Business Insight Zone

Yours truly, holding forth.

Three shameless mercenary appeals items to note:

1. Next week – on Tuesday the 13th, to be precise — I’m slated to speak to the lunch meeting of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association on “Twittering Your Way Through the Economic Storm.” You can find full details and register for the event at this link.
2. Next month – on Tuesday, February 17th — I’ll be talking to Bootstrap Austin about how “You Can Create a Customer Anywhere: What Web Businesses Can Learn from Hardware Store Owners.” Details for the talk (as well as for this month’s Bootstrap talk on January 20th) are here.
3. Throughout this year, I’m looking for more speaking opportunities in general. If you think I might make a good speaker for your group or event, please contact me via e-mail: twalker {at} hoovers {dot} com.

Are there upcoming events that you’re involved with that you’d like to promote? Feel free to share in the comments!

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Photo by Paul Nobles.

You know, I’m not a technical expert, but I think that getting this error message . . .

. . . may have had something to do with the hundred-ish browser tabs I had open at the time. Possibly.

You know that expression “Jumping the Shark“? I’m coining a new one for myself: “Crashing the Browser.”

Just as a television series doesn’t want to “jump the shark” and slide into mediocrity, the savvy knowledge worker doesn’t want to “crash the browser” — either literally, as in this case, or figuratively, in the broader sense of trying to access so many streams of information at once that your brain shuts down.

Here endeth this lesson-to-self.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to trawl through my browser’s history (one link at a time!) to see which of those umpteen tabs were actually worth further thought.

That’s the fruit of a Twitter conversation I had this morning with Kathy Sierra (who, if it needs saying again, is one of my blogging heroes) about which activities to pursue.

It started when I was talking with another Twitter friend about trying to do something awesome every day in this new year. She rightly asked what would constitute “awesome.” (You can read that with or without the Bill & Ted intonation — it’s up to you.) I replied:

Then Kathy and I had this exchange:

Ponder this over your weekend:

What can you do in 2009 that’s
“Simple, Deep, Challenging, and Worth It”?

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Before I took off for the holidays, I told you Seven things you may not know about me and tapped a few friends to do the same exercise. Here are pointers to three posts in reply:

• Colleen Wainwright, the Communicatrix: Ramping up to the end-of-year lists — Colleen gets extra credit because she listed sixteen things. An overachiever, she is. The most provocative (read: crazy) thing on her list: “I will go to my grave saying Jackie Brown is superior to Pulp Fiction.”
• Russ Somers, Egghead Marketing: Seven Things You May Not Know About Me — I worked in the cubicle next to his for two years and didn’t know some of this stuff about Russ’s career. My favorite part (and an excellent lesson in chutzpah) is this: “I dropped out after my first year of college to play in bands. It was 1979, so the fact that I didn’t play an instrument at the time didn’t slow me down. I bought a bass and was in a band within two weeks.”
• Dan Markovitz, TimeBack Blog: Seven things you may not know about me. — Dan’s got a good sense of humor, but he’s not one for mincing words: “Internet entrepreneurs are, in general, the worst bunch of whiners and time wasters when it comes to productivity issues.”

Thanks to all of these folks for playing along!

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ADDENDUM, January 5: My Hoover’s colleague Jeff Dorsch responded in the comments on the original post. Thanks, Jeff! (I’m gonna have to ask you about that Cabo Verde trip, since I’ve always wanted to visit there . . .)

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Photo by Andreas Levers, used under a Creative Commons license.

You didn’t do it all yourself. You never did. Virtually nothing in this world is legitimately a solo endeavor.

Therefore, gratitude is appropriate, even when things don’t seem so great.

Your customers pay your salary. You don’t pay your mortgage or your gas bill or your grocery bill — your customers do. Thank them. Make a habit of it.

Your co-workers cover for you. They inspire you and enable you. (Yes, sometimes they also infuriate you, but them’s the breaks when you’re dealing with humans. By the way, you sometimes infuriate them, too.) Make a habit not just of saying you’re grateful for what they do, but showing it.

Family? Friends? Do I need to go on?

This second day of 2009 is the perfect time to start this habit.

Be brassy about expressing gratitude. Approach or embrace embarrassment, if need be, but make sure you let people know you’re thankful for them and what they do.

(Next up on my to-do list: a dozen thank-yous — by e-mail, in person, on the phone.)

Go tell them.

[Inspiration for this post from Tom Peters.]

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For more entries in this series, see The Basic Basics — an Omnibus.

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Thank-you card by Fern R.

Out of curiosity, I looked through this blog’s statistics to find out which posts got the most page views in 2008. Here are the top 10:

1. SXSW session recap: Jason Fried of 37signals.
2. The price of oil in Euros.
3. The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action. (A high-hitting 2007 post that just kept on chugging in 2008. I returned to Smith’s amazing career again — twice — recently.)
   
