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Advertising / Marketing"I'm
not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won't sell. I'm just saying
that I've seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn't. Let's
say you are a manufacturer. Your advertising isn't working and your sales
are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it,
your family's future depends on it, other people's families depend on it.
Now, what do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces?
Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do
you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving
up?" "Finally
the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that
there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied
customer,. . .inside an enterprise there are only cost centers. Results
exist only on the outside." "Marketing
is far too important to leave to the marketing department." "Just
about every company thinks of itself as market oriented. It's confident
it has the strength to compete with the wolf pack, but in reality it's
often weak and tends to follow the shepherd." "It's
important to understand that marketing is like moving a steering wheel,
then waiting months before the car turns." "'The [British] Ministry,' he wrote, 'have caught the colonies as I have often caught a horse, by holding an empty hat, as if it was full of corn. . ."' from the book John Adams "On average, about 15 percent of leads will be hot, or ready to buy, and another 15 percent will be so cold they will never buy. It's the remaining 70 percent - the solid but not ready prospects - that are ignored by most sales forces." - Anthony Meggs "Creativity is basically subversive. . . ." - Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy "Thank God they crated the word 'muffin' or I'd be eating a cupcake for breakfast." - Marty Liebowitz as quoted in an article by Bo Peabody, Inc., pg 93, Jan "05. "People remember what you repeat. Jesse Jackson's chants seemed elementary to a lot of the media - 'I am somebody', 'Keep hope alive' - but people remembered them. - Rev. Al Sharpton from Esquire Magazine, pg 80, Jan '05 "I don't like the idea of forcing people into becoming leads. I like people to opt-in to entering our sales stream. Our sales team is very busy. They don't have time to waste with people who aren't that interested or who they have to convince to be interested. It's marketing's job to convince prospects to be interested!" - Chris Grams, Director of Marketing Communications for Red Hat [as found at www.marketingsherpa.com] "The role of marketing is one of the most misunderstood aspects of management. Most firms proudly proclaim that "we don't need to market" as if marketing is for "little people" without any other option. Smart people market all the time, no matter how busy they are. That's because marketing has very little to do with keeping busy. It has more to do with what kind of business you have than how much business you have. Stated differently, marketing is about control, not growth. Marketing consistently is the most important thing you can do at your firm. The public reason we don't do it is because we are too busy. But the real reasons we don't market are because we aren't confident. Because we aren't focused. And because it forces positioning." - David Baker, principal of ReCourses Branding"A
great brand 'adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience.'" ".
. .when customers lack detailed information about the full range of vendors
or the functionality and pricing of their products, brand becomes a proxy
for imperfect information." "An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties." - Djuna Barnes Change"The
art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change
amid order." "Perfection
is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time" "Today's
peacock is tomorrow's feather duster." "With
few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles
a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the
reputation of the business that remains intact." "History's
lesson is that it is precisely the times of wrenching change that humankind
makes its most significant advances, that the largest enterprises are created,
that the richest personal fortunes are built, that the most enduring achievements
are recorded." "The
significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking
we were at when we created them" "If you keep ordering truckloads of manure, they'll keep delivering them." - unknown "There are good questions and bad questions in life. The bad questions are what-if questions. What if I were smarter, or stronger? What if I could see? Those are dead-end questions. A good question is, How do I do as much as I can with what I have? - Erik Weihenmayer, blind mountain climber "If you realize that all things change "When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." - Alexander Graham Bell Education"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." "It's
easier to graduate than to learn." "Most
business books strike us as shallow, built around chirpy lists of do's and
