Category: Strategy

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The One Overwhelming Reason Why Marketing Campaigns Fail

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Saturday, 9.51pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’ve been listening to the audio book of From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-line Dispatches from the Advertising War, by Jerry Della Femina, and it is well worth doing.

It’s a story of how the advertising world worked in the 1970s – full of gossip and insider history – and later inspired the series Mad Men.

And strewn among the anecdotes and stories and personalities are nuggets of advice and wisdom worth picking up.

I wrote a few days ago about Felix Dennis – and his approach to talent. Hire it early, nurture it, guard it and when it is time, get rid of it.

Femina talks about the life of an advertising copywriter earning £30k a year, who is fired for being too much of a smartass – or so he thinks. The real reason is probably because his boss had his eye on a writer who could come in for $8k a year.

The more you earn – the more likely it is there is an eager young thing behind you – eager to take your place.

We don’t see this because we tend to fall in love with our own ideas, our own sense of value.

We sometimes believe that we’re irreplaceable. That we do something that no one else can do and so we’re protected from failure in some way.

In groups, that way of thinking can become magnified – until the group is so sure of an idea that it just cannot see how it can fail.

Until it does.

Femina gives an example of a beer ad. This company had come up with a new line of beer, one much lower in calories than the others on the market.

The job of marketing the beer was given to an agency. After much brainstorming and thinking, the creative geniuses decided that they would market the beer to healthy people – people who exercised – and push the health benefits of a low calorie beer.

Sounds good in theory, but the ad failed.

Why was that?

Femina argued that it’s because the creatives in charge didn’t really get why people drink beer.

They drink beer at leisure – it’s when they sit down with friends and have a drink – or sit on their couch at 9am in the morning open a can.

People drink sitting down, in the main. Perhaps they stand at the bar when there isn’t a seat. But really, how many times have you seen beer drinkers drinking as they walk, jog or press weights?

You serve beer to people having a break, having a good time. Perhaps they’re bowling, where every once in a while they get up, roll a ball, and then sit back down again.

Golfers don’t drink beer. Not while they’re playing, anyway. Have you seen a group pulling their clubs and also dragging along a cask?

The ad was going to fail, Femina says, because the premise it was based on was wrong. Beer drinkers drink for leisure, not for exercise.

But the advertisers spent $5 million. Surely they’d make a good ad for that kind of money?

It doesn’t matter what you do and how much money you throw at the problem. If the initial premise is flawed, the rest of the campaign is doomed.

If the initial premise isn’t right, everything from that point on will fail, because the whole foundation of your campaign is weak and unable to hold up.

When you think about this – it makes a lot of sense.

It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only one indiscretion to ruin it.

You may have the most comprehensive case in the world, but if you’ve made one small mistake, everything you’ve ever done is in doubt. That’s what happens with prosecutors that do something wrong – all their previous cases have to be looked at again.

Napoleon thought he’d be able to invade Russia quickly and decisively- but was wrong about how his troops would fare in the Russian Winter. A couple of centuries later, the Germans learned that lesson again.

Campaign failures, whether in marketing or elsewhere, are often a result of lots of little things going wrong everywhere.

When you trace it back, however, there is usually a root cause – an initial premise – that is at the heart of it all.

And in marketing, you get the initial premise wrong by not understanding or discovering the real reason why people buy what you’re offering – the real benefit that they want from you in exchange for their money.

Beer drinkers don’t want you to give them a six pack. They want you to help them have a good time with friends.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Is The Shortest Path From A to B?

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Thursday, 9.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sometimes the best mental models are the simplest.

Take the challenge of starting a business, for example.

If you attend a startup conference or study for an MBA, you’ll be shown a process to follow.

At a startup conference, you’ll probably come across the Business Model Canvas and work through the various boxes on there, from your value proposition to the channels that you are going to use to get to your customer.

If you do an MBA, the modules that you study include accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, operations management. And a few others that, looking back, are more complex variants of these four.

So, do you need to do a business model to start a business? Or do an MBA to run one?

Having participated in the first approach and gone through the second – I’d say they are valuable experiences.

The theory you learn in an MBA can be applied during a startup experiment and it might actually help.

But the question I’m asking myself is – is it necessary?

To answer that, let’s turn to John D. Rockefeller.

