advocacy

What to obsess over

What to obsess over:

The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it’s not going to fundamentally change your business.

I’d have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today…

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

[Agreed. Now that measuring things is getting easier, deciding what to measure is important. In world where people espouse “measure everything” that firehouse quickly needs some arbitration.]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Survivorship

[Feel free to skip the Lance stuff, it just illustrates my point…]

Lance Armstrong | Ritte van Vlaanderen Bicycles:

Doping will undoubtedly make you a faster cyclist, no argument there. What doping won’t do though is make you win the Tour de France 7 times in a row. A higher hematocrit doesn’t instill in someone a maniacal drive to not just succeed but dominate. HGH doesn’t help you climb back from the edge of near certain death and come back to the sport you love to not just compete but win. Corticosteroids don’t lift you off the tarmac on Luz Ardiden and propel you to victory. All those things will make you faster, they don’t make you win. Cycling is not some magical sport where as soon as a red blood cell agitating needle touches your vein you’re vaulted into the ranks of legends. Cycling is like every other sport in existence, there are amateurs and professionals. The professionals are so much better than the amateurs that it is literally impossible for us to understand the scope of their competitive level. All of the pharmaceuticals in the world aren’t going to turn me into a professional bike racer let alone a multiple Tour champion. There is a reason there are so few dominant athletes across the sporting spectrum. They all share a insatiable ferocity that equates losing with failure. It is not enough to just win, they must destroy. Jordan, Federer, Woods, Schumacher and Merckx (who tested positive let’s remember) all athletes who relished the opportunity to exhibit the superiority of their talent. The list of sporting legends is short because becoming one is so damn impossible. Doping doesn’t make champions otherwise I would have been on the cover of Wheaties boxes years ago.

Lance not only did something which has never been done in cycling but he also was the reason so many of you probably even know what the sport is right now. And rather than fading into mild obscurity only to emerge selling half decent bikes with his name emblazoned across the down tube like so many other past champions he funneled his fame and efforts into a cause that affects nearly each and every one of us at some level. Does doping change the fact that he beat cancer? Does doping change the fact that he decided he wouldn’t die? Does cancer give a shit if he doped? And before you talk about how his inspiration was fueled by deception lets just remember that World War II was ended by an lifelong alcoholic and a rampant philanderer. They did know a thing or two about great quotes though.

So while it seems that so many of you are so happy with this decision and relieved that we can finally move forward I sit here (in a Hermes scarf and Dolce slippers of course) sad. Sad for the sport and sad for a great champion. Because this embarrassing USADA charade masked in “unbiased fairness” has done nothing to clean up cycling. It has sullied it further. It’s the frothing at the mouth, pitchfork wielding mob who upon finally burning down the subject of their ire are left standing around a smoldering pile of smoke and ashes that lies on the front steps of their own house. Nothing will change because of this and if so many of you are so happy to see this outcome then I suggest you quit watching professional cycling altogether. It’s not cleaner now than it was, the sport will always have cheats and the science will always be one step ahead of the piss cups. This is a black eye for cycling, let’s just hope there’s enough ice to stop the swelling.

[I’m rereading Laurence Gonzales’ incredible collection of books about the systems related to accidents and the mental mechanisms that apply to survival. Well worth (re)reading. He finds an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what he calls “deep survival”–go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive. Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe–the strategies remain the same. LG writes: “Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event–you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer–you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history.” And so with any life altering event you trigger survival mechanisms. And as with all things extreme and not some do, some don’t. Everyone who does has something to teach. Possibly too, those who don’t Or at least their stories. Years ago, fascinated by the history and often tragic stories that take place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where I’ve enjoyed so much outdoors time) it was interesting to go back and look at some of these stories from Gonzales’ standpoint. And also from my own and what I’ve learned about surviving. So whether or not you care about what Lance did or didn’t do to win, he’s a survivor. And taking a look at his story as relates to the stuff in LG’s books makes that very clear. Don’t assume that this is the last chapter. He’s more than just a badass bike racer. And if in these recent times you’ve survived being bounced out of job and have landed on your feet… If you were in a car wreck that have left scars on you… If you made it away from an abusive spouse and are now in the arms of someone who loves you… you have something to teach and share. Please do so.]

Open infrastructure and the common good

Open infrastructure and the common good:

At this very moment you’re using a magnificent outcome of this kind of “common good” approach that I’m talking about—the Internet. Yes, yes, I’ll pause for you to crack an Al Gore joke here, but let’s not miss the point. The Internet exists the way it does because no private or state actor owns it, right? The reason no private or state actor owns it is because of explicit decisions made by both its creators and funders to treat it as a common good. From TCP/IP up to higher-level protocols like HTTP and electronic mail, no company or government agency has the power to declare “from this point in time forward, things using this protocol will be different.”

Those protocols are open infrastructure. Sometimes they have nominal owners but control has been relinquished to a standards body; sometimes they’re true public domain. Businesses can build on them, governments can try to spy on them, and of course vice-versa—but they’re public roads, not private ones. Everybody can use whatever web browser they want or email client they want or MP3 player they want. People can (and do) build businesses on top of those protocols, just like businesses in the physical world are built on top of physical infrastructure that those businesses only pay for indirectly.

