My first newsletter of April, Brand Entropy vs. Brand Harmony, encourages companies to do a little “spring cleaning” to keep their brand from becoming disorganized, confusing and unappealing to customers.
Entropy is the tendency for systems to move progressively from states of organization to states of disorganization– and your brand is not exempt from this powerful force.
Read the newsletter: Brand Entropy vs. Brand Harmony
When was the last time your company made a daring, bold decision that turned out to be wildly successful? Not that recently? Not ever?
But how likely is it that your company’s boring, middle-of-the-road decisions will ever turn out to be wildly successful? Probably never.
Steve’s newsletter challenges you to “Quiver in Your Boots” from time to time– only risky moves have the chance for great reward!
Read the newsletter: “Quiver in Your Boots”
And here’s a link to Apple’s famous “1984″ ad referenced in the newsletter.
Steve has a very interesting newsletter today about What businesses can learn from non-profits. His list of six takeaways include defining results as “What’s at stake,” and striving for win-win situations with customers and partners. Yastrow & Company has worked extensively with non-profits, so it’s exciting to bring some of our insights to our readers.
So what do you think? Has your business learned anything from the non-profit world? If you are with a non-profit, what else do you think the business world can learn from you?
Read the newsletter: What businesses can learn from non-profits
One of my favorite food brands in Chicago is Ian’s Pizza. (Full disclosure: My son Levi works at the Chicago location, so I get the occasional free slice.) This is a place that really knows who it is, and lives up to its brand promise. Ian’s has an atmosphere that is the opposite of pretentious, and serves pizzas by the slice in such eclectic varieties as Chicken Cordon Bleu, Guacamole Burrito, BBQ Steak ‘n Fries, Butternut Squash and the bestseller, Mac ‘n Cheese. By 1:30 AM on a Saturday night, the Clark Street bar crowd is formed into lines out the door, all waiting to buy slices to complement the beer they’ve been drinking. And, by the way, the job title of the pizza servers, such as Levi, is “Pizza Slut.” As I said, they are very clear about who they are and what their brand is.
Ian’s first location is in Madison, Wisconsin, not far from where protestors are protesting, and legislators are talking about legislating. Someone in Egypt (as if they don’t have enough troubles of their own) called Ian’s and ordered a pizza to be delivered to the protestors. Ian’s posted a tweet about it, and things took off from there. Politico picked up the story, and according to this story in the Huffington Post, people have ordered gift pizzas for Wisconsin protestors from 48 countries and all 50 states. Here’s a video from the Associated Press and an article from New York Times.
Isn’t this a wonderful ironic twist? An Egyptian, in the days just after Mubarak steps down, orders a pizza for protestors in Wisconsin. That’s got the makings of a great story.
And the fact that Ian’s is so non-traditional makes the story all the better. This story would have been really boring if the Egyptian had called Pizza Hut of Papa John’s.
Isn’t it great to see an idea that spreads so quickly, with no advertising, no paid media and no hype? Just enough real people doing something interesting, combined with a dose of social media, to interest more traditional media in helping spread the story.
Next time you’re in Chicago, Madison or Milwaukee, stop by Ian’s for a slice of Tortellini or Breakfast Burrito Pizza. Or, if you’re in some troubled Middle Eastern hot spot you can take a break from your own strife, and then call Ian’s to have a free pizza sent to a Wisconsin teacher who might lose her collective bargaining rights.
Here’s a little more background on Ian’s Pizza from their Facebook page.
Companies are often very careful about who has access to information. Distribution lists are carefully considered. Columns are deleted before printing. Approvals are required before sharing data.
Sometimes these rules are breached, and sensitive data falls into the wrong hands.
But … what do you think does more damage in your company, information getting to too many people, or information not getting to enough people?
I think most companies have this backwards. Don’t be so careful. Give more access, not less, because information helps people decide and act. In most cases, you are causing more damage by protecting information than you are by sharing it.
Err on the side of share.
They don’t sell Shakespeare at Wal-Mart. They don’t sell Beethoven either, although I could imagine Fur Elise or the 9th Symphony’s Ode to Joy appearing, almost by accident, in a seasonal collection sold at a discount in the Wal-Mart music department.
I’m not criticizing Wal-Mart for this, anymore than I would criticize a road-side convenience store for not selling health food, in the midst of their potato chips, pork rinds and industrial-sized boxes of Skittles. What our largest retailer carries is a reflection not of what they want to sell, but of what their customers want to buy. Selling Shakespeare or Beethoven would be big money losers for Wal-Mart.
So why does it matter that Wal-Mart, the store that sells just about anything we could need for our homes, can’t sell some of the most important examples of our cultural legacy? (Lest you think I’m only considering dead, white, western males as part of our cultural legacy, I don’t believe they carry anything by Lao-Tzu or Emily Dickinson either.)
