Ask.com - The Algorithm?

As I ride into work each day, we drive past the Ask building and a billboard that says "Ask: The Algorithm Killed Jeeves." Ask is trying to reposition themselves as the search engine with the best algorithm. In theory I can understand why Ask wants to do that: if they can beat Google on Google's own territory then the company might be able to create some real momentum.

In reality though, this is another branding disaster because Google has already staked its position in the consumer's mind as the search engine with the best algorithm. Obviously, this claim may or may not be true anymore, but it continues to be true in the mind of the consumer. Why? Because Google's brand was built upon hundreds and thousands of news stories telling consumers in the early days of the Internet about how well Google indexes web pages and finds what you're looking for. People were so widely convinced, in fact, that Google became the number 1 search engine, overtaking all of its early Internet search competitors.

Now Ask is trying to take that position, but there are no news stories about the effectiveness of Ask's system. Creating an algorithm is old news. So Ask has to rely on buying advertisements on television and billboards to blast in people's face that they have the best algorithm. And because it's through the lens of advertising people don't buy it. There's just no one to verify their claim, and so they will fail in trying to take Google's position as the best algorithm.

If anything, Ask should be continuing to differentiate on the ease and human elements of its search engine. Instead of investing in commercials and billboards, invest in making it so Ask is the best at recognizing human syntax. You can still have a great algorithm to back it up, but the key selling point of Ask is that you get to ask it a question in everyday language. That's why it's one of the few search engines still operating - it differentiated itself. It should continue to stress this point of differentiation and parody Google for being a less human search engine.

First Day at Stone Yamashita

I was thoroughly impressed by my first day at Stone Yamashita. The office is gorgeous. All the furniture in the office looks as though its been picked out by artistic designers. The space is wide and open, exactly what the kind of space you'd expect of innovative thinking. The desks are in lines like cubicles but without the walls, and there's a very egalitarian feel to it. Keith Yamashita himself worked in the same sized area as the rest of the firm, and he came over just to introduce himself and say hi. A Herman Miller chair accompanied each desk, along with two computer monitors. I was immediately outfitted with a Blackberry and an Apple computer, both of which I'm still learning to use.

The kitchen was perhaps one of the coolest perks. The firm orders in all sorts of groceries (many of which are organic) from Whole Foods that are available for the taking. They also have a really effective recycling system like I haven't seen on the East Coast, and it's really simple too. Blue recycle bins are just more numerous than trash cans. They have areas for cans and bottles, but I was encouraged to limit my bottled water consumption to conserve plastic. Finally, I was asked to throw anything like paper towels, cardboard, or organic stuff into a compost drawer instead of the trash. The facilities manager says that they have very little trash - mostly plastics - as a result. I just kind of wish the rest of the US would follow suit because it's not that hard.

What really got me about the firm though was just how genuinely nice and positive everyone was. After working at Merrill Lynch last year, where titles and your level of compensation were so important, it was pretty much a 180 to be working at a firm where everyone, even the founder of the company, was going out of their way to introduce themselves. We weren't treated like interns, as much as new employees who are part the team. The dress was also really casual; in fact, the accountant came over with long hair, an earring, and a Deutschland jersey - not your everyday accountant! They're taking us out to lunch for much of this week, which is great to get to meet them and get free food. I think it speaks volumes how you treat the lowest level employees.

I'm actually excited to be there as opposed to other jobs where I felt like I had to be dragged there. They had materials for us ready to go when we got there, so it's the first job that feels like I'm doing something meaningful as opposed to menial labor. That was really my first day - keep the honeymoon period rolling.

Sublet Hell

Subletting is actually a nightmare for college students. Since college students are only in school for eight months of the year, they allow others to purchase time in their room during the months they are gone.

I recently went through this experience, both in finding a subletter in Philadelphia and finding a place to sublet in Berkeley. Both turned out to be a huge pain in the neck, and it was mainly because I didn't know the right questions to ask.

Finding a subletter
For my Philadelphia apartment, I posted an advertisement on Craig's list, looking for a subletter. I got various responses, including one from a woman from Portugal who said that she was coming over here to work as a market researcher for a British firm and would take the place on the spot. She said I could contact her employer who would send the money directly to me.

I talked to her employer who had an African accent who gave me his phone number and asked me for an address to send her check. Having heard another voice, I really didn't care who was subletting my room, but rather that my room was being subletted. As long as I had money in pocket, this woman could feel free to live there.

At the same time, my gut was telling me something wasn't right. Her email was written in poor English, and she sent me a picture which was a bit too good to be true. Then I received an email telling me that her boss would send me $3900 and then I would take out my portion and send her the rest of the money by Western Union. This sounded strange to me, but like I said, I could care less as long as I got money in the bank account.

Finally, I saw something on Craig's List saying, "Watch out for scams and don't do any deals involving wire transfers or Western Union. Deal locally." I read the warning and found out that this woman was a scam artist. Basically, I was going to get the $3900 check, cash it, and then send her a check. A few weeks later after I sent her the check, I was going to find out the check was bad. I immediately sent the scam artist an email with some choice words and found a new subletter.

Lesson: It matters who you get to sublet your place. Find out:

• Why they're subletting
  
• What their home address is. My dad was pretty smart about this because he asked for my new subletter's driver's license to get the address.
• How long they plan on staying

Verify the truth of each and every question. You may want to have a criteria for the type of subletter you want. Also, make sure to get as much of their rent as possible up front. Since they're usually only subletting for up to three months, it's easy to ask for their first and last month's rent as a standard.

Subletting from Others
I had trouble with the place I was subletting in Berkeley as well. My friend Ravi set me up to talk to one of his friends. I asked the guy a couple of questions about the room, but I didn't really know what the right questions were. He said I could get the room for $500 per month.

About a week before I was supposed to go out to California, I get a call from my future roommate, who told me that he's claiming the bottom bunk. This call obviously took me by surprise because I didn't know that I had a roommate, let alone a roommate in a bunk bed for $500/month. I told the guy I was subletting with that I was going to find a new place and he said that he understood.

Lesson: Make sure to ask every question imaginable when subletting without ever seeing the place. Here's the list I ended up using:

1) How far are you from the metro station?
2) Is the room a single or a double?
3) How big is the room?
4) Could you send me pictures of the room?
5) What furniture is in the room?
6) Are utilities included in the rent price?
7) Does the room have television and high speed internet?
8) Are there laundry machines near by?
9) What's the earliest I can move in?
10) What floor is the apartment on - is there an elevator?
11) How many other roommates are there and what are they like?
12) Is there a kitchen - what does it have in it?
13) How many bathroom and showers?
14) What size is the bed?
15) How much do you want as a down payment?
16) Is there heat and air conditioning?

A lot of these seems like simple, straightforward questions, but if you don't ask them all, you get surprised with a roommate bunk bed. Make a list of questions ahead of time, and you won't be surprised. Overcommunication is the key.

Welcome to Berkeley

I just moved into my new place at Berkeley. I ate lunch down in what's called the "Asian Ghetto." I had a fantastic chicken with penne pasta and mushroom sauce. The reason I chose the restaurant: they had pictures outside and that dish particularly caught my eye. I wondered why more restaurants don't use pictures of food. What if a restaurant included a picturebook per table with their various dishes displayed. Would it increase the number of different dishes people try, and therefore increase the number of visits they make because they don't get tired of the same dish over and over? Right now pictures of dishes are associated in my mind with low budget Asian restaurants. I think Chili's is the only restaurant I can think of who's menu is extensively littered with pictures of food. What if a nicer restaurant made a nicer picturebook?

I also traveled down Telegraph, and it had what my dad would call "character." I can only describe it as a sort of multicultural market. The different stores each had a specialty - a tea and herbs store, t-shirt store, poster store, skater apparel store, etc. There was not a single chain that owned a store on the block. In addition, the streets were lined with flea marketesque vendors trying to sell their artwork. One fellow had made pencilholders out of pennies (I hope the United States Treasury doesn't come after him). All I could think was that the Ries's would be happy because they keep telling brands to do one thing and do it well. Focus, focus, focus.

What's a Chumby?

I saw one of my friends "add the personal Chumby application" to their Facebook profile, so of course, I had to see what in the world a Chumby was.

According to the Chumby website, a Chumby is a screen that connects the web wirelessly to your "Internet life," including blogs, news, photos, weather, and Facebook. For instance, you wake up to your Chumby alarm, touch the screen to change to weather from Weather.com and then news from CNN. It's an always-on computer.

The website says: "Replace your old clock radio (the chumby blows it away) and wake up to the exact time (set from the internet) and your favorite music. Or put it in the living room and keep tabs on your Web world while you're just hanging out." All for just under $200.

I can only speculate, but it looks as though the company is taking what my Marketing 101 professor would call a "skim strategy." That means that they are selling it at a high price to early adopters, and as the technology improves, it will significantly lower in price.

I could envision this little gadget replacing my clock radio, but the question is: at what price? Currently, Radio Shack lists its most expensive clock radio, the "Oregon Scientific Weather Radio and Docking Station," at $150, and its average clock radio is in the $20 - $40 range. You can pay $80 for a really nice expensive one.

So do I see a future for the Chumby? I think it's a quirky enough device that people will pre-order it and buy online - how many, I don't know. And they've done a smart thing, making it in several different colors (and perhaps with a customizable design?). But I think they really need to increase their economies of scale and cut the price of the Chumby in half to make it a truly viable widespread device.

Once they do that, they're at least in the price range of one of those gadgets you would see being sold in the SkyMall magazine on airplanes.

Should the Media Industry Converge?

I've been doing a lot of reading on innovation because of my summer job with Stone Yamashita partners, and so I have gotten into broader forward-looking thinking.

Today, Mark Cuban, billionaire business man and owner of the Mavericks, writes about the media industry, suggesting it should converge. He observes that Rupert Murdoch is so convinced that the media industry should converge that he is willing to pay $5 billion to purchase the Wall Street Journal, so that he can rename Fox News as the Wall Street Journal News.

I don't see it as much as a question of these media "converging," as he termed it, but rather that they have a unified master brand strategy. If Fox News were renamed the Wall Street Journal News, then the feel of the Wall Street Journal newspaper would need to be translated into a television show that is all news all the time. Fox News could not simply report in the same way it currently reports, only under the Wall Street Journal heading, because the Wall Street Journal is about business, whereas Fox News is a general/political news station. It would certainly tarnish both brands because of inconsistent expectations.

I can understand, though, the feel of the Wall Street Journal and Time in television form. General news has saturated the market, whereas Wall Street Journal News could be the first all-business all-the-time station. Time could be an editorialized news station with more in-depth reporting. I feel as though there as so many genres of news not being reported on television right now that either these news sources wouldn't work in video form or there's a huge opportunities for these companies to take advantage of with the proper resources behind them.

I think that the strength is not in the convergence of the media, but rather in a unified TV-Print-Online strategy that defines and strengthens each media brand.

The 8th Habit - Is it worth it?

I started Steven Covey's The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, which is a continuation of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The first part of the book was a little bit of fluff with little to note, until he gets to his 12 chapter program.

Ideally, he'd like to read each of these 12 chapters in one month increments, so over that month you concentrate on that teaching. I was skeptical at first, but I decided I would read his chapter and then decide whether it was worth the commitment.

His first chapter was about one of the concepts in his first book, which is the power of choice. Many people see things that happen to them as stimulus and response. You get hit by a car, and so you get upset at the person who hit you. Car = stimulus, upset = response. It's almost automatic that by natural law, you should feel the emotion of anger if someone hits you.

