Is your Marketing Working? 45 Beautiful Questions

Here are 45 beautiful questions questions  that may help you in figuring out if you are making any mistakes in marketing your business or organisation.  I got up to 26 yes's myself.

1. Are you The Guy(s)in your market place.
2. Are you remarkable?
3. Are you blogging yet?
4. Are you marketing daily?5. Are you focused at ALL?
6. Are you using Google Alerts?
7. Are you word of mouth worthy?
8. Are you building a permission asset?
9. Are you reading Seth Godin’s books or any books?
10. Are you giving enough away for free?
11. Are you building a timeline of credibility?
12. Are you the original; Are you just the echo of someone else’s idea.
13. Are you leveraging your channel appearances in every possible way?
14. You ARE getting talked about, but you don’t know who’s doing the talking?
15. You ARE remarkable, but are you relevant? Or worthwhile? Or marketable?
16. You ARE blogging, but are you disciplining yourself blog every single day?
17. You ARE blogging every day, but your posts are too long, too safe, uninteresting, unfocused and written with poor architecture and ZERO Call to Action.
18. Are you saying WAY too much?
19. Are you creating noise, not music?
20. Are you trying to force word of mouth.
21. Are you the observer, not the observed.
22. Are you trying to hard to convince people.
23. Are you trying to be the arrow instead of the target.
24. Are you worried about marketshare, not mindshare.
25. Are you interrupting people, not interacting with them.
26. Are you relying on your customers to connect the dots.
27. Are you marketing efforts cause customers to hear from  you, not about you.
28. Are you trying too hard to be authentic, which results in you NOT being authentic.
29. Are you sitting around waiting for your annoying, low-rent YouTube video to “go viral.”
30. Are you using WAY too much text on EVERYTHING.
31. Are you(still) calling it “marketing.”
32. Are you(still) calling them “customers.”
33. Are you(still) wasting your money on advertising.
34. Are you(still) using Papyrus as your company’s primary font.
35. Do you think people care.
36. Do you think people have time.
37. Do you think customers aren’t smart.
38. Do you think putting up a MySpace page is (actually) going to help grow your business.
39. Do you know who you are.
40. Do you have enough samples out there.
41. Are you  take too long to return calls and emails.
42. Are you stopping marketing when you become successful.
43. Do you  have a strong web-SITE, but a weak web-PRESENCE.
44. Does your marketing looks like marketing.
45. Is you goal is to make money, not create positive change.

Any to add? Please add a comment or join our mailing list back up on the right

Intranets and innovation

I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking charity web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to log on every day or so and see what the boys and girls have achieved. No-one can say that web technology hasn’t taken massive leaps forward over the last few years and changed our horizons and expectations of how we find information and interact massively. Except, that is, if they look at one specific area. Intranets.

Almost without exception they look exactly the same as they did five years ago. While the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true Web-based rich media applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect our intranets, our most powerful internal communications tool, to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually and fundamentally not much has changed.

I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as it presents me and you with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is, more often than not, passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.

Intranet audits were a staple of my experience. I have seen lots of them. Way too many for anyone who wishes too maintain their sanity. With some glorious exceptions, which I can count with my socks off, there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet has acknowledged by management as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of technology and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication, engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we like to put into our mission statements.

Forums, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto some intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging  wikis or, bless them, just a simple blog site. The opportunities and benefits for social computing applications and collaboration on intranets are huge.

Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge bank. (Arguably more useful is actually a 'failure bank' but that’s another story) These tools are used not so much for communication but address the ‘at least we know where it is when we want to find it’ principle.

The true asset value of a company is its knowledge repository. It is 60% and more or your net worth if you believe Harvard Business School. Can you think of a better reason than giving the management of knowledge flow, its retention and acquisition of new knowledge innovation and creativity in your organisation anything less than 150% support and making it your number one priority? I can’t think of any either but amazingly, although internal communications, innovation and differentiation features in pretty well every survey of corporate priorities, (even more annual reports) few pay it more than lip service. Why? Because it is hard to do and few know really where to start. ‘We tried the intranet thing but it doesn’t work ‘is probably the most often used phrase I hear. So you give up do you? Or, do you just get better at it?

Let's just pick one simple example. The commonest .net2 deployment are, or at least should be, blogs used for collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. This is frankly bonkers as they take seconds to set up and can save thousands or in some cases millions of pounds. Seriously. Just ask Apple.

Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine, and I know this is a stretch, the impact and discussion arising from 40 sales people dealing with the inevitable launch issues and how quickly these issues would be flagged, fixed and customer facing people made aware of solutions.

The often quoted example of this in practical action is BT's launch of their Home Hub. Initially it was an unmitigated disaster but, by using a blog site to give direct feedback from sales people, installers and development engineers to the CEO, it was transformed into the biggest selling device of its kind, not just in the UK but across Europe. Millions. I kid you not.

Imagine her feeding back to the team, the whole team, by video with a small thank you and identification and appreciation. It really isn’t hard this stuff, but lets not get too giddy here. It requires something much more than a few techy tricks to solve this problem. Normally its dowon to human being somewhere cluttering up the landscape with assumptions.

The phrase I often hear from frustrated CEO's who are bemoaning the lack of effective corporate communication is that 'my door is always open'. Yes, it might be,  but he is teh thing, it works both ways too.

As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.

So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss, mistrusted and a place of last resort for finding information.

Frankly, because it is not that big a signal on the corporate radar simply. On the face of it, there are few metrics that can get it put on the spreadsheet for the weekly meeting that get the juices going. It is true to say that the benefits (and costs) are largely hidden. But if you have to pick one try just this one. Staff retention. Then look at the incurred costs for loss of knowledge and recruitment and training. Now that is truly scary. It can wipe of the profit for a business unit in no time. One key loss alone will pay for the tweaks in the intranet that may (I would say probably) alleviate much of the frustration in allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Which, if you are still awake, is cited as the number one reason individuals leave jobs

This position is reinforced by the often prevailing view that it is just good money chasing after bad. The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest more time and effort in it now? Many executive teams, optimistic about the intranet’s potential in its early days, now wonder what all the noise was about. While there certainly are productivity tools online—that’s just a matter of common practice in the workplace anyway—the innovation and the knowledge sharing that was supposed to flow from the intranet just never materialised.

Why? Well we could point to a range of contributing factors. Actually you can generally just pick one of the following and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases it's just simply down one major decision, often made at the beginning of conception- who will be its owner? Who looks after it, nurtures it and cultivates it? For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What should a knowledge manager manage then?

So who does own it. It is seen by many as a poison chalice - it is easy to pass the buck to IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now, and this may surprise a few people who know me but I’m going to stick up for them, well, for a minute anyway. It’s a s**t job. That is why they bring their own sandwiches - it is their one small pleasure. (It's really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks).

It is a close tie as to whether HR or IT departments get more bad raps. To be fair to IT, they have probably invested time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and, unsurprisingly given their workload of fixing printers and replacing laptop keyboards that are allergic to Starbucks Latte, are in no hurry to move in a different direction. They haven’t had their lunch yet anyway. Intranet software vendors aren’t exactly blameless either. Few are using .NET2, most use ASP. or ASP.net at best, which is five year old technology. Do you get the theme here? And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making all that compatible with their new ERP system or SAP.

Corporate IT staff and corporate comms staff, some of them, anyway—are largely under informed, if we can put it delicately, about what’s happening on the Web and often have a blind-spot that something they use daily actually could actually be hugely relevant and have a massive benefit to them. They hold the belief, justified or not that ‘Our company would never sanction that’ so they don’t suggest or push their ideas forward. It's a self fulfilling prophecy and a depressing spiral. 20th century communication in a 21 st century world. And any way, should the IT department be doing that. Who should be keeping on top of this? Can it really be the IT department’s responsibility, most of which are stretched pretty thin just keeping the meter fed, and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.

Many communicators/managers  figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? This is an interesting view from those who inhabit the dreamworld of delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least for every IC and innovation projects I know and have worked on, is that it's about change and change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end date, think that box is ticked and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing life-cycle. Even more so for the company Intranet. It should be the heartbeat of any organisation. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.

Trust, and that is the key element in all effective communications, is developed through consistency, relevancy, timeliness and accuracy. One intranet I recently was asked to look at had not had anything added to it for three years. That is not an intranet, that is an historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.

Inevitably at some point we have to start talking numbers to justify investment in fixing tweaking or ripping up and starting again. As you or somebody else from higher up the food chain will undoubtedly obligingly point out, there already has been an investment that been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for. It’s difficult for organisations to write off significant investments in order to start from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you should persevere with old tools and tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interesting to see the metrics applied to measure its effect, success or return on investment. Generally these amount to a big fat none, which, for any management process is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.

And, if you don't think your intranet may not be mission critical in your organisation, here is one statistic you may like to reflect upon. Even if this is only half true it is still truly breathtaking. On average the typical administrator in any office environment spends 45% of their working day looking for information to help them do their job. 

I am assuming that those who could make the decision to invest time, effort and funds in getting the intranet right have no concept or are remotley interested in the impact that freeing up 25% of their colleagues time could have on, their customer focus, their efficiency and even, their bottom line. If my tone appears to have a slightly sarcastic edge my apologies, but it arises from the huge frustration that my experience has shown me that faced with all the other daily challenges what is looking them, literally in the face, every time they log on to their network, is often the cause of so many of their problems.

The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive to implement.

There are some practical limitations and by far the trickiest for most organisations, both public and private sector, is struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are an anathema to assumption intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content. But is that what they should be their role anyway? Is there an argument for loosening the approval processes in key areas? I’d argue, yes absoblinkinlutely yes. Should senior management really be a feared of any possible negatives and shouldn’t they be aware of them and manage them anyway? We live in a world of 360 degree reviews and employee engagement surveys, you carry out them of course don’t you? You don’t? Well you are in trouble then and I'm sorry to say thatthe best intranet in the world won't help you.

Or maybe you subscribe to the view I saw recently in a post from an HR VP which was a thinly disguised ‘You should be bloody lucky to work for us, just get with it’. And then to sweeten the message, guess what, 'we are having a pajama day next week' just to show you how cool and cute we are. Erm, yeah. Really? I see that in any comany and I’d be polishing up my CV. You will be needing it when your competition cream you into history or you get ‘outsourced’.

Just ask for this stuff, what can they say? No? It's just a word and won’t kill you. I’m hoping here that you actually have some form of innovation and idea management built into your intranet. No? Then start reading at the top again and pass this onto your boss and her boss's boss

Paola Antonelli on Design Innovation and Storytelling

Internal communication and innovation

Internal communication is inseparably linked to the development of any innovative culture. Whether this is improving the quality of service, delivering competitive difference, delight for the customer, better business processes, reduced marketing costs. The list goes on and on. All of this great, good stuff, which we all strive for, comes at some cost in energy and investment in skills but success is fundamentally limited by the ability to communicate effectively up, down, sideways, inside outside. The CEO’s moaning frustration of ‘Why don’t they just get it, can’t they see that this is not just good for the company and them too’, misses the big point. That it is up to them, and them alone, to communicate and to lead that communication effectively. This is their first and most important job, because without that ability no process, no initiative, no change, no improvement that needs to work will work. It’s that simple.

Yet many senior managers still persevere with the shouting louder, quickly followed by the placating ‘its fun to work here’ gesture. People are way smarter than most managers give them credit for. And, it has to be said, that the human condition often makes us all way too smart for our own good sometimes. We, largely anyway, have a disproportionate capacity for creating our own misery from the most tenuous of reasons. From one instance of inconsistency, one poorly used word, one miss-timed email we come up with an infinite number of possibilities that puts us on the road to the Valley of Despond and the recruitment web sites.

It’s an inbuilt survival mechanism. We are the only animal that imagines the future. On a personnel and organisational level this can be both a blessing and a curse. While we may look at future where the taking of risk, or the success of some personal initiative could be met with praise and prizes, equally, if we fail it means embarrassment, the loss of respect from our peers and managers. So why should we take any risks at all? The response is, in most cases, that we don’t. Unless we are motivated to do so. And motivation does not come from a snappy Power Point presentation, an email, a rousing speech but from one simple belief. Trust. 

Trust that you have the freedom and power to act without reprisal or criticism. 

Trust that what the management says the management actually means. 

Trust that they are making the right decisions for the good of the organisation and you as individuals.

And the killer of trust comes down to one thing. Inconsistency. You don’t have to be a great orator, a great writer or storyteller, although that helps enormously to inspire trust. Just applying consistent messages and the demonstration of management walking the walk works. It just does. But, one piece of hanging thread, if pulled - which it will undoubtedly will be - can unravel any strategy, any good intention and kill the momentum for change.