don'ts, written for sophomores. Even the smarter books are often just magazine
articles or journal contributions blown up to book length with Styrofoam
peanuts. The great futurist Marshall McLuhan noted this "word inflation"
30 years ago. He took to reading only the right-hand pages of books and
claimed he missed nothing!" "Education
is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." "I'm an expert in information systems, not economics, but I know a high-paying job requires one be able to produce something of high value. The economy is producing the jobs both at the high end and low end, but increasingly the high-end jobs are out of reach of many. Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves. Many Americans can't believe they aren't qualified for high-paying jobs. I call this the 'American Idol problem.' If you've ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief." - Mike Arguello, as quoted in The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, pg 262 "Hire attitude, teach skills." "A
human being donates his energy to work in order to enjoy and lead an enriched
and satisfying life. . . We think that it is necessary to satisfy the workers'
monetary as well as other needs simultaneously. First of all, there is
the satisfaction of achievement in work. Second, there is the satisfaction
of cooperating with a colleague and receiving the approval of others. Third,
there is the satisfaction of witnessing an institution grow and achieve
maturity. It is satisfaction, pride, and consciousness toward participation
that make workers feel that they are contributing to a great objective
and are doing important work in the company." "The
best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." "So
much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people
to work." "There
are two kinds of people: those who do the work, and those who take the
credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." "Somebody
once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities:
integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first,
the other two will kill you." "In
the end we must have people to match our principles, not the reverse." "Every
organization has its own specific issues, but wherever I go, employees
tell me the same things: They want to learn how to do things, they want
to grow, they want to be independent and have control over their work,
they want to be connected to others, they want to be involved, they want
to have a specific goal or vision of what can be, and they want a driving
force or principle to follow." "If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants." - David Ogilvy from Ogilvy on Advertising. "Those
who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others." "If
you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave
it to." "There
is no trick being a humorist when you have the whole government working
for you." "Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience." Karen Simpson as quoted in The Commercial Appeal "Consultant's credo: give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he does not need you." - Frank Romano "Government is like a big baby -- an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other" - Ronald Reagan "Information
is a lot like liver and onions to a 6-year-old. The more you chew it, the
bigger it gets." Economic
forecasting is the occupation that gives astrology respectability. "Confidence is that giddy, short-lived situation before you fully understand the situation." -Ron Higgins in The Commercial Appeal, 7/2/02 "When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps, when he says perhaps he means no. When he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means perhaps, when she says perhaps, she means yes. But when she says yes, she is no lady." - Lord Denning Regarding the rise of electronic networks: Capital (meaning both money and ideas) when freed to travel at the speed of light "will go where it is wanted, stay where it is well-treated. . ." - Walter Wriston from his book The Twilight of Sovereignty. "Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time." - Chilon "Man
will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will
pick himself up and continue on." "'You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator,' she [Abigail] wrote. . .'We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.'" from the letters of Abigail Adams to John Adams, taken from the book John Adams "Investing
is the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing.
You stand at the plate; the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S.
Steel at 39! And nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except
opportunity. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then, when the fielders
are asleep, you step up and hit it." "Easy
access to funding tends to cause undisciplined decisions." "The
race isn't always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's
the way to bet." "October.
This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in.