His book, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, has a few gems in it. Nuggets that you should put in your pocket.

Starting with accounting – from the time he was a boy he kept a book keeping receipts and expenditures.

He called it Ledger A, and he writes that he was taught to give away a small amount of money regularly.

And that’s all you really need to know about accounting. Cash in. Cash out. And one needs to be more than the other.

If a business works at that level, it will work. If it needs a complicated accounting approach to make it work, you’re probably going to lose your shirt.

Human resources. Perhaps Warren Buffett can help.

He says – work with people you like, admire and trust.

Recruit for character and values – train for skills. Hire slowly and fire quickly.

How about operations management? The principle to use is KISS. Keep it simple.

Marketing? Marketing is about having conversations with people that have the power to sign a contract – the power to authorise payment to you.

Everyone else is just in the way.

People aren’t going to buy from you just because you want them to. They’ll buy because they want to. And if you somehow get them to buy against their will – they’ll feel rubbish about it and avoid you.

And no one gets rich on the first sale. It’s the second and third and fourth – the lifetime value of the customer – that makes you rich.

So the point of marketing and sales is not to sell.

It’s to introduce yourself, make people aware that you exist, not push for anything straight away or interfere with their current plans. Just let them know that you are available to serve them.

A slight digression on finance – and back to Rockefeller.

He tells a story where one friend asked another for advice on whether he should invest in cash or in Standard Oil stock. The person being asked didn’t want to answer – to put himself in a position where he was held responsible for the decision.

But the other was having none of it – and pressed for an opinion.

Finally the first one said – put half in cash and half in stock and see what happens.

In there is the secret to asset management – to wisely managing a portfolio of any kind.

If you don’t know – then go 50:50. Change that ratio only when you do know something.

Another sneaky little lesson. Does the rate at which you borrow matter?

No.

What matters is the return on how you invest your borrowed money.

Put it in projects that pay back in two years, and you can borrow money at 10% all day long.

All these little thoughts are mental models – models that can help you get from A to B in the quickest possible way.

In a straight line.

You can go to school to learn them. But you need to go to work to really learn them.

A lot of us spend a lot of time meandering about – zig zagging through C, D and E, before we realise that the straight route is the one to take.

The idea of going in a straight line is simple.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Would You Do If You Got Fired Tomorrow?

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Wednesday, 9.59pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I had a chat with a friend of mine a few days back.

He’s the boss, and had to make some difficult decisions about letting some people go.

It was a big decision – he felt the responsibility. But it had to be done for the sake of the business. The business came first.

When you get the inside view of the process at the top of a business, you realise a few things about life.

First, no one is indispensable. No one is irreplaceable.

Felix Dennis, in his book How To Get Rich, says overhead walks on two legs.

He’s also blunt about the value of talent to an employer like him. Your talent and my talent.

Identify talent early, he says. Then you can underpay it for a short time, if the work is challenging enough. Then you pay the market rate. Finally, you’re paying it based on past reputation alone – at which time you must part company with it.

There’s a lesson there. The more expensive you are, the more at risk you are.

So why is it, when you type the headline of this post into Google, most of what you get is stuff on how to manage your feelings and the law about human resources?

Both those are all very well, but if you’re a well-paid employee, you should really have a backup plan in place.

You may never get fired – but you have insurance for your life, for your house. You have a disaster recovery plan at work. Why wouldn’t you have a disaster recovery plan for your job?

So, here are some thoughts about the most important things you need to have in place as part of that plan.

1. Know Your Runway

Robert Kiyosaki defines wealth as the number of days you can survive if you lose your job tomorrow.

Real wealth is not what you have in the bank, it’s not just a money number.

It’s how long you can live on that number.

Take a simple example.

Let’s say you have $100,000 in the bank.

You have a great job. The house, the car, the golf membership, elegant living and holidays cost you $10,000 a month. The same amount that the job pays you.

You’d last 10 months if the job stopped paying you.

That’s your runway.

The longer your runway, the more time you have to get yourself sorted again.

So the first piece of your your plan is to work out what you can slash your monthly costs to if you absolutely had to.

Then, look at your bank account and work out how many months you can go without pay.

If that number is more than 12 – you have a year that you could survive with nothing coming in – you’re doing well.

If it’s less – especially if it’s a lot less – you need to start building your runway now. The time to build it is when you don’t need it.

2. Know Your Value

There’s a saying – price is what you pay, value is what you get.

Value is your secret weapon. It’s the thing you offer that no one else does. It’s why someone should give you money and not someone else.

And in today’s world, there are an unlimited number of ways to become more valuable. Simply becoming good at one thing will make you more valuable.

Choosing that one thing is an important thing for you to do.

All too often, we let that thing be decided by others. You do what you’re told to do at work. You wait for workplace training. You progress up a chosen path.

That won’t make you rich, and it won’t make you safe.

What will make you safe is the stuff you do on your own, your homework, the stuff that you build after hours.

How you use non-billable time is how you increase your value.

Whether it’s a skill like coding or carpentry or a service like sales or social media management – you need to figure out the value you bring.

Because that’s what people will get out their wallets for.

3. Have A Product

But, people have to be able to give you money in exchange for something. In exchange for a product.

Think of everything you do as a product.

A product has certain characteristics:

  1. It is well defined.
  2. It has a price.
  3. It gives the customer a benefit.

A service is no different from a product in this sense. A plumber fixes your plumbing. A copywriter writes your webpages. A programmer creates an application.

What you want to do is avoid the fuzzy world of “jobs” that need to be done. Unless you turn your superb administration skills into a product like being a personal assistant.

The reason for you to treat yourself as a provider of products is that you take control. Instead of being someone that is told what to do by your employer, you think of yourself as someone that provides benefits to an employer.

Any employer willing to pay your price.

Which leads us to the last point.

4. Be Ready To Hustle

You can’t avoid being successful if you are prepared to tell your story to four or five people every day.

If you have something of value to offer, wrapped in a product with a price, then all you need is to find customers.

And the way you do that is by getting off the couch and going to look for them.

It’s like the dad that told his kid there was a million dollars under his shoe.

The kid kept looking under his shoe, until he realised what that meant.

Use up some shoe leather going to find those customers. It’s easier now with LinkedIn and email and the Internet.

It should take you less than a day to find 100 people that might benefit from what you have to offer.

It should take less than a month to contact them all.

As long as you have more than a month of runway – you’re bound to succeed.

At which point, the whole memory of being fired will be a distant one. And the chances are that you will look on the whole episode with gratitude because it set you on this new, better path.

There’s Only One Thing You Need To Do

Have your plan. And be ready to ACT.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Know Something Is Worth Doing?

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Tuesday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’ve tried todo lists, and they don’t work for me.

The lists of actions fill up faster than I can tick them off. Then, all of a sudden, I have fifteen pages of todos and no real plan for dealing with them.

And I think it would be a mistake to force myself to do them in order. Or rank them in some way. Or work out some kind of process for managing them.

Because that leads down a rabbit hole of list holders and Filofaxes and text files and apps and all that kind of stuff.

The kinds of tools and books and stationery that are everywhere, tempting you away from doing the work.

And they have a seductive siren song – if you use them you will get better, more productive, more beautiful, more sexy.

Maybe that works for some people.

I just know I’ve spent many hours thinking about how to do things rather than actually doing them.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Scott Fitzgerald once wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Maybe I can use that as an excuse…

So, on the one hand you have the idea of sharpening your axe. If you have an hour to cut down a tree, spend the first 50 minutes getting it sharp and then get to work.

On the other hand you have the school of long hours and hard work. The workplaces where facetime matters more than anything else.

Doesn’t matter if your axe is blunt – just get on with it and work harder.

Which is problematic. As Scott Adams writes, the reward for doing good work is usually more work.

Promotion doesn’t help. Robert Frost suggested that if you worked hard 8 hours a day you could eventually become a boss and work 12 hours a day.

For many of us, we should make better choices about what is worth doing. How should we spend our time?

Warren Buffett writes about how he constantly looks for ways to make large investments but tries to avoid small commitments.

Your time is the greatest asset you have and investing it wisely is the biggest job you have to do.

Should you be spending it on minor tasks or focusing it where you can make a big difference?

Buffett says – if something’s not worth doing at all, it’s not worth doing well.

For those of us that work as consultants or any other profession where our time is what makes us an income, this is crucial to learn.

