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Great post by Hugh MacLeod today on gapingvoid:

Consultants showing off how smart they are? Under-employed or over-employed, that is content marketing. Exactly.

You write a blog. You build a dedicated following. You leave a discreet, non-pushy trail of breadcrumbs to what your business actually does for money. If X percent of your readers take the bait and become paying customers, hey, you win.

I love the ending, too:

That’s the good news. The bad news is, effective content marketing requires two things: world-class content and a world-class product. Harder than it looks. Life is unfair.

That’s the hard part: Making something truly great.

And I think the key to that is your “art”, as Seth Godin would call it.

Something that comes form inside your soul or the core of your being in a way. It doesn’t have to be deep or mystical or weird. It just has to be you, what you’re about, in a very real sense. You can’t fake it.

That’s one of my core themes, as you’ve probably noticed by now.

I love this design from Method, as shown in FastCompany‘s July/August 2010 issue:

It’s beautiful and smart at the same time.

The detergent is eight times more concentrated than normally, but then it has a built-in dispenser to make sure you don’t overdose.

And then they just look good.

I’m looking forward to the day when you can get them here in Denmark.

Bonus scrap: Joshua Handy, their senior director of industrial design, has the word “disrupter” listed as one of his titles on his business card.

Method is a great example of rethinking and challenging the assumptions about a segment of the market and how it’s always worked.

Stumbled on this interview with Blake Mycoskie of Tom’s Shoes in Inc. Magazine last night. Some fascinating bits from it.

First, the stats: He’s 33, lives on a boat outside of Marine del Ray, and has a 10-person management team run his company, while he’s on the road most of the time. Each time you buy a pair of their shoes, they donate another pair to people in the third-world countries, who need shoes.

“I usually get up at 8:30, have a Cliff Bar for breakfast, and spend a few hours thinking and writing before going in to the office. Almost every morning I write in my journal. I’ve been keeping one for a long time–I’ve filled more than 50 books. I write about what’s going on in my personal and spiritual life or what’s going on at work. It helps me keep things in perspective, especially when things get crazy or I get stressed or we have obstacles.”

That’s pretty cool, if you ask me. Journaling each morning about his personal and spiritual life. I wonder how many Fortune 500 CEOs do that on most mornings?

I’ve just picked up journaling again, after reading that. I’ve done it extensively in periods, but have always fallen out of the habit again. It is very helpful.

Do you keep a journal?

Have you incorporated giving into your business?

Another quote:

I’ve read a lot of business biographies. I dropped out of college when I was a sophomore, so those were my education in business. I’ve probably read 40 to 50 of them–on Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Howard Schultz. Ted Turner’s autobiography is really interesting, and so is Sam Walton’s. I read that one very early in my career.

The great thing about biographies is the subjects have already been successful, so they’re not insecure about their failures. Howard Schultz doesn’t mind talking about all the dumb things he did when he started Starbucks. Reading about those mistakes taught me a lot.

Another famous entrepreneur who tends to steer away from traditional business books and instead focus primarily on biographies, is Jason Fried of 37signals. Seems smart to learn directly from people who’ve dunnit. Ted Turner bio ordered.

This video with Steve Jobs shortly after Apple bought NeXT and brought him back in charge, is absolutely stellar.

I think his insight about what marketing is all about is spot-on. Marketing is about what you stand for.

People don’t really care about your widget and what it does. Some people do, of course, but not in a way that will allow you to make any kind of relationship with your brand.

37signals is a company that has always understood this. They’ve stood for something, against something else.

That’s what speaks to us at an emotional level, and causes us to have a relationship with a brand that’s much deeper than just the benefits of the products themselves.

Tony Hsieh at Zappos‘ great insight is that in this day and age, your brand is going to equal your culture over time. You cannot hide your company’s real culture, its true soul, over the long haul. It’ll show.

I’m also reminded of this passage from Scott Bedbury’s book A new brand world:

To their credit, the Portland, Oregon-based creative powrehouse Wieden & Kennedy — what has kept a relationship with Nike since the agency opened its door in 1981 — had sought in vain to find something deeper within Microsoft that would resonate with the world, not unlike what they had accomplished for Nike.

