by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Growth, Marketing, Planning, Sales
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 20 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The optimal way to keep your customers happy
— From Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers.
What is your business’ mission? Are all the policies and procedures in your business designed and geared toward fulfilling its mission? How about the tiniest of details? Hmm… this is usually the last part to get attention because it’s easy to overlook or to simply be as vanilla as everyone else… yet the optimal way to keep your customers happy is by paying attention to the smallest of details.
Let me share with you the story of Derek Sivers, Founder of CD Baby, a company that sells indie music online. When an order for a music CD had shipped, he had a standard email message to notify his customers and to thank them for their business. However, his mission was to make people smile, and that message felt completely incongruent. So, he took 20 minutes and wrote this instead:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
I bet it achieved its mission of making you smile! It’s silly, funny, and adorable—all at the same time—and it’s also incredibly smart as a way to convey CD Baby’s mission and brand personality. As a matter of fact, if you Google private CD Baby jet you’ll see that, as of the date of this post, there are 1,010,000 results that reference this email (and when I publish this it’ll be 1,010,001 and counting…).
Clearly, Sivers could not have anticipated this outcome when he wrote his email. Yet being true to his mission—even in the smallest of details—endeared the company to its customers and “that one goofy email created thousands of new customers.”
“When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.”
ACTION:
TODAY: Take that one tiny detail about your business that bugs you… yes, that one… We all have that one little thing that drives us crazy (and that we tend to overlook because it’s so tiny that we think we should not give it all that much importance). Now is the time. What do you need to do to make that one detail congruent with your mission? What is your equivalent of Derek Sivers’ taking 20 minutes to write his email to make his customers smile?
FUTURE: Make an inventory of all the touch points in your business’ customer journey. What can you do to make sure every single touch point is congruent and reflects your mission in the most favorable way? Map out and list the actions that you need to take to ensure this happens, then get to work on them. The result will be a stronger bond with your clients, greater loyalty and increased sales. Well worth it, don’t you think?
Know someone that could use a smile from Derek Sivers’ funny email? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Creativity, Growth, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 30 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: You are part of a creative lineage.
— From: Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
How many times have we heard that nothing is original and that there’s nothing new under the sun? In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon shares a great way to get inspired to create your art (whatever form that art takes*) based on the work of many other artists from which you draw ideas and inspiration.
“If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.” After all, “every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.”
Kleon illustrates this by focusing on genealogy: you are the genetic combination of your mother and your father who, in turn, were the genetic combo of their parents, and so on. “You are a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors. [And] just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don’t pick your family but you can pick your friends… the music you listen to… the books you read… You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.”
“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” – Goethe.
Our job, then, is to selectively collect good ideas. “The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
Kleon’s method for growing and climbing your creative family tree is this: “chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch. […] Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff.”
Google everything and everyone. Read as much as you can. Nowadays people leave digital footprints everywhere, so it’s easy to learn from the people you admire; and if you can connect with them via social media or in person, even better. But if your mentors are no longer with us, Kleon says, “the great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.”
ACTION
TODAY: Start building your creative lineage: What do you want to do? And who do you want to learn from? Make a list of your dream-come-true mentors. Then select the one mentor from whom you’d like to start learning and search for his/her work on the Internet.
FUTURE: Continue learning from your selected mentors and follow their paths. Bask in their recommendations for books, blogs, resources, podcasts, etc. Learn until you know that mentor’s life in and out, as if it were your best friend’s. Once you know this, do a brainwriting exercise to see what ideas come to mind about your art with your newfound knowledge. Then select the next mentor based on your previous mentor’s recommendation. Repeat, repeat, repeat… and never stop, make it a habit, and always be learning and growing. (Of course, if you are reading this, you are very likely a lifelong learner… fist bump!)
Do you know someone who could benefit from building a creative lineage? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
_________
* I’m subscribing here to Seth Godin’s description of art in his book The Icarus Deception: “Art is not a gene or a specific talent. Art is an attitude, culturally driven and available to anyone who chooses to adopt it. Art isn’t something sold in a gallery or performed on a stage. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another. […] Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map— these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.”
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Let’s redefine failure
From Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes–But Some Do by Matthew Syed
We’ve all failed at something at some point. It’s not a happy day when that happens. It’s a mad scramble as we watch our project go down in proverbial flames. The memory of it is not a happy one either and, usually, we try to avoid bringing it up again, right? Ugh!
Matthew Syed in his book Black Box Thinking, says there is a better way: “If we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure.”
“We learn from our mistakes, it is as simple and as difficult as that. […] Sometimes committing errors is not only the fastest way to the correct answer, it’s the only way.” This is, obviously, easier said than done. The key is not in the procedures but in changing the attitude towards error that liberates individuals and organizations from the “twin dangers of blame and cognitive dissonance,” which is the default mode when things don’t go well.
James Dyson, the inventor of the famous Dyson vacuum cleaner went through 5,127 prototypes (!) before his technology was ready. As tragic as airline accidents can be, the findings are quickly applied and transformed into new rules for all aviation personnel in the world to avoid the same mistakes. (Read more in this book summary by Samie Al-Achrafi.)
Heather Hanbury, former headmistress of Wimbledon High School in London, created “Failure Week” after she saw her students doing well academically but struggling to reach their potential outside the classroom. The rigidity of the school system punishing mistakes was stagnating the students in other areas of their life. She said to Syed, “You’re not born with fear of failure, it’s not an instinct. It’s something that grows and develops in you as you get older. Very young children have no fear of failure at all, they have great fun trying new things and learning very fast.”
How can we, then, unlearn and redefine this acquired fear of failure? A trite—but illustrative—example that comes to mind is the one coaches sometimes use to exemplify why we should not give up: think of an adorable baby girl who is starting to learn how to walk. Would you give up on her simply because she falls constantly? Would you throw your hands up in the air in frustration and blame it all on gravity? The mere thought of it is ridiculous. However, we sometimes do this (metaphorically-speaking) to ourselves and to our projects.
Here are some questions and a few posts to help you redefine and reframe for yourself:
- How many times have we given up on something that we’ve considered a failure without giving it a fair chance? (Read: Move forward imperfectly.)
- How many times have we found the process frustrating as opposed to making the most out of it? (Read: Why 5 Times.)
- How many times do we bury as deep as we can within ourselves whatever happened, and waste the opportunity to learn from it? (Read: You are not your past.)
And I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from T. Harv Eker:
“Every master was once a disaster.”
ACTION:
TODAY: You are the only one who knows yourself best and who can redefine failure for you. What steps can you take today to reframe a recent “failure,” so that you can make space for the new learnings? Even in the worst of situations there’s always a positive thing if you know where to look. How about focusing on that? It may look like “Where’s Waldo?” at first, but don’t give up. This simple process will help you reframe and redefine!
FUTURE: As much as it’s uncomfortable to accept, there is no way we can avoid making mistakes in the future. So let’s reframe that too: instead of keeping our fingers crossed and holding our breath “so that nothing goes wrong,” how about trusting in our ability and willingness to be able to gather the information and resources to solve the mistakes to the best of our ability if and when they happen? Ah, what a relief that thought brings!
Know someone who could use some help redefining failure? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 57 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: You are not your past
— From A Second Chance: For You, For Me, And For The Rest Of Us by Catherine Hoke
Spoiler alert: The ideas in this book will change your life for the better. It’s all about love, empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and a keen eye for business.
Catherine Hoke is the Founder of Defy Ventures, an “entrepreneurship, employment, and character development training program for currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, and youth.” Defy teaches character building and business to inmates so that when they are released, they can become the CEOs of their new lives and new businesses, productive members of society, and legal, role models for their families and their circles of influence.
The statistics speak for themselves: under the regular prison system, 76.6% of previously incarcerated individuals will return to prison; whereas 95% of Defy “graduates” never go back. What is Defy doing that it has lowered the rate of recidivism (return to prison) down to only 5%? This book will tell you! It’s a combination of the story of Hoke, her healing and second chance, and the wonderful work that she does along with her team at Defy to give second chances to inmates who sometimes have never truly had a legitimate first chance (some of them are locked up before the age of ten for playground fights!). Here’s a TED Talk with more details and many success stories.
