There is no reason for anything, only reasons

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In a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, host Blair Enns was talking about how businesses fail. In his view, they never fail for a single reason but rather for a variety of different reasons. From the show:

“It’s a basic tenet of design thinking that there is no reason for anything. There are only ever reasons, multiple reasons. When our business fails, we go to the excuse and say, it failed because of reason and it’s usually external reason, but if you look at how species go extinct, it’s a combination of, it’s called the press pulse theory, pressure, constant pressure, and then a pulse. We blame the pulse, the external thing that happened to us. We don’t take stock of our role in the ongoing pressure that the business was feeling because of the things that we were doing or not doing.”

It’s a harsh way to view business failure, but I suspect it’s often true.

Following the same idea but flipping it around a bit, it reminds me of my recent post about the erroneous focus on last touch attribution. When companies are working to determine why a particular customer found them, they try to drill down to the reason. This is a fool’s errand, because it’s almost always a variety of reasons.

If your business is struggling, resist the urge to find “the reason”, and the same goes for your marketing — when you finally sign that great client, know that it was due to many of your great efforts and not the one that they happened to see last.

What do you need a review for?

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I’ve always found the idea of employee quarterly reviews to be very interesting, particularly at smaller companies like ours. We’re aware of what everyone is doing, and we make corrections as necessary as part of our day-to-day work. It seems silly to me to save up the good and bad for a quarterly review rather than correct and praise as needed.

It turns out that Steve Jobs had similar thoughts. In “Becoming Steve Jobs“, they share this bit about reviews:

Where’s your annual reviews and all that? I told him that I’d never had an annual review! Steve didn’t believe in reviews. He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, ‘I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’

Based on that, it seems that Jobs didn’t do any kind of quarterly review, whereas we still do. While it’s not a “review” by any means, it’s a good change to catch up, make sure things are going well, set goals for the upcoming quarter, and otherwise just make sure all is steady. Any issues have been resolved at the time of the issue, so there’s no need to make someone nervous about how their performance has been — they should already know.

What are your thoughts on quarterly reviews? What’s the best kind of content to include in them?

The customer isn’t a moron – she is your wife

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It can be easy to get frustrated with your customers, but it’s almost always a bad move. As Seth Godin said years ago:

“if you hate your customers, you’re going to hate your business.“

You don’t have to like all of them all of the time, and we even fire some from time to time. However, on the whole, we love our clients and I hope that you love yours.

In David Ogilvy’s classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, he reminds us of this with a simple statement:

“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”

To him, it’s a way to remind us that people aren’t “consumers”, they’re humans. They have names, they have lives, they’re probably fairly smart, and they have a lot going on. As many things do, it brings me back to the idea of sonder, which is the idea of “that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours“.

Customers can be frustrating at times, but they’re humans. They have lives, and good days, and bad days, and everything in between. Heck, the consumer might even just be your wife.

Let it drop

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In a recent game of Pickleball that I played, one of our opponents did something interesting. He was a very good player, but not particularly nimble on his feet. A few times we dropped a very short ball over the net and he’d simply let it bounce twice and lose the point without really making much of an effort.

This was wise, because I always go after those shots, which usually means falling to the ground and still failing to hit the ball. He knew well enough to let that one drop and get us on the next one, which worked out well for them — they smoked us.

While I’m not one to advocate for giving up, he reminded me a lot of the lessons from Annie Duke’s book “Quit“. Among other things, she said:

“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”

Or perhaps more closely related to Pickleball, Duke says:

“When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.”

When I saw a short ball, my instinct was to go for it even if I had no chance of getting to it (but a non-zero chance of hurting myself in the process). He knew his limitations ahead of time and responded appropriately.

More closely related to business, it made me think of Jeff Hilimire’s new book “Dream Small“. To paraphrase, Hilimire encourages us to take our time and make the steps we can, rather than going for broke right out of the gate. Start small, and over time perhaps you’ll grow.

It’s ok to sometimes let the ball drop so that you can keep playing the game.

SKUs per square foot

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In the books that I read, Costco tends to come up a lot. They’ve grown slowly and steadily for decades, and they’re a business that we should all try to draw lessons from.

Even in books about other companies, such as Joe Coulombe’s “Becoming Trader Joe“, Costco was there. In this case, it was in reference to a metric I had never really thought about before: SKUs per square foot. Put another way, it’s a measure of how many different products are in a given area.

From the book:

“No fixtures. The store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe’s carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet.”

Based on my experience, this seems to add up. Publix seemingly has a different SKU every few inches, whereas Costco will have huge pallets full of the same item. Costco’s method is much easier to manage and grow, but we certainly need Publix for their variety. Both are great, but I hadn’t ever thought about that unique measurement of SKUs per square foot.

Committees should never be creative

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There are good sides and bad sides to having committees involved with a project. Oversight and a variety of opinions can be helpful, but things can often get bogged down if consensus can’t be reached.

