Published on March 4, 2011 by Scott Gould

Productivity vs creativity and the creative’s problem

We need to get things done. And there was a point in my life 2 years ago when the book, Getting Things Done literally saved my life.

I want to break down the 5 pillars of productivity in preparation for a seminar I’m given on this on Sunday at The River Church. (If you’re in the neighbourhood, you are welcome to come – 2:30pm this Sunday.)

Before we begin: productivity vs creativity and the creative’s problem

Ahead of discussing the 5 pillars, I want to make an observation on the problem that we are trying to solve. Most of us have too much on our plate. We are inundated with ‘stuff’ and struggle on a daily, weekly and yearly basis with getting the things done that we need to and/or want to.

Of course, in the end, most stuff comes about right. But I wonder whether we reach anywhere near the potential that we could if we were more organised.

Further more, whilst everything might be alright in the end, the stress levels that we are living at with the weight of responsibility that most of us have crushes and paralyzes us. So whilst we might get to the end of the year with the stuff done that we needed to, it is with the price of exhaustion and the neutering of our creativity.

Yesterday Esko Kilpi challenged me that we should not use the word productivity for humans, but rather the word creativity. My good friend Robin Dickinson also talks about developing a strong NO and not filling out time with so much that we aren’t focussed on the present. Both of them would say that productivity – trying to squeeze more and more out of your day – is a foolish and inhuman pursuit and we should rather seek to have creative whitespace in our days.

Whilst I certainly don’t fall into the other side of the ditch – working 18 hours a day is not working smart – I am working in an environment where I have a lot to do and oversee and my days are on the fuller side as opposed to the free side.

Furthermore, anyone who is ‘creative’ knows that creativity requires discipline. And productivity requires creativity. The two are intrinsically linked and I wonder if it isn’t just a semantic game playing them off against each other.

The 3 values of this balanced life

Thus my premise for productivity, revolves around some core values that are a healthy balance of creativity but also reality:

Integrity. That you become a reliable person, to others and to yourself, and that you do what you say you will do.
Efficiently effective. That you become efficient, giving the time to tasks that they require in order to give you time for creativity, and that your creativity and thinking time is effective. This also denotes control and mastery of what of you do.
Healthy. That you have balance between work and play (not just work, not just play), between enjoying rights and managing responsibilities, and that you enjoy a clear mind. This is freedom.

I think that whether we call it productivity or creativity, these three are good qualities that span all spectrums.

Published on March 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

How to make Meaning

Yesterday we asked whether our brands are making meaning after examining the progression of brands from functional, to aspirational, and now to meaningful.

Today: how on earth do you make a brand meaningful?

Guy Kawasaki, when he discusses the Art of Innovation (exceptional videos – 10 minutes long), says that you must make meaning with your offering. He explains that products that go deeper than entertainment and touch at purpose at the ones who are making meaning – that their existence in the life of their customer is one that helps the customer define their world.

There are two core parts here for me that I would say we could distill “making meaning” down to:

Help people understand and define their life through your offering. Deliver offerings that empower people to make sense of where they are today, and where they were yesterday.
Move beyond entertainment to purpose. Provide people with direction, help them to discover their reason for being, where they want to be tomorrow. Make your brand something that people can derive identity from.

So we’ve got yesterday and today, and tomorrow. Understanding yesterday and today, and directing tomorrow. I believe that offerings and brands that do this are meaningful to me on the most fundamental level.

For example, my church, The River, is a meaningful brand to our community. We help people through teaching resources understand where they are and where they’ve come from. And our events, our community, and our strong emphasis on life application and living life on purpose provides direction.

Labs

So how do we go to the lab and make meaning? If our two key words are understanding and directing, then we must take what our offering is and adjust it to provide these two. Some ideas:

Deliver tools that help people categorise themselves. This categorisation helps them define the world within them. Note that this isn’t boxing people in. For example, the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Markus Buckingham was meaningful to me because the large set of skills that it assigns you with via the online test helps you better understand yourself. The label increases self awareness with restricting me. Apple do this with their product types – “Are you a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro – or are you an iPod Nano?”
Deliver tools that people can build on. The idea of building platform is what Apple did with the App Store. Because of it, other developers have an income, therefore Apple is meaningful to them. Guardian also did the same with their Open API.
Deliver tools that help people define the world around them. The power of faith is that it gives people a decision making framework through which they can understand their life. Decisions are powerful and when we help people make them and define their worlds, we are meaningful to them. Consider here how powerful youth tribes are in that they provide slang that defines what is part of their tribe, and what isn’t. That slangs defines their world.
Deliver tools that help people direct their life. Or perhaps more pertinently, helps people make their next step. If your offering is making the next step for someone easier, then you matter to them. I’m doing courses with my wife on how to breastfeed, change nappies, give birth, etc, and the fact that these courses are preparing us and helping us make decisions about our life is meaningful to me. They are helping direct us.
Deliver tools that people can use to help others. The power that I’ve seen in affiliate and networking marketing programs is how they give their distributors all the tools in the world to get others on board. And guess what? That type of assistance directs people to do it more, and the original distributor draws value and direction out of this.

More?

For a more in-depth and academic approach to making meaning, read this article that I found on “developing meaningful brands“.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts: how do YOU make meaning?

Published on March 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Your Brand: Is it Making Meaning?

Most brands don’t compel people. Today we’re going to look at shift in the consumer mindset that demands that brands who want to go somewhere must compel them.

Robin Wight said in his insight at Like Minds that brands exist to make the purchasing process easier. This was an eye opener for me because I realised how it is indeed the case that a brand reduces my need for original critical thought and makes me rely on what Robert Cialdini calls fixed action patterns – fixed ways of reacting based on certain mental shortcuts.

Certainly for the majority of brands that you’ll see at a supermarket, that’s their role. But what most of the Friends reading this will be in the business of doing is moving beyond brands that merely make it easier for us to purchase or align with. We are interested in making maning, in aspiration, in purpose, in challenge. Our ideal brand is one that people derive identity from.

The brand on three levels

In an exceptional video entitled Rethinking the Idea of the Brand, Umair Haque talks about three levels of brand. (Thanks to Brian Driggs for emailing it to me.)

Functional brands seek to differentiate one product from another by targeting a particular demographic. This is what Umair describes as the base level of branding.
Aspiration brands emerged as status symbols: I don’t buy a Samsung MP3 player, I buy an iPod. This is where Umair says we’ve been for the last 3 decades.
Meaningful brands are, paraphrasing Umair, where a brand has a tangible output on the consumer’s life in terms that matter for them. He says furthermore than meaningful brands are the opposite of egocentric demand, which he calls alocentric. The general thrust is that a meaningful brand contributes to the human race, not just me as an individual.

(Side note for another discussion another day: I would understand Umair’s description of meaningful brands to be highly linked to community and we could also label them as social brands.)

Overcoming indifference with purpose

The power of the meaningful brand is that is overcomes indifference. With functional and aspiration brands saturating markets left, right and centre, a meaningful brand taps into something deeper than a brand meeting my immediate functional need.

In actual fact, I see meaningful brands as tapping into Maslow‘s top hierarchy of self-actualisation - or as I say – purpose.

Recently I was talking to someone who unites a community of people around an event. They wanted to know where to take the event, and my response was that they needed to go beyond entertainment (uniting people around a good time) and instead unite people around purpose. In other words, make meaning by helping the community make meaning.

As a church pastor, community builder, mentor and with Like Minds, I’ve always seen the direct benefit of basing the orgnisations purpose in the helping of others find their purpose.

How can you be indifferent to something that has helped further you on your quest for purpose and meaning?

Making your brand meaningful

We’ve covered enough ground for today, so tomorrow we’ll discuss just exactly how we make a brand meaningful. And what we need to discuss that is your feedback on this post now. The conversation has begun – now add your thoughts:

How do you move a brand from aspirational to meaningful?
What the meaningful brands in your life?

Announcements, Brand Experience, Community, Marketing
branding, meaning, purpose
11 comments
Permalink

Published on March 1, 2011 by Scott Gould

Rethink public speaking: 5 ways to get off the stage

Are you as good at public speaking as you think you are? Or do you on the other hand think you could never talk to crowds of people? Then this quick post is for you.

I am always looking out for great speakers to come and impart their expertise at Like Minds, and one of the ways that I do this is by reading a lot of blog posts by a range of different people. It’s easier to find an expert on an issue by searching for text than video. However more often that not – in fact, around 90% of the time – I find that the great writers I research turn out to be very poor at speaking.

The peculiar thing about this is that it isn’t just the writers. Even people who I talk to face-to-face and have engaging conversations with often end up being very poor when it comes to public speaking.

Here’s what I realised: both the great conversationalists and the great writers aren’t actually bad at communicating, and they aren’t bad at speaking and engaging – it’s just that when they get put on a stage, they go into presentation mode and loose all the charisma, passion and warmth that they had before they went on.

It’s a type of stage fright that turns interesting social people into boring broadcast people. But luckily, you can get out of it.

Learning how to get off the stage, when you’re on stage

As I said, I find most people to be very interesting in a one-on-one or small group conversation, and the reason why is because it is a conversation. We are used to giving not just words but non verbal communication, our attention, our passion, our sympathy, and more, within conversations. But put someone on stage and all of sudden it becomes a presentation to them.