As all the (true) stories in the book unfold, we—readers—are taken into a parallel journey of our own, filled with paradigm shifts and empathic reflection, because Hoke walks us through the prisons we build in our minds. “We are all behind bars—the bars of perfection, the bars of shame, of judging and being judged.” This fits me, unfortunately, like a glove, as I am a recovering perfectionist and have also beaten myself much, over and over, for a long time, for many mistakes I’ve made in business and in life.
“What would it be like if you were known only for the worst thing you have ever done? Think back to the worst decision you’ve made, the one you regret the most, the one that caused you or others the most pain. Maybe it was something criminal. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was emotionally or morally or spiritually wrong. Maybe it was an act of omission. What labels could people have attached to your mistake?”
You are free to cast the first stone if you have never done anything wrong, but as the book says, “Aren’t we all ex-somethings?” We’ve all made big and small mistakes… and the beautiful idea that I want to take from the book for today is “You are not your past.” Focus on yourself today and on who you are becoming. Forgiveness is for ourselves: it’s a choice and a decision we make. “When we don’t choose forgiveness we live in the past.”
Don’t tie yourself to the past. Give up the hope of a better past because it just weighs you down. Instead, level up now and work towards the hope of a better future. “Forgiveness doesn’t mean the offense was okay. […] No one is suggesting the doormat model. Forgiveness is not about inviting people to hurt you again, break your heart again, disappoint you again. You’re free to refuse to work with someone or to not engage with someone you can’t trust. But when we forgive someone, we open two doors: a door for them to improve and demonstrate that they have a contribution to make to others, and a door for us, to find a path forward.”
ACTION
TODAY: Identify where you are clinging on to the past. Whether its business or personal, where have you not let go of something you did or something that someone did to you? Ask yourself if you like living with that feeling or if you’ve just grown accustomed to it. Think for a moment: wouldn’t it be liberating to forgive? Make the choice and try it, wholeheartedly. If the choice doesn’t work out you can always come back to where you were before forgiving, but I bet it will be life changing.
FUTURE: After you’ve done the action for today, know that after you think, “I choose to forgive me/him/her/them” you may not feel warm and fuzzy and your brain will fight you back. Maybe immediately, or maybe the following day (it’s a habit that needs to be changed), but your brain will tell you all the reasons why you want to revert to a state of unforgiveness. Every time that happens, choose forgiveness. Build the new habit. And choose forgiveness again. And again. “Forgiveness is as much about the forgiver as much as the forgiven. It allows us to take our attention off the past and put it on the present and the future, where it can do some good.”
Want to learn more about Catherine Hoke, the book or Defy Ventures? Here’s a podcast with Tim Ferriss. And if you know someone who needs to forgive, please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Opportunity
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 58 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
You lead. Your tribe communicates.
— From: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
Seth Godin asks “What does it take to create a movement?” Take, for instance, “microfinance as a tool to fight poverty.” And he cites the answer he got from the Acumen Fund regarding Mohammad Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank, “the problem (and its solution!) were recognized more than thirty years ago.”
So why did it take so long for the idea to get traction?
“There’s a difference,” says Seth, “between telling people what to do and inciting a movement. The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing… Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate.”
That’s how Skype grew all over the world. That’s how Wikipedia grew. That’s how social movements spread. Communication is key, and real leaders know how their tribe communicates and enable them to do so.
The book tells a story that Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen (a non-profit global venture capital fund whose goal is to use entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty) shared with Seth about Unicef spending a lot of money in creating posters to promote child vaccinations to the mothers of Rwanda. “The posters were gorgeous—photographs with women and children with simple messages written in Kinyarwandan (the local language), about the importance of vaccinating every child. They were perfect, except for the fact with a female illiteracy rate exceeding 70 percent, words written in perfect Kinyarwandan made little difference.” Jacqueline noticed “that the way messages spread in Rwanda was by song. One group of women would sing a song for other women, both as a way of spreading ideas and as a gift. No song, no message.”
The bottom line to all this? “Your tribe communicates. They probably don’t do it the way you would; they don’t do it as efficiently as you might like, but they communicate. The challenge [for you as a leader] is to help your tribe sing, whatever form that song takes.”
Here’s a video (17 min) of a TED Talk Seth gave called “The tribes we lead.”
