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I’ll pick up where I left off, with a (really) brief history of thinking outside the box.

As I was saying while referencing our paleolithic cousins,

 thinking inside the box has happened forever and is good; thinking outside the box has also happened forever and is also good.

Which is to say, both approaches are evolutionarily valid; they’ve contributed to our species’ survival. But as a consultant or entrepreneur, you may be more concerned with outside-box thinking – a mini-framework:

1. Notice patterns others don’t
2. Learning & doing stuff lots of different ways, with the goal of (a)
3. Learning & doing the same way over and over, also with the goal of  (a)

I think (c) is how we discovered the Olduvai Handaxe 1.5 million years ago in what is now Tanzania. You can see one of the earliest examples of it at the British Museum. I once stopped there after a day’s work at my Clerkenwell co-work. Look what I found:

This happened because someone used one stone to chip away at another stone, over and over, in a very controlled, artful way. Or many people did, for many generations. For perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. And finally they noticed and codified patterns that let them reliably replicate these useful objects.

These were so useful that in the exact same region, the Olduvai Gorge, the exact same objects were being made one million years after their invention.

The British Museum provides play-by-play detail:

This example is made from fine-grained, green volcanic lava called phonolite. Using a stone hammer, the maker has carefully struck flakes alternately from both faces around the entire edge, making it thinner at the tip and thicker and heavier at the bottom, with a regular edge all round. 

Imagine how much more useful the Olduvai handaxes were compared to any old rock you picked up off the ground.

… handaxes were used for a variety of everyday tasks, including all aspects of skinning and butchering an animal or working other materials such as wood

Not all version of these handaxes are as big as the one pictured, though. The versions used for hunting would have been lighter and smaller and as carefully honed as possible, whereas the versions used for skinning and butchering would have been as thick as possible, and possibly less carefully made.

In order to survive, people spent their time perfecting this axe. Effort well spent: they survived and thus, here we are as a species – not extinct yet.

Fast forward 1.5 million years, from East Africa to North America, to our recently deceased stone age homo sapien grandparents. There, 13,000 years ago, we still sharpened rocks to survive, yielding the Clovis point. This was quite an improvements over Olduvai stonetech – sleeker, more balanced, lighter, usuable as spearheads.

That’s because just like our ancient rock-artisans, we iterated improvements: a better blade stone or a better hammer stone. Maybe a new striking technique. Or maybe we applied heat. We applied Agile and eked out piecemeal innovations.

Whatever case, we were thinking inside the box – the “sharpen rocks to survive” box. Even if some of us were quite creative as we did so.

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Then – boom – true innovation struck: PsyOps hunting.

The first Buffalo Jumps happened about 5,500 years ago in the great plains of what is now Head-Smashed-In((“In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the buffalo plunge off the cliff from below but was buried underneath the falling buffalo. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.” via https://allaboutbison.com/buffalo-jumps/)), Canada.

Long before riding-horses, rifles, or bows & arrows appeared in North America, our forebears figured out how to use coyote costumes and carefully orchestrated movements to corral herds of bison from grazing pastures to steep cliffs.  Whipped into a panic stampede, some members of the herds were forced off steep cliffs, to fall to their deaths below. This yielded far more meat than any handaxe, no matter how light or how sharp.

Who knows how the first Buffalo Jump happened? Maybe one day, after thousands of years hunting bison, a few crazy hunters started wearing coyote masks? Maybe to startle their prey into an ambush consisting of a fellow hunter hidden on some perch. And then the lightbulb went off,

what if we drove them to the cliff?!

That’s pure speculation, by the way. But here’s what didn’t happen – a CTO co-founder didn’t say, “Okay guys, can we think outside the box here for a sec?”.

People who ask for outside-the-box-thinking might mean well, but they’re not understanding how it works. They’re asking the wrong question. They’re over-relying on meeting-banter to ideate. They’re thinking too hard and now allowing space to not think.

By the way. they are often the same kinds of people who are bent on productivity. I know because I’ve been that person. The problem is that productivity stamps out the opportunity to (repeating myself for emphasis):

1. Notice patterns others don’t
2. Do or learn in many different ways, to notice patterns
3. Do or learn the same way, obsessively, to notice patterns

And as we all love to blog about, productivity is not equal to effectiveness.

They want you to perfect the processes by which you make the axe, make more axes per hour, “innovate” better axe materials, and improve axe UX.

But no matter how many amazing axes you make, you’ll never drive a herd of 2,000-pound buffalo off a cliff and feed 100 family members for a year.

Happy hunting
– Rowan

 

In consulting, content creation, software, and other avenues of contemporary/digital entrepreneurship, a Point of View is an idea or set of ideas, about where, how or why value is created, or even how value is hidden or locked, in your marketplace.

Because of its linkage to value, others in your industry should find this idea impossible-to-ignore and should be likely to take action on it. A Point of View is often a personal and industry-specific take on some long-existing common wisdom. A Point of View is the prerequisite for Thought Leadership.

Using software algorithms, or algorithmic human processes, to make marketing decisions. Such decisions revolve around:

• say/display/show/send
• when, how much, or how frequently to do so
• to whom the above applies to
• when to stop doing the above

Common types of marketing automation include email drips, outreach email marketing, display advertising, content personalization, customized interactivity such as daisy chains, internationalization, and retargeting.

Notes
Marketing automation is under-utilized but when it is utilized, it’s typically over relied upon. The more a business automates marketing, the more room there is for (a) mistakes at scale and (b) expertise-based decision making.

A workplace-psychology phenomenon whereby it’s extremely difficult to de-promote someone once they been granted a promotion – no matter how badly suited they are for their new role.

Coined by Kevin Kelly:

a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence. 

 

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Clay Shirky’s words – Kevin Kelly coined the term.

The target for this principle is the big nonprofit industry, major corporations and organs of government (to wit, the “Military Industrial Complex”). 

But the Shirky Principle is conceptually (if not literally) applicable to independent expertise businesses. People who run such institutions are subconsciously inclined to amplify or exaggerate the problems they solve. For organizations like these, the workaround the Shirky Principle is to be diligent in recognizing non-problems.

A theory coined by Kevin Kelly holding that an artist or other content creator needs just 1000 enthusiastic customers to forge a career. The simple math employed in this widely cited and influential article reckons that the enthusiastic fan will pay $100/yr, yielding net revenue of $100,000/yr for the creator.

Whether the specific math is right, or whether it be 100 fans or 2,000 fans, is not the point. The point is to focus on cultivating small, targeted, niche audiences. 

This theory is mis-applied to consultants and entrepreneurs; they have customers, not fans. Thus, they may need far more or far fewer than 1000. For example, a healthy consulting services business has between 8 and 12 customers a year, for a total of perhaps 100 over a business-lifetime.

The first version of a product or productized service that has value both significant value to the user and to the business providing the product. For a product to be considered MVP, if has to have enough value that users are happy to pay for it.

Commonly misunderstood to be the first version of a product that has some value to the user – usually not enough that they are willing to pay for it.

Just a quick note here on “retargeting”, an odd little loophole that makes it possible for small, indie businesses to exploit the exact same advertising strategy used by massive brands. I wrote about this last year but looking over those posts, I wasn’t clear enough.

To be clear: you should get an Adroll account and experiment with retargeting. 

Who knows, maybe this won’t be true in 6 months. But I kinda think it will – and I think you should be aware of it.

On a recent client call, I had the chance to talk shop with another experienced hand at digital marketing. As we spoke, I reflected internally my surprise that retargeting is still the same opportunity as years ago. Gary Vee said in early 2018 that retargeting was a rare opportunity would end in 18 months. I believed this reasonable prediction at the time. But today it’s still a good opportunity; it hasn’t gotten expensive.

Before I go on, here’s how I define it:

Used interchangeably with remarketing, retargeting tracks a person’s visit to a website (via a browser cookie) in order to subsequently show ads to that person on other parts of the Internet.

For example, you visit a web page which details a book you are interested in. Then a month or even six months later, the book seller shows you an ad for that book on Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet.

You can think of retargeting as “reminder advertising”.

