Secrets for Success

I am a frequent flyer with Southwest Airlines and am continually amazed at how they succeed by flying in the face of conventional wisdom. As an example, on my last trip with them I was delighted by the availability of comfy leather chairs in the waiting area as well as marble-topped side tables featuring charging docks for laptops and iPods. Wow, now that is superior customer service!

I also read an insightful article titled “Southwest’s Seven Secrets for Success” in the latest issue of Portfolio magazine. The article articulates the success secrets as: 1) One plane fits all, 2) Point-to-point flying, 3) Simple in-flight service, 4) No frills, no fees, 5) Strong management, 6) A relatively happy workforce and 7) Aggressive fuel hedging. It proves why Southwest is popular and profitable.

Island Time

My wife and I just returned from celebrating our twentieth anniversary in Key West at a bed and breakfast that had no televisions, alarm clocks or telephones in the guest quarters. Fortunately, we did have air conditioning to help us survive the sweltering heat and humidity. Yet not only did we not miss the other accoutrements, but doing without them actually enhanced our overall enjoyment of the island visit.

At such times I am reminded of the pleasure of living by what I call “island time.” While we all may not live on a tropical island year round, simply living in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the ocean tide, we can carry the concept of island time into the stream of our daily lives. Life can even be fun.

We should rule time, not the other way around. And technology is meant to serve us, not become our masters. I must confess that we did peek at our cell phones periodically to check the time and we even indulged ourselves by toting along our iPod portable speaker system to enjoy tunes on the trip. But we left our laptop at home and resisted the fleeting temptation to check email at the local café.

Taming Technology Too

Technology yields us many liberties yet we are often quick to forget its limitations. I recently came across a thought-provoking special report in the British publication The Economist titled “Labour Movement: The Joys and Drawbacks of Being Able to Work From Anywhere.” You can read it at www.economist.com.

The report identifies several tentacles of technology, including the tyranny of time: “Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons of Dilbert cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be).”

And the report includes an example of time tyranny that we can all identify with: “It is becoming commonplace for a café to be full of people with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones or…hacking away at their keyboards, more engaged with their e-mail inbox than with the people touching their elbows. These places are ‘physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated.’”

I periodically enjoy heading down to a local café with my favorite high-tech tools, but I also try to remain sensitive to the presence of other people by visiting with fellow patrons and otherwise being personable. Communication is ultimately designed to draw us closer to others, and using tools in a high-touch way helps us tame the tentacles of technology.

More Print is Dead

Due to time and space constraints, I saved some of my thoughts about the book Print is Dead for a second subsequent post here. At the end of the book, author Jeff Gomez outlines “Five reasons publishers will still exist in a digital age” and so I’ll list them:

Find talent…With millions online, finding anything worth consuming is getting more difficult. “With so much content already out there, and more being produced each day, publishers will fill an important need and perform a valuable service by reaching into the digital slush pile and pulling out the pearls.”
Support talent...The Internet is great for making an initial splash, but not for turning that splash into a career. “So while it’s sometimes too easy to get an audience online, that exposure is only really useful if it’s in support of something that users can interact with apart from the vehicle that brought the initial exposure.”
Edit talent…Even geniuses need editors. “Without editors, books or electronic texts will simply be blogs in a different package.”
Expose and market talent…As more authors are discovered online, more authors are promoted online. “Using the power of the Internet, publishers will do numerous things to expose and market writers to online communities, including creating banner ads, interactive websites and blogs, as well as performing outreach to bloggers and Internet reading groups.”
Pay talent…The Internet creates communities, but it doesn’t pay them. “What publishers will continue to do is sell the works of artists in the marketplace, and then pay royalties on those sales.”

I highly recommend anyone involved with the publishing industry to read and digest the book Print is Dead. It is one of the top couple of books I have read about publishing and I can unequivocally state that it is an invaluable guide to the uncharted territory that lies ahead for writers, editors and other wordsmiths involved with the creation of content.

Print is Dead

To give credit to whom credit is due, I learned about the book Print is Dead on Thomas Nelson publisher Mike Hyatt’s blog located at www.michaelhyatt.blogs.com/fromwhereisit. I pay attention when someone of his stature describes a book as “must reading,” and it did not disappoint. The premise of the author, Jeff Gomez, himself a publishing executive, is not that books are bound to disappear, but that the delivery of books as we know them will change radically, namely via digital systems. In other words, the news for past, present, and prospective authors is “digitize or die.”

I had read about half of the book on my way to speak at a recent conference for aspiring authors, and without having come to this part of the book, I found myself saying to them that “if you don’t have some sort of online presence, then you may need to rethink your viability as an author,” even going so far as to query, “if someone Googles you and finds nothing about you, do you really exist?”

An excerpt of the book, the chapter titled “Writers in a Digital Future,” is available for free download at http://printisdeadbook.com and it echoes my thoughts exactly: “Authors who choose not to take part in any sort of online promotion or to curry online exposure, and are unwilling to do things like start a blog, post clips on YouTube, have a page on MySpace or otherwise engage an Internet audience in any meaningful way will find themselves at an increasing disadvantage.”

Trying the Flip

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and the enclosed one is of my latest tech toy, the Flip Ultra Camcorder. If the elegant design of the device doesn’t sell it, its utter simplicity of use closes the deal.

I first heard about it last month via the weekly “Circuits” newsletter distributed by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. You can learn more about the Flip at www.theflip.com.

As Pogue succinctly stated, “Instead of crippling this ‘camcorder,’ the simplicity elevates it. Comparisons with a real camcorder are nonsensical, because the Flip is something else altogether: it’s the video equivalent of a Kodak point-and-shoot camera. It’s the very definition of ‘less is more.’”

According to Pogue, the Flip has been the top selling camcorder at Amazon.com since its debut about a year ago and it has already garnered about 13% of the camcorder market. I am loving mine and sold my mother on getting her own after she saw how user-friendly and fun it is. Try the Flip, you’ll like it.

The Plenitude

While on a business trip a couple months ago I picked up an intriguing book in the MIT Press “Simplicity” series called The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff by Rich Gold. For the uninitiated, “plenitude” means “the abundance or plentiful supply of something.” In terms of the text, it refers to all of the “stuff” we each create and consume on a daily basis.

One particularly golden gem of insight that I gleaned from the book had to do with the concept of creative artistry: “The art flows from personal vision and from a unique sense of self. To many artists, art is more a calling than a profession, though one still needs to be trained in it, and there is certainly a business side.”

That statement liberated my thinking by giving me permission to create as an artist with a uniquely personal perspective and interpretation of life as I see it and not simply as a producer of commodity. As Gold suggests, “Without artistic vision stuff tends to…commodity…and…if you are merely producing commodity, you’re dead.”

Time to Live

With today being Leap Day, I am reflecting on what a gift it is to me. Today is an extra day to do whatever needs to be done, but it also is a gift wrapped as extra time to live. As I am staring down the deadline of a major project, I am very thankful for the added time today affords, but even more than that I am grateful that today gives me that much more time to spend with my wife and enjoy the good life that God has seen fit to bless me with.

Less is More

As I have been planning my year, I’ve reflected about how little I actually need to enjoy life, particularly as it applies to my library. I love books but I estimate that I presently own more than one thousand volumes, half of which I’ve never read and a quarter of which I’ll likely never read. With that said, I have made it my regular practice to clear out books in the latter category to make room for ones in the former and to create space for new acquisitions rather than buy more bookshelves.

Alas, with the big annual used book sale coming to my hometown this weekend, I am challenged to discipline myself anew. But what I’ve actually been considering lately is drastically reducing the number of volumes in my library so that virtually all the books I own are ones that I’ve either read or realistically plan to read in the foreseeable future.

Regarding my philosophy of “less is more,” I recently read a relevant posting by Richard Watson on the Fast Company Blog: “One of the key challenges for the twenty-first century will be how to cope with the almost infinite amount of information that will be produced. According to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, one of the most valuable skills in the future will thus be the ability to select and synthesize information. This in turn means the ability to develop criteria for filtering what’s valuable and what’s not will become highly prized.”

Making a Difference

As I post my last entry of the year, I am reminded of an excellent book I recently finished reading titled Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Rather than use this space to highlight its salient points, I instead am inspired to share some instances from my own life this year in which I was able to influence someone else’s life for the better.

Earlier in the year, my wife and I bought an Italian motor scooter called a Vespa. I was so enthused about the scooter that I posted an entry about it on a Vespa forum and included a picture of it. Much to my surprise, I later heard from someone in the Netherlands that they changed their decision about which model to buy based on my glowing review. Suffice it to say that I never dreamed I would help sell an Italian scooter in Holland!

Another example of influence comes from closer at home. On Christmas Day, my wife and I had her parents over for a special supper. After our meal, she and her mother got out the sewing machine to mend a garment and I gave her father a guided tour of the Apple iMac computer we got earlier in the year. He later informed me that as a result of my passionate referral, he went out the very next day and got his own iMac to enjoy!

