Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman's Blog About Surprise

What I Learned This Week: The Importance of Virgin Eyes

 About 10 months ago, our faithful Maytag dishwasher gave up the ghost, puffing its last sigh of hot drying air on the collected table settings and cutlery of a Friday family meal.

The very next day, my wife and I replaced it with a shiny, new, high-end machine from Miele.

Only problem is that the new, sleeker machine was about two inches narrower than the hole left by the departed Maytag.  We made a note to call our contractor and order a customized piece of molding to match the kitchen and close up the offending gap (see the offensive gash at right).

So here I sit, composing this blog post, 10 months later, and that hole still stares me in the face.

Why?

Because it's become "part of the furniture."  

This gaping wound used to drive me nuts.  For the first few weeks, it was an ugly daily reminder of a job unfinished, a scar on my otherwise perfect kitchen, a source of embarrassment that I would hide from others by leaning against it.

These days, after countless calls to the contractor, two missed appointments of repair and a handful of "I'll do it myself over the weekend," I hardly notice it anymore.

What was once jarring is now invisible.

Which brings me to this week's learning--the importance of using Virgin Eyes.

The concept of Virgin Eyes was one of the key points I introduced in my Pow! book (for the two or three of you reading this who have still not purchased it, you can do so by clicking here), under the tactic "Wear Virign Contact Lenses."  In a nutshell:

"Wearing Virgin Contact Lenses enables you to paradoxically see things again for the first time.  Directions are simple: insert, then look at your product, your service, your dilemma as if you've never seen it before."

The lack of Virgin Eyes causes corporate blight, and stains reputations of businesses large and small.  I see it all the time:

• the crack in the elevator mirror
• the piece of loose brown countertop held in place by a square of grey duct tape
  
• the boardroom wall marred by chipped paint and holes where hooks used to hold paintings
• the exposed extension cord or snake of computer wires
• the frayed edge of a laminated restaurant menu

...I can go on forever.

The chestnut cliche "Time Heals All Wounds" is indeed true physically; the passage of days and weeks renders the aberration into the commonplace. 

But emotionally?  Spiritually? Reputationally? (Hey, I just coined a new term!)  Your customer, your client, your friends don't see things the same way you do.  What has become invisible to your eyes is still harsh to theirs.

So the lesson here is to see the everyday as if it were the first day.  Notice the things that others will notice...and fix the ones that you'd rather they wouldn't.

Trust me, it will make a difference.  A very positive difference.

That said, lemme call that damn contractor one last time...

What ELSE I Learned This Week: When Bad Email Happens To Good People

Always send to yourself first!

This is what happens when merge fails...

 

What I Learned This Week: Ambiguity Is The Devil's Volleyball

Perhaps comedian and old friend Emo Philips said it best when he uttered this literal handful--a mere five words!--of concise wisdom:

"Ambiguity is the Devil's volleyball."

Three times this week I saw it happen.

To be clear, I three times this week saw what happens when things ain't clear.

--I saw a hard-worked, lengthily-negotiated business agreement almost come crashing down because both sides thought the other was responsible for the next step.

--I saw an A-plus level fundraiser thrown into a state of peril because of miscommunication over the featured attraction's commitment.

--And I saw a solid friendship teeter because of poorly explained expectations over timing and location of multi-family Spring Break vacation.

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard rain... (I digress, but Dylan fans get what I mean.)

Given the state of modern technology, there's no excuse anymore for "he said/she said" or "I thought you meant..." arguments.  Our electronic workshop provides us with a plethora of tools--email, voicemail, synced calendars, web reminders...I can go on for hours--that allow us to plan, to share plans, to confirm plans and to cover our asses five times over with Teflon and Kevlar and other bullet-proof materials.  

That said, there's little or no excuse anymore for anything BUT clarity.

It sounds pedantic and obvious, but clarity is the lubrication for progress.  Life works so much better with an "I get it!' than with a "Huh?"

Problem is that rather than being met with a demand for an explanation, most vagueness is met with interpretation, which leads to further uncertainty, which...well, you get the drift.

So what did I learn this week?

Be precise. 

Say what you mean.

And confirm that what you meant to say is what is understood.

Get it?

If not, well...it's your serve.

Something Cool, Magical and iPopping OTHER THAN the iPad...

Okay, so it's NOT the 100% be-all and end-all subject matter of this blog anymore, but jeez, I still dig it big-time when one of the globe's most major marketers exploits the element of Surprise for fun...and profit.

Jeez, these people are having so much fun, you'd think they were at an Apple product launch or something...;)

What I Learned This Week: The Biggest Waste In Marketing (A Dirty Secret)

Its origin is debated, but one of the classic marketing quotes (and conundrums) is:

"Half of my advertising budget is wasted. The problem is, I don't know what half."

Well, here's the answer:

BUS ADVERTISING IN WINTER

Over the past couple of weeks, at home in Montreal and on vacation in Vail, I marveled at how utterly inefficient bus backs and sides are when fighting the elements from December to March. Some of them got so filthy that they were totally, unequivocally illegible. Even the buses that were lucky enough to get an overnight wash saw their ad panels caked in slush and grime by lunchtime.

In many cases, without Superman's X-ray vision and a good pair of glasses, you'd be hard pressed to even venture a guess at the identity of a company and/or its message. Why an advertiser would want to showcase its valued brand under a layer of yuck is a mystery to me (unless, of course, they play with the medium, and use the filth as part of the message...but I digress), but that mystery only serves to solve the one laid out at the top of this post. 

At best, given the pipe dream of an everyday wash throughout the winter months, by mid-day, Mother Nature will be your bus ad's creative director, and she's using a skanky palate of greys, blacks and browns.  Without a brush.  Tossing 'em about like a combination of Jack Frost and Jackson Pollack.

So unless you're selling ugly, you're wasting half your budget.

At least half of it...

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UPDATE:

This just in courtesy of Bernie Malinoff...how winter yuck can kill your brand:

What I Learned This Week: The Seven Words That REALLY Matter (Defining Your Decades)

Throughout the holidays and into last week, I read countless attempts by columnists, pundits, philosopher kings, bloggers and analysts (did I forget anyone?) trying to define the first decade of this 21st century with its own proprietary word or term.

And while I understand the media's need to slap a personality onto each 10-year span (i.e. "The Me Decade" or "The Swinging '60s"), I think that instead of trying to understand decades as a whole, we should reflect on what they mean to us on a more personal level.

Let me explain--over the weekend, I brought a pair of jeans that needed hemming to a tailor I've been dealing with my whole adult life.  I was introduced to him by my late mother, and have introduced him to my kids...he's fit and fixed the clothes of three generations of Nulmans.  Anyway, Allan the Tailor told me he's retiring. 

"I'm 80 years old now," he explained. "I'm not well, and at this age, I have to think about closing up shop...in more ways than one."

"Hmmm," I said to myself, "so that's what you think to yourself when you're in your '80s..."

This got me to thinking about decades and words/terms that really matter to us while we're living them. If my goodbye to Allan taught me anything, decades are defined by a change in what our predominant, deepest, most innermost thoughts are, not by slick catch-phrases.

So all that said, here's MY list of Decade-Defining Words, with brief explanation. I capitalize (and italicize, and bold) the word "MY" because I'm sure YOU may disagree with, or even take offense, to 'em. If so, bark it out and tell me yours...but now, without any further ado:

In Your 10s (and teens):

POPULARITY

(What matters most: your social status and what others think of you)

In Your 20s:

INDEPENDENCE

(You're not a kid anymore, and want to be taken seriously)

In Your 30s:

RECOGNITION

(If indeed there is a "me" decade, this here's the one)

In Your 40s:

REVENUE

(Not as selfish as it sounds; really more about providing for family, and future)

In Your 50s:

RELEVANCE

(When you really start to see a generation gap, and question where you stand)

In your 60s:

SECURITY

(Personal, financial, relationships...all trying to be solidified)

In Your 70s:

COMPANIONSHIP

(Oh please, don't let me be lonely...)

I'll stop there...perhaps Allan defined his 80s in a way that is a little too depressing to contemplate right now. 

And I've got a few weeks--Jeez, I've got a few decades!--ahead of me to learn a new word for that one.

What I Learned This Week: All Ideas Are Born Equal (Even the Stupid Ones)

Four wildly diverse concepts have serendipitously collided to provide the impetus for this week's learning:

• The publishing of an interview I did with McGill U prof Karl Moore
• Seven days of riding the lifts at Vail Mountain
• The frenzy of last week's CES innovation orgy
• The inspirational message of next week's Martin Luther King Day

It all began with a question from Moore in an interview about entrepreneurship we did a few weeks ago during McGill University's Homecoming Week (you can catch the whole thing on video by clicking here). He asked me:

"What's the difference between a good idea and a bad one?"

My immediate answer was flippant, but I think rather on-target: "Success."  It's the ultimate qualifier, the X-factor that separates the champs from the chumps, so to speak.

But as I elaborated, I actually learned something...from myself, ironically:

All Ideas Are Born Equal 

I explained that, in essence, all ideas start off the same, with equivalent merit.  They begin to travel a parallel path down the same road, but at one point, some ideas die while others continue to fly. Eventually, after numerous drop off points along the way, a lucky few ideas reach the pinnacle of success...and are thus deemed "Good," I suppose. 

The process of idea survival, from conceptulization to realization, is very Darwinian.  The real learning though, is that at birth, all ideas have an equal chance at success; at the point of conception, nobody truly knows the end result. (As I mentioned to Prof. Moore: "If I could accurately predict the future, I wouldn't work, I'd buy lottery tickets.")

To me, ideas are like children--at birth, there is no such thing as a "good kid" or a "bad kid."  Their eventual fate, and defining "labels," will be decided by time, nurturing, upbringing, hard work and a sprinkling of luck.

Which brings us to CES. 

The number of ideas borne from this annual techfest madhouse is somewhat overwhelming, and the consumer marketplace battlefield is littered with the silicon, plastic and metal corpses of well-intentioned concepts that have crashed and burned.  Some are stillborn inside the booths of the Las Vegas Convention Center; others die a very public and expensive death, taking careers, reputations and stock prices down with them.

However, nobody goes into CES with the feeling that "My idea sucks." Hope springs eternal for every company and their respective "babies," and everyone at CES believes that someday soon, their kid's gonna play in the big leagues.  Yet, in reality, when it comes to the hundreds of ideas that see life over a four-day span:

• Today's sure thing may be tomorrow's laughing stock (uh, speak to Microsoft about Vista...or to NBC about Jay Leno).
• Today's eye-rolling cause for ridicule may be tomorrow's industry-leading standard.

Which brings us to the hills of Vail.  Doing upwards of 10 marathon-like runs a day leaves you with a lot of contemplation time riding to the top of the mountain, and I spent much of it thinking about the high-speed detachable quad lifts that took me there. 

Before the advent of these lifts, which fly at an average 13.6 miles per hour, riders moved up the mountain on fixed cables at a speed of about 5.5 mph. In trying to solve the problem of moving more people faster in the late '70s, one Doppelmayr engineer had the guts, the vision, or the foolhardiness, to propose:

"Hey, why don't we speed up the cable to more than twice its speed, and then, at the top and bottom of the hill, simply remove the chairs, and then re-attach them?"

Just think of the reaction that humdinger of an idea must've brought. 

CRAZY!  FOOLISH!   DANGEROUS!  RIDICULOUS!

Yet it was the one idea that survived all subsequent drop-off points, as Wikipedia points out in a very comprehensive look at chairlifts: "They (detachable lifts) are now commonplace at all but the smallest of ski resorts."

REMEMBER:

All Ideas.

Born equal. 

Even the stupid ones.

Yup, some ideas are indeed stupid (which is why I can't stand brainstorming sessions that begin "There's no such thing as a stupid idea").  And I don't mind stupid ideas; as we've seen, they sometimes reach the success pinnacle while their seemingly "smart" brethren die on the vine.  It's the mertilessness of the uninspired idea that gets me down.

That said, here's an idea I had while riding the Doppelmayr towers: 

The precious commodity of every mountain resort is snow.  Yet after every snowfall, so much of the stuff never actually reaches the surface of the runs themselves.  Instead, it covers the trees that line the routes; picturesque, yes, but a valuable waste as the surface snow gets worn down and groomed.  So here's the idea:

Why not invent some sort of blowing device that can attach to a small helicopter or plane and puff the snow from the trees onto the runs?

Yes, it sounds nuts, but I'm sure that detaching and re-attaching chairs from a lift line did too the first time it was uttered.  Same goes for the idea of "guns" that "make" snow...which are also now standard at all ski resorts.  Save this post for 10 years and see what path this idea travels...

So, all this to say, we need to promote un-judged ideas. In exponential quantities.  Ideas are a numbers game--the more we generate, the greater the chance of multiple successes and breakthroughs.  As I told Prof. Moore (gee, I was glib that day) eventually, the hand of fate will either congratulate you with a pat on the butt or humble you with whack to the head.  

That's the separation process, the one that comes at the end.

But in the beginning--as expressed by Thomas Jefferson and used as a rallying cry for Martin Luther King--all ideas, like all men, are all born equal.

So here's a toast to baby boom of ideas.  Raise your glass, and think up.