How to Succeed in Business without Really Spying

Ninjas were 16th century James Bonds who were tapped by their samurai masters for the dirty work of spying, sabotage and assassination.

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, thinks ninjas created the die from which today's business winners are cast.

He draws out that comparison entertainingly in his new 250-page book Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

"Ninja innovation is my catch-all phrase for what it takes to succeed," Shapiro writes in the introduction. 

"You have to display the qualities of the ancient Japanese ninja, whose only purpose was to complete the job. He wasn't bound by precedent; he had to invent new ways."

In defining ninja innovation, Shapiro offers a quasi-memoir that might have been titled My Life in Consumer Electronics. 

The stories are fun and the major characters—including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg—mostly notable.

From the book we learn that business innovators, though not literally given to spying, like James Bond are particularly single-minded. They don't think twice about breaking the "rules of the game" to win.

Shapiro scatters among the lessons lengthy gripes about US immigration policy, government regulation and unions, leftovers from his first book, The Comeback.

But the fresh material—especially his inside look at lobbying and the history of the Consumer Electronics Show—makes Shapiro's new book worth reading.

In an interview, I asked him whether business success demands that you play the tough guy.

"Absolutely not," Shapiro replied. "In fact, that's a recipe for not being successful. Instead, you have to think like a ninja. You have to be clever, creative, and think outside the box. You have to set a goal and relentlessly pursue it. You have to have a plan and a strategy and you have to be focused."

How to Toot Your Horn at a Tradeshow

You can trumpet your message at a tradeshow if you know what the audience seeks, says exhibit marketing expert Mim Goldberg in an interview with eConnections.

Effective graphics draws the audience into your booth and "creates memorability and validity to follow up after the event," Goldberg says.

But to be effective, booth graphics must be simple and focused on the audience's needs.

"Consequently, knowing and understanding your target audience is necessary," Goldberg says.

Pinpointing solutions is smart. Money-savings. Time-savings. Better productivity.

Illustrating big ideas is not. A booth that tries too hard to will be ignored or forgotten. "You can always tell if an [ad] agency has done the graphics for a show because they look like blown-up ads," Goldberg says.

But booth graphics alone aren't enough. "Verbal messaging and some form of interaction are necessary," Goldberg says.

"For example, if your company’s message is saving money, have graphics, discuss how your company can do this and, if possible, have a product that can demonstrate how this may occur."

Think Billboard

Want to know if a new-product idea is any good?

Create an ad for it. 

Or, better yet, a billboard.

That's how Apple rose "from flame to fame" in the late '90s.

Using journal entries and agency memos, California adman Rob Siltanen constructs an account of the birth of Apple's legendary "Think different" campaign in Branding Strategy Insider.

On a July afternoon in 1997, in a cluttered conference room inside Siltanen's agency, the campaign began life as a series of billboards. 

They looked just like the ads that would eventually appear on TV and in newspapers and magazines nationwide a few months later.

The idea for the campaign paired two sources: an IBM ad campaign running at the time ("Think IBM") and Ralph Waldo Emerson's chestnut, “To be a genius is to be misunderstood."

No sooner had "Think Different" launched than "Apple became the talk of the town," Siltanen recalls. 

The ads pushed consumers "to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way."

Within 12 months, Apple rolled out the multicolored iMac and the company's stock price shot up 300 percent.

Want an acid test for your new idea?

Think billboard.

The Elevator Post

Readers report they enjoy Copy Points because the posts are concise.

That's no accident.

I think of each post as the e-version of an "elevator speech."

And the elevator is in downtown Washington, DC, where no building may be taller than 14 stories (so as not to contravene Jefferson's vision for Our Nation's Capital).

It's mind-boggling that, in the age of Tweets and TED Talks, so many bloggers are windbags.

They've forgotten one of Strunk and White's chief lessons:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Got that?

Make. Every. Word. Tell.

5 Scary Social Media Trends

Pity the corporation. In an obdurately unfriendly world, it has to maximize shareholder value.

A little thing like a broken guitar can bust millions in market cap. And batter a reputation as well.

Blame it on social media.

"Social media and the technology behind it—Web 2.0—has forever changed how corporations 'manage' reputation," writes Ogilvy PR's John H. Bell in Corporate Reputation in the "Social Age."

The danger, Bell says, lies in "the explosion of consumer-generated media found in more than 150 million blogs, social networks, consumer opinion sites, video and picture sharing networks, and worldwide message boards."

Five big trends affect how corporations manage their reputations today, Bell believes.

Hypertransparency. With 150 million active social media users, there are "thousands of forensic accountants, social watchdogs and activists watching your company," Bell writes.

Viral crises. When a crisis hits, the word spreads quickly, "often with the accompaniment of YouTube videos."

Demand for dialogue. One-way messaging—news releases, robotic spokesmen, TV ads and customer-service scripts—are out. Conversation is in.

Louder brand detractors and employees. Social media well arms the corporate critic. "It doesn’t take a Goliath to become a formidable adversary for a corporate brand," Bell says.

Uncontrollable brand fans. Even happy customers can blacken your name with their online antics. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Marketers must be authentic and transparent, Bell says, because "conversation is competing and often winning as a communication channel online."