Video: Start With Why

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

I caught this video earlier this year and all I can say is that it has changed how I run projects and decide what to do. It’s by Simon Sinek on the subject of “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action”, after his book on the same thing (affiliate link.)

Simon basically says that great leaders don’t start with WHAT they start with WHY. I can identify with this on so many levels, the most pertinent being the work I do at The River Church in Exeter.

At our church, there are 101 things that we could do – ‘the whats’ – and most times, we’ve done things in the past because others were doing them and they seemed like good ideas. It’s not to say that we just did whatever came into our mind, but when you are running a church you are always looking for new ways to reach and help people, often on a tight budget, and when you see another church have success with a certain activity, you naturally want to emulate it. It’s not a surprise that many of things over the years have failed, probably the most memorable being when we went on TV for a year, which exhausted us and brought little gain in return.

Also, both in church and in my other ventures, there’s always the times when you’ve having a leadership discussion and you focus the whole meeting on a small part of ‘the whats’ while totally ignoring ‘the whys’. I guess the reason is that it’s easier to talk about a ‘what’ because it’s easier to change and more immediate to change.

What this video has helped me do is focus on ‘the whys’ first, and if there isn’t a satisfactory ‘why’, then to by no means look at ‘the whats’. Have you ever worked on a project without really knowing why? Have you found a task keeps changing because you don’t know the why? Have you found you do things without real purpose and direction? This video will help you as much as it’s helped me!

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. Be honest – where are you on this scale at the moment? What are your struggles and victories?
  2. What are you thoughts on the power of WHY? Are there times when you have harnessed it?
  3. If you have already seen this, how has it changed you?

Fail Forward

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I’m not so much a fan of Seth Godin’s blog as I am of his books (I think the focus in his books is better than the blog which often I find too ethereal). However, I found this post on failure from him to be very good.

Seth writes on the levels of failure that we should have:

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.
FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.
FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.
FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.
FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

This reminds me of a book I read many years ago by acclaimed leadership expert John Maxwell called Failing Forward (affiliate link). In it, John discussed the mindset and the methods of making failure a positive – to literally ’fail forward.’

I remember being so afraid of failure that I would go to any length to avoid it (even if a project clearly was going to fail, I put an overload of resources in to minimise its failure, which of course took precious resources from other projects), and I’d certainly cover my failures up. One day, if we get time to sit down and chat, I’ll go through the list with you!

The point was that reading Failing Forward, I began to think very differently about failure, and actually began to see it as being part of success. You can’t talk of this and not, of course, think of Google who celebrate failure. In fact they don’t just celebrate it – they see failure as a necessary part of success – which when you think about it is very true. You have to fail to succeed.

Seth’s post, John’s book, Google’s philosophy – they all serve to help us embrace failure and learn from it, rather than fear it. I find, however, than many embrace failure but still don’t learn from it. It’s easy to say “FAIL OFTEN”, but how do you fail often?

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. When, exactly, did you start failing forward? What changed your mindset about failure?
  2. How have you learnt to learn from your mistakes? What methods fo you have in place?

Are You Afraid To Give It Away?

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TemptationI don’t know who first said it, but the idea of an open platform and being an active authority is that by equipping people with the best resources that aren’t your own – by sending them away – you get them back.

This is the premise that most of the digitalls on Twitter follow. They share links all day long, because by being active in their area and telling you where to go, the idea is that you’ll look to them as the authority. Beyond that, there’s a bit play in open innovation with co-creation too.

An Open World

It does, however, go a lot deeper than this. The idea of open platforms is one of open source, of creative commons, of open innovation. This isn’t giving information away in such a context that people can directly see where the source was – like a ReTweet – it’s a place where you are giving people to take your work and use it, and there’s no guarantee people won’t use it for their own gain without attributing you as the source.

It’s one thing sharing someone else’s content and then getting a kick back if someone likes the link. It’s another sharing your own content for free and not knowing what’ll happen with it.

I can tell a story from both sides of this fence. Being honest with you, I’ve been the one who has ripped the work off of others (back in my HTML days), and I’ve also been the one who has been too afraid to share my creations for fear of it being ripped off.

Last Saturday, on our discussion of “Together“, a friend I made in Helsinki, Johanna Kotipelto, made an exceptional statement with regards to people being too afraid to collaborate together. Joanna said, in what I think is a highly quotable phrase, “Sharing is still a threat: it’s like taking a Mona Lisa to an exhibition – unsigned.”

