Startups and Baseball

I have a strange talent in being able to draw parallels between seemingly unrelated things. It’s a superpower that may come in handy one day if I’m plucked off the street to try to save the world on an impromptu game show.

But, absent that, I’ve been thinking about baseball and startups. Together. Like peanut butter and chocolate, which I’ve also been thinking about.

One thing I love about baseball is that, of all the major sports in North America and Europe (1. where I spend most of my time; 2. major defined as “sports that capture national attention and are part of the fabric of the culture”), it’s the only one that’s open-ended (defined as “not on a set clock”).

Well, that’s like a startup. Both startups and baseball have time guidelines in that certain things have to happen within certain reasonable time limits (startups: funding, milestones, deliverables / baseball: pitches, innings) but the amount of time is extremely flexible and can change situationally.

This just can’t happen in other sports. In hockey, for example, no matter how close the game is, during the regular season, there will be a shootout following a short overtime period with reduced player numbers. Then it’s over. This is artificiality. In baseball, a game can, in theory, go on forever, and some seem to. While most games are between two and three hours, I have been to several that lasted five. It’s a thing of beauty to watch something unfold in real time as it should. Again, like a startup, where the best laid timings of coming out of stealth and into beta and then going live are as influenced by as many factors as a baseball game. Pitchers can work quickly (the lean methodology) or be deliberate, pausing at length between pitches, throwing to first often to keep the runner in check (as do many VCs).

There is something beautifully organic shared by baseball and startups. There is a shared flow, a progression of thought and action. Both can be amazing things to watch and be a part of. As someone who has played in and watched a lot of baseball and startup games, I find both exhilarating and relaxing at the same time. I actually prefer watching minor league baseball because the players there are learning. You see more mistakes and you can sense the learning. The level of hustle is immense as everyone in the minor leagues is trying to be noticed, to move to the next level. Minor league baseball IS iteration. It’s A/B testing writ large, in that another player in another city is trying the same thing or something else, all in an effort to stop riding buses from city to city and to fly in the big league plane.

And, like folks involved in startups, baseball players work during the summer, as do I.

On that note, I have some baseball tickets to buy for tomorrow night and a pile of emails that need a reply.

Have an amazing day, my friends.

Saying the Wrong Thing

I’m not sure when it happened, but there was a moment as clearly defined as an earth tremor when saying the wrong thing became something few dare to do.

Progress is based on saying the wrong thing. When Apple was presented the Think Different campaign by TBWA\Chiat\Day, the Apple board rejected it. Only when Jobs and Wozniak said “Hey – we’re going with it, even if we have to pay for it ourselves,” did it get greenlighted, or at least that’s the way the story was personally told to me at Apple’s Executive Briefing Center a few years back.

Think Different said the wrong thing. Use our product and you’re a misfit. You’re different. You. Don’t. Fit. All of which are, parenthetically, outstanding things. Fitting sucks.

I think The Meeting killed saying the wrong thing. I remember a time a few years back when I was in a senior management meeting and the HR genius brought in a management consultant to work with our <sarcasm> cohesive </sarcasm> group. When asked to rate our team cohesion on the highly innovative 1-10 scale, most said 9, though half of us wanted to say the wrong thing (the truth), which was 0.034 and at least one of us (me) mouthed the word “falafel” and said nothing.  We were dulled by hours of weekly meetings where we had all the sap extracted from us like spring maple trees.

Saying the wrong thing is an art form. Its execution as tender as a ballet movement, as precise as sushi master Jiro’s deft cuts. Saying the wrong thing fuels innovation. It makes getting up in the morning more than a pointless loop with the finish line the merciful return to bed. Cassius Clay said the wrong things. Andrei Sakharov said the wrong things. Elvis said the wrong things and, yeah, Steve Jobs said the wrong things.

So what are you going to say today?

The 24-Hour Brand

I can’t believe I feel that I have to write this piece. But I do.

Every company has a brand. Contrary to what has recently been written about companies not having brands, but only products, everything and everyone is a brand. That’s the way that I see it and it’s not a new discovery for me. Nor should it be for you.

Last week I spoke at an event in Stockholm with close to 4,000 educators. Each of them represents their school brand and, more importantly, each of them is their own brand. They are a personal brand and a professional brand. And they can craft their brand to become whatever they want it to be.

And this week in Reykjavik I’m working with startups and entrepreneurs. See above. Same deal.

What really gets me these days are brands that think that work hours exist. All brands should aspire to be global brands. Even if you’re a brand in, say, Kansas City, and you’re pretty much local in that you sell only in your home city, you should still aspire to be global in at least one of your dimensions.

Kansas City may be a good example. Let’s say you run a BBQ place there and sell the best sauce. Even if you don’t ship it globally, don’t you want to be known for having THE best sauce in the world? Why would anyone make anything and not at least aspire for it to be the best?

Never strive for just okay. Never allow your brand to be pretty good. Pretty good quickly becomes so-so.

So I don’t get brands that 9-to-5 it. Take airlines. How many airlines do you think run a live 24-hour twitter feed? Look for yourself. Surprisingly few.

Um, you’re an AIRLINES. Even if you’re a domestic airlines, you have passengers from throughout the world. Why are you not interacting with them on social media in real time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? This totally eludes me.

What can it cost for an airlines to have three or four people running their social media outlets? I’d estimate the marginal cost at 0.000000000000001% of their annual passenger revenue. And do you know what happy potential passengers do? They. Buy. Tickets.

How is this hard?

And, while I’m on it, if you follow my advice and run your social media feeds all the time, hire only genuinely nice people.

Again, how is this hard?

Example: every interaction I’ve had on Twitter with Icelandair has been enjoyable. Every interaction I’ve had with Air Canada has been, well, not enjoyable. Is it just me? Doubtful.

Hire nice people. Have them engage in a genuine way with your past, current, and potential clients. When you mess up, have them say “Wow – sorry…we meesed up.” Often, that does the trick. Have them be genuine and human and nice.

This is what I want to see on Twitter:

YOURCO Hey @sullenboy, sorry, dude. I should have been more helpful yesterday. How can I fix it today?

And I want to see it at 4am in Iceland and noon in Beijing.

Hey, friends. Rock ON.

A Good Story. Well-Told.

Everyone likes a good story. Well-told.

This means two pretty important things that we don’t usually step back to reflect upon:

1. That people don’t like bad stories;

2. That people don’t like badly-told stories.

These are, of course, very different things. It’s possible to do a magnificent job telling a bad story, just as it’s possible and more commonplace to do a bad job telling a magnificent story.

But everyone likes a good story. Well-told.

The stories we hear, whether through advertising, person-to-person storytelling, or any other form, convey emotion and organize information. Stories tell us what we need to know if we want to act and lead us to that self-same action. A good story motivates. A bad story derails.

But perhaps nothing is a greater waste in message communication than a really fine story badly-told. The lost opportunity is monumental, but we see and hear this every day. Great storytelling unlocks and directs emotion. Emotion is a call to action. Emotion makes us spend money on the merchandise and tickets of our favorite team. It makes us pay twice what we would pay for an unnamed can of peas and ten times more for a shirt with a horse or alligator on it than a plain one made of the same material often in the same factory.

I can’t overemphasize how important all of this is in communicating your professional and personal brands. There is, truly, not much that’s more important than being able to convey the meaning of your stories to others. One way to convey meaning is to do so consistently and regularly. This is one of the tenets of good teaching. So if your stories are educational, as they should be – if they have meaningful lessons to share – their impact comes through pattern, repetition, reinforcement. Your stories become a beacon, a talisman, a truth.

The Psychographics of Schools

Schools are notoriously poor at psychographics, the science and art of understanding what truly motivates a particular group of people, here, their clients. There are absolutely exceptions – schools that really get it, but they are few and far between.

What schools excel at is demographics. Yep, some of the best demographic work I’ve ever seen has come from schools in the United States, and I mean a level of granularity that scares the life out of me when I think about the opportunity cost represented by the person hours that must have been dedicated to said task.

Yes, schools need to examine demographics. If a high school is thinking about adding on a middle school, for example, it would be useful to know that there was a dip or spike in birth rates in your catchment area, say, a decade ago. And speaking of said catchment area, it’s highly useful to know which parts of town your families come from and to understand the demographics of each area.

If schools really want to dive into something radical that I’ve advocated for a long time – and that is create a true UX (“user experience,” for the uninitiated) strategy, psychographics are precisely where to begin. Psychographics allow us to understand and appreciate what makes families who currently do or might choose to attend your school tick – information that simply isn’t available through demographic research. Recently, I was really impressed at how a superb research firm provided me and my client not only a demographic analysis, but also crossed over into psychographics by naming each tranche of the city in issue by the characteristics of the families, for example, “Techie Troublemakers,” for an area of town populated by coders who love to go to raves (I made that up, but you get the drift).

What factors do you think motivate a family considering sending their kid to an elite day school in, say, Los Angeles? Here are a few, from my almost three decades of experience in and around schools:

fear, affiliation, membership, elitism, competition, academic strength, program features, community, networking benefits, technology, and more.

If we can really understand a family’s interests, attitudes, interests, lifestyle, and desires, we can create a user experience that will resonate with them. As an aside, I’ve also long said that part of a family’s user experience with a school is how the brand looks and feels. And I don’t believe that websites featuring Ivy-covered walls and more tartan than you can shake a stick at is the way to go in 2012 (unless it is, meaning that actual psychographic research shows you that historical affiliation and a strong sense of wanting  to maintain the long-standing status quo is the direction you should head.)

It’s remarkably important for schools to understand and use psychographics because without them, we really can’t understand and shape culture. Where students and families come from doesn’t help a school create and nurture a culture that resonates with their clients. Understanding who they are and want their children to become does.

I’m going to speak about psychographics in the EDU and startup spaces a few times over the next few months – I’m sure I’ll be back here to update this piece.

Alliances

My good friend, colleague, and all-around great guy, Damian Madray, recently wrote a truly amazing piece called “Investing With Design: How Your Design Thinking Could Bring Huge Returns.” You can find his piece here, and I really commend it to you: http://goo.gl/zPKtn

His thesis is a simple one: that creative investment (an exchange of creative work for a startup in exchange for equity) makes sense for all involved. I fully agree, in part because I’ve been predicting a similar niche for scholars and thinkers.

Let me explain: there are many facets of a successful startup. Experience, technical proficiency, luck, design, sales, and much more. A piece that is often missing is someone on the team who is able to provide knowledge, information, and perspective from their own training and experience that might be very different from that of the founders and core team. I’m talking about people with advanced training in scholarship and thought.

If we really reflect upon what the right idea at the right time might be, there are elements far beyond that of what it usually involves to launch a startup. It might be about history or society or politics or educational theory and practice. Sometime the perspective and knowledge a startup needs falls outside the expertise of the team and into a totally different realm. As someone who remains connected to the education space in the startup world, I see this here all the time. Many have bemoaned the paucity of teachers in the EdTech startup space, just as one very narrow example. I think the problem and solution goes far broader and deeper than this.

Whatever the next big and important things might be in the world of startups, they will become big and important as a product of the right connections and conversations. I see scholars and thinkers playing a very important role in this. Sometimes the answers we most need come from the least expected sources. Sometimes the best alliances happen when we bring together people who see things from totally different orientations, as there is remarkable power in a diversity of experience and world-view.

I’m planning to speak about this in the future and will update the blog when my thoughts evolve. I welcome you to contact me to join the conversation.

140 Training

In a hyperprevious work incarnation, I was a high school English teacher. It was many sleeps ago. It was fun. The snacks were good and I usually found myself on a basketball court by 3;30.

What wasn’t fun was trying to erase years of students being allowed to say what they wanted to say or write what they wanted to write in as many words as they chose to use.

That was really un-fun like a traffic jam on the way to the football game or a really long lineup at DQ when all you want is a quick soft serve like you used to have almost all the time when you were a kid or like waiting for a bus that you know should arrive at 9:17 and you’re there at 9:15 and are sure of it because you’re using your phone to tell the time and it’s synced to some atomic clock and anyway it’s not fun.

I taught them to edit.

To use words with precision.

As one uses a single blade to shave. With economy of motion. Deliberation.

Which is part of why I love Twitter and am advocating that all writing teachers should use it as a training tool for their kids.

It’s simple, when you think about it. Twitter limits you to 140 characters. It is by nature a highly powerful tool to teach not only lean writing, but lean thinking.

I used Twitter training in my teaching decades before Twitter was invented. I’d use these things they used to have called “index cards.” They came in colors. I’d have a student use four colors. White would be their current thought. They usually filled the card if they didn’t write on the back. Red would be their fist edit. We’d meet, then yellow would be their second edit. Same thought, significantly fewer words. Then we’d meet again and the green card would contain a coherent, tight, perhaps even elegant thought.

It was a pleasure to read, that green card was. It was a cool breeze slicing a Southern summer sun.

It was probably 140 characters, perhaps down from, say, 700. Or more.

Why is this important? Because we write as we think. And we think as we write. So if you can’t edit on paper, you can’t edit your thoughts when you’re talking about an idea. Or pitching someone on something or anything. Like giving you money. Or a chance. Which is really important.

So, I’m advocating that in real life and for practice, more teachers use the 140 model. And for more good practice, have kids try writing emails to each other on this: http://three.sentenc.es/, a device that limits the unlimited verbosity of email to three sentences per communication.

Ideas need to resonate. They do so better when well-crafted.

