Entries Tagged 'On the Edge' ↓

Readers here on exceler8ion know that Shannon and I are social media advocates and practitioners. As geek marketers we use this stuff, we live this stuff, and we make this stuff. Joseph Jaffe of JaffeJuice.com, a respected colleague and conversation leader in our space is hosting an online book sale today over on Amazon.com. His latest book is called Join The Conversation and promises to share new research, case studies, insights, along with trends in social media that are happening right now in businesses around the world - large and small.

Joseph is using OUR network of bloggers and blog readers along with his offline and online social networks to make a statement about our collective voice today by selling as many books on this day as we can (Sunday October 21, 2007). I just purchased a copy for Shannon and I, and I hope you do the same. Joseph does very good work.

Buy the book today using this link and Joseph will donate all the affiliate commissions from today’s book sales to charity.

If you want to enjoy more of Joseph’s work I’d also suggest you listen to his weekly podcast Jaffe Juice and visit his company Crayon, a social media company among the first agencies to build online communities in Second Life.

Technorati Tags: Conversational Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing

Do you feel like you’re running on a treadmill and can’t get off while your life passes you by?

Work for a boss or company that belongs in the last century?

Clawing your way through each day trying to achieve a work/life balance while all the time you’re drowning in financial and spiritual red ink?

Do you know deep down that you’re not living up to your potential?

Me too!

At least I was until a couple of years ago.

Have you heard about entrepreneurial phenom and renaissance man Timothy Ferris? Tim is on the New York Times bestseller list right now with his book The 4-Hour Workweek and with good reason. You may have heard that Tim went from earning $40,000 a year working over 80 hours per week to earning $40,000 per month while only working 4 hours per week. His book has people talking about personal outsourcing - using big company strategies to delegate your own personal and business work offshore and replacing that found time with high yield work and time for life. I just finished my first reading of his book this morning at 1:30. I read it over a few days and had a hard time putting it down. Next, I’m going to re-read it and do all the exercises and put the game plan in to action.

While I don’t have time for a full review right now - my main goal is to make the strong recommendation that you go buy the book and read it this week. More importantly, that you act on his recommendations as I am going to do (I’ve already started using some of his tools). There are some true paradigm shifts in this book that strike me as completely unique and I am really excited by the potential I believe is here. There are others that you’ll recognize as tried and true management practices, business, or personal management skills that have proven to work for many others.

The difference between many of us and Tim is that we don’t act on this knowledge at all OR we do so inconsistently and incompletely. It is clear from reading Tim’s book that Tim is highly effective at *doing*. That’s why he put together a supplement business soon after attending Princeton and started ringing up $40,000 in monthly income before he got smart and really accelerated his business using the techniques he details in his book. Tim is scary good because he embodies working smarter not harder - that’s the whole point of the book.

Whether it’s because you want to start your own business, spend more time living life richly, or get back to actually having a life while you stay in your current job there are actionable tactics in this book to help you. For me the book is exactly what I’ve been working on really dilligently over the last couple of years with my business exceler8 and in my life in raising my two youngest kids while Shannon slays the corporate dragon at Hodes Interactive.

This book is highly meaningful to me RIGHT NOW because I have been working my way up to doing the very things in Tim’s book that he recommends. He’s given me some needed keys to unlock my potential and has also confirmed that I’ve been 90% on the right track. I’m on the precipice of a big leap forward in my business and in life and I feel that you could be too if you can absorb and act on what this book is saying.

Good luck on your journey and let me know if i can help.

- Julian

Technorati Tags: The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss, outsourcing, personal outsourcing

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Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Mash Yahoo! Mash, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friending, blogs, blogging, vlog, vlogging

A blogging friend of mine, Yvonne LaRose asked me an interesting set of questions on Facebook. I wrote her back first thing this morning and then I thought it made sense to publish my answers. Who know, maybe you’ll find the content interesting as well.

Yvonne asked about what I thought about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and if I had any new terms I might be able to tell her about. I offered enterprise mashup and bacn . Bacn because it’s timely and relevant and enterprise mashups because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past four months (more to follow on this later).

