W. Clement Stone, who built an insurance empire worth hundreds of millions dollars, would make all his employees recite the phrase, “Do it now!” again and again at the start of each workday. Whenever you feel the tendency towards laziness taking over and you remember something you should be doing, stop and say out loud, “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!” I often set this text as my screen saver. There is a tremendous cost in putting things off because you will mentally revisit them again and again, which can add up to an enormous amount of wasted time. Thinking and planning are important, but action is far more important. You don’t get paid for your thoughts and plans — you only get paid for your results. When in doubt, act boldly, as if it were impossible to fail. In essence, it is.
If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.
If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you’re on the hook. It’s an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.
Running a project requires a level of commitment that’s absent from someone who is managing one. Who would you rather hire, a manager or a runner?
Beacon Ad Network (a company I co-founded) has launched their new ad platform. It is the first marketplace for placing ads on Christian websites.
Content producers submit their sites to the directory, and set ad zones across their site and the prices. Advertisers can then purchase ads in those zones in a few clicks, and then track the success of their ad in real-time. It’s never been easier to purchase ads on Christian sites.
In Chinese, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s slogan, “finger-lickin’ good,” came out as “eat your fingers off.”
Ford executives spent a long time scratching their heads trying to figure out why the Pinto was a complete flop in Brazil. Then someone told them that pinto was Brazilian slang for “tiny male genitals.”
And the folks at Gerber didn’t know that because of high illiteracy rates in some African countries, pictures on the outside of packages are always representative of what’s inside. No surprise, then, that customers were more than a little repelled by that cute baby on the baby food labels.
Making sure that every issue has an “owner” is an essential part of being an effective internet manager. So as you go through each item on your agenda, make sure the first issue you deal with is “Who owns this?” If a particular issue has an owner (and that’s the case most of the time), he or she is the one who handles it. If an issue is homeless, spend a minute or two figuring out who it should be, or simply appoint someone.
Getting the ownership issue out of the way early will help your meetings—and possibly your entire company—run more smoothly. Instead of wasting a lot of time on endless discussions you’ll be able to turn a particular issue over to one person who will then coordinate what to do with it.
Fire and Knowledge aims to be thoughtful and challenging through quotes, links, commentary and essays.
Topics include science, religion, politics, literature, history and technology. As someone said, there are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people.
