Redesigning The DNA Of Your Life And Your Organization

The Three Laws of Performance reconstructs how we look at problems, challenges and solutions that impacts, as we should be looking at it, the intersection of our personal and professional lives. Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, performance experts, go right to the heart of the matter: how to achieve extraordinary, lasting results.

This happens by employing the three laws to your personal and professional environments:

Law 1:  How People Perform Correlates To How Situations Occur To Them –The First Law rejects the concept that people do what they do because of a common understanding of the facts, and instead takes the view that people do what they do because their actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.  When people understand that situations occur differently to each of us, then other people’s responses and actions suddenly make sense.

Law 2:  How A Situation Occurs Arises In Language – How situations occur is inseparable from language.  Untying the knots of language begins with seeing that no matter what is said, other communication is carried along with it.  The unsaid – but communicated – includes assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentment, regrets, interpretations, and more.

Law 3:  Future-Based Language Transforms How Situations Occur To People – This Law rests on an important distinction:  there are two different ways to use language.  The first use is descriptive – using language to depict or represent things as they are or have been.  The second is future-based.  It has the power to craft vision, and to illuminate the blinders that prevent people from seeing possibilities.  

Ok. . .now I'll be the first to admit that I'm a huuuge fan of sexy. Sexy clothes, sexy cars, sexy ideas. If it's sexy, there's a good chance that my radar will pick it up, I'll check it out and give it some love. Good or bad, for better or for worse, sexy gets our attention, time and time again. The only problem though, is that often (and not neccessarily always), sexy is temporary, fleeting and surface. On many occasions sexy is the draw, with no main feature.

For the last eight years, social media, on a sexy scale from 1 to 10, has been a 12. Books have been written, gurus have staked their claim, and magazines have declared how it will change the way we live.

Now digital media is affecting how communication is beginning to be shaped here, early in the 21st century, but let's not get carried away.

Technology is great but just because you're sexy today, doesn't mean you'll be sexy tomorrow. Being a media darling means nothing. What needs to be understood is: sustainability. Today's "products" of technology cannot exist in a vacuum.  There needs to be an understanding of how they relate to business, and culture and how they impact, feed off, and converge with one another.  The web 2.0 echo chamber/hype machine is so loud about you needing to get on the train (before you get left) that being savvy, knowing what actually drives business, and understanding what real value is, gets lost somewhere. What can happen is that after it's all said and done, what you're left with is, a bunch of sexy tech fluff.  

A few examples:

Friendster - not successful (financially) until it was purchased by a South East Asian company, seven years after it was founded and used in conjunction with an e-commerce platform. The social part didn't generate revenue. The e-commerce platform probably will.

Myspace - Last year, in June, the Rupert Murdoch owned outfit slashed 30% percent of its workforce.  Additionally, traffic has been constantly declining and revenue (as of November 9, 2009) was down by 26 percent .

YouTube - Purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion dollars, has yet to get much bang for all those bucks. As stated by Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research, "YouTube has ended up being a management, operational and legal overhead and a drag.”

Twitter - Now last year in June I wrote about how Twitter was definitely being hyped above and beyond what it really was. I could have been wrong (it happens on occasion), but just a couple of months ago RJ metrics did their own twitter data analyis. A few conclusions:

• A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.
• About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.
• Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.

Now online social networks aren't going anywhere. They will continue to impact us and affect the market landscape, but it's time that the wheat get separated from the chaff. Spending time and resources on sexy is cool, no problem. Just keep in mind, if you've got an Aston Martin DB9, but with no gas. . .well that's an easy equation:

Sexy + Empty = Going Nowhere

What happens when you converge motion graphics, stop motion animation and live action production into a one compelling piece...the badness. . .

Electrocinema