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Seth's Blog

Seth Godin's riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.

TEDthinkToday

Can you factor this?

If you're like most people, you get a little queasy at the thought. And when you were in tenth grade, you surely wondered why they were bothering you.

(the answer is (x-2) times (x-2), in case you were curious.)

It turns out that the real reason you needed to do this work was to be able to play with numbers in your head. Abstract numerical thought is an important skill among educated people.

Which brings us to TED, a conference held every year in Long Beach. It's going on right now.

Watch a few TED videos and try to get ahead of the speaker. They have an idea...it's probably a conceptual tricky idea, one with a lot of moving parts. And there is a lot of shorthand and arm waving ... basically, it's similar to a quadratic equation. If you need the other person to slow down and explain every little bit, you've missed the point. The point is to do abstract conceptual thought. To get in practice taking the accepted status quo and questioning it, at least f

Frightened, clueless or uninformed?Yesterday

In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.

Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.

Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.

And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.

The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.

One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.

When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like m

The least I could doFebruary 7

One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That's actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.

No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings... what's the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.

Of course, there's a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.

Radically overdeliver.

Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.

iPad app of my dreams: the digital talking padFebruary 6

Here's the spec. If you build it and it's great, I'll use it and I'll blog it.

A while ago, I posted about the talking pad and a modern version of it.

I think there's a killer app version of this for the iPad, and I hope someone will build it. The talking pad is an interactive presentation tool for smart people.

Overview

It's a very simple concept: a collection of pages (slides, images, type, let's call them pages) that are easy to navigate in a non-linear way. Along with the standard zoom features, I'd like to be able to write on any of them in real time using my finger. I can also call up, on demand, a calculator or a blank drawing pad.

Creation

I can create the talking pad files on my Mac or on the iPad using a builder app, and sync both ways. The builder is really simple, just the ability to organize pages I create in other apps, with simple navigation, scale and type tools.

Navigation

Instead of it being linear (like Powerpoint or Keynote), the pages are arranged in a grid or checkerboard. From any page, then, I can go back, forward, up or down, and the four diagonals as well. So depending on the conversation I'm having with my audience, my 'next' page can be any of 8.

In addition, the app supports an external monitor. When I'm hooked up to the

The relentless search for "tell me what to do"February 6

If you've ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."

When asked, resist.