"I thought you knew what you were doing…"

One of the principles of being on the bus, in the class or in your seat is that you are along for the ride. The teacher/boss/driver knows what he's doing, just shut up and sit still.

Apparently, we have come to embrace this. It's safer, and easier too. With this worldview, all blame clearly goes to the people in charge, and powerlessness is a seductive habit.

What a shame.

In an industrial setting, giving up our independence in exchange for eager compliance can lead to productivity and thus success. As that age fades, though, our habit of surrender might not pay off.

The internet is an organizing tool, a connection to billions of others. We've been given a keyboard and a megaphone, a way to change the story or the election or the policy. The authority that comes from asset ownership or experience is worth less than ever before, but we are often eager to defer to it, even when we know that the authority is wrong.

No one can force you to stand up, speak up and make a difference. But if you back off and play along, please understand that whatever happens happened, at least in part, because you acquiesced.

A $75 bottle of wine tastes better than a $14 bottle of wine. Even if you switch the wines. The promise implied in the price actually changes the way we experience the product.

Two things to keep in mind:

a. Giant promises lead to poor experiences. When you strain credulity and then fail to deliver on the miracle, we won't enjoy it, nor will we trust you again any time soon.

b. The reason we hesitate to make big promises is that we are afraid. Afraid to own it, afraid to be vulnerable in the face of possible disappointment.

Once you make a big promise, you have to work harder to keep it. Easier, it seems, to merely make tiny promises instead.

But the fact remains: Human beings have better experiences when they expect to have a better experience. To hold back on your promise is to deprive your customer of something valuable.

A promise doesn't have to be a grandiose statement, with or without fine print. It can be something as subtle as the music you hear when you walk into a restaurant or the respect a salesperson offers you when you first interact…

[I'm going to disagree with myself about a different sort of case–it is the promise that starts an ongoing experience. A promise just big enough to get me started on something that gets better all the time is the best way to engage, because that ever-improving experience will continue to delight and surprise, increasing my word of mouth and satisfaction. Alas, these sorts of experiences are hard to build and hard to find.]

I just finished Gary Vaynerchuk's new book. It comes out next week, and I recommend you spend some time with it.

Also! Here's a list of my most popular blog posts of 2012, together with a link to a bound collection of the best of my blog and ebooks from the last seven years…

It's a blend of two things. "I'd really like to help you," and, "If this isn't for you, that's okay, there are others it might be a better match for."

Generosity, not arrogance. Problem-solving, not desperation. Helpfulness, not selfishness.

What do Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter all have in common?

That's right: They have brand names that revolve around repeating a letter. Two "o"s in the first three and a double "t" in the last.

Human beings are pattern-making machines. That's a key to our survival instinct–we seek out patterns and use them to predict the future.

Which is great, except when the pattern isn't there, when our pattern-making machinery is busy picking things out that truly don't matter.

One of the problems of using the past to predict the future is that we sometimes fall in love with the inevitable coincidental patterns that can't help but exist in any set. But that doesn't mean that they work for predicting the future. Past performance is often no predictor of future results.

And yet you wouldn't know that from all the meetings we have arguing about things that can be clearly proven to be random artifacts.

The real danger of false pattern matching is that it helps us avoid the real work of digging deep for a genuine understanding of human behavior and the organizations that succeed.

Before you spend a minute or a dollar on marketing, perhaps you could answer some questions:

• Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?
• What change are you trying to make?
• How will you know if it's working?
• How long before you will lose patience?
• How long before someone on your team gets to change the mission?
• How much time and money are you prepared to spend?
• Who gets to approve this work?
• Who are you trying to please or impress?

It's cheaper to answer these questions than it is to spend time and money on marketing, but, alas, it usually doesn't happen that way.

Black Friday was a deliberate invention of the National Association of Retailers. It was not only the perfect way to promote stores during a super slow news day, but had the side benefit of creating a new cultural norm.

Any media outlet that talks about Black Friday as an actually important phenomenon is either ignorant or working hard to please their advertisers. Retailers offer very little in the way of actual discounts, they expose human panic and greed, and it's all sort of ridiculous if not soul-robbing.

Sixteen years ago, my friend Jerry Shereshewsky helped invent 'cyber Monday' as a further expansion of the media/shopping complex mania. It was amazingly easy to find people eager to embrace and talk about the idea of developing yet another holiday devoted to buying stuff.

Here are some of the steps involved in creating a marketing phenomena like this:

1. Find something that people are already interested in doing (in this case, shopping)
2. Add scarcity, mob dynamics, a bit of fear
3. Repeat the meme in the media. Press releases, B roll, clever statistics regardless of veracity
4. Do it on a slow news day, and mix in famous names, famous brands and even some hand-wringing about the plight of workers

Apple does this with its product launches. The IRS does the opposite of #1 around tax day. Nike sold a billion dollars worth of sneakers this way.