A few important points that I have omitted from the dictionary definition:

• Retargeting is unfairly thought of as privacy-invasive and conflated with truly invasive data aggregation driven by advertising. Properly executed, retargeting can be GDPR-compliant.
• Pretargeting, which is closely related, can also be performed ethically if correctly executed – but it’s trickier. It involves uploading a list of user profiles to an ad network like Facebook to see if any of your users match their users. Ideally you collect your users with something like an email subscription form that has an advertising disclaimer. Anyway, once you upload your list, the network then shows your display ads to matched user profiles already in their system. 
• Together, retargeting and remarketing are referred to as, “warm advertising”. As distinct from cold advertising, such as running ads on Google or Facebook to people who have no idea who you are. The terminological parallel is to sales calling – warm vs cold. 
• Retargeting is the only form of paid ads (as opposed to boosted content) I’d recommend to promote specialized, non-lead-magnet content, such as in-depth stories, podcasts, YouTube channels, or art.

The enduring profitability and low-entry point for retargeting is probably bolstered by:

• the pandemic lockdowns’ effect of creating more total ad space (even while spending on display ads is up 10% in 2020)
• the ongoing aversion to digital advertising
• the fact it’s still misunderstood or lumped in with cold advertising

There may be one more reason – in order for retargeting to be worth the investment, you need some web traffic (not much but some), and ideally, an ecommerce friendly-funnel.

In other words, you need a top of funnel, to drive decent traffic to the landing page where you drop the retargeting pixel. And even if you can’t sell your product or service on your site (that your retargeting ads link to), you should facilitate the booking of demos or sales calls that will do so.

With the above conditions met, retargeting makes sense for most businesses, even with modest web traffic, both because of the availability of easy-to-use adtech, like AdRoll, and because of the low cost of the advertising itself. 

Happy retargeting (:

Rowan

Used interchangeably with remarketing, retargeting tracks a person’s visit to a website (via a browser cookie) in order to subsequently show ads to that person on other parts of the Internet.

For example, you visit a web page which details a book you are interested in. Then a month or even six months later, the book seller shows you an ad for that book on Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet.

You can think of retargeting as “reminder advertising”.

What is success? My definition isn’t far off from the certification requirements for a B Corporation. These have evolved a lot since back in 2009 when I secured a BCorps badge for my former business, but the basic concept is the same: holistic value-creation.

Thus, I define success in business as the creation of sustainable financial and non-financial value in a way that includes everybody – owners, employees, contractors, customers, partners, community members, fellow citizens, and the environment itself. (Yes, that last bit encompasses flora and fauna.)

Which in turn means your business model designs for this kind of value creation – in fact, B Corps certification requires that your concretize such a business model by altering your company’s legally binding bylaws.

By this definition of success, Walmart is a total failure. For one thing (among many), it does the opposite of creating financial value for its fellow-citizen tax payers – by forcing them to subsidize its own underpaid and exploited workforce. 

And meanwhile, millions of unknown small businesses are successes.

As long as you’re defining success for your business, you might as well think about how that translates to your own success.

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As I have mentioned, you should explicitly define all the words important to your business. “Personal success” is probably on that list.

Personal success is harder to define because it’s subjective, cultural, arbitrary, messy, and fluid. The default definition (wealth, power, fame) comes from 17th C. puritan theologians who viewed financial achievement through hard work as evidence of God’s blessing. Some trace the coinage of the concept to a 1684 business and personal development book, “The Tradesman’s Calling”, by Richard Steele. 

Let the religious tradesman be excited to the practice of industry. It conduces much to our temporal prosperity; the diligent are usually blessed with plenty; and no doubt affluence is a blessing…

Popular culture may have a less Godly idea of success than in Steele’s time, but don’t we still suspect that hard work and getting financially rich are inherently virtuous?

If you don’t explain to yourself what a word means, you will use the explications of others. And they may ignore your best interests. If you don’t define your personal success as a participant in your business, then the legacy of Richard Steele will do it for you.

Other, non-financial factors to consider:

• cultivation of expertise or artistry
• influence over a group of people
• quantity and quality of relationships
• quality of spiritual experience
• self-acceptance
• lifestyle balance
• the perfect cry-to-laughter ratio
• contentment

I bet there are many more… the cultivators of lifestyle balance are usually blessed with the perfect cry-to-laughter ratio; and no doubt self-acceptance is a blessing

There’s another way to distance yourself from the Puritans’ idea of business or personal success, however. Stop thinking of it in terms of any subjective qualities, let alone objective metrics, tied to a point in time, such as your 30th birthday or your death. Instead, consider that success is an agreeable state of mind by which you (and your colleagues, clients, etc) experience the work you do today.

To your success,
Rowan