Recycled: The myth of the CMO
Joel Spolsky points us to: The myth of the CMO. It surprised me after I read it, because I wrote it! If I can’t remember stuff from five months ago, that’s not good. Not good at all.
technical chops come second
Brandon Hull points us to: A4Flash – flash templates, flash template, flash intros, flash presentation and flash web design. I have no doubt they can make things move. I’m not sure, though, that this site makes people click.
The best sites are often designed with a paper and pencil. If your arm gets tired, you’ve probably overdone it.
Lying with a name
Karl and Andrew pointed me to this study less than five minutes apart, so it must be good. How to tell a story with your name: Florida Red or Moody Blue: Study Looks at Appeal of Off-beat Product Names – Knowledge@Wharton.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Ejaz Mohammed points us to: ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says.
Great Enough!
Perfect is the enemy of good. No doubt about it.
The excellent feedback I got from readers made it eminently clear that you agree with this sentiment. If you don’t ship, it’s not really worth doing. More important, we’ve only got a finite amount of time and resources to invest in anything (thanks, Chris Morris). The real issue is this: when do we stop working on something (because it’s good enough) and work on some other element of the offering.
When do we stop working on making a keyboard better and start working on the packaging or the promotion? When do we accept the status quo as unchangeable because the marketplace has embraced a standard, and then put our effort into less earthshattering, but presumably higher leverage tasks?
If you riff through your top 10 great successes of the last decade (you pick your field, doesn’t matter) aren’t most of them areas where someone refused to accept that the industry’s status quo wasn’t good enough, and instead set out to change a fundamental rule of that industry?
Maxwell House settled. Howard at Starbucks didn’t. American settled, Jet Blue didn’t. Vogue settled, Daily Candy didn’t.
I’m not arguing that nothing is good enough. Far from it. Every time I give a speech, I spend two slides saying, "everything is good enough" and at some levels, I’m totally right. But for those that are intent on creating something remarkable, it seems that the attractive vision is to believe precisely the opposite, at least about the stuff you care about.
Double SUV storytelling
Andrew Tonkin sends us to Sprayonmud Products.
Not only isn’t your SUV actually safer, but now you can spray on mud to prove that you are using it to its full potential. Or not, who knows…
More on good enough
Tons of mail on my recent posts. Three kinds:
1. Starbucks coffee isn’t that good. "It’s the story, not the coffee" you wrote.
2. I’m right, nothing is good enough.
3. I’m wrong, I’m elite, everything is good enough for most people. And having people agree on screws is a good thing.
What sort of screws are in your house?
Philips head (the kind with the X) and slot screws are quite common. And they don’t work nearly as well as they should.
McFeely’s sells square drive screws (see Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools.) These are better in every way. And you don’t have them.
Why? Because the "original" kind are good enough. And once Home Depot and the local hardware store and the contractor agree on something that’s good enough, the market gets stuck and we end the relentless search for better.
If it weren’t for the web, these screws would have their own tiny niche (except in Canada, where they know better). I wonder if thanks to a few blogs, better starts showing up?
The seduction of “good enough”
What an amazing world we live in. Information flying about at the speed of light. Cures or treatments for many major diseases. Airplanes. Food for many, if not most. Cat food that tastes like pate.
It almost feels churlish to complain.
But here’s the deal: almost everything is lousy.
Sure, it’s way way better than it was. Sure it’s a miracle.
But is anything as good as it could be?
Maybe a cup of Starbucks coffee or a Scharffenberger chocolate bar. But almost everything else needs a lot of work.
That canoe could be half the weight. There’s no reason to wait an hour to get on an airplane. Software development should be twice as fast at half the cost.
And what’s with the layout of this keyboard? They came up with a keyboard a century ago, decided it was good enough and then stopped! Holy Carpal Tunnel, Batman.
I’ve got a few posts worth on this topic, but here are my two big ideas to start:
1. Humans tend to work on a problem until they get a good enough solution, instead of a solution that’s right.
2. The marketplace often rewards solutions that are cheaper and good enough, instead of investing in the solution that promises to lead to the right answer.
This all sounds pessimistic. Are we doomed to inefficient products, unreliable computers, overpriced services and new devices that last for a while and then just plain break?
I don’t think so. I think that the open nature of the web and the hypercompetitive environment of worldwide competition are pushing things in two different directions at the same time. First, the hyper-cheap, sort of junky stuff that discounters and others want to sell in volume. And second, the relentless pursuit of better. (RPB). RPB is the opposite of good enough. It’s not Jack Welch’s six sigma nonsense in which engineers codify mediocrity. It’s a consistent posture of changing the rules on an ongoing basis.
David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue, was talking today about the way he’s running the airline. By any measure, it’s good enough. Hey, it’s far and away the best airline the USA. But he’s not even close to settling. He riffed today about turning one out of three bathrooms on every one of his planes into a ladies only room. What a great idea. Low cost. Fast. And RPB.
I asked him why he doesn’t raise the price on the 20,000 flights they fly from New York to Florida (every day). If he raised it $10, he’d make an extra $11 million a year in profit! Without losing a customer.
He said, "We could always do that later. Right now, it keeps us focused and hungry and efficient to do it for less."
Thirty seconds
I was walking on stage, Tom was walking off. I got to talk to him for thirty seconds.
My energy level tripled.
Tom Peters does that to people. He does it on purpose. Do you?