YouTube; The New Source of Free Music

I never cease to be amazed by the new ways that people find to get around the law. As the record industry continues to send civil suits to college students, the college students are just getting started and using YouTube to listen to their music for free.

The record companies still put up their music videos on YouTube, so tonight, when someone wanted to listen to a song that I didn't have on my computer, they just looked it up on YouTube for free. In fact, some of my friends make continuous channels of songs to listen to.

And the record industry is still suing. They're behind the times.

Mark Warner for Senate

He is just so money:

I Want to Be Sold On Your Company

I have been going to employer presentations for a week now, and some of the firms just don't get it. I don't want to just be told about your company's background and ten year trajectory; I want to be sold on your company. I want to know what unique employee experience that I get from your company and why people at your firm are happier than people at any other firm.

Here are some of my suggestions:

1. You have 45 minutes. A good presentation about the full scope of a company should be able to be done in 45 minutes, which allows 15 minutes to go and meet people. I have three more presentations after yours, so keep it short and sweet to keep my attention.
2. Don't introduce everyone in the room. This is standard employer presentation fare - introduce everyone who works for the firm, their division, and where they're working. I can't keep track of all those people, so don't make me zone out while you introduce them.
3. Give me perks. There should be quirky things about your firm that just make it pleasant to work at. I know L.E.K. Consulting talked about their beer tray that goes around on Fridays. Sure that's not the meat and potatoes of why you go work there, but it's interesting and fun. Do you fly your people first class? Stay in a five star hotel? To an undergrad who has never gotten that travel experience, it sounds sexy.
4. I want to know your culture. I am going to be spending the majority of my week working and I want to know what your people are like. When I ask a lot of employers about their culture, they give me a blank stare.
5. Be excited about your own company. If you aren't excited about your company, I won't either. If you can't quickly tell me why it's the best place in the world to work, then how am I going to think it's the best place in the world to work.

I want to be sold. I want to find the perfect place and fall in love with it. So sell me.

Recycling - East Coast Style

Jason stockpiled plastic and glass bottle in his room to recycle. There wasn't a recycle bin within two blocks of our house and no recycling program for our house. It's atrocious.

Potbelly Gets Sandwiches

Out of all the sandwich shops - Subway, Izzy's & Zoe's, Quizno's - Potbelly Sandwich Works gets it. Entering the store, you head straight for the line. As you're waiting in line there is an open refrigerated section where you can pick up a drink. Then you come to the service person who takes your order, and they're nice - they're trained to be nice. After putting in your order, you walk past the chips as they warm your sandwich. Past the chips there are three or four registers. And the price - that's one of the greatest parts: it's cheaper than any other shop around. They have managed to achieve maximum efficiency, upselling, and personality that all come together for a great sandwich experience. Apparently there are "off-the-menu" sandwiches as well that make you feel like you're a part of the club.

Penn just got a new Potbelly across from HUP. The service was slow when we went, but I'm sure it will become a madhouse as they get into their groove. If only they picked a better location.

Justice

A U.S. judge awarded $2.65 Billion from the Iranian government to the families of the 261 soldiers who were killed in the 1983 Lebanon attack.

Let's hope the Iraqi people don't get any ideas.

Special Interests Disconnected

I talked with a woman today who dreamed of a time when students would no longer think that drinking alcohol was cool. She thought it would happen within 50 years - anyone who drank more that 3 drinks would be looked down upon. She even said that sending kids to college was more dangerous than sending kids to war because she said that 1600 college students die each year of alcohol poisoning.

There was nothing I could feel but disconnect from this middle-aged woman as she talked. She didn't understand the underlying motivations of a college kid for drinking. She said "half of college students have their heads on straight, while the other half party like crazy." She called anyone who drinks more than three drinks in a night an "asshole."

This sort of fanaticism is what brands special interests as "crazy." They need to steep their utopianism in reality and understand that there will always be a contingent that smokes, drinks, has sex, does drugs, etc, and there's no such thing as eradication only containment. Unless you can identify underlying motivations in teens not to drink, you will never be able to make tangible changes. It's like a company who sneers at their customers - they will never really connect with them.

That's what I think the brilliance of the latest marijuana campaigns is. It takes real fears, worries, and distastes of teenagers for marijuana and it feeds it aback to them. It's hard work to steep your special interest in reality because you really need to explore the mind of the person who you're trying to convince to change (her "drunken asshole"). Until you truly understand the person, you will continue to be seen as a fanatic.

PowerPoint Presentations Seth Godin Style

Tonight I went to employer presentations where the speaker had seas of text on powerpoint slides behind them. It was painful. It was then that I realized that for the rest of my life, it will be a struggle to convince other people to make good PowerPoint presentations.

Seth Godin writes the book on PowerPoints in his post called Really Bad PowerPoint:

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report...

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas...

Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works...

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

Every time I start reading a PowerPoint slide, it takes my attention away from the presenter, and the whole point of being at a presentation is to listen to the person teach you the information rather than reading it. If you want the facts and figures in a presentation, make a leave-behind instead and put all the details in that leave-behind.

Diversify Leadership Like A Portfolio

This is a subject I've been giving a lot of thought to as I've helped my friend Andrew restructure his student government and listened to Jason talk about the power of the centralized Chinese government.

What I've decided is that you can look at leadership like you would a portfolio. If you have one stock in your portfolio, then there is significant volatility in your portfolio as the stock goes up and down. The risks are high when you invest in but a single stock, which means you can get incredible returns if the stock surges like a Google. At the same time though, if you pick a bad stock, your portfolio will plunge.

Leadership works in a similar fashion. If an organization is reliant upon a single leader, like a Steve Jobs or Lee Iacoca, then the organization can do phenomenally well under that individual. But what happens when that leader leaves? Usually, because the organization has become so reliant on that individual, the organization will slowly decline. So as you go from leader to leader, you get a lot of volatility because the success of the organization is based on that single person.

Now let's talk about diversified leadership, comparing something like a dictatorship to a democracy. If the dictator is deposed, then the organization plummets into disarray. On the other hand, if the president were to be killed in a democracy, so many other leaders have been cultivated that the succession would be swift and far less volatile.

I firmly believe in leaders cultivating leaders below them and diversifying leadership as opposed to centralizing. It takes a leader with a very small ego to let his leaders shine above him, but at the same time, that's what makes the leader so powerful - he is the keystone that manages these great leaders below him.

Apple Computer Takes Over Best Buy

Apple's retail stores have been an unmitigated success with the highest sales per square foot of any other retailer - including stores like Tiffany's. These stores were created because Steve Jobs was dissatisfied how retailers like Circuit City and Comp USA were maintaining the Apple displays. Well recently, with the rise of Apple retail stores, iPods, and subsequently Apple computers, Best Buy has a large display specifically for Apple. In addition, Apple gets to use its own employees to staff these stations in hopes to add another $400 M in Apple sales.

The lesson here is that Apple and its computers are hot and growing and with enough of a customer base to create a retail space in Best Buy that Steve Jobs would approve of.

BlackBerry Has Arrived

So it's official - BlackBerry is finally starting to filter its way down into college. A number of my friends now have BlackBerrys (Blackberries?) , despite its difficulties with Gmail. At this point, it's the early adopters in the college age range - the people who are overly-involved and need to tote their email around with them; however, knowing how over-committed Gen Y is, it won't surprise me if BlackBerry's become more widespread. BlackBerry may have a new market to look at, but they'll need to make the device more customizable to fit with the younger styles. And they have to do it without alienating their core group of business users. I would go long on BlackBerry, even though I hear good things about the new Google Phone that will go across carriers.