I could share many other examples of the power of influence but these two seem particularly powerful to me since they involve relatively pricey purchases in the thousands of dollars. While I admit that influencing buying decisions isn’t as big a deal as helping change someone’s daily behavior, helping someone get a good deal does make a difference to them.

The Gift of Time

My wife and I recently returned from our autumn retreat to the pastoral mountains of North Carolina, where we had the good fortune of being housebound by the weather a good deal of the time. While visiting family there, I had a couple days of downtime to savor the insightful writing of author Ellen Vaughn in her latest book, Time Peace: Living Here and Now with a Timeless God.

Among her more piercing insights are this gem: “If we believe what we say we do—in a huge, sovereign, good God who created all things, including time, and has ordained both our days on earth and our entrance into eternity—we will not be anxious about time. We are in fact rich in it. We can enjoy God’s present. We can relax, and smile.”

As I write these words I am reminded of even more timeless wisdom found in “The Message” paraphrase of the Book of Acts 17:26-27: “He made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God.” I particularly love the phrase, “plenty of time and space for living.” As we all enter the busy Christmas season, I pray we slacken our pace long enough to celebrate Christ and unwrap the gift of time.

The Need for Speed

In The Age of Speed, author Vince Poscente presents the contrarian view that speed is not necessarily what ails us as a society. It is our failure to leverage speed that afflicts us, he suggests, and harnessing the power of speed is the secret to not only surviving but thriving in today’s time-crunched culture, keeping us ahead of the curve.

Featuring counterintuitive insights and provocative research, the book challenges readers’ assumptions about the nature of speed and its influence upon our daily lives. “We’ve been warned of speed’s potential to create problems, but we crave its benefits, so in many ways, we have a love-hate relationship with speed,” writes Poscente. “But to get the full benefit of speed, we have to detach our perception of ‘fast’ from the notion of ‘busy.’”

According to Poscente, it is only when one becomes agile by anticipating opportunities, aerodynamic by multitasking effectively and aligned by living authentically that one is able to succeed in the age of speed. He stresses the need for readers to heed the call to harness speed lest it become a burden instead of a blessing. Speed read the book and reap the benefits.

Trend Watching

It’s been a while since I shared about trends so I thought I’d highlight the latest issue of Trendwatching located at www.trendwatching.com/briefing. As the brief itself states, “Find out about the ‘why’ of trend spotting, the mindset required, the resources needed, the process of embedding trends into your organization and how to actually apply them.” And note that there is a big difference between watching trends and mere fads, which are here today and gone tomorrow. Trend watching, on the other hand, should ultimately lead to profitable innovation.

Joie de Vivre

I finally took the plunge the other day and ordered a couple of books from Amazon and I was not only pleased with the service but my selections also. One of the titles I got was Joie de Vivre: Simple French Style for Everyday Living by acclaimed restaurateur Robert Arbor. I read it over one weekend and found it as delightful as I had hoped it’d be after reading sample pages using Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature at www.amazon.com.

The book’s title, which is French for “enjoyment of life,” captures the essence of its message: life is meant to be savored one sip at a time, not gulped down indiscriminately. Arbor is a French expatriate who has owned and operated several successful French-style eateries in New York City and still maintains a residence in the French countryside.

What I loved about the book is its elegantly simple approach to living a life full of meaning and merriment with the ones we cherish. Coupled with artful photography from the author’s wife, the book’s chapter titles are arranged in a type of culinary order, from the French love of breakfast to gardening, farmer’s markets and other simple pleasures.

For the cuisine-minded, recipes are sprinkled throughout the text, but in an unobtrusive manner for those of us more inclined toward the message than the menu. As Arbor writes, “A big part of comprehending 'joie de vivre' is understanding that enjoyment in day-to-day life is the true key to happiness. Finding happiness in small things means that ordinary days are filled with pleasures rather than obligations.”

To Be Continued...

My television viewing, that is. My last post dealt with both of our televisions dying within a two-week span last month and how it caused me to consider not replacing one or both of them. And after much thought and prayer, the verdict was to replace the primary one and dispose of the secondary one.

However, during the course of researching a prospective replacement online, I came across an advertisement for a local family-owned and -operated television repair place. The good news is after the manufacturer suggested that I carry our primary set to the curb, I was able to get it fixed, and to the tune of about a hundred bucks, much less than the cost of replacing it with a new one that had less features.

As for the secondary set, it was indeed carried to the curb this morning, and I am already feeling much better about owning only one television. Also, we have resolved to be even more discerning when it comes to what we allow through our eye and ear gates. Our guiding light is a favorite scripture of mine: “Keep vigilant watch over your heart; that’s where life starts [Proverbs 4:23].”

Tuning Out Television

After eight years, our primary television gave up the ghost the other day. Fortunately, I was able to finish watching Wimbledon, which I look forward to every year, on our secondary television. However, at thirteen years of age, it also has shown signs of quitting. All of which has gotten me thinking about either not replacing them, or at least only replacing one of them and severely limiting the time spent watching it.

My wife and I know firsthand what it is like to live with little or no television in the house, as she grew up in a household largely devoid of the one-eyed monster, and I grew up in a rural setting where we were lucky to get good reception of the three major networks, let alone cable or satellite. And for the first five years of our marriage, the only television we had was a ten-inch black and white set with antennae, which we actually boxed up during our first year of Bible school.

What I’ve been reminded of lately is how little I’ve missed television. In its place, my wife and I finally broke out our vintage Scrabble set to play for the first time in our married lives, and on our nineteenth wedding anniversary no less. We’ve also read more, listened to more music, hosted friends for a pizza and game night, ridden our scooter around town, and enjoyed a host of other fun, albeit low-tech, activities.

One of the books I’ve read pointed out that the average American spends four hours a day watching television. That adds up to more than one day every week, two months every year, and a decade by age seventy, that we spend glued to the tube. I for one think that is too much, and we are contemplating what to do about it. So, stay tuned for details…

The Voice of Authenticity

I had a life changing experience the other day at a training conference at which I spoke. One of the other speakers, a voice specialist, stated that the most important aspect of a message is “authenticity,” which made me think about my message slated for the next day and how I would present it.

Rather than try to gloss over some trials I had been going through, I decided to be authentic and share my struggles with the audience. The resulting experience was one of the most rewarding of my life, as the message resonated with people in a profound way and led virtually all of them to share with me later how much it had touched them.

And speaking of authenticity, I also read an article by Mark Batterson in Ministry Today that articulated what I had been wrestling with: “Life is too short and leadership is too challenging to try to be two people! At the end of the day, I’d rather be disliked for who I am than liked for who I’m not.”

The Change Function

In The Change Function, author Pip Coburn explains why certain technologies get widely adopted and others do not. In Coburn’s words, “The Change Function says that users change habits—which might include adopting a new technology—if and only if the pain of their current situation is greater than their total perceived pain of making the switch to a proposed solution for their pain.”

In a nutshell, Coburn dispels the “build it and they will come” myth, which has obvious application for businesses of all stripes. According to Coburn, without a user-friendly focus, all the features and functions in the world won’t help convince a consumer who feels confused by mixed messages.

The classic case study is the overwhelming success of the iPod, which has achieved iconic status by simply adopting the Mies van der Rohe philosophy of design: less is more. What folks outside of Apple are only gradually coming to realize is that “feature creep” turns off far more than it turns on. If only Apple would design a universal remote.

The Nomadic Lifestyle

I must credit Fast Company for once again serendipitously guiding me to some cool content about the intersection of life and technology, which I study and write about. The reference in question is the Web site at www.thefutureofwork.net/blog, which was listed as a blog of the month in the latest issue.

As I perused several intriguing postings, I discovered the link to an article titled “Where Neo-Nomads’ Ideas Percolate: New ‘bedouins’ transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office.” What I liked so much about the article was how it depicted the nomadic lifestyle made possible by today’s technology, a trend whose time has come and that I’ve personally adopted as my own.

Adding to my ability to work when and where I like is my recent acquisition of a Vespa scooter. It is incredibly fun and enables me to tote my laptop and cell phone to my favorite cafes in style. Like my Macintosh, it comes clad in a cool color called Excalibur Grey, and, also like my Mac, it is elegantly designed and simple to use, a synthesis of form and function.

Uncommon Sense

I read in the New York Times recently the good news that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission recommended cell phones not be given clearance for use on airline flights, with which I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I must admit that I was somewhat surprised common sense leadership actually trumped lobbying for a change.

Suffice it to say that all too many people cannot be trusted to exercise good judgment with the use of cell phones, especially in the cramped quarters of an airplane. Case in point: one of my neighbors activated the speakerphone capability of her cell phone the other day and had it cranked so loudly that I could actually hear everything the other person was saying, all while I was more than fifty feet away and inside my house!

It remains to be seen whether or not cell phones ever make their way onto airlines, but I travel enough to welcome the electronic downtime that in-flight no-cell zones afford me. Without such helpful guidelines, the already not-so-friendly skies become even less so.