Where good ideas come from – and please can they hurry up

By on February 22, 2012 in Biz

I enjoyed the discussion of Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, the first chapter of which I read ten days ago and thus couldn’t remember a lot of. That’s one side effect I find from all the reading – one interesting thing is quickly eclipsed by another and another. OK, and reading Steven Johnson should involve a fully engaged, non-drifting brain, which perhaps I didn’t have that Friday afternoon. But from the Johnson book comes the idea of ‘connect, not protect’ – that ideas want to cross-fertilize. This also came up in the last section of the Business Models book, and I find it encouraging. I also appreciated the point about how to ‘explore the edges of possibility that surround you’, something most of us don’t do enough, given the pull of a daily routine. I went to a Skillshare class on problem solving in November, and some of the same points were made: change the physical environment you work in, and if you’re wrestling with a particularly trying problem even consider taking a different route to the subway or bus stop – anything that can help take your brain out of its usual thinking patterns. I love learning more about how good ideas can come into being, but one thing all the books seem to agree on is that they don’t come instantly. Time is something I don’t have as I try to get to the crux of the idea for my business.

Amit Paley talked about market research at the Washington Post, which was really interesting – the fact that data was collected on readers but not shared in a way that actually made the data particularly useful from a business perspective. He said Bloomberg has always been data-driven, and that makes it easy for them to tailor their customers’ experience. But isn’t it easier for Bloomberg to be data-driven because of their business model – I mean the fact that customers are paying for the Bloomberg terminal. Isn’t their thinking that the customer has already forked out for the product, so getting them to answer a bunch of questions before being able to use it makes sense? I remember signing up for the Washington Post and multiple other publications for work purposes, but finding it a real pain to go through the hassle of registering for sites I wanted to briefly visit each day or so for my job. With a regular publication for a lay audience, the customer can just stray somewhere else if they get fed up with the registration process, as I sometimes did.

As for Jeff’s class on the intricacies of ad models, please don’t test me on this any time soon.

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The heck of tech

By on February 21, 2012 in Tech

I’m taking Jennifer at her word here and confining this to a paragraph, which, when it comes to tech, is pretty much all I’m good for. I’ve definitely found the Treehouse tutorials useful, although I have started to run into problems and am not being awarded my ‘badge’ at this point, even after viewing videos twice. It’s very time consuming to do this, even though I know it’s good for me. But boy is HTML tedious. I’m not looking forward to possibly having to view a video or two for a second or third time in order to try to pass the various tests the site offers. And I’m not sure how good a use of my time this is, given the vast amounts I need to do on multiple fronts, not to mention actual paid work as well. What I’d really like to do is conquer WordPress, which unlike everyone else, I’m not familiar with. For instance I’d like to be able to make this site a lot prettier than it is but haven’t worked out how to do the things I want to yet. There aren’t enough hours in the day. At least for those of us who need 6-7 hours of sleep a night.

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Women, schwomen

By on February 21, 2012 in Incubator

This week I’m using this incubator space to try to synthesize my thoughts. Last week I sent an email to 40 women friends and acquaintances, putting forth my idea for a podcast and asking for comment. I’ve had a 30 percent or so response rate, but everyone wants something different, which far from clearing things up, left me even more unsure of my direction. Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis has been adamant about this business filling a need, not just being something nice or cool to do. Several women emailed back saying they’d love some kind of product that looked at the world from a woman’s perspective, or gave them access to the voices of women they didn’t usually hear. But many of these respondents are public radio nuts with a predisposition to be interested in these things. Trying to switch my idea over to something that is truly a ‘value’ to women is making my brain melt. (I exaggerate slightly.) Herewith some bullet points to try to help me pinpoint some of this.

