Skip to main content

The Purple Cow, Disc Two

As I mentioned earlier, Purple Cow is the second of Godin’s books that I’ve ventured into. While Permission Marketing was solid and worth the effort, the Purple Cow is inspirational to the point of making me sit in my car in the parking lot without turning it off. It very much articulates a philosophy that I very much identify with, by expanding on some of the ideas from Permission Marketing. Godin is an astute observer of trends in society and in business and is very good at reading people and figuring out why they do what they do. As I mentioned in my first Purple Cow post, according to Godin (and this passes the sniff test with me), the reason people act so herdlike is fear—but ironically, when people don’t take risks, their chances of failure are much higher.

Here is a red-letter list that Godin asks us to pull over for and write down:

1. Don’t be boring
2. Safe is risky
3. Design rules now
4. Very good is bad

Godin says, I think very rightly, that people want to be safe. What they teach us in school is to do reasonably well, not stick out, not ask too many questions, etc., etc. The problem with this is that it doesn't make us different enough to succeed in the marketplace.

So I read Ben's post today about whether associations will be able to sort-of harness the energy happening in these online communities. I think that yes, if they start thinking along the lines of Godin's list. It's risky to let passionate staffers cultivate online communities and write blogs on behalf of the organization, but I think it's the way to move forward.

UPDATE: This line of thought reminds me of Creating Passionate User's awesome post on "Death by Risk-Aversion."

By Seth Godin
ISBN# 159184021X

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...
Read more

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more