Three magic words. They light up our brain, they grab our attention, they initiate action.
But they're being corrupted by the ease of reach and the desire by some organizations to grow at all costs.
I doesn't always mean a human. More and more, "I" means us, the corporation, the shareholders, the faceless. I is actually, "we," and you're not a part of that we.
NEED more and more means "want." We want you to do this, to buy this, to forward this, to write about this. We want it because it will give us more.
YOU doesn't mean you in particular. It actually means, "anyone." Anyone who can see this site or read this email or drive by our billboard. If you've got money or clout or attention to spare, sure, we want you.
Political fundraisers have turned this from an art to a science to an endless whine. So have short-term direct marketers with access to a keyboard and the free stamps of internet connection.
We used to have our ears open to anyone we loved or trusted whispering, "I need you." It's been overwhelmed lately, though, by selfish marketers shouting, "WE WANT ANYONE."
November 16, 2014
One thing you'll discover when you start pan roasting brussel sprouts or tomatoes (or running a theater or an airline, or just about anything for that matter) is that more is not always better.
Sure, I know that you have three uncooked sprouts left, and it would be a shame to not serve them, but if you add those three to the pan with the others, the entire batch will suffer.
Adding one more is just fine, until adding one more ruins everything.
Greed costs.
November 15, 2014
If someone asked you how to do something, would you act it out, using no words at all?
Of course not. Yet, in our increasingly post-literate world, it seems like organizations are afraid to use prose. It doesn't cost anything, and when you post a link, you have all the room in the world to clearly write out a narrative of how something works. You can even do it in 200 languages without too much trouble.
Here's the fundamental mistake that marketers make: Great design often needs little explanation. And so, natural, organic, effective design often comes without written instructions. But, and it's a huge but, the converse is not true. Shipping something without instructions doesn't mean it's a great design.
What are the chances that a guest is going to use this hotel shower properly the first time?
Why does Ikea believe that providing nothing but little pictures is the best way to teach someone to do something?
After wasting hours trying to figure out the proseless instructions for a fancy lamp I purchased from an Italian company, I wrote a narrative for the company, in the vain hope that perhaps they'd save other people the trouble.
Most people would never choose to read it. Except the people who are stuck and confused, which is precisely the group you write instructions for. When in doubt, write it down. By all means, you still need pictures, even video. But there's nothing to replace the specificity that comes from the alphabet. Use labels. Use words.
November 14, 2014
I grew up near a mall that had 42 shoe stores. If a store didn't carry what you wanted, it wasn't a big deal to walk 22 feet to a store that did.
The core issue of net neutrality isn't whether or not a big corporation ought to have the freedom to maximize profit by choosing what to feature. No, the key issue is: what happens when users are unable to choose a different middleman?
In a town with ten newspapers, finding a newspaper that brings you the truth you seek is not a challenge. But network effects and lock in mean that in more and more arenas, there's a natural monopoly arising.
The simple example is cable TV. It doesn't pay to wire a town with five or six competing cable companies, and so we end up with one middleman. The simple understanding of net neutrality: When there's only one middleman, who gets to decide what you see?
When local retailers disappear, who decides what you can buy? Do we want a middleman to be able to lock content out for their own reasons? I think it's reasonable to have the following principle in place: Promote what you approve of, but don't black out what you don't.
We can argue that it's smart branding and good business to let your users have what they want. But often, corporate short-term interests fly in the face of long-term customer satisfaction, and the race to profit gets in the way of our culture's need to hear and see and read work that might not fit those interests.
What if search engines or ISPs decide to 'disappear' content they don't like? When there are plenty of middlemen, it's not really an issue. But when there's lock-in, it's too late to have this discussion.
We make a deal with the natural monopolies in our lives. They get the privilege and the profit of being the only one, but in exchange, they accept the responsibility of being open middlemen, of being neutral, of not blacking out those that don't pay up or that don't agree.
If ConEd or your local power utility said, "sorry, our electricity can't be used on Maytag appliances because they didn't pay a slotting fee," you'd be appropriately incensed. But when it happens to ideas, I fear the cost is even greater.
We live in the connection economy, a world based on ideas. When a few corporate titans can control the flow of those ideas and the essence of that connection, we've given up far too much.
November 13, 2014
Eight years ago, I described how city-wide wifi would destroy the business of local radio. Once you have access to a million radio stations online, why would you listen to endless commercials and the top 40?
I realized last week that this has just happened. Not via wifi, but via Bluetooth and the smart phone.
