The Media Supermarket

So you want to loose some weight? The best thing to do, is to look at yourself in the mirror ten times a day. Every morning check out the latest developments on the sides of your belly, your thighs, and anywhere else that loves to accumulate fat. These are the visual results of yesterday’s activities. You should also keep checking your weight three times a day, and make sure you are familiar with the results as much as possible. To be more in touch with results, please check all the clothes that you have and make sure you know which ones still fit and which don’t fit anymore. Focus also on how much you are able to eat as opposed to the past, and how much less exercise you can perform. And keep going like this until you really loose yourself, instead of loosing weight.
This is how you focus on results and results only. This is the “right and professional” way of working. You keep thinking about whatever results you are getting.
Several problems.
First, you cannot control the results, so stop focusing on them. You can’t force people to love your product, or adopt your new technology.
Second, you will create stress in the environment. Instead of looking at the sky and feeling bad about the result (rain), you know what the obvious thing to do is.
Third, you will loose touch with reality and the great opportunities that come with it. The map you have for yourself about the world is necessarily not the most accurate, and you gain better understanding as you go through the process. The more focused you are on the results the more likely you are to miss these opportunities.
Fourth, no learning, no experience. For the same reasons, you are out of touch with the realities, and you will not allow for serendipity to enter your world. You are also shutting yourself out of your ability to contain serendipity in the project. 
In my strategy course in college, we were taught that the proper way of executing a strategy, is to decide on it, and follow through until you achieve it. As a control freak, I had a simple question, “what if we discover half way through, that we don’t have the right strategy?”. I didn’t have the guts to ask that question, but I do now.
Our other class on flexibility in the new market place made sense though.

If you are working in the business of generating attention, time, and hopefully viral effects for your content, please try not to fall in the trap I’ve fell in several times.
The typical process is coming up with a list of things that can be done, and then going on to generate a huge list of ideas that seem really cool and popular, and “would really be great”. The next step would be to religiously follow these steps as if they are steps that get you closer and closer to the greatness you are aspiring to.
Usually, these ideas are nothing but me-too ideas hoping to aggregate everything in one place, or the other extreme, where your team mates will try to not imitate anyone, and find our own edge with something “really unique”.
I totally disagree with both approaches. They are purely business approaches.
The first approach assumes that the road to success is clearly carved, and you just have to get the whole thing working, and people will love it. In actuality, you are getting ideas that are working and trying to just group them together, or trying to beat the good ones in their own game.
The second approach assumes that if you are unique enough your product will kick off. This is just putting one egg in one basket. If it doesn’t pick up (and it probably won’t) you are left with no eggs.
My proposed approach is not a synthesis of these two, and doesn’t try to get the “best of the two worlds”. I think the investment should be in the readiness of people working on the project. This can be done by strongly establishing the attitude and approach of hunting.
The hunter invests in being ready, in having good tools for hunting, protection, navigation, and team work. Fishing is a great example. You need to be extremely patient, and extremely alert at the same time. Because, when you least expect it, a huge fish might catch your bait, and you will have to go full force making sure you properly capture it. And you will definitely have to let go of all the other “tasks” on your project list for that day. 
Establishing a brand is more of a fluid game than it is like building a building with known boundaries and calculated costs and timelines.
The investment should be in equipping the team with the necessary tools that allow them to be flexible, alert, responsive, and hopefully patient. The investment should be in creating and maintaining this mentality in the minds of the team, and training them on operating in this mindset, not in carving huge project plans and tasks. These will all change when the rubber hits the road.

There has been a lot of talk about the non-linearity of the world, and change. Quantum mechanics teaches us that change happens in bounces and stages, instead of increments. Chris Anderson talks about the non-linear long tail, and how disproportionate the different pieces are in terms of their share of the “pie”. Seth Godin wants us to forget the tail, and focus on the head because of the disproportionate rewards and because “the winner takes it all”.
I have personally observed that the road from becoming an F student to C student is shorter and easier than the road from A to A+. I have also noticed a jump in my skill in certain things that I am learning. All of a sudden, there is more clarity in handling the skill, and there is a distinctive difference in the amount of comfort and confidence in dealing with it.
We can easily demonstrate that, by observing the explosion in popularity of some of the biggest websites, that did not exist several years ago.
The immediate reaction might be to embark on a “non-linear way of thinking and operating” due to these facts and to the nature of change.
Although we need to take this into serious consideration we should remember that we are linear. We as humans have certain limitations that allow us to only do so many things at once, and therefore we should seriously consider that we are bound to act in a linear way.
You can only say one thing at a time, sell one customer at a time, and learn a certain number of words per day.
We should stick to the “old” way of improving our business and learning, and that is, by doing the maximum we can do per day - every day. Then every now and then, we will experience a jump (or a fall) in our performance due to the combined efforts (or lack thereof) and to some dots that became connected.
The point is not to be fooled by the hope of getting very lucky and forgetting about the importance of hard work and patience.

If “Location, Location, Location” is the mantra in the real estate world, I’m starting to believe that it should also be the mantra of cross functional teams as well. After a heated debate over whether or not location is important in producing quality work, I decided to watch.
Then I traveled to our office in another country.
Before long, I was asked by a colleague about a certain product we are working on. We decided to have a ten minute meeting out in the sun and talk about it. I shared some simple facts about that product, and I was very happy to know the next day that this gave him a good edge in his offering to the client, and the order more than doubled just because of that addition! The same day, we shared another product with another colleague, and with one simple recommendation, we were able to eliminate a lot of frustration about that product with a very small modification. These same colleagues were able to assist me in some partnerships I was trying to make, and we decided on several steps to get these things done.
I became a believer.
Had I not traveled on this trip, would we have not been able to “get our jobs done”. Yes we would. But it’s not about just getting the work done. It’s about jumping to new places, and levels. It’s about creating a harmony in the team, that would almost automate the process of innovation and creation. It’s about being in a vibrant group that is more like an orchestra than a “business unit”.
I am just remembering the way “friendships” were formed during my college years. They were based on a very simple and pure criterion: whether or not you attended the same elective classes together! We used to become close friends, share intimate information with each other, and they become special people in our lives. Of course much of this expires when the course ends and we acquire new friends.
An important psychological factor in this is that people start to view the world in a similar manner when they spend enough time with each other. A closer look shows that we start to adopt the positions of the people we work / live with, in the same place. My reasoning is that although there are logical reasons that push us to think similarly with close people, there is another hidden reason why we tend to take similar positions. We don’t want to break whatever harmony there is, and we find it difficult to reject these people when they are expressing strong emotions. Of course, this is an investment we do, so that eventually we are given the chance to freely express our feelings.
Imagine what can happen when people with opposing points of view (sales and production or marketing and finance) sit together and start seeing the world from a similar perspective, and start sympathizing with one another! You get harmony. You get great results.

Let’s explore whether or not we can get more website traffic by adding more content to our website. I’ll try to make it scientific and later we will tackle the issue from a human perspective.

Create in your imagination a world with the following characteristics:

• The internet has only two sites: 123marketing.com and ABCmarketing.com.

• Pages indexed on search engines are two hundred pages, split in half between these two sites.

• Each page talks about on of the only two topics; marketing or advertising.

• All pages are ranked equally on search engines, meaning they have the same degree of optimization, and therefore, they are all equally likely to show up as the first search result for their respective keywords.

• 123 has 80 pages about marketing and 20 about advertising. On the other hand ABC has 20 pages about marketing and 80 pages about advertising.

The table below hopefully simplifies the whole story: