I heard this while speaking with my friend Mark Levy, who heard it from some branding guy, he couldn’t remember whom. “Positioning is dead,” the guy said. Since both Mark and I are positioning people this was of major interest.

He said that positioning was dead because the people, the users, the community… they were creating the positions of companies by participating in Web 2.0. He believed that companies’ positions were defined by what was being said about them in the infosphere.

This is total nonsense. While Web 2.0 gives people a voice and amplifies the conversation, you have to ask where the conversation comes from in the first place.

Look–most people, bloggers included, want to be lead. They want to be told what to think about and how to think. Then they can react and respond, but not until then. It’s very rare that people initiate the conversation. Those who do are called “thought leaders,” everyone else is part of the crowd.

Positioning is all about framing a context that defines what people need to think about. Positioning is about providing the seeds that ultimately flower into conversation. Reasonable people take the seeds and help them germinate. Unreasonable people create the seeds. Good positioning unreasonably tells people what to think in the first place.

Web 2.0 is a fabulous development in how people and businesses communicate. It’s like going from a one-way street to multi-lane boulevard. Just don’t get deluded into seeing this as creativity. Most of the time it’s just traffic.

All UNREASONABLE ideas violate some accepted wisdom.  Some norm.  Some convention.  Some formality.  Some age-old practice.  Some way of doing things, the contravention  of which would be inconceivable.

That’s what makes them unreasonable.

I’ve been wracking my brain to find a new one, but there’s no way around it. Although there are hundreds of specific approaches, when you distill them all down, there are only three ways to expand a business. Three main ways, and only three. What are they?

1. Sell more to your existing customers
2. Find more new customers
3. Merge or acquire your competitors

You might ask, “What’s the point of talking about three when there are ‘hundreds of specific approaches’?” That’s a reasonable question - it’s easy to think consolidating them obscures the opportunity. But in fact, it’s just the opposite.

You see, most people don’t think much, and when they do they never pay attention to how they’re thinking -so they never develop tools for how to do it. Generalization is one of those tools - a powerful one allows you to crunch a whole bunch of information into a few manageable pieces you can more easily manipulate in your mind.

That’s what we’ve just done here. Now that you realize there are only three ways to grow a business - whether it’s sales, or cash flow, or market share… whatever, you can examine each of these three more carefully and see how they apply to your business.

And that’s what you should do next.

To say that time management is a huge problem could be understatement of the century. Except for Tim Ferris, the author of The Four Hour Workweek, I don’t know anyone who feels they have enough time for everything they’re supposed to do. Full disclosure: neither do I - expanding Axcelus (our international business acceleration consulting company) definitely takes a ton of time. But that’s the key word — supposed. The ultimate secret to time management is this: only do things you want to do, and only do things you are pretty sure will help you accomplish whatever it is your care about.

That’s unreasonable time management because there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of things you’re supposed to do each week; things other people think you should do. Maybe even things you read in a magazine, or in a blog somewhere.

But in the unreasonable world, there are no shoulds, no supposed-tos. There is nothing you have to do because it supports some else’s world-view. There are only the things you want to do and only the things that will make a difference. If something is not at least one, or better yet — both of these things — DON’T DO IT!

Take a look at your task list, and delete everything you either don’t want to do, or don’t think will make a difference in your current cause. Only do what’s left. Of course, this doesn’t insure you have enough time for all these things and you still have to choose among the remainders, but at least you’ve pared down the list.

You have two choices for the rest of those things: delegate them to someone else if they are important enough, and if not, just dump them. (Here’s another time management secret: if you dump things, and they end up being important, someone will remind you later.)

Met a really unreasonable guy yesterday. His name is Mike Long, and he’s a behind-the-scenes internet marketer. What that means is that he’s helped a number of very successful internet marketers become successful. Extrememly so.

His new website is http://www.area51marketing.com/, and it’s definitely worth a visit. It currently isn’t selling anything — although of course, it may down the road. Right now, he’s giving away excellent free content (”content” is a Mike Long word) about how to do certain marketing things better. What’s particularly interesting is that he’s controlling the “free” content so that it cannot be redistributed, which runs contrary to the way most internet marketing marketers work.

He probably doesn’t tell people this out loud (I’m not sure if I’m supposed to repeat this), but Mike says that his true goal is “Total Understanding.” In other words, he is successful to the degree that his work improves the general level of understanding — in whatever domain he is applying his efforts. Not more sales, more profits, more happiness, more sex. Simply more understanding. I think that’s being unreasonable.