Mike Huber

This is just slightly adapted from an image found here.� Humorous but basically true.� Notice no time is shown talking to the customer and getting feedback.

This came to me in an email but I do not know the origin of the story.  Perhaps, the person that first wrote this could respond and I can give them credit for a truly heartwarming story.

In 1986, Mikele Mebembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University.
On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mikele approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mikele worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Mikele stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Mikele never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Mikele was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mikele and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mikele, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mikele couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mikele summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mikele’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

One day one, a large lake contains only a single small lily pad. Each day the number of lily pads doubles, until on the thirtieth day the lake is totally choked with vegetation. On what day was the lake half full?

The answer is on the 29th day.

It takes 29 days for the first half of the lake to fill with lily pads, but only twenty-four hours for the lake to become overwhelmed.

Welcome to the 29th day.

Imagine that the proliferating lily pads represent the expanding array of changes that face us. Daily changes occur but businesses cannot absorb the repercussions fast enough to keep pace.

Now, substitute the word changes with competitors.
The online world is constantly changing. The old mantra about the speed of change in online is every online year is worth 7 in the offline world. With that amount of change and time compression, how do you keep up? How do you innovate?
How do you change your website in order to hit a moving target?

How do you put your mind around all the changes to make sense of the different opportunities and how do you frame those opportunities within your corporate mindset to implement them and to return a positive ROI? You do it by studying the competition, by studying web site best practices and taking these disparate pieces of information and putting them together to form new web site layouts, new products and new sales opportunities.

Online selling is about studying competing businesses and why they are successful. It’s about studying why they make the decisions they do. And then, it’s about looking at the current products available for you to sell and melding them with the disparate pieces of information you’ve gleaned from your competition and coming up with innovative new products that build revenues exponentially.

It’s the 29th day, an expanding array of changes and competitor s products face all of us in an increasingly compressed time frame. It’s time to make changes in your website strategy.

What do you do?

Contact me, I can help.