People like doing what other people are doing. People don't like being left out. The media likes both.

If it's over your head, does it really matter?

At some point, when the stakes are high enough and your skills and desires are ready, you will swim.

And when you swim, who cares how deep the water is?

[You might find that deeper water is actually calmer and easier to swim in…]

Why do ambitious projects often fail to meet our expectations? (Unambitious projects fail because they have low expectations). Why do software and other project teams so often get frustrated and stuck?

OVERPROMISING: During the magical early stages of the project, we envision not just perfect execution, but limitless features. At this stage, every project needs a truth teller (not a no-sayer, because they are easy to find and worthless, but a truth teller, someone who has been through it before and knows the difficulties that lie ahead).

"Everything takes more time than you thought, everything costs more money than you thought, and almost everything turns out not quite as cool as you expected." Merlin Mann

UNDERSHARING: As the project gets built, our instinct is to hide. Hide our roadblocks, our mistakes, our worries. As we hide, we keep the rest of the team in the dark. As the darkness settles in, it's easier than ever to keep hiding, because to unhide now is double the trouble.

LACK OF POLISH: The charette-driven, when's-the-deadline mindset might be a good way to force yourself through the resistance, but it has a huge cost–you will be judged. The market will not judge you by how much work you did, we will judge you by how it works and looks and feels. And that comes from polish, and polish cannot be rushed.

Two other thoughts on this:

1. Sometimes, all three of these stooges contribute to a piece of art. Sometimes, the audacity of being underinformed, combined with the ego strength of the final push over a deadline causes a magical thing to arrive. Bravo! But it's not dependable. If this is what you need to make art, then by all means, go for it. But be clear to each other about what's on the table.

2. The internet has made it possible to launch sloppy and polish in public. This is a form of oversharing, right? With thousands of people seeing each iteration, you can't hide what it looks like and you can't hide from the feedback. Here's what you need to understand about this: the launch isn't the end, it's the beginning. Back when I made books and software on floppies, you could say, "it's done." If you polish in public, that's never your option. It's not done. Have you planned for that?

Tantrums are frightening. Whether it's an employee, a customer or a dog out of control, tantrum behavior is so visceral, self-defeating and unpredictable, rational participants want nothing more than to make it go away.

And so the customer service rep or boss works to placate the tantrum thrower, which does nothing but reinforce the behavior, setting the stage for ever more tantrums.

Consider three ideas:

• Listen to the person, not the tantrum
• Tantrums want to deal with tantrums
• Create systems to avoid it in the first place

When an employee calls you up, furious, in mid-tantrum, it's tempting to placate or to argue back. That's the tantrum pressing your buttons. Instead, ask him to write down every thing that's bothering him, along with what he hopes you'll do, and then call you back. Or even better, meet with you tomorrow.

Email tantrums are similar. If someone sends you an email tantrum, don't respond, point by point, proving that you are correct. Instead, consider ways to de-escalate, not by giving in to the argument, but by refusing to have the argument.

Engaging in the middle of a tantrum does two things: it rewards the tantrum by giving it your attention, and it makes it likely that you'll get caught up, and say or do something that, in the mind of the tantrum-thrower, justifies the tantrum. That's the fuel the tantrum is looking for–we throw tantrums, hoping people will throw them back.

When you have valuable employees or customers (or kids) who throw tantrums, that might be a sign that there's something wrong with your systems. The most basic way to decrease tantrums is to find the trigger moments and catch the tantrum before it starts. By creating a way for people to raise their hand, send a note, light a signal flare or otherwise highlight the problem (internal or external) before it leads to a tantrum, you can shortcircuit the meltdown without rewarding it.

If your dog is going crazy, straining at the leash and barking, it turns out that yelling, "sit," is going to do no good at all, no matter how loudly you yell. No, the secret is to not take your dog to this park, not at this time of day, at least not until you figure out how to create more positive cycles for him. Eliminate the trigger, you start to eliminate the tantrum.

Unfortunately, just about all big customer service organizations do this precisely backward. They don't escalate to a supervisor or roll out the kindness carpet until after someone has gone to Defcon 4. They decide that it's too expensive to be flexible, to listen or to treat people fairly, and they wait until the costs to both sides are really high, and then they give an empowered person a chance to solve the problem. There's huge waste here, as the problem costs more to solve at this point, and the unseen challenge is that they've established a cycle in which umbrage is the rewarded behavior.

And the last (but essential) thing to keep in mind is this: tantrums are really expensive, and if you can't extinguish the ongoing problem, fire it. Fire the customer, fire the employee. Establish a standard that says that people around here don't act like that. Expose the tantrum for what it is, and if necessary, do it in front of the tantrum-thrower's peers. It will free up your resources for those that are able to earn them.

When the cost of throwing a tantrum is high and when the systems are in place to eliminate the triggers, tantrum behavior goes down.