Hi Yvonne,
Sure I’ll give it a go!

I think web 2.0 has been beaten to death. In memes, articles, and white papers it has been defined in a great number of ways. For me web 2.0 is about interactivity. Web 1.0 was about publishing and getting offline stuff online. Web 2.0 was about empowering individuals and adding conversation. In my opinion this brought *people* in to computers and the Internet for the first time in a meaningful way.

Web 3.0 is very up in the air as to what will shake out. Many refer to this as the semantic web, a place where a much richer tagging and classification of underlying data will drive greater access to content. Think enabling technology. I think all the technical stuff that underlies web 3.0 is very cool but the focus should be about humanizing the web, or humanizing technology.

I think that what is happening with web 3.0 has a chance of doing this. To me, I’ve always been a geek and a technologist but I feel now my mission and use of this technology is here for the purpose of connecting US - we the people! Just like Facebook did for this exchange between you and I Yvonne. A bunch of 1’s and 0’s in programming made it all possible to execute but a person and a group of people made things like blogs, messaging clients and Facebook. For these reasons I beleive we are living in a renaissance.

New terms: hmmm.
As you say, mashup is a really good one.

How about enterprise mashup! I just completed a four month project on enterprise mashups (company mashups for profit). It’s about combining multiple data and or web functionality to produce something. At the very least a useful aggregation of stuff on the web but if done well, a solution or tool that is better than the sum of its parts.

Example: You want to build a site for collectible baseball cards. You build a mashup that collects classifieds information from eBay, Craigslist and forty different speciality sites that sell collectible baseball cards. You put it all together in a new online database and design a user-friendly search engine to sit on top of it. Then you get fancy and add a shopping cart that lets your site users buy baseball cards from any of those sites through your own new easy-to-use baseball card shopping site. You get the data by using mashup tools to scrape the web sites you want the information from. Scraping is no different than Google robots (bots) crawling sites to check for changes so they can be indexed in the search engine.

One more? Bacn. That’s pronounced bacon.

“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

Now, I think since I’ve done all this work early on a Sunday morning I’ll go publish my reply on a blog somewhere - maybe someone else will find it useful. Hopefully you got some little thing from all my blather!

Cheers Yvonne and thanks for writing.
- Jules

Technorati Tags: bacn, web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, mashup, mashups, enterprise mashups

What do French Fries have to do with innovation in recruitment practices? Well, you’ve come to the right place to find out.

I was just reading a great post by Jason Warner from Google over on his site, meritocracy.net. He starts out his post by recounting his experience with the pleasant staff from IN-N-OUT Burger with their simple yet pleasing menu, and the recognition that IN-N-OUT must be employing some really good recruiting practices. JW goes on to compare IN-N-OUT’s laser focus to the moving target - Jobster.com, whose recent layoffs and change of focus has left some folks without jobs, and left customers/prospects, JW included, wondering what business problem Jobster.com solves. JW makes great points about the realities and subtleties of staying on the leading edge of recruiting - this post is my contribution to that conversation.

Here’s a quote from JW about IN-N-OUT to get your mouth watering:

“…I stopped by an In N Out Burger over the weekend and had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. The restaurant I visited is right down the road from my corporate apartment of Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, and I was amazed at the quality of the staff that was working. These people were friendly, attentive, and in genuine good spirits. It was a unique fast food experience to say the least. In N Out is doing something right when it comes to talent acquisition.

If you haven�t been there, In N Out Burger sells 6 items. That�s it. I counted. Only six: Burgers, Milkshakes (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry), Sodas, Milk, Coffee, and French Fries, as I recall. $350 million per year of these 6 items by most estimates (they are privately held so we don�t know for sure).”

What’s so innovative about a menu so lacking in variety? To answer that question you have to consider IN-N-OUT’s history:

“In 1948, the first In-N-Out Burger was founded by Harry and Esther Snyder in Baldwin Park. Harry’s idea of a drive-thru hamburger stand where customers could order through a two-way speaker box was quite unique. In that era, it was common to see carhops serving those who wanted to order food from their car. Harry’s idea caught on and California’s first drive-thru hamburger stand was born.

The Snyder’s business philosophy was simple: “Give customers the freshest, highest quality foods you can buy and provide them with friendly service in a sparkling clean environment.” These principles have worked so well over the years that they are still the company’s fundamental philosophy.“

Back in 1948, the innovation was the speaker box - who would have thought that an oft ridiculed device of our modern era would prove to be a feature that consumers found attractive. We can only assume it was the speed and convenience of drive thru service that caught people’s attention back then. But, what kept burger lovers coming back was a focus on solid business fundamentals, in the form of providing a squeaky clean burger stand and only the freshest ingredients and methods of preparation. Today, the speaker box is no longer an innovation but what is innovative, is great tasting fast-food and great service!

And what about recruiting and hiring practices?

In-N-Out pays its employees significantly more than the federally mandated minimum wage of $5.15 per hour and California’s minimum wage of $7.50 per hour � currently starting pay is a minimum of $9.50 per hour. For its full-time associates, the company offers complete employee benefits, and provides ‘fringe’ benefits in the form of annual company picnic, gifts at Christmas, the opportunity to participate in a variety of other company-sponsored activities, as well as paid holidays and paid vacations. On average, each of their 200+ store managers earn just under $100,000 annually, and have been with the company for 13 years. The restaurants are closed on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter. It is one of the few chains to receive a positive mention in the book Fast Food Nation. In-N-Out is active in the communities it serves. Every year the company provides free burgers to participants marching in the Rose Parade, provides cans for donations, matches customer donations 3-to-1 in April for National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and underwrites various fundraisers to support local charities and non-profit organizations.”

source: wikipedia, IN-N-OUT

I’ll let you be the judge of whether these specific practices would be best categorized as innovative, or simply solid business fundamentals. For me, they are often hard to separate in practice, since the ability to execute on business fundamentals is so incredibly rare.

Innovation is a culture - it doesn’t tend to happen in isolated silos (just talent acquisition or just sales for example) so it’s not surprising that IN-N-OUT has lots of innovation up its sleeve. While the burger connoisseur in me has long coveted an IN-N-OUT burger and shake, the marketer in me has always appreciated their ability to create scarcity, devout, loyal (even rabidly loyal) customers, while fostering an environment where community word-of-mouth from their happy customers was rewarded.

I’m talking specifically about IN-N-OUT’s now rather famous ’secret menu.’

Back in the day, which in this case only goes back to the 90’s, IN-N-OUT was a state-of-mind that could only be enjoyed in Los Angeles. When L.A. transplants traveled home for the Holidays from Northern California, New York, Seattle, or other far-flung locales, their itinerary for their visit would look something like this (I’m not exaggerating - if you’ve spoken with enough people about IN-N-OUT you’ll know that this is pretty common):

• get bag from luggage claim
• go to IN-N-OUT
• head home for Thanksgiving Dinner
• visit best friend from Grade School
• Go to IN-N-OUT with friend from Grade School
• depart

These devout IN-N-OUT clients were the very community that created the secret menu. And long before the ’secret menu’ was acknowledged on a corporate web site, before even the presence of a corporate web site, there was IN-N-OUT’s burger university where store managers were taught to live and breathe not only their core menu, but the secret one as well. Those store managers then made sure that all of their staff knew BOTH menus and that the cash registers had selections for secret burgers like the ‘3×3′ right along side their most famous menu item, The Double-Double.

IN-N-OUT, did these things because their customer focus went beyond listening to their customers, they were students of their customer. As such, they made adjustments to their menus based on observing the nuances of their client�le. Just as JW talks in his post about being a student of business, and how he uses this focus to help him innovate in talent acquisition:

“What I have done is made a career out of observing and assessing behaviors, competencies, and the subsequent results of executive leaders with whom I�ve worked with at both large companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, and Google, and at the small 50-person start-up Oracle technology consulting company that my team and I helped rapidly scale in the late 1990s. I have become a student of competencies, behaviors, and their resulting impact on business results.

