Happy New Year

In just a matter of hours, 2009 will be upon us.  If you have not done so, please read my article on setting New Year’s Resolutions.  You may also be interested in some statistics about New Year’s Resolutions.

Happy New Year!

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Personality Poker ®

It’s official.  Personality Poker® is now a registered trademark.  In 2009 we will be announcing some exciting developments with this brand.

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Why Aren’t You More Successful?

A friend of mine is a fantastic freelance writer.  After telling her how great she is, she asked, “So if I’m that good, how come I’m not working now?  Tough market out there.”

Yes, it is a tough market.  But I suspect that is not the reason she can’t find work.  She has fallen into the trap of believing that being good is good enough.  It’s not.

I often tell other professional speakers… “We are not in the speaking business, we are in the marketing business.”  Or maybe more accurately, we are in the marketing and innovation business.

The late, great Peter Drucker once said, “You get paid for creating a customer, and you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center.”

His perspective is brilliant.  I particularly love that his definition of innovation is not focused on creating new products but rather on “creating a new dimension of performance.”

If your business is not as successful as you would like, maybe you need to focus more on marketing and innovation.

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Wii and the Bell Curve

Many of my recent posts discuss “Innovation and the Bell Curve.”

One quick comment on this idea.  I often say that the left-hand side of the bell curve is about affordability and accessibility.  But sometimes it is just about accessibility – for a premium price.

Two quick examples come to mind.

The Nintendo Wii is one of the best examples.  Here, instead of creating higher quality graphics that would appeal to the advanced gamer (the right-hand side of the bell curve), they created graphics and interfaces that would appeal to people ages 8 and 80 alike.  That’s accessibility (left-hand side of the bell curve).  They must be doing something right.  According to Engadget, 1.7 million Wii units were sold last week, when only 500 thousand XBox 360s and 240 thousand PlayStation 3s were sold.  And of course there are all of the Wii add-ons.

Another example comes from the Financial Times.  This is the best business and finance newspaper in the world.  In addition to the paper, they offer many advanced services that would appeal to only those in financial institutions (right-side of curve).  But they also offer their Lex subscription service for mobiles.  This boils down all of the most important news into bite sized nuggets (and it is one of the most popular sections on the print edition).  For people suffering from information overload (like me) this provides greater accessibility to the topics that matter most (left-side of curve).  The cost to deliver this service is close to nothing (it’s all digital), yet the price to the consumer is more than the price of a print paper subscription.

Sometimes being more accessible (simpler) can lead to greater value and hence greater returns for you.

Happy Holidays.

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Happy Holidays!

I hope that everyone will be taking time off to enjoy family and friends. See you in 2009.

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