Here’s why this matters: We live in a society where intellectual discourse has become too much hassle. Too few people are willing to explore subjects deeply, use “big” words, or familiarize themselves with the historical or cultural context of issues. Shakespeare? Beethoven? Plato? Thoreau? Ugh.That’s too much work. And it doesn’t stop here. Listen to any cable news show, or reality TV show, or talk radio show. The level of argument and polemic is usually not high enough to get a C+ in a first-year college course. In some sense, Wal-Mart is a bellwether of our national zeitgeist, and, when it comes to intellectually-charged thinking and conversation, the state of things is pretty depressing.
By way of example, just look at the health care debate. On one side people cry “Death Panels!” while on the other side people boycott Whole Foods because of a Wall Street Journal Op Ed piece on health care reform written by their CEO. The only fault of John Mackey of Whole Foods was not that he wrote the piece (which, although I didn’t agree with everything in it, seemed to me to be thoughtful, well-reasoned and well-written), but that he expected people to actually read what he wrote and think about it before reacting to it. The primary fault of the crafters of the proposed health care reform’s policies toward seniors was not that they created their policies, but that they expected the public to actually check, for themselves, what was written before reflexively agreeing with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity’s comments on the policy. Lazy thinking is a bipartisan issue.
(I asked my cousin, economist Peter Yastrow, how many people he thought had actually read the health care reform bill. He answered, “Two.The guy who wrote it and his mom. His girlfriend said she read it, but she was lying.”)
I am tired of people being too lazy to think. We live in a golden age of knowledge, where our reserves of knowledge are expanding exponentially every few years. I get very encouraged when I read or listen to people like Ray Kurzweil on the subject of our expanding knowledge base, but then I get depressed when I think about how little most people care about this new knowledge.
I spend my work life interacting with business people, helping them improve the state of their companies. This is my unequivocal, air-tight, passionately-held belief, based on my own empirical evidence: The executives who are willing to think are the executives whose companies are most successful. This disinterest in thinking and intellectual exploration translates, directly, to sub-standard business results. Don’t agree? Please debate me on this one.
So, I’m not just making a social commentary. I’m offering my opinion on the connection between lazy thinking and business performance. It is a very strong connection.
I don’t really care if Wal-Mart sells Shakespeare. I’d just like to know that, once in a while, someone walks through the Wal-Mart book section and stops at “S” to see if their immediate craving to re-read a favorite passage in King Lear can be satisfied.
My friend Steve Subar, CEO of Open Kernel Labs, made an interesting point over dinner the other night. “Do you realize you can’t major in selling at any business schools? You can major in accounting, or marketing, or finance, or economics, but not in selling.”
To test Steve’s assertion, I did a little searching. It turns out you can major in sales management at a number of business schools, but I couldn’t find any majors in selling. As anyone who’s ever been around sales organizations knows, there is a big difference in the job of selling and the job of managing sales people. So, as far as I could tell, Steve was right.
Pretty ironic, since sales ability seems to be one of the greatest career differentiators out there. Need proof? Go look at any law firm, insurance agency, financial advisory firm, dental practice, auto dealership, restaurant, software company, real estate firm, etc … just about any type of company, in any type of industry … and you will most often see that the people with the most lucrative and most satisfying careers have been successful at selling.
Are Steve and I wrong? Can you get an MBA with a major in selling? If not, does it matter?
People are always saying that it is ludicrous that medical schools don’t focus enough on teaching future doctors about nutrition. Add to the mix that business schools don’t teach about enough about sales.
In Steve’s new post at tompeters.com, he tells us to be suspicious of across the board cuts. Go read it! Then answer this question:
Have you noticed any particularly egregious examples of “across-the-board-cuts mania” lately?
I have. Just tonight, someone close to me lost his job because his company laid off all their consultants. These are the consultants that wrote proposals and made sales. Do you really think all of them should have been let go?
We are living in a very interesting time. Pay attention: This will be history.
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Sit in most business meetings, and you will hear opinions flying left, right, up, down and sideways. Corporate conversations are so frequently battles of opinion, and these opinions are often confused with the truth.
In reality, truth is elusive, and is always harder to find when obscured by opinions. It’s not that truth can’t be found, it’s just that we often confuse someone’s opinion for the underlying truth.
There is a Buddhist saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”
Be careful not to confuse someone’s description of an issue with the essence of the underlying issue. See the moon, not the finger pointing at it.
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In addition to writing, I spend most of my work time helping companies unleash their potential by creating better connections with their customers. This happens through my speaking events and through Yastrow & Company consulting engagements, where my team and I help companies figure out who they intend to be in the future, and then engage the entire company in creating that future through strong "We" customer relationships.
Before starting Yastrow & Company in the mid-90s I was vice-president of resort marketing for Hyatt Hotels. My experiences in the hotel business showed me clearly that most marketing doesn’t happen in the marketing department. Customers are paying attention to all interactions with a company, not just the promises made in traditional "marketing communications."
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