Great advice from the Renaissance writer and philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli: “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.”

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A company recently was granted permission to pump up to 170 million gallons of fresh water a year out of the aquifer near where I live. People will be glad to pay more than a dollar a bottle to drink the same water I drink for practically nothing. Why is that?

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According to a study conducted by the Global Information Center, the average American in 2008 consumed an average 12 hours per day, or more than 100,000 words, of information. Not surprisingly, about 60 percent of that information was consumed through radio and television. And the hours of information consumed grew at a rate of 2.6 percent per year from 1980 until 2008.

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How much of our working lives are spent in meetings? And how much of that time would you classify as unproductive and wasteful?

A friend of mine, David Goad, regularly posts blogs that are both insightful and informative. He posted one recently on how to make those mandatory meetings more engaging and effective: http://davidgoad.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/dead-air-dynamics/. I think the article offers up some good suggestions on how to keep things lively. I encourage you to check it out.

I have found that we marketeers tend to fall into one of two categories: some of us are visionary, conceptual dreamers while the rest are executioners. The idealistic thinkers spend much of their time with their heads in the clouds, coming up with grandiose plans. The operations types, meanwhile, have their proverbial noses to the grindstone, making sure the projects are accomplished on time and under budget.

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“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare,” says author Robert Wilensky. “Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.”

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Has life dealt you any setbacks along your journey? Here’s some advice from two guys who have shared your experience:

Lee Iacocca went to work for the Ford Motor Company in 1946 as an engineer, but it was in sales that he distinguished himself. He quickly rose through the ranks and in 1964, at age 40, was named president of the Ford Division. He is credited with helping to design many of Ford’s more popular cars, including the legendary Mustang. He eventually ascended to the top of the pyramid and was named president of the Ford Motor Company. But clashes with Henry Ford II led to his eventual firing in 1978, the very year the company posted a $2 billion profit.

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If your institution is still in the mindset of refusing to think of and treat your students as customers, then I’ll wager your retention rate could definitely stand improvement.

In their book Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers observe that customers have good memories. They add, “Customer trust can be destroyed at once by a major service problem, or it can be undermined, one day at a time, with a thousand small demonstrations of incompetence.”

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When Shakespeare wrote about all the world being a stage and all of us mere players upon it, I think he was on to something. When we talk about customer service and enhancing the teaching and learning experience, I think emphasis needs to be placed on that last word. It all boils down to the experience.

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Last fall, as my wife and I cruised the Northwest Passage, we saw a lot of totem poles. Carved by natives centuries ago, each pole, with its distinctive carvings, told the story of the family or village it represented. As a stranger approached, he could tell a lot about the community and its inhabitants by the various animals and symbols represented on each pole.

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Anyone wondering how the current economy is affecting community colleges need only look at a recent survey conducted by the Campus Computing Project. Almost three-quarters of 120 college presidents and chancellors surveyed said enrollment at their schools was up at least 5 percent over last year. At the same time, 57 percent of them reported their budgets were reduced this academic year, and 61 percent said they had experienced mid-year cuts.

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In the past, I’ve written about taking advantage of free viral marketing by posting videos of your institution on social networks like YouTube and DailyMotion. In this posting, I’d like to address the dark side of that equation.

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I had an interesting phone conversation the other day. A telemarketer from our local cable company called to see if we would be interested in bundling our internet service with them as well? No, I replied. They had provided our internet service years ago and the service was terrible. We would lose the signal about every six weeks, which would be followed by a 30-minute phone conversation to schedule an appointment, and then several more days before a technician actually showed up to jiggle the wires. Their substandard service, I told the young lady, had nearly destroyed my consulting business.

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I had the pleasure a few years ago of meeting and spending a few minutes with Joe Clark, the baseball bat-wielding principal of troubled Eastside High School in Patterson, New Jersey. Clark’s success in turning the school around earned him a good deal of notoriety, and his story eventually was made into the movie, “Lean on Me,” in which actor Morgan Freeman played his part.

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We marketeers do a pretty good job of informing our audiences about whatever product or services we pitch. We inundate them with lots of facts and figures that tout all the benefits, advantages, and features. But do we invest as much time and careful attention in making sure those same folks understand what we’re telling them?

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One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned about marketing was from an old silverback gorilla at the St. Louis Zoo. I was a young man at the time, temporarily living in the area, when upon visiting the attraction, I encountered this gorilla who was sitting near a shallow pool at one end of his long rectangular cage. He (excuse the personification, but this fellow really took on human characteristics as you will learn in a moment) was staring intently at the surface of the pool, his nose just inches from the water, as he slowly stirred the surface with his index finger. As he continued doing this for several minutes, a throng of people watching him eventually moved to the end of the cage and got as close as they could in order to see what the gorilla was staring at. At just the precise moment, his hand slicing the water’s surface, the gorilla sprayed the onlookers with a wall of water. As the shrieking victims scattered, the gorilla doubled over in laughter. Then, once the drenched had departed and a new, unsuspecting group of potential victims began to form, that old gorilla began the process all over again.

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Look at the picture at left. Where does your eye go? Why does it go there? Because the red apple stands out, right? And why does it stand out? Because it’s different!

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Last month, the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, published its last edition. Last December, the Tribune Company, which owns my hometown newspaper, filed for bankruptcy. And even that bastion of journalism, The New York Times, is carrying more than $1-billion in debt and has borrowed millions more to stay afloat by putting up its Manhattan office building as collateral. Read the rest of this entry »

My friend, Rick Bommelje, a professor of organizational communication at Rollins College and a noted expert on effective listening, included in one of his recent newsletters a list of 10 ways to get management to listen to your ideas. Getting management to adopt one’s ideas is a problem I think most communication officers struggle with, so with his permission, I’m sharing them with you here:

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Colleges and universities today are increasingly realizing the value of video on their websites. From campus tours to interviews with students and faculty, they appreciate the impact of sound and motion on their audiences. But many institutions have taken the next step and are pushing video onto file-sharing sites like YouTube and the Paris-based DailyMotion, which boasts more than 36 million unique visitors monthly and gets more than 16,000 new videos posted daily.

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