Reading Time: < 1 min I have a great tip for you today to help you go viral more often on social media: show a lot of hate. While we all say that we want to more uplifting content on social media, hate spreads much more quickly. I know you’ve all seen it, often from very “nice” people online that […]
Satisfying your customers isn’t nearly enough
Reading Time: 2 min Satisfying your customers is a good thing, and it absolutely beats the alternative. In most environments, though, “satisfying” falls far short of where you need to be. In the book “Raving Fans“, the authors argue for this very point: Blanchard and Bowles argue that there’s a clear distinction between satisfying your customers and exceeding the […]
Train people well enough so they can leave
Reading Time: < 1 min There’s a maxim I’ve heard a few times over the years that goes something like: “You should invest in your team to make them the best that they can be. This may mean that some leave for better opportunities, but that beats the opposite of just not investing in them at all.“ This came to […]
The hopeful side of AI
Reading Time: 2 min There is a lot coming because of AI, and much of is not good. There’s not a ton of awful things to expect, but a lot of just… yuck. Like I shared yesterday, I suspect we’ll see more spam email, more AI-powered chatbots, more automated social posts, and just a lot of “we don’t need […]
Marketing automation works best when it’s backed by humans
Reading Time: 2 min If you’ve followed my writing for very long, you know I’m not a big fan of automated emails. There are cases where they are done correctly and can be valuable, but the most common implementation seems to be “cool, let’s blast stuff out!”. If you’re going to automate, I suggest two main rules: It seems […]
Reflecting on experiences
Reading Time: < 1 min We all experience many things, and there is a lot to be learned from those experiences. The question is: how do you actually learn from them? As explained in Tara Jaye Frank’s book “The Waymakers“, it’s not the experience itself that creates the learning. She shares: John Dewey, American philosopher, educator, and cofounder of the […]
The Sunday Summary: Making assumptions, multitasking, and seeing every animal at the zoo
Reading Time: 2 min In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week. Mon, September 23: Finding material to deploy attention“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy […]
Covering the zoo
Reading Time: < 1 min The difference between a stated goal and what the goal really is can be staggering. Take this simple idea from Madeleine L. Van Hecke’s book “Blind Spots“: Maybe it will hit you that you’ve been acting as if the goal of the outing was to “cover every inch of the zoo,” rather than to “have […]
You can’t be perfect, but it’s easy to be good
Reading Time: < 1 min In reading Tara Jaye Frank’s book “The Waymakers“, she shared an interesting thought that I think applies to many areas of life. She said: When I first became a mother at twenty-five, someone gave me a quote on a tiny piece of paper by Jill Churchill that read, “There is no way to be a […]
Interleaving your skills
Reading Time: < 1 min A few years ago I wrote about the idea of intentionally making some things more difficult and I recently discovered that this concept has a name: interleaving. The book “Hidden Potential” has some great examples of that: I assumed it would be ideal to practice one skill until you make progress, and only then move […]