I'm a big fan of the Made to Stick guys, brothers Dan and Chip Heath. But their article in the September issue of Fast Company was off the mark a bit. Here's what they said:

"Products make the leap from pedestrian to premium when their creators think of them as ideas. Some products are heavy on ideas: perfume, spa treatments, life coaching, alcohol. Others are practically idea-free: mailboxes, fax machines, oil changes. Notice anything about the two sets of goods? You make mega-margins on the first and mini-margins on the second. Margins feed on ideas."

Clearly, the first set of products enjoys better margins and it's instructive to make note of that. But are the higher margins because of the "ideas" associated with the products? Or are higher margins justified because the products speak to higher level yearnings, i.e., beauty, purpose, joy, pleasure, meaning?

And more importantly, is it really impossible for products in the second group to speak to these higher level yearnings? I don't think so. Think about this:

What if when I pulled in to get my oil changed I was invited to select a gourmet soft drink (or espresso) and fresh-baked pastry (or chocolate) before I was shown to a graciously appointed private waiting room. In addition to a comfortable chair, phone and internet connection and stereo system with satellite radio, perhaps the room overlooks a water garden or displays beautiful artwork (which might be for sale). Perhaps getting my oil changed is a brief, but welcome respite instead of another tedious, mind-numbing task from my never-ending to-do list.

I think I'd be willing to pay a couple of bucks more. And I'd probably get my oil changed on time.

Truth be told – I don't really know. But let's have a go at it. Yesterday I posted about A Whole New Mind. To set the stage for THIS discussion, here's another quote from the book:

"...businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beautiful and emotionally compelling."

How do we do that? Well, let's think about a couple of examples. First, Ethos Water from Starbucks. Functionally, Ethos Water is portable H2O, much the same as the other competitors in the $10,000,000,000 business. But here's how they make Ethos emotionally compelling:

Every bottle makes a difference Ethos™ Water is the natural spring water that helps children around the world get clean water.

You're not overpaying for something that comes free from the tap, you're helping kids get clean water. Emotionally compelling.

And have you seen Method products? Gorgeous, elegant ... dish soap? Yep. I've needed to buy dish soap before but I've never particularly wanted to buy dish soap – but with Method I WANT to buy some dish soap, I'm excited about dish soap because it is physically beautiful.

You might be thinking – yeah, that's fine for them. And that's nagging at me a little too. But I'm going to think about this some more. I have a sneaking suspicion that this idea about beauty and meaning might be more universal than it might first appear.

Get your arms around this:

“The United States spends more money on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the other goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations.” (Polly LeBarre, Fast Company, March 2003)

It’s about Abundance – although to my mind Abundance might be too weak of a word. But it’s the word Dan Pink uses in his remarkable book, A Whole New Mind. This is a spectacularly insightful, well-researched, delightfully-written book. (If you’re only going to read a couple of books in the near future, please make sure this is one of them – if you’re going to read a lot of books, make sure this one is at the top of the list – please.)

Here’s part of what Dan says:

“For most of history, our lives were defined by scarcity. Today, the defining feature of social economic, and cultural life in much of the world is abundance.”

Here’s why that matters, again quoting from Dan:

“For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful … In an age of abundance, appealing only to the rational, logical and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them.”

Uh-oh. That changes things. Big time. Not only does the widget have to do the widget’s job – it has to confer aesthetic or emotional benefits as well. How do we do that? More later.

Marc Gobe's book Citizen Brand: 10 commandments for transforming brands in a consumer democracy has much to recommend it. I read it some time ago and was leafing through it again this morning when I came across this:

If a brand can present a dream in a very real, unique, and personal way then people will be able to connect with that dream. It is vital to ask (every day) what is my brand's dream?

I love that idea. I love it because it reaches way past the functional attributes of a product or service. It speaks to the customer's heart, which is the most direct route to a sale.

I'm behind on my blog reading and just came across the post by John Jantsch about the 4-Hour Workweek book. It's a good, even-handed post about a really suspect book.

I read the 4-Hour Workweek a few weeks ago and my overwhelming impression (opinion) was that the author was a silly, selfish young man. While there were a couple of ideas that made a lot of sense, Timothy Ferriss seems to have no clue that business is NOT just a way to make money – that business is also a way to contribute and that there is a moral imperative for business to act, at least in some small fashion, as a force for good in the universe.

There are few (probably zero) businesses that are sustainable without some contribution to the greater good. Now, perhaps I misinterpreted what Timothy Ferris had to say. But for me, the entire book reeked of the get-rich-quick scams of the past.

John Moore hosts the blog Brand Autopsy. It's one of my favorite blogs with consistently insightful ideas and articles. John has just published a new feature called Espresso Shots of Business Wisdom, leaning on his experience as a Starbuck's marketer. It's a cool feature - you should take a look.

Seth Godin raised an interesting question yesterday in his post, Is Good Good Enough. That post reminded me of some thoughts I had about the subject a few months ago.

A little over 30 years ago, a friend of mine was enjoying the fruits of a thriving typesetting business. But out in Cupertino, under a veil of secrecy, Steve Jobs and his band of renegades were hatching the MacIntosh computer. It was a simple, amazingly inexpensive machine that rendered the old typesetting process more or less obsolete.

The drive to new and different is as powerful as it is inexorable. It’s also profitable. Back when my friend was riding high in the typesetting business, a lot of what we take for granted today didn’t exist: Mutual funds, overnight package delivery, big-box retailing, home video, coffee bars and cell phones to name just a few.

Leaders are often tempted to ask, what’s next? But the better question is, will it really matter? And the best question of all is, will it change the game?

Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change anything by fighting it. You change things by making them obsolete through superior technology.”

Last night I got together with my friend, Rick. Rick started a business in his garage a few years ago, and that garage venture has grown into a seriously Kick-Butt company (i.e., is a great place to work, serves customers and community in an extraordinary manner, makes a bunch of money and grows steadily). Rick shared a new idea he had for his business. The idea was double cool and it reminded me of one of the absolutes of a Kick-Butt company.

Different in a way that matters – that matters a lot. If you intend to blow the doors off, you better have a product or service that people want more – way more – than anything they can get anywhere else. I'm not talking about something incrementally better, not 10% or 20% better, not even twice as good. Maybe five times better will work, but it's probably more like 10 times better.

That's a pretty tall order. You might be thinking it's impossible in your business. And it probably is. Right up until the time one of your competitors (or mine) figures it out. Then it's not impossible – it's disaster.

It's hard to imagine any better use of our time, talent and resources than to address the question: What would it take to make our product or service 10 times more attractive than any other option available to our customers and prospects?

A few years ago, the subject of Teams was all the rage in the business press. I read a few of the books and found them lacking (at least) and often just plain silly. So when my wife suggested I read Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I was less than enthusiastic.

But this book is wonderful – although a little sneaky. It's easy to read and the story is interesting in ways that most business fables are not. But the principles deliver a big-stick wallop – at least they did for me. Here's part of what Lencioni says:

"An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance ... Every good organization specifies what it plans to achieve in a given period, and these goals, more than the financial metrics that they drive, make up the majority of near-term, controllable results."

That might seem like – well, duh? But seriously, can every one of your direct reports tell you immediately and specifically what they'll deliver in the next week and the next month? In most organizations (including ours) the truthful answer would be NO. This book reminds me to change that.

The cover story of the August issue of Inc. magazine is: Fun! It's the New Core Value. It's an interesting story and it's well ... fun.

In the last couple of years I've done some thinking about fun in the workplace. My conclusion is that fun can be an important element in a productive culture. But for fun to exist in the workplace, there must be a solid foundation. And that foundation must contain (at least) these three elements:

Freedom from fear – Fear most often comes from bad management. When managers are erratic or capricious, people don't know what's expected – and they get scared. When managers are moody or volatile or abusive, fear permeates the culture and there is absolutely no way for fun to flourish.

Respect for the contribution of others – This is simple. If you're working your tail off, but you see your co-workers slacking – how are you going to feel about those co-workers? It's tough to have fun with people for whom you feel disdain. For fun to be a positive force, everyone in the organization has to have an oar in the water.

No stifling formality – Formality is like a too tight pair of pants. They're both uncomfortable and restrictive. Formality imposes a caution (maybe even a paranoia) that is antithetical to fun.

Fun is good – but, it's probably not easy.

A few days ago, I read a post by Todd of 800-CEO-READ. In that post, he was commenting on the book Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter. Here's part of what the post said:

"I have to tell you I don't understand the popularity of fables like this. They are meant to appeal to a large audience, and that is the trouble for me."

This seemed way wrong-headed to me, but I hadn't read the book. So, I read the book. And while the fable is not my personal favorite form, the book was terrific. And it was terrific for exactly the reason Todd didn't like it – it was accessible. How can a book meant to teach important concepts to a large group of people be criticized for appealing to a large audience?

There was something else I loved about the book. I'm a guy who embraces change, who finds the status quo boring. Change comes naturally to me. As a result, I don't think much about the process for helping people through change. Kotter's 8 Step Process of Successful Change is a thoughtful roadmap – one that I'll put to immediate use.

I finished reading Ram Charan's new book KNOW HOW last weekend. As you'd expect from Charan, it's a big company book – and to my mind, not terribly insightful overall. There were, however, some choice tidbits – one of which follows:

"Positioning is the central idea of your business and the foundation for whether or not you are making money. The true test of your positioning is the real world. If people like what you have to offer and you can sell it at a profit, you'll make money. If they're confused about what your business provides, or they don't like, you won't. In other words, if the dogs don't like the dog food, you lose."

The most important question in business might well be: Why is what we're offering better for our customers than the other options available to them?