So imagine yourself working on a few variations of a blog post headline when your editor says one of them, perhaps not your favorite, would be better for SEO (search engine optimization). That’s what we call a no brainer. Never say no to better SEO. Period.

I was in a conversation along those lines yesterday. It reminded me of one of my favorite little life-advice snippets has always been “never say no to an offer of a breath mint.” If you don’t immediately see why, think about it.

I asked around, got some help from friends, and came up with the following “never say no” list:

1. Never say no to better SEO. This is about websites and blog post headlines. If you’re not sure what’s going to give the best SEO, that’s one thing. But if you know, or somebody who has reason to know tells you, follow the SEO.
2. Never say no to free publicity (even the bad stuff generates interest).
3. Never say no to product or business or customer feedback. And, taking that to a broader scale, never say no to free advice. Digest it, analyze it, decide for yourself whether it’s good advice or not, and act on it or not. It’s your choice. But first, listen.
4. Never say no to your IT people. The computer you save may be your own (our IT guy suggested that one).
5. Never say no to an opportunity to learn something new and useful.

Honorable mentions: these last two are a bit off the small business and entrepreneurship setting as a target, but I decided to include them both, one because it’s good life advice and the other because, like its author says, “it’s in the manual.”

1. Never say no when your own child asks: “will you play with me?”
2. Never say no to a hostage taker. It’s in the manual.

I want to start this with a story. I’m quoting Jason Cohen in his post Business advice plagued by survivor bias, with thanks to Alan Gleeson for tipping me off to this one. As you read this story, think of how it applies to business experts and business advice:

During World War II the English sent daily bombing raids into Germany. Many planes never returned; those that did were often riddled with bullet holes from anti-aircraft machine guns and German fighters.

Wanting to improve the odds of getting a crew home alive, English engineers studied the locations of the bullet holes. Where the planes were hit most, they reasoned, is where they should attach heavy armor plating. Sure enough, a pattern emerged: Bullets clustered on the wings, tail, and rear gunner’s station. Few bullets were found in the main cockpit or fuel tanks.

The logical conclusion is that they should add armor plating to the spots that get hit most often by bullets. But that’s wrong.

Planes with bullets in the cockpit or fuel tanks didn’t make it home; the bullet holes in returning planes were “found” in places that were by definition relatively benign. The real data is in the planes that were shot down, not the ones that survived.

Could there possibly be a better summary of survivor bias? Do you see how it matters with business research? I need to thank Steve King as well, because he focused on survivor bias recently in his post Don’t Quit Your Job Until You’ve Talked to a Small Business Failure. Steve points out, in that post, that if we only ask small business owners about risk, we only get opinions from the survivors. 

But if your goal is to find out how all small businesses owners think about risk, this approach is flawed.  This is because former small business owners – the folks that went bankrupt, lost their companies or were removed from their jobs – are no longer small business owners so they aren’t included in these surveys.  Because business failures are excluded, the survey results are biased towards successful small businesses. 

Do you see his point? You can’t get an accurate picture of a contest by asking only the winners. Sure, the winners are the right ones to ask for stories of what worked. But the losers have some insight too, like on what didn’t work. 

 (Image: Nick Schroedl/Shutterstock)

We all forget too easily: the best startup funding is sales. Sure, angel investment, friends and family, SBA loans, all of those options are necessary for most startups. But sales is better.

If you can, find the early customers. Give them a deal, make them important, work with them to optimize their needs; but make a sale.

Even if you need to go out and find investment — and I speak now as an actual angel investor — there’s almost nothing as convincing as actual sales. People are spending money. It makes a new business proposal far more credible.

True, not all businesses can do that. But a lot of them can. And, as we write about business plans and seeking investment and all, we forget the real sweet spot: finance growth by making the sales.

Imagine yourself as judging a business plan competition. You read the plan, watch and listen to the pitch, ask questions, and consider the answers. What do you do, in that situation, with a team whose opportunity is in your opinion bigger than it realizes? What about a team whose opportunity is different from what it realizes?

Do you reward the team for what you’re thinking and they aren’t? For the opportunity they’ve built that they don’t see?

For example: a team is trying to do too much too fast, spreading the business way too thin, and therefore losing, in your opinion, a really interesting opportunity at hand. That opportunity would require focus, and they’re trying to do way too much.

Another example, almost the opposite of the first one: the team is focusing very narrowly on a hard market, not seeing what you think is a much more interesting and easier to address market in a different direction.

