I regularly talk to new coaches to share my experience, because I believe that the world benefits from more people with a coaching mindset, and as a way to pay it forward for the coaches that advised me when I transitioned into coaching. These new coaches often ask me about my sales process, and since […]
Category: marketing
What problem is your product solving?
I’ve given the same advice to a few different people over the past year, which generally means it’s time for me to write up that advice as a blog post. In this case, what I have been telling entrepreneurs is that they don’t have a business until they are addressing a problem that people will […]
Dan Pallotta’s TED talk “The way we think about charities is dead wrong”
A friend of mine had recommended I watch this TED talk by Dan Pallotta, titled “The way we think about charity is dead wrong”. I finally got around to watching it last night and wrote up my notes in an email to my friend and then figured I might as well post them on the […]
One step at a time
I was helping an entrepreneur friend with his investor pitch last week, and something was bugging me – the pitch didn’t feel right, even though I think the idea is good. He is passionate about how to run a company, so he was describing his philosophy of management in the pitch. And I realized that […]
Who is your audience?
One of the broader points that I don’t know if I made clearly in my last post is that effective communication depends not only on the message you are delivering, but also on the audience which the message is targeting. In the case of writing a resume, you have to remember that you are targeting […]
Trade-Off, by Kevin Maney
Amazon link Trade-Off is a book which explores a simple, but useful, way to frame the world. Kevin Maney plots products along two dimensions, fidelity and convenience, and then spends the rest of the book discussing how products end up in different places on that graph, from the “fidelity belly” to the “fidelity mirage” Fidelity […]
Chief Culture Officer, by Grant McCracken
Amazon link I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate. Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how […]
Super Bowl Sunday
Yikes, it has been a long time since I blogged. I’ve been buried at work, although things seem to be slowing down a bit (knock on wood). For those of you that want more regular updates, I recommend Twitter and/or del.icio.us as those get updated more regularly. This past weekend, though, I made time to […]
What is the story?
Finding the story has been a recurring theme for me recently. It’s come up in a variety of settings, so I thought I’d explore the topic some more. Let’s start with the anecdotes. A friend was looking for advice on sprucing up her resume. I started with the normal advice of stating accomplishments rather than […]
Personal branding
Yesterday’s post on branding actually started because I have been thinking extensively about personal branding throughout my just-completed job search. Looking for a job entails trying to find a plausible intersection between one’s background and skills, one’s interests and career aspirations, and what a company needs. For a generalist like me, this gets particularly interesting […]