One thing that committees should never try to do, though, is to be creative.

In his classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, David Ogilvy said it simply:

“Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.”

Taking it a bit further, he shared this thought:

“Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.”

Committees can be helpful, but they should be kept under clear restraints when working with a creative project of any kind. Let them criticize, but never let them create.

Who needs to know your plans?

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The rise of Trader Joe’s was something that most people didn’t see coming, as they stayed under the radar for a long time. In his book “Becoming Trader Joe“, Joe Coulombe shared a lot of great insights from his journey, and this is one that stuck out to me.

He shared how many companies are scared of their competition finding out their plans and beating them to the punch, but that it almost never happens. It’s like I shared last year about our processes at GreenMellen — execution matters way more than learning the steps.

In his book, Coulombe shares that he has more concern about his staff not understanding the plan, saying:

“I took a cue from General George Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not.”

If he got so worried about his plans leaking that even his own team didn’t get it, then he had no chance of success anyhow. It’s also similar to Tim O’Reilly’s famous quote of:

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

Don’t worry about others stealing your ideas and plans — they have enough to worry about already, and I promise they’re not worried about you. Teach your staff, execute well, and maybe someday you’ll have a chance to share your story of success like Coulombe did.

Informational keywords don’t help your business

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The world of search engine optimization has been changing dramatically over the past few years, and you can find many of those changes in my SEO category of posts. However, there are still some fundamental truths that people often miss.

A big one is around keyword targeting. The goal is often to get “more traffic”, but a better approach is to get “good traffic”. The mistake I see is when companies work to rank well for informational terms that won’t lead to new customers — it brings traffic to the site, but sales don’t come with it.

For example, if you’re an HVAC company you might try to rank for the phrase “why don’t they still use freon in air conditioners?“. It’s a good question, and might get some good traffic, but who is asking it? It’s unlikely to be someone looking for help right away, and more likely just a general query. You’ll get traffic from it, but it won’t help your bottom line.

Correcting this mistake often leads to a weird result — you’ll get less traffic on your site, but more revenue. Getting better traffic to your site can lead to more sales, even if the overall volume of traffic is down a bit. Rand Fishkin recently shared a great “5-Minute Whiteboard” video that unpacked this further, and I encourage you to check it out.

Traffic from those informational keywords isn’t hurting you, but it’s giving you weird data and isn’t supporting your goals. Focus instead on terms that convert and you may seen the fun mix of traffic dipping and revenue rising, which is ultimately your main goal anyhow.

Shake it off and change direction

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We all get things wrong from time to time, and our response to being corrected is the key to future success. Daniel Kahneman was always happy to be “less wrong than he was before“, and David C. Baker knows that every time he learns something important “it’s because I’ve been wrong“. That’s not to say you should be wrong on purpose, of course, but to take the lesson in the right direction.

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was famous for his ability to learn he was wrong and make corrections along the way. In the book “Made in America“, they share a few things about Sam:

Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.

The second part of that is fascinating to me:

  • “He is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known.”
  • “He just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”

Those two have to go together. If you aren’t able to just shake it off, then your ability to learn from your mistakes will be greatly hindered. If you make a mistake a bit of a post-mortem to understand where you went wrong can be important, but dwelling on the mistake is no good for anyone. Shake it off.

Putting out resumes? Have NotebookLM take a look first

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We’re in the process of hiring a new Senior Designer at GreenMellen, and resumes have been pouring in with many excellent candidates. We always look at each one by hand, including their portfolio and social media accounts, before deciding on a next step.

For those that we’re choosing to interview, I’ve added a small piece to our process and it’s something that the interviewees should consider for themselves as well — NotebookLM.

If you’re not familiar with NotebookLM, it’s a tool that allows you to upload various sources into a project (such as web links, videos, PDFs, etc) and then you can chat with an AI about that content. However, the killer piece is that you can have it do an “audio overview” of the content, which is essentially a short AI-powered podcast (and it’s shockingly well-done).

Here’s an example of how that works:

In our situation, I’ve added each applicant’s resume and website to a separate project in NotebookLM, and then had it create a short podcast based on that content. Specifically, I tell it:

We’ll be interviewing this person for senior designer role at our agency. Based on their website and resume, what are some questions we should ask to dig into any interesting areas of theirs?

Prior to the interview, I listen to the podcast (usually 5-15 minutes) while digging around a bit more on the website as I work to learn more about them. It’s been great!

You too

It got me thinking that if you’re job hunting you should do the same thing. Toss your resume and website onto NotebookLM and ask it something like “I’m going to be interviewing for xx job soon. What do I need to correct on my website and resume in order to look more prepared for the interview.” I suspect you’d get some good stuff.

Like all AI tools, it’s imperfect and could make up fake info, which is why I also click around to verify what’s saying, but it’s pointed some things that I might have glossed over at first glance and has been a helpful addition to the process.

If you’ve not tried it yet, check it out at notebooklm.google.com.