Shaun Nestor

By Seth Godin

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

• 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.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.

By Seth Godin

Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."

Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"

Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."

In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?

If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is…"

Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often.

Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.

I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.

Daniel Isenberg, a Professor of Management Practice at Babson College, wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review on reigniting the entrepreneur environment – even calling it a revolution.

Here’s a summary of what Isenberg says.

??1.    Revolutions start locally
2.    Revolutions need people
3.    Revolutions require resources
4.    Revolutions need revolutionaries
5.    Revolutions need a call to action
6.    Revolutions need an inner council
7.    Revolutions require leadership

The most important deliverable in these first six months is to engage, excite, and empower the entrepreneurship stakeholders, demonstrate commitment, and show your constituents that you mean business. This will set the stage for the next phase of new policies and programs to help hardwire the change into the fabric of the society.

Read the entire piece here.

I get excited to see creative examples of retail businesses expanding their sales vertically.

I just witnessed a car washing business partner with a 3rd-party windshield chip/repair company – what a great partnership! While the car wash employees hand-dried the clean vehicles, the repair employee was able to inspect the windshield and contact the customer. The interaction, thankfully, was brief, as the repair employee had his script well-rehearsed and provided information to the customer efficiently.

What makes this partnership so key is that the car was was able to expand their sales reach without additional resources. It required no involvement by their employees, it did not require more time from the customer, and it did not require an expanded infrastructure. These businesses do not directly compete with each other, but have similar customer demographics, making the partnership work.

How can you expand your retail sales vertically? Try it out:

1. Identify a business that targets customers similar to yours
2. Do your businesses compete directly? If no,
3. How can you each benefit from showcasing the other's product or service?
4. Does it require additional time or training for your employees?
5. Will it hinder your customer's shopping experience? If so, is this an acceptable move?
6. How will you measure the impact? Do you have a rewards or affiliate program in place to reward referrals (if necessary)?

I'd love to hear how you have worked this out – feel free to share in the comments section.

Penelope, over at Brazen Careerist, wrote about the entry-level positions and the best way to avoid them or get away from them quickly. Here is what she has to say:

Entry-level jobs have that lethal combination of bad pay + boring work. So the faster you can get off that bottom rung of the workforce ladder, the better off you are.
Here are three ways to do it:

1) Play well on a team.
2) Blog about what you want to do for a living.
3) Focus on connecting with people instead of jobs.

If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success.

- Malcolm X

I had a fantastic 4-hour meeting with my favorite client today. We disagreed a lot during those 4 hours, but that isn't what made it fantastic. The best part was our ability to look at a "stupid" topic/idea/subject – the true issue – and not the person making a suggestion.

Admittedly, we all had terrible and stupid ideas, but the group was able to look at the issue at hand and come up with a creative solution – much better than any of us could have conjured independently.

Do you have people within your circle – business or personal – who you can have lively, issue-dominate, conversations with? If not, why?

Four hours, a lot of disagreement, and even more productivity. It was a fantastic meeting.

Brian Trelstad and his team at Acumen have had great success using a metric they call BACO (the best alternative charitable option). They can compare the results of the development and investment work they do to the results that direct aid or charity would generate instead. In short: when you understand the alternative, it’s far easier to not only measure your work, but value it.

If you are familiar with a great restaurant just down the street, that raises the bar for a new restaurant to get your business…

If you live in a one-company town and have but one skill, you don’t have a lot of options. The boss tells you what to do and you do it. On the other hand, if you’re a world-class Ruby on Rails programmer with a reputation on Stack Overflow, you have plenty of options, and as a result, your boss treats you with more respect… and you can be a lot more choosy about which projects you take on (realizing, of course, that you stake your reputation on everything you do.)

Call it your BAPO… best alternative professional option. It changes your posture when you have an option. If you’ve got another client more interesting or better paying than this one, you can confidently act that way –it raises the bar in the way people treat you. When St. Luke’s was the hottest ad agency in the UK, they made the decision not to grow–in order to take a new client, they had to fire an old one. What do you think that did to the behavior of the current clients?

Corporations and organizations brainwashed generations of people to believe that they had no option. Go to school, go to the placement office, get a job, do what you’re told. The amazing reality of our time is this is no longer true. And yet. And yet few people are developing their alternative, building an external reputation and yes, even moonlighting on the weekends. When you have the option, not only does your confidence change, your work does as well.

Via @Seth Godin

Gill Corkindale wrote a very interesting piece for the Harvard Business Review on the leadership lessons that could be learned from the BP oil spill disaster. He goes on to say:

It will be months, if not years, before the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill will be fully understood — environmentally, commercially, and politically. In this respect, and the fact that the disaster will have a deep effect on the Unites States psyche, President Obama was correct to draw comparisons with the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That said, it is hard to draw any more meaningful comparisons between the two disasters — unless we consider the glaring differences in the quality of leadership displayed during the last two months. What have we learned?