But Covey asserts that there is actually a space between stimulus and response - a millisecond pause - where you can actually choose your response to any situation. This decision gap is naturally larger for other people than others, and you can tell from peoples' baseline of patience. But Covey believes that you can train yourself to widen that decision gap so that you are in control of your responses and emotions.

It's a powerful idea, and I've certainly seen it come to play in my own life. Not so much when things were relaxed, but rather when people get stressed out - that decision gap starts to close. It is the difference between a good manager of people and a poor manager of people.

Therefore, I will take Dr. Covey's challenge and spend this month from May 20 - June 20, attempting to widen the decision gap. That means that if I snap at you, you have permission to call me out on it. It's all about choice.

Cigarette Warning Labels

Right now, my friend Andrew is over in Germany for the summer, and he noticed on his travel blog the difference in cigarette warning labels. The warning labels are obviously government mandated and so they are different in the European Union than in the US. In fact, the US cigarette warning labels are completely ineffective.

My consumer behavior class had me research how to make the cigarette warning labels in the US more effective, and we had a boatload of recommendations. I thought you all might find them interesting.

1. Pictures Speak Louder than Words. People actually have better recall for pictures than they do for words. This better recall, according to the picture superiority effect, is because pictures are coded in the mind both as an image and as a word. Canada has perhaps some of the most gruesome pictures, showing diseased gums.

In addition, these pictures are not simply small warnings on the side of the package like in the US. In Canada, warning labels are required to take up at least 50% of the box, as opposed to the 4% of the package in the US. All of the sudden, if you're carrying around a box of cigarettes, you're actually carrying around a repulsive image. While The Tipping Point suggests that this gruesomeness will have little effect on addicted smokers, it will certainly have an effect on potential teenage kids who don't want to be seen with such an ugly box.

2. Change the Warning Labels Frequently. The current cigarette warning labels are the same warning labels that the United States has had since 1984. They have only added one new label in 2000. Why is this constant bad? Because people get used (habituated) to the message. Canada has 16 different warning labels to combat this habituation.

3. Keep Your Message Simple. A 2005 study by Adkins found that half of all tobacco consumers read at a sixth grade level and below. That means that the messages need to be simple and direct, especially because a 1999 study by Krugman found that people must be able to understand the specific dangers mentioned in warnings. Let's take a look at one of our warnings:

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.

How many smokers really know what emphysema is? How about "complicating" pregnancy? This actually leads us to our next recommendation.

4. Be Descriptive. Just as I said before that images tend to have better recall than words, you can actually use words to evoke images and increase recall. For example, intangible words like justice and freedom have worse recall than words that evoke images, such as chair or house. Let's compare a US warning label to a Canadian waring label:

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health
• Tobacco use can result in the clogging of the arteries in your heart. Clogged arteries can cause heart attacks and can cause death (Health Canada)

The first one has no descriptive language, and instead makes vague reference to better health. The second one, on the other hand, emphasizes this clogging which we can imagine is like a clogged sink that doesn't work well. Using descriptive language can really increase recall.

5. Focus on Short Term Social Effects. The current US warning labels talk about the long term effects of smoking, such as heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema, etc. They don't talk about anything that will happen now because of smoking, such as bad breath, teeth, and yellowing fingers. A study by Haresku suggests that social consequences are actually more important to people than health consequences, and so cigarette warning labels should make believable, short term claims, like you'll smell bad, rather than unbelievable long term claims like "Smoking Kills."

6. Stop Attributing It to the Surgeon General. In Israel, they did a study about the affect of source attribution, comparing the effectiveness of warning label when it was attributed to the government, as opposed to when it was not attributed to anyone. They found that the message was believed more when it was not attributed anyone. And think about it, who is the surgeon general anyway? He sounds like the man trying to tell me what to do, and I'm going to rebel against the man. Stop calling it the Surgeon General's Warning.