4. Deliberate practice in the working world. (Look for my review of Geoff Colvin’s book Talent is Overrated — previewed here — soon; I think the concept of deliberate practice has enormous implications for smartly-run businesses.)
   
5. A coming bubble in alternative energy?
6. Alcatel-Lucent and the right way to do layoffs. (Interesting: I published this one in October 2007, but it drew a string of comments in 2008 . . . when Alcatel-Lucent did yet another round of layoffs. Good ol’ A-L — always reliable for more layoffs.)
7. Ground control to Lincoln: What are you thinking? (I said a lot of congratulatory things about Ford in 2008. This wasn’t one of them.)
8. Gary Vaynerchuk at Grape Vine Market in Austin. (When Gary V. comes to town to talk at my regular wine shop — within half a mile of my house — I show up, take notes, and write it up for the world. It’s just that simple.)
9. A BitTorrent for e-books? (Another 2007 post with legs. Sometimes I inadvertently hit the jackpot with keywords.)
10. The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE): a first look. (Interesting: this post drew substantially more hits that my review of the book on ROWE.)

Out of further curiosity, I dug up the 2008 posts that drew the most comments and trackbacks. Again, the top 10:

1. The power of naive questions. (Regular readers will know that I return to this powerful concept often.)
   
2. When is it time to kill a project?
3. Gary Vaynerchuk at Grape Vine Market in Austin.
4. Book Review: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (A hypothesis: #10 in the list above drew more keyword-hunters wanting to know a little something about ROWE, but this post drew more people who were more deeply interested in the book and its concept, ergo readier to discuss it.)
5. What “Real Advice” Would You Give Your Company? (I liked how commenters took the gloves off for this one.)
6. Time is the resource, but attention is the problem. (Sometimes I write a post and more or less forget about it, but this is one of those with the kernel of an idea in it that I’ve come back to again and again.)
7. The benefits of failure.
8. Putting on the Dunce Cap. (Until I looked over both of them just now, I hadn’t realized how this post and the “Real Advice” post above related to one another.)
9. Being wrong. (My mom told me she laughed out loud at the pictures on this one.)
10. The Social Media Are Not So New. (This is one I’m really proud of, and expect to build on continually throughout 2009.)

Did I, by any chance, write something that was a favorite of yours in 2008? Please stroke my ego tell me in the comments!

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Photo by Banamine, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Here’s hoping it’s a very good year!

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Image source.

I forget the exact wording of the old saw that says your problems should get bigger and better over time — IF you’re really growing.

STAGNATION

Think of what a heartbreak it is to see someone struggle with the exact same problems year in and year out — always one paycheck from disaster, always “meaning to” turn over a new leaf, always facing the same petty imps that have bedeviled them for so long.

Too many people in business stop learning regularly when they finish school, such that they’re always being left behind by the latest developments in their fields. Too many companies never seem to grow out of their problems, such that they’re always having to restructure — and always failing to restructure adequately. (Why does Alcatel-Lucent come to mind?)

GROWTH

Contrast that to the development of healthy, well-adjusted children. As they grow, they can take on bigger and better problems, so that as kindergartners they are challenged by tying their shoes and solving 2+2, but as teenagers they are challenged by rebuilding the engine of an old Mustang or solving differential equations.

The best companies — Toyota, Google, General Electric — grow by remaking themselves better every day. It’s a sort of pre-emptive, positive restructuring that forestalls the need for the brutal kind of restructuring. And these companies are willing to take on ever-bigger challenges as part of their cost of doing business in this better, more fulfilling, more profitable way.

YOU?

Which category have you been in lately? If you filter out the truly unavoidable effects of this year’s economic downturn, were your 2008 problems of about the same caliber as your 2007 problems? Were they grander, more like Google’s? Or pettier, more like Alcatel’s?

Commit yourself now for the new year that starts tomorrow. Put yourself, your team, and your company into the growth category. Abandon your pettiest problems; replace them with the steady pursuit of the best opportunities. You’ll stretch yourself, but that’s a good thing.

Tying your shoes shouldn’t be a problem by now. Time for some rocket science.

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Photo by .A.A.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal nagging on of an uncompleted task.”
—William James

It’s the next-to-last day of 2008. Why not isolate a few nagging tasks that don’t need to follow you into 2009 and finish them off one by one between now and tomorrow?

Maybe you could even throw some things away off your to-do list, without doing them at all. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to accumulate an ever-growing list that includes a lot of could-do’s and nice-to-do’s alongside the must-do’s.

Today could be the perfect day for giving your task list a haircut. Heck, give it the crew cut it deserves, and launch yourself into 2009 with a spring in your step.