Effective communication is the be all and end all of any organisation. The worst of it is that most managers feel that they are great communicators. No doubt their intentions are good and their heart is in the right place. But in the thousands I have worked with over the years there are only a handful who actually get it. They are the true innovators who know that it is not just about having that great idea, or clarity of vision but know how to sell their idea, to tell the story, who use their passion and are above all know that its about being consistent.

Definitions of Innovation

Hutch Carpenter has come up with an intriguing  collection of definitions of Innovation.  

Check them out at on his blog site

How does my future look?

A few of my clients, and myself included are going through some curious times, trying to evaluate the direction and plan their next steps, reacting to the current financial crisis - or maybe is it an opportunity to do something different? Or Innovative?

The Beautiful Question is here to help and today to HELP people imagine what they need to become in order for their goals to manifest. Today that means to ask questions that will help them ( and me) imagine in detail what they want to achieve. You can ask or answer theses as an individual or an organisation - just swop 'person' for 'company'.

1. What will this decision look like in 10 years?

2. For your life to be perfect, what would have to change?

3. What kind of person do you definitely NOT want to become?

4. Is this experience helping you become the best version of yourself?

5. If you pursued this dream, what would your life look like in 30 days?

6. What would REAL fulfillment look like in this area if you were truly living your life purpose?

We need to position ourselves in the future to EMPOWER people to speak from the future, then look back to identify the steps that led there.

1. How do you want the world to know you 3-5 years from now?

2. What three things can you do TODAY to increase your freedom tomorrow?

3. Look ahead six months: standing there, what decisions would you make today?

4. What three small acts you could take today to prepare for the life or work that you’d like?

5. What steps need to be taken to make you feel like you’ve achieved a Return on Investment from this new endeavor?

6. What has to happen in the next year for us to be able to look back and say, “That was best possible use of our efforts”?

Then we need to ask questions to INSPIRE people to paint a compelling, detailed picture of the desired future and make meaningful strides toward it.

1. What would your life look like right now if you were truly healthy?

2. If everyone did exactly what you said, what would the world look like?

3. What are the essential features of the world you want to live in so you can be your best?

4. When you imagine living the life you want, how do you see yourself starting your day?

5. What would REAL fulfillment look like in this area if you were truly living your life purpose?

6. What if, overnight, a miracle occurred, and you woke up tomorrow morning and the problem was solved – what would be the first thing you would notice?

Innovation Handbook for CFO's

With over 25 years experience of throwing myself at brick walls of various heights and thickness, trying to develop a culture of innovation and creativity in a wide range or organisations, I can say, without any shred of doubt, that the biggest barrier to establishing an innovation culture is convincing senior management of its value, and showing them ways to measure its impact to justify investment. Sometimes these are innovations in themselves.

Less than 3% of companies have any innovation performance metrics and reporting systems in place and, those that do, are in the top 5% of top performers in their sectors. A coincidence maybe? Are you mad?

The Word cloud below illustrates some of the key  considerations and serves as a memory jogger for senior management when they are not just giving lip service into their annual company report or sales blurb that they are being 'innovative'. Most really haven't a clue what that really means. Although they would all like to be like Apple. Mmmm!

Or, you can simply carry on as you are, and watch as your competitors harness their innovation and creative talent and burst out of the recession first, leaving you trailing in their wake.  Like a dinosaur looking up at that big round thing in the sky wondering why it's getting bigger.

Ready, Set.... Bang! Or what you would like to remind your boss about Innovation

More often than not, in my teaching and in writing about innovation and change management, I seem to spend a great deal of time looking at trends and explaining how organisations can adapt internally to position themselves to capitalise on the opportunities they may be presented with. And much of that time is currently spent trying to putting into perspective the fact that even though we've always had downturns there are still plenty of growth opportunities. But one thing is for sure, that applying creativity to those plans and making innovation the heart beat of an organisation, to allow you to hit the floor running when the ties loosen and things start to get moving again, isn’t just a nice thing to think about, but is going to be fundamental. And if you don't embrace that then you really will be toast, no matter what your size and resources.