  • Women and men are, on the whole, still raised with different expectations for their behavior. They’re socialized differently: as a result women are still more likely to feel uncomfortable putting themselves forward, ‘rocking the boat’, or talking themselves up, as outlined here in Clay Shirky’s 2010 ‘rant against women’ (thanks to Jeff Jarvis for reminding me about that).
  • This tendency to hold back can harm women, although I am not sure how many realize it. It hampers us in everything from negotiating successfully with everyone from the cable company to the boss, and also in more subtle ways: my experience is that women are more likely to accept what we’re told and not question it (or not feel we can). Back to negotiating: lots of research shows women nearly always settle for less money than men, stopping the negotiation process earlier than guys do (read the wonderful Ask For It if you don’t believe me. It should be every woman’s bible, even if you think you’re a rock star negotiator).
  • We are less likely to pursue opportunities that could further our careers (pursue patents, for instance, if we’re scientists who’ve made a discovery, or write op-eds or make speeches).
  • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook talks about all this women-don’t-put-themsevles-forward-enough stuff, so I believe there is something in this – some value I can bring. But can this really be done on a weekly, even a bi-weekly basis? Is there enough to say to make this work if I purely talk about these issues of upbringing, culture and confidence? It seems doubtful. I would still like to look more broadly at news stories that involve women. Also, as one of the recent pieces about Sandberg pointed out, she is largely talking to a privileged group of women – those who’ve been to elite colleges and ended up at Facebook and similar companies. What about everyone else? Do I try to speak to everyone, including women who do some of the most difficult jobs, such as home health aides?
  • Look at the way women are portrayed in much of the media, mega-glammed-up, skimpily dressed, etc. I think this is an awful message to give young girls. This, too, is important – see Brianne’s blog post about young girls’ presentation in Facebook photos and this Jezebel piece about teenagers asking YouTube viewers to tell them if they’re ugly. Appearance seems to be becoming more important the further away we get from the heyday of the feminist movement. (I should admit right here I’ve never read any of those books by the famous feminists.)
  • So who has to change – women, or society? Society should change, of course, but women are part of society, and these values about what a woman should be like are so ingrained in many of us that we judge other women’s actions or appearance just as harshly as some men do. Addendum: look at this ForbesWoman post by entrepreneur Thomas Korte about a day spent with 1000 female entrepreneurs. He cites lessons for men after each point he makes about the day.
  • The value I bring is knowing these issues from personal experience and being able to analyze them and pick them apart in a lucid and hopefully entertaining way, in order to help women who struggle with these issues overcome them. The question is, does anyone care?
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Drilling down

By on February 16, 2012 in Biz

This week for the first time I’m thinking properly about how to actually plot this business idea of mine. The Darden Publishing ‘business model innovation’ article came up in class on Monday. The piece talks about something that arose in my subsequent meetings with Jeremy Caplan and RevSquared, which is that – especially according to Jeff Mignon – I really need to ‘drill down to the core set of assumptions on which [my] new concept depends.’ It’s tough, but I get it – you have to give people something they actually want, clamor for, rather than something you think is interesting and might be good for them. The idea of ‘creating superior value’ for my ‘customers’ (or readers, listeners or viewers, in my case) is one I must tackle.

Some early customer research this week reiterated what I already knew: there’s so much content out there for and about women, how am I going to stick out? I have to keep reminding myself of what Hong Qu said during our first week about content being static (I read that as ‘dull’) and a platform being much more exciting, interactive. The question is, how to bring that to my project? Jeff Mignon told me my focus right now should be the mission of the project: what problem am I trying to solve? I believe I’m edging closer to the nub of what I may be able to offer: insights into human behavior that can help women improve their lives. For example, the stories I’ve done on women and language and the way women communicate have brought forth many ‘a-ha’ type comments from listeners or readers who recognize something about themselves in the piece, and then want to change that particular linguistic habit so they can have more clout in, say, the workplace. But is there enough of that type of content to sustain a site/podcast week after week?

I have this persistent, niggling feeling that there’s gold somewhere in them thar hills. I just have to mine it.

On another note, during Jeff’s class on disruption, we talked about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction that human relationships and interactions represent the truly valuable content out there. This came from discussing his letter to shareholders, in which he talked about the importance of relationships. On the flip side of the relationship question, I loved this post I came across yesterday on HBR.com by Daniel Gulati, who I interviewed last year for a piece about the future of work. It’s spot on about something I have vaguely thought about but chosen not to dwell on: the more time we spend posting and also ‘curating’ ourselves on social media (which, let’s face it, we all do – few of us want to post a horrible photo or to say something that makes us look stupid) the more we are essentially turning our friends into customers of our content. I wonder what effect this may ultimately have on our friendships.

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Women in the news

By on February 14, 2012 in Incubator

Anyone studying here in the CUNY entrepreneurial journalism program is expected to develop a media business during the next four months (yes, just four months).  Being a radio nut as well as a radio reporter, and someone who loves writing about women’s role in modern life, I’ve wondered for a long time why there is nothing in this country like Woman’s Hour, the great BBC Radio 4 program that looks at news stories involving women. The show touches on everything from the latest scandal on dodgy breast implants to the safety of female politicians in Afghanistan to why women force their feet into stilettos. It’s incisive, and thanks to two good hosts it often makes me think differently about a topic. I want to create something like that (albeit on a less ambitious scale) over here, but I have a lot of work to do. My question for anyone reading this is what would you like to hear in such a podcast, if in fact you’re even interested in the idea? I want to bring the lively storytelling style I developed while working for Marketplace to a different setting. While I would love to actually report stories for this venture, realistically this is a start-up podcast and right now the way I see it working would involve me as moderator, discussing a topic or two for 20 minutes or so with two guests for each topic – guests with different views on the matter under discussion. I want to get a debate going. And to be clear, I’m not interested in harping on how the world has done women wrong. I find it tough to articulate exactly what I love about the stories I’ve done on women and society, but I think it comes down to the fact that women and men are still raised with different expectations of what they can do in life (and what they should do) and develop different communication styles, and these cultural factors affect the way we navigate the world. They can also affect the level of success we have at work and in the rest of life. The more we know about this stuff, I believe, the better our chances of thriving.

How does this sound? Would you listen to such a thing? Do you even listen to podcasts? Perhaps you feel there’s no need to delve into the news looking at matters from the female point of view? If this idea does pique your interest, what would you want to hear about? What would you far rather NOT hear about? Please feel free to post comments below.

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The business model as story

By on February 9, 2012 in Biz

Wrestling isn’t quite the word, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the main idea Joan Magretta lays out in her HBR piece ‘Why Business Models Matter’. That is, that a good business model is really a good story. I love this idea as I appreciate a good story and like to think I can tell one. Also, thinking of business models like this makes them sound a lot less technical and more human. I chose the Mrs. Meyers brand as my example in class the other day in part because that brand has been built around a real person: Mrs. Thelma Myers herself, married to Stanley since the 1950s and mother of nine. The brand differentiates itself from other ‘green’ household products because the head on the bottle actually belongs to a live person uttering commonsense midwestern values. She’s in a video on the website and has even written a book about managing housework (I bought it, but soon realized I could never live up to her standards). The problem is, Mrs. Meyers will inevitably die. Right now the brand satisfies our need for authenticity and connection very nicely. But given that a key part of the customer relationship segment of the business model plays on Mrs. Meyers’ no-nonsense appeal, what happens to the business when the ‘story’ changes? The need for green products has been met by other brands. Will consumers stick around simply because of the products’ enticing smell? Situations like this have probably arisen in the past, and I’d be curious to know the results.

Much as the storytelling idea appeals, surely there is a risk that you can convince not only yourself but other people that you have a good story, yet it runs aground anyway? This happens because we’re good at fooling ourselves. The dot-com boom and bust is testament to this. Entrepreneurs clearly thought they had great narratives, but many assumed consumers would behave in ways that fit in with the shiny new internet rather than with the way humans actually behave. I’m certainly still trying to work out what my own business’s story is.

 

 

 

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