June 1, 2020
What Is Normal
Responding To A Post I Just Read
I wrote the following to something written by @cleverdevil over on MicroBlog.
Normal Is A Privilege
I have no disagreement with the threads of the article, more the title and even then the title makes sense in the context of Jonathan’s article - which focussed on ‘white privilege’.
But. BUT …
To me … ‘normal’ is not so much a ‘privilege’ as a process that allows the majority to ignore the dark underbelly of society because it doesn’t affect them. That works in the racist world - even if you’re white and not racist, burying the problem is the problem. But, what of the non-racist ‘normal’. What of Wall Street over Main Street ‘normal’. What of incarceration in the United States not only at unprecedented levels for the country, but also orders of magnitude higher than any other countries ‘normal’. What of LGBTQ bias ‘normal’. What of sexual harrasment ‘normal’. The list is endless.
Those are just some of the ‘normals’ I question as we call for ‘getting back to normal’.
It’s clear. Then again, it was clear before George Floyd. It was clear before COVID. It’s always been clear - if you cared to look. But - unlike in all those horror movies, we generally don’t go investigate the crash in the bathroom, the lights in the cornfield, the haunted house at midnight.
Instead, most of us wrap ourselves up in our bed clothes tighter, try to get to sleep and hope that come the morning, it will be light, all the problems will have gone - and we can carry on as if nothing happened.
That’s what my friend Daniel Szuc in Hong King calls ‘sleepwalking’. It’s what most people do. They sleepwalk through life. Accepting, without questioning. Because it suits them. Doesn’t affect them. (Except it does - but that’s another story)
It’s what I was talking about in the newsletter What’s Next a few weeks ago. We are at a red pill / blue pill moment.
AGAIN.
Lets get it right this time.
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humanity
May 31, 2020
On Empowerment
”While Team Human may be compromised in the digital environment, team algorithm is empowered.”
Douglas Rushkoff
Read More : On the Internet of Things, We People Are the Things.
quotes
May 30, 2020
Back To Basics - it’s About Being Better.
The nature of people is that we want to get
better and better things
for less money
faster and faster
That is the landscape we are competing in.
Lower and lower prices never ends well … ask photographers, copy writers and graphic artists.
Likewise faster and faster introduces a raft of potential issues
So, all you rally have left is ‘better’.
Time enhancement … better results, better experience. THAT’s differentiation.
Rule ‘N’ … if what you get paid to do can be delivered across the internet, then someone else can do exactly the same thing.
They will probably do it for less money.
They will likely do it faster,
So your differentation is ‘better’
If your job can be done by someone who doesn’t;
What value are you bringing?
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business.just.business
May 30, 2020
Design
“If you care about design, I would posit that the most pressing evolutionary challenge it faces is not design systems or design-to-code or even accessible design, as worthwhile as perfecting those pursuits might be. Rather, the single most consequential barrier to design’s next level of success is simply explaining itself to society at large.”
Scott Berkun
From an Interview - “How Design Makes the World”
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observations
May 30, 2020
On Time
”All we have is the time we have left.”
Dave Winer
quotes
May 29, 2020
Raising Money in the UK v the US
I’ve used versions of these words in several emails over the past couple of years, so decided to publish for posterity.
If you seek to raise money based on what you have … then the investment you get will be a percentage of that which you have.
BUT
If you sell the imagination, the vision, the people, the team, the possible … then the investment and associated valuation will be a percentage of that dream.
NOW
You just have to work out how to deliver that dream, how you quantify it, what journey you take to get you there and just how much of that dream you are prepared to give away in return for the money to make the dream happen.
To Help You Think About That
Why Killer Products Don’t Sell is a book written by a long time friend of mine - Dominic Rowsell and his partner in crime - Ian Gotts.
The book in some ways lays out how to deliver on that thinking.
When I read the first draft, I described it to Dom as ‘Crossing The Chasm For Sales’ ….. which you will see has become a tent pole in how the book works.
About The Book - According To Amazon
“Coming from conversations with executive teams of technology companies, venture capitalists, and M&A advisers, the insights contained in Why Killer Products Don’t Sell are gold dust. First the book lays bare the claim that sales is sales is sales. It exposes the 4 very different ‘Buying Cultures’ and how they should be approached: Value Offered, Value Added, Value Created, and Value Captured. But it also gives a proven methodology for assessing a company’s product mix (‘offering’ vs ‘buying culture’), and a transformation approach to optimize sales and improve competitiveness.”
Get The Book
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business.of.tech
May 28, 2020
There’s Teams That Work - And There’s Teams That Don’t.
The nature of what I do finds me working (all be it remotely) with different teams. Turns out that different teams - are different kinds of teams.
The Three Teams
[1] There’s a team that has been building itself up over the course of a number of years. Not everybody knows everybody else. The idea is coming together. Dialogue and discourse is open and transparent. There is respect for what people are trying to do. This idea stands a good chance of coming to fruition. The right questions are being asked. Different skills and knowledge is being brought to bear. The ‘leader’ of this team knows what they know and knows what they don’t. What they don’t, they seek to complete through introducing new people into the ‘Gladwell Distribution’.
[2] A second team has members who have known each other for a while, but have only recently come together to form the company that they all thought that they wanted. But what is that company? What is the ‘raison d’être’? They each have different answers. They all want this to work. They have a good sprinkling distributed across the Galdwell circles (the best of the three actually), yet this is the team that is most likely to lose. This is down to leadership. Theoretically, all on the team are equal, but there is an ‘alpha’ in the mix. They know what they know and have no recogniton that there are unknowns. Team members aren’t allowed to bring their best to the party. Instead they are pulled down and villified for stepping outside of the box.
[3] And then finally there is the team that barely know each other, but came together because of a shared idea. There hasn’t been a full ‘Gladwell Distribution’ to focus on the problem at hand. Specifically, the team is strong on domain and network but has zero Sales. The leader has recently recognized this … so lets now see what happens.
Team [1] stands A Great chance of taking off and doing something real, different and meaningful.
Team [2] has the most tangible offer, and might well get going, simply because it is an easy concept and there is a need. BUT, it will not deliver on its full potential if the alpha is allowed to continue unchecked.
Team [3] is least likely to succeed because they lack ‘Sales’ in the Gladwell Distribution. Period. It is now understood. Then there is a lot of work in front of them to convince others what they personally know and hold true.
The Gladwell Distribution
Known Knows to Unknown Unknowns
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observations
May 27, 2020
The ability to change, and to grow, and to confound.
I think that for some of us it is almost impossible to have a cohesive identity or, rather, there are some whose inconsistent and conflicted sense of self is their identity. There are those who have an identity that is contrary and evolving and forever at war with itself. It is perpetually in the process of challenging its own best ideas. Once an idea of self — a stance, a point of view, an identity — is settled upon, this inner subversive begins the business of dismantling it. Yet, this resistance to a fixed identity could be our greatest strength.
Perhaps I inherited this tendency from my father, who had, to say the least, a perverse and contrary view of the world, or maybe it is because I was born between star signs, or it could just be the old boomer in me that continues to have a nostalgic fondness for disruption and chaos, but I have forever felt a horror of being boxed in by an identity and an inflexible opinion, for this allegiance to a single personae can be the very death of creativity.
Maybe, Eleonora, there is some advantage in not having those ‘bits fit together’. This lack of cohesion prevents us from being enslaved by absolutes — what is true and what is not true, what is the right way to be and what is the wrong way to be — and affords us the ability to embrace contradictory ideas at the same time.
For an artist, particularly a songwriter, this ability to be open to influence, to discard personae, gives us the freedom to express ourselves in contrasting ways. When I think about the artists who have had the greatest impact on me, this fluctuating and disordered identity, and necessity to reinvent themselves, is common to most of them. I think this is what I look for in an artist — the ability to change, and to grow, and to confound.
