How to Change the World

The Art of Visual Thinking

In the venture capital business, many people think that a short pitch is thirty slides and a short business plan is fifty pages. My how they are mistaken.

The more slides and pages that you need to explain your business, the less likely you will succeed. Truly, the best pitches and plans require nothing more than one page or a picture to explain them. Do you recognize this picture? It's how Southwest Airlines was pitched.

To provide more insight into the process of visual thinking, I tapped Dan Roam. He is the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures . In a previous interview with him he explained why and how to use visual thinking in your business. Click here to read it. To learn even more about visual thinking, be sure to read his book.

Incidentally, my momma didn't raise a fool, so as soon as I figured out what he does, I asked him to apply his skills to a real-world task of mine: explaining Alltop to people. These are the pictures he came up with. I like them! (Larger version here.)

"How Women Work"

Check out this great article called "How Women Work." It's like a combination of Women for Dummies, Everything You Wanted to Know About Women But Was Afraid to ask, and Women: The Missing Manual.

My favorite factoid: men have 6.5 times more gray matter than women. Women have 10 times more white matter. Gray matter is for processing centers. White matter is for creating connections between processes so that people can see and process patterns.

Everyone who wants to stay married or market stuff to women should read this.

Imagine a Bigger Market and You'll See a Bigger Market

Scientists in two studies at the University of Virginia discovered that softball players and golfers who had good days perceived balls and golf holes as larger than the players who had bad days. The question is, Did this difference in perception cause the player to have better days or did the day's performance cause the players to perceive the ball and holes as bigger?

Enter a third study at Vandebilt University. Researchers asked subjects to imagine vertical or horizontal stripes. Then the researchers showed vertical strips to one eye and horizontal strips to the other eye of the subjects. They found that the subjects saw the kind of stripes that they were told to imagine--indicating that imagination affects perception. Read about all three studies here.

Maybe if entrepreneurs imagine that their market sector is larger than what it is, they'll do better. This is an unscientific leap of reasoning, but entrepreneurship requires unscientific leaps of reasoning. If nothing else, I'm going to imagine that a hockey goal is larger than four by six feet the next time I play.

The Magic of Marketing

A research team from Durham University and the University of British Columbia is investigating magic tricks to further understand how people's minds work. The key magician's techniques that the team investigated were misdirection and illusion.

For example, in the misdirection trick, a researcher dropped a lighter and cigarette while misdirecting the subjects to the opposite hand. Most of the observers did not notice the researcher dropping the two objects even though it happened in plain sight.

In the illusion trick, a researcher tossed a ball into the air. In one case, his gaze followed the ball's upward flight. In the other, his gaze remained on his hand. 68 percent of the observers claim to have seen the researcher toss the ball into the air when his gaze followed the ball--that is, social cues created this expectation. Only 32 percent of the observers claimed to have seen it fly upward when his gaze didn't because there were no social cues.

You can see photographs and videos of these experiements here. For good or for bad, misdirection and illusion are probably principles of marketing too. Sometimes you can't even see the gorilla market in your midst because of how your mind works.

Kronomy Again: Apple Timeline

Take a look at what Jeffrey Gordon did with Kronomy after he read my posting about the company.

Apple Computer’s life path
make your own   show details

Make Your Life Flash Before Your Eyes

Guy Kawasaki’s life path
make your own   show details

God help me, that's my high-school graduation picture that you see in the second frame. Showing you this picture, however, isn't the reason for this posting. The real reason is to tell you about a company called Kronomy that enables you to create a time line of your life with descriptions, pictures and video. Then you can share your story and make your life flash before your other people's eyes before you die via 3D browsing. The site also features a whole bunch of social networking functionality such as commenting, sharing, and "friends." Check it out!

Also, I have to pervert everything: one interesting (and probably unintended) use of Kronomy is to document a product's lifecycle from initial sketches to prototypes to version 1.0 and so on. Someone should do the history of Macintosh using Kronomy. That would be cool.

It's Not Easy Being Me

Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do--for example, host 250 women bloggers at your house. This is a photo from the Kirtsy ("Digg for chicks") and Alltop ("aggregation without aggravation") pre-BlogHer party. If you click here, you can see many more including White Trash Mom lifting her leg, Jenny the Bloggess drinking two-fistedly, the world largest wok to make paella, AllMediocre stealing dirt from my son, how Silicon Valley moms pack to drive across the country, a new chesttop-publishing advertising model, and the baby that Johnson & Johnson didn't want to see at its mommy-blogger seminar.

Alltop Badge Contest Winners

Voters have selected the five winnners of the Alltop badge contest. Each winner will receive a iPod Touch. The winners are:

1. Jesse Pons
2. Glenn Sakamoto
3. Kristen Chase
4. Ben Goheen
5. Cayley Vos

You can see the winning entries here. My thanks to everyone who entered and who voted.

How to Change Someone's Mind

There's nothing I like to study more than techniques of persuasion, and I want to persuade you to check out a website called ChangingMinds.org. You can think of it as Robert Cialdini, my hero when it comes to persuasion, on steroids. Here is a direct link to theories of persuasion but do spend time on other theories such as power, friendships, and emotion.

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Haven't taken this course, but I bet it's useful: Managing Without Authority Alok Jain: Thanks for the tip!.

The Wall Street Journal Lesson

A sign of PR cluelessness is writing to a reporter after an article appears because you think that it should have mentioned your product or company. There are two problems with this theory: first, the reporter isn't going to revise the original piece; and second, she's not going to write another article covering the same topic in the near future.

Thus, the most likely outcome is that the reporter thinks that you don't understand how journalism works. However, you never know because a clueless move of this sort worked for me recently. In the middle of June, Wendy Bounds wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal blog called "15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading." She mentioned my blog, but it would have been great if she had mentioned Startups.alltop.com and Venturecapital.alltop.com too.

So I emailed her--hoping that, best case, sometime in the far future she'd mention Alltop or these two specific sites. Knock me over with a feather, she then wrote "Anti-Social Aggregator? 'Alltop' Lists Any Story, Not Just Popular Ones." I can hardly believe my good fortune, and I learned several lessons:

1. Digital media is different--duh!. Blogging and other digital media are much more nimble than paper-based publications. A second story on Alltop was unlikely in the old world unless there was "big news" about the site. With blogging, you can link various tidbits of coverage published at different times and create a cohesive resource for readers. It's not easy to do this with print.

2. Richer is better. If my email was about yet-another entrepreneurial blog that should have been in the first story, Wendy would not have written written about it. However, the follow-on story about Alltop made the first story richer and better for her readers because it aggregates similar content.

3. Solving a problem is good too. Unbeknownst to me, Alltop solved a problem for Wendy: she couldn't find a good list of entrepreneurial blogs using Google while writing the story. Alltop was the answer for her problem, and she thought many other people must encounter the same problem.

To tell you the truth, there are two more lessons that I learned--or, more accurately, relearned. First, "if you don't ask, you don't get." Second, "sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart." My recommendation is that if you're dealing with a similar situation (digital media, your product or service truly supplements the original story, and you really solve a problem), then take the shot.