote to pessimism and cynicism about giving relief to the poor.

The following two projects are not yet fully funded. Can you join in?

Lead from the Front, not your Rear

Who hasn’t had the opportunity to either experience leadership (good or bad) in action, or to exert leadership in some setting? Some basic observations from both sides of that experience can translate into effective rules for successful leadership.

A leader motivates through encouragement rather than ridicule or intimidation: Motivation involves the personal goals of the participants, not just the leader’s goals. Smart leaders try to help participants attain their personal goals, knowing that this will result in high achievement for team goals and project goals. Ridicule or intimidation are thought to be a shortcut to motivation, actually they undermine it and cancel it out. They’re a form of defeating the soldiers on your own team, and threatening the others. It’s not a smart form of leadership - it’s the sign of a leader abandoning the larger goals for the sake of winning personal authoritarian ones.

A leader doesn’t trade power for control: Power doesn’t need to exert control, it is confident enough that it can afford to persuade. When one reaches for control, it’s actually a denial of power, a confession that one doesn’t have it, and it’s to relinquish power in that area. Controlling people reduces them to ‘monkeys’ - anyone can go read a presentation for you but, if they’re not motivated, how likely is it that they’re going to win your audience and turn them into evangelists for your product? In most cases, anyone can meet the basic requirements and job description, and deliver what you ask on time. Whether or not they will be amazing, exceed your expectations, and deliver a ‘wow’ at the end is based largely on motivation, interest, and their own personal sense of meaning and success. It has to mean something to them and, if it does, and you know what it is and how to ensure they have that meaning, you don’t need control - you have power. Power is the power to create vehicles of meaning - which is why a master presenter can close the deal for your product in the hearts and minds of your audience. It’s not because he reads a powerpoint in the voice of Charlton Heston - it’s because he thinks about the sources of meaning for his audience.

A leader doesn’t base authority on absolutes: The ‘my way or the highway’, ‘what I want, and I don’t care about the rest’ approach is often thought to be authority. Respect for authority is said, in bad leadership, to be jumping on demand like a wind-up toy, to whatever one is told. But real authority (real leadership) isn’t based on absolutes. Real authority comes not from cancelling discussion, even after you’ve made up your mind, but from continually listening, considering alternatives, and welcoming constructive challenges. Authority that expects to be followed without question or challenge is actually undermining its own effectiveness. The role of the best minds on a team or project is to ‘push back’ when something may affect outcomes - if you silence that when you’ve made up your mind, you silence it for the future when you’ll need it to ensure your own success. That’s not authority - that’s absolutism. A leader with authority frees his people from burdens by letting them know the concern has been heard and documented, and that the responsibility for deciding against it is on the leader.

A leader doesn’t ask you to accept responsibility without control: A leader doesn’t leave it on others if we fail and on himself if we succeed. There are many forms of this. If you’re given a goal and a deadline, but then a number of other things are piled on, and the deadline isn’t moved, that’s a form of responsibility without control. “Just get it done.” isn’t the answer of leadership - it’s the answer of someone who intends to blame others for failure. If you can’t go to a leader with, “I can do what you ask, based on this time frame, or moving these things around - which do you prefer?” — not without invoking anger, frustration, and threats - then it isn’t leadership, it’s dumping on you.

A leader cultivates respect by giving respect rather than shame or fear: An effective leader doesn’t confuse cowed people who offer up the rituals of deference with loyal people who are working for you because it’s a joy to do so. The latter will work through hard times, rough waters, and pour their particular genius into the project. The former will do what you say. Would you prefer someone who does what you say or what you intend? Leaders who try to use fear and shame as motivators have a belief in their own infallibility. But leaders who recognize their fallibility are more effective, and know that what they need are fully-engaged minds, who wed their hearts to their work. This is accomplished by creating an environment of mutual respect. Often you’ll get schizophrenic environments where intimidation and ridicule are coupled with praise and pats on the head. For one thing, pats on the head aren’t the same thing - if you don’t mean it, no matter how ‘good’ you think you are, and how much your people pretend, deep down the best ones will know it. For another, on-again off-again respect-riducle fame-fear motivation attempts turn your team dynamics into a vending machine of self-serving detachment. If you want to win the nods but lose the will, use shame and fear to ‘master’ your team members.

Things bad leaders say:

• “But you don’t understand what it takes to lead in this environment. This is different.” (the ‘it was war, and war is Hell’ argument - excusing bad leadership by appeal to context)
• “It’s because you’re difficult to manage. Sometimes I have to do things I ordinarily wouldn’t do, just to get through to you.” (the ‘you made me beat you’ argument - excusing bad leadership by blaming the followers)
• “I do what I have to do - if you don’t like it, feel free to leave.” (a combination of the ‘leaders aren’t subject to standards for means, just for ends’ and the ‘love it or leave it’ arguments)
• “You have to do what you’re told. That’s all there is to it.” (an appeal to absolutes - to control disguised as authority - excusing bad leadership by silencing anyone who thinks differently)
• “Don’t complain and stop asking questions. Just get it done.” (the ‘make bricks without straw’ response’)

As much as a leader may talk about knowing how to motivate people, what it takes to be successful, and delivering the end result, these are just excuses for doing it badly. And it doesn’t work. The results of this kind of ‘leadership’ is that you stress out your most diligent workhorses, you create an amoral “every man for himself” atmosphere that expresses itself in gossip, tattling, backstabbing, and other social dysfunctions - bad team dynamics, and you de-motivate your most dedicated people - decreasing their loyalty and their concerns for keeping all the pieces together - you create silos. These things are the inevitable results of bad leadership that covers for, makes excuses for, and exalts itself, and blames others.

Leadership books are a dime a dozen. But there are few of them that recommend the techniques of bad leadership mentioned above, and most of the rules above would be considered basic to human motivation. That means even a wet-behind-the-ears assistant manager at a burger joint, or a green corporal may command more successfully than a veteran ruler with six figures and some initials in his title. But you would rather be that person? Or would you rather be that person and be effective?

The cost for bad leadership in a corporate millieu where bad leadership is ubiquitous seems relatively small. So yes, you may not pay for it all that much, and may prefer to take little lumps than do the work of being a decent human being, which is all a good leader really is - a decent human being in the context of leadership. How many “nice” people would turn into little monsters if they took on the mantle of command? This is the key point: I’m not going to try to tell you that you’ll suffer greatly and endlessly if you don’t follow these rules - you’ll achieve a mixture of mediocrity and success that will likely get you promoted through to retirement. I’m not using the fear of punishment as a motivator, here. Instead, I’m saying if you want to be amazing at it, want tremendous success, want silly levels of honor as a leader, then follow the above rules like they were gospel.

Things effective leaders say:

• What do you need from me in order to be successful? (This should be something you hear periodically.)
• What do you want in the context of this team and this organization? What are you working towards? (Assesses individual motivators. A good leader will help his people achieve these.)
• What am I doing well as a leader, and what can I do better? (Invites openness about personal and professional development, leads by example)

Not everyone is cut out to stand at the front of an organization structure; some are the right hand or the left or the rear guard or the avante garde. Leadership, though, as a conscious set of efforts to be effective, is useful in a lot of venues. The same person who is your right hand man, may be a leader at home, his church, in a non-profit, or in a small business for which he moonlights. The lessons from that are: an effective leader can often lead from behind the scenes (he doesn’t need constantly to be recognized as a leader), if you’re an ineffective leader, your mistakes are likely to be obvious to a whole range of people you don’t suspect, and leadership, effectively, is shared - it doesn’t demand sole exercise of the leadership role. Take away what you will, but leadership is everywhere; in any crowd of 100 people, it’s more likely that 75 will be leaders than 10. And we’re watching, and discussing this. Good leaders are icons and bad leaders are bywords in the effort to understand and use the rules of effective leadership. If nothing else, we can observe the successes and mistakes of others and the consequences of them, and hone our own skills. So lead on… lead from the front, and not your rear.

Don’t let them Chubby-size it

You know, some time back, as part of a ’smaller footprint’ initiative, I started ordering down at restaurants. Junior burger at Braums - kid’s meal if I need more. Smaller beverages. Light portions. Partly, of course, you calculate the cost and the calories, not just what you throw away.

It’s a waste, of course, the extra 40% that you don’t need - not because people are really starving to death in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and now again certainly Eastern Europe. It’s a waste because, as an old friend once said, ‘if you don’t need it, it’s doing as much good in your belly as in the trash’.

Some people have laughed at me and said it means I’m old. I have to laugh back - they don’t realize that it’s not that I’ve gotten older - it’s that everything has gotten larger. I’m still ordering the same size I was 20 years ago. More or less - I remember the 70s and 80s when Seven-11 ruined us with the “Big Gulp” and piles of candy and sweets became the norm - for “adults”. Some excellent writing has been done on this sort of infantilization - one journal cover I saw had a grown man, over 6-feet tall, holding a little box of Lemonheads in one hand, and it expertly made the point - he looked ridiculous and pathetic. He looked like someone whose mental condition had remained in High School. In that sense, too, it’s not that I’ve gotten older (I still struggle w. people’s bowls of office candy), it’s that the world has gotten younger - and I don’t mean physically.

But I notice the order-takers don’t consider me old. Even the non-tipped ones ask with some amazement: “are you sure?… that’s all?… don’t you want some (more bloated calorie crap)?” They don’t ever ask the geriatric crowd. Just me and my family. Of course, I’m putting away less than a lot of the geriatrics in front of me who order a small shake, while I order a kid’s shake (extra small). It’s all I need. What am I off doing with those calories, the Iditarod? And I look younger than the younger guys making fun; God willing, my hair will still be black while they’re waddling down the aisles of their wards.

Age aside - the economics, the health issues (bad carbs kill good people), and the general principle of the thing (I don’t want to be force-fed a lot of corporate-engineered dietary plans, like some beef they’re fattening up for a short, slow-moving life) - these all combine with the small footprint principle (take, use, waste, harm, destroy, indeed touch as little as you have to), and the useless gigantism of our age:

Would you like that in a Super Grande?
What’s a super grande?
It’s a Grande with 20% more and an extra shot.
Do you have a Mega Grande?
Actually, yes. Would you like one of those too?
Just give me a sample cup, how many ounces is that?
Sixteen.
Half of one, then.

and the result is: No thank you, no dessert - I had bread. No gallons of soda. No full pots of coffee (after 2 cups, switch to tea - does a body good). Go super-size someone else! (Remember, they’re not supersizing the meal, they’re supersizing you!) No jumbo shrimp full of hormones, no amazing super-oranges full of bizarre texture and very little flavor. No. No, no, and no. No thank you.

I would like a dietetically sound amount of real food that was cultivated without size-altering enhancements, and I would not like it served blended in a personal cooking vessel with a 16oz side of ranch, or accompanied by assorted dipping sauces, or a veneer of gravy, or smothered in enough cheese to make a loaf of sandwiches. I would like small, dammit - because in your world, small means of ordinary size, reasonable, and a heck of a lot of business sense for me.

Another Rule of Work

It’s been a while since I posted a new rule of work, and this is www.rulesofwork.com after all. So here goes:

Never do anything for money that you wouldn’t do for free.

It flies in the face of conventional wisdom, of course - which is, “never do for free what you could do for money”. Contrary to that, I’ve found it’s one of the priviledges of the talented to do both. What would Doctors Without Borders be without talented doctors who are able to sustain their efforts through economic activity? What we’re talking about with my rule is ethics.

Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship (someone with whom I’ve significant disagreement in some areas, but deeply admire for his social work), pointed out that in Germany, in the 1930s, the Heidelberg professors filled the minds of young Germans with anti-human revolutionary ideas. After the war, when called to account for this, they said ‘We’re only teachers - we’re not responsible for what people do with our ideas.’

The implication, of course, is: yes they are - a teacher is morally responsible for enabling others to act upon what he teaches. And being paid for it doesn’t mitigate this - it underscores it as an ethical issue as well. A designer is responsible for what people do with what he designs. Not responsible in an absolute way - it makes no sense to sue a tobacco company because you’re dying of cancer when you smoked Lucky Strikes all your life. That’s a fallacy of Western thinking - the idea that, because you’re morally responsible, you’re entirely responsible.

But you can’t go building a web site for a violent gang of criminals because it’s ‘just a job’. If you wouldn’t do it as a volunteer, you darned sure shouldn’t do it for money. The question is not who should receive blame or whether there should be punishment - it’s whether it’s right or wrong to go down that path in the first place.

I’ve built sites that people have subsequently defaced, obliterating much of their SEO value. Sure, they were enabled to control their own sites, because I built them. But I’m not entirely responsible for what they do or don’t do with them afterward. Even if they do nothing, and just let it sit there, it will decrease in value over time, because it lacks any user involvement (e.g. blogging). That’s on them. But I’d have no moral dilemma with building their site for free, so I’m willing to have built it for money as well. And in the end, if they lower its value over time, that’s a separate matter. I wouldn’t build a site for a bunch of Heidelberg professors - though one suspects they’re teaching entirely different ridiculous ideas today.

Anyway, the implication of this rule is another rule:

The job is always more than the mere mechanics.

The parts of your job that a monkey could do (e.g. a computer program could do it for you) are never the most important parts. Even if your work isn’t primarily the work of the mind, it’s the part that is the mind’s work that’s most important. That’s the key to work involving human beings. Physical labor is quite noble, but it’s because it’s the meaning of the work that matters, and the true workman, the genuine craftsman, the excellent tradesman, is the one who brings his intelligence to it, grasps its meaning, and contributes and is involved at a level that’s in accord with its goals. That work is tedious indeed which asks you to shut off your mind and just punch out more widgets. And that client or company that asks that is not only shooting themselves in the foot - they’re denigrating the meaning of work itself, and we’re back to the computer program.

Envision Corporations as Business

Do you work in a corporation? Ever think things would be better if you could have a Red October and terminate about half your colleagues? Not in a Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of way - but with a pink slip? Who would you fire first?

If you ran things - ran it like your own business, who would it be? Start with the gestapo - those people who have no purpose at all but to go around detecting when anyone is having fun, so they can kill it. You know, the ones who catch you laughing in the hallway or smiling in a conversation and look for a way it can be wrong. The enforcers of dress codes. Dress codes themselves are a separate issue; the enforcers need something else to do.

How about the incompetents - the people who have been faking it all along and manage to get by on who likes them - who they’re tight with - or a pretty face - but they really are quite useless.

The purposeless - those who are perpetually on break or chatting - the ones that spend most of any given day stalling - trying to look like they have something to do, while simultaneously they avoid taking on any work in any way they can.

The bad moods - the ones who are always always in a bad mood, always act like it’s your responsibility to make room for it, and always use it as an excuse to complain about work, ditch work, or dump work on someone else - those who don’t hold up their end, because it’s just not their day. With them the snippy emoticons - those who can only get away with the way they talk to anyone they consider a lesser being, because of some demographic issue, or because powerful people either tolerate it or aren’t aware.

The tattlers - you know who they are - the ones who are always trying to gain approval by turning in their peers or making their colleagues look less than desirable. The gossipers, backstabbers, petty plaintifs (they always have an “HR issue” perched on their shoulder, and they dare anyone to knock it off), perpetually sick, shirkers. . . .

Imagine you’re your own consultant and you’re cleaning house. And then, at the end, you declare it voluntary sandals month, bring in turkey and dressing for your own off-season Thanksgiving and encourage people to snack at their desks, invest in real coffee and don’t let people fark it up, cancel all the non-essential feel good meetings and demand a damned good reason for having each and every one (the fact that you had one last week isn’t good enough), limit administrative emails to three a day, based on priority, declare 20% of the day “do what you please” time and insist the other 80% be kick ass and you’d better produce time, declare all feel good moments optional and then don’t censor the bulletin board. Put a ban on one thing: bowls of candy - they’re the crack cocaine of work life - push the pushers undergound. You can eat a steak at your desk, as long as you don’t stink up the place (no microwaved food - microwaves get donated to Goodwill), but bowls of candy can be freely dumped on sight by anyone. Stock the place with all the things you might need to send or go out for - everything from Tums to Tylenol, Kleenex, hand lotion, washing machines, napping areas, books and magazines. And free, unrestricted internet: you infect it, you buy it, but no ban on e-mail and web sites.