There are lots of things that are important. Tasks that are important to us, and tasks that are important to others.

We’ll get satisfaction out of accomplishing important tasks. Others will only pay us if they believe that we can accomplish an important task for them.

But that’s not enough.

If we want to do things that move us closer to our goals, the tasks also need to be well defined.

We need to be clear on the shape and size of what we’re doing. We need to know how long we’ll do it and at what price.

With knowledge work, this can be hard.

But we need to get rid of the fuzziness and be clear on what we’re doing. That’s the only way to build a business instead of having a hobby.

The task for us is to try and spend our time in the zone – the magic zone – where the majority of what we do is both important and well-defined.

The rest is not worth doing at all.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Kinds of Targets Should You Set When You Want To Change A Habit?

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Monday, 6.14pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Are you the kind of person that thinks if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working?

Do you set ambitious targets – because that’s what you feel you should be doing – and then feel guilty and down when you don’t achieve them?

If that’s the case, perhaps you’ve been going about targets all wrong.

Let’s take a few things that many of us would like to do.

We’d like to become more mindful – more calm, we’d like to be healthier and fitter and we’d like to be better at our job – say it’s a sales role.

What do you need to do to achieve these outcomes?

Well, we’ll need to put time and effort into them. If you’re not calm right now, then being able to be calm is a process. If you’re overweight – that’s another process. As is selling.

What many of us do is start with a target – set a goal – have an ambition.

I’m going to meditate for an hour every day. I’m going to the gym for an hour five times a week. Or I’m going to make 100 calls a day.

We rush into the task full of energy. We give it all we have, perhaps for a few days, perhaps a few weeks.

Perhaps even a few months.

And then, it gets hard. If we aren’t seeing results or life gets in the way or other things become more important, it just becomes too hard and we start to “forget”.

And then we stop.

One answer to this is that you should have more willpower. Do more affirmations, tell yourself to do it, control your mind and focus…

But that’s hard, isn’t it? How long can you keep going at full speed before you just run out of gas?

This way of being is hurting us more than it’s helping.

Some people suggest we do things differently.

Think about the game Limbo, for example.

That’s the game where you turn around, bend over backwards, and shuffle your way under a pole. Then the pole is lowered and you start again.

That gets harder and harder, doesn’t it?

Well, what would happen if you set the pole at neck height, faced forward, bent back slightly and shuffled under the pole?

It would be embarrassingly easy, wouldn’t it?

And this is the secret of how many people manage to train themselves and set new habits.

You’ll find a few examples in Tim Ferriss’ book, Tools of Titans.

Here you have the monk that says to become more mindful – take just one breath a day.

To get fitter, do just one push-up a day.

IBM used to ask it’s sales representatives to make just one sales call a day.

And, if you want to be a writer, just writing two shitty pages a day will get you on the way.

So, for the next thing you want to change, before you start with an ambitious and far reaching action plan to reach a goal, try this.

Set an embarrassingly easy task that you’ll do every day that will move you closer to your goal.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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This Is The Simplest Strategy Model You’ll Need To Know

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Sunday, 10.23pm

Sheffield, U.K

What is it that makes a strategy succeed?

The way we answer this, often, is by looking back.

Why did Microsoft become what it is and dominate desktops around the world? Why are there enough Apple phones in the world for the entire population? And why is IBM still around?

Or, what makes one particular influencer popular? Why does a particular chef or singer or artist hit the big time?

Surely there are patterns we can find and copy to become successful ourselves?

But there is a problem with this. All too often, history is not a good guide. The path others took is a fragile one and sometimes crumbles away behind them.

What are your chances of starting a search engine that will compete with Google? Google has more computing power than you can imagine.

If you’re a grad student at University, what are your chances of raising the several billion needed to set up the next Google?

An article interviewing Professor Bala Balachandran has a useful way to think about your options.

Michael Porter once wrote that your have two ways in which you can stay profitable over time.

One – you can do activities different from your competitors.

Two – you can do activities differently.

Four words that stand out, two of which are the same, leaving you with three to ponder. So much packed into so little.

Porter’s emphasis was on different and differently.

Let’s say you’re in the web search business – going back to our previous example.

