Nearly 150 years ago, George Eliot gave us a name for our project. She pointed out that we could ameliorate the problems of the human condition, day by day, year by year, toward better.
Max Roser highlighted three sentences that seem like they can’t all be true: “The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better.” But of course, they are. And they continue to be.
I wish meliorism had a catchier name because the concept deserves to be more widely understood and embraced.
This is the point. This is at the heart of our work and the challenge of our days.
We give names to the days of the week (we even have weeks). We eat something different for breakfast than dinner. We chronicle the passage of time. In fact, our chronicling of time is what makes it noticeable.
Coordination can only happen when we’re in sync with our peers, and coordination is the result of the peers we choose and the time we choose to measure.
Show me your calendar and I’ll tell you where you’ve been, where you’re going and who’s on the journey with you.
If your calendar isn’t working for you, get a new one.
Organizations lie all the time. Big lies, sometimes, but usually small ones.
Is the call volume actually unusually heavy? Did a chef really prepare this meal just for me?
These fiblets are so common that they become part of the culture, a trope that lets the user know that this is a real organization–the same way that certain kinds of logos are trendy, these lies show that the organization is part of a particular genre. (Have you ever noticed how many INSURANCE COMPANIES WRITE SOME OF THEIR RULES IN ALL CAPS? It’s because that’s what big insurance companies do).
The insurgent marketer, then, has two practical choices:
You can easily show that you’re not of this group by relentlessly telling the truth to your customers. “We know that this phone tree is inconvenient, but it saves our operators time and so it saves us money.” Or, “The boss doesn’t want you to walk around the service bay, it has nothing to do with insurance regulations.”
You can sniff out the fiblets your competitors use and use them as well, creating the meta fib that you’re as big and heartless a bureaucracy as they are.
As consumers, it definitely doesn’t pay to call out the fiblets when talking to hard-working frontline employees. They’ve got it tough enough already.
In big organizations, project management is a distinct skill. It involves timekeeping, record keeping and organization. The project manager knows the budget and the deadline, and ensures that constituents stay in sync. This is the construction coordinator and the movie producer.
The product manager, on the other hand, makes decisions about features, scale and the final product. The product manager coordinates many inputs and ultimately makes critical marketing decisions, because they’re deciding what the product is. This is the architect, the movie director and the real estate developer.
In startups, agencies and scrappy organizations, it’s quite likely that one person is doing both jobs.
If that’s you, it’s worth a second to consider if it pays to get better at the one you don’t like as much. Managing projects better changed my career.
When the truck makes a delivery at the nearby True Value hardware store, Danny needs to figure out which shelf to put it on.
Should the extension cords go next to the hoses? After all, they both do the same thing, one with electricity and one with water…
The purpose of putting things in order is so that others can find them.
If you’ve been frustrated with a price list, a menu, a user interface or a bookshelf, it’s because someone didn’t spend the time to understand the expected taxonomy.
When we sort our stuff, we’re telling people a story. A story about our stuff and a story about how we see the world.
We don’t have to like the fact that the world demands a taxonomy, but we can accept that it does. Strangers want to know what shelf to put us on.
When I include links to various books and items on this blog, your purchases generate a small royalty that I earmark for worthy causes. This year, we were able to help BuildOn and the community in Khakh build a new school. It’s the first real school building the village has ever had, and it’s likely that members of the community, inspired by this first school, will be organizing to build a second one soon.
A building is more than shelter. It’s a flag, a placeholder, a symbol of commitment. A school like this transforms the culture, and will make a lifelong difference for thousands of people.
If you want to change the world, change the systems. And buildings are a fine place to start.
Tens of thousands of miles away, we’re also able to help rebuild housing with the Fuller Center.
Marketing as we know it happened because of machines. Machines made factories dramatically more efficient, which meant that producers could no longer easily sell everything they made. When you go from making four ceramic plates a day to 4,000, your capacity starts to look like a problem.
That’s a new challenge. A farmer could figure out how to use every bit of fertile soil available.
CBS TV didn’t have excess capacity. There are only 24 hours in a day, and they could only broadcast one at a time. YouTube, on the other hand, makes almost all of its decisions based on their unlimited capacity to host video.
The challenge of infinity is contagious. While some freelancers are fully booked, most have hours each day unspoken for. An unspoken hour of capacity can feel like a burden.
The quest for more is seductive.
But what happens when we accept that capacity might not be excess? It might simply be capacity.
How do we start to see our way toward better, not simply more?
One reason is that we’re really good at noticing when they’re out of tune. Just a tiny bit off changes our perception of the sound.
The other reason is that if the performers wait for a leader in their section to go first, every entrance and every attack will be muddled. You need to go when it’s time to go, not wait to follow closely behind.
Coordinating our tone and our tempo creates magic, and yet we often fail to lead, preferring to follow instead.
In 2024, worldwide gift card sales will pass a trillion dollars for the first time.
It’s a good grift.
Surveys show that the buyer spends about 21% less per gift than they do when they actually buy something, while the recipients of the gift find themselves spending 61% more than the value of the card when they actually redeem it for money. Most of all, the retailer comes out ahead–far fewer returns, lots of never redeemed cards, better cash flow and new customer accounts when people do show up to eventually buy.
In the current system, the recipient loses. They get a smaller gift, they often spend more money than the gift was for, they’re stuck with the store the giver chose (which is the only thing they actually chose) and there’s very little in the way of thoughtfulness or connection involved.
In essence, holidays become a circle of people, handing the same wad of cash around, except instead of ending up with the cash, they then spend even more money when they go shopping tomorrow.
Every cultural occasion and holiday has been commercialized by retailers in search of more. And the insatiable desire to consume is contagious, and gift giving is inherently viral, since you need to have someone to give the gift to. As a result, we’ve built a system that’s expensive and not particularly good at what it sets out to do.
Given the size and profitability of the cards, I’m surprised that they’re not a much better experience.
What might a better process look like?
Go the the online store, find an item you think a friend would like. Instead of ordering it, choose GIFT CARD.
The store asks you if you’d like to purchase a charitable donation add on as well.
Now, the site produces a unique digital gift card, with a picture of the item and a link to redeem it. The QR code it generates also includes a thank you from the charity.
Your friend simply has to scan the lovely page you printed out (or emailed them) to go to the redeem page. Once there, they can choose to get the item you carefully picked out, choose something else or easily get cash back.
And so, they get delighted three times: When they get the thoughtful card. When they go to the site and discover they can get the cash back. And when the item arrives in the post and they unwrap it.
Now the thought really does count. This is a low hassle, high delight way to show someone you were thinking of them. If stores used their persuasive powers, it could also raise billions for worthy causes along the way.
Either that, or you could give cash and save everyone a lot of trouble.
December 22, 2024
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