John Carrier

A few weeks ago, we got a new dining room table.  It’s awesome.  It seats six comfortably, and fully-leafed, it can accommodate 10-12.  We have hosted a couple of big Shabbat dinners with friends and family, and this Saturday we’re hosting our first Passover seder.  The funny thing is, we’re still going to need a card table on the end, because we’re expecting 13 for dinner, my personal record for mouths to feed in one meal.

So, one goal down, nine to go…with a twist.

A couple of months ago, I decided to start thinking about maybe considering (in a very preliminary way) the inkling of a notion of possibly changing the course of my career…and becoming a rabbi. 

Since then I’ve talked to my own rabbi and to rabbis at the three rabbinical schools he suggested I check out - JTS, Ziegler, and Hebrew College.  All the programs sound interesting, and all the rabbis gave me something different to focus on in preparing to apply, leaving me with a lot of work to do over the coming year, if I want to apply for admission to rabbinical school for the fall term of 2009.  And I do.  More than anything.

So to the extent I make this a cat blog and talk about myself, I imagine my journey to rabbinical school will predominate in the coming months.

Have you been down this road (or a similar radical career change / ecclesiastical calling), and can you tell me where the pitfalls are?  I’m all ears.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

–MK Gandhi

I’m in a bit of a quandary.  Perhaps you can help me out.

Since late last night (while up past my bedtime to prepare for Passover) I’ve been thinking of the famous, bumper-worthy quote above.  It has resonated with me since the first time I encountered it (in a collection of quotes, or perhaps on a t-shirt), and that resonance deepened when I read Gandhi’s autobiography a few years ago. 

It is a simple and direct yet elegant and profound instruction on how to live one’s life meaningfully, mindfully, and deliberately.  It is also incredibly existentially demanding.

That’s the trouble I’m having…not whether I can be the change - which is challenging enough - but exactly what change I want to see.

Where do I begin?

Where do I cease?

Beginning is easier: I want to live in a world in which people are less attached to their possessions and more committed to their relationships.  This is the primary change I want to see, a world where spending time with someone is more laudable that spending money on someone, or even worse, spending money on yourself to impress someone.

More concrete: everyone stop working so much - and I mean long hours, not hard work, since who really works hard anymore? - in order to buy stuff for your spouse or kids to make up for the fact that you work so much.  Leave work at a decent hour, go home, hug your kids, and gaze into your wife’s eyes for a full, uninterrupted minute.  Your kids will remember your warmth long after they forget what PlayStation is.  Your wife will not miss the trinket you could have bought with your overtime.

That’s the change I want to see.  I think I can start being that.

What change do you want to see?  Why can’t you be that change right now?

Wow. I thought only record companies had the gall to alienate their best customers with legalistic bullying. I was wrong.

Ford is now claiming ownership (in the sense of intellectual property) of all images of Ford vehicles, including photographs that Ford car owners take of their own cars. When a group of product enthusiasts called the Black Mustang Club tried to publish a calendar of their own cars on CafePress, Ford cease-and-desisted their behinds by releasing the legal hounds on CafePress.

Makes me want to use my best Bugs Bunny voice (all respects and posthumous royalties due to Mel Blanc): What a maroon.

This is not a rant against intellectual property rights. It’s a rant against bad marketing by companies grown-up enough to know better.

For the sake of “protecting” your brand, Ford, you have just alienated a group of people (at least twelve of them) who were likely to buy and actively promote your products for the rest of their lives.

In taking this action you’ve spread a little anti-marketing among many more people than every would have even heard of the BMC 2008 calendar otherwise.

Good show, Ford.

If you really need to pad the to-do list of your legal department so it appears they do something other than dig for loopholes in labor and pension laws, don’t you think your time could be better spent on a less desirable ideavirus?

Come to think of it, that white decal would stand out pretty well on a black Mustang.

Your turn:  How does your company (past, present, or future) treat its biggest fans?  On the flip side, what kind of treatment have you gotten by being a fan?

Colin Beavin, aka No Impact man, posted today on the problem of air travel and its impact on the environment.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, per se, and I’m not proposing to start the horse-and-buggy revolution in business travel and bi-coastal commuting (I’m talking to you, Schouweilers).

I do consider myself a “mental environmentist”: I believe that our mental environments our cluttered, principally by outmoded assumptions that no longer serve us.

Colin talks about the significant and growing impact of air travel (largely business-related) on the health of our atmosphere and suggests we look at alternatives like high-definition teleconferencing and other advances in telecommunications. I’ll take it a step further…and a step closer to home.

This is a special case of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: people hanging on to old ways of doing business despite new information (or technological progress) because the cost of change — questioning your own assumptions, admitting you were wrong — exceeds the perceived benefit of switching.

More prevalent case than air travel, but related: Where I live (Minneapolis) people commute an average of 45 minutes per day (round-trip) so that they can gather in the same building to work, even though they spend 80% of their time or more isolated in their own cubicles. Furthermore, they usually commute by driving alone in an SUV (by my observation, at least).

The assumption? People work better when they congregate in a central location. The reality? This model gained acceptance and solidified as a best practice well over a hundred years ago, sometime after the great urbanization of the US but decades before modern communication technology.

I haven’t seen updated numbers lately, but I heard JetBlue and Best Buy were doing quite well with homesourcing and reducing their employees’ impact on the environment, to boot. If you care about that sort of thing.
A lot of people will fight to the death for the idea that business requires facetime, by which they mean guaranteed access to physically observe and interrupt their coworkers during a fixed interval totaling 40+ hours per week.

I think it’s a combination of clinging to outmoded assumptions and lack of trust, which begs the question, if you don’t trust the people you work with, why do you work with them?

