4. Own your subject. You don’t need to be an expert at first. You should work hard to become one, but when you’re starting out, you should find the book other books and websites in your area reference. Read that book. As time goes on, pick up the books that book referenced.

Most non-fiction books tend to regurgitate what’s already out[,] ditto for websites, but by going to the core book and then going from there you will be ahead of the game.

A few things to consider:

1) The threshold to being able to help someone else with your expertise is often very low, because the other person is starting from scratch. In a sense, everybody can be an expert in the eyes of someone else at a given point in time.

2) In fact, due to the “Curse of Knowledge” (read Heath & Heath’s “Made To Stick”), you are likely severely overestimating the amount of detail someone you are in a position to help really needs. In other words, once you know a lot about something, it is difficult to put yourself back into the position of someone who doesn’t yet have that knowledge.

Most of the time you will just overwhelm them with information that they really didn’t need or could process at that moment. (Think just-in-time knowledge rather than just-in-case.)

3) Instead of merely piling additional detail, get to a level of depth that allows you to truly innovate. Offer a solution that is not merely 10% better, but 10 TIMES better.

(This is Guy Kawasaki’s formula for tech start-up success, but it really can be applied to just about all other areas of business as well.)

Offer something that reduces all of the detail, depth, and complexity for your customer or client by giving them something new. To get there, follow the advice from the quote above, and then reconnect the dots in a whole new way.

While the competition is fun to follow, especially if your favorite team or alma mater is still in the running, I’d like to draw your attention to some factors in play, hidden in plain sight if you will, that add to the excitement:

While there are countless multi-round tournaments in any number of sports, only the NCAA has evolved a truly outstanding "portfolio" of brand names surrounding the tournamant and its stages, each of which make use of the principles of good brand names (first discussed here), foremost of the principle of "rhythm, rhyme, and speakability" including by way of alliteration:

First there is the already mentioned "March Madness" to describe the entire procedure. Then there are the named tournament rounds, the "Sweet Sixteen" (what is sometimes called a 1/8 final), the "Elite Eight" quarter-final, and the lastly the "Final Four" semi-final.

Note that in large part due to the alliterations, the NCAA terms roll of the tongue much more so than the traditional, generic terms.

Now you may be saying, "why does this matter so much, I don’t even care about basketball…"

It matters because enjoyment derived from saying a brand name is a strong predictor of the both the viral success as well as the depth of imprint in the consumer’s mental real estate of that name. Making it enjoyable to repeat, to say or think more often, will accelerate the spread of a meme through a population, and embed it more thoroughly in the individual.

Rhythm and rhyme, including alliteration (which you could see as a form of front-loaded rhyme), are pleasant and also more memorable to our unconscious minds (that is the reason why you still remember most advertising jingles to this day).

It doesn’t hurt that each NCAA "brand name" is reasonably short, while also still being sufficiently descriptive/evocative of the things they are referring to.

In fact, they even take out some of the complexity of having to think of the somewhat confusing traditional "quarter-final", asf. terminology (number of teams left devided by 2), in favor of simply counting the number of teams still in the tournament. Simplicity is typically good. Simplicity wins.

Yet none of the names are too generic to hurt differentiation in your mental real estate. And they all are easily understood, requiring no spelling out (unlike this massive brand name failure). But the alliterations providing a certain rhythm and rhyme are ultimately the most important drivers in this case.

The end result is, more people talk about March Madness and its rounds, more often.

It is very likely that you were already familiar with these NCAA Tournament "brand names" EVEN IF you’re not particularly following basketball. Now that’s strong branding. You would do well to apply these powerful principles to your own brand naming.

If you can’t get all of them lined up for a given name, apply as many as you can. One thing we do know is, "March Madness" is a winner…

I consider this a must-read to get yourself back up-to-date on everything that has transpired over the past 3+ months behind the scenes, while we were all busy watching something else, the global financial melt-down, say.

It is almost precisely 1 year and 1 month to the day that Microsoft first launched its unsolicited buy-out bid, and you know the endless back-and-forth that ensued. What stands out is that as of today, while Yahoo’s stock has fallen from its pre-offer price of about $19 on 2/1/2008 to about $12 (and Jerry Yang was so maligned for not taking Ballmer’s offer that he ultimately resigned a few months ago), Microsoft’s stock has gone from $32 to now around $17 during that time!

If you do the math, that’s worse than Yahoo’s stock has done. So who still wants to argue that Ballmer would have really been much better at steering Yahoo (or really worse: the combined Micro-hoo “Franken-carrier”)? Which brings me back to the headline, and this quote from Blodget’s post that sums it all up very neatly:

Another six months of Microsoft Internet futility.  Last summer, Microsoft had been struggling to succeed online for 13 years, and it had only managed to run a distant third.  Now it has been struggling for 13 and a half years.  The company’s Internet branding, strategy, and organization is in its usual chaotic disarray.  Perhaps the new search head, stolen from Yahoo, can cut through the bureaucracy and fix everything.  After 13.5 years of a lot of talent and money being thrown at this problem, however, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

So the saga continues. The patient (Micro-hoo) indeed isn’t completely dead yet… but Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz now appears to have the upper hand in any negotiations from here on…

Note: In case you don’t recall how badly Microsoft’s branding in particular has been going, refresh your memory here. Branding is where it all begins, after all, how can you know what you should be doing if you don’t know who you are?! And hoping that an engineer like Lu, however talented, is going to fix branding and related woes is simply delusional.

You might also enjoy this post on complexity, and why even the 800 Pound Gorilla such as Microsoft cannot avoid it’s pernicious effects.

Love him or hate him, no one could accuse him of not getting his hands dirty with actually using Web 2.0, including in the service of the creation of countless interview videos with both start-up and established players in the Tech Industry which he posts over on FastCompany.tv. His above mentioned participation actually does appear to border on the super-human, and he seems to at times be simultaneously asking, AND himself be a guinea-pig for, the question of where all of this technology usage might lead us next.

An astute commenter over on the aforementioned TechCrunch "Intervention Post" stopped to

wonder if 10 000 years from now, just one month’s worth of all Twitter content, if preserved, could provide an interesting historical clue to future generations of how life on earth was….like a Pompeii or Rosetta Stone unlocked secrets of past civilizations and languages. And who could blame them upon discovering such a treasure for thinking Robert Scoble the God of the Twitterverse?
 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/im-sorry-robert-but-its-time-for-a-friendfeed-intervention/#comment-2575369

Given all of this frantic Web 2.0 activity and the constant exponential expansion of information and information processing in all of its forms, I found it instructive that several of Robert’s recent posts appeared to confirm a theme that I usually try to drive home with many of my coaching clients: Simplicity wins. Or at least tends to confer an unfair advantage to those companies and entrepreneurs practicing it.

First, his post on his personal discovery of the joys of the dead-simple and low cost "Flip" video camera ("The best gadget I stole in 2008") – the one with the fold-out USB plug arm obviating the need for an extra cable, and one of the gadget sales hits of 2008 – reminds us that users want things to just work, without having to first navigate a dizzying array of menus, settings and options. "Do one thing and do it well" (enough), without requiring training just to do the average use case of that one thing, is the operative mantra.

The Flip starts and stops video recording with one large/obvious button, and records in formats that are immediately uploadable to YouTube et al. without further video processing. I opted for similar simplicity this past Christmas when I selected a Casio Exilim digital camera for its one-button video function and YouTube friendly formats over other possibly more feature-laden, but more complex offerings. Simplicity wins.

Next, Robert wrote on what he sees as the promise of rapid growth in 2009 for Tumblr.com ("Tumblr’s lead dev: Scoble doesn’t know what he’s talking about"), a Web 2.0 "micro-blogging" service (really I consider it "medium blogging") that thrives on a simple posting mechanism (via browser bookmarklet that simply works, and fast) for clipping and reblogging Web content, as well as reblogging the "Tumble blog posts" of other Tumblr users one follows – all with automatic attribution. Tumblr may well be the currently fastest way for a complete novice to get a simple blog up and running, and then actually post to it frequently because it can be fast, easy, and fun.

Notable competitor Posterous.com pursues a similar strategy by making simple email-based submission and intelligent/automatic media handling its main mechanism. I hope both services continue to push/copy each other’s innovations, add a few more useful features, and above all, keep things simple. Because if they do, they are very likely to win (Tumblr’s bookmarklet post submission already prompted the addition of a PressThis! feature in Wordpress blogging software for example).

Last, Robert did a half-in-jest-fully-in-earnest piece on the comparison of the Twitter and FriendFeed services mentioned above ("10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not"). Despite having been one of Twitter’s heavy users with tens of thousands of followers, he had started to really kick things into high gear on FriendFeed since about Q2 of 2008, and may have almost single-handedly driven early adoption of this startup aggregator service conceived by a handful of ex-Googlers.

But while FriendFeed has just won the Crunchies for Best 2008 Startup, Robert makes the case that it has features sufficiently complex that they may prove a turn-off for non-techy users, and could prevent wide-spread mainstream adoption of the kind that Twitter is now experiencing (besides nightly mention and some crowd-sourcing uses by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the likes of Shaq, Lance Armstrong, Hodgman of the Daily Show and Mc vs. PC ads fame, and ex-Saturday Night Liver Jimmy Fallon have recently adopted Twitter to communicate with their fans).

Whether or not sophisticated users like Robert feel that FriendFeed’s advanced features are useful or not is besides the point: What counts is that Twitter’s single-minded focus on 140 character "micro-blog" updates makes it immediately accessible and understandable, whether or not a prospective user ultimately decides that they find the service useful or not (I had previously described how Twitter’s branding also aides in people rapidly "getting it"). This has also made Twitter somewhat of the "Swiss Army Knife of the Internet", prompting hundreds of third-party services, extensions, and uses based on its simple infrastructure in often ingenious ways.

So, three different examples of simplicity wins, all just from one blogger’s posts. I hope they have you convinced that simplicity indeed provides a competitive edge, and that with each additional layer of complexity (each additional step in the use of your product or service), you tend to lose say 50% of your residual audience, prospects, or users. You can do the math as well as I can: You want to keep the number of those additional steps to a miminum. Less really can be more after all.

So my prescription for you, your business, or your new product launches in 2009 obviously is: Keep it simple!

The XBox 360 and other devices division (think Zune, etc.) is hemorrhaging money and just had to take another $1 Billion charge due to extensive hardware problems with the XBox. You’ll love this: "… the Xbox 360 return problem was getting so severe that the company was running out of ‘coffins,’ or special return-shipping boxes Microsoft provides to gamers with dead consoles."

That’s on top of the fact that no one cares about their Zune MP3 player and iPod "competitor", and that the Nintendo Wii and its disruptive innovation approach is running circles around the XBox and Sony Playstation.

Why am I bothering to highlight this for you? Two reasons: 1) There is a law of complexity that in essence states that complexity in an organization is directly related to its size. 2) Even mighty Microsoft cannot escape the logic of said law, regardless of how much money they throw at a problem.

The ultimate irony of everything that transpired with Microsoft in the Anti-trust domain since circa 1998 is this: Microsoft could have likely benefited a great deal from the break-up into smaller, more tightly focused companies that it fought like a banshee to avoid (and that really only got taken off the table once GWB took the White House). This is because Microsoft has grown well past the 800-pound-gorilla stage, and currently has all of the nimbleness of an aircraft carrier.

You see, entrepreneurship is concerned with what we call "arbitrage", or the assignment – or more often reassignment – of resources to their most efficient, most profitable, highest and best uses. And the law of complexity demands that in order to continually be able to do so, we need to focus on keeping things as simple as possible.

So the only question is, would Microsoft be worth more today if you added together say three or four different, more dynamic offspring companies than in its present configuration? Given the news and products that have come out of Redmond over the last 7 years, the answer is likely yes.

Richard Koch in his seminal work "The 80/20 Principle" has an entire chapter (Chapter 5: "Simple is Beautiful") devoted to complexity and how it relates to 80/20 thinking, which goes beyond what I will repeat here (highly recommended read though).

But to give you only the most key points: 1) Internal complexity is usually hidden but very real nonetheless. 2) It does not negate the benefits of scale (the idea that with scale, the additional cost to e.g. produce one more unit moves closer and closer to zero), but rather it "steals" from scale. 3) Studies have shown that "only one characteristic differentiated the winners from the less successful firms: simplicity." 4) Identify and focus on the most simple 20% of your product design, service delivery, marketing message, sales channel, even customers/clients.

As with the Microsoft case, it’s usually fun to see laws in action…

• The 50 Who Matter Now

I linked to the page with the, unsurprisingly, #1 ranked Google team of Page, Brin, and Schmidt. You can navigate either backwards (from the top down) or forwards "count-down-style" from there (50th place is next). I found counting down and keeping the guessing game going more fun.

Notably absent (or only indirectly present): Microsoft. I’ve said for a long time that MS has no innovation mojo left (some would argue they never had any to begin with), despite having the largest R&D department and budget of anyone.

They grew into such a giant (organizational size and inefficiency due to complexity correlate directly), all they can do anymore is buy innovation… which they did, by buying aQuantive and their Riax ad-tracking system for rich-media sites to the tune of $6 Billion.

Riax is prorietary sofware (proprietary sofware at Microsoft? No way…), developed by CEO Brian McAndrews, and is – supposedly – "something Google can’t yet match." Well see how long MS takes to screw it up or make it as much of a yawner as everything else they touch: MSN, Zune, Vista, what’s next?

Why would you care? If you are in business you better know not only that Web2.0 and related phenomena and innovations are here to stay, but how they will affect your business, creating either disruption or upside potential for you.

It’s good to be in the know…

Extra benefit… you get to SEE what those people look like that invented the stuff you use everyday… without having to do dozens of Google or other searches… connections, bloodlines and blood feuds, juicy tidbits and major business nuggets… all there for you presented on a silver platter…

Key mentions for Bloggers:

• Barry Diller is putting together niche sites such as a joint venture with Blog Queen Adriana Huffington (Huffington Post) for a Daily-Show style humor site (#16).
• Philip Rosedale and his Second Life are the likely vanguard of all future shopping/consumption experiences (#25). And IMO that will include consumption of information such as Blogs
• Technology-blogger Michael Arrington, Founder of TechCrunch, is influencing the flow of the VC money river (#22). How’s that for the power of the written word and information?