For a detailed graphic you can explore, see: The Money Chart.

Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.

Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”

If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.

Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.

Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.

Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.

Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.

David Ogilvy

It occurred to me a few years ago that most of the teams I was working with were missing a clean vision.  They had many “projects”.  They all had “vision statements” in their plans.  They had “objectives”, “strategies”, “prototypes” and all of the other stuff that goes into good planning.  But most were missing the ultimate destination in a form that would allow them to share a clear and unified understanding of exactly where they were all trying to go.

Expressing your vision in a way others can understand it allows them to rally, inspire the right thinking, and make the right choices along the way to realize it.

This got me thinking about the automotive industry and the “concept car”.  These are real and functioning manifestations of a vision.  They are not just built to excite consumers at auto shows.  Rather, they are destinations that force the company to think about exactly what the future looks like: in a way they can physically explore it, understand it, test it, find problems and solutions for it, and ensure the right choices are made in the boardroom to enable the company to realize it.  Perhaps most importantly, building your concept car allows you to think outside of your own manufacturing constraints, so that you can focus on what consumers actually want and what you would have to be able to build (vs. what you can build today that they “might like”).

Example:  It’s hard to imagine Apple could have gotten to any of their products without a very clear, real and functioning prototype of what they wanted at the beginning of the process.  It’s also hard to believe Apple would try so hard to innovate if they owned production facilities that couldn’t make a completely different product next year.  They have a fully functioning vision at the start, and then design the business around getting it to consumers.  It’s obvious for engineers, so why do so many marketers miss it?

We need more “concept cars” in our thinking.

Whether its art, language or even genetics - in life everything really is a remix.  There is something primal to this.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

“Ben, let me add something to that and backup just a bit. There is extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive team, and they lead 35,000 employees that I would call wicked smart – and that’s in all areas of the company from engineering to marketing to operations and sales and all the rest. And the values of our company are extremely well entrenched.

We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well. And I would just reiterate a point Peter made in his opening comments that I strongly believe that Apple is doing the best work in its history.”

This explains so much, on so many levels.

When briefing any piece of good communication, it is critical that you understand exactly what you need to say to sell your product to consumers – and then prioritize these points.  Make sure you never compromise the critical with the less important.

Apple are the masters at this as far as I am concerned.  I regularly use the following video in workshops with young marketeers when trying to demonstrate the point on the importance of simplicity, priority in messaging and NOT trying to do everything with everything.

Michael Marantz produces a wonderful adaptation.

I wondered the other day:  just how many great marketing organizations are currently focused on small points of relevance and differentiation with their products, while ignoring much bigger and more important insights?

I have been in a number of discussions recently where we have been building improvements to products in line with product based insights about our consumers, and knowledge of our target consumer segments.  This usually leads to some small packaging design changes, minor product upgrades or pricing changes.   Within the consumer, category and segment contexts in which we look at the world, all of these things are good and make sense.  However, going home the other day I was on a tube where the guy sitting next to me was doing his groceries on his phone.  We had missed something:

Our consumers real world is so much more vast and complex than our sophisticated modelled views, that in looking at something so specific we were missing something huge.

Consumers are changing.  Digital, and mobile technology, are changing them in ways which we are all only beginning to grasp:  They are more informed.  They find products differently.  The choose products differently.  They buy products using this technology and then publish and share product recommendations based on experience.  All of these factors are fundamental to marketers, and anyone using a modern mobile smartphone should catch this.  But how many of us are acting on it as a first order priority for our products and the way we sell?  My guess:  not many.  Most are paying lip service to the movement, but few are building their offers up directly from it.

Ask yourself:  In this context, what is more important: looking at the new colors for this season, or making sure consumers can browse, share and buy it through their devices?  Adding a new slogan to your packaging, or ensuring a web based contact point allows consumers to contact you immediately (especially unhappy ones)?  I would posit that unless you are selling to an over 65+ demo, there will be more value in the latter choices that are focused on the broader digital movement – for every one of our businesses.

The lesson here for me is that you need to look for the most obvious and generic insights first, before you focus on the more narrow, segmented and differentiated. You don’t want to be blinded by detail.

I hate it because it lacks real direction and meaning, or worse, is flat-out misleading.  Marketers will look at their consumer segments, they outline who is growing and why, and then mark the gaps between themselves and the competition.  Being ‘competitive’ in this context implies that the goal is to offer the same types of ‘features’ or benefits as your competition is offering –  and that this is somehow OK.

It’s not OK.  Ever.

Why?  Because consumers are happy with products that are deemed good enough until something BETTER comes along –  something that gives people a new reason to question what they are currently buying, and switch to, or adopt it.  You never get BETTER when trying to be ‘competitive’ only leads you to match the other guys.