What has become evident, to me at least, is that probably the most pressing issue for any business owner, leader and indeed any organisation leader, today is in bringing things back to the core. In order to take a step up in developing an internal innovation culture we have to take a step back first. While uncertainty and chaos disrupts local and global markets, there continue to be the basic truths that still apply: understanding your industry, competition, skills requirements, the gap in capabilities, but most importantly understanding your customer and having the ability to respond to their requirements quickly and effectively through outstanding internal communication, are the factors that will define any organisations’s future success. Thinking outside the box is all well and good but you still have to look in your own box too to see what really is there hiding in the corners. But look in a different way

So what can you do right now to make sure you are at least on the starting blocks when the pistol is fired?

Think expand.

The current climate it is undoubtedly depressing and demoralising and it's all too easy right now to lose your motivation and direction. It is easy to say but Don't let that happen! The future is out there still! So think opportunity: Apple, GM, (OK, Bad example ;-),Microsoft and my window cleaner, who now has 15 people working for him and is just as much a success as the big guys, were all founded in periods of recession.

Check your reaction times

Agility is the key word. You have to have a team that can react to opportunities faster than the competition. That means giving them the freedom to make decisions, not body-checked by internal processes and management pyramids. Allow them to take real responsibility for their own budgets and have fixed goal posts that everyone understands. Your people are way, way better and more capable than you think. Let them think and be inspired by taking off the shackles.

Immerse in creativity.

Idea generation is now at warp speed- products are insect like in their life span but appear out of nowhere. Twitter didn’t ‘exist’ 12 months ago until Stephen Fry talked about it on national TV. Incidentally have you ever seen an ad for Twitter? Rapid product change is not just desirable it is what is happening now: we don’t have choice in dealing with it, reacting to it and embracing it. We just have to face it.

Check your knowledge.
Your ability to access ever more scarce, specialised skills will define your future success. It's your ability to establish a fast, agile, quick-to-assemble collaborative team that will define your ability to grab all the opportunity that is emerging out there. If you don’t have, it get it. Creative talent is your most valuable asset. Not mini-me’s and karaoke ideation. Look outside your industry. A sign of a truly crap company, waiting like a dinosaur for the meteor to hit, is their recruitment advert which says must have xxx years experience in such and such an industry. The job that should be advertised in that company is for a new CEO .

Know thine enemies.
Where are the threats likely to be coming from? Could new business models, technologies, new regulatory, political or social trends impact your bottom line in a way that you hadn't thought of before? The biggest clothing retailers are now the supermarkets!

Scout for talent.
Heads and ideas are your most precious asset and are going to be a scarcer and scarcer resource. Just as football teams scout the playing field of the world you must do the same. And don’t look in the normal places such as the Universities and the Milk round; look outside, at the new entrepreneurs, the children in school enterprise clubs, the single mums with passion, the new entrepreneurs, give them a platform and develop the management skills to utilise these in the best way for them, not you. People leave bosses, they don’t leave companies. The rewards in developing your talent pool are way above any ROI calculation.


Define your voice.
You have to keep people focused on the future. Not what happened last week. Leadership is largely about keeping your team focused on opportunity and goals, and then carrying the water for them to allow them to deliver. Positivity, talking about the future and consistency reinforce that. If you waver, so will they and then you are on pushing a snowball up a volcano.

21 Beautiful Questions for the newbi and the (Oldbi) Entrepreneur

My 21 beautiful questions for any new ( or old ) business to ask itself.... and should keep asking daily

1. How can you charge a premium price so you have a large margin to provide an extraordinary value and experience?

2. What is the ‘Reason Why’ customers should do business with you and pay you a premium.

3. What rules do we want to make the rules for your business and how can you prevent industry norms dictate how you’ll work or who you’ll work with.

4. How can you create your business around your life instead of settling for your life around your business?

5. How can we constantly force ourselves to focus on the ‘critically few’ proactive activities that produce exponential results. And prevent getting get caught up in minutiae and bullshit?

6. How can we minimise start-up risk but have maximum upside potential?

7.How can you get your idea out there as fast as possible even if it’s not quite ready by setting must-hit deadlines. Let the market tell you if you have a winner or not. If not – move on and fail forward fast! If it’s got potential – then you can make it better.

