In junior high I was in the concert band. I played trumpet, and I was supposed to practice at least five days a week. I was lucky if I practiced even once a week. And sure enough, I never really improved. To be fair, the stakes were never high enough
We recently went camping with some friends in a nearby state park. To plan the trip we had to pick dates and book our site months in advance. Camping reservations have gotten to the point where if you don't plan way in advance, you may never find a
The current zeitgeist of business and leadership advice is all about deciding early, and deciding now. To not wait for perfect information, and just keep forward momentum. I think it's true you'll never have 100% certainty or perfect information about anything, and chasing it can cripple
is not a 30 minute meeting. A true "quick sync" is a 5 minute conversation to solve one small point, within a project that is otherwise baked. It's figuring out the arrangement of the frosting. It's not determining the ingredients of the cake batter.
Most marketing ops people seem to long for a fresh slate with their martech stack. If only they could start over from scratch in Marketo, they'd build it right this time. Yet once we get into these systems, even in ideal circumstances, the issues start to crop up.
You can tell if an ops person has any user experience saavy by the picklists on their forms. Consider the country select picklists on a "contact us" form. Most start like this: * Afghanistan * Akrotiri * Albania * Algeria * American Samoa * Andorra * Angola * Anguilla * Antarctica * Antigua and Barbuda * Argentina * Armenia * Aruba
Growing up, I always admired my dad's sense of direction. He never seemed to need a map. He never got lost. He always knew where we were going, even on vacation in a totally new place. Once I started driving, I discovered that I too had a similar
There's a great chapter in The Obstacle is the Way on process. When dealing with big, challenging work, the big picture matters at times, but most of the time, it's best focus on the small, doable pieces of work in front of you rather than getting
Shifting a team's work to revolve around two-week or monthly sprints can improve output and satisfaction. Especially as marketing ops teams grow and become more relied upon in a marketing organization, the ticket queue tends to pile up far faster than the output of the team can knock
As I've now spent more time with Eloqua, I can say it leaves much more room for customization than Marketo. There's several layers of interconnected systems and subsystems in Eloqua that are just completely missing in Marketo. In some cases this yields some greater freedom and
I've been reading Jacques Cousteau's Diving for Sunken Treasure, a book that is featured directly in Wes Anderson's Rushmore, while Cousteau is the main inspiration for Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan, so
It's tempting to. After all, what's another five, ten, fifteen minutes of sleep? And you're already so comfortable.... Of course if you're me, one hit of the snooze button turns into five, and all of a sudden I'm an hour