Nick Cave, Issue 99, The Red Hand Files
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humanity
May 27, 2020
Growing My Newsletter List
My Newsletter celebrated its first birthday a couple of weeks ago. It was important to me, because one year ago I had tried several times to start such an endeavour only to fail in maintaining the cadence. Let me document these four ocassions - still on the Substack platform - for posteritry if you will.
Sadly, even before that, I had many other attempts on other platforms. I wold grade all atempts with a resounding ‘F’. Heavens, I even used Mailchimp at one point to autoroute my blog out to poor unsupecting people.
- Jun 1 2019 - saw another launch, announcing that I was starting again … again … with the subtitle :
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
This time it stuck.
I gave myself a year to prove to myself that I could maintain the cadence, so yes once a week but also ‘yes’ on the same day every week …
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What I did not set out to do was put focus into growing the list. Each newsletter had a footer asking for forwards and shares and I cross posted into Facebbok, Twitter, LinkedIN …. I just accepted whatever was the result.
I just checked the stats, since the June launch yes - absolutely people have unsubscribed and moved away. But even with that - I still have just under 20% more subscribers today than I did when I started. In that I take great pride.
And with that done and dusted, moving now into the phase 2
Today I sat in on an event that was run by Substack. It was the first of three events that they are running to help writers
- grow their list
- transition to a paid for subscription
- building a community with your subscribers
For me, the jury is out on the openess of Substack. If you have read the ‘Thoughts of Chairman John’, you will have noticed that I am very kean on ‘owning your own material’. So I am being careful that I have local copies of all the newsletters that I send out, because it is unclear what happens if Substack goes away. I haven’t yet found an ‘export button’ that would allow me to creat a JSON file of all my work. Likewise they also - currently - do not support you having al of this under their own domain, so if I did move - all my material sits under johnphilpin.substack.com - not (say) newsletter.philpin.com - and so the links would break.
As a comparison, I run a microblogging site with a company suitably called Micro Blog. All the content is hosted on MicroBlog servers - but you get to it by visiting John.Philpin.Com. If I export and move the close to 4,000 posts sitting on that site to a different provider - I can do that seamlessly - and all my links would continue to work. In short I keep my IP under my domains and have full portability. That is a different story … for now.
Back to Substack the service.
Really nice. It has everything you would need to run a newsletter from top to bottom and the people that are there are not people like me … the writers that use their service include professional writers that are leaving their professional positons on the beat in places like th NYT and setting up their own shop with Substack.
Ok - enough of me going on about this - this is what Substack says - it is a great read.
All this to say … take a look … and really highlight that now I have proven to myself that I can write and keep this going - I can move this newsletter along.
So - next step is to grow the membership - and I have a range of campaigns ready to launch that will help me do just that .. build my list to a meaningful size and for it to be a list of people that make up a loyal community.
Step after that is to move the newsletter to a subscription model. The material that gets published today will continue to be free - but a second / third paid for branch of the newsletter will be made avaialble. This will also tie into the book that I have coming out in a couple of months - which is focussed on a specific subset of the overall People First discussion.
More on that to come - will likely come back to this and update it sometime in the future - but for now - this is where I am.
Today’s Highlights
- Be consistent and experiment from time to time
- Have a presence
- Complete your “About Page” ✅
- Give readers and incentive that keeps people engaged and feel involved
- Have high quality photos so it looks great when you share on socials
- Write your own story. You’re not writing what other people think will sell. Write what you believe in. Start with a small, devoted audience ✅ That I did … thankyou. No doubt some have left, but also no doubt others have joined.
- Encourage people to comment
- Stick to a number that allows you to put out quality
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business.of.tech
May 27, 2020
Flying High
https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-2f99983c-1299-4ca6-92af-20b6c3e0c106_1200x800
Murray Foubister.
Iguassu Falls, Brazil/Argentina
Good practice for ‘COVID times’ I suspect.
Read The Whole Article.
I’ve never worked for a large company. Well, unless you call 30 people large. I’ve worked for myself and for others … in construction, emergency services, tourism, deliveries and seen the world while I was at it
Will
Newsletter
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