31 Dec 09 The biggest change in 2010 will be the rate of change (again)

I love and hate the echo chamber, but Seth makes a great point.I’m still amazed by how quickly IT is pushing forward connect things together, and allowing me to make this post from my phone while watch Buzz on a PS3.2010 will be a year like last, where the exponential curve of change becomes even more pronounced and noticable as it flys by. Looking forward to that Apple announcement on the 26th to kick it off.Happy new year everybody!

Seven years gone

A friend worried out loud to me the other day, “I spent the last seven months doing this [job] and I have nothing to show for it. If I had known I would have spent seven months and gotten nothing, you can bet I would have done something a lot more fun.”Ten years ago I wrote this post about the decade that ends today.The oughts (the “uh-ohs”?) were a tough decade on a macro level. Front page news events will give the textbooks plenty to write about in the years to come.But on a micro level, on a personal level, this was a decade filled with opportunity. The internet transformed our lives forever. Opportunities were created (and many were taken advantage of). And, like every decade, just about everyone missed it. Just about everyone hunkered down and did their job or did what they were told or did what they thought they were supposed to, and just about everyone got very little as a result.Maybe ten years is too long a period of time to plan for. So how about seven?Seven years from now, what will you have to show for what you’re doing right now?If your answer is, “not much,” perhaps you should consider a new plan, one that might generate a different answer, or, at the very least, be a more fun way to waste seven years.

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23 Dec 09 Creating value vs Making Money

Many sales people set their goal to make as much money as possible.

This is a fantastic goal for a salesman, and often it is perceived that to achieve this goal you must extract the largest amount of money from a customer per visit. However, in most cases, this isn’t the optimum path to making as much money as possible (which to some may seem counter intuitive). The way to optimise the amount of money you can make per customer is to provide them with the most value per visit. By providing value, you create the revenue stream that will ultimately flow back to the sales person creating it. By focusing purely on extracting as much money as possible per customer, you may be draining the water from the land such that nothing will grow there ever again.