Credit: Christian Greller

Thinks about it this way: as long as you’re not making a living doing what you love, then you’re still someone else’s bitch.

It doesn’t matter if you call it a “job” or a “client,” if it’s what you do to pay the bills so that you can use what little of your free time you have left doing something else, then it’s not yours. You’re relying on someone else to put food on your table and a roof over your head, and you are not free.

The flip side to this is that if even you have a “boss” and are “employed” by a “company,” as long as you love what you do for them, then you are free. This is the path you’ve chosen and, if given the chance, would choose again, because the time you spend putting food on the table and a roof over your head is time spent doing what you love.

So this is what I want you to do. Take a second to forget the labels that people like to put on things to make themselves feel better or someone else feel worse about what they do for a living, and ask yourself this: Who do you work for?

Either way, all is fair.

There’s this saying that came out of Second-wave feminism that “the personal is political.” Personally, I’ve never agreed with it, if only because I see politics as an exercise in the collective well-being.

I mean, yes, we live in a liberal democracy where individual rights are supposed to be job #1. But politics is about mediating competing interests. There are going to be winners and there are going to be losers, and when something affects your own self-interests, it’s very hard to not take it personally.

But just because we take something personally, that doesn’t mean it was. We all have our own self-interests, and it would be hypocritical and illogical to expect someone to choose our self-interests over their own.

Take business: the world of business is ruled by self-interest. When someone we know makes a decision to our disadvantage, we have to swallow it up and remind ourselves that “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

In fact, the only things that I’d say are truly personal are love & war. We may go to war over competing self-interests, but unlike business, part of your self-interest is to vanquish me. That is pretty damn personal.

And love, well, love is something we experience to the complete exclusion of our reason. That’s why a very logical man once said that “the heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of.”

There is no logical choice involved in who we fall in love with or they make us feel.So it’s kind of ludicrous (and illogical) to expect someone to be logical about their romantic feelings.

And that, my friends, is why all is fair in love and war.

You know what my father used to say? “Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face.”
– Roger Sterling

Dealing with clients really is like dating. It’s so easy to get overly involved with them and lose sight of the big picture.

You take on the client, start over-analyzing them, their culture, and what they’re doing. And then you start obsessing on everything else they could be doing.

You think about what more they could be doing to get the most out of the relationship; about how they can benefit by taking it up a notch, “getting more serious,” and take the relationship to the next level.

But sometimes, the timing just isn’t right. Sometimes, they’re just not ready for anything more serious. And it can be hard to come to terms with that.

Sometimes, they’re just having a good time — enjoying things just the way they are. And if you push it, and start trying to be more serious about their business than they are, you’re just going to push them away.

So the best thing you can do is relax, and try to enjoy the ride, too.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
–George MacDonald

Credit: ynahteb

Have you ever wondered how far your the trust of your personal brand goes? Or how many degrees of separation it can transcend?

Imagine that you’re pretty good at what you do and that you’ve even made a bit of a name for yourself in some circles. Then imagine that one day, one of your connections reaches out to you with a job offer — a good offer to do interesting work.

Now what do you think will happen when you start work and many of your colleagues don’t know who you are? Will they trust their colleague’s judgement in hiring you and give you the benefit fo the doubt? Or will your presence make them feel uneasy and threatened?

They’ll probably Google you to find out what you’re all about? What will they find? How do you think they’ll react to it? How do you think it’ll affect the way you do your job?

Do you think it’ll make them want to reach out to and engage you? Or do you think it’ll make them want to challenge you and find the chink in your armor?

After all, there’s so much more to your personal brand than just your credentials. There’s also your personality and all the pieces of it you leave online can end up coming together to make up the lion’s share of your first impression.

Your personal brand can do a lot to build trust, but how transferable is that trust? Will it follow you through the doors that it opens for you, or wil it get bogged down in office politics?

And how would you react to a new guy with a strong personal bran? Would you be cynical about all the smoke and mirrors they used to build it? Or would you be curious about who they really are and try to engage them?

Credit: md_foto

The other day, I was listening to an episode of The Age of Persuasion called Big and Small. One of the things that the host, Terry O’Reilly, touched on was how marketing and advertising agencies fall victim to Stockholm syndrome.

You see, in our eagerness to understand a client’s brand, we live, breath, and eat it, and start seeing it in the very same light that our clients do. We stop seeing the forest from the trees, and start seeing just the one tree.

We end up losing sight of the big picture and how our client’s brand fits into for the average consumer. For the average consumer, our client’s brand is just another tree in the forest. They’re just not that big of a deal.

And our job as marketers isn’t to make consumers see our clients as the most important tree in the forest. Our job as marketers is to help consumers realize that the forest just wouldn’t be the same without that tree — without our client.

But when we fall victim to Stockholm syndrome, we start believing that our client is the most important tree in the forest. And when that happens, we are no longer able to relate to consumers, and that means that we are no longer able to do our job.

Of course, the catch is that if we’re going to do our job and help consumers relate to our clients brand, we’re going to cast our clients in a light that doesn’t make them look like the most important tree in the forest. And how are we supposed to pitch that to our clients? How do we tell them that what they live, eat, and breath isn’t all that much of a big deal after all?

Here’s a clip from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program of Guy Kawasaki explaining why he thinks that it’s a better idea to ask a woman, not a man, for their input and/or advise on a business model or idea. It’s an interesting way of looking of things, but I think if overlooks how an aggressive competitive-drive can also drive innovation.

Via Ruben Harris

Hat tip @redstarvip

So here’s a tactic that social media probably can’t do anything about: scent marketing. This is a clip from WatchMojo.com, the company with whcih I got my start as a video blogger.

Something interesting that the interviewee points out is that “most of the research suggests that [scent] doesn’t change your mood; but it can make you spend more money, it can make you linger longer, and it can impact how positively you evaluate products or the store you’re in.” Talk about a sweet (smellling) tactic for FMCGs. In any case, I’ll let the expert do the rest of the talking…

When I was in the military, there was a lot of emphasis put on leadership. Now that I’m in the world of business, there’s a lot of emphasis put on management. Well, I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the difference between the two, and this is what I have to say.

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