#frontiertips

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Create Your Own Competitive Advantage

Yesterday morning I took the stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair, surrounded by fellow book enthusiasts, to talk about marketing books in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. A few hours later one of my favorite clients took the stage in Las Vegas, presenting a deck and script we built together, in front of a crowd of fairgoers interested in products of another kind. Connecting our two presentations, half a world apart from one another, is a concept that’s undergoing serious revision: the idea of competitive advantage. A phrase that once suggested a long-term sustainable edge, you can’t use it in that context with a straight face these days. Competitive advantage must now be a way of doing strategy: Thinking about your product development plan and marketing playbook as agile realities, in a state of constant revision and refinement. My client knows this, and was presenting a suite of modular tools that will allow her to adjust easily to new market realities. Meanwhile, I was publicly exploring a particular case study: a traditional publisher supporting “intrapreneurship” in order to create solutions and uncover new opportunities while protecting their core business. However you’re doing strategy planning these days, I hope you’re doing it this way. If you are, tell us how it’s going. If you’re not, call us in. We’ll go halfway ‘round the world for you.

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Four Steps for a Successful Brainstorming Session

Joel Chan and Christian Schunn of the University of Pittsburgh sought to understand how "thought A led to thought B that led to breakthrough C." Via Fast Company:

Don’t filter. “If you start a meeting and you say, 'Okay, we’re gonna come up with really good ideas,' that can be a really bad way to start,” says Shunn. “With that kind of pressure to come up with the best ideas right away, you don’t have a sense of exploration. Things will kind of run dry.”

Don’t start with an example. Planting a solution which worked in the past in someone’s mind makes them much more likely to come up with similar solutions rather than new ones.

Use analogies. "They allow you to step between worlds that seem disconnected and connect them based on some structure to help you come up with new ideas, even if they’re not radical, and then build on them," says Chan.

Beware of incentives. When you give people incentives (like cash) for ideas, "they come up with lots of ideas and they tend to be very similar to each other but not a lot of creative ideas," says Chan.

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Trust

Screen shot from Bezo's launch of Amazon's phone.  How to build trust.

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Insight: Even the smallest distractions can seriously throw us off.

Evidence: Researchers asked participants to complete a series of tedious computer exercises and programmed interruptions to occur after every sixth step, requiring a code entry before returning to work.

They found that a 4.4-second interruption caused people to triple the errors they made when they returned to work, and after a 2.8-second distraction, they more than doubled their errors.

Why It Matters: This means that “it’s not just a phone call that counts as an interruption — just the ringing counts … even if all you want to do is find your phone and shut it off,” the study’s lead author, Michigan State University psychologist Erik Altmann, said.

What To Do: Try dedicating 60- to 90-minute chunks throughout the day to distraction-free work (studies show that’s about as much time as your brain can bear to produce quality work before needing a break, anyway). During that time, sign out of instant-messaging programs, turn off email pop-ups, put your cell phone away, and stay off social media — just imagine how many notifications you’ll have when you sign back on!

Source: NY Mag

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5 Ways To Be A Better Leader Today

"The more I learn, the more I know that I don't know much." It's so freeing to adopt that philosophy as a leader and realize leadership is a journey that evolves over time and experience. Its not a destination. You aren't going to wake up one day and say, "well, looks like I made it...I'm a leader."  It takes effort, internal course correcting, and a vision. Easy, right? Leadership styles can and will change. If you have a certain perception as a leader you can work to change that perception if you want to. Several quick and actionable tips to do just that:

1. Write your aspirational leadership descriptors down on a sticky note and have them on your desk so you are looking at them daily.

2. Ask 3 people to list 10 adjectives that describe you and see if they align with your leadership goals.

3. Allow for 30 minutes of weekly reflection for you to assess how your behaviors are stacking up against who you want to be as a leader - yes put 30 min on your calendar so you actually do this.

4. Be a servant leader. You're there to help others and the greater good. Don't be too proud to serve your people and walk alongside of them.

5. Stay inspired. There's no way you can effectively lead and inspire others if you're not inspired yourself. Maintain a work/life balance so you can do the things you love; find people, articles, podcast, books that inspire you and renew your thinking.

Bonus Tip: Find a mentor, a truth-teller, that knows you and has accomplished some of things you're wanting to accomplish. They'll be able to guide you, be a sounding board, and give you tough feedback while also affirming your strengths. 

- KL & MT

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Plagued with procrastination? Tips to stop and then start.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone” ― Pablo Picasso A little intense? Yes, but just go with it. The man had a point. Many of us are plagued with the procrastination monkey on our back. Endlessly trying to decide if we are "working smart or working hard", as the saying goes, or if we are spending our time on tasks that are trivial - enter the art of email jockeying. There is no shortage of difficult tasks that grace our desks on a daily basis. And no shortage of the more trivial, but necessary. It is universally difficult to not focus on the easiest of our to-do list, leaving the difficult for later when we have more time - a phenomenon that never happens. Whatever your procrastination pain, we have a few tips to avoid this pitfall. - Stop checking things. Don't keep jumping back to your email, Linkedin, Google Analytics, whatever. Just stop. Focus on one task at a time and avoid the other distractions your computer houses. - Aside from your calendar notification, remove all others. There's no reason to get pinged each time you receive an email. And to point #1, how are you able to stop checking your email if it's taunting you from the upper right corner of your screen with a visible alert and corresponding noise? - "Eat the Ugly Frog First". Complete the task that is the most difficult and the most time consuming, first thing in the morning. It's our knee-jerk reaction to arrive at work, get our bearings and start checking all communication mediums. Don't do it. Dig into the hardest task when your brain is the most effective. This will make you feel better about the rest of your day and remove the burden of that huge looming task. Other tips? Find us here. - BC