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.

In an ideal world, saying no to one thing makes you more credible when you say yes to another. Telling a caller the truth about what your product doesn’t do makes them more likely to call back when they need what it does do. Turning down one kind of consulting job because you’re not expert enough makes you that much more credible when you call yourself an expert in something else later on.

I’ve really enjoyed the power of no in the past. No, our software doesn’t do that, it does this instead. And no, that’s not the kind of consulting I do. It’s a good feeling to say no during a sales call.

The world we live in, however, is not that ideal world. A lot of those customers don’t come back for what you really can say yes to.  A lot of them go somewhere else, settle for something else, and their itch is scratched, and they’re done.

I’ve never forgotten the hard lesson I learned in 1985 when I turned down an invitation to speak at COMDEX, the then-big PC industry show in Las Vegas, on PC industry trends. I’d been an industry trends follower previously, but had been concentrating on business planning for a couple of years. I attended the show for a client, looking at trends for their business plan, and attended the workshop I would have given. To my dismay, the guy who did it presented nothing more than what anybody could read in the trade magazines the week before. And to my further dismay, the audience seemed to like it. My turning down this opportunity was my paying homage to a standard of professionalism that apparently no longer existed. And nobody cared.

Last week Matthew Scott (MatthewRayScott on Twitter) sent me back to that memory with his very interesting eight-minute reflection on expertise, on his blog The Strategic Incubator. He called it Social Media Experts + Irrelevance. 

His eight-minute audio post is about turning down what would have been a $21,000 engagement conducting workshops on Twitter and Facebook about marketing because he didn’t consider himself “expert” enough. And then discovering that the person who ended up doing it was probably way less knowledgeable than he is. And younger, with no visible track record in marketing, and not nearly as visible in Twitter.

Matthew, on the other hand, is a successful marketing/strategy coach who’s really good at Twitter (in my opinion). He should publish a collection of his “note to self” tweets as a book. He’s also a veteran of actual management in big companies, and a former military officer, a good writer, and a good thinker. And I don’t think he should have turned down that job, because, well, if he isn’t an expert, then I don’t know who is.

But in his thoughtful podcast on the subject, Matthew says:

“I had to turn it down because I’m not an expert. … and how the heck is this person going to stand up and deliver a message in which they have credibility?”

He ends up dismissing his own question, as:

“Irrelevant. The conference invited them. The conference gave them credibility.”

And that’s the problem – who is an expert? Who gets to be the expert in these things? Is there an age requirement? Success requirement? Some minimum number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or blog subscribers? Last month I posted this post tracking a blogger who complained about social media experts without sales or new product launch experience, and then this one suggesting that expertise comes from more than specific middle management experience. I think these are real issues, without good answers.   

What we’re calling social media is a new phenomenon. It’s very hard to measure expertise. I have to admit that I’m very impressed with blog subscriber numbers, less so with large numbers of Twitter followers, but at least that’s a metric. And they don’t publish revenue stats like they do the winnings of pro golfers or tennis players. And Twitter, particularly, is a virtual ocean of people who are putting expert beside their names and are getting by with it.

Too bad Matthew, you should have taken the money. The conference and its audience would have been better off.

(Photo credit: Levent Konuk/Shutterstock)

This post title should be recited to the tune of “lions, tigers, and bears, oh my;” that is if you’re old enough to remember The Wizard of Oz, or young (at heart) enough to have seen it as a rerun. It’s rhythmic and its cyclical and it never stops.

Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn are potential business advantages right now. Believe it or not, Twitter offers me real productivity gains. If you don’t see it yet, you will, later on. Facebook and LinkedIn do that for others (not me, but only because I can’t deal with too many different media). Businesses that manage these facilities well are ahead of the game, for now. If you don’t believe me, look at Zappo’s valuations when Amazon.com bought it.

Soon, though, they’ll be expected. It won’t be that businesses operating on the leading edge get credit. Instead, it will be that businesses operating behind that edge will suffer.

That’s the cycle: technology boosts productivity, and that boosts expectations, so we go back to the start again.

I’ve seen that same cycle for a long time now, over and over. When I started with spreadsheets, in 1980, they were so new that my use of spreadsheets gave me competitive advantage in business school. (That image to the right is a 1979 ad for VisiCalc, the first mainstream spreadsheet). Not any more; everybody assumes spreadsheets. Complicated spreadsheets don’t buy anybody competitive advantage. The same was true, believe it or not, with word processing (yes, there was a time when business people didn’t all understand word processing). Now we all assume that. There was a time when an early personal computer and WordStar software and a daisy wheel printer was a huge competitive advantage. No longer. And the same thing happened with desktop publishing. First it was competitive advantage, but then the bar was raised, and it became merely expected. And with email, and Internet websites. Technology to productivity to expectations to back to the start again.

True, we got better output. Spreadsheets give us better business analysis, word processing gives us better writing tools, and desktop publishing gives us better output. But we don’t spend less time. We just expect more.

(Photo credit: Woosa Rosa/Shutterstock)

There can be great truth in stories. People have communicated in stories from the very beginning. We use stories to tell about God, family, each other, and business. Stories can be true or false by the message they carry, not just what happens in the story. Fables, parables, short stories … think about how much you learn, and teach, with stories.

Can a story tell truth without being technically factual? I think we all know it can. Is the lesson of sour grapes less true because there was no original fox? Or is the story of the gingerbread man not true?

Marketing is all about stories. (Aside — great book in this area, All Marketers are Liars, by Seth Godin). There’s the story of how it started, the invention of whatever it is you’re selling, or the invention of your business itself, the story of the brand, the packaging, the formula, or whatever. There’s the story of how the customer finds the solution. There’s the story of how the customer problem is solved.

A good business plan is a collection of stories. Your vision is a story about the future. Even financial projections are stories, told in numbers. If we sell this many units at that price, we have this much in sales; but we also have to spend this much in rent, and so on.

As a frequent reader of business plans, I look for the stories. The most important is the story of the customer, the solution to a problem, the path to find it, and the decision to buy. I also look for the story of the startup, and the story of the growth in the future. I want them to be convincing.

(Photo credit: Pixelbliss/Shutterstock)

I was lucky. As Palo Alto Software grew up it found some good people along the way. Some of them stuck with us, and some were related to me, a second generation. We had a sense of community that seems, now that it’s grown, vital to that growth.

But I’ve never really understood about managing employees. When I was in business school, oh, so many years ago, what they taught was organizational theory, which we called “touchy feely,” and it didn’t relate well to what happened to us as we built a company.

You work shoulder to shoulder with people and you care about them. It’s hard to give good feedback on both sides (negative as well as positive) of the performance. It’s hard to stay at arm’s length, even though that’s what all the texts and literature and common sense suggest.

So here is some of what I take out of 25 years of building a company, points related to being an employer and having employees:

1. Choosing people to fill jobs is really hard. People are unpredictable. Resumes don’t work very well, and job interviews don’t work very well either. And the legal advice all companies get from good attorneys, like all the questions you can’t or shouldn’t ask, make that even harder.
2. “Fit” as in employee fit, is vital but also overrated, and too often used as a rationalization. You want people unlike you, not people like you. But you like people like you.
3. People change. Long-term loyal and trusted employees grow in and out of the job, sometimes. Sometimes people find themselves and grow and get better and need more. Sometimes they get tired and stop caring as much.
4. Sometimes you hire the right person for the wrong job. If so, you’re lucky. You find the right job and that problem is solved. Sometimes you hire somebody just for who they are, not how they fill the job description.
5. When family business works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, I’m told, and we all know the stories, it’s hell. But it’s worked for me and Palo Alto Software. As the company grew up some family members grew up as well, finished college, worked in the industry, and came back to be a second generation of management. When that happens and you have a smart, loyal, trustworthy second generation, its great. How sad that some people assume there’s something wrong with that. Why?
6. English doesn’t have formal and informal like Spanish and German and French. One of my mentors would never use the informal you. “Because I might have to fire you tomorrow,” he would say. There’s wisdom in that, I think, but then one day he jumped out of a high hotel window to his death.
7. You can change the job, or move the person to a different job, but you can’t change the person. The people change on their own.
8. Suspicion, hearsay, jumping to conclusions is dangerous. You don’t get to act on the smoke. Wait for the fire.
9. Firing people is the hardest thing you do. And the hardest firing is the loyal and honest and hard-working employee who just doesn’t get the job done, or keeps making the wrong decision, and doesn’t fit another job. You were supposed to stay arms-length, remember? I still don’t know how people do that.
10. It’s easier to fire five people in a single day than just one person ever, except when that person’s had a bad attitude.

We baby boomers have lost too many cultural icons. Don’t take away Woodstock.

Some nut shot John Lennon. Good journalism — or was it reality? — took away our faith in institutions. We’ve pretty much lost Ford, Chevrolet, General Motors, Wall Street, faith in television news, trust in doctors, air, water … hell, they even took away Christopher Columbus, who went from great explorer to racist exploiter, all in one generation. And now there are people who say the 1969 moon walk was faked. But Woodstock too? What’s left?

I turned 21 in 1969. I was a West coast kid, nowhere near Woodstock, working a summer job between years at college. But, despite the technicality of geography, I was there in spirit just like the rest of that half of my generation that had woken up to new values, wanted to change the world, believed in a new kind of freedom, opposed the Vietnam war, and drank the cool-aid. With whatever symbolism we could find, usually nothing more than long hair and bell-bottom pants, we paraded our loyalty to what we thought was going to be a once-in-history sweeping change in humanity.

The Woodstock media sensation was cultural affirmation.  It was just about a year after the 1968 student uprisings world wide — riots, broken windows, overturned cars, breaking out simultaneously in places as far apart as Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, and cities across the United States. Unlike the year before, though, it was a new kind of uprising, a peaceful uprising. It was validation. Half a million people gathered for three days in a muddy field with no money, no violence, no hierarchy, no police, no authorities, and no problems. And it proved what we’d been saying to ourselves, to our parents, to our teachers, bosses, and anybody else who objected.

It felt like a turning point. After Woodstock, “Hippy” was no longer a bad thing to be.

All of which brings me to this disturbing segment of a fascinating Wall Street Journal video (below) on how Woodstock changed music. Oh the loss, oh the disillusion! Is nothing sacred?

Disillusion number one: marketing? The narration says “the Woodstock nation was born, ushering in a whole new area of marketing. True, I’m all grown up now, I get marketing, my company depends on it like the rest of small business, but jeez, marketing at Woodstock? That’s Woodstock’s legacy?

No, I hope not; but then John Scher, CEO of Metropolitan Talent, explains:

“You had a new brand. It was called Woodstock. And you had music that was associated with a mass movement: A social, cultural, and political movement. Music could be marketed, differently, than it was before. And then you had people who had no soul, just trying to sell product, trying to figure out how they could latch on.”

(If you can’t see the video, click here to go to the source at wsj.com)

But wait: it gets worse. The narrator implies that the legacy was more the movie than the event, and in the movie …

“Not all the performers fared so well.  The order of performers was changed, some were left out, in some cases songs performed elsewhere replaced songs performed at the event.  It all helped to create a memory that wasn’t necessarily true to life.”

And still worse. The five-minute piece finishes with WSJ Music Critic Jim Fusilli:

“There’s a lot of really terrific performances that received no exposure. For the past 39 years, they’ve gotten very little bounce. A lot of Columbia artists didn’t get into the film. A lot of Capitol artists didn’t get into the film, or onto the album. You had a giant label in Warner Brothers, who had possession of the music at Woodstock.

“I don’t remember what actually happened anymore either. I’ve been struggling against the myth of Woodstock. I’ve probably read 10 books, I’ve listened to (I bet your) two thirds of the music that was at Woodstock. I’ve talked to probably 20 people who were at Woodstock or involved in Woodstock. And I don’t really know what happened anymore. The only thing I have that I can trust is the music.

“This is a debate that I have with myself all the time, as to whether things like Woodstock, and the Beatles, and the Stones, will continue into the future. Whether people will have the same affection for them once the social context has changed. And I think it’s hard to say. The truth is that as long as a single hippy remains alive, the myth of Woodstock will be perpetuated.”

Screw historical accuracy. Power to the people. Leave Woodstock alone.

On the other hand, sacred? Who are we kidding? So, in the immortal words of the late great Gilda Radner (another baby boomer, by the way), never mind.

Somebody asked me recently how my background relates to programming computers, and software. That’s hard to explain, given that I majored in Literature as an undergrad, then got an MA in Journalism, then an MBA. None of that says programming.

In my case it was like falling in love. I first used word processing when I was still with United Press International (UPI) in Mexico City, back in the 1970s (it was an early Atex system). Then, when I got accepted to business school they gave me a teach-yourself-BASIC programming book, and told me to learn it before the school year started.

Flickr cc by Jana_aka_BADGRL

Programming, making the computer do things, was fascinating to me. It was like making real things, but with a touch of magic. Do the code, press run, and when it did what I wanted, filling the screen with my results, I loved it. I ended up with a part-time job helping fellow students with the computer in the business school basement, and building my own computer from parts (for you really old-time computer geeks, that was a CP/M computer and an S-100 bus).

What reminded me of these good old days was yesterday my daughter Megan sent me this: Someone At Apple Has A Sense Of Humor. The MobileCrunch report cites this piece of code deep in the iPhone, where you’d only find it by trying to hack around the main stuff:

00009 @interface UIViewController (UIViewControllerClassDumpWarning)

00010 – (void)attentionClassDumpUser:(id)fp8 yesItsUsAgain:(id)fp12 althoughSwizzlingAndOverridingPrivateMethodsIsFun:(id)fp16 itWasntMuchFunWhenYourAppStoppedWorking:(id)fp20 pleaseRefrainFromDoingSoInTheFutureOkayThanksBye:(id)fp24; 00011 @end

What that says there is “Although swizzling and overriding private methods is fun, it wasn’t much fun when your app stopped working. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Okay thanks bye.”

My actual programming was mainly in the 1980s, when “hacking” was a good thing, and those of us who worked with personal computers could feel like we were some kind of an in crowd at times. I did do some real code for Business Plan Pro’s first version, and, before that, I wrote code for the early Business Plan Toolkit using spreadsheet macros. Error messages could be kind of fun.

I’d like to brag about some of the more amusing error messages I left, but, sorry, I’d play with them during testing but I always chickened out and cleaned them up to look more professional (and, sadly, dull).

And that also reminds me, as well, of how programming was so often a one-person job back in the 1980s. I’d do it for myself, first, use it, and then productize later. That’s a lot different from the teams of programmers everybody uses today. But things, including the computer programs, were a lot simpler. Not as good, either — not by a long shot — but simpler.

But I searched Google for funny error messages, and a lot come up. You can click the link to see for yourself, or maybe just use this one, which seems like one of the best.

I’m troubled by the concept of “fit” and how it works with growing a company and hiring employees.

It’s not a new concept, and I should have figured it out, by now, since I’ve watched Palo Alto Software grow from nowhere to 45 employees.

But I haven’t. And I don’t think it’s just me. I think there are two very different sides to the same idea, one perfectly logical, the other sinister, and threatening.

The good side of fit is what you look for when you invite a new employee to join a small company. You want a good fit with team spirit, cooperation, and working together. Values are extremely important. One of the best ways to build a company is to build it around values — like a mantra, a meaning, how your company makes the world better — and to bring together people who share those values.

Flickr; photo by BenSpark

The dark side of fit is a rationalization, a code word for favoring one kind of person. It’s code for discrimination. It gets used as a catch-all phrase to exclude people who are different.

The answer to the puzzle of fit is that a good fit on a team is not sameness or similarity. A strong business grows through diversity, finding people who bring new skills, new ideas, and new points of view. As you move from a one-person company to finding that second person, you want somebody different, not somebody like you. That’s the foundation of the business value of diversity.

It’s scary to me how often diversity ends up as a political football, and “fit” as an excuse. Diversity is not just good policy, it’s also good business.

You know the phrase:

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Right? You hear it a lot.

But what if, in fact, invention is the mother of necessity. Once the technology exists,  we then complicate things, demand more, and use up the productivity gain in raising the quality bar.

Take budgets, for example. I realize it’s hard for most people to imagine a world without ready access to spreadsheets (you’d almost have to be a baby boomer, since spreadsheets and personal computing burst onto the scene in the early 1980s). But spreadsheets changed what we expect of budgets and budgeting. The invention changed what we define as necessity. We can do the numbers now, so we demand more numbers.

Or word processing, and then, a few years later, desktop publishing. The combination completely changed what we expect of business correspondence. You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but there was a time when we wrote letters and memos and mailed them. Yes, I mean using the post office, and postage stamps. Back then, we didn’t get hundreds of letters to answer every day. The invention changed the necessity. We can email now (or tweet, or blog), so the world demands more communication.

And cell phones.  Ah yes, lots of us remember the world before cell phones. We didn’t bug each other nearly as much, back before cell phones, as we do now; we didn’t expect phone calls checking in, updating each other, nearly as much. Less communication was acceptable.

Are we more productive? Who knows? Do we have a choice on the matter? No. Technology goes one way. Whether we like it or not.

I spent a spare moment on twitter last Saturday afternoon. It had been a busy day, a long drive home in the morning, quiet time to myself in the car, then an explosion of small children, a beautiful summer day, a nice dinner in the garden.

And I discovered this:

Top 10 Things All Women Need To Know About Men. It caught my eye in twitter, I clicked, I read. I liked the intro. I’m not a church goer myself, at least not anymore, but the introduction, church or not, God or not, was pleasant enough and engaging. Thoughtful.

I even like the list. There’s something in the tone that makes me like the author. I browsed his blog, called Big is the New Small, and liked a lot of what I saw there. His name is Scott Williams.

But parts of it bother me. Maybe at 61, almost 40 years married, I’m getting tired of the stereotypes. For example, when Scott writes …

We are not mind readers, say what’s really on your mind.

… I can’t help thinking how different his view is from my world. My wife has never had any trouble speaking her mind, some of my daughters do automatically, others don’t. And I don’t always. I don’t think this is a gender thing, certainly no more female than male.

And on this one:

We need our time alone: guys night out, man cave…

My response to this is: “wow, no offense to guy friends, but no thanks.” What with business to do, kids, family, trying to have a life … I never understood the guys’ night out syndrome. I never wanted it. Is that really just me? Or is that a matter of life, family, and work, leading to precious little down time, and not wanting to spend it with guy friends.

It reminds me of the recurring thread, not from Scott in this case, of people taking vacations from family. As my wife and I had kids, we never wanted vacations separate from them. Vacations were about them.

Then again, maybe it is me, maybe I am different. I’ve liked a lot of so-called “chick flix” in my day (which contradicts another point on Scott’s list) and I usually remember dates (which contradicts yet another). But I do match a lot of his points.

So why take issue? Because stereotyping genders worries me. Not that I don’t like gender differences; I do, that’s the spice of life. I’m all in favor of gender differences as long as we’re not talking about jobs, or opportunities, or compensation or freedom. And identifying men traits and women traits can even be useful (the Mars/Venus thing opened my eyes to some things I hadn’t seen before). But it makes me uncomfortable too. When Scott says, in his list of things women should know about men,

We want to be the leader and the protector… let us lead.

It worries me a bit because it hints at heirarchy, a leader and a follower, based on gender, in marriage. I guess I naturally have the instinct of protector maybe, in a physical way, male; when we used to take the kids up to the high country above Yosemite Valley, I was the one awake at night worrying about bears, because the rest of them assumed Daddy would keep them safe. But then my wife has been the mother bear protector of children sometimes more than me. She can be really scary. And, getting to the point, I don’t think marriage is about a leader and a follower. Let’s hope you have some of both, on both sides.

Another of Scott’s ten points is …

When we say nothing is wrong, “Nothing is wrong” nothing means nothing!

Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes. But, really, only one gender has trouble with this? I think not.

We want to be respected and appreciated.

Weird. What’s that doing here? Who doesn’t? What does this have to do with men and women? Is there anybody anywhere, man or woman, who doesn’t want to be respected an appreciated?

This is endearing, but it also gets old. Reminders of how we’re different can be a useful, even if we run down the list and they’re not exactly right for any one of uys. But the idea that some of this — like respect and appreciation, or leadership — are gender specific — is not that good for anybody. In my opinion.