Is it the best business opportunity, based on the assumption that this team will listen and redirect? Or is it the best business plan?

Having seen similar situations as angel investor, I want to put my money where the opportunity is; as long as I can reassure myself that the team will see it as I do. But as a judge in a venture or business plan competition, I think I have to go by what the team says, not what I think it could have said.

What do you think?

Did I miss something critical here? The chart at right is from my Choose your own world view post on here Tuesday. I was trying to relate choices to results and highlight tradeoffs; but I wasn’t sure whether these three factors pulled away from each other, or did they in fact work together if you find the sweet spot in the middle.

In a thoughtful email later that day, Kate Putnam said I missed something critical:

Work you like should lead to business success (however you define that). The third piece should be what you give back to your community.

I asked her permission (I think it’s rude not to, with an email) to publish her comments here. She explained:

You are not teaching your children much if you don’t do that. You are not sharing the fruits of your success if you don’t do that. Plus, if you do it right, you meet new friends who share your values and whom you would not stumble across in your regular day-to-day existence. I have learned a lot for my business from my non-profit board work and the people I met through it.

Good point, Kate. Here’s a revised version to the right. It adds community as a fourth leaf.

And the question remains: do these factors pull apart, from center outwards? Or do they come together in the middle. I can argue that either way. I think it depends on your world view, your experience, and choices you make.

Kate added this as well:

I tell my children that “to whom much is given, much is expected.”

After reading that email, I also wandered off to her website, and found her business called Package Machinery, focusing on sustainable practices in packaging. And Kate is on Twitter as wrapsustainably. So I like discovering that she is obviously not just saying it, or writing it in email; she’s doing it too. That makes her comments that much more interesting.

Business stories aren’t just stories. They’re the underpinnings of company culture and policy; powerful, and possibly dangerous.

Consider this: If customer service representatives get together for morning coffee and swap stories about annoying customers, the level of customer service will go down. It’s unavoidable. If the people behind the counter at the coffee shop share annoying customer stories behind the scenes, they smile less. They like the customers less.

No, I don’t have the research to prove it. But it’s true.

The owners and managers of a business need to realize their stories set tones and themes for the business.

My wife said my extreme customer service post here Monday encourages anti-customer stories. She has a good point.

This is easy to explain in parent mode, and from there it’s an easy hop to business mode.

• Let’s assume that when you were a teenage driver your dad insisted he’d always been a careful driver. All dads do. But you drove too fast as a teenager, despite your dad’s warning.
• What if your dad just winked and said “don’t worry about it, I drove like a maniac as a kid. I got lots of speeding tickets.” You would have driven even faster, right? It’s OK because dad did it.

The same thing happens with your business. Don’t swap stories about the annoying customers. Talk about the good ones.

Sometime around the middle of last week I published the following quote from Walt Disney:

A man should never neglect his family for business

Somebody who read that quote followed up by asking me:

Yes, it’s possible, but you need to apply common sense too, no?

That comment started me thinking. And I ended up drawing the diagram here and wondering whether there aren’t two competing worlds we live in or choose between.

I posed the three factors you can see in the diagram:

1. The people you care about
2. Work you like
3. Business success

And that led me to a the key question: Do the three factors pull away from the center, and away from each other; or do they push towards the center, and work better together.

So which of these is your world?

1. The Glass Half Empty

If all three of these main factors here pull you away from the others, you live in a sad world. In that case,  time with people you care about takes you away from business. And work you like makes you less successful. The underlying world view is full of hard roads, long work weeks, managing by criticizing and threats, racing rats racing, and climbing corporate ladders. In this world, nice guys finish last.

• The more attention you give to people you care about, the less you have work you like and business success.
• The more attention given to work you like, the less of you is available for your people, and the less business success.
• The more attention focused on business success, the less you can give to people you care about and the work you like.

2. The Glass Half Full

On the other hand, what if you live in a world in which all three factors pull towards the center?  Focus on work you like, and you do more, achieve more, become more successful, all of which makes you happy and giving more of yourself to the people you care about.

Is that your world?

The easiest argument to make is that business success and work that you like go together. Do what you love, love what you do, be more likely to succeed. Building a business around doing what you love is hardly a novel idea.

It’s harder to argue that focusing on people you care about (you could call that family if you like, but it’s not necessary) generates work you like and business success. I think this is where we have to bring in the compromise, just as my friend suggested above. Find ways to compromise to maintain balance between work and the rest of life.

Conclusion

Is either one of these worlds real? They both are. It’s up to you.

(Photo credit: PeterPolak/Shutterstock) (Drawing/diagram is my own)

Seems like negotiation week for me. I published this post about Seth Godin’s take on business development, and then another on how win-win is the only win in business negotiations. That leaves me thinking about negotiations I’ve been involved in, things that have worked, and things that haven’t worked. And I end up wanting to post the three rules here, because it seems like they always work.

Disclosure: I’ve never taken a negotiation course; not the ones they advertise in magazines, and not one in business school either. These rules are things I learned the hard way.

1. How does it feel to be them?

Call it empathy. “Walk a mile in their shoes” is a good old-fashioned saying. I know a lady who would say “see it through my eyes.” There’s no substitute for understanding the other side of the negotiation. What are they thinking? And, by far the most important, what do they want?

2. Find the win-win

There are no zero-sum games in long-term business deals. You have two winners or two losers, never just one winner and one loser. Sure, you might be able to get that kind of a victory (we win, you lose) in a negotiation sometimes, if you make that a goal … but that won’t last. Businesses wise up. Relationships that aren’t good for both sides don’t last.

So look for that in every negotiation. How can they get what they want, and you get what you want? Maybe both sides get slightly less, but both win. That’s the goal.

3. Negotiate before the contract, not with the contract

The most common mistake in negotiation is dealing with the legal contract. First, you have to realize that only a tiny minority of legal contracts ever determine anything. You have to sue for breach of contract to make a contract really matter, and if it comes to that, you already have a disaster. The vast majority of disputes are dealt with by discussion, revision, and, for the really hard ones,  mediation.

I’m not an attorney, so don’t take this as legal advice. In practical experience, though, what I’ve seen that works is that you get all your terms straight first in simple memos (yes, definitely, written; just not legalese) and then do the contract. The contract is the last step.

(Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock)

I really like this video (8 minutes), not just for what it says, but also for what it doesn’t say.

As Jeff Bezos stands comfortably in front of the YouTube camera, in a garden, with a flip chart, I’m reminded of the “it’s good to be king” refrain in Mel Brooks’ classic History of the World Part 2. There are experts all over the place — the Web, blogs, Twitter, et al., generate experts more than anything else — but Bezos is someone who’s 15 years down the path now and looking back on it with engaging and seemingly genuine good humor and good intentions. There’s no urgency here, and no embarrassment about giving advice. It’s delightfully simple understatement.

As he talks about Amazon.com’s history and the recent purchase of Zappos.com, he uses the simple motif of the flip chart, hand written, to punctuate his points as well as anybody ever has with PowerPoint or Keynote. You’ll see what I mean if you watch.

He boils it down to four simple points:

1. Obsess over customers. Not competitors, not anything else, but customers. “Start there and work backwards.”
2. Invent. “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either-or thinking.  We try to figure out a solution. You can invent your way out of any box. Invent on behalf of customers. It’s not just the big things, like Kindle, EC2, the cloud, but an inventive culture. It’s so many small things.
3. Think long term. This is really critical. Most initiatives take 5-7 years before paying dividends for the company. The ability to think in five-year and seven-year timeframes is rare. It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood. Many inventions are misunderstood in the early innings.
4. It’s always day one. There’s always more invention in the future. And new ways to obsess about customers.

The occasion is the acquisition of Zappos.com, which generates a lot of positive comments near the end.

Note: if you can’t see the video on this site, you can click here to go to the source on YouTube.

I posted here yesterday about what makes a good manager. I asked whether you are a good manager, and how you would know if you aren’t.

One thing I’ve thought of since is one way to tell you aren’t a good manager. Sometimes the negatives are easier. And although I can’t imagine all the different ways you could be a bad manager, I’m at least quite sure that one way is to pretend to delegate without actually delegating. What is that? Here’s how, step by step:

1. Tell somebody they’re in charge of something.
2. Wait.
3. When it’s done, tell them what you would have done instead.

I can pretty much guarantee the result of this kind of management: your victims will stop making decisions on their own. Over time, you’ll end up frustrated that nobody thinks for themselves anymore. Everybody has to ask you everything. You’ll ask: “what’s wrong with them all?” And the answer will be: you.

And yes, I know what you’re thinking: there’s something wrong with my number 3, because you have to tell people what went wrong. You have to analyze results, right? Isn’t that management? Or do you just shut up? The answer is you analyze results without suggesting you would have made different choices if you’d done it yourself. Learn this line: “good decisions sometimes have bad results.”