A Passionate No

by Gil Reich on March 9, 2010

Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility:No

“To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.”

The management lesson to me is that — contrary to popular perception — there’s often far more pressure to say yes than to say no. This is true whether the sexy new thing is Universal Health Care or a War in Iraq or some cool new widget.

Sometimes the correct answer is Yes. Usually the correct answer is No. And the only way to be able to say Yes — and to deliver — where appropriate is to say No all the other times.

I have very mixed feelings about the Tea Party movement, but the part I love is their passion for fiscal responsibility. Any moron can increase spending and lower taxes. And any product manager can get excited about all the new great ideas that come along. But you won’t be able to deliver on any of those new ideas unless you’re very passionate about saying No to all the others. The average company is like the US government. Its biggest challenge isn’t finding great ideas. It’s finding the discipline to store up enough resources to focus on the one or two great ideas that they have.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/biscuitsmlp/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Best of SphinnCon 2010

by Gil Reich on March 7, 2010

SphinnCon Israel was great, thanx Barry! Thanks everyone for all your help in generating this post:

SphinnCon

SphinnCon

Best Speakers:

Best Lines:

  • Sam Michelson: You need to meet with your clients to understand what they really want. I like spending the weekend. With the ones who aren’t in jail.

Best Take-Aways:

  • Gab Goldenberg: Build long term relationships, friendships, reciprocity (not trading). One of the best strategies is guest posting.

Best Gags:

  • Sam Michelson: Fake slide about building reputation for the Mossad.

Best Running Jokes:

  • Dixon Jones after being tweaked by Ari Ozick that Majestic has a bad UI: We have a bad UI because everybody uses Excel anyway … Then I download it into Excel, because we have a lousy UI.

Best Tweets:

  • Shira Abel (@shiraabel): ohhhhhh… dangerous keywords. Oh. Not as exciting as I had hoped…
  • Dan-ya Schwartz (@danjas): I wonder if @neyne knows that his computer is projected. I enjoy following the way his mind work. [I wish I were there].

Best Examples:

  • Vanessa Fox: TSA’s Reputation Management success.
  • Shira Abel: Lower Merion School District’s Reputation Management failure.

Best Interaction:

  • Tomer Honen: Phone went off while he was speaking. Asked if it was for him, said to tell them he’s not here.
  • And then Tomer again, setting up Vanessa. The exchange went something like this:
    • Conference Participant: I got a message that I have too many URLs.
    • Tomer: How many do you have
    • Participant: About 180 million.
    • [After the laughter died down the second punchline came...]
    • Vanessa Fox (from the audience): I programmed that feature!

Best Live Blogging:

[I almost wrote Lisa Barone & Barry Schwartz out of habit :-). Great job by Debra.]

Also in this series:

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Why the Tea Party Encourages & Terrifies Me

by Gil Reich March 5, 2010 politics

I usually avoid politics — why lose or offend readers who agree with me on the blog’s core ideas but disagree with me on politics? But as I come closer to articulating this blog’s core ideas (more on that in a future post), I’ll take my chances that you’ll stay with me despite knowing my [...]

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SMX Speaking Debut at SphinnCon, SMX Toronto

by Gil Reich March 4, 2010 Uncategorized

I’m making my SMX speaking debut on Sunday at SphinnCon. And next month I get to present at SMX Toronto.
Just learned that a perk of speaking and blogging about it is I get to share a 15% discount code to SMX Toronto, so just use REICH15 when registering.
Vanessa Fox, who was named Best Moderator in [...]

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Best of BirdBrain

by Gil Reich March 3, 2010 Best of

Jeff Pulver, Yossi Vardi, Mel Rosenberg, Noam Fine, and Sharon Ariel ran a networking breakfast and Bird Brain Unconference yesterday.
A bunch of creative people doing different things. The highlights:
Best innovation idea:

Roi Chobadi: A chat client that looks like you’re programming in Visual Studio. You know, so when your boss walks into your office you don’t [...]

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George Washington: Leadership & Restraint

by Gil Reich February 20, 2010 Management

George Washington never got the same respect from many intellectuals as some of the other Founding Fathers, but that tells us more about those intellectuals than it does about Washington. Washington was the central figure of the American Revolution, and I’m not only referring to the war, but also the fifteen critical years that followed. [...]

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Large-Scale Content-Creation Sites

by Gil Reich February 10, 2010 Industry Analysis

Excellent recent articles in the New York Times, TechCrunch, and All Things D have brought some clarity and insight to the issues surrounding large-scale content-creation sites. Here’s an industry overview:
Who?
Demand Media’s eHow, Associated Content, New York Times’ About.com, Aol’s Seed.com, Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com’s WikiAnswers (where I work).
What?
These sites create thousands of articles every day.
The [...]

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Wikimedia’s Strategy Memo

by Gil Reich January 25, 2010 Industry Analysis

Wikimedia’s strategy memo is interesting for what it has and for what it’s missing.

Key Concerns:

Editing community has flattened out.
Have been very successful in the “Global North” but it will be much harder to grow in the “Global South.”
Technological and financial infrastructure have not kept pace with growth in readership.

They will:

Invest in their infrastructure: technological, [...]

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On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog

by Gil Reich January 15, 2010 Industry Analysis

In 1993, the New Yorker famously published a cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The internet was where you lived your anonymous second life. How times have changed.
The excellent Doc Searls mocked the way sites treat your privacy by imagining it in the real world:
“The [privacy] policy tells you that, if [...]

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Finding My Passion, Finding My Tribe

by Gil Reich January 14, 2010 Blogging

Friends (if you’re reading this, that includes you), can you help me out with this? For my birthday, my wife bought me a consulting package from Beyond Blogging. Step 1 is “Finding your passion.” They write:
“It’s essential for long term success to find a topic that you’re passionate about. …
Here’s a quick test: If you [...]

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