Please share your opinion in the comments below. I’m dying to know if I’m wrong about this.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

Today, I’m going to do a little mashup of ideas from two of my current living heroes, Timothy Ferriss and Keith Ferrazzi.

Keith’s new thing is sharing your goals with your friends to garner their support (and deepen your relationship with them), and in that spirit, he recently blogged his goals for the new year.

Tim’s book, the 4-Hour Workweek, teaches you to throw out your reasonable goals in exchange for unreasonable ones. His logic? Since (a) radical goals can be waaaay more motivating than humdrum ones, and (b) there’s less competition for the far-out stuff (more people dream of owning a dream house than a dream castle), then (c) you are more likely to reach your crazywild goals than your run-of-the-mill ones, if you take your crazywild goals seriously and actually take the first steps toward achieving them.

The mashup: here’s my list of the Top 10 Insane Goals I want to accomplish this year. I came up with this list after much thought over the recent holidays using the methodology Tim calls “Dreamlining.” Out of 30 or so things I would do if I had $100 million in the bank and there was no way I could fail, these 10 (in no particular order) would be the most life-changing.

1. Take a family trip to Israel.
2. Run a 50-mile race.
3. Take the BOSS 28-day wilderness survival course.
4. Purchase a dining table that seats 12 people.
5. Take a volunteering trip through AJWS.
6. Through-hike one Triple Crown long-distance trail.
7. Take sushi-making lessons. In Japan.
8. “Winter” (as a verb) someplace warmer than Minnesota.
9. Take a family trip to Europe.
10. Start a “virtual” brewery: Develop a tasty beer recipe, contract-brew it at an established brewery, and distribute it solely through the Internet.

Accomplishing any one of these goals would change my life for the better. Accomplishing 2 or 3 of them would make it the best year of my life (after the birth of my children, marrying my wife, blah blah blah). I’m going for all 10. Now, where’s the coffee?

Has anyone out there done any of these things? What’s the best way to start? Please use the comments below for tips and trips, or better yet, to list YOUR most outrageous goals for 2008.

Someone wrote to me last week to ask how search engine marketing could help improve his business online. He sells stuff via a website with lots of navigation buttons; to borrow from Seth Godin’s lexicon, bananas everywhere…which is, unfortunately, industry standard web design.

Here’s how I responded, with the hope that it can help you with your online pursuits as well.

I’d caution you not to focus your strategy on search engine optimization. It’s one tool in the toolbox, and a blunt and expensive tool at that.

If your goal is to increase traffic, then we can research the most popular and most effective keywords used by prospective buyers of [your product] and [your category], then help rewrite the text on your site to optimize the frequency of those keywords, while still making it readable. Finally, I’d work with a network of bloggers and other site owners (or develop my own sites) to link to your site, which will raise your position in Google and other search engine results, possibly bringing you more traffic. Over time. Probably.

If your goal is to increase SALES, then I would recommend a few other changes to your site before investing in higher traffic.

First, you give your visitors a lot of choices in your site navigation, and experienced advertisers will tell you that the more choice you give someone before the sale, the higher the chance he will walk away before making up his mind and handing you money.

Second, you have a great opportunity to develop what [Seth Godin and] I call a “permission asset”, or a collection of contact information from your site visitors along with explicit permission to communicate with them again in the future. This is substantially different from buying/renting mailing lists and sending spam. This is important because if you don’t have the means and permission to follow up with a visitor, it is probable that if they don’t buy from you on their first visit, you will never see them again.

Once those changes are in place, you should employ a combination of pay-per-click search engine advertising (for immediate increase in traffic) and search engine optimization for the slow, long-term climb in Google ranking. Both will cost you, if you want results, but with the proper measurement, you can maintain a positive ROI on both, and they will be a sound investment rather than a draining expense.

That’s how I would approach it. If you need help implementing it, let me know. If you’d prefer to implement it yourself, let me know that, and I can recommend some good books.

Warmest regards,

John Carrier

That goes for you, too.

What are your biggest frustrations when it comes to online marketing?

A friend of mine is starting a book club for fellow consultants, and she asked me to make a recommendation for our inaugural title and write a blurb about it.

I thought I’d share it with you…

*****

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazi and Tahl Raz

From consultant John Carrier:

This book was first recommended to me during a brief stint as a salesman…but please, keep reading!

Up to that point, I had been a heads-down consultant for about four years, focused on delivering great project results to whomever my client was at the time, but not taking an active role in networking or marketing myself for future projects. “Never Eat Alone” opened my eyes to a whole new dimension that my career (as well as my personal life) had been missing.

Often people who work in a highly technical field, such as finance and accounting, believe that their professional success depends far more on what they know than who they know — experience and competence rather than so-called “people” skills. They may even be turned off by the whole idea of intentional networking because it feels false or insincere. We all have an experience of meeting with someone who was clearly more interested in telling us about themselves that hearing about us. This gives relationship building a bad rap that it doesn’t deserve.

Ferrazzi addresses this negative perspective with his admonition to not be that “networking jerk.” On the contrary, taking a sincere interest in growing who you know, how well you know them, and how well they know you will have a dramatic impact on your success. This is especially true for consultants like us who are in the market for new and better employment more often than other professionals are.

Never Eat Alone isn’t just for salespeople, or for any one class of professional. It’s not about being the best schmoozer or collecting the most business cards at the next networking event. It is about working on your relationships — both business and personal — in a thoughtful, organized way to build a more successful and satisfying life. Reading it has changed my life, and I strongly recommend it to every colleague in the consulting business.

*****

…and your business, too.

If you have an opinion about how important relationships are (or aren’t) in your business, please leave a comment below.