All posts by Mary Yolanda Trigiani

Experience: professional services, boards, strategy, accounting, consulting, investment management, banking, technology. Ethic: urgency, efficiency, candor, humor, spirit.
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She’s Geeky. And grounded. And performance-ready.

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She’s Geeky is an unconference that continues tomorrow.  It’s for women. 

There are many attendees blogging their observations in real time.  Journalists visited today, and answering their questions revealed as much about those in attendance as it did the gathering.  Which is the point.

She’s Geeky is a beautifully spontaneous, productive and business-oriented exercise.  Most critically, the unconference is about the women on the technology playing field — not about making a splash, building a database of targets or being "where the elite meet." 

There are women from every walk of tech life, at every level and at various shades of visibility.  The result?  Down-to-earth dialog, unscripted and unrehearsed, between people who want to work and contribute as true players in one of the most exciting industries on the planet.

Last week, we had several splashy startup announcements coming out of one of the industry’s glittering events, here in San Francisco.  As I read the coverage and the company blogs, it strikes me that we are still plagued with a sort of self-centered, look at me-aren’t I brilliant approach to building visibility for startups.  Some of these startups are already funded to the tune of millions of dollars rounded up via connections as opposed to merit, bloated with employees and laying claim to the highest levels of innovation.  Yet nowhere do their leaders illuminate the underlying functionality.  Very little airtime is given to the customer experience — and what’s there is self-congratulatory hype that treats customers as props in the startups’ march to fame and fortune.

It is so refreshing to participate in an alternate experience, stripped of artifice and dedicated to facts.  She’s Geeky relies on sharing what we know with others just for the pure pleasure of the interaction.  On discussing performance, strengths, weaknesses, wins, losses — all in the context of making sure that we can contribute to the industry and own the contributions.  On showing how reason is the foundation of fairness, not the exclusive province of the connected caste.

Think of it this way:  if two heads are better than one, why not make at least one of them a woman’s?  More than likely you’ll see a fact-based result that considers all parties and possibilities.

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The fall of the empire?

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A few people have been writing this week of their concerns about too much connecting via social networks and too little personal exchanges.  That we’re relying too much on the Internet to sustain relationships.  And those relationships can only be of questionable quality.

It’s timely they are raising these concerns because it gives some long-time experts the opportunity to put the Internet in an historical, cultural context.  Its introduction and immersion into our lives are as important as the telephone, the airplane, men walking on the moon.

Stowe Boyd wrote a terrific post on why we must not fear use of the Internet but embrace it as the tool that it is. 

I think if the empire falls, it will be due to the importance we place on what we project instead of what we think or do.  The fact that a lot of the posturing occurs on social networks is of less concern than the fact that we humans continue to pursue status and honor acquisition.

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One week until She’s Geeky

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I’m looking forward to She’s Geeky.  It’s an "unconference" — which means a few scheduled talks, informal breakout sessions and an opportunity to hear and digest the perspectives of just about anyone who comes.  This year it’s for women only. 

If the stars align, I’m going to livecast some conversations from the site, using Ustream.tv.  This way, those who can’t come this year can have a quick look into the subjects that bubble to the surface. 

If you can break away, She’s Geeky begins Monday afternoon and ends Tuesday afternoon.  This will be a good way to gather data on the technology experience to the benefit of all.

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Google + Random House = higher book sales?

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Epicenter reports a rumor that Random House is caving/cashing in to join the Google book scanning initiative.   

I hope they at least wait to load books of recent vintage whose writers are still on the planet.  [Like yours truly.] 

The article reports that this might give RH a boost in sales.  Search me, but I still think publishers ought to look at their current business models before they embrace something that could mess with their writers’ intellectual property. 

They should move online to market their books, not run the content there.  Launch Internet campaigns.  Livecast author interviews.  Provide advance copies to bloggers.  Create interactive websites for books and authors.  Revive the old-fashioned serial approach, if you’re bent on putting content online.  Use dynamic language to invite readers’ interest.  Focus groups of people beyond NYC and the East Coast.

Finally, try publishing fewer and better books.  Then you can apply more marketing muscle to those books instead of spreading your staff too thin.  That means better message platforms, stronger analysis of sales trends and a brand that readers everywhere recognize and understand.

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Lipstick Queen on products and a point of view

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A couple of weeks ago I heard Poppy King participate in a panel discussion on doing business in the US.  She is Australian. 

When Poppy was barely out of high school, she invented her own line of lipsticks, marketed it, got it into the best stores and sold it to Estee Lauder.  She is finishing a book about the whole experience, scheduled for publication next year.  And she has a new company called Lipstick Queen.

Poppy remains very close to her original inspiration:  her love of lipstick and desire for a unique color range and consistency.  She has come up with a straightforward way to keep focused on the essence of her business [in the cadence of the wedding day ritual, "something borrowed, something blue…"].

Something simple
Something true
Something consistent and
Something with a point of view

Of course, the trick is, you have to understand and deliver "simple" and "true."  Without these realities, there’s no need for consistency or message.

I like how Poppy has taken an inanimate object and stressed the importance of having a point of view about it.  No matter how many times we have an example like this — whether it’s Lipstick Queen, Apple or a Web service — I like being reminded that putting a product out there deserves your attentiveness to what you want buyers to experience.

If you have a point of view — whatever your role in an enterprise — it will come across in every task you perform.  Your point of view is where differentiation begins.