But You Must Act

Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.

Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.

According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.

Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).

But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).

The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.

If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?

That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.

As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).

The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."

But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.

Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.

He procrastinated.

An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:

Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. 

Are you too self-assured?

Leave a Trail

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where
there is no path and leave a trail.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreamforce, "four epic days that fly by, but stay with you forever," concluded yesterday in San Francisco.

Salesforce once again pulled out all the stops to educate, entertain and evangelize an eager crowd of more than 150,000 users.

"Dreamforce epitomizes a new breed of user conference," says Emily He on the DoubleDutch blog.

That new breed of conference "looks beyond the horizon to build a community that focuses on honoring your customers’ and prospects’ needs and desires," He says.

Honoring attendees' desires means delivering "all of the content they care about, whether it involves your solution or not."

How many corporate event producers look past their company's present horizon?

Not many.

I know one major cloud computing company that nearly scrapped its mammoth annual event, "because we have nothing new to say."

If you lack marketing imagination, don't give up the ship. Take direction from trailblazers like Salesforce, He suggests:

Feature diverse speakers. "Think beyond your industry’s usual guest list," He says. "Your attendees care about more than their jobs, and they want to hear from people who’ll change the way they think about the world at large."

Elevate attendee engagement. Deliver a memorable experience through parties and concerts. Facilitate workshops and small gatherings throughout your event. Provide an app that lets attendees make impromptu plans to meet up and amplify their experiences through social media.

Exploit your content. Videotape the best presentations and target people unable to attend the live event. Curate event content as e-books and blog posts. Ask top presenters to join you on a road show. "While a stellar live event can be a large investment, it can be extremely effective in fueling your pipeline," He says. "A single successful event, if done right, can power your entire marketing strategy for the year to come."

Café Culture

Halfway through Everybody Behaves Badly, I'm reminded how so many of the 20th century's big ideas were born in cafés. Ideas like DNA, the computer, surrealism and existentialism.

Conferences rarely birth more than bunches of sore butts.

But we could do better.

World Café is an effort to try.

More a movement than a method, World Café urges conference organizers to structure large-group dialog around five principles:

• The meeting environment should be special and modeled after a café; no more than five people should sit at any one table.
  
  
• A host is assigned to each table; she should welcome attendees by setting the context and sharing the rules of café etiquette.
  
  
• Dialog should comprise 20-minute rounds; after each round, the groups disband and move to different tables.
  
  
• Every round should be prefaced with a specially-honed question; questions can be repeated at subsequent rounds, or build on previous questions.
  
  
• Between rounds, attendees should share insights and results; those reports should be captured in cartoons at the front of the room.

Out of His Skull

It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

                                                                         — Patti Smith

Recently I met Noah Scalin, who launched his career as a fine artist by creating a skull every day for a year.

"Creativity is a practice," Scalin said. His advice:

Pick something—anything—and make one every day for a year.

Scanlin's is the best advice on creativity I've heard.

Authors—bloggers, marketers and thought leaders—fret constantly over "finding their voice," "discovering their brand essence," and "achieving authority."

None recognizes "author" and "authority" share the same Latin root, auctor.

In Ancient Rome, an auctor originated. (In contrast, an artifex (artisan) labored to realize the vision of an auctor; he had less clout as a consequence.)

Want to find your voice? Discover your brand essence? Be an authority?

Originate. Something. Every. Day.

2,000 Maniacs!

Math classes mold our young minds to believe numbers.

Politicians exploit that.

• In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy sparked a nationwide witch hunt by claiming 205 commies worked for the US State Department.
  
  
• In 2014, Representative Michele Bachman propelled cuts in food stamps for 850,000 US households by claiming 70 percent of the funds went into the pockets of Washington bureaucrats.
  
  
• In 2016, Member of Parliament Boris Johnson triggered Brexit by claiming EU membership cost the UK £50 million every day.

You might sway mobs with it, but does "proofiness" work in marketing copy?

No! says the late copywriter and filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Lewis' legions of axioms included his "Rule of Statistical Deficiency:"

Readers respond less to cold-blooded statistics than they do to warm-blooded examples.

In On the Art of Writing Copy, he urged marketers to avoid statements like:

75% of the children affected might be saved.

Marketers should write instead:

We lost Jimmy today. His parents knew his pitifully short days were numbered. They never lost hope... until the end. But Mary, Karen, and Billy are still alive. We're fighting for their lives.

Fine for fundraisers. But what about B2B marketers?

Statistics are still deficient.

The following leaves you chilly:

71% of HR directors say our LMS is a very useful tool to enhance employee learning.

But doesn't this warm your blood?

We asked HR leaders from 10 companies if our LMS boosts enterprise learning. Execs from Acme, Spacely, Soylent, Wonka, Sirius, Clampett Oil, and Burns Industries said yes. Our clients experience the difference.

NOTE: Herschell Gordon Lewis departed this life September 26 at the age of 90. He wrote more than 20 books on marketing and produced over 40 films.