Laura’s Winning Ideas

An ancestor of mine, Matteo Ricci, is back in the news this week. A map commissioned by the Chinese royal house is on display in Washington DC at the Library of Congress. You can read the BBC article and see a picture here.

Matteo Ricci was the first missionary from the West who was welcome and became revered by the Chinese leadership. He arrived in 1583 with new knowledge from the West, but was open to discovering the sciences and inventiveness of the Chinese educated class. Contrary to the BBC article, he was not the first missionary sent to China, but the first who was allowed to stay.

His first work in China was a small book, On Friendship, which just became available in the US in english. The Chinese Prince who had commissioned the book was pleased, and the small book became very popular in China.

I’m going to try to get to Washington D.C. to see this before it leaves for Minnesota where it will have a permanent home with its new owner. It’s one thing to try to keep up with the Joneses, but just try to avoid being a slacker with ancestors like these!

I’ve been thinking about teaching Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) proposal writing skills lately.

The first assumption technical experts bring with them is that, what is obvious to them should be obvious to others. This isn’t correct, and loser proposals prove this. In many cases, your competitors are technically as qualified as your team. However, the winning proposal communicates value in a more illuminating way.

Chris Witt at Life after Powerpoint! said it best yesterday:

– Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
– Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
– Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

This is a perfect analogy for proposal professionals. We tip the candles of our SMEs to light the candles of our clients.

Once again, copyright is in the news.

David Klein

This time, an artist, Richard Prince has been sued for copyright infringement. The case was filed in New York District Court, alleges that Prince violated copyright when he scanned photographs from a book, printed them onto canvas, and then painted on top of them, adding evocative elements like face paint and electric guitars.

His defense is that he “transformed” the original image and so is free of the tethers of copyright. (Yeah. right.)

Don’t do this at your firm. Like running with scissors, letting your scanner substitute for legitimate licensed images is dangerous.

There’s a great article in the Wall Street Journal about this case. Click here for the link free for the next week. (After that you’ll need a subscription to get this article on-line: Color This Area of the Law Gray)

There are some instances in which “transformation” will pass muster. Like the time that Jeff Koons was inspired by a fashion photo of a woman’s legs with dangling sandal. He’d massaged the image so much that only the photographer could see the resemblance.

Even so, if he’d been a businessperson instead of an artist with renown legal representation, I suspect he would not have prevailed.

Satire is another shield for artists, but in business, it makes you look petty to satirize a competitor.

Don’t think that you can “transform” the logo of your competitor and come off looking good nor staying outside the legal protection afforded trademarks and copyrighted images.

Keep it clean out there, and don’t run with scissors scanned images!

Good conversation yesterday with Aina Vilumsons of the Wisconsin Procurement Institute.

I left her office with some nuggets that sparked several ideas today which can be used for marketing in the next few months.

Time is of the essence

The bad news has been delivered to the White House: infrastructure projects can’t get underway in less than 18 months, and money needs to be flowing NOW.

Consider holding a brainstorming session in your firm. Are there ways you can improve or drastically change the way you deliver that would transform the speed to market?

I’ve seen engineers split projects in a way that allowed construction to begin very early, with some loss of efficiency, but accomplishing the goal of an immediate construction start. If your team can come up with ways to expedite flow, you may find opportunities to land new work based on your ingenuity.

Architects, Engineers, and anyone early in the infrastructure pipeline has an opportunity. The challenge is to shift from focusing on scraping your fees down as low as possible to focusing on allowing the larger expense of construction to proceed earlier than usual, or in a way that solves the problem.

Remember, you can have two: Fast, Cheap, Good. The focus in this moment may be Fast and Good, rather than Cheap and Good.

Money Will Shift

Defense spending will go down, Energy spending will increase. DOE and EPA will have more opportunity as funding shifts. Where you market to federal agencies, a shift should be considered. Where you contract to prime contractors who work for DoD, you may need to look for prime contractors with relationships in other agencies.

Easy to see that some areas will have attention paid, and other areas will be starved for funding. Adjust your marketing accordingly.