It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go.
But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before.
AI plods along into the future, using machine learning to closely examine the past.
And radical visionaries often slam into unforeseen obstacles precisely because they failed to do the reading.
Somewhere in between is a useful set of tactics.
One of the spokespeople for the new milk marketing campaign confessed that she doesn’t really like drinking milk. Sales are way down, and an entire generation is drinking other beverages.
Other than the people who are paid to sell or lobby for milk sales, few people are concerned. Milk isn’t going away, but it certainly isn’t growing.
Marketing isn’t the act of getting people to buy what you’re paid to sell them. Good marketing is the craft of understanding what people want and need and helping them achieve it.
There’s no need to sign up for the endless uphill battle of marketing against a positive trend. Sell something you believe in, to people who are eager to believe in it as well.
You’ll do your best work on behalf of an audience and a cause that deserves it, appreciates it and applauds it. If it’s just a job, you’ve sacrificed your best energy for a paycheck.
Pick your client, pick your future.
More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed.
And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us down.
It’s not easy to say, “I was wrong.” And so people live in stress, sticking with something that used to work longer than they’re comfortable with. Our challenges in shifting perspective keep us stuck in the past. These are sunk costs, decisions we can’t unmake, but they don’t have to be forever commitments.
One way forward is to rename this moment and change the story. Instead of “I was wrong,” perhaps it’s useful (if less satisfying to others seeking victory) to say, “It’s time to make a new decision based on new information.”
That’s not weakness. That’s not flip-flopping or even embarrassing.
That’s practical, resilient and generous.
A useful metaphor for freelancers and small businesses.
Every good restaurant should have two different salads on the menu.
The boring salad is the regular kind. It’s there for people who know that they want a reliable, repeatable, unremarkable salad. It’s the safe part of a safe meal. It might remind them of their childhood or it’s simply the foundation for a nice evening without any tension around the food.
The fascinating salad is a chance for the restaurant to bring surprise, delight and care to the person who orders it. It’s remarkable in the way it combines unexpected elements, and even though the ingredients it uses make it accessible to people who have careful diets, it’s still extraordinary, and worth what it costs.
A fascinating salad is a marvel. It’s not that hard to create, but it demonstrates the passion of the person who produced it in a memorable, almost emotional way.
Too often, freelancers end up offering just a boring salad. It feels safer than getting rejected. Or they pretend to offer a fascinating salad, but at the end, they lose their nerve and simply charge more than they should for a boring salad that’s pretending to be fascinating.
A metaphor involving parking meters.
Over the years, parking meters in town have evolved into a cumbersome, awkward system. Coins are heavy and you need to have them handy, meters need to be reinforced against theft and breakage, town employees have to empty the coins and securely deliver them to the bank, meter feeding allows local employees to hog spaces that might be used for shoppers… you get the idea.
But replacing all the meters is expensive and because it’s inherently a centralized system, involves a lot of lobbying as well as a group of people making a choice with limited expertise, a choice they’ll only have to make once, they can’t learn from their mistakes…
Enter Parkmobile, an app that promises everything to everyone. Except it increases the cost by more than 100% by charging fees, it’s awkward, has a silly password policy that makes it cumbersome to use, sends many many emails to users and it doesn’t generate more revenue or flexibility for the town. It charges people double and gives them less.
But you can see how they managed to find the budget to do the difficult and expensive work of lobbying one town after another to gain monopoly status.
The network effect is sticky and hard to overcome, and as we move the internet of things from our phones to just about everything we touch, it’s worth thinking about resilience, flexibility and the reason we need something in the first place.
Often, we end up compromising about our compromises, maximizing for the wrong outcomes and getting hooked on a new system that forgot what the original system was even for.
In this case, the first principles begin with why the meters exist in the first place. There are two goals:
At first, having people put a nickel in a meter made sense. It’s just enough of a hassle and just enough of a cost that it all balances out.
Thanks to the portable id that a smart phone offers, one simple solution is to have people scan a code that automatically gets them a period of time to park at a spot for free. The dashboard for enforcement is easy to build, and in a typical small town, the revenue loss is pretty small–a few more shoppers more than makes up for the cost of lost meters.
If one still wanted to maximize revenue, it wouldn’t be difficult to hook that scanning tool up to any number of online payment services (like Venmo or Paypal) and simply cut out the middleman.
Once we see we have cars, spots, drivers and phones, all in a dance, we can make new decisions based on what we want, not what simply polishes what we had.
One could also easily sell parking passes, give local discounts, senior discounts or even give merchants codes they could use for employees in certain spots. You could make it so that the first ten minutes are free for fast in and out trips, or have it so local employees pay less in long-term spots, or that shoppers can easily get their parking cost rebated if they make a purchase.
Or you could even rethink why cars are taking up so much space in our villages and towns and reconfigure the entire flow of humanity and traffic.
But all of this is difficult because of the many constituencies involved and the stakes required in making UX choices in public.
Design thinking is simple to describe in two questions:
Who’s it for?
What’s it for?
In the case of a system replacing a previous system, these questions often get replaced with:
What’s the easiest way to polish what we compromised on last time?
Part of the magic of WordPress and its success is that the open nature and decentralized user experience they offer allows the individuals and organizations using it to embrace their first purposes instead of backward engineering from a centralized monopoly and a bagful of money.
And a key benefit of distributed systems is that they improve over time. When you see something that can be made better, make it better.
When a system is new, few are watching, so a handful of people with intent can design it and optimize it. As it gains in scale and impact, it calcifies at the same time that new tech arrives to codify the decisions that were made when the conditions were very different.
The next time you pose for a photo, keep in mind that we pose for photos because the speed of an exposure used to be so long that if you didn’t pose, the photo was blurred. We changed the tech, but baked in the cultural expectation.
Sometimes, we need to take a deep breath and go for better instead of more.
Lots of organizations (and individuals) have plans and processes for getting the word out. In fact, we spend trillions of dollars doing so.
Do you have a plan for getting the word in?
Is it simply random chance that some ideas get to you and your team, that cultural and technical awareness just happens? How do the people who know share their knowledge with the people who don’t?
If knowing what’s happening is important, it probably pays to focus on how (and when) we discover the new stuff.
Debt is a financial miracle.
If you buy a property for 20% down, with the bank financing the rest, and it goes up in value by just 10%, your profit is 50%. (I’ll wait while you do the math.)
If you have a factory and can buy a machine that increases productivity, the money you borrow to pay for that machine creates enough profit that you get to do it again. And again.
Alas, the ratchet can also go the other way.
If that property goes down in value a little bit, you lose everything.
If your competitors buy better and more expensive machinery than you have, they can sell for less than you can, and your investment disappears.
Farming is difficult. It always has been. But leverage and debt make it a persistent challenge. If the weather is better than anyone expects and the markets are just right, you do really well for a season. But if conditions change, if fertilizer is hard to get, if there’s a glut–well, the bank still does fine, but the farmer can get wiped out.
The reason that supply chain issues were so bad is that leveraged organizations needed to figure out how to extract every penny from their cash flow, and having less inventory on hand seemed like a smart way to eke out a bit more leverage. Until a shipment is late and then it all grinds to a halt.
And… when a bank or an investor is considering two power plants, and they discover that the coal plant is 1% more profitable in the short run but 100x worse for the community, they go for pennies instead of resilience. Because leverage multiplies the value of a short-term penny so much that they feel as if they have no choice but to choose the fragile, selfish, short-term path.
Leverage accelerates everything. Learning to see it is a key step in understanding how to fix it.
Some friends moved away, and the cake at the party read, “We’ll miss you.”
Perhaps it would have been more accurate for it to say, “You’ll miss us.”
Because, after all, what’s mostly being missed is the community of friends and neighbors. Even when someone moves away, the community remains.
When a marketer serves a community, they create the conditions where they’d be missed–because the ideas or products or services they bring are important, not simply tolerated.
That’s a worthwhile goal.
Our habits, preferences and idiosyncrasies make perfect sense. We each know that we have great reasons to embrace our ways and stick with them.
Other people’s habits, though, show that they are simply picky, weird or too sensitive.
The difference between a preference and a foible seems to be mostly where we’re standing.
Now it’s a business model.
People are regularly fooled by crypto scams, NFT hype, opioid felons, algorithmic spam at scale, health claims, illogical political arguments, fundraising pitches, overnight shortcuts on the road to riches or happiness and MLM hustle. Your account has been locked, click here…
When it becomes the tactic of a scalable business, it’s not surprising that the fooling gets more refined and persistent.
Buyer beware. Of course. Of course we should check our gullibility at the door.
But this overlooks the simple cultural truth: just because it’s a business model doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it. Simply because it might be exploiting a legal loophole doesn’t give someone free reign to spend their days taking advantage of people for their own benefit.
Buyer beware puts the onus on the individual who’s getting fooled. But we also have the ability to separate ourselves from those that would seek to profit by fooling us. You can’t work against us and also earn our respect.
Culture is a horizontal set of principles that we enforce in service of the community. If your job involves ripping people off, walk away. No one wants to live in hustle-world, it’s not even a good place to visit.
Sometimes we get what we hope for. Often, we get what we tolerate.