ACTION
TODAY: No matter how big or small your tribe, you are indeed a leader. Stop for a moment to think how your tribe communicates and how you can motivate and enable this communication to take place better. OR… want an even better action for today? Watch the video above, at the 16:40 minute mark Seth says that to start a movement it only takes 24 hours. Go start your movement!
FUTURE: Make a list of the various tribes that you lead: your family, your company, your team, your friends, other social circles, internet groups, and more. What is the way in which each group communicates? How can you motivate and connect them? How can you enable, elevate and empower (3 Es) this communication for your movement to gain steam?
This post goes out with much gratitude to Seth Godin for his wonderful books, for being a ruckus maker and starting a movement, and–especially–for the tribe he leads, the altMBA. It was out out of the communication from within the tribe that this blog was born. I’m a proud alumna! Here’s a conversation Seth and I had on Facebook Live where I talk about my altMBA experience.
Know someone who leads a tribe? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter! Curious about the altMBA? Hit me up and I’ll gladly share my experience and answer your questions.
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Marketing, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
How to turn any venture into an admired brand
— From: Bigger Than This: How to turn any venture into an admired brand by Fabian Geyrhalter
Since I love marketing and the creativity behind it, I’m always delighted to hear how companies brand themselves. The media likes this too, and frequently we hear the branding stories about startups with innovative concepts or products becoming beloved brands, as people flock to purchase whatever they’re selling.
Rarely, if at all, do we hear about companies that sell commodities turning them into beloved brands. That is, until now. Branding Guru Fabian Geyrhalter, author of How to Launch a Brand, recently published his second book, Bigger Than This. In it, he details 8 principles that help companies who sell commodities (“products and services that have remained widely unchanged”) turn their brands around to tell empathic stories that resonate with their existing tribes and create new raving fans.
Here are the 8 principles. Follow one or follow all to position your brand strongly:
1. Tell your story. Stories are memorable and relatable. “They flip the intangible into something tangible, the unrelated into something emotional.”
2. Believe in something and be vocal about it. “Any brand can stand for something meaningful, but to do that it has to define and embody its values.” And the values need to be aligned with those of the customers and the community.
3. Root for a cause. “Identify a social cause that can be activated in an authentic way to manifest that the purpose of the product/service goes deeper than solely generating sales.”
4. Connect with your heritage. We all like to anchor ourselves to different places because we feel a sense of connection or belonging. “Connect your product with the desire of consumers to formulate a deeper connection with the place your brand will be known for.”
5. Be delighted to delight customers. “A small, unexpected gesture will lead to them seeing [your brand] as a friend.”
6. Be transparent. “Create a strategic plan on how far you will take the idea of transparency and where your brand will draw the line.”
7. Stand in solidarity with your customers. “Only deep and honest empathy will touch people’s hearts long term. A quote from Alan Alda in the book says, “… focusing on the other person’s need and not my own was the most effective way to make a sale.”
8. Customize if possible. “Start simply by using your collected customer data to create personal experiences surrounding your customer service or product interactions. Customization can start a small as that and grow from there.”
Finally, the book leaves you with this short and helpful template for a “simple positioning statement to derive the bigger story,” and it instructs to “put extra emphasis in deriving your ‘because’—your reason to believe.”
“To [target audience]
our product is the [category]
that provides [functional, symbolic or emotional benefits]
because [support/reasons to believe].”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at what you do or what you sell. Could your brand benefit from any of the principles above? If so, identify the one that you can start implementing today (even if just with one tiny action). Note that these principles could also apply to a personal brand. What does your online image say about you in the various social media platforms that you have? How can you tell your story in the best light possible to resonate with those you lead?
FUTURE: Run both your business and personal brands through the above principles and template. Both brands will come out stronger and better positioned to suit your goals.
Let me know if you’d like me to put together an online branding session (at no cost, of course). I know a few branding gurus and will gladly invite them to share their knowledge with us via Facebook Live or a webinar or video chat. I think we could all benefit from hearing experts in the field as to how to position our business and personal brands in a stronger way. Shoot me an email to let me know if you’re in, and I will plan accordingly if this idea gains traction. Fingers crossed!
Know someone who might like this post? Please share it via email, Facebook or Twitter!
