“Nothing Without You” is a powerful worship song by Dr. Tumi that resonates deeply with believers who recognize their complete dependency on God. The song’s lyrics express a heartfelt acknowledgment that apart from God, we are nothing and can do nothing. With its soul-stirring melody and honest lyrics, “Nothing Without You” has touched the hearts of many Christians around the world.
Here we Go..
Getting someone to switch is really difficult.
Getting someone to switch because you offer more of what they were looking for when they choose the one they have now is essentially impossible. For starters, they’re probably not looking for more. And beyond that, they’d need to admit that they were wrong for not choosing you in the first place.
So, you don’t get someone to switch because you’re cheaper than Walmart. You don’t get someone to switch because you serve bigger portions than the big-portion steakhouse down the street. You don’t get someone to switch because your hospital is more famous than the Mayo Clinic.
The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed.
Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn’t think was so important.
One of the biggest risks you’ll face as an employer is hiring the right people. When you hire well, it can catapult your business ahead of the competition. When you hire poorly, it can cause your business to suffer major setbacks. The fact of the matter is that the people you hire can make or break your business.
When it comes to the hiring process, it’s your job to choose the right person for the job. It sounds so simple, yet it’s incredibly challenging. There are so many factors that go into making a hiring decision that it’s easy to make common hiring mistakes that cause you major headaches.
No matter how perfect your hiring process is, there’s always room for improvement. Let’s take a look at a handful of common hiring mistakes that you’ll want to avoid:
Being Unrealistic
Not Understanding The Job You’re Hiring For
Lack Of Interview Preparation
Poor Communication Skills
Hiring Out Of Desperation
Terrible Employer Brand
Not Targeting The Right Audience
Hiring For Experience, Not Personality
Lack Of Adequate Screening
Rushing To Make A Decision
Waiting Too Long To HireAre you guilty of any of these common hiring mistakes? It’s highly likely that you are. To minimize your hiring risks, it’s important to dedicate a team of HR professionals to focusing on the task of hiring. These pros know how to look out for red flags during the hiring process, how to screen potential candidates, and how to make educated hiring decisions. These skills are essential if you want to hire wisely.
Do yourself a favor and minimize your risk of making any of the above hiring mistakes. Your business will thank you.
Which do you want?
Freedom is the ability to set your schedule, to decide on the work you do, to make decisions.
Responsibility is being held accountable for your actions. It might involve figuring out how to get paid for your work, owning your mistakes or having others count on you.
Freedom without responsibility is certainly tempting, but there are few people who will give you that gig and take care of you and take responsibility for your work as well.
Responsibility without freedom is stressful. There are plenty of jobs in this line of work, just as there are countless jobs where you have neither freedom nor responsibility. These are good jobs to walk away from.
When in doubt, when you’re stuck, when you’re seeking more freedom, the surest long-term route is to take more responsibility.
Freedom and responsibility aren’t given, they’re taken.
People are fickle, but we’re generally rational. When someone makes a choice (hiring, firing, choosing a vendor, buying a soda) they’re using some sort of internal logic and reasoning to support that choice.
As a marketer, you win when they choose you.
So, why choose you?
The answer to that question is your competitive advantage. What makes it likely that more than a few rational people will consider their options and choose you or your company or your organization?
Truth: It’s rarely a computerized cost/benefit analysis. Instead, it’s a human choice.
When the factors that matter to me are processed through my worldview and compared against the options I’m aware of, I will choose you when your advantages are greater than the competition, provided I believe that you’re worth the cost of switching.
Key points:
Matter to me: Not matter to you or to the next guy, but matter to me. That’s all I care about. (Example: it might mean more to me that my friends use your product than it does that you’re cheaper).
Worldview: Based on the way I see the world, the assumptions I make, the truth that I believe in. (Example: If I don’t trust young people as a matter of course, I’m not likely to choose you if you’re young, all other things being close).
Options I’m aware of: If I don’t know about you, you don’t exist.
Switching cost: The incumbent gets a huge advantage, especially in high cost/high risk/network effect instances.
Some of the ways you might build or maintain a competitive advantage:
Access to hard-to-replicate Talent
Hard-earned skills
Higher productivity due to insight or organization allowing you to be cheaper
Low cost of living for you and your staff allowing you to be cheaper
Protected or secret technology or trade secrets
Existing relationships (switching costs working in your favor)
Virally organized product and organization
Large network of users already and a network effect to support you
Focus on speed
Monopoly power and the willingness to use it
Unique story that resonates with the worldview of your target audience
Shelf space due to incumbency
Large media budget
Insight into worldview of prospects–making what they care about
Emotional intelligence of your salesforce or customer service people
Access to capital and willingness to lose money to build share
Connection to communityNot on this list, at least not prominently, are “we are #1!”, “we are better!” and “we try harder.” Cheerleading skills are not a competitive advantage in most settings. And, with few exceptions, neither is “we are new.” Also, “we are better and I can prove it,” is rarely a successful argument.
Here’s what your board wants to know:
What’s your competitive advantage?
Is it really, or are you dreaming it up?
How long will it last?
Can your competition copy it?
Does it resonate with the part of the market that is looking to buy?
Is the advantage big enough to overcome the switching cost?
Consequences
Frederick Lewis Donaldson created a list of seven social sins that was soon popularized by Gandhi. One hundred years later, it’s more relevant and more urgent than ever.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
When we create these imbalances, we pay for them.
They’re not the same thing.
Hope can fuel us. Hope can be refilled. Hope opens the door to possibility.
Expectations, on the other hand, are a trap. They make us brittle and lead to disappointment.
When we raise our hopes and lower our expectations, we establish a resilient way forward.
If every building in the shopping district in a big city was owned by one landlord, rents would go up. So would the prices of everything sold. The landlord would keep a significant percentage of each store’s profits and innovation would suffer as well.
Google’s monopoly is real.
They pay Apple more than a million dollars an hour to be the default search engine on phones. It’s more profitable for Apple to threaten to build a search engine than it is for them to actually run one. Google overpays for the default status because their hegemony gives advertisers fewer options. And by controlling the flow of attention across the web, they can dictate how websites work and what our experience is online.
Ever since Adam Smith began writing about capitalism, it’s been understood that monopolies are a defect in the structure of free markets. Locking in an advantage gives the monopolist the power to ignore its customers and we all suffer as a result.
A company grows by getting ever better at serving its customers, its vendors and its employees.
A company becomes a monopoly by becoming ever better at becoming a monopoly.
Few companies have done a better job of marketing the benefits of their monopoly than Google. They rarely charge their users, but offer free software and engaging stories instead. But they have relentlessly grabbed more and more of our attention, and used it to create a sinecure that costs all of us. It’s not just ecosia, duckduckgo and kagi that are paying for this monopoly. When a company can shift the rules and focus on more instead of better, we all pay.
Almost every element of good bread happens long before it goes into the oven.
Too often, we spend our time and effort on the exciting last step. And too often, we forget to spend our time and attention on the preparation that’s a lot less urgent or glamorous, but far more important.
Poor preparation is a lousy excuse for a last-minute selfish frenzy. That frenzy distracts us from doing it right the next time.
If you want to understand where mastery and success come from, take a look at the inputs and the journey, not simply the outputs.
…then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage.
The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.
Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.