The demand is for productivity - make it performance-based not position-based. Dump titles and fear-based relationships - everyone has a different set of responsibilities and everyone has to justify their existence by producing. If someone says, “so and so is flying in, we need to clean up and be on our toes”, be prepared to fire ’so and so’ upon arrival - they’re scaring people - or else fire the dolt that made you afraid of the harmless visitor. Use the recouped funds from the first day to buy everyone a solid meal.

Give everyone VPN access and a passkey - everyone can work from anywhere. If you don’t trust them, don’t hire them - the point is that everyone’s work is obvious in a performance culture. No one can slack and not get noticed. Flexible schedules - 4 days on, 3 off - telecommute - whatever you can do that your duties reasonably allow. And loose job and role definitions, based on skill sets rather than presents handed out as favors or power plays or formalities - let people define their own contributions a little more freely. It really does work, if your goals are fairly well-defined. Speaking of definition, let people attack ill-defined problems - don’t silo-ize your people so they only care about their area, department, or list of tasks. That’s the death of success. What happens when things fall between the cracks of job titles? Flex, bend, stretch, reach, and wiggle.

And when you’re done, what have you got? Is it still a corporation, or is it your own business? In some important ways, it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s both. The point isn’t firing people - not really. The point is that if you could modify a corporation to operate as many great companies have done - based on performance - you no longer need police or snitches to work for you - you no longer need to control everything or limit access or send out a barrage of announcements or routinize and schedule other people - in fact, if you do, you’ll fark it up.

Not realistic, you say? Yeah, you really would have to fire about half the people that normally work in such places for it to happen. That’s why it’s hard to see right now. But then you hire the people that thrive on it. Some companies that operate this way have only a couple hundred employees, some have a couple of million, and some have one. They’re there. They do exist. They’re not even all that hard to find, though they may not be where you’re living right now. But don’t be too quick to blow off what’s working for quite a lot of people.

And if you’re a ‘bigwig’ reading this, and you see in it the death of bullshit, how you respond to that is kind of a gauge of character, isn’t it? If you like it the other way, you may not be too happy with me right now. I don’t mind. “I’ve seen land. It does exist.” (Waterworld). In fact I’ve operated both business and non-profit in this way, having seen both done the other way, and I’ve been consistently successful at it. If it’s down to you happy or me happy, I’m willing to go on without you.

In the end, the truth is, corporate culture is widely broken, but there are ways to fix it, and there are companies making a pretty good stab at doing so. Google is one of the most famous ones. But there are small companies with handfuls of employees doing the same thing. Or we start our own - but of course that’s not how this post started. Business has a lot to teach corporations and perhaps it starts in the imagination.

So if you’re reading this blog and just can’t see running your own business, but you’re up to your bare chin in “business casual”, look around for ways to flex. It goes all the way up to ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) in which “each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done”. But if you can’t swallow it all yet, take baby bites. Google’s just one of a number of companies doing the 20% time thing (do what you want 20% of the time), and while some people do play video games or do their taxes, most of their great applications that started out in Google Labs began first as 20% time - developed by people because a) they were interested in a problem, b) they weren’t barred from the access needed to solve it, and c) they weren’t robbed of the flexibility to do something valuable with their creativity.

In software, if you subtract features and limit capabilities, it isn’t just ‘normalcy’ and ’standard business practice’. It’s called “crippling” the software. Companies do it, either through lack of vision, or a desperate need to feel they’re exerting control. These are the same reasons they do the same things to their employees. And they are crippling the potential of business in a free market. Just like crippleware, you get cripplejobs in cripple-companies - the access drastically reduced, the capabilities deeply limited, the responsibilities neatly corralled, the creativity controlled, and the effectiveness so predictable that it becomes the running joke - meetings, meetings, rules, lunch, and meetings, but what do we get done?

If artificial intelligence were ever born in machines, it would be from the fuzzy, ill-defined logic sets that exist in overlapping areas of development and extension. If people are or have been intelligent, then corporate life, as is commonly conceived, may actually be reversing the process, so the result is indeed artificial, and in the end, we are going through the repetitive motions more common and appropriate to machines.

I still envision a bubble in the world in which human genius and ingenuity push our horizons past even the capacity for communication with any but our peers. Fortunately, that just insures a deeply interested market, and a virtual corner on it for the rest of us. I don’t know if I’ll be a part of it, but I’d like to be.

I suspect everyone has something to contribute somewhere, and it’s a matter of pairing the right person with the right responsibility. Not everyone has the character to find and love the work of their hands, and you can’t always do it for them. The “firing people” thing is really just making a point - the people that can help you, that can help any enterprise, are those who if not satisfied with what they’re doing, are doing it with satisfaction - the work is the thing - it’s always the work. The other baggage, that makes it like a cross between Jerry Springer, Night Court, and the Kremlin under Stalin is a sign of a lot of people being on a wholly different path and making an entirely different kind of organization.

Split personalities aside, you’ve got to figure out who you’re going to be, and be that, as a person or organization. You hear that 20% is the fabled number of productive people who carry the other 80% - the slackers - the so-called Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule. You see? That’s the expectation - 80% waste - 80% failure - 80% slackers robbing the 20% who matter of their own 20% extra effectiveness. That’s the crippling lack of vision that makes places like you work deal with the crap you deal with on a constant basis. Foo on the 80/20 rule! The point of the above discussion is thinking about a place where 80% of what happens is real work, and 20% is your own darned business, because you rock! The 80% slackers are the reason your workplace is in the shape it’s in. Frankly, I’m back to thinking about what it would be like to take the 20% and go start our own company. I say “our” because if I don’t found it, then I want in, dammit; I want in.

What’s wrong with my web site?

If you’re not getting a lot of traffic, and you’ve invested in a solid, reasonably attractive, well-organized design, and basic search engine optimization, the problem is most likely that your site is static, not dynamic. In other words, it’s the same furniture arrangement each time - the content never changes, so it’s not going to draw much of an audience.

That’s the outdated web site thinking from some years ago when people put up web sites and figured there were only a few thousand or so on the web that matter, so if you have one at all, people will come. Remember the dot com bust? But everything has changed. New sites that do well are dynamic sites - their written content is always changing. Not the style and colors - changing that often confuses and alienates the very clients who are interested in dynamic sites - it’s the written content that needs to be continually fresh and new. In fact, one of the rookie mistakes is investing a ton in fancy visual and graphic content, flash animations, etc. while dynamic sites with fairly simple design, fast load, and efficient lay out kick your butt in search engine rankings, inbound traffic, and the viral factor (people you don’t know sharing links to your site posts with other people you don’t know, generating exponentially high traffic).

In the past couple of years, blogs for instance (sites on which the content changes every day or two) have overtaken the static sites of major news organizations in terms of both Google rankings and number of visitors (plus the viral factor is all about dynamic sites - just doesn’t happen with static content), so that those large corporations are in a panic to create their own blogs. But of course their blogs come off as corporate speak a lot of the time and are just taking up space - they just don’t get it. Small businesses, free agents, independents, and volunteers are kicking their arses. On the web, the blogosphere rules and, in the blogosphere, this is the era of the small entrepreneur.

If you have a static site, you need to either add on a blog, pair it closely with a blog,  or embed a blog so that your front page content changes constantly. Your blog as the most important part of your xsite. If you’re looking for overnight results, there’s nothing instant about it, because there’s no such thing as a push-button instant climb to the top method (if there was, I’d be a multi-billionaire selling it).

But if your blog or your site hasn’t moved since you built it, there’s really no reason for people to interact with your site on a wide scale, because there’s nothing new, fresh, and regularly (every day or two) updated so they have a reason to take interest. Anyone can hang out an online business card that says “I want your business” -  but so what? Ultimately - in the mind of the client, what have you given them to interest them beyond the billboard?

That’s where you come in. Yes you. There’s just no substitute for involving yourself in your own business. 5-minutes a day is all you need - it will take some time to see results, and you’ll need to be consistent to generate interest. But even the big hooplah (justified with truly dynamic sites) about social networking to improve search engine optimization simply won’t work with your site static or changing only seldom - for one simple reason - social networking works on dynamic sites, not static ones. It’s blog posts that get picked up and credited and linked back to and become traffic drivers and, if you’re lucky, go viral and ultimately generate significant interested business traffic from social networking.