8. How can you find partners and team members who are strong where you are weak and appreciate being paid on results?

9. How can you avoid ever get paid based on hours worked.

10. How can you leverage your marketing activities exponentially by using direct response methods and testing?

11. How can you measure and track your marketing so you know what’s working and what’s not?

12. How best to Bootstrap? Having too much capital leads to incredible waste and doing things using conventional means.

13.Keep asking the right questions to come up with innovative solutions. “How?”, “What?”, “Where?”, “Who Else?” and “Why?” to open up possibilities. How can you get the headspace to realise that you will never have a perfect business and you’ll never be totally “done”? Deal with it.

14.How can you focus most of our time on your core strengths and less time working in areas you suck at?

15. How can you make it easier for customers to buy by taking away the risk of the transaction by guaranteeing what you do in a meaningful way?

16.How can you have something else to sell (via upsell, cross-sell, follow-up offer, etc) whenever a transaction takes place? The hottest buyer in the world is one who just gave you money.

17.How can you fire your most annoying customers? They’ll be replaced with the right ones.

18.How can you prevent the market from beating you down into being just a commodity? And how can you develop and build your business’s personality so that it that stands out. People want to buy from people.

19.How can you create your own category so you can first in the consumer’s mind?

20.What is the opposite direction competitors are headed – how can you go there? You’ll stand out.

21. How can we do the unexpected before and after anything goes wrong so customers are compelled to ‘share your story’?

50 things you need to know about your customers to help your innovation strategey

50 Great answers to the Beautiful question you should be asking your customers and would be customers , "What do wish that we knew about you?'

How will these enhance and focus your innovation strategy and impetus? These answers were originally written by my favourite blogger Sonia Simone. who is just a brilliant writer

1. I don’t need you to be perfect, but I do need to know I can rely on you.
2. Telling me what you don’t know makes me trust you.
3. It means a lot when you take the time to thank me for my business or a referral.
4. You don’t need to do all that much to be a superhero. Just do exactly what you say you will do.
5. A friendly voice on the other side of the phone means more than you can imagine.
6. Your employees treat me about as well as you treat them.
7. I don’t mind spending the money, as long as I feel I’m getting real value.
8. My life is really stressful. If you can reduce that stress, you become immensely valuable to me.
9. I want to tell you what would make this relationship better for me. Why don’t you ever ask me?
10. I don’t understand a lot of the messages you send me. Can you make them clearer?
11. My life is very complicated. If you make it easy for me to just buy a simple all-in-one package that I can use without learning anything, I’ll take it and be grateful. (I’ll even pay a premium for it.)
12. I want to trust you, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone.
13. Once you’ve won my trust and loyalty, the truth is you can screw up once in awhile and I will forgive you. If I don’t think you’re taking me for granted, that is.
14. When I refer my friends and you give them exceptional service, that makes me look and feel smart. I love that.
15. I spend an awful lot of time being scared to death.
16. The wealthier I get, the more I like free stuff.
17. A lot of the time, I secretly feel like a lost little kid. I don’t admit it, but I want to be taken care of.
18. I’m lousy at admitting I was wrong, but I respect you when you do it.
19. I like to get little goodies no one else is getting.
20. I don’t understand how to use your Web site, but I can’t admit that because it would make me feel dumb.
21. There’s no worse feeling than feeling like I was suckered into trusting you. If I’m screaming at you or one of your employees, that feeling is probably behind it somewhere.
22. Our relationship isn’t equal and it never will be.
23. I get crazy jealous if I think you love another customer more than you love me.
24. I don’t have any interest in your excuses. In fact, I usually don’t notice them at all, and if I do, they annoy me.
25. I find myself endlessly fascinating.
26. I hate salespeople, but I really like to buy things.
27. I only like to communicate over the phone/Web/mail and I hate when you try to make me communicate with you over the mail/phone/Web.
28. I want to buy your product, but I need you to help me justify it to myself.
29. There’s something in my life I’m afraid of losing. If you can make me feel like you’ve protected it for me, my gratitude will be intense and eternal.
30. I’ll give you anything you ask if you can help me not feel silly.
31. I want you to do the hard work for me. Even better if I can get all the credit.
32. I’d rather do it the convoluted hard way than learn something new.
33. I’d love to know something about your product that I could use to brag at a dinner party.
34. I have the attention span of a goldfish. Go too long without contacting me and I’ll simply forget you exist.
35. Money is no object when it comes to my obsessions.
36. What you think you’re good at is not what you’re good at. Ask me, and I’ll tell you what you do better than anyone else.
37. I like it when I feel like you’re talking just to me.
38. It infuriates me when you answer the phone while I’m talking with you face-to-face.
39. Embarrassment scares me more than death.
40. I’m lazier than I would ever admit.
41. I’m more selfish than I would ever admit.
42. I’m more vain than I would ever admit.
43. I’m more insecure than I would ever admit.
44. Despite all that, I secretly think I’m a better person than most people. Help me believe that and we’ll be fast friends.
45. I believe I deserve much more than I’m getting.
46. I want to tell you everything you need to know in order to sell to me, but I’m lazy. Make it easy enough and I will. (Especially if you flatter me a little.)
47. I don’t know what I want most of the time. You need to figure it out for me.
48. I mostly daydream about making life better for myself, but I’ll take action to keep from losing what’s mine.
49. I believe that most of what’s wrong in my life is someone else’s fault. Let me keep that cozy illusion and I’ll believe anything you say.
50. It really is all about me.

Innovation Management Top 20 tips

1. Don't always question.
I know it is what most of us do, and what the Gurus told you do in the old days of last year. They implored us to 'Question everything. Challenge every assumption'. You still do that, just don't get obsessed with it. Instead, revitalise the casual conversations and information sharing as a normal business practice. And devote as much as half of your time to developing that dialogue. You can't expect to learn a lot just by challenging your staff. They will, more often than not, give you the answer they think you want, especially if they have to give answers off the cuff. Welcome, unreservedly, one another's thoughts and opinions and give them time to respond.

2. Establish a nil tolerance for Mediocre Practice but don't polarise the process and focus too much effort on establishing Best Practice.
Instead focus on ways to eliminate worse practice. When is best good enough anyway? A Best practice will invariably come out in the end if you are initiating the other 19 ( or so) principles. Well a few of them anyway. Incrementally it is a much quicker fix, for both you and the customer. In any case the question you should be asking is 'Are you benchmarking yourself against the mediocre, the safe, and the obsolete? Is it a 'me to' action. Do you want to give Karaoke performance of Britney Spears or Ella Fiztgerald. For a lot of people Britney is good enough. But for some....

3. Actions SHOUT.
I'd like to introduce you to the CASER principle, with apologies to Gordon Gould, the first man to use the word, laser, whose acronym I have blatantly hijacked. (Laser actually stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation for all you pub quizzers out there, which is why you shouldn't really spell it with a 'z'.)
I have made up my own version. CASER which stands for Creativity Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Results.

If you can vividly show the effect, good or bad that results from the implementation of their ideas you reinforce the feed back of the original signal. Or, as Spiderman puts it to Dr Octopus, you get 'harmonic reinforcement'. Show them that you take their ideas seriously, and they will trust you more seriously to share their ideas.

3. Actively Look Out.
Scan the horizon, not just through the myopia of market analysis or the telescope of your marketing or sales department. That is an awfully narrow field of view. And, have regard not just for at the usual suspects, the competitors in your field or your own market. Navel fluff picking isn't pleasant to look at and you eventually look silly or deranged.

Most of the good ideas don't come from your own staff (Or you for that matter). You are not the stewards of all things 'magnificent'. Humbleness is truly attractive and inspiring. Acknowledgement of others contribution wins friends and accomplices.

4. Experiment Persistently.
Assume nothing. Enlightened trial and error outperforms any planning of intellects however flawless their rationale.You can, and must, plan ahead to know where you want to go, and what steps you will have to make to get there. But then put the plan aside and focus on the first steps. Regularly stop to reflect on the action and repeat the process.

3. Let go of the need to be right. It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.
Your mistakes are your experience. Pass it on. If you malign failure, you destroy entrepreneurship, snuff out innovation and in the end you harm the company. If you "forgive and forget" because you want to be that great boss you always wanted to work for, that same mistake will be repeated twice or a dozen times. Failure is normal, accept it, move on but demand that lessons be learned and communicated through the entire organisation.

Expect no less from everyone in your organisation.

4. Empower but support
It is absolutely all right, positively, to give assignments to people who have never done it before. The codicil is that, if you do, then it is your responsibility as a manager to provide them with a network of expert advisors whom you trust. Legitimacy lies in competence as much as position in the organisation chart. Position without competence results in disaster. Competence without position results in helplessness.

