The PurplePrinciples.

A collection of guiding management principles I wish I had understood before having to learn them the hard way:

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.

PurpleSites.

Far from complete, below is a small collection of my current favorite PurpleSites on the net:

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.

Start knowing exactly how you want to finish.

Have a vision.  Being able to paint a destination for yourself before you begin work on something is the key to getting there fast, and ensuring that everything is focused on the deliverables that matter.

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:

For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release is the new/updated product’s customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.

If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built). Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).

What a simple method for inspiring a detailed vision for what you need to end up with, before you have spent a dime.  It’s like a brief, but personified.

Parkinsons law.

Parkinsons law:

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.

Apples n’ baskets.

An analogy I use with my teams in trying to draw out the best in each other:

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.

The Peter principle.

The Peter Principle:

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.

Wikipedia:

It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modelled and has theoretical validity.^[1] Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

Beware of the new guy.

How many times have you seen the new manager come into their role and systematically deconstruct and change everything that was built before them?

Sometimes this is required.  But not always.

I cannot remember where I first learned it, but there is a saying in brand management that “a new friend can be a brands worst enemy“.  In brand management constant reinvention destroys value – as consistency with a brand over time is how it establishes its meaning.

As a new manager, you need to try to find an unbiased way of identifying what is good and working vs. what is clearly not and needs to be improved.  Build on the first, and fix or eliminate the latter.

Use caution in your approach.  Just because you did not develop it, doesn’t mean its wrong.  Just because it’s not ‘perfect’, doesn’t mean it should be changed.

You cannot save your way to greatness.

There are a lot of businesses that seem to be single-minded on cost reduction these days, and less focused on the customer, improving their products and generating growth.

Cost reduction can be productive, useful in creating short-term value or in reallocating resources towards growth.  But alone driving costs out of the business will never lead to the big ideas that build value.  You need to invest in ideas and innovations that will grow the business moving forward.

It’s really that simple.

Seth’s in session.

For those that know my marketing side, they know we can’t discuss much for long without Seth Godin popping up: either in quote, in principal or in practice.

I just came across this piece from Dan Martell that nicely summarizes some of the many lessons that fall out of his works (Godin in quotes):

Strive to be remarkable.

“How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”

It’s all about the stories.

“The only asset to get built online is permission.”

Let your product speak for itself.

“The product is the marketing. You can’t out spend.”

You cannot hide from customers.

“Are you going to bet on secrets, or are you going to be open?”

Your plan isn’t enough.

“Successful people rarely confuse a can-do attitude with a smart plan. But they realize that one without the other is unlikely to get you very far.”

Be humble.

“No one cares about you, not even your mother-in-law. No ones eagerly waiting your press release.”

Create meaning.

“Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.”

There is a hierarchy to success:

“Attitude, Approach, Goals, Strategy, Tactics, Execution”

Listen to your customers.

“Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul.”

Flex your expertise.

“Everybody is an expert about something”

Implement quickly.

“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”

Choose your words carefully.

“Why waste a sentence saying nothing?”

Focus on great customer service.

“The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.”

Don’t be afraid of being edgy.

“Playing safe is very risky.”

Find your precise market.

“Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what?”

Push limits in your industry.

“You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless.”

Create desire.

“People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want”

Man up.

Seth Godin on ‘Whining’:

Two problems with whining.  The first is that it doesn’t work. You can whine about the government or your friends or your job or your family, but nothing will happen except that you’ll waste time.

Worse… far worse… is that whining is a reverse placebo. When you get good at whining, you start noticing evidence that makes your whining more true. So you amplify that and immerse yourself in it, thus creating more evidence, more stuff worth complaining about.

So true.  There is such an obvious corelation with the people who think positively and their ability to deliver positive results.  The negative always end up caught in this downward spiral.

S.M.I.L.E.

Almost every brand and company is trying to engage consumers with digital these days.  Everyone is talking about ‘conversations’ they want to have, or that those consumers could be having about them.  However, in the end, its always about the content you end up creating and putting out there for the world of digital beings to react to.  If they do, then the conversation begins.

To help, I pulled this simple ‘S.M.I.L.E.’ approach I liked for generating such content off of www.servantofchaos.com:

• Small – make sure your content is small and easily digestible. Don’t write 1000 words when 140 characters will do

• Meaningful – ensure that your content means something to your audience. It’s one thing to push your content out, but you do want people to read it too!

• Intent – make your intent with the content transparent. Don’t say one thing and do another

• Laugh out loud – the three word acronym LOL means “laugh out loud”. Don’t forget that much of our inter-personal communication is based on sharing and humour. Share that aspect of your personality in your content

• Engage – make sure to follow-up with conversations/comments as they occur. Don’t let the conversation start and end abruptly.

Good design…

Dieter Rams 10 principles of good design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

My life with computers.

Thank you Flowtown for this reflection of my life with computers.  Great.

Virgin Galactic.

What a huge deal.

You have to admire the imagination to have a vision like this and the dedication it takes to get there.  What a great achievement.

Update: Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Makes First Glide Flight | Autopia | Wired.com.

Leo Burnett.

An ad industry legend, Leo Burnett’s genius can be seen in some of his most famous quotes…

“Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret… to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink.”

“Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people – and he won’t do very well in advertising.”

“Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”

“If you can’t turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn’t be in the ad writing business at all.”

“Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable. “

“The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself. “

“The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships. “

“The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships. “

“The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders. “

“The work of an advertising agency is warmly and immediately human. It deals with human needs, wants, dreams and hopes. Its ‘product’ cannot be turned out on an assembly line. “

“To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas. “

“Too many ads that try not to go over the reader’s head end up beneath his notice. “

“We want consumers to say, ‘That’s a hell of a product’ instead of, ‘That’s a hell of an ad.”

“When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either. “

~ Leo Burnett  (1891 – 1971)