Reading for Growth

In 2003, multiple members of the team from my day job attended Leadership Network's Camp Improv and heard Jim Collins speak. It inspired us all to read Good to Great. The book was transformational to our language, methodology and thought processes. But more than that, we learned just how much a good book can impact growth...and we began reading.

Reading for entertainment can be a great way to spend a weekend, but reading for growth is something different. In looking over what I read in 2011, it was interesting to me that I averaged two a month. These were the titles that were the most significant for my growth professionally:

• The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds
• Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte
• Architect's Essentials of Negotiation (The Architect's Essentials of Professional Practice) by Ava Abramowitz
• SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
• The SPIN Selling Fieldbook: Practical Tools, Methods, Exercises, and Resources by Neil Rackham
• Reworkby Jason Fried
• Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Richby Duane Elgin
• Perseveranceby Margaret Wheatley
• Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin (I know this one seems irrelevant, but her thinking in this context helped me with a marketing challenge.) 
• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything 

So, what do you plan for your reading list in 2012?

© Cathy Hutchison 2012

We have symbology for pauses

There is a musical symbol for a rest. Sentences have commas.

When it comes to pauses, we have symbology.

Why? Because rests give meaning to the content. Run on sentences are hard to understand. And music without separation is simply noise.

I think this is true in life too.

We need items on our calendar that are simply rests. And they should be as non-negotiable as they are in sentences and music. © Cathy Hutchison 2011

Communicating visually...

A "must-have" skill for the digital world is the ability to communicate visually. This slide deck by Brian Halligan on inbound marketing is impressive in its ability to communicate big concepts with simplicity and style.

Killing It! How to Crush the Competition with Inbound Marketing

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

Developing personal rhythms

Everything in nature has a rhythm. Sunrise, sunset. Seasons. Moons. (I watch the squirrel outside my home dash off every morning and return to the tree in the evening. Usually complaining at me if I am in the chair swing.)

The thing about rhythms is that they actually seem to be good for us.

One of the challenges of the digital world is that everything is 24/7 which creates work environments that make it easy to live in reactive mode. Which can leave us responding to requests and challenges, rather than proactively creating.

Rhythms can help with this.

I once helped a friend by participating in her research project which looked at life in 30 minute increments. My big epiphany was that if you start logging what you do every 30 minutes of every day, you find that most every day is exactly the same. It doesn't feel the same because the conversations are so different, but the type of activities that you engage in on a daily basis are actually shockingly homogenous.

Most of us drive to work at the same time each day. Answer e-mail at the same time. Eat at the same times (and often the same types of food). Brush our teeth at the same times. Watch TV...yada, yada.  The point of  the project was that if we really want to experience change in our life, it starts with changing what we do with the 30 minute blocks.

Maybe today is the day we start looking at the rhythms in our life.  Which of the blocks do we need to change to take us out of reactive mode? Because to live our dreams, most of us have to create. It is up to us to find the time for it.


© Cathy Hutchison 2011

What if you only had 2 years?

I had a dream the other night that a friend of mine learned he only had two years to live.

In the dream, he scaled back all of his goals to what could be done on that timeline and arranged everything to accomplish them in the time he had left. His wife and his friends helped him.  It became a grand adventure that we were all part of.

All of the things that were limiting his dream had to be figured out.  He had to make it happen within the constraints of current cash flow and with the talents of the people around him. There was suddenly no more waiting for additional funds, skillsets or for the market to change.

What would you do if you knew you had an expiration date in two years?

Could you accomplish something?

Would you have fun trying?

 © Cathy Hutchison 2011

SEO for Beginners

There are whole firms dedicated to consulting on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so the topic is pretty broad, but there are some simple things you can do to improve your ranking in non-paid search.

If your goal is to be the first site listed whenever someone types in “company + your city” then chances are you should hire an SEO firm to go through your site and build strategies for on-page SEO (keywords and content) and off-page SEO (links and social media). However, there are some simple strategies for beginners that can improve your ranking in the search engines simply by understanding what influences your positioning.

The most important concept is that search engines read text in HTML. (Which means if you have a beautiful flash site, it may be invisible in search if there is no text to read. ) The more words you have relevant to the search term, the higher you come up in search. For example, if your company’s name is “This Amazing Company” then the more times you say the term “This Amazing Company” in your content the more relevant you become to the search term “This Amazing Company”.

With that in mind, search engines prioritize beyond simply how many times a search term is used on your site. They prioritize titles of pages with the home page being the most important. So, if your home page is simply titled “This Amazing Company – Home” you are missing the opportunity to reach people moving into your neighborhood who may be searching for “your service + your city.” A simple fix is to change the title of the home page to “This Amazing Company – these services in your city.” (My guess is that you can be more creative than that.) Search engines also care that you have unique titles for the different pages on your website.

Another opportunity is to add keywords in your footer. If your company’s address is in the footer of each page, then your city suddenly shows up on your website…a lot. You may choose to add a sentence on other things people may search for where you would like to show up in the rankings.

Page descriptions are another under-utilized item. You have the opportunity in the meta-tag to write the content that comes up in the preview of your page. In HTML, it looks something like this:

<head>
<title> This Amazing Company | a service provider in Your City</title>
<meta name="description" content="This Amazing Company is passionate about connecting people and doing wonderful things in our community. We can help you with this service, this service and this service.">
<meta name="keywords" content="amazing company, your city, community, wonderful things” >

When you first make changes, it isn’t unusual to get a bump in how high you show up in natural search, and while you may mistakenly attribute that to the brilliance of the changes you’ve made; more likely, it is because the page was “fresh.” It isn’t unusual to check back on that search term in a few months to find you’ve fallen in the rankings. Search engines are much more interested in recent content than older content, so the “freshness” of your pages actually matters. Structuring your website in a way where new content is added frequently makes a big difference.

Google has some fantastic tools which can read your site and provide feedback on things as detailed as the most used keywords on your site and duplicate titles of pages. Check out http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and begin to explore.

=============================
Many thanks to Mark MacDonald at PinPoint Creative Group who inspired me to do my homework on such things! If you do decide to begin improving your web presence his firm is a great place to start.
© Cathy Hutchison 2011

Human-Sized Corporations

I've been reading the book Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin.  The book is about sustainability, but in a holistic sense--one that starts with our own personal choices.  Not just about using compact flourescent light bulbs or recycling, but where we choose to live, how we work and what we own.

In the "living simply" chapter, Elgin expresses an idea I'd never considered before--mostly because I didn't think it was possible.

Simplicity is also manifest in more human-size places of employment.  Many people work within massive bureaucracies: huge corporations, vast government agencies, enormous educational institutions, sprawling medical complexes.  These workplaces have grown so large and so complex that they are virtually incomprehensible both to those who work within them and to those who are served by them.  Not surprisingly, the occupations that often emerge from these massive organizations tend to be routinized, specialized and stress-producing.  Simplicity in this setting implies a change in favor of more human-size workplaces, by redesigning organizations so they are of more compehensible size and manageable complexity.  By consciously creating workplaces that encourage meaningful involvement and personal responsibility, the rampant alienation, boredom and emptiness of work could be greatly reduced.

I work in a human-size place of employment.  There is personal responsibility because if you drop a ball, you know the person that it falls on. But I also deliberately sought that out. I've worked in a large corporate machine before and I always felt like I was playing a game where no one would tell me the rules. 

What I didn't think about was what these machines--which provide the lifestyle of a majority of the people we know--do to the soul.  Yet when your job feeds and houses you and there is no way to opt out. Moreover, we've become so specialized that few of us can pack up and work somewhere else.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I do believe a reingineering of corporate America is inevitable.  With the web providing tools that allow small companies to function like large ones, maybe the shift to smaller is possible.

© Cathy Hutchison 2011