So the trick is learning how to act off stage while you are on stage. And to help you do that, here’s five really easy quick musts for you to follow:

1. Make it a participation not a presentation. The moment you can free your mind from having to present, and instead can focus on having the pleasure to participate in an experience means it’s no longer about YOU. You realise that actually, it’s not about the quality of what you say, it’s the quality of how people feel. So don’t make it all about what you say – get some audience interaction – make it a conversation in which you are just one of the parties.

In fact, one of the first things you should always do when you begin a participation is to get people to participate by a show of hands, clap, or something similar. It makes people feel involved.

2. Tell stories. It’s funny how many people who go on about story telling in media don’t actually tell stories. Instead, they bore us with boring images of others telling a story. And if you think it’s about how well you tell the story, you’ve missed the point. Story telling is really about providing a clear example that someone plays out in their mind as you are telling it.

If I told you now that I spent yesterday eating bananas, what have you just thought of? That mental involvement – you actually picturing a banana – is far more valuable than me showing you a picture of a banana because it means that you mind is active not passive, and that means that you are participating.

3. Reveal your wounds. When someone talks about how they got it right all the time, we feel inferior. But when someone reveals how they failed a dozen times before they got there, it inspires us and endears us to the speaker.

Now don’t go trashing yourself – but the ability to use weakness once or twice in a talk to help people identify with you is incredibly powerful.

4. Be brief. The old speaker proverb goes, “blessed are the short winded, for they shall be invited back.” Being brief not only makes the organisers happy, but it shows you respect the minds of people enough to keep things precise and not laborious, and that you credit them as being intelligent enough for you to say things once, not a dozen times in the same talk.

Also remember that after 30 minutes people are hearing more from their bottoms than from you.

5. Rehearse. A lot. Whoever thought that rehearsal made something inauthentic wasn’t a good speaker themselves. We rehearse everything in our lives so a speech shouldn’t be different. Rehearsing means that you have got the speech so automated in your mind that you can let go of the notes and instead focus on the participants – because they are the ones that matter.

And if your eyes are off the notes, then it means they can be on the faces in the crowd. In fact, what I do is look at as many people as possible in the eye.

It’s not public speaking

Hopefully – if you can put these five practical tips together – then you’ll be able to get off the stage while being on stage. But that’s the practical part.

The deeper part is to realise that it’s not about public speaking at all. The phrase in fact reeks of broadcast. What I’m more interested in is personally imparting. Imparting means that I take something that is mine, and using the practical points above to be a selfless as possible, I impart what I have to others as personally as possib;le.

The masters of this – like many of our Like Minds Alumni – have the ability to talk to hundreds of people in a crowd, but make each one feel like they are talking to them.

Your Leading Thoughts

Before you go off and become a marvellous, awe-inspiring public speaker, take a moment to add to this list – what is your top public speaking tip?

Published on February 28, 2011 by Scott Gould

If it doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead

Want to learn why if you content doesn’t spread it’s dead, and how to make it spread? Read on.

You’ve heard me bang on before about spreadability vs reach. I arrogantly thought that I had come up with the concept, but I found out in the middle of last year that Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford had been using the phrase far longer than I had.

One of the things that Henry wrote about in 2009 that I was re-reading recently was the notion that If it Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead. I’d advise you take 10 minutes today to read the article. Sam on the other hand has been writing about the difference between sticky media and spreadable media. You can see some of his slides on the subject in this presentation.

Spread me or I’ll die

Certainly Henry and Sam’s thinking is high level but what they are both saying when it comes down to the basics is that if whatever you produce isn’t spreadable, it is dead. You might succeed in getting something to stick with one person, but if they don’t spread it… well.. it’s dead.

I can see a few levels of spreadability here, crossing both offline and online:

An item needs to compel people to spread it in the first place (as Scott Stratten says, people spread awesome)
An item should be simple, because complexity is hard to explain and spread
An item should provide the words for mouth if it expects word of mouth – in other words, give us the words to use when we spread your product
An item should have built-in one-click ways to spread it

So if we took a typical peice of digital content:

It should be awesome. This spans from a Facebook photo that you are tagged in (awesome because it’s personal) to a video that makes you laugh (awesome because it’s very funny) to a blog post that speaks right into a situation you are in (awesome because it’s relevant)
Simplicity for online content mostly means short and simple. But when people get offline, it seems our attention span increases, which is why we shower The King’s Speech and Black Swan with Oscars (both films, interestingly, with a simple premise)
A photo by nature will warrant a description, but a video or blog post should have a title and a description that people repeat
In built spreading means a blog post has a retweet or Facebook like. Facebook’s eco system enables one click posting of any media item to one’s newsfeed, Disqus auto posts comments to feeds, etc. (Unfortunately, Twitter still requires two clicks to share which I think is just plain idiotic)

I would say that each level trumps the level below – so whilst many people adorn their sites with share buttons, you can still see that they’ve only had 5 retweets of a particular blog post. Clearly the content wasn’t compelling, and thus despite having those share buttons, it didn’t spread and now it’s dead.

Of course, I have hundreds of these blog posts, particularly the last 6 months, that just haven’t been shared because the content was not compelling enough.

Seth Godin in Purple Cow praises Hotmail’s use of the inbuilt email signature that was at the bottom of every Hotmail email account inviting others to sign up. They certainly hit level 4 and got millions upon millions of signups because of it. But this was only because the content itself – the email – was compelling and personal in the first place. I can imagine far fewer email accounts would’ve been created of the back of a SPAM email message – which is what people perceive Hotmail to have become.

Be Compelling

Thus your ultimate goal has creators of any media is to make it compelling – compelling because it’s personal, relevant, entertaining, inspiring, and so on. If you do, people will spread it. And if you add ways to make it spreadable, people will spread it more.

Your Leading Thoughts

Your thoughts as a leader are valuable and the driving force of this blog.

Are you hitting those 4 levels with the media content that you are creating?
If we took “compelling”, what are the different parts of that, i.e. personal, relevant, entertaining, etc?

Published on February 27, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Put People in the Story

I thought this video was a really great example of promoting a product by putting people in the story.

Just a note on this: putting people in the story is more powerful than teling them the story. And telling people a story is more powerful than just showing off a logo.

More to come on this over the next week, including how I’m going to be using this principle for Like Minds.

Enjoy your Sunday,
Scott

Published on February 24, 2011 by Scott Gould

Why you must see yourself as the leader that you are

Last week I did an interview on leadership, community and social media with Adrian Swinscoe, which I thoroughly enjoyed and you can listen to here.

At the end of the blog post in which the interview was posted, Wendy commented and talked about a situation where others might regard her as a leader, but she doesn’t think she is one herself – and asked if this is a problem. I think it is, and so I responded. Here’s what I responded with, and it’s important to post here because I believe it is detrimental to not see yourself as the leader that you are:

Leadership expert John Maxwell maintains that there are 5 levels of leadership – the lowest being “position” which is being a leader because of your position, but nothing more. Then each level on top is about being a more influential and regarded leader beyond the position that you may or may not have. (link to the framework: http://hubpages.com/hub/John-Maxwell-defines-5-levels-of-leadership

Very often, poor leaders are those who only ever exist on the “position” level. People follow them because they have to. I’m sure we all have known someone in this position, or even been this person at some point in our life! The next level is “permission” and this is where people follow you because they have given you permission as a leader to do so – regardless of whether you have a position or not. You don’t have to have a position for people to give you permission to lead them.

Often at this second level, people regard us as leaders more than we do ourselves. This is because when we are aspring and unsure of our leadership, we are more aware of our weaknesses than our strengths, so when we display leadership we don’t see it because we are more caught up with the mistakes we made or what we could’ve done differently.

This is a natural stage of leadership and is to be expected – but leaders must grow through it. If they dont, and continue to not see themselves as leaders whilst others do, these others will loose respect for them and the leader’s stature will be diminished in their eyes. Imagine if you respected me as a leader, but I kept on telling you I wasn’t a leader. At first you’d try to encourage me, but after months of this, you’d begin to see me as less of the leader that you once thought.

Aspring leaders must not, on the other hand, over step the mark and act as more of a leader than they actually are! This arrogance is the other side of the ditch.

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you or have you had to fight this problem in your life? (I have!) If so, how did you overcome?
Digitally, how does this effect people who don’t realise the influence that they actually have online?

Published on February 22, 2011 by Scott Gould

In Dubai This Week

Hey all – just a quick note to say that I am in Dubai all week, Monday 21 – Friday 25 February, and would love to meet you if you are here, or would love to catch up with any connections that you think might be prudent for me, as we are taking Like Minds out here later on this year.

If you can, comment on this thread, or drop me an email or a tweet, or preferably, just go right ahead and call me on 0044 7771 795566.

Hope to hear from you,
Scott

Published on February 20, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Birthday Party

Too often we complicate community, marketing, social media, etc. So when I saw this exceptional video the other week, I had to share it with you.

Question: doesn’t this just get you right back to the basics of:

Identifying passions
Identifying influencers
Targeting online and offline to create word of mouth
Delivering an exceptional product / event
Creating multiple levels of participation within the product / event
Providing some memorabilia / takeaway to build advocacy for next time
Keeping the community alive

I think I’ve got myself a new framework right there?

So my task to you: boil this down to the simplest framework and let’s discus.

← Newer entries

Older entries →