Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant? Eat like a bee!.

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant? Eat like a bee!

Posted on November 10th, 2009 by Sacha Chua

© 2007 Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, GNU Free Documentation License

In Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy Kawasaki advises you to eat like a bird and poop like an elephant. By that, he means that you should be a voracious consumer of information (according to him, hummingbirds eat 50% of their body weight in food a day) and you should spread your knowledge as liberally as possible (much like the way an elephant poops a lot. He explains how this helps you see the connections between ideas and create value, and he gives a number of examples of opportunities he found when he did and opportunities he missed when he didn’t.

Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services Guy Kawasaki

The vivid advice made me think of eating like a bee, an analogy I like more. Bees collect nectar from lots of different flowers, pollinating them along the way. (Some even intentionally gather pollen!) Even by itself, this pollination already serves the ecosystem. Bees take the nectar, digest it, and structure it into beautifully ordered hexagons that hold lots of energy. They do this along with lots of other bees in a highly social activity.
And of course one can make all sorts of puns regarding bees and the International Business Machines corporation, of which I am part. Indeed, I, bee, am.
So how do these thoughts translate into real life?
I love reading. Being close to one of the largest public library systems in the world means that there’s a never-ending rotation of books through our bookshelves. I read tons of books about business, management, leadership, marketing, consulting, entrepreneurship, personal finance, productivity, self-development, relationships, creativity, and writing. I also occasionally throw in books about history, sewing, psychology, mathematics, science, popular culture, and fiction recommended by friends. And then there’s the occasional piece of mental junk food (Regency romances and the like). I read lots of blog posts, too – they’re an excellent way to get different insights and fresh perspectives.
I also love writing, putting together diagrams and presentations, and exploring other ways to explain things. That’s either elephant-pooping or pollinating and making honey, depending on which analogy you prefer. ;)
This has been working out really well for me. The more I learn, the more I share. The more I share, the more I learn.
Some people have told me that they don’t blog because they don’t know if they have anything interesting to share. A bee picks up pollen in the course of its everyday work. It does not stop to ask the next flower if this pollen is interesting enough or worth sharing. It simply shares and lets the world work the rest of the magic.
What are you picking up while you’re learning, and what can you share with others

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.

Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant

Rebecca Jones posted this in Leadership on July 15th, 2012

Guy Kawasaki’s advice to the SLA 2012 keynote audience is to eat information like a bird (they eat a lot), and poop it out like an elephant. Get it in, analyze it & get it out.  He covered the 10 points of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions (his new book) guy@alltopcom

As an Apple employee, a venture capitalist and now as a speaker, he has done a great deal of enchanting.  How do you evangelize, influence and enchant people. Highly recommends Influence (as has Ken Haycock for years). His top 10 tips for how to enchant your customers, managers

1. Achieve likability
   • Have a great smile, not a forced grin; a Duchenne smile uses your eyes and your mouth – you “want crows feet”
   • Accept others for what they are & not try to change them; don’t expect to be liked if you aren’t liking others
   • Default to “yes”; always think of how you can help other people; the upside of being liked far outweighs the downside of being taken advantage
2. Achieve trustworthiness

• Amazon.com trusts people not to return e-books in the 7 days that, in fact, they’ve read; in return we trust Amazon.com
• Zappos.com trusts women not to take advantage of their shipping both ways; in return women trust Zappos
• Bake, don’t eat
• Find something you can agree on, even the smallest thing

3. Perfect your product or service – perfect what you do – make it great

• It is easier to enchant people with great services than with crap
• Do something DICEE: deep, intelligent, complete, empowering (makes you more creative, more productive), elegant

4 Launch your service

• Tell a great story, a personal story, not using words like scalable, enterprise, curve-jumping, etc.
• Plant many seeds;Use salient points; calories vs. miles (if you eat this bag of chips you need to run 25 miles! ); gigabytes vs. # of songs

5.  Overcome resistance to your service

• Electronic gaming overcame the market’s resistance by calling the games educational toys not games
• Provide social proofUse a dataset; the facts are there but the market refuses to believe it; Gapminder.com uses datasets to change mindsetsEnchant all the influencers, not just the obvious

6.  Endure

• Grateful Dead encourages ppl to pirate its music; it has a special place for ppl to “tape” it’s concertsBuild an ecosystem about your industry or serviceInvoke reciprocity. 

• Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robt Cialdini
• Instead of saying “you are welcome”, say “I know you would do the same for me”, which means “I know you will do the same for me”; as a defaulter to yes and a baker not an eater you also need to enable ppl to pay you back
• Don’t rely on money;
• Be a great presenter
• Customize the introduction to the audience
• Sell your dream of what your service can solve ppl’s problems
• Use 10 slides in 20 minutes; in 30 point font

7. Use technology

• Remove the speed bumps to getting to your company or service
• Provide value – insights – what to do to make sure a bad thing doesn’t happen to your client
• Eat information like a bird eats food & poop it out like an elephant: take lots in, digest it and spread it around — get it out there in a meaningful way!

9. Enchant up to your boss

• Drop everything else when your boss asks
• Prototype fast; if your boss asks you to do something, whip it up quickly as a prototype; it proves that you’ve dropped everything
• Deliver bad news early; the moment you know something is wrong, tell them

10. Enchant down to the people who work for you

• Provide a map (Daniel Pink’s Drive) for ppl;
• help them develop mastery;
• Suck it up; don’t ask people to do something you won’t do

ginaposs@gmailcom — if you want the presentation, send an email to Gina.   His site is www.alltop.com

• Competencies & Careers « Dysart & Jones

  July 16, 2012 at 4:47 pm · Reply

  [...] books that were recommended in this session included the one Guy Kawasaki mentioned in yesterday’s opening keynote session,  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robt Cialdini; Work the Pond which has great tips [...]
  
• Enchanting & Quality « Dysart & Jones

  July 16, 2012 at 5:36 pm · Reply

  [...] provided great coverage of yesterday’s opening keynote speaker at SLA 2012, Guy Kawasaki.  I want to add a couple of things.  He emphasized that enchanting really required [...]