I read an article in ADWEEK explaining why any content a company creates should be considered marketing and the importance it all has to building the brand.

Content is marketing, we all know that. But marketing is also content. So are HR manuals, social media policies, annual reports, analyst reports, research studies, customer evaluations, product reviews, employee testimonials, customer testimonials, videos from conferences, CEO blogs, tweets, updates and check-ins.

The article reminded me of something I wrote last year that dovetails perfectly.

Why are so many blogs and biz books overwritten; saying the same thing over and over as if repeating the message for an extra hundred or more pages will make it more powerful?

Even fiction often follows the same pattern.

Why is so much content garbage?

Why do people insist that more is better?

Why do they assume that using a word with multiple syllables will make them sound more intelligent and impress the reader?

Websites are worse, both B2B and especially B2C.

Way overwritten and in long dense paragraphs with the vital information buried.
Has it gone completely unnoticed that almost nobody reads anymore?

The majority scan and in a hurry, spending 5-10 seconds to decide if they want to spend the average of 30 seconds on that page.

And those of us who do read are easily annoyed by bad design and the garbage that passes for content.

The problem, of course, is that a healthy ‘data-ink ratio’, which means saying a lot clearly in as few words as possible, is hard work.

I probably shouldn’t complain since I offer a service called Clarity REwriting that contributes significantly to my revenues, but still.

It’s easy to avoid dense, opaque, overwritten books and blogs, but when I need information from a website I am stuck.

So do yourself (and me) a favor.

Think about the data-ink ratio when you develop your content; doing so will improve your business.

I’ll add that consideration applies just as much to your internal docs.

Some of the worst examples come from HR, but it’s often not their fault, since so much HR content is developed by lawyers and very few of employees are fluent in legalese.

DISCLAIMER: What follows is an ad.

If you need assistance with the clarity of your content call or write me (the contact info is in the right hand column); you’ll find I’m fast and more affordable than you might imagine.

Flickr image credit: 10ch

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

If you are looking for the worst advice on which to build your company culture, be sure to add this piece of un-wisdom from Ashok Kushwaha (whoever that may be).

“I am responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.”

The first half of the sentence is true, you are responsible for what you say, as well as the way you say it.

It’s the second half that will royally screw you up and contribute to your company’s destruction.

It is your responsibility to be sure you are understood, whether it’s working with your team or explaining your vision and market to investors.

And it’s not just when you’re the boss.

The same holds true as a friend, volunteer, parent or the grown child to your parents.

In fact, the second part relegates the whole to one of the stupidest sentences I’ve heard/read in my lifetime.

However, it does fit the current attitude that eschews personal responsibility and believes that any word/action/behavior is justified/excused as long as there’s a reason.

That said, the possibility of success should be reason enough to make sure that whoever your audience is has a clear understanding of what you mean, since not understanding provides a clear path to failure.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Do you love technology? Do you long for or live on technology’s bleeding edge?

Which comes first in your mind, the technology or the problem it addresses?

Too many entrepreneurs’ focus is 80/20—80% technology and 20% problem.

“To me, the computer is just another tool. “It’s like a pen. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you. —Red Burns, the “godmother of Silicon Alley” and head of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

The problem is the book and the book is what you’re selling.

Your buyers/customers/users don’t care about the technology—at best they won’t notice it; at worst they can ignore it.

They will care about the book; about the story it tells and the experience it offers.

It is the book they will pay for—not the technology.

And it is the book that others will invest in.

Flickr image credit: brewbooks

There will be numerous stories today about the events of 12 years ago; however, I already shared the only personal story I believed added a different component to the usual conversation.

Instead of looking backwards, I want to show you the present and what one company, Toyota, did to change the course of food philanthropy in New York City—a lesson that other areas would do well to consider.

Many businesses of all sizes write checks to charities and others offer time off for their people to actively pursue projects.

Toyota wrote check, too, but then had a better idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen. … an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance.

Think small improvements that offer large results over time.

What could a bunch of engineers and a dose of kaizen really do for the country’s largest anti-hunger charity?

To get the full impact you need to read the story, but consider this,

At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.

The biggest take-away of this story is the absolute proof that the only thing required to take an approach known to yield positive results and successfully apply it in circumstances with no relationship to the norm is not an open mind, but rather a willingness to be proven wrong.

“They make cars; I run a kitchen,” said Daryl Foriest, director of distribution at the Food Bank’s pantry and soup kitchen in Harlem. “This won’t work.”

Happily, Foriest was proven wrong.

Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank. (…) “I never thought that what we needed were a bunch of engineers. In our world food is king, but we didn’t know that the queen would be kaizen.”

So the next time you are about to reject an outré solution, remember what kaizen did for the NY Food Bank and rethink your decision.

Flickr image credit: Inha Leex Hale

I read an interview with Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza and several things stood out that would be useful in hiring and juice your corporate culture.

Juice your culture, because, as you grow, your culture will assimilate and mimic the traits of those you hire.

D’Souza was a diplomatic brat whose family moved every two years. The result was an ingrained learning curve and appreciation for those different from himself.

We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.

This applies as well to those who change companies, since every company has its own culture and every manager a subculture.

Culture is a reflection of values, so the trick to good hiring is to know what which values in your own culture are truly critical.

It’s not important if previous cultures were similar to yours; what is important is understanding in which cultures the candidate thrived and how they compared to yours. As discussed Friday, skills and performance are not independent of environment.

The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.

Good cultures foster personal growth, which requires personal awareness and a willingness to recognize what needs to change.

Finally, talent and attitude are far more important than current skills.

And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?

Your team and therefore your culture are stronger when people crave new challenges that not only stretch their current skills, but are outside their comfort zone.

People who aggressively drive to constantly learn, grow and change are only a challenge to management when they aren’t given those opportunities.

When that happens everyone suffers; the individual; the team; the company; and you.

Flickr image credit: ennox_mcdough

Companies that allow silos risk seeing divisions and departments that fight each other instead of focusing how each can best contribute to the company’s success—think Microsoft.

Globally, politics has become dominated by ideological silos and the wealthy believers who funnel rivers of money to their pet ideologues—think US Congress.

Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.

Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.

Every article I read tells me to “sign in and see what your friends are reading” or buying/thinking/doing/voting.

Dozens of new apps offer to filter your information/experience/travel plans/etc. based on what “people like you” think/did/own/bought.

The result of all this curation by like-minded people is a constant narrowing of experiences, therefore attitudes and thoughts.

That narrowing leads to an inability to understand those not like us, which, in turn, kills compassion, i.e., the ability to walk in the other person’s shoes.

The end result is a rise in all forms of bigotry, not just people, but food, places, cultures, religions, politics—the list is endless.

I’m not saying there isn’t value in curation, especially considering the tsunami of information that engulfs everything in its path.

Just be sure a large chunk of the recommendations come from people NOT like you.

Flickr image credit: SalFalko

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Entrepreneurs love hiring so-called stars; they work hard to steal them from a rival and brag about what their newest hire did previously.

Which, unfortunately, has little to do with how they will do in the future—think Ron Johnson and JCPenney.

Yet, no matter how often they are disappointed, bosses of every kind continue to hire based on history, with no consideration of contributing factors.

“Across all our studies, the results suggest that experts take high performance as evidence of high ability and do not sufficiently discount it by the ease with which that performance was achieved,” the paper reports.

Passion can take your company a long way, but if it isn’t backed up by good hiring you’ll be in big trouble, because the wrong hire can quickly derail success.

This isn’t new info, nor is it rocket science; people do not perform in a vacuum and common sense should tell you that environment and colleagues are an integral part of any individual success—but it doesn’t.

… not only were the studies’ subjects [business executives and admissions officers] unable to counteract this correspondence bias, they remained susceptible to it even when warned explicitly of its dangers. (…) …seasoned professionals discount information about the candidate’s situation, attributing behavior to innate ability.

The outcome is one of which you should be hyper aware.

“One of the consequences is that you end up admitting people who should not be admitted, and rejecting people who should not be rejected.”

It takes hard work to beat an innate prejudice, but it can be done

Take a moment to download The 12 Ingredients of a Fillable Req, CheatSheet for InterviewERS™, and CheatSheet for InterviewEEs^™; implement them and you will be well on your way to better hiring.

Image credit: HikingArtist

In a world that constantly chatters about the importance of authenticity what’s a good recipe for staying authentic and enjoying a high level of creative freedom while making a giant difference by shaking up the establishment and still be able to pay the bills?

Ingredients

A group comedic actors, scriptwriters and directors in their 20s to late 30s

Add a wicked, satirical edge.

Mix well.

Post on your own YouTube channel.

Watch the money and changes roll in, although the money comes faster.

(Be sure to turn on Closed Captioning if you aren’t fully bilingual in Spanish.)

Any question why more than five million people have watched this?

YouTube credit: portadosfundos

Are you familiar with the Darwin Awards?

They are given posthumously to people who die as a result of their own overwhelming stupidity for removing themselves from the gene pool. (They are well deserved; if you don’t believe me then read through a few of them.)

However, in these brave new days of social media we need a new award; one that honors stupidity, sans death.

We need an award for all those who through their bragging on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube draw the attention of law enforcement before they can do yet more damage.

The postings document illegal acts that go from mundane to murder.

Social media paved the way for one undercover cop to buy 250 weapons, including guns that could pierce body armor and multiple walls.

The actions are prevalent enough that they warrant a new award.

Call it the IYPITWC (If You Post It They Will Come).

Or maybe DITRA (DIY Rat Out).

Perhaps it could be a Get Into Jail Free Pass.

Wait! I have the perfect name.

The SMIA (Social Media Idiot Award).

Flickr image credit: Global X

August 23^rd was an interesting reading day for me.

First I read about the ingredients that nine different entrepreneurs utilized to create great cultures and are applicable to any company of any size.

Then I read what some would consider a rant about how culture was used to enable legal discrimination.

The ingredients described in the first article made me smile and shout ‘yes!’, because they are the same things I’ve been preaching for years.

However, the twisted use of culture to legitimatize bigotry and discrimination enraged me—as it always has.

I have long recommended using culture as a hiring filter and still believe it is one of the best around, since attitude is far more important than skills when it comes to who you hire.

People who believe manipulation is the correct tool for getting ahead do not belong in a company that promotes strictly on merit and accomplishment; in fact; they can easily destroy it.

However, a talent for manipulating people has nothing to do with age, gender, race, creed, color, alumni status or the myriad of other differences that may take you out of your comfort zone.

Flickr image credit: Paul Dixon