In his post, Can You Change Everything? , Seth Godin considers the possibility that “You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think.” After skipping past ones like “become a vegan”, I excerpted my favorites from Seth’s 45 item list of possible rut-busters:
3. Publish your best work for free online
4. Close your worst-performing locations
8. Host a conference for your competitors
9. Connect your best customers and organize a tribe
10. Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
11. Start a blog
12. Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends
14. Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
15. Answer the customer service line for a day
16. Learn to be a killer presenter
18. Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
19. Call former employees and ask for advice
22. Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
24. Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
28. Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
31. Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no appeals
33. Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
35. Write five thank you notes every day
42. Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
Zayo-ite’s and Envysion’eers, which ones might be most interesting for your businesses?
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The one that resonates with me the most is 15: Answer the customer service line for a day. I’ve done similar things before, although usually when tech support was stumped. I always found that talking to customers gave me an immediate and often surprising insight into my work and gave me ideas on how to make things easier for customers. I also serves as a good reminder that customers’ priorities are often very different from most software developers’ priorities.
And, of course, who can say no to bathrobes?
I like # 35. Write five thank you notes every day. Something I have talked about often and only do once in a while. Need to incorporate in to my routine. Thanks for pointing these out. I will keep you posted on progress.