Bing and Yahoo are going head to head with Google. I’m not sure what’s happening with Yahoo, really, but Bing is funded by Microsoft and so has the financial muscle needed to compete with Google.

Three quarters of the world’s searches happen through Google. The others are trailing.

Because they’re doing the same activities the same way.

A minnow that some people use – although less than 1% – is duckduckgo.com. Because it does search differently.

While Google tracks everything you do and can tell you the sex of your unborn child, duckduckgo does the opposite – it sells you on how it protects your privacy.

But what’s the technology that will actually sink Google? Is it too far ahead?

Google is big. But is it bigger than the entire world? Perhaps the next Google will actually be a distributed search engine like yacy that runs on a few billion distributed computers in India and China?

Professor Balachandran steps away from Porter’s emphasis on difference and focuses on the word activities.

His point is that strategy is inseparable from the activities you do.

A strategy that does not involve action is navel gazing – no more than a dream.

And you can build a strategy around activities – whether different or differently.

This chimes with what Scott Adams says about how he became a cartoonist.

He says he was an average cartoonist, an average storyteller and knew a little about engineering.

When he put all three together, he created one of the most loved comics in the world.

Many people can do each of these three activities.

By combining them, Adams got a strategic advantage over everyone else out there.

This is a strategy that all of us can use.

Do different things – or do things differently.

That’s it.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What’s Andrew Carnegie’s Number One Secret For Succeeding In Business?

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Saturday, 10.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I don’t know how you go about writing your blog, if you have one, but my approach is quite random.

Really.

If you were to get some advice from a marketing person on blogging, you’d probably start by having a goal, understanding your target audience, coming up with a list of topics they’d find useful, getting a schedule set up, crafting headlines and spending a lot of time promoting what you’re doing.

That’s how it should be. Perhaps.

What I do is start with an idea – something random I’ve read. Say it’s about the Rule Of Frequency – which I’ll cover in a separate post.

This particular article is associated with GNU/Linux, so that gets me searching and gets me to the O’Reilly Open Books site. Which talks about the Open Library project.

A lot of what I learn and write about wouldn’t be possible without people putting time and effort into sharing what they know.

And since that seems a good thing – the fact that there is an Open Library project is also very interesting.

Because it seems to me that people create stuff for one of two reasons. They think it will help them in some way. Or they need to put down what they know before they burst.

The ones who do it for the second reason create much more interesting stuff. Stuff that’s actually useful.

And those are the books and articles that are worth reading. So, it makes sense to spend time hunting them down.

Wandering through the Open Library finally has me stumbling over Andrew Carnegie’s book “The Empire Of Business”, printed by Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1902.

The first chapter is a talk to young men – young people if we bring it up to date – where Carnegie tells you what he’s learned over a long business career.

His success secrets…

It’s good to start at the bottom, he says. If you’ve started there, you’ll be motivated to get ahead and much less likely to be led astray by the temptations available to those with more money than you.

Then there are three things you shouldn’t do. The first two? Don’t drink or speculate.

The third one… this is out of left field…

Don’t “indorse”. This means lending your name to support someone else. Perhaps as a favour to a friend – or as an influencer in these modern times. Probably “endorse” today.

In essence, be very careful who you lend your reputation to, because if things go wrong, you’ll be dragged down as well.

Then… what should you do?

Instead of looking at what you are asked to do – what you must do – for an employer, look for what you can do.

You’re paid a wage to do what you must do. To make more, you must do more.

Future millionaires have one sure habit, Carnegie goes on. “Their revenues exceed their expenditures”.

If you can save, if you can show that you can hold on to money – others will lend you hundreds and thousands what you have when you need capital.

And then… we come to his final secret – the big one…

You can make money in any business – in any legitimate one making or dealing in a product that people want.

If you want to make money you need to do one thing. “Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively” on that business.

Stick to it, fight it out, resolve to lead, be the best, have the best and know the most.

In other words, he says, “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket”.

And finally… be patient. You’ll get there.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Tell When You’re Overdoing It

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Friday, 9.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sometimes a phrase paints a picture in your mind – and you know there’s something there worth thinking about.

I stumbled across such a phrase on Charlie Stross’ blog. Charlie is a science fiction writer living in Edinburgh.

He talks about using a revision control system for writing his books – and writes that when he has some spare time he’s “going to poke around with git, but pointing a distributed SCCM at a novel is a bit like using an ICBM to swat a fly”

That is a fantastic phrase.

And it’s conjures up a picture that is worth keeping in mind.

Because, so much stuff around us is incredibly complicated yet astonishingly useless.

Take writing, for instance.

If you do any kind of professional writing – for a sales proposal, for example – you know that you go through certain phases.

You need to do your research, then try and pick out the most important points, organise them in a sensible order, fill in the text, go and find or create images and charts and tables and sprinkle the whole thing with plenty of examples and proof points while keeping track of any references and data that might be important later.

Then, perhaps you open Microsoft Word and stare at a blank page.

It’s hard to get across just how unhelpful a tool Word is when you want to do a serious piece of writing.

Yes the capability is in there somewhere. You can use an outliner. There is a reference manager. You can set out the document and pull in pictures.

Very quickly, however, as the word count and images rack up, you end up with a multi-megabyte monster that slows down when opening and starts to haunt your dreams.

And the software world is full of such examples. We have bigger and better computers, but we never seem to be able to get things done any faster.

The developers of these tools are constantly trying to made them better – but perhaps they’re just overdoing it and the actual benefits lie elsewhere.

Maybe we just need something much simpler.

What we see on our computers is happening around us in life as well.

Take a look around your house. Perhaps you’re one of those rare people that has only what you need and nothing else.

The kind of person that empties out your briefcase or bag every night and fills it again in the morning.

The rest of us, especially those of us with kids, live in what appears to be a collection centre for plastic and fabric.

Do we really need that many toys? Or clothes? Or pots and pans? Or bags?

Books? Now there I have to admit – I’m not sure there is such a thing as too many books…

But I know that sometimes I need to get rid of them. And I do. Reluctantly.

Whatever your goal in life – it probably involves an element of living well – being happy.

And I wonder just how happy all this stuff makes us.

As the saying goes, first you own your stuff. And then your stuff owns you.

Perhaps we just need to put all these ICBMs down and have a rest.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Should Your Computer Do When It Has Nothing To Say?

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When you spend time working in a GNU/Linux environment, something strange happens.

Especially if you like the terminal – as I do.

For example, I recently discovered that Google has a cloud offering, just like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

You can set up a server and have a play – and it says that the really small ones – the ones they call a droplet – are forever free.

That’s the kind of price I like.

So, I played about creating a website – setting everything up from a browser that acted like a terminal. If you don’t know what that is – it’s a bit like DOS.

And do you know how many times the droplet – the terminal – interrupted me while I was working?

How many times did it stop to tell me I had new mail, or that a new file had been added to Dropbox, or that it needed to be updated?

That’s right – not once.

There’s a rule that’s part of the Unix Philosophy – a cardinal virtue. It’s called the rule of silence.

This rule says – if you have nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, say nothing.

It’s ignored by virtually every other type of system out there.

In fact, many do the opposite of being silent. They jump up and down, waving and shouting and pushing into your space, vying for attention.

People study exactly how to get you hooked. It’s called Captology, which stands for Computers as Persuasive Technologies – or now just behaviour design.

In essence – these systems know that if they want you to act in a certain way – then they have to get three things right:

  1. You must want to do it.
  2. You must be able to do it.
  3. You must be prompted to do it.

Watch out for this approach the next time you use Dropbox, for example, and see how they try and get you to upgrade.

They know that you want to keep your photos safe. If you have Dropbox, then you probably know how to put photos in there – but because photos take up space you’re probably keeping them somewhere else if you have the free account..

So what do they do? They introduce lots of prompts – with a pop up asking if you’d like to import your photos, integrate with your documents, add videos.

Anything that will make you add more to the folder and decide that you need to upgrade and pay for more space.

It’s just good business. Good, old fashioned manipulation.

That’s focusing on number 3. But you can do number 2 – make it easier for them. So videos autoplay on every service out there and your binge watching soars.

If you want to learn more about how to do this kind of work, or learn how to avoid it, here’s a good article.

The best defence, however, is a good offence. Turn off every notification, every alert. Stop using devices if you have to.

Or use a device for exactly one purpose. A text editor for writing. A camera for photos. Taking nothing in your pockets if you want to relax other than a good paperback.