Johanna wrote more about it in her post on Man 2.0 where she examines some of these themes more – it’s well worth a read.

The thing is – do I agree? Do I believe that sharing is a threat?

The Fear is Laziness and Ego

I think the ultimate display of this fear (in the blogging world at least) is when bloggers never link to other blogs but there own (or rarely do it), and keep writing about their experience, their ideas, and never our experience or our ideas.

I consider this fear to actually be laziness and ego. When I read a feed for a few weeks and find they never link out and talk about anyone but themselves, I think that they are too lazy and too self consumed to actually focus on others and curate conversation for others.

This same laziness and ego, in my opinion, is also what stops people from sharing – because you know what – if you talked about what you consider to be your intelectual property enough, you’d be generating so much discussion about it that people would know you’re the source. I’ve started to see, for example, a lot of the ideas that we’ve discussed here talked about on blogs I’ve never heard of and from people I don’t know – but they know where the source is, and the conversation keeps coming back here. (Also, we need to loosen up a little – we often think our ideas are better than they actually are!)

And I think the people on the other side of the fence – who take other people’s work and pawn it off as their own – it’s laziness and ego on their own side, but it says I’m too lazy and too good to work hard and get this myself.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. First of all – which side of the fence are you on? Where do you sit on this issue?
  2. What is the FIRST example that you think of where ‘giving it away’ has caused a win? (Mine currently is Guardian’s Open Platform)

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk

Are You Living A Life Of Purpose?

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Ok, so perhaps this is deep and delving a bit too much into people’s salads, but the other night I was at a dinner party and when asking about their interests and passions, the person said to me that they weren’t really doing the things they felt were a fulfilment of their life and found they were in a rut. When I asked them what they did for others, it was the end of the conversation.

It seems everywhere I go, people are describing the same thing – that they are just going from work to home to the bar / pub / coffee shop, and that’s it.

And I’ll go out a limb here – it seems these people are squandering their life and living at a bass level with little fulfillment or working out of the talents and giftings that they have for our common good as people.

The reason why this gets me down? Because I believe no one should live a life that isn’t giving to others. And I believe that no one should live a life where they aren’t actually fulfilling their potential. When I see people like person I met the other night, I just can’t help but feel they are living like a chicken when they were meant to soar like an eagle.

I want to make clear that I’m not saying this is about wealth. Some of the poorest people I know are the most giving, but then also so are some of the richest I know. This isn’t about how financially rich you are, but how purposefully rich you are.

Nor am I saying that this is exclusive to our western mindset. People leaving in areas of extreme depravity still practice this idea of purpose and the common good – in fact, it seems our over-materialistic western world is the place that struggles with it.

The question I’m asking myself at the moment everyday at the moment, to test myself? What have I done that matters?

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Do you live for others? I think we should, so if you don’t, tell me why.
  • Why is there an epidemic of chicken living?
  • What are you doing that matters?

B2B & Social Media: Provide A Solution

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You’ve probably heard at one point or another the question “does Social Media work for B2B?” Perhaps you’re even asking it yourself.

One of the main things that helped with me this is a post by Dan Blank called “Creating Interest vs Providing Solutions” from late last year. Dan says a number of pertinent things in this post, my favourite being:

If you can’t properly monetize 18 million unique visitors a month, how will another 5 million help clarify the way forward?

The point is that charging for interest is different to charging for a solution. Dan argues that many B2Bs, and publishers in particular, are thinking very narrowly about what their real asset is, and desperately trying to cling onto it, rather than actually start from the users point of view and explore what needs they really have around their interests:

Even in the cases where pay walls will work, it is not a complete solution, it is just one revenue stream. And in all likelihood, it is not one that will restore revenue and profits to the levels being lost by print.

Ads & Sponsorships are one model, but getting customers to pay you is another. If you rely solely on ads & sponsorships, how many page views is enough for your market? How many webinar sign-ups? How much growth can you garner year after year?

To differentiate your revenue streams, you may want to consider developing products that provide direct solutions. What service do you provide – could you provide- that people couldn’t live without?

Dan then linked to an exceptional presentation by David Cushman, called “a new era for specialist media.” Any regular here will find the ideas similar to our discussions on spreadability and people-to-people, but it is most certainly worth a look.

[slideshare id=2509580&doc=sipakeynotedc-091116051033-phpapp02]

All of this discussion makes me think again about the need for Social Media to be useful. And by useful I don’t mean useful for you, I mean useful for your users and/or community. We really need to understand them, with quantitive and qualitative research, and deliver what lifts restrictions for them – what enables them to do what they previously could not do.

For a really good case study on this, watch Yann Gourvennec’s Insight at Like Minds. His work as the Head of Digital and Internet at Orange Business Services is very, very inspiring.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Are you a B2B player in Social Media? If so, are you providing a solution?
  • How do we begin to think ‘solution’, because I think at the moment we are very caught up with interest over solution.
  • How do you communicate solutions, without making everything a sales pitch?

Break It!

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Death of a Light BulbThis isn’t for everyone, so if you’re not the daring type of person, then go and read something else and save yourself the stress. However, if you are a thinking person who likes to push the envelope that little bit further with each new thing you do, then this will be right up your street.

Innovation means breaking things. Nothing that you currently do can be holy. If it isn’t moving forward and moving the bottom line, you’ve got to break it.

Right now we’re working on Like Minds Conference, Autumn 2010. We’re breaking a lot of stuff. We’ve taken everyone of our assumptions about what traditionally makes a great event, and we’ve broken a lot of stuff.

One instance is panels. I’ve never been happy with how they work, and I’m so thankful for Dave Lutz who shared this post with me, the comments of which encouraged me to go ahead and break what I didn’t think worked in the first place.

Lesson? We need that nod from our peers to say – “yeah, break it.”

Breaking things means we find out what works. Consider good ideas that aren’t just profitable ideas. I remember telling one person this ‘incredible idea’ I had, but was so glad that he could help break it and instead move me onto an idea that was breaking and making new things.

I guess I’ve found that the best ideas of mine are those that break the norms.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. What isn’t moving the bottom line? Why haven’t you broken it?
  2. What norms are you currently breaking?

Photo courtesy of lasszio

The End Of The Age Of Content, Part 2

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Burned textureThe last time we talked about the end of the age of content was in April this year, for me best summarised by one of my favourite quotes of the year from Jeff Jarvis:

The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Content is becoming has become a commodity. As I’ve been saying for over a year now, there’s too much of it. We’re over saturated. Trying to compete with content is a hard, hard game to win.

And the trouble about content is that all the digitalls have in front of their faces on Twitter all day. But for a second consider you are a digicool. How do you even find blogs like mine and yours? I would say relationship, or a very thin long tail.

Our Options

If it’s the end of age of content, then what is next, and what are our options?

1. Fight it. Keep saying that ‘Content Is King’ and tune up your personal brand and affiliate program, while you compete against the thousands upon thousands of others doing the same to promote your blog and product over theirs. If you’re trying to build a big blog or launch a community group, you also can’t start by fighting on this front, because others are doing it better than you already.

Ok, so perhaps that is a bit harsh – but my point is that you can’t fight on this level alone.

2. Relationally push. Every business starts out with friends as customers. If for the digicool it is through referral that blogs, etc, are discovered, then we lean on those relationships. The issue here through is that it doesn’t scale.

3. Go niche. Find focussed interest topics to specialise in. People are more prepared to go with specialist content as opposed to generalist. But writing about a niche subject doesn’t mean people will flock to you, nor trust you. Again, we are back to social authority.

Curation

Where we are going towards is curation. By having a good bit of fight, building relationship, finding niches, and then being a curator of the content and co-creation that is already happening, we find new meaning. The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Seth Godin posted an exceptional audio peice on “The New Dynamics Of Book Publishing” last month. I seriously recommend you listen to it.

From all the consulting that I have done with publishers of late, Seth’s insights are right on and encapsulate much of what I’ve been going through with these publishers.

If we take this into the Music Industry, for example, should’ve been curating experiences and communites rather than trying to create and sell music. The creation part is a comodity, the community curation part isn’t.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. Are you a curator? Where are you curating and how are you doing it?
  2. Curation is a new buzz idea that’s going around at the moment – do you see it as the future?
  3. Content creation has it’s own challenges. What are the challenges of content curation?

Photo courtesy of irisb447

Video: What Do Consumers Really Want?

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RD0OZCyJCk

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

Today I’m sharing a video that changed my life. I watched this in February 2009 when on a weekend break in Cornwall, and as I saw Joe Pine’s TED Talk on The Experience Economy, it resonated deeply within me because it explained what I had spent all my working life doing: staging powerful, compelling experiences.

Shortly after, I purchased the book and read it when I took a group of interns to Romania for a week in April 2009 (whenever I read it now, I think of Romania in an instant.) A few months later when researching Joe a little more, I saw he was on LinkedIn and I sent him a thank you message for how it had changed my life and my business. Joe responded, and from there we kept in touch. I was fortunate enough to meet Joe in December 2009, and Joe was very helpful with hooking me up with Teemu Arina, who spoke at Like Minds in Helsinki. Such is the power of Social Media! (BTW Joe is now on Twitter.)

My Takeways

I could and have spent a lot of time talking about what I learned from this video, but my main takeaways are:

  1. Good and Services are commoditised. They are everywhere. If you want to be unique and remarkable, you need to offer an Experience.
  2. An Experience is a customised Service. This provides the starting point to start staging Experiences.
  3. Staging Experiences doesn’t make them inauthentic. In fact I say that the more you prepare for people is the more that you actually value them and care about the experience that they’ll have. Case in point: Like Minds is highly prepared to deliver a compelling experience to every participant – because I care about people learning and connecting.
  4. Authenticity is two things: being true to yourself, and then being true to what you say you are. I wonder how many businesses fail on BOTH!
  5. Whatever the level of Authenticity of your offerings, whether Fake-Fake or Real-Real, you can embrace it and make it work.

Joe has co-authored two books with James Gilmore that combine the thinking in this video. I would highly recommend that you purchase both Experience Economy and Authenticity (affiliate links), because they have given me an incredible way to understand economic value and the levels of economic offering. If you like anything about what I do, most of it has some root in these two books – either because I learned it there, or have found that I was already doing it but it was described there.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Do you offer Experiences? Or rather, what Services do you offer that you could customise into Experiences?
  • Where does your business lie on the Authentic Matrix?

Together

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Wall Of Peace - MoscowIt’s a concern of mine that despite all our social media, people still don’t do things together.

Words like community, team, collaboration, relational, participatory, social – they are all over Twitter, but then when you share these links or comment on these posts, do you get a reply? When you ask people not what they say about social media, but if they are doing social media, how many are building connections and really collaborating?

The truth is that working together is hard.

It’s hard because we grow up today in a such a me-focussed world and live such me-focussed lives that the preference of others and putting others first that is required for team work doesn’t come easily.

Case in point: communication. Every Sunday at church, we have a team who handle the sound, the lighting and the audio/video content. They all link into each other, yet when Sunday comes and they are working together, I was rarely hearing them talk to each other, and as such, the whole Sunday experienced suffered.

Why was this? Because they were used to living in their own minds and focussing on their own angle, that they were almost unaware of the others around who needed their support and communication. Now that I’m teaching them communication and helping them see the need for the big picture and to give of themselves to each other, they are working far more powerfully as a team.

Malcolm Gladwell writes some very interesting stuff about this – particular in the area of focus – in his book Blink (affiliate link.) With focus, we tend to close off what’s going around and zoom in onto one thing. And I think that technology has heightened this ability within us – for good and for bad. Think about the hundreds of millions of knowledge workers who spend all day with computers, not uttering a world as they live inside their head and shift digital paper. What they are getting better at is having a tight focus. What they are getting worse at is looking up.

In order to get on together we need to look up. We need to prefer one another. Valuing the person in front of us. I’m shocked by how much ego I still see – people clamoring for the attention, to give their point of view, to ensure they are heard and that they get the credit. You know what I decided? I’m going to give the credit rather than get the credit.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. When did you learn to really work together? What was the time that switch you from being me-focussed to we-focussed?
  2. If you could give one tip to people that would help them become team players, what would it be?

Photo courtesy of Jeff Bauche

Build Not Buy

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As MasterCard have told us, there are some things money can’t buy:

  • You can buy a house, but you make a home
  • You can buy a car, but you learn to drive
  • You can pay for a good wedding, but that doesn’t make you a good husband
  • You can buy a ball, but it doesn’t make you a player

Even going to the gym and paying for a personal trainer doesn’t make you fit – you have to do the work and build up your body.

Here’s what I’m seeing a lot of: people buying and selling, but few building.

I think this is what separates just any old event from a community driven event, or separates any old product from a lifestyle product.

What I’m seeing even fewer of is people who don’t just buy an education and theory, but build learning and reality.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. Take a moment and tell us – what are you building?
  2. What is the market for building?