And remember the key rule of blog posts: Don’t paste in other people’s writing or links to other writing. There’s no short cut like OPM (other people’s money) - there’s no benefit and significant drawbacks to relying on other people’s content. For one things, search engines will lower your ranking for it, because it’s duplicate content. It’s ‘web-spam’. So copying news articles to paste into your blog would just make your site even less effective, not to mention less interesting - besides which, if you didn’t get explicit permission for each piece from the copyright holder, you’re liable to get sued - especially if you make a dime off of it as a business.

Instead, you write what’s on *your* mind, just like you would an e-mail to someone who’d be interested in what you’re thinking about relative to your line of work, your region of the country, etc. That’s what you post. Surely you don’t make it through an entire work day without a single work-related thought or idea or observation running through your head. If so, what are you doing? You can post common misconceptions, frustrating policies that affect your industry, an outlook on your local market, or just comments on the weather and how it’s too nice to be stuck in the office. Five minutes a day. If you can’t spare that to market your business, it’s either hopeless, or you’ve got plenty of business already - be happy.

Blogging is basically like journaling, except it’s public. That’s also why hiring a blogger is not a particularly good idea. It won’t sound like  you, or reflect your thoughts, people have no reason to contact you (they’d contact him), and that person won’t have the interest and industry or regional expertise in what they’re doing that you do - it’d be like putting a $5/hr person in front of your phones - do you really want that person representing your business? They don’t have enough emotional stake in it, and you don’t know if they’re being effective, unless you watch over their every move anyway, and really there’s a good chance it won’t come across as authentic to any readers. Remember, the corporate sites are busy hiring bloggers to do exactly this kind of thing and they’re still really not making a huge dent in it all. Thing small, think personal, and think about what you know, what you do, and what advice or expertise you can give away to other people.

The key to drawing business with blogging is give something away. Tips, tricks, insight, advice, coaching, guidance, inside information, an inside look… things they can’t just pick up easily anywhere. But the key is just talk. Talk about what interests you, and you’ll be twice as authentic. You’re giving away this writing and, in exchange, you hope to build a readership and interested visitors (over time, mind you), that generate primary and secondary referrals.

There’s more to it than this, of course. If you want to build an overall marketing plan for your small business. But this is where you start. If you can’t get this going, it’s questionable what else you can do.

Owners of static sites: You have to think about the fact that if you have a building with great office furniture, and a professionally-produced sign, and a spotless parking lot, in a great area of town, but your lights were off all the time, and no one seemed to be alive inside… how much business are you going to get? Your web site is like that. If you leave it sitting there like furniture and don’t touch it - if it doesn’t live, change, etc (again, speaking of the written content) - it’s not going to draw a lot of interest. There are people who don’t believe this, and that’s fine. There are indeed other marketing methods that also generate business (like mailing out cards or running a contest). And I won’t knock these; I will just say that these work best as part of an overall marketing plan where the pieces fit and interact together.

If you’re with me this far, a couple of articles may interest you:

Automated Marketing: A Lay Gospel

Marketing to Stan & Fran & Jan and…

– Daniel DiGriz

www.editgeek.com

www.mixmysite.com

Faith in a Blog about Work

Look, here’s the point: I have more than a couple of jobs, but I limit what I discuss to two, so we don’t have to waste time with the “you’re a freak” discussion. I often hear people talk of: “putting in long hours”. As opposed to what? I was going to work anyway. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. People talk of “work-life balance” but why does work need to be balanced? Work *is* life. Work is balance. “Work and play?” Work is the way that I play. People say, “You do what you have to, so you can do what you want to do.” But work *is* what I want to do. I don’t get it.

Work is supposed to be the source of meaning. That’s the whole point of this blog. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s worth, in other words, taking seriously, making the work of your hands, the work of your life. And whatever isn’t worth that much, you set it down for what is.

A fundamentalist lecturer who spoke extensively about work has said “the good things are the enemies of the best things, if only for lack of time”. We have so little time, so little life left to us in our mortality, to establish what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. If you’re reading this and you’re over 30, your life is half over, statistically. Maybe you’re optimistic - ok, so even if you’re life is 1/3 over, and you’ve only got 2/3 left, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then when?

I used to teach a class in which I’d begin with a bonding exercise - ask each participant to answer a seemingly simple question: If we paid all your bills, alleviated all your debts, met all your obligations, and gave you the car you want, the home you want, the title you want, etc. - what would you do with the rest of your life? The goal was to bypass some of the social armor we put on, the defensiveness of new environments, and coming from diverse backgrounds, and see a little bit of the person in each other, just a little beyond the veil. And you see it, because you see in each person the universal search for meaning - meaning that can be understood in the context of work.

But it’s amazing how few people spoke of something resembling work. Some spoke of traveling or of learning/studying (both of which represent the search for meaning) - a small minority spoke of engaging in some particular profession or launching a business. The exercise proceeds by asking the question “why” until you get at the reason behind the reason (not just a restatement of the original). Suffice it to say that answers broke down (without people saying it explicitly) into either “I have no idea what my life means, so I would search for meaning” or “I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, and it’s work”. The final question - either way - was, “So, even given limited resources and time, what steps are you taking, on a constant or daily basis, in that direction?”

The goal was to accomplish a bit of inthinking - thinking together about a shared problem that’s uniquely held by each participant. The result is the creation of a much more effective learning environment, because further activity becomes attitudinally focused around the mutual acquisition of meaning that work constitutes in the first place. In short, this implied bond quickly created more cohesive work groups with a discreet understanding of what our work actually is. Minds were open to finding meaning through the work we were bound to do together. People still come up to me in crowds and tell me the turning point in their attitudes about their work was those classes. Those were sales classes too - full of professional skeptics. It’s not me, though - work really can be like that.

The answers to that last question, though - “what are you doing to go in that direction now?”, ranged from “You’re right. I will (or I am)” to the challenge, “What about you? Are you doing what you’re meant to do?” - to which I would always answer categorically “yes”. And indeed I was. And without belaboring the details, that’s still true. As much as I can, and I am trying to make more “can”. What I can’t bring myself to do is just whittle away the hours. Even reading a book is work. The best quotation on reading I’ve read is “When you read, make to do lists instead of notes - if you can’t do that, you’re reading the wrong books.”

Your work is holistic - it involves the whole person - what you put in and what you put out. Your work, the work of your life, the work of your hands, is too important to leave to the merely adequate, to a placeholder, to be in fact anything other than the source of meaning in your life. Even in religion, the word “liturgy” (the Christian worship service) means “the work of the people”. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth taking quite seriously. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work.

In fact, Christianity provides a very useful fork for attitudes about work: one attitude views work as a curse - a kind of necessary evil - a blight upon one’s life that one should rather escape if one can. This view has generated a generation of slackers - decades, in fact, of drop-outs, and beatniks on the Kerouak model. Work, in this experience, is the source of frustration, not the locus of joy, much less the means of salvation. And this is often thought to be the Christian model.

Historically, it is anything but. For one thing, the Christian view is that, when God pronounces a curse, it is an act of love, which is actually designed for the salvation of the individual - for union with God, rather than alienation from God and all things. It is saving man by putting a boundary on his despair (the opposite of meaning). The idea of a curse in the occult sense of a malevolent force of destruction is foreign to Christian tradition. Secondly, the tradition is that all things blighted with death - with frailty and frustration - all things deprived or distorted of meaning - are being redeemed, deified, transformed into vessels of meaning, conveyors of salvation. Work, in the Christian view, while it is uncomfortable because of the death inflicted on mankind and the world, is meant to be a means of overcoming death. In fact, without one’s work, one cannot be saved, according to the Christian gospels. If one reads the parables of the talents and of the minas and of the vineyard and the other Christian teachings on the mystery of work, it is a primary means of union with God. The alternative is “weeping, outer darkness, and gnashing of teeth” - that’s despair.

A common misconception is that the Christian scriptures say that work is a curse. Far from it; they say that the ground is cursed - the environment, the context of work - not work itself.

Cursed is the ground because of you, In sorrow you shall eat of it all your days. It will bring forth thorns and thistles, and you shall eat the grain of the field: by the sweat of your brow you will get your bread, unil you return to the ground, for you were taken from it. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In fact, the curse is that things will frustrate your work (e.g. “thorns and thistles”) - the implication is that work itself is a holy thing confronted by disaster which it and we must overcome for rightful ends. We’re not much on proof texts here, but that’s what the words actually say and that’s the attitude that Christian tradition actually preserves, pop-religion aside. Keep in mind that the first thing God said to man was to work- the work of rulership over the earth jointly with the work of tending and protecting and replenishing the earth and making it peaceful:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed-bearing fruit; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth that lives, I have given every green plant for food”. And it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it.

