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Felix Hernandez at Yankee Stadium on May 5, 20...
Felix Hernandez in 2008.   Image via Wikipedia

Hire oddball talent, observed Tom Peters in his heyday as Guru du Jour.  He was telling business leaders to look beyond pedigree, beyond the right schools or consultancies and devel0p staff that had the skills and drive to succeed.

Credit the Seattle Mariners for doing just that with Felix Hernandez, their baby-faced Venezuelan pitcher who first started playing for them while a teenager.  Baseball history is littered with the remnants of Cooperstown busts created too early for teen phenoms, but the Mariners stuck by their man. And Felix Hernandez was consistently on the brink of greatness. Each season, as he crossed into his early 20s, the young man they call “King Felix” pitched between 190 and 200 innings of major league baseball.   Each year, he struck out between 165 and 176 batters.   But he never had a winning season.  All the signs pointed to one, but for four years, Hernandez consistently lost more games than he won.

Credit the Mariners then, not for seeing what everyone else saw in those flashes of brilliance, but for sticking by their guy.   They didn’t overpay for what was delivered, but did boost his salary more than $100,000 in 2008, a sign that they liked what they saw. Then the breakthrough. Felix Hernandez led or was near the top rank in every major pitching category he qualified for during 2009.  He was selected as an All-Star.  He won 19 games, losing only 5, and stepped up his pitching from “lots of potential” to “brilliant”.  Handled the ball every 5 days from May 8 to the end of the season, a span of 26 games, Hernandez consistently threw 100 pitches and deep into the game, allowing the bullpen to rest.  The team’s pitching workhorse did all this for a team that won slightly more games than they lost.

ESPN has a fun tool called the Cy Young Predictor.    The model uses a formula crafted by two highly respected statisticians and predicts the winner of each league’s Cy Young Award, given to that season’s best pitcher.   The model awards Hernandez the most points in either league, and the closest competitor in his league trails by more than 7%. Assuming the model and pundits are correct, Felix Hernandez will receive a Cy Young Award this month at the age 0f 23.

That outcome wasn’t always expected, even during this year.  Hernandez reeled off four straight victories and then lost three straight games.   His career won and loss record stood at 43-39, respectable and average.  Then Hernandez  went the rest of year winning 15 games and losing only 2. In any occupation, from baseball pitching to marketing to practicing law or medicine to painting, we all have opportunities to show our potential.  The smart leader that recognizes and nurtures potential among quirky talent, even a teen phenom who hadn’t yet developed, can be rewarded many times over for patience and guidance. One year doesn’t make a career in any of those occupations, but credit the Seattle Mariners for realizing the talent they had on board needed time to develop.

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I watched another potential lead go by today and decided not to purchase the information because the prospect was in a medium sized market.  Their sole criteria was that they wanted to rank in the top 3 spots for a certain local phrase. It’s important that you as a small business don’ t make this mistake:  there are no more ways that rankings can be counted. There are lots of SEO specific phrases that tie into this concept.  Ignoring them for a minute, here’s what you need to know:

  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on the physical location of the Internet connection you’re using.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on whether you have a Google account and are logged into that account.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on how other searchers have interacted with a page and query over time.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on constant testing Google does for thousands of variables.
  • And our new favorite, Google Social Search.

Forget about Social Search for a moment.  Remember this because it’s critical business advice that predates the Internet by thousands of years. Who cares how many people visit your store, call your 800 number, stop by your cave to see if your wheel is more round than Ogg’s, say your cow’s milk is the best or think you’re a dandy doctor?   Referrals and word-of-mouth are great, but the bottom line remains the bottom line.

If people walk in to a retail store, quickly mutter, “Just browsing” as a spell to ward off salespeople and leave without buying anything, you’ve perhaps gained some brand awareness (but it may be poor), and you’ve used sales resources on someone who didn’t buy. That’s what happens when businesses say they want to “rank” for a term.  They don’t want to rank for a term.   They want to make the most profit possible given the enterprise’s constraints.   Having a great location helps retail walk-in traffic for some businesses.  Having a great web location helps too, but the days of static placement on search engines are over.  Stop asking about them.

We, the person reading this post and I, can sit down side by side, type the same phrase in a search engine’s query box and receive different results. Rank is worthless. Traffic is only slightly better, and the only reason you should care about traffic is as a function of profit. So back to Google’s Social Search, now being beta tested in Google Labs.   Right now, this is opt-in so you have to want to see this information, but Social Search will change the results page based upon people identified as part of your social network.

What does that cover?   Well, consider that your Facebook friends list is likely wide open.  Ditto for your LinkedIn contacts and your Twitter feed. Here’s a killer.   Once a search engine can associate your account on that search engine with a Facebook, Twitter or other account, then the true social “graph” is reality.  Here’s something else to chew on:  if a search engine associates your account with four other networks and finds that of all the people, you’ve “friended” four other people, the knowledge it can glean by micro-targeting will make today’s web advertising look primitive. So please stop asking for “rankings”.   You’re a smarter businessperson.  Ask for profits.  And demand ROI from your online marketing efforts.

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Big Thinking is kicking off a series about How To Communicate Bad News because we see too many partners, clients and friends often miss the mark and make bad situations worse.

There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops
There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops

The first guideline we’ll share is straight out of today’s headlines:  

Be Honest About The Rules.  

There is an incalculable multiplier if you break the rules, your actions cause problems and you are not immediately forthright with every possible stakeholder fast. Lightning fast.  Greased lightning fast.   So fast that you may not have a solution yet, but you’ve already assured people you are resolving the matter right now.

The problem may be as basic as a spreadsheet error that only becomes a broken rule if you cover up the mistake.  Or the problem could be as specific as flying a jet with more than 100 passengers for more than an hour past your destination.  The comments the cockpit crew made puzzled everyone.   The federal government announced today that the flight crew claimed they were using laptop computers in the cockpit, were distracted and ignored radio calls and other signals. If their story is true and they were looking at new schedules resulting from their merger, they have hopefully handed over their untampered with computers and will face whatever disciplinary action occurs when you don’t do your job and fly 160,000 pounds of plane on top of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.  

But Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole blew their chances for problems by releasing cagey statements since Thursday.  Only today, on the fifth day, have federal investigators released a statement about the events that caused Chaney and Cole to operate their plane in the way they did. Imagine two headlines. One reads, “Pilots Reprimanded, Suspended for Using PC In Flight“ The other reads, “Government Investigators Uncover Truth About Stray Jet.“

Your responsibility is to tell the truth when things go bad and own up if you were breaking the rules.  Coverups don’t work, and the fallout is always worse.  These pilots may have thought they were protecting themselves, but they were really causing massive brand damage to Delta and Northwest who are already balancing the intricacies of their merger.  That ripple effect directly impacts tens of thousands of employees and millions of individuals who own retirement funds that have invested in the company whose stock price might suffer in the short run. Communicating Bad News is not hard, but there are standards to which you must adhere.  Be Honest About Breaking The Rules is the first standard.