I read a lot of things last week from a few choice bloggers who started positing that the “new” stance on failure was wrong.  The newer stance on failure is that it’s a good thing.  That not being afraid to fail is valuable because it forces you to take risks.  Those that don’t take risks can’t really gain anything.  I believe this to be the case, but, as with everything, it has it’s limitations.

Fearlessness to the point of recklessness is an issue for people and organizations and it will crash your ride.  Pump the brakes.  Slow down.  Slow down.  You are not in a race in most cases, at least not a race that haphazard moves will win.

But I’d still take a manager that seeks out measured risks instead of shying away from them.  Failure in itself is recognized as a negative thing.  Success is positive.  Those two things stand out.   Yet when thinking strategically, failure(s) as a stepping stone to success(es) is a very good thing.  The key is recognizing and knowing how to deal with the former in order to find the latter.

As sad as it is, inertia is probably one of the main reasons that so many companies make such huge piles of money.  Once a person or business has someone in place as a supplier (think cell phone usage, hair salon, oil changes, web access, etc.) they are usually very unlikely to go somewhere else.  This pervades a great deal of industries and as a consumer it is your duty to attempt to fight this inertia and get the best value for your money.

A quick example is my credit card.  I’ve had the same one since college.  Most people get one credit card in college and use it as their primary card for a very long time.  This perfectly corresponds to my usage.  There are many more better cards in terms of deals and money back for my money, but the phone call to alter my current situation (”I want a better deal or I think I’m going to get a different card from another provider” = lower interest rate) has always been the obstacle.  Is it that hard?  No.  But there is ALWAYS something else I could be doing that’s a bit more fun.

How much money would that call have saved me in the long run?  No idea.  I could probably get to a rough estimate, but let’s just say over the last six years with that card during school and lesser cash flow periods I’d racked up some big bills.  I payed them all off, but at a larger price than necessary.

Industries where it is easy to pick up and choose someone else will try to build in incentive programs or return requests.  Restaurants will offer a free meal after five stops.  Airlines will build in travel miles (they allied with one another now and the program is arguable as to worth.)  Service industries recognize that their product has to be remarkable in order to stay on top of mind, so they try harder.  Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

The power of inertia is great, although not in a good way.  If you justify lessening the quality of your product by leaning on that power, you’re doing it wrong.

People often confuse asking for help as a sign of weakness, when it’s actually a sign of strength.  Far too many people would rather do a subpar job at something on their own in some vestige of ability than do a compelling job in coordination with someone else.

Many are scared to ask for help because it makes them look inferior or unqualified for their positions.  It’s understandable that people would feel this way, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct outlook.  As with most things, new jobs and tasks take time to fully comprehend and do well.  Teaming with someone who knows the job and can help you accelerate your path down the knowledge curve is just plain smart.

I’ll often say that there is a fine line between creativity and insanity, hard work and obsession, etc.  There is a very broad line between asking for help and it being a reflection of eagerness to do things right and incompetence.  You may have met a few people who really aren’t equipped to do their jobs well.  Most will stay quiet in order to avoid any confrontation about their performance, but occasionally, you’ll run into people who will ask for help on every little thing they do, and this can be an issue.  Thankfully, I’ve met very few people like this and it’s usually not a reflection of character, but a poor choice in vocation.  Choosing a livelihood that you can’t excel in every day is simply not viable and at some point those people may want to consider a career switch.

There is also another great part of asking for help, it instills confidence and recognition in the people you ask it from!  This should very much be your practice in a new role, but also when a new person arrives in your business or team.  Just because someone hasn’t worked as long somewhere as yourself doesn’t mean that their skills are negligable or that you can’t learn from them.  It’s a very positive cycle if done correctly.

Finally, you may want to look at help as career development for both yourself and your boss.  Even if you don’t necessarily need help, you might ask for reviews on work in order to get feedback.  I also very much believe in helping your boss grow, which means providing them time to be the boss and think critically about your work and how to improve it.  When your superiors do well, you’ll do well.  When it’s a continuous cycle, the business will do well, and at the end of the day that’s the name of the game to begin with.

It’s so on as of now.  I’m doing a heavy training week that a good deal of our operations go through and trying to push through a large project at night.  It’s going to be a very busy week!  In some ways, this sort of thing is kind of stressful because you want to learn and do a good job, but it’s a pretty cool story as well, bro.

Until next time.

It seems like it lately.  I haven’t been writing at all and it’s bumming me out!  There are so many great things happening right now that are worth mention, but finding time has been tough.  Making time is impossible, of course.

I’m having a tough time getting into a grind of writing, but other than that, life is going really well.  I’ve never been this busy with work and it’s an incredible learning curve.  It’s such a valuable learning curve too.  That’s what I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on, how much long term value is being built slowly in the short term.  There are always things to learn, especially at a new company:  the culture within the company, the interaction and viewpoints of different functions and levels of tenure, how and where to find resources, what kind of representations of data are expected and wanted, how can you make an impact, how can you get to know everybody and learn about them, while managing everything on the day to day.  It’s non stop and it’s good.

Just not for writing.  :-)

It’s good. It’s damn good.

Vonnegut is new reading material for me, but I have to say that his voice is distinct and welcome. You can tell something is different with his style almost immediately. This book is about war. It’s about human beings and how silly we are.  Something there is eminently folksy and colloquial about him; he’s very subtle and unassuming.  It catches you off guard and then leaves you comfortable.  His prose is like a long known relative that you could say anything to, anything silly or perhaps not so smart, and it wouldn’t matter because he doesn’t care about all the mistakes.  He celebrates them and holds them dear, for they are what make us us.

Slaughterhouse Five is a story about Billy Pilgrim and his journey through war and through time.  He is someone very special.  He can travel through time and does so quite often, throughout many different times in his life and even to his death.  He travels through space as well, to a planet inhabited by a race of extraterrestrials known as Tralfamadorians.  Their planet?  Tralfamadore, naturally. These beings are also special in that they know all time and events.  They do not view time as we do, it is not a variable existence that can be altered, it simply is.  So it goes.

Vonnegut does well to describe the fragility of life here, but he does much to downplay death and exonerate those times which seem painful.  He looks at death through the eyes of the aforementioned Tralfamadorians, as though it is merely one of many moments which can be existed in.  They focus on the good moments.  They think we are silly.  They are probably right.

This is a short book, but not on worth.  It is written in short bursts, where each small passage goes quickly and the chapters evaporate in a matter of hours.  Those fond of more intricate and thought out works may not understand or care for it.  I thought it wonderful in so many ways.  Wonderful in that we simply don’t know everything and many of our preconceptions about life and death simply may not ring true, even if that bell was constructed with good intentions.    Frankly, this is why creative writing is so valuable, to encompass and reframe our perception in a way that gives us more than we started with.  It is a dark novel in some ways; in the same ways that life is dark.  That’s half of the charm here, the other half is tied up in the unconventional.

I have a feeling many people wouldn’t “get” this kind of writing due to the humor noir and the surreality interwoven, but for those that do “get” it, it’s a treasure.  Pick up a copy, or borrow mine.

There’s a good reason I don’t write about what my specific job entails. A lot of posts on this site are derived from my experiences at work and in life with marketing. A lot of it is just so I take the time to look at what is happening and what I’m doing today; I find that writing about it helps to learn from it. But I don’t get into specifics.

In today’s day and age, anything you say about your company can be held against you, so for me to speak about my employer in any way is very similar to (and in many peoples eyes the same as) being an appointed representative. That’s not good because chances are your company didn’t want you to write about it.

Just as importantly, a competitor can build out your strategy by reading published information. You can build out division structures based on LinkedIn. It is all there for the taking and adept marketers who have this as part of their job responsibilities will exploit it to their advantage. When they know what you’re up to before it hits the market, they may already have an answer. Surprise! You spoiled your own parade.

Loose lips sink ships.

Every now and then I’ll reference how I’m a marketing dork. And by that I mean that marketing excites me and really interests me in way more ways than is normal. It’s a dorky obsession and I’m lucky that I get to work in a field that interests me. You train yourself to really like it, but after a while watching other companies’ moves and tactical initiatives is fun.

Over the years, I’ve lost interest in videogames for the most part. I’m not much of a videogame dork anymore. When I was a kid, all I could think about was playing videogames. I would beg to play Nintendo at my cousins place. I’d play for hours and hours on end at the babysitters place when she rented a nintendo. I spent even more time playing my first system, the badass Sega Genesis. I got a Playstation for Christmas around age 13 and that was a game changer. I played through FF7 and Metal Gear Solid, which was an insane game at the time. I had friends that had more means to buy games and I’d spend a lot of time at their places playing.

In the last few years, I’ve tried to get back into videogames occasionally. I got a Wii and played Ocarina in Time, which was good. I beat RE4 and that was sick as hell. Then I got a bit tired of the Wii and got an Xbox. Despite having a newer system, I don’t ever really play it and it just doesn’t intrigue me.

The game I didn’t mention as a teenager was Starcraft. That is my favorite game of all time, I think. It’s a real time strategy game, which means it’s like a game of chess where everyone can move at the same time. You harvest resources and use them to manufacture an army (similar to the WarCraft series in that way.) I played Starcraft for a good four or five years in highschool and after into college. It was cool because it was the only PC game I ever got into, and it was truly an amazing game. Looking back, the graphics are now putrid compared to today, but the replay value was off of the charts. This game revolutionized competitive E-Sports. South Korea is famous for obsessing over it. They have two television channels devoted to it and professionals get paid up to $300K per year to play competitively. It’s a big freaking deal.

I haven’t played it for quite a while but a funny thing happened. When I was younger a good friend of mine into art and computer graphics played the game too. We played 2 vs. 2 online with other people and had a blast. He stated in the 11th grade or so that he was going to work for Blizzard. It actually happened. He got a scholarship to design school in CA and went down there. He got a job at Blizzard (now owned by Activision) and has worked there a good four or five years I’d think.

He has been working on Starcraft II.

It’s coming out in a week. Here is the trailer for it:

Now that is the best CG I’ve ever seen, but the game itself is going to be immensely enjoyable. I’ve been involved in testing the beta and it is absolutely sick. Beyond the game being great and me losing a ton of free time to this over the next few YEARS, I wanted to congratulate Zack (my friend from HS) on his accomplishments and achieving his goals. It’s great to see people set out to do something and get there. Nice work broham!

If you want a game that’s well worth its weight in gold, pick this up. The learning curve for competitive play is high, but I swear once you understand the gameplay that you’ll absolutely love it.

UPDATE: I can usually get video to resize but this one is acting odd, sorry that it scrolls into the margin. The game comes out 7/27! Pick it up!

Life is really a series of transitions. It takes time to understand them and it’s quite easy to drift through them without even noticing too. This is certainly one for me. Work has been consuming a huge amount of my time and so you may have noticed that writing has not been a pressing matter. Although I don’t enjoy not getting more posts out, it’s simply the way it is now. I don’t know how long it will take before I get back into a better cadence of output; truthfully I expected to get much more done with a more structured schedule but it hasn’t happened.

Much of the time I’d expected to use to write has been spent in recovery from mentally exhausting work. Exhausting may be putting it drastically as it is actually quite a bit of fun. There have been so many instances where a thought has struck me that I could have put out 2,000 words on, but the time to fully address the thought and shape it into something comprehensive and consumable hasn’t been present. Much of the time has been spent reading books on work (pricing and services marketing) and some on getting back into American Literature. I’ll review Slaughterhouse Five soon, but to what extent is yet to be seen.

I went home two days ago in order to start a trip for work. I spent the day with my parents and really enjoyed the serenity of my first home. It will always be home in many ways, but now it really isn’t my place. I realized a few years ago that it wasn’t home in the same way it was growing up. Minneapolis is and has been home for some time now.

Friends are getting married and starting families. They are scattering into different areas with different reasons. Many more are appearing at close proximity while others escape over the horizon. It’s easy to reflect when the changes are so apparent. So many good things have happened over the last few years! So many changes. And yet there are still so many in store. It’s exciting and melancholy at the same time.

Scanning Digg I saw this Old Spice social advert, the Old Spice guy (who I had never seen before seeing an ad at PREDATORS the other night) is in a video saying hello to Kevin Rose, the CEO of Digg. It’s pretty funny. Check it out:

Can you imagine my your brain and my incredible body and handsome face parts?  Of course you can’t.

The point here isn’t that it’s a funny “viral” video; it’s that a traditional CPG company such as Old Spice is manipulating it’s advertising in a new way that actually uses technology in an innovative way.  It’s essentially a play to get more posts online and therefore spread the word of their brand.  And it’s working.  I went to their website just to see who their holding company is (it’s P&G…of course.)  They’ll see a large uptick in hits to their site and most importantly free video plays.  Well run viral campaigns such as this (some might call this “guerrilla” like tactics) will hit core audiences.  That can be done via other mediums, but not on the cheap.

How many more companies have the fortitude for this kind of thing?  Not that many…but they’ll grow in numbers as the evolution continues.