Filipino cuisine & Positioning (under 7 seconds)
A friend of mine just got his restaurant into the top 50 of Asia. If you plan to visit Philippines, this would be a great place. 🙂 Anyways. You know what stood up while going through their posts? Their boldness [in their positioning]. This is their post: What we serve.An 8-course menu that explores ideas around Filipino cuisine. A selection of natural wines, cool cocktails and crisp craft beers.The flavors are Filipino. There will be patis, soy sauce, bagoong, bold, funky, pungent and bitter…
99 problems but a b*tch ain’t one
Do you BATCH your thinking? How do you know what ideas are worth pursuing or not? One way it has worked for me has been daily writing. (Thank you, Jonathan Stark!) Daily writing has its challenges, but one that is not is getting ideas —and writing (almost) 24/7… Start Batching Batching ideas comes as a process of putting them down and either making an outline or brain dumping what comes to mind. No judgement. It is what it is. And it’s always a good start. This process becomes a “living”…
RE: What’s “Immersive” [from Making The Museum daily mail]
This email from friend and daily mailer Jonathan Alger from Making The Museum reminded me of the Diving series. In diving, you don’t use “go for a dive”. You use “immersion” as the technical term. Ideas 4 and 5 really hit home. 4. Immerse originally meant “to dip”.Immersion comes from in-mergere, 14th century Latin meaning “to dip”. Like into a fluid. Immersive experiences “dip” you.5. Immersive is temporary.Dipping is an action, temporary by definition. Fish aren’t dipped in water, they’re…
Trout & Bass
Jonathan Stark and Ed Gandia had this talk on Ditching Hourly about positioning, niching down and fishing —in the ocean v in a barrel. And they talk trout and bass. [,,,] You’re [fishing] in the ocean or standing next to a barrel full of trout. […]Would you rather have the thousand trout that you can see right there, that are jumping into your hands?Or would you rather be out in the ocean in a dinghy with a single hook? You don’t get a big net. That is for big companies.You always only have…
What the hell is water?
How’s the water?Asks one fish to other two.One of the other two replies “What the hell is water?” David Foster Wallace, Kenyon Commencement Speech The curse of knowledge. We assume what we know MUST BE known for others. Because we do something so natural that feels like breathing to us, doesn’t mean everybody else does too. Today’s email from Louis Grenier made my head click. You do something so easily it feels like breathing. It’s just natural. The thing is, you’re too close to it to really…
Quit charging your worth
“Charging your worth” focuses on you, not on the outcomes and transformations you can drive. It doesn’t focus on what your clients are after. It assigns the subjectivity to your POV (what you think it’s worth), instead of figuring out what is valuable for your clients. It implies that your worth has a fixed price. So that for whatever task you do, the price will be the same. Design a strategy? X price. Mown the lawn? The same X price. Wash the dishes? Same X price Implement a whole biz…
Mapping an ecosystem
Here’s the work of a project led by Philip Kotler: The Wicked 7. It’s a map of how intertwined several (and most times unseen) factors are. It aims to take a systemic approach —or at least gain awareness of how things work… and what could change. With this map, you can have a better picture that taking incremental change (or aim at one-problem) won’t influence the system itself. Taking an overall approach might do. Can you map out your own business ecosystem? Map of The Ecosystem of Wicked…
Incremental v. Systemic
Incremental change Takes how not to disrupt the system in search for (small) efficiencies and improvements. Slow: 1,3,5,10… Small changes to increase. Safe: Keeping what you have (aversion bias kicks in). Short term: Not big changes now. Sales to keep. Revenue to keep. Profit not to lose. Don’t stir the pot. What does it look like? Raise your prices… according to inflation, or by 5-10% Raise your prices incrementally +5%, +15%, + 30%… [Timestamp 14:07] ESG, B-Corp Short-term: how can it…
Change
Last couple of years, systemic change has become mainstream. Shows, podcasts, books have been published recurring to the idea that systemic change is needed to stop the decay of the environment or that it will help change how (broken) things work. I agree. However, the lens the vast majority sees systemic change through is of incremental change. They picture it like a waterfall. As if one fix will lead to fix the other one at a time, ignoring (consciously or not) they’re interrelated. That is…
It’s not fair
There’s no fair thing. Not from your POV as a seller / service provider. What you charge has nothing to do with you. Or if you find it “fair”. It’s about what’s important to your clients. If they think the work you’ll do will mean 500K to pay you and it’s acceptable to them, they’ll pay you (and you’ll take it). You don’t say “Oh, I don’t think it’s fair (to me) because it might take me 20 minutes to get that done or it’ll cost me 20K or I’ll be happy with 7K because that’s what ‘I’m worth'”….
