Snapped at CeBIT recently:

Clever or just ridiculous?

No I did not stop to find out what they were selling.

Or accidentally funny?

Snapped at a parking station:

Many of (most of? ALL of?) us maintain multiple facades. We are one person at work, a different person when with our friends, parents, partners; and yet another person when on the Internet. And it even varies depending on where on the Internet!

Imagine if we could harness and channel the energy we spend on maintaining these façades towards something more constructive!

The same situation exists for businesses too. We …

Businesses often don’t need what they think they want…

We want a cool website with all the latest gizmos and a splashscreen to entertain our customers.

What you need is a website that helps your customers get to the useful and helpful information effectively.

We want an award winning marketing campaign to remind our customers about us.

What you need is to start giving a damn about your customers.

We want a specialist …

Perhaps it is not so much an attention economy (where generating attention is the new currency), but rather an attention-starved economy.

Attention-starved as in: “I want someone to pay me attention and I am prepared to pay for it!”

A service business is not really about the quality of service, but rather the quality of the attention paid to customers. Customer services is more than just serving customers, it is …

Ken Warren wrote about the 10 pitfalls of operating a private practice as a counsellor/therapist. Although targeted at a very specific audience, these points are nonetheless just as valuable for other service businesses to ponder.

Here’re some of the pitfalls, with my thoughts on each:

Operating your business like a charity.

There is a distinction between giving everything away for free (especially because you feel sorry …

I caught up with a friend the other day and we had an interesting conversation which has bearing on what we have been talking about.

She is a life/personal/business coach/consultant. Over the past three years or so she has been trying to find her place, to clarify what she is about and how she does business. She did courses, created workshops, wrote books, did …

Self reflection does not lead to meaning. Meaning requires external/social acknowledgement. “…meaning is socially, not individually, conferred…. If one only tells one’s story to oneself, it remains arbitrary and ultimately without meaning or point, because no one else has acknowledged it, even as a story.”

To make meaning of some thing or some situation, we need some “other” to acknowledge it and pay it attention. “Every act of paying …

So you can’t decide whether to be a millionaire or an artist?
Hot, unmissable tips on GapingVoid.
Thanks be to Stilgherrian for the heads up.

Small is the New Big and other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas. By Seth Godin ISBN 1-59184-126-7.

This is essentially a paper version of Seth’s blog. It is filled with observations, insights and ideas on many aspects of the activity of business.

I particularly like his thoughts on the rise of the individual craftsperson, and the associated decline of big, faceless, don’t-care, corporations.

For someone …