7. Include Tips to Quit. This was an interesting finding we came across in an AIDS research study by Marchand and Filtrault. They claimed that if the labels were too scary, then it would activate the fight or flight mechanism in the mind. The way to circumvent that mechanism and use fear effectively was to include tips to quit. This way, people had a way out. In Canada, they have tips included on the inside of the box.

Conclusion. So will all these changes actually make a differences, or are some of us just doomed to smoke as The Tipping Point suggests? Well, Hammond did a study with chain smokers in Canada after they implemented just about all of these changes, and he found the warning labels were effective.

• 20% of smokers said that they were smoking less as a direct result of the warning labels
• 50% of smokers said they would like to see more health information on the box
  
• 58% reported that they felt disgust
  
• 44% of respondents said that they felt fear from viewing the warning label

Another Hammond cross-cultural study found that,

• Canadian smokers were 2.68 times more likely to believe smoking caused impotence
• 1.4 times more likely to believe cigarettes contain carbon monoxide (even though one of the US warning labels specifically states that cigarettes contain carbon monoxide!)
• 2.88 times more likely to believe that cigarettes contain cyanide
  

Yeah, I think the US labels could use some improvement.



Appendix, Current US Warning Labels:

1. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.
2. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.
3. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight.
4. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.
5. SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Tobacco Smoke Increases The Risk Of Lung Cancer And Heart Disease, Even In Nonsmokers (Added in June 2000)

The Penelope Trunk Interview

Today, Guy Kawasaki posted an interview with Penelope Trunk, entrepreneur and author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. They talked about everything from why women should not file sexual harassment suits, to when it's worthwhile to get a master's, to the merits of living at home after college.

I was particularly interested in this article because many of the questions seemed to be geared toward people coming out of college. For example, Trunk suggests that kids should stay home after college because of the rapidly increasing insurance and student loan payments. It just makes sense not to run up more debt with room and board. She also suggests that the first job out of school isn't as important as people make it to be since "most people have eight jobs before they turn thirty."

There was one other concept that popped up in my Good to Great post as well - the idea that it pays to be the best in the world at something. Trunk advises that you should specialize in a career and become the best at it. The person who is the best at something not only has more job security, but also gets paid exponentially more than someone who is average. This concept also popped up in the book The Psychology Of Selling: The Art of Closing Sales by Brian Tracy, who found that the top 4% of salesmen made 50 times more than the bottom 80% of salesmen. Look at the salaries of the top entertainers, sports stars, or even consultants who make thousands of dollars and hour. There is no doubt that it pays to be the best. The only thing stopping you is talent, ability, passion, and figuring out what you want to be the best at. No biggie right?

Good to Great

Good to Great by Jim Collins

This book has already become a classic management book. This book covers the insights gained from Collins' study of Fortune 500 companies. In this study, he compared the stock returns of Fortune 500 companies over the last however many years and looked for companies that went from being a good company to being a great company. This good to greatness was based on a few criteria

1) Before the company was great, it had to have 15 years of industry average stock returns
2) At some turning point, when the company became great, it had to sustain that greatness for at least another 15 years.
3) These returns needed to be at least 3 times the general market over that 15 years.

He found eleven such companies and compared them to a set of eleven comparison companies who had similar returns during the good period but never turned into a great company. Collins' then made observations about what those eleven companies had that the other companies lacked. At least 70% of the great companies needed to have the trait, and at most 30% of the good companies could have the trait.

Collins then divided his findings into three parts: disciplined leadership, disciplined thought, and disciplined action.

1) Disciplined Leadership
The most interesting finding in this section was about charismatic leaders. Collins found that charismatic leaders were negatively correlated to creating a great company. He called these Level 4 Leaders - the ones who came in with big visions and managed the company as an extension of their own ego (think Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy). These tend to be leaders who produce great results while they are there, but they are not sustainable results. These big shots tend to squash any other potential leaders and replace them with "yes" men that can carry out their vision. They make no plans for succession, which really means that they set up the company for failure without them. "The best way for everyone to know how important I was to the company is to show how much it failed after I left."
Collins found instead that Level 5 leaders were present in all eleven of the Good to Great companies at the time of transition from good to great. These leaders were all extremely humble and tended to claim that it was either luck or that anyone could have done their job. What they particularly excelled at was choosing great people to work around them. These leaders were not the "front cover of Forbes" type, but rather focused, humble leaders who brought great leaders on behind them.
This was another important distinction: the level 5 leaders made sure that the right people were on-board - people who were self-motivated and disciplines - while the wrong people - people who did not strive for greatness - left the company. Not a single Level 5 leader came in with a vision or a program to turn the companies around, but rather found the right people to come on-board and then created the vision. This delay in vision was another shocking finding.

2) Disciplined Thought
My biggest takeaway was that companies need to find one specific and usually simple strategy that works for them and then become the best in the world at it. The best way I can explain it is by thinking about a tall basketball player who perfects the lay up. According to the Good to Great strategy, that player should practice that one shot over and over again, exploiting his strength. He shouldn't be trying to diversify to become the best three-point shooter and point guard at the same time. He needs to be doing that simple lay up over and over again, and he will win the game. One example was Walgreens who found early on that what people really wanted was convenience, and so it's growth strategy became simple: location, location, location. They just kept opening Walgreens in convenient locations - even if that location was only a few blocks from another store location. This simple strategy grew them from being a good company to a great company. It takes real discipline to stick to one core strategy, and the good companies tended to diversify their strategy more - working on the three-pointer one day and the lay up the next, depending on the fad of the time.

3) Disciplined Action
In this section, Collins talked about how the strategies of great companies stayed consistent, even in times of great change. Once again, he talked about Walgreens, but this time, how they reacted to the Internet bubble and the threat of Drugstore.com. Drugstore.com was the poster child of the Internet boom. At its height, the company had a price to revenues ratio of 400X, while Walgreens was priced at 1.5X. Everyone predicted that Drugstore.com would put Walgreens out of business because Walgreens wasn't online. Despite this pressure, Walgreens reacted slowly and thoughtfully, and instead simply throwing together a website, Walgreens took its time to make the technology fit its strategy, rather than making its strategy fit in technology. While Drugstore.com went bust, Walgreens launched a successful integrated internet/store strategy that once again centered around convenience. Collins notes that most often, great companies are not the first to adopt a technology, but they are the best at applying it.
In this section, Collins also talked about the idea of momentum in gaining buy-in from people. Collins kept getting asked by people "How do I motivate my people?" And what the study found was that level 5 leaders don't usually have trouble with motivation because level 5 leaders have employees who are self-motivated. What Collins said was that as people start seeing the change and the success of a leader, their movement gains momentum, as more people yearn to be part of a first class organization. Anyone who doesn't, leaves. As a result, motivation, or disciplined action, were not a problem in the great companies, rather people just wanted to be a part of something great, so they worked hard. It was an interesting idea.

That was pretty much the things that I took away from Good to Great. This book really spoke to me not about the fundamentals of building a great company, but rather leadership 101. I tend to be the loud/charismatic leader who comes into an organization with a vision I want to implement. This book has made me take a step back and examine the effectiveness of that leadership style. I now value quiet excellence more. I have certainly learned more humility over the past year, and it's something I am sure I can continue to work on. I liked this book - not because I now know how to make a great company - but rather because I understand what it takes and it made me reexamine how I lead. That was most important to me.

Diet Coke Plus - The Soft Drink with Vitamins?

I saw a billboard on my way up to Philadelphia for Diet Coke Plus. The value proposition is that it's a soft drink infused with vitamins, and I guess the idea is that when someone reaches for a Diet Coke, they go "Oh, I could have the same taste with more vitamins - I guess I'll choose the healthier choice."

To me, this move seems cannibalize Diet Coke sales more than it expands the pie. I can't imagine there is a big enough target market that goes: "I don't like Diet Coke, but I'd try Diet Coke with vitamins!" to really warrant new packages and production line. This move appeals mostly to the health conscious consumers who already drink Diet Coke so that they'll feel even healthier. Doesn't do much for market share.

The only rationalization I could see is that maybe consumers would want to pick Diet Coke with Vitamins over Diet Pepsi. Though, to be honest, this value proposition seems weak at best. People don't expect their soft drinks to be healthy, and so perhaps I am shortsighted, but I can't see a big clamoring for Diet Coke with Vitamins, even though people are trying to be health conscious. Soft drinks are a guilty pleasure - not a health drink. I'm sure Laura Reis would have a field day with this one because of the branding involved.

I don't predict a rosy future for Diet Coke Plus, because it seems silly to me. As always, we will see what happens.

A Tweak in Language

Seth Godin today writes that when a store helper asks, "May I help you," it's equivalent in its uselessness to asking a teenager "How was school today?"

It's funny because I was thinking about the same thing when I walked into Radio Shack the other day. The RadioShack employees are paid on commission, so helping you is pretty important to them. When I walked in, the sales rep asked me if he could help me today, and I politely declined. I tend to decline most of the time, perhaps because I'm stubborn and perhaps because I'm a man.

At the same time, though, I was thinking, "If I were him, I would be asking customers something they don't have a predetermined response for, like, 'What are you looking for today?'" It's a little tweak in language, but it would make all the difference in getting a response.

"Oh, you want headphones, it's over here - follow me." In this way, I am not supposing the customer is helpless or incompetent (which is what the customer feels when you ask him "May I help you"), but rather, I am now cutting down his or her time in the store. I am suddenly a value added.

Tweak your questions, and you'll get a much better response.

Barnes and Noble: Can't a Guy Get A Seat?

I went to the Barnes and Noble in Tyson's Corner the other day, and if you haven't been able to tell yet, I kinda like bookstores because I get to browse. It's the same to me as the supermarket is for my mother. After browsing for a bit, I took out a book and wanted to find a couch to sit down on. I found something like four to eight couches in the bookstore. I also found something like four to eight additional sets of people just sitting on the floor. I wondered to myself whether it was good business practice to make your customers sit on the floor. On the one hand, it meant that people needed to get their books and get out, so the business would be efficient. On the other hand, it meant that they were forgoing some of the loyalty and user experience to get people in and out.

It reminded me of how Richard Branson started his first successful Virgin Music Stores. At the time, music was only sold at retail in stodgy stores where people came in, got their music, and left. Branson took advantage of the deregulation of record prices and sold his records at discount. In addition, he created an atmosphere where people wanted to stay and hang out to listen to music. He put out bean bags and mats on the floor because it was the hippie era, and so people just sat and listened to music. In one store, though, he found that his revenues were swiftly dropping, and he realized when he visited that it was because too many hippies were sitting around smoking weed and so paying customers couldn't get in. You can read more about it in Branson's great autobiography, Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way.

There's obviously a balance between customer experience and efficiency. I can understand that Barnes and Noble doesn't want a whole bunch of people sitting around their store reading and not buying anything, but at the same time, it's really sad to see a bunch of people sitting on the floor. My recommendation would be to at least put in uncomfortable seating in the form of wooden chairs, rather than no seating whatsoever. That was people can sit down if they want, but they can't sit long enough to read a book.

Keith Yamashita's Unstuck

Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World by Keith Yamashita

Continuing forward in our innovation series, I read a book called Unstuck today by Keith Yamashita, the chairman of Stone Yamashita Partners, the company I am going to work for this summer. The book focuses on how to get a team that's stuck for whatever reason (and they name seven reasons) and make it unstuck. Much of it centered around team dynamics and troubleshooting different problems.

What I liked most about the book was that it looked at solutions to problems as systems rather than one-off solutions. I feel like that's an important viewpoint that many people aren't exposed to. When a problem like low sales comes up for a product, you can make a short term patch to boost revenues by issuing discount coupons to consumers, or you can go back and figure out at the fundamental level what is wrong with the product. I actually first learned this concept from a book I won at summer camp called Rich Dad's Retire Young, Retire Rich. In this book, the author talks about the difference between the rich and the normal is whether you have a system or not. For instance, in high school I started tutoring, and I made money hourly. When I started a tutoring company, however, I created a system that leveraged other people's time, and I got paid $10/hr for time I didn't work. That's the power of a system against a one-off solution.

There were other great concepts and takeaways in this book too:

• Can your organization function without it's leader?
• Stress similarities in a group and build a common soul in a team to create cohesion
• Increase face-to-face time when starting a team
• Keep your teams from 5-8 people
• Futurecast - visualize the future and see what challenges lay ahead
• Make up new words to articulate a new action; when you control language, you control the debate.

Another trend that I think I will be seeing a lot of at Stone Yamashita was to dramatize ideas. This concept I first read in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People. The basic idea here is that actions speak louder than words. For example, instead of telling someone to write down their vision for the company, Yamashita has the specific exercise of writing a newspaper article about what your company has accomplished three years down the line. This exercise gets people to experience the information and live it rather than just listen to it. He has several more examples scattered through the book, although this dramatization is not something he explicitly teaches.

What's this book good for?
I think this book is not just good for people who are stuck, but people who are also starting on new ideas. The book asks a lot of questions that gets creative juices flowing rather than tell you exactly how to solve things. I think it's actually an important book for leaders to read, as long as they have a project to apply it to. It's a practical book, so without application it isn't useful. At the end of the day, it's a short 3-hour read that is worth your time. I recommend it.

When They Zig, You Zag

Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands, by Marty Neumeier

As I'm preparing for my job at Stone Yamashita Partners (SYP), I going to be reading a lot of books on innovation - especially books that mention SYP. The first book in this series is called Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands, written by Marty Neumeier who is the CEO of Neutron LLC, a brand consulting company.

Background
Neumeier frames his book around the importance of innovation in an supersaturated world of advertising messages. Over the passed 200 years, he states that sustainable competitive advantages in business has evolved from the means of production (industrial revolution) to the capital to purchase mainstream media advertisements (rise of the television) to now the battle for the consumer's mind. The first into the consumer's mind generally wins. As a result, in congruence with the Purple Cow theory, products need to be substantially differentiated and remarkable from competitors so that people will talk about them to one another. Neumeier cites a study that showed that companies that are considered more differentiated produced financial returns of around 4%, whereas companies that were considered undifferentiated lost about 4%.

Summary
After stressing the importance of innovation, the author reveals his 17 step process to create the Zag (innovation) when everyone else is Zigging. These 17 steps help you first find that vision and core purpose that Collins and Porras talk about in their bestselling book, Built to Last. Then it takes you through what you need to think about in terms of tangibly differentiating the idea from other products or services and putting your idea in front of a trend like green initiatives or
dieting. Finally it talks about how to get and retain customers.


Review
This book was a quick read - I sat down in Barnes and Noble, and three hours later I was done with the book. Zag is a particularly good book if you're trying to develop a new idea or reinvigorate an old brand. It succinctly takes you through all the necessary steps to differentiate your brand. Obviously it won't tell you exactly how, but it gives you the frameworks so that you can figure out how from your own experience. If innovation or focus is not your concern, then you probably don't need to read this book.

Move Out but not On

It's one of those sad packing days. I've had an amazing year here at Penn, and with only one more year to go, I can't help but ask the cliche question: where has the time gone? I asked Jason a question today that I'd be interested to hear from other. How do you make sure your life doesn't go by too fast?