5. Don't refer to the 'Internal organisation'.
Talk about specific people. Referring to other organisations of the company as "them" is laying the ground for future excuses about the lack of results for everyone.
Organisations are almost inevitably impersonal, complex, and change every 24 months anyway. People and communities however are far more stable, resilient and trustworthy.

7. Kill off internal client-supplier relationships.
The internal market approach is the very worst possible form of internal collaboration. A client-supplier relationship in a monopolistic environment is the epitome of bureaucracy. It damages the social network and value of the company and paralyses its ability to solve problems for the customer. If you want to reinforce the silo mentality that is the next best way of doing it.

8. Before deciding on a plan, always ask with whom the plan was discussed.
The raison d'etre of the corporate manager is not to come up with the bright ideas, but with ideas shared with other stakeholders. Reject all proposals and action plans bearing only the signatures of your staff.

9. Involve people collectively in your thinking.
If you merely want compliance (at best) rather than real commitment then use managerial authority to deploy programs and plans from the top-down. Then sit back and watch it all unravel. If you want people to adopt your views and act accordingly, you must engage in meaningful conversations with them, and not "cascade down" or "communicate messages". If you have a teenager you will l know exactly what I mean.
Think about the power of stories. No-one is won over by a PowerPoint slide, a chart, other peoples quotations, or an Excel spread sheet. Well they shouldn't be. Nor will they ever adopt for themselves another's goals. Intellectually in the short term it may possibly- short term in this case being the five minutes after the Ra-Ra speech until the next problem hits them as they get back to their desk. For medium or long-term participation you need to connect emotionally (How to do that? Well that is the tricky part and the reason why 99.999% of all managers, including you and me are not Steve Jobs. See The Beautiful Question Part 11 posting for a possible answer)

10. Management is not so much about delegating to individuals than about organising and empowering groups.
Effective action ("execution") in any organisation is all about coordination and synchronization. Speed of execution is best achieved by self-synchronisation of competent people who understand and trust each other. The first job of a manager is to detect who these people are and make sure they work together in the right setting (working group, project team, community of practice...) Or separate them if they or in a dysfunctional group. .

11. It's not about giving objectives.
It's about making sure they understand your intent.If they really understand your goals and if it makes sense to them, they will figure out what to do by themselves. It is by far more difficult to articulate a clear intent than to give objectives. Those that figure out that particular trick are the true leaders. Remember the power of the story.

12. Never give targets without negotiating them first.
Giving measurable quantitative targets without negotiating them with those responsible for making it happen is just bad management. But negotiate hard and if you do shift their comfort zone, give them the support to deliver. Not an excuse to fail.

13. Don't Squirrel knowledge
Don't think that you always know what information is 'good' for your staff. Let them know what you know, give them access to every document you have, unless it is explicitly confidential or for a damn good reason. Don't work on a "need to know" basis. No one ever said 'Oh, that Barry bloke, he communicated too much'. Let them sort out the information overload. There are plenty of tools and tricks to help them. Even if you do cocoon them they will always find out but via half-truths, conjecture, second-guessing, the water cooler whispers and arrive completely at the wrong picture. Paranoia is a part of almost every human activity so don't give it more oxygen. It is far easier to manage any fallout than motivate the disenchanted.

14. History is good- Look back.
Encourage the promotion of the myths and legends. Balance market studies, action plans, specifications etc. With case studies, lessons learned, good practices. Spend some time reflecting on past experiences. And ingrain all new employees and stakeholders with the story. Commitment to the past reaffirms the company's culture and the brand.

15. Don't promote people that sound smart, but those who make sure that smart things happen.
The company's promotion process is the primary driver of employees' emotional positivity. It isn't money, or perks or glory. It can build or destroy confidence or simply reinforce the CGAS attitude.

16. Don't expect dedication from someone who fears for his job.
All efforts are stalled by the fear of job loss. If you need to fire people, do it at warp speed, and make sure it appears to all as an exceptional event.

17. Never manipulate your staff. You actually can't!
Employees are hypersensitive to inconsistencies and incoherence across an organisation. They immediately detect every ripple of manipulation when they hear conflicting messages. Largely, because they are looking for them and we come circling right back to the paranoia thing again. Establish trusted relations with your peers first. Trust is the bandwidth of communication

18. Get yourself a knowledge technology coach.
Communication and collaboration technologies are dramatically changing. E-mail for collaboration is becoming extinct. You need to up your game.