One of the key behaviors I see effective leaders consistently dispay is to separate the productivity from the activity in their pursuits, and winnow that down to clarify business results around a single, well-defined objective. Generally, things aren�t as complicated as we make them.”

The key that relates to innovation I’d like to pull out of JW’s comments lead me to my summary for this post:

Breakthroughs in performance often come from taking notice of some small, but terribly important characteristic or trend (think Gladwell’s Tipping Point here). IN-N-OUT’s first was the speaker box, a solution to address the explosion of the car culture that L.A. created and is still known for the world over. IN-N-OUT is like the world class surfer who pours over tidal data and weather reports as much as they study the ocean and the break of the waves before venturing in to the water the same way a pro golfer will pour over the bend of the grass on the putting surface or the surrounding terrain, knowing how it will make the ball move from left to right or vice versa before making their putt. They are students of the small, but terribly important characteristics of their trade.

To innovate in any area you can often get the jump start you need from just this kind of observation, analysis and perceiving, and a student of business looks for clues to their problems and solutions EVERYWHERE. Sure, you already attend recruiting industry events, network with colleagues, and read blogs that cater to this community like JW’s Meritocracy - but don’t get stuck in our little world of talent acquisition - for its borders, like any small community are reassuringly relevant but so well defined as to sometimes prevent new thinking.

If you’re going for innovation - you NEED new data, new exposure, new people, new networks. Perhaps an example from one of my old communities would help bring this point home:

I ran an online ad serving team for a network of 40+ web sites. I was, and remain, a student of web technology, design, online advertising, ad serving systems, and analytics among others. A few years ago, as the dotcom economy recovered, the online ad market experienced their first true widespread inventory shortage. One of the key aspects of online ad inventory is that it is perishable. Once you serve a web page with the ads that are supposed to appear on it, that inventory is GONE. In other words you are dealing with a highly dynamic format, and a perishable commodity.

All of a sudden the key topic in every ad serving newsgroup was about inventory utilization and optimization. All sorts of new practices were developed - my peers and I hired and trained dedicated inventory management personnel, and we all worked on improving our systems to better manage our perishable inventory. In the heat of all this work it occurred to me that we were trying to rewrite the book on how to manage inventory, as if we were the first to have to deal with such matters in business. I started to think of other non-internet advertising related fields that might help shed some light on our struggles.

Can you think of any?

Sure you can. The one that excited me the most was the grocery industry. Who has been dealing with the problems of efficient use of perishable inventory longer than your grocer? Food goes bad, demand ebbs and flows, annual cycles run their course, unanticipated spikes in demand occur, and through it all at the end of every day - what is not sold is tossed out, gone forever. With people starving around the world, the perfect picture of waste and lost money. What I learned from searching for information in this industry gave me new insight into the problems of inventory management, from people, who unlike me and my peers, had been dealing with these issues for their entire career, rather than a few months.

What parallels in talent acquisition can you find in the lessons of IN-N-OUT, JW’s post, or my example? Please, let me know what you think. Perhaps you can even share an example of how the subtle differences you observed, the dots you connected in a moment of shower inspiration, once helped you create an ah-hah business practice in recruiting and talent acquisition.

P.S. For JW and other Bay Area newbies, the burgers at IN-N-OUT are hard to beat, but right across the San Mateo bridge and a little north of you is a local East Bay Burger chain called Nation’s Giant Hamburgers. Their location in Alameda at 1432 Webster street is one of their oldest and Alameda is well worth exploring. Their original location was actually in San Pablo, and then Oakland’s Jack London Square, and the latter is worth a visit as well but since JLS has been strip mall-ized to some extent I enjoy the laid back working class nature of their Webster street location. Yeah, I could send you to their newest Daly City location but this is an EAST BAY institution and so that would be pure sacrilege. For my money, Nation’s make the best burgers in the Bay Area - I’ll go so far as saying that as a burger connoisseur who has sampled many hockey pucks across this great nation, that this is the best chain burger I’ve ever had, perhaps even the best ever.

- Jules