Did you know that the fear of public speaking is even worse than the fear of death for most people? Yes, some people prefer almost anything to standing in front of a crowd and talking. Innovation is almost as bad at some companies – I’ve heard it said a number of different ways, but it all boils down to one thing, a fear to innovate:
I was asked the other day – “How do you have the time to blog?” – Great question. There are plenty of people out there who are attempting to do the same thing, are brimming with great ideas, but simply do not have the time. I’ll tell you – it’s no secret – you simply have to block it off like everything else. If you didn’t know, I also do a podcast and a TV show every weekday. How do I do it?
I used to watch reality programming but have since kicked the habit since we dropped cable and moved to pure on-demand TV watching (Netflix, etc.). One of our favorite shows used to be Restaurant Impossible – if you haven’t caught it, you probably know the type – this famous chef (well, at least Food Network famous) would go around to failing restaurants and in 48 hours with a very small budget (I think it was $10,000) attempt to turn them around. He would go in, see what was going on, and typically do three things:
By now you’ve probably seen those famous images comparing design vs user experience – a beautifully designed and straight sidewalk is forgotten, instead a path is cut by people who need to get somewhere. I’m sure that the architect and the landscape designer put a lot of thought into the perfect design for space, only to be thwarted by what people actually do.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about how some startups get started and find traction I’ve been seeing some interesting patterns – namely one which seems to work in almost all cases, and that is simply repeating your message over and over and over until you get noticed.
Hot on the heels of my last post on annoying your customers, here’s another good one. So we finally received our FitBit Flex devices on Monday, but they were in our city on Friday, but just sitting, cooling their heels. Here we are, after waiting for months, with FedEx now teasing us that the devices are here, but not here. This is what we saw when we checked on Friday: