If you’re a small business owner, I hope to heck that you’ve heard of John Jantsch, the man behind Duct Tape Marketing.
With Duct Tape Marketing, John has created a system for marketing your small business, so you can forget about the hype and guesswork, and counting on consultants to decode the mysteries of marketing. John’s system will get your business beyond the clutter and into the limelight.
John is insatiably curious, admits to getting bored easily and is a voracious reader of 100 blogs and 4 books a week. During our conversation he shares his wisdom about:
- How social media years are like dog years
- His “light bulb” moment about the secret to marketing small businesses
- The 2 biggest mistakes that John sees over and over, and make him smack himself on the head every time
- How to turn your biz into a “Referral Engine” that people love talking about
- Creating a brand that’s as cool as Apple (don’t worry.. you don’t need their budget or iPads)
You can read John’s award-winning blog Duct Tape Marketing here (it’s a Forbes fave and Harvard Business School featured marketing site) and follow him on Twitter at @ducttape.
Posted on July 13, 2010
I’m a big fan of Matt May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. It speaks to my belief that design is an increasingly critical element of everything we do. Not just for those of us in the “creative” industries, but for all of us in all we do. With so much stuff everywhere – content is free – it is through design and elegance we find solutions and create value…and do Great Work.
Matt’s first award-winning book was called The Elegant Solution, and was written after many years advising Toyota on business design and helping build Toyota University. He now spends much of his time advising corporations on how to build in elegance and design into the work that they do.
In our conversation we talk about:
- The important difference between basic vanilla simplicity and elegant simplicity
- Why you need a “To Not Do” list
- How to find the sweet spot between your skills and the challenge at hand
- And what drives Tiger Woods to succeed. (Yes, we did this interview Before The Scandal)
You can follow Matt on Twitter at @MatthewEMay and at his website www.InPursuitOfElegance.com.
Posted on March 31, 2010
Brian is the Chief Philosopher of Philosophers Notes, a website and business I discovered about a year ago and think is absolutely terrific. Brian’s role as Chief Philosopher is to study and share the the world’s greatest wisdom. He has picked the hundred best, wisest, smartest books, he has articulated the thousand best ideas in those books and from those he has extracted the ten core principles behind the real works of wisdom that guide us and shape is in our 21st century.
What makes this sweeter still is that Brian is also a brilliant entrepreneur. He founded an organization called E-Teams that grew, was massively successful and sold it in 2000 to The Active Network then came back and founded another brilliant online company called Zaadz which is now known as Gaia.com and which is also terrific – it’s like a Facebook or LinkedIn for people who want to save the world and change the world.
This is a really juicy call, full of ideas and in it we talk about:
- How you know if you’re ‘following your bliss” (and what Carlos Castaneda has to say on the point)
- One of the deepest choices of life: do you step forward into growth or back into safety
- A brilliant mapping system to help you keep track of your path
- And what Brian learned from Jim Loehr about projecting his shadow
- The importance of ritual
And of course, a whole lot more.
You can find Brian at www.PhilosophersNotes.com and follow him on Twitter at @_Brian_Johnson. (And if you do so, you’ll see he’s just announced he’s getting married. Woo hoo!)
Posted on February 24, 2010
One of the giants in the self-development world, Leo Babauta. His blog Zen Habits is read by over 150,000 people, and with good reason. It’s practical, wise and committed to helping people create a better life for themselves through simple productivity. He’s also the author of The Power of Less, a best-selling book which helps de-clutter your life on every possible level.
I’m thrilled to say Leo has contributed a piece to my new book, Do More Great Work.
In this interview Leo and I talk about:
- How he balanced two jobs (and a family with six children) to launch Zen Habits
- Leo’s core planning tool – and it’s about having fun
- Why starting small is the most powerful way for getting big
- The secret to leaving behind a bad habit and taking up a more positive, new one.
You can follow Leo on Twitter at @zen_habits and read his work on his blog.
If you enjoyed this interview, you’ll also enjoy my conversations with:
Posted on February 8, 2010