It’s interesting that the very next thing God said to man was to fast, - it was a rule - to not eat up all the earth, or eat even of everything in it, even if man could consume it all, and even if it was designed as food, and even if it was in his care; but the implications of that is a different discussion for a different venue. We’ll stay with work. If you look closely at the Christian telling, work is the life of paradise, and the very deprivation of meaning from work, which came when Death fell upon it, is the very thing from which the curse is designed to save us.

There is, in our culture, a certain audacity in “bringing religion into” a discussion on work; it’s a faux pas - and I don’t violate it because I’m unaware of it. I’m a pretty smart guy - when I break a social rule, it’s intentional - I just have a reason that’s discreet and not readily apparent, or I’ve weighed the cost against a more desirable object and acted accordingly. I’m breaking this rule, because the rule itself - the separation of religion from work is, in part, based upon the very separation of work from meaning, and indeed upon the historical misunderstanding of the Christian view of work which is embedded in contemporary Western culture. Obviously, if work is thought of as a curse, the resultant “religious” ideas are not really smoothly compatible with an effective or thriving workplace. Keep in mind, I’m suggesting that’s part of the reason for the social taboo. Don’t believe it? What do people talk about on Monday morning and Friday afternoon - escaping from work - perhaps “having” to work during the weekend - sounds to me like they think it’s a curse. It’s culturally ingrained. So I break the taboo on religious talk at work to redefine the curse inherited from a religious misconception that’s breaking work for so many people.

The other causes for which I’m violating the norms of a professional blog are that: I find Faith to be the richest and most powerful and widely familiar source of metaphor to augment a discussion about meaning and about work, and also because we’re talking here about history. Historically, sociologically, anthropologically, these ideas have shaped our society in one way or another and are still latent within its cultural assumptions. What economist or historian or student of work completely throws Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) - over his shoulder? It’s required reading in the academies for any such professional, and ignorance of its thesis on the results of a particular work ethic is a basic failure of general education. One could cite other such discussions, but the point is, the faux pas only survives as such when we are not conversant in the breadth of discussion happening in most other places in our culture and in the world. The world is bigger than that rule, bigger than that supposed norm - and, frankly, this blogger always feels free to use ideas from anywhere anyway.

The primary subject matter of this blog is a synthesis of collective wisdom and individual insight on work. If Christendom had nothing significant to say, that in itself would be a profound commentary, and worth examining in that light. When it comes to work, we listen everywhere.

In any case, that’s the deal with the blog: This author deems a false construct that dialectical opposition of work with various avenues of life that are brimming with meaning. Work *is* the vehicle of meaning. Work isn’t opposed to family, to Faith, or to fun. One person commented on an earlier post that “hobbies” were invented, more or less, as attempts to survive the dualism that occurs when you oppose work with life in the mind. As reasonable and meaningful reactions to conflicting internal-mental and external-societal and cultural demands, I can’t speak against them quite so vehemently. But I can say, in my experience, they fade away when you find yourself doing what you’re meant to do with your life. Someone might say, “Well, I’m meant to play.” Perhaps you are - go play; I’m not - me, well, I’ve got to go to work.

Marketing to Stan & Fran & Jan

You’re a billion dollar firm putting out a web site to position your company before the entire English-speaking public. Your marketing people are armed with formidable demographic research that, after weeks of culling and analysis, is oriented into a dozen “models” - virtual consumers that will be users of your web site.

Another 25% of your audience is detail driven, motivated by facts, and likely to read every page. If you don’t give them sufficient information to make a decision , they may not even contact you.They’re sketched, named, and pasted like wanted posters on the walls of your project team’s workplace. Joan the single mother of three. Tommy the single welder. Jim the jetsetter… The goal is to understand their expectations and design the site accordingly. Frequently, for example, there are several ways to access the same material, multiple contact methods, and content targeting each audience.

A million dollars later, you’ve got a web site. Well - THEY’ve got a web site.

You and I, statistically speaking, are unlikely to have that kind of scratch to throw around for an internet presence which, frankly, if you’re smart, is only one component in your internet marketing plan. So what do we do, if we want to market to a wide audience, but not shoot so wide we hit nothing? What if selling to people who are like us isn’t enough, and we don’t want to leave anyone out in the cold?

What we do is take stock of the four classic personality types - the four temperaments that have been utilized to discuss diversity in human personalities from the ancient Chinese and Greeks to Jung, Keirsey, the DISC system, and so many other approaches to the same basic data.

Most of us are familiar with them (or have at least come across them as): Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Sanguine. Or maybe: Thinker, Feeler, Director, Intuitor.

Usually, presentations of these types are done badly, and end up becoming a touchy-feely exercise in feeling good about oneself and passing some corporate training time. In other venues, they’re given religious significance. And often they’re misunderstood as boxes in which you put people. But really, they describe fundamental directions we personalities tend to take when approaching problems or making decisions.

For our purposes, lacking a high dollar marketing team, we put these directions to use, creating our content and designing our navigation and style for the four broad paths that human personalities tend to take when we market them. If you like, give them names, like John, Paul, George, and Ringo - or Hank, Bill, Dale, and Boomhauer. It’s “demographically”-based marketing on a budget. Just a brief set of examples:

About 25% of your audience is bottom line rather than detail oriented, goal-driven rather than information driven. You have to give this type everything they need to make a decision on the first page - the page leads from goal to close in the space of a 2 minute conversation. You have to give them multiple options (like email, call, or fill out a brief form), otherwise they’re not getting to make the decision - you are. And you can’t bog them down with too much data - make it available, but give just enough that an effective choice can be made. Also, if your business model supports it, give them the ability to buy right now, 24/7, right on the front page. Often the key to a sale here is letting them give you the money now.

Another 25% of your audience is detail driven, motivated by facts, and knowledge-focused. They’re likely to read every page on your site before they make a decision and, if you don’t give them sufficient information to make that decision, they may not even contact you, let alone buy. You’ll hear from them if they feel you’ve done your part, and they either need more info that, reasonably, is available through a direct contact, or they’re ready to go forward. Contact methods are important here, too - you need to give them an email address or non-invasive form, as well as a phone number. They may be up late at night looking at information, comparing answers, and may contact you during your off hours. Give them the means: in your content, tell them what the process is, from start to finish. Navigation is everything here: make sure your information is laid out in a logical, orderly fashion, and is easily accessible from anywhere on the site.

About 25% of your audience is bottom line rather than detail oriented, goal-driven rather than information driven. You have to give this type everything they need to make a decision on the first page.The other two personality types (50% of your audience) are driven more by personality and personal contact than by a cognitive approach. They differ between them over how they make decisions (you didn’t expect me to give away everything here, did you?), but to give a simple example: have photos on your site with human beings in them. If you don’t look good, you can get stock photos of models - what they’re wearing and where they’re standing is important, too, mind you, and there’s more than one issue there. But don’t make the mistake of making your site all information and tools, because that’s what YOU are interested in. Without a handshake, without a sense that the lights are on and someone’s home, and that real people run this business, you’re going to lose half your audience half the time.

We should distinguish this, of course, from targeted-marketing (aiming at, for example, luxury property buyers in Ft. Meyers, Florida or new home buyers in Charlotte, North Carolina). That’s certainly an important direction, too. But regardless of whether you’re doing targeted marketing or making a single web home to attract and service all your clients, being certain to cultivate the interest of diverse personality types, and avoiding alienating any of them, is certainly important.

There are many benefits of being conversant in the personality types, for anyone interested in sales, marketing, persuasion, or business in general. But in short, you don’t have to have a fancy (and expensive) team of demographic data gurus to know how you need to market your business and design your marketing tools, like your web site and your newsletter. Draw on the ancient knowledge that corporations all over the world use to understand and accomodate diverse personalities, and you’ll be on the right track.