They tried to define something in the brand that was more meaningful to peopel than mere software, but they came up empty-handed. Even the best advertising cannot create something that is not there. If a company lacks soul or heart, if it doesn’t understand the concept of “brand”, or if it is disconnected from the world around it, there is little chance that its marketing will resonate deeply with anyone. It’s a lot like putting lipstick on a pig.

This perfectly illustrates what I care about in business and marketing. The soul of the business. The heart of the company. The values. What they’re about.

And not just something you’ve made up.

Something that’s real. It comes from the hearts and the souls of the people who work there, and who lead the company, no matter where in the organization they lead it from.

I haven’t read it, but my understanding from Seth Godin’s mention of the book, suggests that Honest Signals gives a scientific explanation fro exactly why it’s impossible fake the soul of a company.

People can tell. Period.

I came across this sentence in a book I’m currently reading, and it struck a chord with me.

When I look back at my life, I see a string of events where I’ve finally owned that was pretty good at something.

With math, it wasn’t until I got a perfect grade at my final high school exam that I finally owned it.

With cooking it wasn’t till recently when I spent an evening cooking with a few people who all worked professionally with food in some capacity, and realized I fully measured up.

And on and on.

It seems there’s this voice in my head saying “I’m not really that good at such and such area”, that’s just there by default, until proven wrong by some dramatic demonstration that seems to speak to me at an emotional level.

I believe I”m not alone in this. I think many of us have a tendency to not “own” how great we really are.

I’m not sure why.

Partly just habit, I think.

In part because it’s safer. There’s no risk of hubris. There’s no responsibility. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m not really that good at that.”

What about you? Do you recognize this? Why do you think this is?

Just rediscovered Seth Godin’s free e-book “What matters now” from December of last year (that’s 2009).

From Seth’s opening essay:

It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.

If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.

Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. is is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better.

And from the one right after that, by Anne Jackson:

Until Fear is gone, (and realize he may never completely leave) make the decision to be courageous. The world needs your story in order to be complete.

The last sentence in particular stuck with me. The world needs your story in order to be complete. If you believe otherwise, you’re selling yourself short.

Gigaom on the way Apple targets enterprises (or doesn’t target them):

It targets people. It focuses on users. And Apple lets them decide how and where they’ll use its products.

This sounds simple, but in my experience very few companies think this way. Most startups write business plans that dredge up IDC data on market size, then define their target market (e.g., “Global 2000 enterprises”). Few seem to realize that there are people employed within these target markets, and these people will be the ones who actually embrace or reject one’s product.

I’m frequently asked by some of my customers about how to market to businesses versus consumers. You need to market very differently to enterprises than you do to individuals, the thinking goes.

Well, yes, you can. You can try and sell through the top.

But I’ve always felt that you could also go a different way, which I’d personally find more satisfying: Market to the individuals within the organization.

37signals has done this very well with Basecamp and Highrise. People just sign up and charge it to their corporate credit card, and get on with their lives. No need to involve the IT department or go through lengthy procedures for evaluating and buying software. Just do it already.

And if there’s enough bottom-up demand, eventually the company will have to find a way to give it their blessings.

Much more fun, in my opinion, to do business that way.

(Hat tip to David for the tip)

All struggle is a struggle to accept ourselves. Our lack of acceptance appears to be about other people, places, and things, but it is not.

Resistance to accepting the most intellectual, commonplace, esoteric, or concrete thing comes down to “me,” that little ego identity attempting to survive as a self separate from life.

From Cheri Huber’s excellent When You’re Falling, Dive.

Andrew Orlowski over on The Register.

…throwing out lots of mediocre products isn’t the passport to success. [...] it pays to put more of your wood behind one arrow, or just a few arrows; the more you make, the less distinctive each one is.

I’d say this goes for not just the mobile phone market, but for most matters in life.

(via DF)

We were conditioned to avoid a feeling we had as a child, and now as adults we’re still avoiding that feeling, which we have never stopped to examine.

We suffer trying to avoid a feeling that is only a feeling and means nothing. We are controlled by fear of our feelings.

Paraphrased from When you’re falling. Dive. by Cheri Huber.