[Interesting thinking. But spot on in the above.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Crash diets and good habits

Crash diets and good habits:

Your audacious life goals are fabulous. We’re proud of you for having them. But it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you–the shift in daily habits that would mean a re-invention of how you see yourself.

Organizations can always benefit from better habits. Every day. Do that first.

[I think this every time I set a goal. Because they all seem to fall into one category or the other. Set the habits in place that will allow you to accomplish the audacious goal and you will.]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Lance Armstrong: Victim?

Lance Armstrong: Victim?:

But it’s not the what of this case that bothers me, it’s the how. Ends do not always justify means, and sometimes, in order to preserve higher values, you have to let guilty parties walk. In this instance, I’m less concerned about proving that Lance’s yellow jerseys are smudged than with the fact that USADA keeps mutating into what looks like a law-enforcement body, which it isn’t.

USADA, which participated in the federal investigation, isn’t part of the U.S. government and isn’t a judicial body. Newspaper stories tend to shorthand it as a “quasi-governmental” entity, but that’s not accurate. USADA is a private non-profit corporation hired to manage the anti-doping program for American athletes who hope to participate in the Olympics as well as various local, regional, national, and international competitions. And it’s gotten out of control.

[Worse yet, there’s nothing in this for anyone (outside the folks with the vendetta). It’s all ancient history from a sporting sense, and if you care about who winds up being listed as the winner of the races, there probably isn’t anyone in the top ten that I think was clean in those days. This simply seems predatory. Just when they thought Lance was gonna have to deal with the same sort of stuff Barry Bonds etc. did, there was no case. Now this smack of anger and retribution. Stop wasting everyone’s time and money. It’s over.]

[and…]

Think about that for a moment. The current anti-doping superstructure started out as an effort to prevent cheating in privately run games. Now we’re talking about Interpol and international treaties and fudging American legal principles.

That’s why, if experts are correct—and Armstrong’s lawyers are setting up an attack on USADA’s methods and authority—we could be in for a big and very important battle. Even if you are a Lance hater, and it pains you to think that he doped and might get away with it, you might want to pull for him this time.

[This reeks. And it has nothing to do with Armstrong. It’s fundamentally wrong.]

World Champion Water-Bottle Fetcher

Leg-Breaking Climbs, Crashing for Shoe Covers, and World Champion Water-Bottle Fetcher:

But one of the things that marked me the most today was Mark Cavendish. At one point on the first climb I think, I saw him fading back. At first I was like, “Oh, is he getting dropped?”

Then a few minutes later I saw him coming back up with his world championship jersey just stuffed with water bottles and I was like, “How cool is that?” It is not every day that the world champion is working for the common cause. But it also scares me because if the world champion is a domestique, just how good is the team?

By the looks of Sky’s performance today, very, very, very good.

[David: “Don’t let your company culture become one where certain people are too good to do the jobs that need doing. Making shit work is everyone’s job.” Clearly the case on this team. Allez!]

Source: Hardly Serious with Jens Voigt

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You:

The reward for winning is the perception that you’ve won. In your celebration of your awesomeness, you are no longer focused on the finish line, you now lack a clear next goal, and while you sit there comfortably monetizing eyeballs, you’re becoming strategically dull. You’ve forgotten that someone is coming to eat you and if you wait until you can see them coming, you’re too late. Just ask Nokia or RIM.

The Devil in the Details

Apple’s current biggest competitor is itself, and I think Steve Jobs learned this the hard way – from the sidelines. When he returned, one of his first hires was a gentlemen named Tim Cook, and while Tim Cook holds a degree in industrial engineering, he is not an engineer, a designer, or a poet. Tim Cook is an execution machine and he exists at Apple to enable them to pull off one thing – the iPod Mini moment.

By initially focusing on getting Apple out of manufacturing and streamlining the supply chain, yes, he dramatically improved margins and it’s a lot easer to kill a bestseller under the warm blanket of an attractive balance sheet. But Cook’s larger contribution is an operations team that enables them to build and ship new products with increasingly ferocious regularity.

The reason you’ll see new iPhone hardware in the fall and yet another iPad come spring is because Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.

If you think nothing revolutionary was announced at the recent WWDC event, if you think you’ve heard it all, I ask you to think about what they’re not talking about. I was thinking about the iPod Mini as I watched the announcement of the MacBook Pro. While it is certainly one of the sexiest pieces of metal on the planet, it also represents painfully consistent execution by Apple.

Yes, you’ve heard it all before – Retina display, thinner, faster, and more, but I trust Apple when they say they re-imagined everything in the design. I fully expect there is design work in the MacBook Pro that you’ve never heard of that will give the next iPhone or iPad a competitive edge and I believe the experience they’ve gained executing this design will allow them to not only maintain, but increase momentum.

How long can they keep it up? I don’t know, but I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

[One of the keys here is to have a next goal prepped and ready for after you’ve achieved success. And possibly a different one if you fail.]

Why Lance matters a lot and not at all

Why Lance matters a lot and not at all:

You also stopped caring because at this point doping is factored into your view of the pro peloton. You know some people are doing it. You know that extraordinary results from ordinary people are suspicious. You know that just like in every other sport, some people will cheat and get away with it. And you know what? Who cares? Catch them if you can, but please let me sit back and enjoy the freak show and don’t remind me every ten minutes that it’s professional wrestling on bikes. And grab me another beer while you’re up.

[Smack on. This applies to all pro sports by the way… at least for me.]