Zoinks! New website, what were they thinking!

AA,

That’s right ya’ll, MT is growing up! New website, new logo, new designs. . . ok well the new designs are in development inshaAllah.

Let me begin by saying that “design is a journey, not a destination.” Alhemdulilah, a lot of people loved the old website, rest assured that we did too. But the face-lift was necessary from a technical point of view: we had too much flash, pages were not linked to a single template, there were inconsistencies in text and page layouts. . . so on and so forth. It served us well and give it our heartfelt salaams!

This is just the beginning of a new phase in MT’s history. We like to call it the Phoenix Quarter because we rising out of some ashes from the last six months. We back. We bad. And we love Lupe Fiasco. Ok, that last part was not necessary but it is very true.

We kept the spirit of the old website for the most part, there is one area that is very different from the old part. That is the product page. Yep, this thing is totally different. You asked for more, larger, easier to access pictures and that is what we gave you.

What do you think? We would love to hear your thoughts on three questions:

What do you like/dislike?
Why do you like/dislike it?
How can we improve it?

Let us have it!

Salaam.Z.

MTBT: Motivating the motivators.

Salaam,

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the king declares, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

If Shakespeare was alive today he might have quoted the old leadership adage, “It is lonely on top” and however you want to say it for the most part it holds true. Regardless of the situation as a leader it is your obligation to provide direction to your peers and keep cool when things get hot.

MuslimTees has been a unique experiment in leadership. In the beginning, the three founders did not define an organizational structure. We would just be three guys, all doing work that needed to be done. That did not work out. At all. A business, an organization needs a leader.

In the end I was elected as the ameer, or leader, of the group. Which is not automatically a good thing as might be perceived. It comes with a lot of responsibility. I am held accountable by Allah for how I treat my followers, provide questions to answers that I have no experience in, and so forth. At the end of the day the responsibilities that people think you have are only the iceberg of you worries.

From a business point of view, a leader is responsible for success or failure. MuslimTees has recently had some tough times too. We had a messy transfer of duties which I hold myself to blame for bad planning. It was a tough fall and early winter, the team felt demoralized and any progress was effectively halted. To reiterate, it was tough.

As an individual I felt just as bad as the rest of the team but as a leader I had to put on a face of confidence and make people believe in a plan that I was not sure would work. After shelling out some vitamin ‘b-lieve’ I realized I could go for a boost myself. I wondered to myself, “who motivates the motivators?”

There are many ways to find motivation as a leader. The easiest one is to have a peer motivators. Who can serve as that person? Well, other motivators who have roles that are parallel to yourself. Are you an MSA president? Why not find another MSA president in another school? Grab a coffee once a month and shoot the breeze. I am fortunate enough to be friends with PhatwaFactory’s founder Obaida Abdul-rahim (if you have not heard of PhatwaFactory you need to go there and buy some of his hot shirts), he has always been a great person to bounce ideas off of and willing to listen to my complaints, may Allah increase his rizq in this life and the hereafter.

I’m going to try to make this as least cliche as possible. . .but the biggest motivator for me was Allah. The weird thing is was that asking Allah for patience and guidance was not my first idea rather it was one of my last. It is ironic since I was doing stuff for MuslimTees which one would thing would help me remember Islam, especially considering we have the Islam-Africa shirt.

When reflecting about it, I found the same to be true about my work in MSA (Muslim Student Association) or other Islamic work. I might be weird, correction I am weird, even so I think that many leaders ‘resort’ to asking Allah for support as a last means rather as it being the first step of tackling a problem. The next time I need a boost I’ll start with Allah and then everything else.

What do you do when you need a boost? Share your strategies.

Salaam.Z

MuslimTees Business Talk is an ongoing blog series providing practical business lessons, occasionally from a Muslim perspective.

Simplicity (or lack thereof)

Salamos -

Yep, we’re still here! After a little re-vamping, which we are still in the process of, expect a lot of new things, inshaAllah, that will make your MT experience much more greater.

Winter break is over or almost over for most of us people who are getting an edumication – mine was filled with a conference in Chicago, which was successful alhamdulillah (shout outs to all the cool people I met from all over America!), lots of family time, Eid, and some parties and friends here and there. I’m actually glad to get back into the cycle of things because I have a lot of cool classes this semester I’ve been looking forward to. (Did I ever mention how fun it was to be a Fine Arts major? very fun, thank God )

On a random note, everyone make du’aa for this situation of Global Warming because it affects you, even if you don’t care. This morning I woke up and all the snow was just…gone. It feels lovely, as if it was spring, but it really isn’t spring…so don’t just make du’aa, try to reduce your use of fossil fuels, and do your best to re-use and recycle… it’s not impossible, really.

Simplicity – It may be an oxymoron for this blog post, because I just wrote two paragraphs NOT about simplicity.

Often, marketers and entrepreneurs find it hard to simply describe or explain a product or service they provide – but why? Dan and Chip Heath, authers of “Made to Stick” say that it’s because of something marketers and entrepreneurs commonly share: a “curse of knowledge”. They’ve been developing and building their product for a long time that they know too much about it and have too much to say – they try to provide the whole picture, which makes a lot of sense to them – and they aren’t focusing on one core message that will make their idea “stick”.

In art, some of the greatest artwork can be ruined when the composition of the piece shows too much, and shows such a huge picture that it becomes background noise. You need to learn how to focus on an unusual element, or a smaller element that when magnified, shows a different perspective. Same goes with marketing. I’ve had this problem in both art and marketing – my professor once told me that sometimes you have to close your eyes and just cut things out, to remove distracting objects and to just not be afraid to zoom in. It’s hard at first but practice makes perfect.

But how do you know if your message is sticky or unsticky, or if your composition is not working? Chip Heath says that you should always ask the boss. Dan Heath adds that if competitors think your message applies to them as well, it doesn’t work. To think in a more abstract way, one thing I noticed about my art work was that it looked alot different on the wall of the class studio than it did on my kitchen table. I started to tape my art work to the walls all over the house and standing far away. Same with the message – if you can imagine your message next to the message of your competitor, does it stand out? If it doesn’t, how can you be distinguished, and be differentiated from your competitor?

That was something I’ve been mulling over lately, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

wasalams

-nora