Month: August 2009
-
Fertile Fallacies
Recently while reading George Soros’ book on the Crash of 2008, he discusses something he calls “Fertile Fallacies” which I found quite interesting. The basic idea is that there is some knowledge that seems very true and early experiments in that information continue to confirm it’s veracity, but eventually the fallacy catches up with you…
-
Focus Management
How many times has someone asked you about an action that you committed to and you responded: “I’m sorry. I haven’t had time to get to that yet”. Many of these tasks would take only 5 minutes or less to do, so are you really saying you didn’t have 5 minutes to perform this…
-
Kings & Marketing To Perceived Desire
Earlier this spring, NBC announced a new show called “Kings”. They advertised it heavily, trying to build momentum for a show about what life might be like if we lived with a modern monarchy. I saw the ads and had little interest in watching (or even DVR’ing the show) and I wasn’t alone. The show…
-
Target Your Customer Not The Public
Yesterday, my colleagues and friend sent out a link with the title: highly effective marketing. On top of being one of the best software architects I have ever worked with, my friend is also an avid guitarist and wood worker. I watched the video with zero knowledge of wood working and was shocked by the…
-
The Context Matters
A couple of weeks ago, while visiting Colorado, I noticed a number of people advertising their businesses on their cars to varying degrees of success. It made me think that while you do get a lot of people looking at your “ad”, you are also providing a lot of context about your company based on…
-
Terminator, Attention and Storytelling
This last week, we went and watched the latest Terminator movie. Essentially, it takes place after the machines are trying to kill all of the humans and ends up providing more of the backstory to the previous two movies. In the movie, there are several fight scenes that take place in factories where the robots…
-
Seeing Through The Facade
Everyone has a front, a facade, a face they put forward for the world to see. It’s how they want to be perceived by those around them. If the front differs from reality, reality will be discovered. This is particularly true with companies that have many customers who have a megaphone (i.e. the internet). You’ll…
-
Created to Perceive Change
Over the years, in a number of locations, there is a common theme to the way our senses were created, namely, that they sense change. Here are some examples: Touch – Classic experiment, take one hand put it in a bucket of cold water, another in a bucket of hot water and let them…
-
The Sandpaper Effect
There are many occasions where the first time something mildly annoying happens, we simply let it pass. It might even be novel or amusing, but gets increasingly less so as time passes. A joke that is told once is funny, second time, meh. Third, forth, fifth, sixth times it just gets increasingly annoying. The same…
-
The Challenges of Growing Big
How much money did you make for your business last year? If you are an entrepreneur in a small business (or in sales), the number probably pops in your head right away, or at least a method to get there. If you work in a large organization, you probably don’t know and don’t even know how you could know.…