Stay hungry, stay foolish

We’re on track with our launch.  I am excited to share it with you.

Check out this commencement speech by Steve Jobs.  If you’ve seen it before, watch it again.  Don’t settle.

“Give and Take”

The market doesn’t care when your company was founded.  The market doesn’t care about your industry awards.  The market doesn’t care about your slogan.

The market doesn’t care about our concerns; it cares about its concerns.

When marketing, sales and management are oriented toward what ‘we’ want, the market sees us as taking, not giving.  When we seek to take, it sets the tone of the transaction.  It says, “My agenda for ‘us’ is really ‘me’.

The market (customers and employees) appropriately and necessarily go into protection mode.  Once they realize that the other side more ‘foe’ than ‘friend’, they withhold everything they can while still getting what they want.

What they withhold is trust, loyalty, creativity, cooperation, information, and openness.  And all that and more is what your business doesn’t get.

This is the default position of business.  This is why 75% + of the working population isn’t engaged or fulfilled at work.  This is why it is so hard to get and keep loyal customers.

Is it any wonder why there is so much fear today?

Does this sound like a huge opportunity to you?

Q1 Trust Report

Nearly everyone knows what they do.  Not everyone knows how they do it, and most don’t know why they do it.

Marketing and management follow this approach.  We talk all about the “what”.  “We sell a cloud computing solution”.   Then we follow with the brief description of how we do it highlighting some clever features or capabilities.

All good stuff, but it doesn’t reach the part of our brains that make the decision.

We make decisions based upon the “why”.  We think we make them based upon facts, but we really make them based on the “why” and then rationalize our decision with facts so that we appear to have made an intelligent choice.

Brute force marketing does everything it can to manipulate the pitch to sound like the intelligent choice.  But even if they build revenue, they are not building trust.

And trust is completely different from revenue.  Trust will refer more revenue. Trust will increase margins.  Trust will ensure that Q2, Q3, and Q4 are also strong quarters.

What would happen if we measured trust each quarter?

What would happen to earnings?

How would the market react?

West, meet East, she will be working with us from now on…

Our knowledge has expanded greatly with the help of science and technology, but our overwhelming bias is towards all that we can see, touch and feel.  Science and measuring are great.  They’ve made so much possible.  Like this blog post.

But our awareness concerning how we personally function is still quite limited. Especially in the western world because our intentions are formless and cannot be touched or measured with instruments.

Every business transaction is between people.  Every business transaction is about how I perceive your value and how you perceive mine.  Every transaction therefore is about how well we know and represent ourselves and how we understand and communicate with someone else.

We have been separating business and personal, work and play, left brain and right brain for long enough now.  It served its purpose, but the key to business (and our society’s) success in this century will be how quickly we integrate our forgotten side.

As always there are advantages to being first.  It’s foggy right now.  Most people are scared and confused because what they have always done isn’t working as well as it should.

Imagine driving your car and suddenly your steering wheel response becomes unpredictable.  That’s what work and life are like today for most people. And that makes now a really great time to introduce your east to your west.