The car-sharing driver (Bluetooth equipped car, with a smart phone, of course) who picked me up the other day was listening to a local radio station. It was almost as if he was smoking a pipe or driving a buggy. With so many podcasts, free downloads and Spotify stations to listen to, why? With traffic, weather and talking maps in your pocket, why wait for the announcer to get around to telling you what you need to know?
The first people to leave the radio audience will be the ones that the advertisers want most. And it will spiral down from there.
Just as newspapers fell off a cliff, radio is about to follow. It's going to happen faster than anyone expects. And of course, it will be replaced by a new thing, a long tail of audio that's similar (but completely different) from what we were looking for from radio all along. And that audience is just waiting for you to create something worth listening to.
November 12, 2014
The original Peter Principle made perfect sense for the industrial age: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, organizations keep promoting people up the organization until the people they promote reach a job where they are now incompetent. Competence compounded until it turns into widespread incompentence.
Industrial organizations are built on competence, and the Peter Principle describes their undoing.
Consider a corollary, one for our times:
"To be promoted beyond your level of confidence."
Too often, the person who wrecks our work is us.
In every modern organization with upward mobility, good people are promoted until they get to the point where they lose their nerve.
You can check out the original Peter Principle here.
November 11, 2014
We have the privilege about being picky in who we expect/hope/count on/need to pick us.
Pity the foolish 8-year-old boy who gives a kid just a year older the power to make his day. In that moment, being picked for the kickball team is the most important thing in the world, and his dreams are in the hands of a kid with a demonstrated history of poor judgment. If you were walking by the playground and he yelled, "Hey Mister! Wanna be on our team?" it would (I hope) mean little to you. You're no longer willing to be judged by a kid who can't even ride a bike.
But what if your organization or your brand or your self esteem has chosen a chooser you can't rely on, or one you're not qualified to expect to have come through? If you say, "we need 100 of the top CIOs at the biggest companies in this region to choose our technology," you've made it clear who the choosers are. But if this group is swayed by bribes (which you won't pay) or local salespeople (which you don't have), you have a disconnect.
Or what if you "need" to be picked by the anonymous crowds on social networks, or picked by the apparently powerful editor or the bouncer at the club?
A huge swath of human unhappiness is generated by selecting someone to pick you, only to have that person abuse the power, let you down or otherwise seduce you into pursuing something that's not going to happen. Unchoose those people as choosers.
The person or organization you're seeking to be chosen by: Do they have a good track record? Do they choose wisely? Coherently? Reliably? Do they abuse their power, seducing you into acting against your interests? Do they make you miserable? Do they have good taste?
Do you have the resources and reputation necessary to be picked by someone like the person you're needing to be chosen by?
If you've signed up to be approved by, selected by, promoted by or otherwise chosen by someone who's not going to respond to your efforts, it's not a smart choice.
And one last thing: The ultimate privilege is to pick ourselves. To decide that the most important person to be chosen by is ourself.
If you pick yourself as the chooser, if you give yourself the power to say 'go', I hope you'll respect how much power you have, and not waste it.
November 10, 2014
In the magical abundancy-based, post-industrial world, it's tempting to look at the massive web companies that connect us as benevolent overlords, institutions that want what we want.
But then they go public.
Here's a Wall Street analyst with Needham & Company speaking her truth, about Facebook:
“Wall Street cares about the business model. We care less about changing the world.”
The reality of being a senior executive at a fast-growing public internet company is that you're surrounded by thousands (or tens of thousands) of people who make millions of dollars every single time the stock price goes up a dollar.
And that's where the seeds of demise are sown.
Say whatever you want to say, the people around you are all paying attention to the stock price, and Wall Street is driving you to mediocrity, to breaking your promises, to interrupting, shaving corners, and most of all, getting stuck.
Wall Street thinks it wants industrial-style reliable incremental growth, the stuff they got accustomed to getting from General Electric, General Mills and General Dynamic. But in fact, what they invested in this time is changing the world.
The world is going to change with or without this public company. It's bumpy for us along the way, though, because we trusted the companies that are now owned by people who want something else.
November 9, 2014
Is there an alternative to one step in front of the other, barely getting by, slogging it out? Is the only way to do good work to be a zombie (until you get to the end)?
How about, "how fast will this thing go?" Not because you want to get there faster, but merely because you want to find out what it can do.
The guys who delight in designing cars aren't worried so much about getting from point A to point B. Social media heroes like Gary Vee can't point to a direct ROI for everything they do. The famous chef probably isn't using those knives merely because they help her cut the carrots…
Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design. And it's fun.
November 8, 2014
…is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.
This is news, a state of affairs due to the significant value of connection, to the power of ideas that spread and to the low cost of production.
Delighting a few with an idea worth spreading is more valuable than ever before.
November 7, 2014