Be BETTER. Otherwise, your are just another similar product, offering no good reason for someone to consider you. It’s really that simple.

Ask yourself the question: “why is our product clearly BETTER for the people we are targeting”?  If you struggle to answering this quickly and clearly, your product is not only ‘lacking competitiveness’ but is not going to grow.  Go rate your product against competitors on all important drivers of choice, and make sure you have BETTER scores than they do.

Set your destination.

Define the goal, paint the picture of success, first.  An action without this is directionless.

Know your objective.

What exactly is it you are trying to achieve?  Questions are usually easy to solve when you know what the answer needs to be.

Make the hard choices.

Strategy is about choice.  You cannot do everything well, so what do you want to focus on?

Move the needle.

An idea without action is meaningless.  An action with no results is a failed investment.  Make sure the things you do create value.

Keep it simple.

Things are generally complicated, but complexity breeds misunderstanding and people avoid it.  Making things very simple is not easy, but everybody gets it.

Borrow it.

Invent where absolutely required.  But stealing what works and then doing it faster and better is always much easier.

Don’t be insane.

The definition of insanity is to do the exact same thing over and over again, yet each time expecting different results.  Clear the table of what is not working.  Don’t be crazy.

No weak links.

Team members who aren’t pulling their weight, or are counter-productive, need to go for the sake of the greater good.  Even if they are the smartest and brightest.  Its uncomfortable, but essential.

Reward.

Celebrate when you move the needle.  Note others achievements aloud.  Make sure that you mark the occasions where hard work has delivered.

Listen.

Two ears, one mouth.  Understanding what someone actually means is not easy.  Plus, people will like you more.

Finish what you start.
When you start something, write it down and scratch it out once done.  Don’t leave too many things undone.  It creates anxiety, which creates stasis, which stresses you and those that work with you.

Build, don’t destroy.

It’s very simple to spot imperfections in others ideas, and pointing these out rarely has any productive value or result.  Help build on others ideas instead.

Make wonderful things.

Don’t ever leave yourself in a position where you are trying to put makeup on a pig.  Make your products wonderful, and they will be loved and sell themselves.

Be Remarkable.

Doing something that people will notice, and might matter enough to share, is always a goal unto itself.

Be positive.

Negative thinking breeds laziness and inaction.  Positivity is productive and breeds excitement.  Both can spread through an organization like a virus.  Pick one.

Dream.

What would you love to do?  Do that.

Do what you say you will do.

Don’t set precedent as someone who might not deliver by leaving things undone.  You want to be the person whom others can count on to make things happen.

Some people will not to like you.

You won’t be effective unless some people don’t like you.  Trying to please everyone is a certain way to take the power out of any initiative.

Make things easy, useful and fun.

Simple, relevant and engaging.  Be it a product, a project ,an ad or an experience, meeting these three standards will make sure you always connect.

Execute.

The very best idea, without execution, is the worst kind of idea.

TED: Ideas worth spreading.

Arcade Fire + Google = Insane music video browser thing.

How big really?  BBC Dimensions.

Emotions on the internet.  WeFeelFine.

Banksy Gallery.

The Cool Hunter Gallery.

Seth’s Blog.

John Grubers Daring Fireball.

Tom Fishburnes Marketoonist.

Brand Tags.

Trendwatching.

Slideshare.

Google Trends.

Wolfram|Alpha.

The Khan Academy.

On this, I came across this from Ian McAllister on the Amazon practice of writing press releases for products that haven’t been spec’d yet:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Choosing how much time and resource you want to dedicate to any given project or task is one of the most important things a manager can do.  As Parkinsons law predicts, work complexity will expand to occupy all of the time and resources you give to it.  If you allocate an entire team $1 million and 1 year to solve a problem, would you expect them to come back in a month having only spent $5?  No.  The team will always believe the task cannot be simple, and unknowingly set themselves up to spend the resources and occupy the timeline.

Big problems need to be allocated just enough time that resolution will be efficient.  Small tasks should never be given too much time.

Sometimes my best presentations were the ones I only gave myself an hour to prepare…  I simply wasnt given the time to complicate it.  I had to stick to the big, important, meaningful content.

People generally have lots of smarts and abilities, or roughly the same number of ‘apples’ to play with.  But there are simply way too many important abilities, skills or talents for any person to have a lot of ‘apples’ in all of the possible ‘baskets’.  Rather, people have to spread their apples.  Some have a few apples in many baskets and are generalists.  Others have many in only a few baskets, and are very, very skilled in those specific areas.

The goal is always to understand where people have their apples, and then build teams that stack the collective baskets as full as possible.