Older guy walks into the service area on the parkway and asks one of the staff, "do you have a pay phone? My car broke down and I need to call my daughter."
The staff person, killing time by checking his cell phone, is confused. He's not sure what a pay phone is, then he figures it out, and says, "no," before going back to his phone.
It never occurs to him to hand the phone to the man so he can make a call.
Part of it is the boss's fault. He's not paying much attention to hiring or training or incentives. He's paying as little as he can, and turnover is high. After all, every one of his customers is just passing through, no need to care.
And that message comes through to the staff, loud and clear.
Of course, at one level, all of us are just passing through.
From a more practical, business level, the ease of digital connection means that it's more and more unlikely that you can be uncaring or mistreat people and not be noticed.
But most of all, life is better when we act like we might see someone again soon, isn't it?
December 3, 2015
A reporter recently hacked an interview he did with me, turning 17 emailed sentences into two and changing both the message and the way it was delivered.
That used to make sense, when papers involved column inches, but it was for an online article.
Why make things shorter than necessary if you're not paying for paper?
Why make a podcast or a talk 18 minutes long… the internet isn't going to run out of reels of tape.
As we've moved from books to posts to tweets to thumbs up, we keep making messages shorter. In a world with infinite choice, where there's always something better and more urgent a click away, it's tempting to go for shorter.
In fact, if you seek to make a difference (as opposed to gather a temporary crowd), shorter isn't what's important: Dense is.
Density is difficult to create. It's about boiling out all the surplus, getting to the heart of it, creating impact. Too much and you're boring. Not enough and you're boring.
The formula is simple to describe: make it compelling, then deliver impact. Repeat. Your speech can be two hours long if you can keep this up.
And if you can't, make it shorter!
Long isn't the problem. Boring is.
If someone cares, they'll stick around. If they don't care, they don't matter to you anyway.
(PS Hal points out that Roger Ebert had a great line on this: "No good movie is too long! No bad movie is short enough!")
December 2, 2015
Most things are liked because they're popular.
I know that seems to be a redundancy, but it's worth decoding.
Pop music, for example, is a must-listen among certain populations because that's what "everyone else" is listening to, and being in sync is the primary benefit on offer.
The paradox, of course, is that you have to walk through a huge valley of unpopular before you arrive at the population that will embrace you because that's the thing to do.
The focus on mass acceptance, on the big company or the mass market embracing you, distracts from the difficult work of being embraced by people who lead, not follow.
December 1, 2015
The vast majority of products that are sold are treated as generic by just about everyone except the naive producer, who believes he has a brand of value.
A branded object or service has two components, one required, one desired:
1. Someone who isn't even using it can tell, from a distance, who made it. It appears that it could only be made by that producer (or it's an illegal knock off).
Ralph Lauren certainly got our attention when he started making his logo bigger and bigger, but we also see this in the shape of a Paloma Picasso pin, or the label on a pair of Tom's shoes, or the red soles of Louboutin or the sound of a Harley or the cadence of Sarah Kay or …
If we (the user or the observer) can't tell who made it, then there's no brand. That's the distinction between generic and specific…
2. In the long haul, successfully branded items succeed because the user likes that the brand is noticed in daily use, either by others or even by themselves.
That's subtle but crucial. Does the very existence of the logo or the identifier or the distinction make the user happier?
Can you imagine how crestfallen the debutante would be if her date didn't even know what a Birkin bag was?
November 30, 2015
The only way to become the writer who has written a book is to write one.
The only way to become the runner who has just finished a run is to go running.
You might dread the writing or the running or the leading, but it's the key step on the road to becoming.
If it's easier, remind yourself what you're about to be.
November 29, 2015
This is clearly and demonstrably true of mutual funds. It's easy to confirm.
And yet…
We are very uncomfortable with randomness. So the newspaper does a 12 page section of mutual funds, filled with articles and ads and charts, all touting past performance.
Superstition is what we call the belief in causation due to a mistaken correlation of unrelated data. A broken mirror doesn't actually cause seven years of bad luck, and cheering in a certain way isn't going to help the Yankees, sorry.
Of course, we don't live in a completely random world. The scientific method and statistics make it more likely than ever that you can find trends that actually matter.
The hard part is accepting that the random things actually are unpredictable, and refusing to spend time or money guessing on what can't be reliably guessed. It frees up a lot of time and resources to focus on the things that are actually worth measuring.
November 28, 2015
Black Friday, of course, is a con.
But it's also a symptom of a terrible trap we've set for ourselves.
Consider the joy a little kid has the first time he spends his own money to buy an ice cream cone. This isn't something he does every day, it's not something he has to do, it's not something he's trying to get over with. Instead, the entire process unrolls in slow motion. It's consumption, no doubt about it, the last step in a long industrial/agricultural/marketing system. But at least this last step is special beyond words.
Now, consider the mall. The mall, today.
For the three billion people on Earth who have never experienced air conditioning, window displays and the extraordinary safety and wealth that the mall represents, a trip to the mall is mindblowing. For the typical consumer, egged on by a media frenzy and harried by a completely invented agenda, today is nothing but a hassle.
All that time, all that money, all those emotions spent for not one good reason.
It's more about what you didn't get on sale, or how many more people you need to "cross off" or just how much shiny but useless stuff you can grab faster than the next person. A reversal of 100,000 years of not enough to a brief few decades of more, more, more.
Every person reading this today has access to more wealth than the last King of France did. An astounding array of choices, a bounty of available connections and emotions.
Don't let someone else scam you into being unhappy.
November 27, 2015
Thank you as in: I couldn't do it without you. As in: I don't want to do this alone. As in: I was afraid. And mostly: I would miss you if you were gone.
Thank you brings us closer together.
Thank you is a limb worth going out on.
November 26, 2015
Twenty years ago, when I was working on projects with AOL, we were sure that this was the next big thing for a long time to come. It was a profitable natural monopoly, one that could expand to serve everyone's needs. They were the end of the future of the Internet.
When one surveyed people in 1996, most thought AOL = The Internet. They were the same thing, game over.
Then, of course, just four years later, Yahoo cornered the market. It was where everyone started their internet experience. All you needed. That didn't last more than a decade.
We have similar conversations about the form factor and platform of the iPhone. And Facebook, of course, will be the way generations connect online… it's hard to imagine the next thing.
Until it's here.
As far as I can tell, there's always a next thing.
[Even better, it turns out that this thing, the thing we have now, is worth working with, because it offers so many opportunities compared with merely waiting for the next thing.]
November 25, 2015
The art of the successful institution is figuring out which cases are special enough to deserve a fresh eye.
It's virtually impossible to scale an institution that insists on making a new decision every time it encounters a new individual. On the other hand, what makes a bureaucracy stupid is its insistence that there are no special cases.
They're all special. The difficult work at scale is figuring out which ones are special enough.
And, if you want to be seen and respected and sought out as the anti-bureaucracy, there's your strategy: All cases are special cases.
Good judgment, it turns out, is very difficult to boil down to a few pages in a rulebook.
November 24, 2015