Techvolution

In 1992, I could think that I was on the leading edge of consumer use of technology. I was on my third computer since college, had moved in to the world of Apple products, and knew how to use my things to get done what I needed to get done as a teacher, coach, watch collector and trader, sports statistics fanatic, and writer.

I understood basic DOS prompts (I had to having owned the IBM PC Jr. a few years before), could word process with some facility, and could even “fix” friends’ computers, as long as said fix involved restarting the machine and looking unsurprised when everything was fine.

Then, while I still used my MacIntosh desktop (I just love writing ”MacIntosh”), I invested in a PowerBook. This was a “laptop” and it was a brand new game. It was a portable brick that I could carry with me and be productive and all cutting edge. So I did that, carting said PowerBook through all three years of law school.

I never used email in law school. There were 148 people in my law school class. Only in my final year, did I learn that one of them sent an “electronic mail.” Why one would do so eluded me. It was 1995. Clearly, if the era of the Jetsons was coming, I’d rather have the automated food and space cars first.

I first used the Internet in 1995. I bore people with this story all the time and have written about it here before. But since you’re a captive audience, I’ll tell it again.

I was loading a map of my home province of Quebec on my PowerBook. I was told how to do it and how amazing it would be.

It wasn’t. The image of Quebec loaded pixel-by-pixel, thanks in part to the roadrunner-fast connection at the library in Las Vegas, where I was working that day. Noting to self that this would never catch on, I flipped the cassette in my Walkman and continued my day.

Look. I know that there were people coding in 1995. I know that people were using email and I know that people used these machines more effectively and powerfully than I did.

But I was just a guy. I was an athlete-turned-student-turned-teacher-turned-law student. I wasn’t a programmer and didn’t work for the government and wasn’t a scientist on some special project.

Next step in my techvolution was my watch habit. Having received my first watch at 13 for my Bar Mitzvah, I was hooked. I’ve spend my life since then buying, selling, trading watches and looking at all of the pretty pictures that comes along with that. To me, the annual Basel watch fair is better than the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition.

So in the late 90s, I was one of the first members of this thing called eBay. It was a message board – no pictures, no ripoffs, no sharks. Just kind of a classified ads thingy on your computer. And I could buy a watch from someone in Los Angeles even though I lived near Washington, DC.

That was cool.

And then pictures came and I could use this amazing new thing – a ”scanner” – and lay a watch on it and, fairly complicated process later, could try to sell that watch with the buyer having confidence that it wouldn’t arrive in a million pieces and might actually look like that watch I scanned.

And through learning about eBay and building my little but profitable watch trading hobby, I learned a bit about these machines and began gravitating towards tech guys. They were, then, at least in my world, all guys.

So it was 1998 when I’d be as frustrated as hell that I didn’t understand a think that any tech guy would say. But I pushed through it and in 1999, while instill understood little of what was said, my ignorance was a thirst. And that’s still where I am today. It no longer bothers me when something is above my head. If its something I want to know, I figure it out.

In 1999, two amazing tech things happened to me. The first was that I was identified as an educator who not only was bound for leadership, but also had a love and aptitude for technology. That resulted in my first touch with Stanford, which I clearly mark as the entry point to who I am today and the amazing things I get to work on, particularly SVbstance.

The second was that I was asked to update hundreds of computers for the Y2K switchover. Yeah, me. I was trained how to do it, paid really decently, and spent a summer playing with computers. And taking breaks to buy and sell watches. Oh, why did I ever sell that Orfina Porsche Design chronograph?

This millennium hit, all of my machines survived, and I was hooked.

I talk about technology all the time. I wrote about it, think about it, probably dream about it, and am as surprised as all of you when I predict some tech thing to come and it actually happens.

But I’m still just a guy. I’m not a techie, I have no training in technology, and I can still fix any of your computers (as long as the repair process involves turning the machine off then on again – I’m highly skilled at that).

I still don’t get frustrated when I learn about something new in technology that’s over my head. Probably because so much today is. I love technology and while I’m not addicted to it (based on any of the true metrics of addiction) I’m not a fan of being off the grid. Part of who I am as a person and as a worker is to be accessible. I truly believe that sharing who I am an sharing my time, in person and through technology, is part of giving back the gifts I’ve been so fortunate to receive in my life. Yeah, that’s corny, but it’s how I feel. So I continue to struggle with email volume and how to get my technology to work for me and not vice-versa for a change, and I always get lost in thoughts of imaginary worlds where my tech tools are smooth and seamlessly integrated and open doors to a world full of content and leisure time.

And every day I’m still amazed at how far we’ve come in fewer years than it takes to properly age an eminently drinkable bottle of whisky.