Paul Isakson

Taking Time To Get It Right

There are a lot of people talking about the importance of launching and iterating these days. Just put it out there and keep moving. Don't put off launching to make it perfect. It will never be perfect. Just make it good enough and go. Don't be afraid to fail, be afraid of not failing fast enough.

While I agree with the spirit of these statements and the context in which people are talking about them, there is a balance. If it's not good enough, you shouldn't launch it just to hit a self-imposed deadline. Especially with advertising. 

Nobody is dying to see your next ad, so why should you let yourself get caught up in rushing to get a new ad out there? This doesn't just apply to an ad though. It applies to any idea you create. Why hurry? Why not instead, take the time needed to get it right?

It's important to get the idea right because attention is at a premium. You're not just competing against your competitors for people's attention and you're not just competing against the other ads in the time/media space. You're competing against a million other things people could be doing instead of engaging with your idea.

Beyond that, every idea you release into the world determines how willing someone will be to spend time with your next idea. If you wasted their time this time, why will they pay attention to you next time? Every detail of the idea matters in a world where the options for how we spend our diminishing free time or our limited discretionary income are nearly unlimited.

If you want people to spend time with with your ideas, and even more, spread them for you, you shouldn't rush to get them out for the sake of getting them out. Instead, take whatever time is needed to make sure they're good enough for people to want to spend time with them, and good enough that people want to tell their friends about them.

Whatever you're creating, give yourself time to get it right.

Nike Just Does It, Again and Again

 

Yet another good example of Nike getting out and doing things to help people become better at their sports, not just saying things to them through advertising. For more on what Nike is up to with their marketing, see the recent article from Fortune on them.

Nicely done, Nike and R/GA. Nicely done.

Joi Ito's Thoughts on Leadership

Thought this was a great way to frame-up how leadership needs to evolve from "command and control" to "empower and roll" in our current business climate. The highlights are mine. The words are Mr. Ito's.

The Internet has enabled the cost of the production and distribution of ideas and information to plummet nearly to zero-resulting in an explosion of ideas and a low cost of collaboration. This has prompted a great deal of innovation, but also a complexity, speed and capacity for amplification that makes the world a difficult and dangerous place for many organizations and human-made systems designed for a slower and simpler era.

The cost of planning, predicting and managing rapidly changing, complex systems often exceeds the cost of actually doing whatever is being planned and managed. In fact, it can be often easier to try something and iterate than to try to predict the outcome and manage the risks. Most great ideas as well as dramatic failures have been unpredictable and are only obvious in hindsight. (Don't get me wrong: foreknowledge and planning are useful and, often, necessary; they're just not sufficient.)

In such a world, leadership hinges on the ability to master a broad set of skills and character traits necessary for fostering a robust system, including courage, flexibility, speed, values and a strong vision and trajectory. It's more important to have a strong compass than a detailed street map since the map is probably outdated and wrong.

These kinds of decentralized models of leadership have been evolving and emerging in a variety of situations ranging from battle (virtual and real) to religions. The Internet has just super-charged the importance of this type of leadership in almost every organization.

Managers in large corporations no longer have the promise of promotions and long-term employment to keep employees obedient and hard working. Central corporate R&D and planning organizations can no longer provide detailed maps of the world to their staff and partners. Innovation is happening in the most unlikely parts of the organization-often outside of the organization.

Leadership today is about empowering those around you share your vision, embrace serendipity, have the courage to take risks and learn from failure rather than be crushed by it. Diversity must be embraced and organizational borders made porous. Assets such as intellectual property and lines of software code must not prevent aggressive agility. Organizations must be willing and able to pivot away from attachment to such assets lest these assets become liabilities holding back innovation and progress.

In this new world, leaders must be courageous, visionary and comfortable in an environment where control and complete knowledge are impossible and their pursuit futile and counterproductive.

Don't Give Up, Don't Ever Give Up.

 

The Jimmy V Classic was on earlier tonight. Between the games, they played Coach Valvano's speech at the 1993 ESPYs. It's a touching talk full of good advice...

Every day try to laugh, think, and feel joy or sadness to the point of tears.

When you think, think about where you started, think about where you are and think about where you're going to be. 

To get from where you are to where you want to be you have to have enthusiasm for life, you have to have a goal/a dream, and you have to be willing to work for it. 

Enjoy every moment of your life with everything you have. 

Don't give up, don't ever give up.

The Future Is Guided By Voices

  

Apple wasn't the only one making a big announcement last week about one of their devices. They just got a lot more coverage. In case you missed it, here's what Xbox Live + Kinect have in store for watching TV: