Be Different or be dead

May 30, 2020

How your writing skills can be really improved with these free courses

Source: Unsplash

How your writing skills can be really improved with these free courses.

Have you always dreamed of attending a prestigious university of Harvard or Yale, but never had the chance? Now you do, courtesy of Coupon Chief!
They’ve rounded up 98 of the best online writing courses offered by major universities in the U.S. that anyone can take (for free) to improve their writing skills.

From creative writing and journalism to business and technical writing, these courses are designed to help you improve grammar, structure, style, and content through practice and guidance.

Here’s a few course highlights from the post:

▪️English Composition I, offered by Duke University
▪️Modern Poetry, offered by Yale University
▪️Writing a Successful Grant Proposal, offered by Minnesota Council on Foundations
▪️Academic and Business Writing, offered by University of California, Berkeley
▪️Storytelling in the Workplace, offered by Rochester Institute of Technology
▪️Advanced Communication for Leaders, offered by MIT
▪️Storytelling for Social Change, offered by University of Michigan
▪️Writing in the Sciences, offered by Stanford University
▪️Communicating in Technical Organizations, offered by MIT
▪️Writing Case Studies: Science of Delivery, offered by Princeton University
▪️Writing for Social Media, offered by University of California, Berkeley
▪️Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing, offered by Harvard University

With all the free time we have on our hands right now, it’s important to be productive and use the time to level ourselves up professionally and personally.
These free online writing courses will help you do just that.

— Marielle Stroud writes for Coupon Chief on topics related to budgeting, personal finance, and e-commerce. In her free time, you’ll find her sitting on her front porch sipping sweet tea.

 

• Posted 5.30.20 at 06:55 am by Roy Osing
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May 25, 2020

Why copying weird people is necessary for a winning career

Source: Unsplash

Why copying weird people is necessary for a winning career.

The world today revolves around benchmarking; determine who does something really well (as judged by the experts) — call them best in class — and copy them.

The objective of benchmarking: to improve some aspect of your organization or your life based on the experience of others.

In business, benchmarking has been useful in improving process related issue — billing, ordering, fulfilment, human resource methods and the like. In one’s personal life, benchmarking might help in matters such as physical fitness routines, yoga practices and school courses to take.

But at the end of the day, although benchmarking may result in productivity or efficiency improvements, it does little to help either the organization or individual stand out from the crowd.

If everyone copies best in class how can specialness ever be created? All you get is a crowd of bench-markers who all share something in common.

Creating something that is unique and unmatched by others can’t be done by copying anything or anyone. Strategic advantage can’t be achieved by doing what other organizations do; a unique persona cannot be created by copying how others conduct their lives.

The lure of benchmarking is that it’s relatively easy and generally humans like easy stuff. And we also like to fool ourselves into believing that what is easy to do will somehow make us special.

The truth is that copycats are not special; they are their own herd.

I know this sounds axiomatic, but uniqueness is not spawned by copying what other do. The source of innovation and creativity to stand out is the incessant — almost subconscious and involuntary — drive to do things differently than everyone else.

Here are some descriptors of individuals who spend their life trying to be the ONLY ones that do what they do: crazy, delirious, contrarian, edgy, weird, borderline, careless, risky, absurd, eccentric, freaky, funky, creepy and eerie.

The point is, highly creative people don’t attract standard adjectives explaining who they are and how they approach problem solving.

If you’re a normal person and want to be abnormal because it will help make you more creative, here are 5 things you can do.

Never benchmark anything again

You need to dispel the notion that is the antithesis of being different, and that is copying. This means never asking “What do they do?” as a means to doing something creative.

Copying is the straight jacket that will forever prevent you from coming up with something truly new and different.

Bury the copycat. Have a funeral for it and say goodbye.

If you can’t rid yourself of the copycat beast you will NEVER be capable of generating an original thought.

Try doing a 180

A simple way to deviate from what everyone else is doing is to ask:  “What if I were to go in the opposite direction to common belief?”.
This essentially declares that whatever the crowd does you will do the opposite. If you start out with a contrarian view, you are at least able to moderate it to something less extreme — but still different.
The 180 starting point is critical to a creative mindset; without it, crowd forces will suck you in to their mediocre and commonness.

This is one of my favourite examples of going against the flow with an outrageous proposition for customers. I’m not advocating it, but it is one example of a thought process that bucks the trend.
In this scenario let “What if I were to go in the opposite direction?” guide your ways.

Hang around weirdos

Not everyone has the same take on stepping out of the crowd; creative people have their own fingerprint on an approach they find that separates them from those around them.

To find your BE DiFFERENT signature, venture out and discover people who live on the spectrum between “normal” and special; between people who are average and those who are unlike no other. They’re around us if only we pay attention.

If you’re going to benchmark anything, benchmark weird because I guarantee that in the process of following their ways you will discover a sliver of what they do that you can twist to make it your own.

Follow your feelings

The world operates more on feelings than ever before. People buy things on the basis of how they feel about a supplier and the engagement experience they have with them.

They actually expect the product to work the way the manual says; the actual product or service is a commodity where generally price separates competitors in the short run.
The reason to choose one supplier over another doesn’t depend on their product portfolio.

The only thing that differentiates competitors in the long run is their brand — the value they consistently provide which, in the case of major market leaders who perform consistently, is a feelings oriented attribute.

So use how people would feel as the main criteria for deciding whether one of your new ideas might work. Let your intuition trump your logic.

Do stuff with no end game in mind

Activity rather than purpose may be the best guide to follow.

The problem with having a specific destination in mind, is that you engage your logic to try and figure out how to reach it.  And as we all know, once our left brain is engaged, it doesn’t like to consider a myriad of possibilities once it lands on its primary route to achieve the goal.

I was infatuated with The Inner Game of Tennis at one point in my past.

The premise offered by the author was that it is almost impossible to be a good tennis player if you allow your mind to control how you play the game.
Trying to return a ground stroke to your backhand has a high probability of not succeeding if you think “Rats, here comes another shot to my backhand! I know I’m going to screw it up!”

Well guess what? Your control side acknowledges your weakness and gets in the way of your body reacting to the shot and indeed your mind’s prediction comes true!

If you can unhook from your controlling left brain and let your body do what it is naturally equipped to do, your performance will improve immeasurably.
So, focus on the activity not the end game and follow your gut.

These 5 proven ways will help you be a member of the abnormal herd.

They will guide your ways to a highly successful career. Give ‘em a try. They worked for me!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.25.20 at 05:31 am by Roy Osing
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May 18, 2020

How marketer’s can easily create amazing value packages for people

Source: Pexels

How marketer’s can easily create amazing value packages for people.

In my experience as a CMO for a number of years, a marketing organization that has a strategy with these three elements is miles ahead of other organizations, and becomes the best practice for the herd to follow.

The strategy they follow involves a unique approach to:
▪️ The process used to understand what people want and desire.
▪️ The information selected on people that makes a difference on whether or not someone chooses you as their provider.
▪️ How to transform the information into something that people will pay for over and over again.

The process to follow…

The old adage that knowledge is power has a specific application in an environment where competition is fierce, economic shifts are dramatic and unpredictable and where customer wants and desires are changing almost every hour on the hour.

Most organizations employ market research as the tool for discovering the mood and needs of customer groups; the studies are typically performed by an external firm and are done periodically.

Market research has limitations.

— First and foremost, as the name suggests, it deals with ‘markets’; aggregations of people who express similar needs. The problem is that no two people are identical in any way, so when you look at market data you are looking at a blend of individuals where no one specifically is like the data gathered.

— Second, the fact that it is done periodically means that the rapid pace of changing needs could put organizations out of touch with what the current priorities are for the customer.
What people desire in this moment are likely different from what they yearned for a moment ago.

— Third, being outsourced to 3rd party contractors puts the management of customer knowledge outside the organization, and the understanding and application of it in the hands of a few employees.
Marketing receives the customer data and decides what it means to their marketing programs.

A new research model is needed; one that leverages the gathering of customer insights on the run to be a core competency of an organization that is unmatched by others.

Source: Unsplash

A core competency that applies the continuous stream of changing customer needs discovered to create opportunities and solutions for the customer that others simply are unable to do.

Customer learning is the answer.

Customer learning is the continuous process of capturing customer needs, wants and desires real time in the moment they touch the organization.

The idea is that every time a customer ‘touches’ the organization, it represents an opportunity to learn something about them.
My approach was to define all touch points in the organization and focus on the ones that represented 80% of the action.

Any customer touch point can yield productive learning if you consider it as a strategic learning opportunity rather than just a customer contact.

The challenge is to engineer the contact to produce the maximum amount of learning. Structure the engagement to allow you to easily gather their information you seek; ask the right questions, be unobtrusive and let the magic begin.

Obviously one of the engineering issues organizations need to get over is the amount of time an employee is allowed to spend with a customer. If they are managed by how long the engagement takes, the amount of quality information on the customer will be reduced.

And, for online applications, the engagement process must be structured to encourage people to provide information on the website. This has limitations, of course, because it’s not a conversation where the dialogue opens up opportunities to obtain more information from a person.

Source: Unsplash

A touch point that paid off handsomely for me was the customer complaint; when a customer called in with a complaint about something.
Dealing with complaining customers may not rank #1 on the rewarding experience scale for employees, but the complaint can, if listened to closely, produce useful information on how you can better serve your customers.

As an aside, I’m not a fan of being pointed to a FAQ web page as the organization’s way of handling my complaint. The questions are rarely relevant — because they’ve been prepared by employees from encounters with other people — and the moment leaves me frustrated and annoyed. On the other hand, I’ve had some terrific experiences with the Chat function; more resources should be deployed here.

What to do with all the information gathered from customer moments? Store them in a repository that is used by marketers to develop meaningful solutions to the problems and opportunities buried in the data.

The scope of customer learning is to look at the customer holistically; what their needs and wants are at the highest and broadest level.
The idea is to look laterally across their persona to discover their integrated needs rather than to look vertically to define a narrow — slice — need.

A holistic need for a consumer could be to travel every 6 months with their family; a slice need could be to have faster internet speed.
For a business a holistic need could be to leverage technology into a competitive advantage; a slice need could be to increase inventory turns by twofold.

To be able to use your marketing machine to standout from your competitors, it starts with institutionalizing a process to continually learn about your customers.

The information to gather…

The challenge in a world where virtually everyone has their basic needs satisfied is determining how an organization can stand out and be noticed. How does it get tagged with being remarkable and indispensable by their customers?

Today people are looking beyond their basic needs to feed their cravings, wants and desires. They are driven to a higher level to seek happiness; basic needs satisfaction may give people a lift for a period of time but the lustre soon fades — a new SUV soon becomes a used car.

As marketers, if we continue to focus on what people need we will miss the opportunities that lead to market leadership and enhanced profitability. The source of this huge untapped potential are the untapped secrets hidden in the deepest nooks and crannies of every individual that define who they are and how they want to express themselves.

A customer secret is what someone craves, aches and hungers for.

A customer secret has little to do with what someone needs. They need food, shelter, water and dependable communications — they expect to get them and pay as little as possible when they do; they might crave to see a Liverpool game played at Anfield in England and are willing to pay more for the opportunity to have their dream come true.
In a business setting, they might need power to run their manufacturing facility, but would be delighted to have a consultant recommend how alternative technologies could be employed to drive costs down and efficiency up.

Source: Unsplash

Exactly how does one gather secrets? People divulge their secrets only to others they trust, have confidence in, and have a strong relationship with.
If you are an outsider, they won’t tell you anything (other than perhaps what they need) and you won’t discover the gold that will enable you to have a profitable long-term relationship with them.

So, focus on relationship building with people you choose to serve. And don’t expect results overnight. It’s a long term investment; you can’t earn someone’s trust in a 60-minute interaction with them.

Secret gathering is a personal affair. Commit to informally meeting face-to-face with customers every week as a personal priority; you can’t discover secrets from your office. And have a casual conversation with the person you’re meeting; it’s not a formal market research interview — and don’t try and sell them on anything.

Avoid prying into personal matters unless it is a natural lead-in based on the conversation you are having. After the ice-breaker question, be guided by what they say.
And take lots of notes if it’s ok with them. It shows you’re interested in what they have to say.

How to use the information you gather…

Marketing with the focus on products and services is the way most companies engage with the market and compete today.

Nothing wrong with this, but it’s hard to find a unique niche where your competitors won’t find you.
Product competition is always challenged with how to provide features others don’t.

Rather than the traditional product-centric approach, unforgettable marketing is moving to offering packages of value that reflect the broad holistic view of the target customer in terms of their needs, wants and desires.

The key question is, of course, how do you move to the package creation mode when you have been stuck in the product-only gear for so long?
Here are the 5 steps to follow to create packages around your products and services.

Define the core product — start with your core product. It will be the anchor for your package and generally represents the key product or service that you want to offer.

Add elements to your core product — Identify additional components that can be ‘wrapped around’, or added to, your core product.
The choice of what value to add is based on what you have learned — through the customer learning process — about your target customers. The more you know about the customer the easier it is to choose what added elements are appropriate.

Your end game is to create a package that addresses a relevant want or desire in the most compelling way possible.

Resist the temptation to add too many value elements; don’t complicate the package.
Try to add just three additional value components that present a consistent and seamless value proposition to the customer and a natural add-on to your core product.
You can always add more elements later if you discover there are unsatisfied wants evident or if your competition does something creative and you need to respond.

Source: Unsplash

Choose synergistic value components to create your package in order to present a cohesive theme to the customer.
If the value components don’t work well together, your target customer group won’t understand the overall benefits your package provides.

If you are in the financial business, for example, with an anchor product of financial advice, you might consider additional value elements such as on-line self management investment tracking tools and quarterly financial management seminars which all play well together.

Or you might consider wrapping these elements around a four seasons resort hotel room:
— spa services
— yoga classes
— resort activities such as zip lining and water rafting
— a bottle of the customer’s favourite wine with a meal
— day care services

Create the value proposition — Define the value proposition for your package — what is the collective benefit the package provides to the customer?
This is not a statement that simply adds together the benefits of each package component rather it’s a declaration of the overall benefits of all package elements working seamlessly together.

In my example above, how might you define the collective benefits of financial advice, on-line tracking tools and regular seminars? You need to express the theme they collectively express. How about something like “investment self-management”?

Brand the package — Brand your package reflecting the value proposition you’ve created.There is no sense creating something new and not taking credit for your innovation. Too many organizations are into the bundling where product elements are simply added together and a discounted price is applied.

That’s not what I advocate.
Packaging is all about creating something new; bundling is merely slapping currents products together with reduced prices being offered with the volume increase.

Your new brand should reflect the collection of benefits provided. In the example that we have been using how about branding the package ‘The self-management Investment Plan?

Price your package — Price your package in terms of the market value provided.

Think premium pricing. Avoid the bundling mentality — and commodity thinking — of discounting the package based on the number of components in it.

If you have hit the mark with relevant, compelling value you should be able to command a premium price and realize healthy margins.
If you learn that you can’t price your package at a premium level, you have not defined it well enough — your package doesn’t contain the right combination of elements that result in a value proposition people are willing to pay more for.

Go back to the drawing board. Start over.

If you love your marketing craft and want to excel in it, do it the right way. Do it in a way no one else does.

Practise the process I’ve given you here and I guarantee success will be waiting.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.18.20 at 02:18 am by Roy Osing
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May 11, 2020

Hungry people do these 10 simple things to win

Source: Unsplash

Hungry people do these 10 simple things to win.

What separates the individual who has a rewarding career from those that merely show up for work every day and leave unsatisfied?

My experience shows that successful individuals are more hungry than their competitors; it’s as simple as that.

Certainly there are other factors at play that influence performance and success such as education level, practical experience, reliable mentors, and good old fashion luck, but I have seen that “being hungry” is the one single thing that stands out from all others.

In fact, many individuals manifest the common traits and capabilities of success yet don’t rise to the top of their game. I have seen highly educated people, for example, with a deep experience profile and excellent skill set fall short of their potential while others who possess less emerge to finish first.

Those “qualified” individuals who fell short lacked the desire to finish; they didn’t seize and apply the raw power of emotion to grab the opportunity presented to them and drive to capture it like no one else.

The hunger drive to succeed isn’t an intellectual matter; it’s a visceral one which is a fundamental part of who they are.
People don’t think about applying their hunger, they do it involuntarily just as you don’t have to tell your heart to beat.

This is the profile of “the hungry one”.

1. They’re the first one in

They are the first one to put their hand up and volunteer for a new project. They are driven to find a way of being part of new horizons rather than perpetuate the status quo. They want to be known for coveting uncharted waters.

2. They love change

They are always leaning in to conversations that address a different direction the organization should take. They are at ease with personally introducing the necessary discontinuities required to force current momentum to another path. They are a true change agent.

3. They don’t talk about the past

They talk about what needs to be done, not what yesterday achieved. They don’t suffer “custodians of the past” lightly. Dwelling on what worked yesterday frustrates them to no end. They see reflection on the past as an impediment to taking action and moving forward.

4. They are mindlessly focused

They are extremely focused on the critical few things that need to be done in order to achieve the end objective. They are not a fan of brainstorming and see it as only a way of defining what COULD be done as opposed to what MUST be done.

5. They never stop learning

They are voracious learners who pursue knowledge paths that are consistent with the new competencies the organization needs to adopt to perform at high levels. A shift from a monopoly business to a competitive one requires adopting marketing and customer service expertise; the hungry person acquires the knowledge and skills necessary.

6. They take risks

They are extremely proactive and never have to be told to do anything. When they see that something needs to be done that gather the expertise around them they need and they just do it. While others around them ask for permission, the hungry ones assume the inherent risks of taking action and are confident they can achieve positive results.

7. They execute first; plan second

They monitor execution relentlessly. They understand that the plan isn’t good enough to achieve results; rather flawless implementation is required. They are fanatics about ensuring that people assigned tasks complete them on time and on budget.

8. They have spider senses

They are restless, waiting to be on the move. They are anticipatory people who are always poised to act. Some might describe them as impatient and frustrated when they are hovering and waiting as opposed to acting. Their “spider senses” are alive to spot the opportunity to jump.

9. They have ridiculous goals

They have ’unrealistic’ career goals. They declare a bold audacious goal without any idea of how they will achieve it and they go for it. They trust that they will find a way to get to where they want to go.

10. They value what you’ve done not what you know

They are proud of their practical achievements and don’t dwell on what they have accomplished at school. In fact they rarely mention their intellectual strengths, but love to discuss a tough project they successfully implemented despite the roadblocks, barriers and impediments the organization threw in their way.

Successful people have competencies that go beyond the normal. They are based on the instinct to survive and win by standing out from those around them.

They don’t win by being the smartest.

They win by being the hungriest.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.11.20 at 05:31 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink