Understanding Your Audience

The problem with having a stock presentation is that is doesn't take into account your the knowledge of your audience.

Beginning cooks are not going to enjoy a talk on the nuances between the differing genus of nutmeg. Professional cooks are going to walk out on your presentation on how to boil pasta.

If your audience already knows who your group is, move on to the problems that you see in the world and how you are trying to solve them.

Happy

There's an old joke about a patient complaining to their doctor that they are not as happy as the people in the ads.

Making people feel insecure about their present choice is good in the short run, but I think bad in the long run. When your product doesn't deliver unending bliss to your customer, they are going to grow cynical about your next message.

Set reasonable expectations for your customer and the odds of them coming back go way up.

Innovation

An interesting post from an interesting guy: Innovation Occlusion.

Worth the read. Sometimes having too much cash leads to actions that are good in the short run, but bad in the long.

Removing Critics

We all have a layer of critics in our professional lives- those who stand between our art and the customer, the client, the end user, who try to tell us what the client wants, or what will be too scary for the client to accept.

It's a lot faster to go straight to the client and see what they think. You remove the filter and get their honest reaction. It's easier to explain what you hand in mind, what you think your art does for them, and they can tell you more honestly if they agree. The give-and-take is faster.

The product is probably better, too.

Patterns

A friend of mine who is a doctor explained that medical school got a lot easier once he realized that medicine is about pattern recognition. Med school focuses so much on the small percentage of cases that are actually, seriously sick that those instances jump out at you in the real world. "Normal" is boring in its normalness. Once you are able to recognize the patterns, it becomes easier to focus on the needs of the patient and ignore the ordinary variability of life.

That why exceptional people and exceptional work jumps out to the trained eye- you see enough great work and you are able to separate the great from the mundane. The hard part is keeping your diet of high-quality whatever at a level that it keeps your senses sharp.

Craftsmanship

The Bit Method podcast The Flyover Effect has an excellent episode discussing craftsmanship.

I can only hope that the Bit Method crew would define me as a craftsman.

Deals

I've been reading "Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN", and I've found it to be an interesting book, with some caveats.

The book is for insiders, as much of it focuses on the management who are invisible to viewers. Who made what decision and why is a heavy emphasis, so those looking for crazy Chris Berman stories will have to suffer through long stretches of dealmaking between anecdotes.

With a background in media and business (and as a very occasional freelancer for ESPN) I've picked up interesting bits all the way through. One is inescapable: ESPN is very good at making money on every project, which is something we can all learn from. Develop multiple revenue streams, price events properly, control costs, and market like crazy.

Example: The NBA subsidizes coverage of WNBA games because there is no viewer interest in them, thus no advertising interest. On the flip side, NCAA Women's basketball pays its way through advertising, because there is an audience, thus ads can be sold. Understand what your audience wants and doesn't want. Make everything work.

It also helps to have operations in a cheap town like Bristol, CT, where you can pay your staff less and they have fewer opportunities to jump to another job.

Doing everything you can to produce a quality product goes a long way, too.

Even a billion dollar operation like ESPN relies on the basics.