Do This! Get That.

To All Presenters:

Allegedly, business runs on incentives. Incentives to consumers to induce purchase behavior. Incentives to employees to increase productivity. Incentives to managers to boost the bottom line.

The idea that incentives are effective is reinforced by the popularity of the concept. Nearly every form of media streams attractive offers to we, the target audience, on a 24-hour cycle. If you're awake chances are someone is trying to sell you something. Retailers keep offering coupons, businesses keep handing out bonuses and everyone presumes the incentives are successful since, in the short term - and in the most obvious ways - they are.

Do incentives really work? If you want to build a business, will coupons drive sales? Yes. They will. But there is no buy-one-get-one-free offer in the world that will build brand loyalty. Great Clips is a national hair salon franchise who supports deep discounting as part of their grand opening strategy for new locations - often prices are as low as $2.99 a haircut.

During the grand opening these salons do a lot of haircuts. The problem is they have to hire a lot of staff to service customers who only value the product at the discounted price. Shortly after the grand opening these salons see same store sales drop precipitously, as customers move on to the next cheapest shop in town -with layoffs at the salon soon to follow.

Similarly, businesses who offer performance incentives will find they are successful in driving a specific behavior. The problem is employees stop taking risks. They stop thinking creatively and start doing exactly, and only, what is required in order to earn the incentive. Nothing more. The incentive may achieve a short-term objective, but in the long-term it caps personal initiative and business development.

Alfie Kohn writes a great article articulating the findings of several dozen studies which support the idea that incentives do more harm than good.

THE POINT: Monitor the horizon, will your strategy get you where you really want to be? 

Be Not Afeard

To All Presenters:

In ancient Greece a person's creativity was considered to be the direct result of outside influence. Gods, Daemons or Muses held sway over one's ability to sing, play instruments, write or perform. In Rome a person was said to be possessed by Genius - alluding again to an outside spiritual influence. It wasn't until centuries later that our neo-narcissism allowed us to be geniuses ourselves.

The benefit of this spiritual outsourcing is that when Greek stand-up comedians told jokes that bombed, or Roman writers drafted copy that wouldn't sell - they could blame the Gods. This ability to pass the buck empowered them to take risks without fear of personal failure. "It's not me, it's my Muse".

Frankly, this seems like a smashing good idea.

Today if your jokes bomb - your fault. If your book doesn't sell - your fault. As a result people are less willing to be daring lest they fail and subject themselves to ego crushing humiliation. And that's too bad. How many creative concepts never manifest because the thinker is too afraid to share their original idea?

Perhaps we should renew the old philosophies as Rudyard Kipling did, once quoted as saying his creative Daemon abhorred blue ink, so he only ever wrote with the "blackest of blacks".

Or like Nick Cave who at the height of his commercial success declined an MTV Video Music Award saying that such measurement of his creativity might spook his Muse and he couldn't afford to have her abandon him completely.

Presenters - next time you take the floor to pitch a product or communicate a concept, open yourself to the possibility the daring idea you have to make your presentation a true performance comes from something besides yourself. Perhaps this externalization will empower you to act on it.

THE POINT: Your Muse is your inner mentor. Do what your mentor says.

21 Logo Evolutions

To All Presenters:

Our friends at "Bored Panda" (advertised as the only magazine for pandas) have compiled some pretty comprehensive histories covering the evolution of 21 common logos.

Here's a sample:

Here's another:

Here's the link to the rest:

GO HERE!

THE POINT: Nothing stays the same, some icons just age better than others.