Boycotting as Business

One of the most helpful things about both the David Ramsey method and running one’s own business (imo), is that you begin to see everything as business. Who you do business with, what your business can afford, when your business is open for business, and so on. And along with that, for me, comes a reinvigorated sense of refusing to do business with swindlers, exploiters, and dishonorable betrayers of my fellow human beings. We don’t spend our money there.

I’m talking about Boycotts. And not the big ones driven by left-wing newsletters, evangelical radio, or celebrities. I mean the decision that one’s own family, family business, or other assets makes, in the regular course of its life, to shun other businesses, for the betterment of mankind. Boycotting as daily life. Of course, you don’ have to be an entrepreneur to cut off Blockbuster, give the finger to Walmart, or dump any service remotely tied to Yahoo. It’s not about big numbers or big money - it’s not even about “success” - it’s about you, being or not being the kind of person that feeds the monster, whatever the monster may be.

I was at a particular Asian bistro, and I witnessed a manager screaming at a worker and hurling insults at him, taunting and threatening him. I went back to the counter, cancelled my order, and explained that I don’t do business with companies that mistreat their workers. “You can’t do that,” I explained. “You can’t talk to people that way, and expect honorable people to do business with you.” Of course, the rest of the people waiting for their orders looked away but, frankly, they don’t matter. They don’t matter, because things like this, and people like those workers, don’t matter to them. Their opinions no longer count.

Recently, I was in a health food supermarket, and the manager was at the front of the store, pacing with a cell phone, and loudly telling someone (who couldn’t be there that day) that she was terminating them. I stopped at the cashier and informed them that this behavior is illegal, besides being wrong. It isn’t just a failure of “professionalism”. Screw professionalism - it’s a moral failure. And unless these things are addressed, then we’ve made a decision to separate business from questions of ethics and morality. And frankly, if I know that about you, I don’t want to do business with you, either.

Not long ago, the Chinese government demanded that Yahoo turn over information that would be used to discover the identities of dissidents posting views critical to the government to blogs and internet discussion forums. Yahoo did it without flinching - without a second glance. And those men were taken from their families and imprisoned and deprived of any means to support their dependents. Yahoo thought nothing of it. Google, by contrast, was given the same demand and not only refused, but moved their server operations offshore, where the information couldn’t be taken even by force. Google’s mentality? ‘There are some things companies just don’t do. This is about what kind of organization you want to be.’

Needless to say, I have lots of friends and associates who use Yahoo. I tell them about this, if the topic arises, and they make their own decisions. For us, it’s a no-brainer. My business doesn’t do business with organizations that deprive people of basic liberties, destroy families, and punish criticism with injury to life, limb, or freedom. We don’t want dirty business. Neither my household, nor my people, nor my tribe, nor my enterprise.

I’ve taken some flack for this attitude. There are those moral midgets who say that everything is dirty, so nothing you do about it is rational. We’ve addressed those already in an earlier post - they’re not worthy of consideration, when it comes to one’s life’s work. There are those who encourage you to go along with the tide, be normal, be mainstream, live your life and don’t try to change things. Again - they just aren’t as articulate as the aforementioned midgets. But we also get flack for those who look at this as some sort of kooky, antisocial behavior. And yes, we think they can’t really get up the ladder far enough to have discussions even with the aforementioned midgets. But the point here is, either you care about what kind of person you are, and what kind of enterprise you build, and what kind of community you create and contribute to and prop up, or you don’t. You can’t talk to people who don’t - they don’t have the tools for this kind of conversation. For the rest of us, though, normalcy is not in being like those chittering in their ethical ignorance - it’s about being consistent and thoughtful in what we do.

If we’re going to care, let’s care, and make it a regular part of our lives. Boycotting is as natural as buying a loaf of bred at one place because it’s cheaper, or another place because we like Mrs. Donogan; it’s just letting the ethical component remain a part of that decision-making process, and refusing to stunt ourselves or lobotomize the fullness of our humanity.

When in doubt, Blog.

I’ve spoken with a number of people over the past couple of weeks that are searching for their work-lives - for what to do with themselves and, typically, like a Bordertown, they’re drawn to the internet. Partly by stories of heady profits made by people who don’t treat work as a source of meaning - they’re in it for the fast buck, quick hustle, in and out and retire in Aruba. Partly, it’s the knowledge that some people really do find meaningful, fulfilling work on the internet, and free themselves from an increasingly oppressive corporate millieu. One senses a great swell of interest with much less direction.

The problem, as I presented it to one client, is that you need either a unique idea, a specialized niche, or a supremacy of passion about what you do. You ask yourselves questions:

• What are you good at? So good at that you know you’re better at it than almost everyone else?
• What are you so passionate about, not that you’d throw down work if you could and do just that, but that you’d do all the work every day needed to make a business related to that? [You always hear someone say “I could golf all day, and do nothing else, easily.” Sure, but are you willing to work all day at a golf-related business? If not, then that’s not your thing, not really.]
• What niche can you occupy - where can you squat in the market - that no one, or almost no one else is really addressing?
• Is your idea unique, or are there hundreds of other people doing it, and you just “hope” to tap into some of that free flowing sap from the main trunk line? [Have you looked? Often, the very thing that shows you people are making money - “I found 200 web sites of people selling web sites” - shows you that it’s a serious gamble to hang out yet another shingle on that street]. Search the discussion groups - how many of those people are struggling to earn a living wage from what they do - and that’s what you want to take on as a new business? The question is really: What is your idea that’s, in an economically significant way, different than theirs?

Part of the desperation that can lead people to make bad choices is in not yet having the answers to these questions. These are not small questions - they’re part of the hero’s quest. They are the classic questions: “Who am I?” and “What should I do?” They are right up there with “How should I live?” They’re questions of religious import, and too important to be left to “faith”. They’re questions that, if you’re going to ask them at all, you need to know that you know the answers to, even if you’re building the answers over time.

When it’s no desperation, it can be despair. Paralysis. Doing nothing, because we don’t know what to do. That too is a mistake because, sooner or later, you drift farther and farther from that shore, and the genuine voice that asked those questions in the first place begins to be incomprehensible. The true despair, the permanent kind for the not-to-be-redeemed, is the nihilism that has given up, that no longer believes there are answers to ultimate questions.

I usually have a standard piece of advice for people that don’t know what to do next, and have been tempted to leap without looking, to jump based on hope, or else give up based on despair:

BLOG. Blogging will tell you who you are. Start a blog. Start three blogs. Don’t worry about what they’re about - that’s the point. Blog whatever you’re thinking about, every day. If you’re thinking about it in the shower, and you’re not blogging it, why not? If you’re considering it, pondering it, laughing about it, raging against it, for Christ’s sake why aren’t you blogging it?

There’s no instant cure in blogging, though there can be instant relief. Over time, though, you’ll begin to see patterns in your many blog posts. Don’t look too soon. Hold out, persist, don’t try to move the Ouiji - let it happen for real, or you’ll get made up answers from the bewilderment of your subconscious. But eventually, re-read everything you’ve written, and make notes on the patterns. Do meta-blogging (it’s a kind of meta-cognition): think about thinking - about your thinking in particular - and blog about that too. This will begin to fill in some of the raw material out of which answers to some of those important life questions will come. Not all the answers are within, but some very important ones are.

It’s a hard thing, even with help, to decipher. This culture tends to confuse person (who you are) with operations (what you do) with nature (what we all are), and that fundamental error, rooted in ancient theological mistakes, queers the attempt and the journey. But ask those questions separately, and don’t confuse them, and you’ll do all right.

And you can’t be a perfectionist if you want this to work. That’s about what you demand right now, and not about what you need to accomplish what you’re talking about. Be willing to write drivel. Be willing to break all the rules, when you blog. Be inconsistent. And eventually, be prepared to scrap it and start a new blog, or completely revamp (which happens over time anyway). Entrepreneurs prepare for failure and, in fact, count on it; most of their initial ventures will be replaced with later ones, and some of them all along won’t pan out. If that weren’t true of you, you wouldn’t be setting out on this journey.

Blogging will tell you who you are, what you think, what you want, what’s important to you and, ultimately, it will help you gain insight into what you should do. As far as how you should live, that questions comes from out there… and blogging, as a social instrument, can help with that too. It doesn’t always, but it sometimes does.

See you in the blogosphere.

The Joy of Postage

This article has several key points that are barely but still related - despite recent criticism that this is not an acceptable approach to composition.

The poor pay more for everything. Walmart isn’t really mitigating this: First off, there’s the obvious fact that Walmart shoppers are propping up a work model that keeps their wages low, their benefits inadequate, their health in jeopardy, and their standards non-existent - ostensibly to save a few bucks on the front end. This is like mortgage selling, where sure, you can get in with zero down (the front end), but you’ll pay for it on the back end (e.g. points and higher interest rates), and from now on (in the form of higher monthly payments). One of the reasons the poor remain poor (speaking now of the ‘wealthy poor’ - the poor of the US) is “front end only” thinking. Philosophy and awareness impact existence, on a continual, often permanent basis, even among those who don’t like that idea and would simply fart and go back to their TV sets. You don’t have to work at Walmart to work at Walmart, so to speak. Regis Salons, and other companies that utilize wage slavery and nominal, overpriced, inadequate insurance and laughable benefits are only able to get away with what they do, because of companies like Walmart. If you shop at Walmart, you’re either signing the sentence of poverty, ill-health, malnutrition, and premature death for yourself, or you’re signing the sentence for other people. Perhaps they won’t get around to you in your lifetime, in a Martin Neimoller way (”They came first for the trade unionists, then for the communists, then for the Jews…”), and maybe your children will be immune, but that’s hardly the point - the point is what kind of person you are and choose to be.

The other reason Walmart doesn’t work, even on the front end, is an error of perception. One of the key shopping habits of the Yuppie middle class is buying the right quantity - buying in bulk. Don’t buy the 32oz toiletry at $3.95, buy the 64oz at $5.95. Sure, having more money to spend up front can remove that option, in the short term, but so you buy shampoo one paycheck and conditioner the next. On the whole, the middle class shopper is better equipped, cognitively (not innately, but by certain economic traditions), to make a wiser deal. The poor are led to the flashy “sale” displays, and enticed into doing gorilla math - $3.95 is “cheaper”, after all. If you don’t believe this, spend some time in a Walmart - not shopping, but as a sociological experiment. Listen to the conversations in the aisles and in checkout lines. The whole principle, in fact, is faulty. Walmart sells clothes from the Dominican Republic with low threadcount - clothes that typically survive a few washings before the colors bleed, the joints are thin, the seams threadbare, and you’re buying the same thing again. Don’t get me wrong: super-size IS the name of the game at Walmart - but only in respect to pseudo-food. You’ll find 40% more bags of cheese puffs, and yes that math isn’t lost on the average lower class consumer, but the point being missed is that you’re not getting 2lbs of food for $3.95, you’re getting 2lbs of air, chemicals, and fried crap that you’ll pay for, over not so long a stretch of time, in obesity, mental health issues, and other problems of malnutrition and chemical use. Again, you’re getting a flashy deal up front, and getting robbed on the back end.

Significant sociological work has been done studying how the poor are exploited, focusing on, for example, the furniture industry in New York City, or used car finance dealerships. But it’s day in and day out - the daily purchases - not just the ‘big’ things, that whittle down the weak and less perceptive one nickel at a time. And, in cyclical fashion, it makes them weaker and less and less perceptive. The poor live in a fog of hoodwinkery and massive corporate and workplace exploitation. But some of it flows out of just going where poor people go - take stores like Ross or 1/2 Off (Yes, there’s a store called that): nothing is really organized, everything is jumbled - it’s cheaper on the surface, but it encourages you to shop, and it saps your time and encourages you to justify it by carrying away something (after all, you don’t want to do it all again later - you’ll have to spend that time rummaging for the next thing you’ll need). It’s a fog, all right.

This is where the internet can really help. There are any number of useful techniques, and I won’t belabour them all here. But tracking expenses (online spreadsheets), online price comparisons (including all major in-store outlets) - and plenty of information on truly helpful things like the Dave Ramsey method. The point is not just more useful information and perspective (that’s part of it), but also a fundamental shift of principle in how and with whom you do business. Would you rather take 20 minutes, go to PriceGrabber and find the best price on a digital camera, buy it from amazon, and have it on the way to your doorstep w/o ever having to go shopping - or would you rather go down to Walmart and spend a couple of hours looking over a selection of nearly obsolete models that cost about the same $10 more or less? If you’d rather do the shopping, then your problem is recreational shopping, and it’s not a matter of rational discussion anyway. This piece isn’t for you. But also, the internet gives you the opportunity to purchase with justice, from companies that aren’t destroying the world to the degree that Walmart is. Yes, you’ll pay postage. At amazon.com postage is free when you buy at least $25 directly from them. At ebay, postage is part of the price consideration, so you know what you’re comparing and bid or buy accordingly - and yes, a lot of us use it for buying brand new items w/o bidding at all, via the “buy now” feature. I can get that camera brand new, right now, for less money, and in less time than it takes to drive 2 miles to the Walmart.

It’s amazing too, that people who complain about shipping out of principle, have no problem with serving as their own shipping company - gassing up, across the spectrum of their various shopping stops, to transport goods from one place to another. I’d rather have more time at home or the coffee shop, and let the postman or UPS drop it off. I’m not paying with my fuel costs, vehicle wear, or time what the Walmart waddlers would be paying in postage. Postage is a working class joy just waiting to be exploited. Retail is your grandparents’ way of buying. It’s a afternoon drive and a trip to the Woolworth’s or Sears.

And I’m not saying the same thing about mom and pop businesses. Those are worth it, because you get something that doesn’t come with internet shopping, despite the hooplah - community. But corporate retail has worked itself out so that we’re in a post-retail economy, as far as mom and pop go - in the US, that is. When most of the shopping time is spent in conglomerates, you really might as well be driving a Packard. Mom and Pop are online now, and so are many of the better economic choices. From the moment you step inside a Walmart, you’re pecking through the rubble and rubbish of civilization for cheaper cheese puffs. One key to getting out of the ghetto is shopping outside the ghetto. Not to be seen, like those fur-sporting crones in their 4-wheeled boats at the high-end mall. Nope, dump Walmart, get on the internet, eat healthy, and perhaps even engage in the commerce yourself. I’ll see you there.

When it has to be there Tomorrow

You’re filling a sudden order to bang out a Powerpoint presentation for 500 people by morning, and need to walk in looking rested and in control. You need to launch a web site yesterday, because your new client already mailed out their secondary marketing, and their own servers just died. The mobile headquarters of your social action group has twelve hours to get an underground newsletter together and get it into key places before the start of business in the morning.

You’re doing rapid prototyping. Frankly, I love this stuff. Combine virtuosity, brainstorming, and fingers flying so fast on the keyboard that they’re invisible, with a near impossible deadline, bragging rights at the end, and showing off the next day (which consists in just being done and effective), and I’m so there. The sense of accomplishment is immense.

Some key helpers for rapid prototyping:

• Go lean - if twelve slides can be one, make it one. The genius is in the layout and arrangement.
• Gang up - work fast and furious with a symbiotic team - some of the best stuff is clabbered together in smoke filled rooms with papers spread out on the floor, someone at the keyboard, someone at the whiteboard, and someone making the coffee runs, making notes, and giving things another eye.
• Focus on the big picture - get a working model up and running - if the broadstrokes are wrong, you’ll just end up starting over - the details can be nitpicked afterward, and it’s amazing how many opinions that get absolutized when you’ve got lots of time (which word, which phrase, which color arrow to use) don’t seem so contentious when you’ve got a reasonable time frame left to flesh out the details. Again… at the risk of being redundant… if the concept is wrong, you’ll be starting over - know what you want to deliver and why - don’t get sidetracked by tweaks.
• Everyone matters - don’t underestimate any of your team members. Often, the one who’s got his feet up and only refills the coffee pot now and then ends up having the key idea that’s responsible for the most successful chunk of your work. Everyone should be operational, but not necessarily doing what we think - besides, remember the Pareto Principle. 20% of the people will seem to be doing 80% of the work. It doesn’t matter.
• Have organized messes - sometimes it’s cut and paste and two or three mockups before you get it right, and the trash bags in the corner are your best friend. Make a mess, but have piles, and keep your ideas up on the whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, write on the wall. It’s faster to re-paint later than be at Walmart for 30-minutes with that one cashier they have left at night.
• Take micro-breaks - don’t try to justify 15 minute breaks for two cigarettes, video games, and bags of Cheetos. If you’re doing that, you’re not serious. A break is a 3-minute walk away to pee. You keep your momentum, but there is where you have some of your best summary ideas. If you take 15-minutes, you lose 35, so don’t.

What if you’re doing it alone?: Then you have to stop periodically, and become your audience, and look at that way. Then again, and become your stakeholders, and look at it that way. If you’re doing it alone, you have to be ingenious. And, you may need to set an absolute drop-dead time for sleep, based on the minimum that will sustain you, because very likely that’s what you’ll get. If you’ve got a friend or colleague that can grasp the immediate needs, deal with what (for some people) feels like pressure, and contribute to rather than drain your productivity, make the call. If your friends are just as likely to slow you down or distract you or need tons of looking after on mundane tasks, do it alone. Create the team in your head.

This isn’t meant to be a master-guide to rapid prototyping, just a few comments. If there were more to say, there’d be less to do. The key points: it’s fun, there are some good tips, and you can do it alone if you have to. Happy trails.

Business phone under $40

The Motofone F3. For one thing, it’s an act of dissidence, like entrepreneurship, so I like it a lot in that way: it’s been called the anti-iPhone. It’s the opposite of the culture obsessed with texting and constantly communicating with little of substance to say beyond the kind of thing we all hate when someone hits reply-all: “thx” - “yw” - “c-ya” - “k” . . . [”Unsubscribe!!!”]

1. High durability - no glass and it’s practically armored, but scalpel-thin. You can drop it, throw it, stand on it, run over it repeatedly on gravel, toss it off a roof, then pick it up and make a call. No joke. Youtube videos abound putting it through just such abusive paces. It’s like the old 20-pound Bell phones (which were great for clobbering burglars), but this is the shuriken of phones.
2. High visibility (read it in direct sunlight). It reads like writing on paper. Shine one of those Homeland Security lights in your eyes and at least you can call your lawyer.
3. High battery life (if you get the GSM model - if you’re stuck in a CDMA contract, I’m sorry, but at least there’s a version for you). The battery life is due to the same reason (it’s got a display based on e-paper*, which only uses battery when the screen changes, so it’s always on, but with no video drain)
4. High call clarity - the best there is - sounds like you’re next door (I don’t need my clients and I to pay more attention to reception than to each other)
5. Flexibility - I got the unlocked version, so it’ll work on nearly any sim card provider in my part of the world (either a plan like AT&T or T-Mobile or pay as you go, in case you’re on the lam - or just prefer to live like it - no ties, ready to drop and go at any time)
6. Economic justice: it’s under $40 - it runs what a decent landline phone might cost in a discount store. It costs less than a month of service from most providers, and you own it. After all, why should I carry around the crown jewels, or have my equity, debt, or wealth tied up in telephone? Why should a phone cost as much as a mortgage payment, and need a contract to secure? Live light where you can - not to is a grave thing.

The Chickens are Finally Here!

I’ve been watching with interest the discussions in real estate news of the suburbs drying up, with vast numbers projected for empty homes and developments going into the future, and little market to fill them. This will be called overbuilding, and there is that, but I think it’s something else.

Similar news for rural communities goes something like this: “This family was spending $800/mo in gasoline to commute to the city for their jobs, while living in a sprawling house in this idyllic rural community, with schools they like, and a down home feeling. Now they’re spending $1600/mo in gas, and are having to abandon their home and move to the city to be closer to their jobs.”

The first question I have is: you were spending what?!? $800/mo on gasoline? And you were OK with that? How can you justify something like that? That’s just decadent, and morally wrong.

The mortgage and gasoline issues tend to get overblown to make news or underblown because of people’s unbelief about change, but what’s not being talked about is the level of decadence we were comfortable with until now. Living an hour or more from our jobs in the country, or 45min in the suburbs, consuming vast amounts of fuel to compensate, living in gymnasium-sized homes in a sedentary, fast-food, big-box store, media-entertainment culture.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost, and everyone’s sad.

In a hundred years, we’ll look more like India.You can’t live this way forever - it’s not sustainable. It’s silly to live long distances from the place you work. It’s silly to demand so much space that you have to drive until dark to get there. It’s silly to create “communities” out in the middle of nowhere that aren’t sustained by industry or a purpose. And they’re NOT communities, not really - they’re recreational leisure villas.

An associate whose ideas I admire says that the future of how people will live is concentrated urban environments. Other countries already evidence the model - we’re twisting and turning and whining about it because we think we’re special. But just the type of industry that’s growing in the US tells you that work will be centered around large facilities or large urban communities, where the critical mass of brains (the workforce) and the easy flow of money (facilities and finance) are. The days of settling in Nowhere, Idaho are as gone as the farming industry, which isn’t exactly multiplying. In a hundred years, says my friend, we’ll look more like India.

So what we’re seeing is the ‘karmic’ outcome of ideology over rationality, and priviledge over ethics, and the tendency of systems to seek balance — like the human body, striving to repair itself, and deal with excess, foolishness, and abuse.

What does this have to do with a blog about work? Well, work isn’t an isolated part of the system; it’s an integral organ. What we’re seeing is that it affects where and how we live, even if we play the rebel for a long time. And interestingly enough, it holds us by the balls of our economy. Mess with it, and it starts to squeeze.

Swerving into Reality

Half of fearing something will fail is the fear. But fear *is* failure. Fear convinces us to chart a course so devoid of adventure, of risk, of originality, that success is replaced with mere survival. I don’t mean success as in living in the right neighborhood, driving the right car, and having the right job. Excuse me while I vomit. I mean when a particular project succeeds according to its goals and ideals. A real project, not a meaningless project of masturbatory self-improvement - improving the self for its own sake.

Swerve into the oncoming reality. Swerve and be alive.The other half of fearing something will fail is the actual failure, creeping up, not because it’s a bogeyman, but precisely because it’s a real thing that waits for those who don’t plan sufficiently to succeed - who are inattentive. All it takes for a ship to fail to make shore is an inattentive crew. So much of failure is predicated on the predictable, understandable, and forseeable, even if it’s a matter of forseeing that the unforseen will happen. You know, in the movies, when someone watches the monster turn, and stalk toward them, while they’re paralyzed with fright? It’s almost as if they find it a relief to be caught and eaten. That’s how failure creeps up on the hopeless, the fearful, those who refuse to take risk.

It’s a risk to hit the thing with a pipe and run, because you don’t know that it’ll succeed. It’s a guaranteed thing to watch yourself fail. Imagine the skipper, staring at the rocks up ahead, unwilling to swerve, because it’s off course and uncharted. The course has changed. The new course is adventure. Swerve into freedom from fear. Swerve into the oncoming reality. Swerve and be alive.

The News of Snooze

The biggest non-issue of the day, using up millions of dollars of airwaves and bandwidth in chatter, is whether or not we’re in a recession. Does x=y? Is this thing that thing and vice versa? It’s an exercise in absurd tautologies, and the single clearest example of masturbatory pseudo-news currently at hand.

The real question is not whether we are in a recession but whether you are in one.It doesn’t even measure up to sitting around debating what’s a beer and what’s a lager, or whether something qualifies as irony. Like so many of the electoral questions up for debate, it’s just tedious filler, designed to convince us that something is going on.

After all, the news outlets don’t get it: they’ve been working on the old “sell some papers today” model that requires a certain amount of daily content, regardless of whether it’s useful or just wasting your time. This is one of the many reasons bloggers are kicking their asses. Bloggers haven’t promised a certain number of paper or screen columns, a certain broadcast time of business or weather or politics as a setting for their advertisers. Bloggers have to have a freaking point, even if a lot of them do have sponsors.

True, you’ll read posts containing manufactured issues - excuses to sound off that are stretching to fill a page. Mostly, though, you can tell it’s crap, because it doesn’t even manage a catchy title, a decent photo, or a poignant quotation. And if it’s lengthy, on top of that, it usually doesn’t get read. We should be prepared to turn off “the news” as quickly as clicking off of a blog. Often, it isn’t news at all - it’s just “the news” - just your pre-portioned, TV-dinner plate of information-product, propped up with stabilizers and filler.

Besides, the real question is not whether WE are in a recession but whether YOU are in one. Only you and your financial advisor can answer that; the rest is bullshNews.

The 10-minute $2 “business” meal