Silence really is golden.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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5 Vital Skills For a Self-Managed Freelance World of Work

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Many people in charge of companies now still have a mindset of 9-5 factory style work where people are structured in a hierarchy and there is a chain of command.

You’re slotted into your role in the organisation like pegs in a giant pegboard.

But, work is changing. Roles aren’t fixed any more. Not in the sense that you can do one job your entire life and retire with a pension.

As people live older, they don’t particularly want to stop working. And younger folk are finding it hard to move up a career ladder based on roles and seniority when the older ones insist on staying on the rungs.

Which is why Morningstar is interesting.

Morningstar does things with tomatoes. They care about tomatoes. On their website you can learn about the history of tomatoes, watch a day in the life of a tomato and check out prices for tomato products from hot paste to diced tomatoes in juice.

That’s not the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is that they have no managers. The only role in the company is held by Chris Rufer, the President, because it needs to for legal reasons. And he’s got that because he started it.

Instead, they have a workforce of around 400 workers that manage themselves by creating a network of agreements with each other. A peer-to-peer management system, if you like.

You might think this approach is nonsense. Surely the company would collapse without a cadre of trained managers, all being paid four times what a worker earns, watching the workers work?

Somehow it doesn’t. A mini-market emerges instead, and out of the transactions and agreements made between the workers, a low margin business sustains and grows over time.

This self-management system has spawned its own training centre – The Morningstar Self-Management Institute – and Doug Kirkpatrick sets out five skills that you need to have to do this well.

Now, even if you don’t work for Morningstar but work in a regular company or as a freelancer, these skills are worth thinking about.

1. Always take the initiative

Talk is easy. It’s when you start doing something – taking the first step – that magic happens.

Thinking and strategy and plans are all important and need doing. But you have to get started – whatever that means for you.

For example, as a freelancer with no clients, you have to take the initiative and reach out to prospects. If you have prospects, you have to reach out to them with pitches and suggestions. If you have clients, you have to go back to them with new ideas and opportunities.

Stop talking and start doing.

2. Get comfortable with fuzziness and ambiguity

A world where you have a safe, well-paid job where you can’t be fired is unlikely. And, if you do have that, it’s probably pretty boring.

Safety usually is.

Really exciting things happen in places where people wear t-shirts saying “Safety third”.

Fuzzy and uncertain spaces are where you can find and add value. That’s the edge of new technology, new capability or wasted effort that you can sort out.

If you go where other people don’t – you’ll find projects and opportunities and money.

3. Learn how to be aware of yourself and your progress

If you want to get somewhere, you have to constantly check yourself, check whether you’re moving in the right direction.

Time goes by quickly. Before you know it your time is up and you’re behind where you wanted to be at this point.

If you have a mission – a goal – you’ve got to be aware of it every single day and move towards it. You’re not going to make it in one big leap. But a step every day will make it impossible for you not to reach it.

4. Always try to contribute

Don’t wait for stuff to come to you. Don’t hold back protecting ideas and thoughts and plans because you think they are really clever.

If you can help someone else do it.

It’s good practice. You can get whatever you want if you help enough other people get what they want.

Today, the more you share, the more people can see what you do and are willing to trust you.

It’s one thing saying you can do something – another showing your work.

If you contribute, if you’re visible – you’ll make yourself discoverable – and that is the key to getting more work and growing a business.

5. Select for low power distance

You’re going to have a choice of who to work with. There’s an entire world of people out there looking for your exact skills.

Some of them are not nice.

In the series Scrubs, the actors talk about a no asshole rule. It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’re an asshole you’re not joining the team.

This is a good rule to use when working for someone.

It’s good practice to fire difficult customers and spend all the time you save being extra-helpful to the nice ones.

The ones who don’t lord themselves over you.

Your ideal customer is one that doesn’t see themselves as your boss but as a colleague – someone who can work with you to create something that benefits both of you.

Someone who just wants to take from you isn’t worth working with.

In summary

Whether you’re just starting a new career or moving out of an old one into a new freelance way of working, you’re going to have to pick up new skills.

One of the most important is how to move from doing what you’re told to agreeing what needs to be done with people willing to pay you.

Or better yet, offering value that people are happy to buy from you.

And all that starts with a mindset shift.

Followed by massive action.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh