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See Pos­it­ive Shar­ing for details.

So how much do you want to work for Lego right now? (Or at any time for that matter.)

Admit­tedly, I’ve come a bit late to the whole Twit­ter thing (and I’ve always tried to be such an early adop­ter – well, ok, BMX bikes passed me by too – and don’t tell any­one but I’m not on FaceBook).

As it stands, a whole week in, I can kind of see the attrac­tion of Twit­ter. Essen­tially, it allows me to get a quick thought out without writ­ing a whole blog post. Of course there’s also the abil­ity to stay in vicari­ous touch with other people — either those I know or those I’ve heard of. But really it’s a time thing.

It’s inter­est­ing to note that at one time put­ting your per­sonal thoughts ‘out there’ meant cre­at­ing a web­site (well, there was a bit of a period pre-internet but let’s skip past that one). Updat­ing was a pain and not exactly con­du­cive to a dynamic, real time experience.

More recently came blog­ging which made pub­lish­ing the con­tent of your head way, way easier. Every­body waded in, writ­ing lots, updat­ing reg­u­larly. Until life and work got in the way and the posts began appear­ing at more sed­ate intervals.

Now, with the impos­i­tion of the 140 char­ac­ter limit, dash­ing off a quick thought is, well, pretty quick. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how this latest phe­nomenon affects the volume of blog posts. Will people increas­ingly take the quick and easy over the con­sidered? We’ll see.

Of course, this makes me won­der about what comes next. Micro-tweeting with a 20 char­ac­ter limit? Emoticons only? Only time will tell.

It is per­haps stag­ger­ingly unsur­pris­ing that most mar­keters and their agen­cies spend most of their time in search of solu­tions for their brands.

After all, we all want to get to the right answer as soon as humanly pos­sible (if not sooner). It also provides the sat­is­fac­tion of actu­ally doing (and be seen to be doing) some­thing, any­thing – quick, unleash the mar­ket­ing ninjas (if only there really were mar­ket­ing ninjas).

The trouble is – this is kind of dumb.

It’s far bet­ter to spend qual­ity time (as much as you can spare) really under­stand­ing what the prob­lem is. The real prob­lem, not just the one you think it is. The strange thing is when you do, quite often the real prob­lem is quite dif­fer­ent than the one you thought it was.

Your motto in this should be the Buddhist mantra:

Don’t just do some­thing, sit there

Now let me pause for a moment to make one thing abso­lutely clear: I’m not say­ing we should all sit around inspect­ing our navels while the mar­ket goes whist­ling past. Speed is still of the essence. For­tune favours the agile. And ana­lysis para­lysis won’t get you anywhere.

But… if I had just just an hour to come up with a solu­tion, I’d prefer to spend 40 minutes of it get­ting to the bot­tom of the real prob­lem (and prob­ably another 10 minutes rede­fin­ing it) than to have a whole hour with a pad and a marker.

Unbe­liev­able I know. But check out the video below to get a glimpse of a future where you’ll be able to use a computer-based ‘sys­tem’ to access and read the news (well the future as seen from 1981 anyway).

I love the quote by one of the news­pa­per guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rub­ber cups to put the phone hand­set into – the first modem I ever used was almost identical to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT

IDC has made a new report avail­able on Slide­share: Selling in 2009: 10 Ways to find, Win and Keep the Money (embed­ded below). It takes a long hard look at the year ahead and what it means for IT com­pan­ies want­ing to sur­vive and thrive in the year ahead. It is pre­dom­in­antly US-based but many of the recom­mend­a­tions are just as valid in Europe (though the tim­ing may be out by six months or so).

While it gives a slightly mixed pic­ture of just what tech com­pan­ies are up against, there are some clear take-outs for sales and mar­ket­ing people. It makes some pretty plaus­ible, pretty harsh pre­dic­tions, including:

1. Selling strategies that worked last year will not work in 2009
2. Com­pan­ies that sig­ni­fic­antly reduce their sales and mar­ket­ing invest­ments in 2009 will be gone by mid 2010
3. Com­pan­ies that blame their lack of selling on the eco­nomy will also fail by mid 2010
4. Sales organ­isa­tions will be asked to do more with less (no news there)
5. Com­pan­ies that shift head­count to inside sales will provide sim­ilar levels of cus­tomer touch at lower cost…and driver higher cus­tomer satisfaction
6. Sales organ­isa­tions that bol­ster ded­ic­ated invest­ments in lead qual­ity and demand gen­er­a­tion will be rewar­ded with sig­ni­fic­antly higher sales productivity

There’s more in the report but that gives a fair indication.

It’s inter­est­ing that over 60% of respond­ents feel as con­fid­ent or more con­fid­ent about the pro­spects for sales in the next six months versus the last six months. IDC them­selves pro­ject rev­en­ues on the whole as either stay­ing flat or increas­ing mod­er­ately (although the more com­mod­ity end of the hard­ware mar­ket doesn’t look so pretty).

The scar­i­est thing in there for me is the con­tinu­ing lack of align­ment between mar­ket­ing and sales. On hardly any meas­ure did respond­ents rate their align­ment at over 50%. For­tu­nately, the one area that rated (slightly) over the mid­way mark is demand gen­er­a­tion as this will be a crit­ical factor in the com­ing year or two.

At Ban­ner, we’ve seen the rapid change of focus into demand gen­er­a­tion activ­it­ies in the last six months. Our timely part­ner­ship with Elo­qua has cer­tainly paid off as has the suc­ces­sion of people we’ve sent on train­ing as we’ve recently seen a shift into mul­tiple pro­jects involving con­tent cre­ation, sales enable­ment, demand gen­er­a­tion and lead nuture.

While these could simply be a sign of the times, I per­son­ally believe that these kinds of pro­grammes will form the bed­rock for the major­ity of tech­no­logy com­pan­ies’ activ­it­ies for some con­sid­er­able time to come. And while this may be driven by neces­ity right now, in the long term it could pay huge dividends for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies that get it right.

[slide­share id=923821&doc=idc-2009-sales-barometer-top-ten-predictions-1232120663160379–3]

Chan­geThis has been invit­ing people to nom­in­ate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chapter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

The ones that I would have nom­in­ated that are already in include: Flow by the fant­ast­ic­ally named Mihaly Csikzent­mi­halyi, A New Brand World by Scott Bed­bury, the bril­liant Orbit­ing the Giant Hairball by Gor­don MacK­en­zie and The Art of Innov­a­tion by Tom Kelley.

Ones I would add:

• The Art of Pos­sib­il­ity by Ben­jamin and Ros Zander – my all time favour­ite and one of the few I return to again and again. Par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant just now it gives an uplift­ing view of liv­ing, work­ing and man­aging today.
• Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath – the best storytelling book I’ve come across with some real prac­tical insights that I use time and again.
• Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro – great, quick fire ways of think­ing your­self out of problems.
• Slideo­logy by Nancy Duarte – the best book on present­a­tion design ever by a long, long way.
• How Cus­tom­ers Think by Ger­ald Zalt­man – a com­plete eye-opener that clearly demon­strates that there is no such thing as a rational decision.
• We, Me, Them and It by John Sim­mons – the best book on writ­ing for busi­ness (all his other books are pretty damn good too).

Hav­ing said this, one thing about the 100 best list and the books on it – there is a danger with adopt­ing such a canon of work that we fall into a sort of busi­ness and mar­ket­ing ortho­doxy. So, if I want per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing, I read Seth Godin. Present­a­tions it’s Garr Reyn­olds. Viral it’s Mal­colm Glad­well. While I love all these books, it’s really import­ant that we reg­u­larly step out­side the accep­ted canon (in fact out­side busi­ness alto­gether) to find truly fresh, ori­ginal thinking.

Too many the­or­ies (par­tic­u­larly in mar­ket­ing) become estab­lished largely down to a catchy title and an enga­ging writ­ing style without the evid­ence to back them up. As inter­est­ing and fun as this can be, it can also cost a whole heap of money for very little return.

Now, time to get back to our new Twitter-based campaign…

(Image by But­ter­fly­sha on Flickr)