The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June,
December, August and February." ". . . when you tax something, you often get less of it." 'The distance
between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance
is high, the average will go up. It is easier to raise the performance
of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass." "Beliefs
come before policies or standards or practices. Practice without belief
is a forlorn existence. Managers who have no beliefs but only understand
methodology and quantification are modern-day eunuchs." "The
root word of analysis is 'anal'" Shadow management:
"detached enough to be objective yet engaged enough to be committed." Question
asked to Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra: How
do you know when you've performed well as a leader? "One way to check
whether I'm doing an adequate job is to look in my musicians eyes. The
eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership
is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically
as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren't shining, I ask myself, 'What
am I doing that's keeping my musicians eyes from shining?' That question
also works for the transformation of the dominating father: What kind of
a parent am I being that my children's eyes aren't shining? Or the dominating
teacher, or the dominating manager." On motivation:
Speaking about one of his managers, Jack Byrne: "Byrne is like the
chicken farmer who rolls an ostrich egg into the henhouse and says, 'Ladies,
this is what the competition is doing.'" "Courage
rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying
priorities: "In
40 hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur
of the moment will have to make most momentous decisions. With God's help
I shall make them and make them right." The "Christopher
Columbus School of Management": "Leaders
are lonely, because they must think and dream about their work - all day,
every day, day after day. Then they must make what they think and dream
about understandable to people who haven't thought and dreamed as deeply,
or as far into the future, as they have. They must believe in the dream
and in the need to pursue it, and they must do the hard work of never doubting
its importance. Doubts will arise - but the leader's job is to master those
doubts and to press on." "'If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle."' - John Adams by David McCullough, pg 591 "Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies." - Bo Peabody, Inc., pg 90, Jan '05. [Great management means] ". . .helping people find their voice, so they can do what they love doing and what they do well. . .When people find their voice, you don't need to worry about supervision, bureaucracy, rules and regulations, and what I call 'the great jackass theory of human motivation' - carrot-and-sticking people." - Stephen Covey, author of The 8th Habit; From Effectiveness to Greatness, as quoted from an interview in Business 2.0, 12/04, pg 118. "The
best thing I did was to choose the right heroes." "Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving." "A banker is a fellow that lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain." - Mark Twain "When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking." - Tim O'Reilly from an interview in Inc Magazine, May, 2010. On choosing
a business partner: "I think you'll probably start looking for the
person that you can always depend on; the person whose ego does not get
in his way; the person who's perfectly willing to let someone else take
credit for an idea as long as it worked; the person who essentially wouldn't
let you down who thought straight as opposed to brilliantly." "Can
you really explain to a fish what it's like to walk on land? One day on
land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running
a business has exactly the same kind of value. "Restructuring:
That's a word for mistakes." "There
is something about smart people explaining ideas to an orangutan that makes
their decision-making better." "If
you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun." "No
one has much difficulty getting rid of the total failures. They liquidate
themselves. Yesterday's successes, however, always linger on long beyond
their productive life. Even more dangerous are the activities which should
do well and which, for some reason or other, do not produce. These tend
to become. . .'investments in managerial ego' and sacred. Yet unless they
are pruned, and pruned ruthlessly, they drain the lifeblood from an organization.
It is always the most capable people who are wasted in the futile attempt
to obtain for the investment in managerial ego the 'success it deserves.'" "We
spoil our customers so rotten that they don't want to leave. But if they
did, nobody else would want them! "Everybody's
excited about the new service economy, even though there is no actual service
as near as I can tell." "Unless we change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed." - Ancient Chinese Wisdom "Strategy
is like trying to ride a bicycle while you're inventing it." "'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' asked Alice. 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 'I don't care where,' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat." - Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "Predicting rain doesn't count, building arks does." - The Noah Principle "It's difficult to look further than you can see." - Winston Churchill "Midsize
high-growth companies succeed by identifying and meeting the needs of certain
kinds of customers, not all customers, for special kinds of products and
services. . .Business academics call this market segmentation. Entrepreneurs
call it common sense." "Two
things drive this business - technology and paranoia." "There
are three kinds of companies: those that make things happen, those who
watch things happen, and the rest who wonder what happened." Re: Richard Branson (Virgen) " . . .Mr. Branson found his winning formula in the clashing values of the 60's; profit vs people, money vs morality, the corporation vs the consumer, big (business) vs small (human), formal vs informal, planning vs spontaneity, conventionality vs novelty, hierarchy vs egalitarianism, secrecy vs openness." Richard Branson's criteria for every product or service: high quality, innovative, good value, challenges existing alternatives, fun. "You can't ride two horses with one ass, sugarpea." -Sweet Home Alabama "The best business models waste the era's cheapest resources in order to conserve the era's most expensive resources." - George Gilder "My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people."' - Tim O'Reilly from an interview in Inc Magazine. "'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Mad Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it.'" - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland "That which is not worth doing is not worth doing well." - Warren Buffett "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in the shallows and in miseries. . . And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. -William Shakespeare "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln to Colonel William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
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