For those who don’t know, Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player who ever lived. Any marketer can learn a lot from how he conducted business and how he made big plays.

Here are four simple things you can learn from “the great one.”

Gretzky Skated To Where The Puck Was Going, Not Where It Had Been

Wayne wasn’t the fastest skater or toughest guy on the ice. But from age two, he practiced hockey with this sage advice from his father, Walter Gretzky:

16 years later, he was dominating the National Hockey League. That’s because the opportunity to do something great is always where “the puck is going.” That’s where he went. If you hear hockey players talk about Gretzky, they always mention his ability to anticipate that puck.

I heard a great story about a Principal who held a weekly meeting and asked, “what did we learn about this week that could put us out of business?” That’s a great example of thinking about where the puck is going.

Wayne Gretzky Cared About Making His Teammates Better

When Wayne was a kid, he used to lay out all his hockey gear before a game. One day, Wayne said to his father,” there’s a kid on our team that hasn’t scored a goal all year. Today, I’m gonna help him score a goal.” That boy scored two goals that day, thanks to Wayne.

Gretzky Helped More Than He Scored

During his career, Gretzky scored a record 894 goals. He was the best scorer to ever play the game. This is a guy who could basically skate up to the net and score a goal whenever he wanted.

But his assist record is more impressive, 1,963 assists. That means for every goal he scored, he helped two other people score goals. He gave twice as much as he got. That’s impressive!

In marketing, the more you help others, the more you’ll get in return. So, help everybody everyday.

Wayne Didn’t Worry About Lack Of Resources, He Had Resourcefulness

During his years with the Oilers, the team conducted individual strength and stamina tests twice per year. According to Gretzky himself, he always finished dead last in peripheral vision, flexibility and strength, and could only bench press 140 pounds.

Instead of relying on his athleticism, he used creativity and intelligence to avoid players trying to check him, anticipate where the puck was going, and make big things happen.

Don’t complain about a lack of resources. Instead, be resourceful.

Is there a sports figure that inspires your work life? Be sure to leave a comment below.

After they give you extremely detailed information for your proposal, they’re on the phone with old clients and setting up meetings with new ones.

But that’s not your reality, is it?

No way. You’re in a constant struggle to get your team engaged in marketing, especially when they are busy with “billable work.” You’re pulling your hair out thinking, “these people must be crazy.” Marketing needs to be consistently prevalent in your corporate culture. It needs more than a seat at the table, it needs to be leading grace.

Each firm has a unique corporate culture. From the complaints I hear, most cultures suffer from “The Boo Radley Effect.”

Remember the book “To Kill A Mockingbird?” Nobody wanted to get near Boo Radley’s house. They wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Nobody respects Boo Radley. But when things are at their worst, who saves the day, Boo Radley. However, the Boo Radley Effect can be changed. A/E/C firms throughout the country have done it successfully, and thrived! And a new website will give you all the tools you need.

Changing Corporate Culture

The new website, Changing Corporate Culture outlines a four-step plan that can help change any corporate culture. Here are the steps. Click on the headings to get more information on each step.

Educate and Encourage

Teach your staff how to market the firm and bring in business. Then give them positive reinforcement along the way.

Define Expectations

Identify how people should fit into the new culture and how they should act within it.

Acknowledge and Celebrate Success

The step that typically goes undone. Make ensure that individual efforts are noted and appreciated.

Reward

Create a direct correlation between the desired culture of the organization and rewards for being a part of that culture.

Want to learn more about how you can change your corporate culture? Check out Changing Corporate Culture.

Krista Sykes, PhD over at Architecture in Context has been writing a series called, “12 Factors That Can Make Or Break Your Design Business.”

Market research and analysis is not my area of expertise, so I don’t really cover it here. However, it is Krista’s.

She explains:

…almost everyone worries about their competitors, and most strive to determine and meet clients’ needs. But are you in touch with future threats to your business, threats from outside your industry? How about the ways certain social and cultural trends could affect your work? Without an understanding of these and other factors, there’s a good chance that you’re overlooking some seriously important stuff—opportunities that will help your company grow and thrive, and key threats that can make it crash and burn.

If you are interested in learning more about market research and analysis (whether your firm is in design, consulting, or construction), you might want to check out Krista’s series.

You know how you are always baffled why everybody basically agrees with you except that one person? What’s that person’s problem? Can’t they see that everybody else would obviously see things your way?

The problem is that you are suffering from the False Consensus Effect.  We are terrible at predicting the behavior of others, yet we believe their actions and decisions would align with ours. This is the False Consensus Effect in a nutshell.

Many people quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours. We each have information built up from countless previous experiences involving both ourselves and others so surely we should have solid insights? No such luck. In reality people show a number of predictable biases when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes. And these biases help to show exactly why we need psychology experiments and why we can’t rely on our intuitions about the behavior of others. One of these biases is called the false consensus effect. In the 1970s Stanford University social psychologist Professor Lee Ross set out to show just how the false consensus effect operates in two neat studies (Ross, Greene & House, 1977). You can read more about these studies at False Consensus Effect — PsyBlog.

How the False Consensus Effect Can Wreak Havoc on Your Marketing

You probably think you have some insight into how your client thinks and how they make decisions. You don’t. Instead, you have some false idea based on your own biases and opinions.

This can cause you or your firm to pitch what you want to pitch rather than what your client wants. I was once in a meeting where an executive from a large pharmaceutical company told a designer, “If you mention that one more time, I’m taking these drawings and leaving.”

What compelled the designer to pitch what he wanted to pitch? And why was he so shocked at the executive’s comment? It was the False Consensus Effect.

How can you battle the False Consensus Effect at work? Leave a comment.

Over at Neuromarketing, they posted about the power of asking the client to give a prediction on whether they’ll hire you.

Are you telling customers to buy your product? Maybe you should be asking them about their intentions instead. Research shows that if you want to get people to do something, you should ask them to predict if they will do it. An affirmative answer greatly increases the probability that they will follow through.

Researchers Jonathan Levav and Gavin Fitzsimons ran a series of experiments involving behavior prediction of activities like flossing, reading, and eating healthier foods. In each case, the subjects were more likely to engage in the behavior if they predicted they would do so. In addition, the researchers found that being able to visualize the behavior bolstered the effect.

via Prediction Power: Asking Gets Results | Neuromarketing.

Here is the link to the research discussed in the piece.

She gives the book at 5 out of 5. Here is what she says:

You can get your own copy of the Proposal Development Secrets Kindle book here.

During a recent Copyblogger podcast, Chris Brogan gave an interesting insight.

He explained that we live in a world of information. We are constantly consuming this info. However, the number of content consumers is far greater than the number of creators.

This creates an opportunity.

Being The Baker

We read a book to our son called, Baker, Baker, Cookie Maker. In the book, Cookie Monster is baking cookies. And we all know that he loves cookies.

Each time he bakes a batch, the Sesame Street gang come in and eat the cookies…leaving Cookie Monster with no cookies.

He keeps making larger and larger batches. Finally, everyone is satisfied and he gets one cookie (which he happily eats).

Be the baker. Spend your time creating content, not consuming it. Being “in the know” is great, but you’ll be happier and more successful by spending your time creating content.

As Chris Brogan said, he never got work by knowing who was on Dancing With The Stars. Spend your time baking, not consuming!

According to Dan:

Here is his infographic on the best times for your blog posts (based on eastern standard time). You can read more about it here.

Autodesk just announced Autodesk 360, their official cloud-based system. I predicted it, with surprising accuracy, exactly one month ago in the post, How Autodesk and Onlive Will Game The Future of BIM. And while this blog typically sticks to industry marketing topics, I think this evolution of BIM is worth talking about. It also relates to my post on How To Get Into ENR because I will be quoted in Engineering News Record on this topic.

The Technology Behind It

Autodesk 360 is powered by technology from Onlive.

The power behind Onlive’s service, which was originally envisioned to stream high-end video games, is its ability to eliminate the latency you might expect when being served a computer from an off-site location. It achieves this by using many powerful servers, equipped with propriety video chips, working together to serve this computing power to users.

As David Pogue from the Wall Street Journal reported, “There’s an insane amount of technology behind this stunt — 10 years in the making, according to the company’s founder.”

Onlive’s technology is different from the “virtual desktops” offered by companies like Citrix and VMware, which stream your desktop computer back to you. Onlive is streaming their computers to your device, using many servers to give you the exact amount of processing and graphics power you need at any moment. Forget “software as a service.” This is “computing as a service.”

This is how the Autodesk 360 website explains it:

The Tea Leaves Were There

Just a little digging would show you that Autodesk’s intentions to use Onlive’s technology had slipped out a few times.

According to Gamasutra.com Onlive CEO, Steve Perlman stated, “We launched the first version of [OnLive] Desktop white-labeled with Autodesk, before we launched the games service, as sort of a pilot.”

“White labeled” means that Autodesk had been testing Onlive’s technology as if it were their own.

It was even reported that Onlive founder, Perlman alluded to our industry’s use case in a recent presentation.

Imagine “an architect who comes to a client with a tablet,” Perlman said. “The client’s got a big TV in the conference room. The architect can control the presentation of building plans on the tablet; it’s appearing on the TV; and maybe there’s a specialist back at the architect’s office on a Mac or PC.”

According to Onlive’s website, “OnLive Desktop is coming soon for smartphones, PC, Mac®, monitors and TVs via the OnLive MicroConsole thin client, and on connected TVs.” This announcement means Autodesk’s BIM software, REVIT, will also be available on these devices through Autodesk 360.

What This Means For The A/E/C Industry

Adoption of this technology could revolutionize how we work. Here are a few examples:

1. Any screen with Internet connection could serve as your workstation. (imagine working on a BIM model through a flat screen TV or tablet).
2. Outsourcing the “computing” required to run the software we use on a day-to-day basis could significantly reduce the hardware and energy costs absorbed by firms in our industry.
3. It could allow software developers to push forward processor and graphic intensive technologies without fear of leaving behind users with older hardware.
4. Software updates will become a thing of the past. You’ll always have the latest version of the software you use.
5. It could help IT professionals ensure that each computer or device used by the firm has the same specifications and software.

My Scoop

The revelation that this was news, and nobody was covering it, came to me while meeting one February morning with Cordell Parvin. I’ll explain more about that meeting later.

I wrote up my post. But before posting, I sent it to Jan Tuchman saying that she could have the idea if she wanted it. I didn’t hear anything back right away.

After the post went live, a couple weeks went by and I got an email from Tom Sawyer (ENR’s technology editor). They were interested in posting something in their technology email newsletter. I wrote something up for Tom. Tom liked it and considered printing it right away as a Viewpoint (the article at the end of the print publication).

However, they decided to write a bigger piece and just quote me. It is a good thing, because today Autodesk confirmed my prediction with Autodesk 360.

The Lesson

Keep your eyes out. You may pick up on something that nobody else is covering. This is valuable information to an editor or to post on your blog.

As a result, I spent a great deal of  time and energy becoming the best writer I could be. Recently, I stumbled across this infographic identifying 15 common grammar goofs.

If you have any firm “principles,” you might want to send this their way. 

Like this infographic? Get more copywriting tips from Copyblogger.