I don’t shoot the messenger. Ever.
When someone brings up bad news, raises a controversial subject, or just tells the ugly truth in a meeting, I go out of my way to praise the messenger right there and then.
I want to make an example of them for everyone else. THIS is what I’m looking for. Honesty. Openness. Realness. Challenge.
If you don’t do this, you will hear less and less of the truth. And then where will you be?
Early in my career, I came in to find I had a new boss. It wasn’t long before he shared with me the following priceless and absolutely useless advice, “Mark, being too smart can be a disadvantage in this business.”
Inside my big brain, I thank him every day for the motivation that remark still gives me. Every successful day of my career is at least in part a victory over the stupid, thoughtless, and hackish impulses that are inside of every one of us. (more…)
There are so many excuses. So many shades of red and yellow light. You need to see these for what they are, or you’re going to take “Wait” for an answer.
We never get all the facts. Speed chess masters. Champion poker players. Genius stock traders. Anyone who runs a business, a marketing campaign or a brand – they all have one thing in common. They make better decisions with nothing like all the facts.
In other words, they gaze into the same cloudy ambiguity that everyone else sees, and they choose a better path. (more…)
All of us. We are taught what it should be, but we’re not taught what to do about it.
Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, the little firm behind revolutionary products like Ruby on Rails open source programming language and BaseCamp, writes in his wonderful book REWORK, “Start making something.”
He quotes director Stanley Kubrick’s advice to aspiring filmmakers:
“Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
Kubrick knew that when you’re new at something you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.
Digital isn’t a department or a discipline. It’s not a wall that keeps technologists in and the rest of us out. It’s simply the reality of the communications marketplace. We plan and create within this medium with one single goal: to create meaningful interactions.
DIGO’s digital services include:
Digital Thought Leadership. Content Marketing. Branded Content. Call it what you will. The evolution of digital media — particularly the rise of social networks — has created the opportunity for brands to build relevance and trust with their customers by participating, convening, aggregating, syndicating and publishing across multiple channels in a thoughtful way.
By offering content with real value, utility and a credible editorial position focused on topics of affinity to your customers and prospects, you can:
Jeff Pundyk, one of the earliest publishers to make the transition from print to digital, leads DIGO’s content and digital strategy team. Jeff was publisher of the McKinsey Quarterly, McKinsey & Co.’s online and print publication on business management, from 2000 to 2010. Our team stands ready to help you put what you know to work to connect with clients, prospects, and recruits in a richer, more sustainable way.
People in a hurry have to choose.
Choose a veneer of blamelessness. Or choose optimal progress.
It’s really that simple, and that difficult. Because people like to be blameless. They like to manage risk by trying to eliminate it. They want to appear all buttoned up, all the time. They don’t want be seen to fail, even in small ways on less important things.
But what if your choice is to risk failing on the small things versus a certainty of falling behind on the essential things? (more…)
PostSecret is the Haiku of the web. And it’s long been a very highly trafficked site. It’s so simple. People submit postcards, which conform to simple guidelines, sharing their secrets. PostSecret posts them online, and perhaps ads a bit of the comments they inspire.
What can you learn from PostSecret? To give people a simple art form, with rules that make success more likely. Discover something that needs to be expressed and give them the chance to express it.
DIGO did this when we created, “Talk Back To Cancer” for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. We knew people had an intense relationship with their cancer, so we built a simple social outlet for them.
It worked.
