Every year, Audi, Ford, GM and the rest of the auto companies bring concept cars to the big shows. These swooping, modern, magical cars are in stark contrast to the cars that are actually for sale.
Why do they bother? It’s not a form of market research.
Begin with the fact that car companies need their product to be stylish. By making older cars seem ‘old’, they create social pressure to get rid of your existing car (even if it’s running fine) and keep up with the trends. And so, every year, cars are a bit different. Not in performance, really, but in the way they look and feel.
At the same time, though, consumers are really hesitant about buying a car that they’ll regret. It’s such a big purchase, it feels very different than buying a pair of purple uggs that might only be in style for a month or two.
Concept cars, then, are an assertion by the company: here’s where we think we’re going, thanks for paying attention, car nerds! Tell the others. We’re here to entertain you, have fun. We know it’s outlandish today, but by exposing you to these features over and over for five or ten years, by the time the cars actually arrive, you’ll say “of course,” not, “what’s that?”
They’re normalizing design progress. Making it safe over time.
As you’ve probably guessed, this doesn’t only work for cars.
Any idea that needs to move from early adopters to the masses can benefit from a preview that simultaneously delights the nerds while warming up the masses for what’s to come.
March 6, 2019
Broken systems get worse when we confuse the loud voices with the important ones.
Spend a lot of time listening to the loudest complaints and you will elevate those voices to importance, because you’re no longer carefully listening to the more easily overlooked constituents.
A persistent typist with a keyboard might be a cranky critic, but is this the person you set out to serve?
If an airline makes 84% of its profit on leisure travelers, it’s not clear that the person who flies once a year on a last-minute first class fare is the person they ought to be paying the most attention to.
We can acknowledge that someone is upset, we can see them, respect them and help them. But we shouldn’t get confused that there’s a correlation between their ALL CAPS EFFORT AT ATTENTION and our agenda to serve the people we seek to serve.
March 5, 2019
The excuse made by large corporations for the impact of what they produce is that they simply follow the rules.
Of course, at these companies, there’s often a different department in charge of lobbying to change the rules so that they can increase short-term profits while being less beneficial to customers and communities.
It would only cost the car companies a dollar per car to prevent accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, which kills dozens of people. When you can run the car without the key (most modern cars), it means it’s easier than ever to pull your car into the garage and accidentally leave it running, which can kill everyone in your home before morning.
When the government worked to put in a regulation requiring this fix, the car companies lobbied against it.
Why would they do that? (Now, due to outrage, they’re fixing this particular problem. But in the past, the car companies fought seatbelts and other safety measures).
Why does any organization actively fight to lobby to lower its costs when it might benefit customers and their communities? The rules are not going to lead to lower industry sales. All the standards do is raise the bar for all the competitors. I don’t think many of us want to live in the world of Sinclair Lewis.
The restaurant industry fought a smoking ban, and the baseball bat industry fought one on aluminum bats for kids…
Sooner or later, humans are involved. And when someone says, “not on my watch,” they commit to making things better, not simply more profitable. The rules are one thing, but what if you’re better than the rules?
“We can make it better” is a far better motto than, “we meet all the regulations.”
March 4, 2019
All day we interact with others.
And sometimes, they’re bots.
Perhaps you’re in a chat room, and after a few Eliza-quality backs and forths, you realize that this helpful voice isn’t actually a voice at all, it’s simply a bot, here to interface with a tech support database.
Or you’re talking to a next-generation bot on the phone, and it’s only a minute or two into the interaction that you realize you’re being fooled by an AI, not a caring human.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient (and reassuring) to know this in advance?
But we can take this further. If you’re on the phone with American Express and the person you’re talking with has no agency, no ability to change anything and no incentive to care, wouldn’t it be helpful to know that before you had the conversation?
Or what about the publicist or direct marketer, sending you an email that purports to be personal but is in fact only personalized? Spam decorated as human interaction is still spam.
The problem with not labeling bots is that soon, we come to expect that every interaction is going to be with a bot, and we fail to invest emotional energy in the conversations we could have with actual people. I feel bad for all the actual customer service professionals (doctors, bureaucrats and others who help) who have to deal with impersonal interactions simply because their customers have been fooled one too many times.
The bots should announce, “I’m not a person, or if I am, I’m not allowed to act like one.”
Or, if there’s no room or time for that sentence, perhaps a simple *bot* at the top of the conversation. That way, we can save our human emotions for the humans who will appreciate them.
March 3, 2019
How much of your inbox activity is initiated by you? What percentage of your email threads started with an email you wrote?
And how much is spent replying to others?
And finally, how often are you bccing or being bcced?
I hope we can agree that the percentage for the third category should be close to zero.
But for the first two, the simplest way to change your day is to dramatically alter the percentage of the first two categories so that you’re adding way more value for others. In whatever way works best.
That doesn’t mean I don’t like you.
The difference is critical. It’s impossible to be a productive professional if you insist on conjoining them.
Here are two useful things to consider:
- There is plenty of disliked work from people (and things) where I don’t even know the creator. I don’t like John Adam’s operas, and I’ve never even met him. If it’s possible to dislike something without knowing the person behind it, I hope we can embrace the fact that they’re unrelated.
- If we need everyone to like our work in order to feel grounded, it means that we’ll sacrifice the best of what we could create in order to dumb it down for whatever masses happen to be speaking up. Which will make it more average (aka mediocre) and thus eliminate any magic we had hoped to create.
If someone cares enough to dislike our work, the best response is, “thank you.”
Thank you for taking the time to consider it, thank you for caring enough to let me know…
You can choose to listen (or not) to the rest of the feedback, but all you’ll learn is how one person reacted to something you built.
March 2, 2019
At some point, grown ups get tired of the feeling that accompanies growth and learning.
We start calling that feeling, “incompetence.”
We’re not good at the new software, we resist a brainstorming session for a new way to solve a problem, we never did bother to learn to juggle…
Not because we don’t want the outcomes, but because the journey promises to be difficult. Difficult in the sense that we’ll feel incompetent.
Which accompanies all growth.
First we realize something can be done.
Then we realize we can’t do it.
And finally, we get better at it.
It’s the second step that messes with us.
If you care enough to make a difference, if you care enough to get better–you should care enough to experience incompetence again.
March 1, 2019
If it’s an obligation, then you don’t have a choice.
Pretending you do is simply a way to create frustration. Free yourself to simply do what you have to do.
On the other hand, if you do have a choice (and you probably do) then it doesn’t make sense to treat it as an obligation. Own the choice.
February 28, 2019
I’m sitting on a black couch in the lobby of a nice theater. The couch is cracked and peeling, with seven strips of black gaffer’s tape holding it together. And you don’t have to be an interior geologist to see that it has developed this patina over time, bit by bit.
The question is: Who was the first person who decided to fix the couch with tape?
The third or fifth person did a natural thing–here’s a ratty couch, let’s keep it the best we can.
But the first taper?
The first taper decided that it was okay for this theater to have a taped couch. The first taper didn’t make the effort to alert the authorities, to insist on getting the couch repaired properly.
The first taper decided, “this is good enough for now.”
This is how we find ourselves on the road to decay.
Here’s a new video the team just put together for the altMBA. I hope it resonates with you…
PS The early decision deadline for the altMBA is March 1st.
February 27, 2019
For something as dominant as the four digits that we use to tell time, it’s disappointing that there’s no manual, and not surprising that we do it wrong so often.
I’m not talking about the big hand/little hand part of announcing what time it is. I’m focused on how we use our awareness of time to screw up our narrative about life.
Here are some examples:
We focus on the days, making short-term decisions, instead of being cognizant of the years. We ignore the benefits that short-term pain can have in earning us long-term satisfaction. Which means that we often fail to invest, embracing a shortcut instead.
We rehearse the past, obsessing about sunk costs, instead of freeing ourselves up to make new decisions based on new information.
We put a stopwatch on our best experiences, ticktocking the moments instead of living in them.
But we fail to be honest about the time when we’re in a dip, or unhappy, imagining instead that it is lasting forever.
We confuse the thrill of fast-paced media with the magic of doing work that matters, even though they each take just as long.
We might have a fancy watch, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at telling time.
February 26, 2019
