While working on a mutual friend’s collaborative project, I met Jonathan Luebbers. He articulately shared a great insight for our friend. He has given me permission to share with you as well. These are his words:

If you are informative, you’re interesting and nice to have.
If you are insightful and prescriptive you’re extremely valuable.
If they cannot achieve their objectives without you, you’re irreplaceable.
At informative, you get cut if money gets tight and might be replaced when money flows again.
At insightful and prescriptive, you are the last non-essential item to be cut and one of the first to be reinstated when money flows again.
At mission-critical, they pack their lunches, skip wine at dinner, trade down their cars, and cancel the family vacation. They don’t cut you.
Your authority at start will flow from what you present and how you present it.
In the longer run your authority will flow from the results of your clients.

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Jonathan Luebbers (Jonathan_Luebbers [at] yahoo [dot] com) enjoys using strategy, product management, and market research to help people and organizations release their untapped potential. Having returned to MN to be closer to family, he’s looking for his next opportunity. In the interim he co-founded Non-Profit Transitions, an organization of professionals dedicated to helping non-profits through the bumpy waters of the current economy. In his free time he and his wife enjoy finding new ways to make their 9-month old little boy laugh.
Jonathan’s professional profile can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanluebbers.

I recently read a blog post by Louis Rosenfeld, titled “Shame and Disgust” about an ethical issue he faced a while back. A link to his story was posted as an example of dilemmas worth discussing at an upcoming usability conference. Due to spam, his post is now closed to comments. However, he found my reply useful and gave me his blessing to post it here for you.

Hello Lou,

You asked what you “should have done.” I can’t answer that, but I can tell you what I would have done as a contractor in this order:

1. I would have slept on it and calmed down.
2. Stopped everything and scheduled a brief private person-to-person meeting with the person who told me, “they didn’t really want to make it easy for veterans” [His dilemma:  It appeared that his client asked him to go against his better judgment and avoid making a website as usable as possible for the intended web site visitors, who happened to be U.S. military veterans. ] (more…)

Here is how you often hear marketing simplified by experts:

• Get your name out there! (ok, become known, but for what?)
• Go after your niche (well of course! nothing is for everyone – who are your raving fans?)
• Have a consistent brand presence (yes, consistency is the foundation for establishing your integrity)
• Go viral (this one really feels yucky to me, how bout you? when news travels by word-of-mouth it is the sign of success — why associate success with disease? I prefer to call it “making friends.”)

(more…)