347-878-3837

Business

Here are articles on Business

Stumbling on Beauty: Creating Passionate Devotion

,

Click here to listen to this article as a Podcast.

“I’ve stumbled on beauty.” The ground was gray, the horizon melding seamlessly with a velvety black sky. Reflecting in the plain beneath us, four beautiful icons gazed out, happily rotating in a graceful dance. I held my breath, reached out, and pressed a key. The wrong key. The icons faded down, and in the distance, my screen reappeared and swooped towards me. I was back in reality.

It was the day after I switched to the Mac, six weeks ago. My fingers, trained by 15 years of Windows use, typed some magical incantation and took me somewhere … beautiful. It took three days of searching to figure out what I’d done.[1]. In my search, I became a convert, wishing dearly to recapture that moment.

Stumbling on beauty. What a great experience for a customer. Disney knows it, too. Where else can you stumble on a candlelit dinner for two overlooking the Caribbean…in the heart of Orlando. It’s the little things that grab people’s hearts and keep them coming back.

How do people use your product or service? Can you arrange for them to stumble on a delightful surprise? Perhaps hauntingly nice music at an unexpected moment. Beautiful artwork. Or (gasp) full-service at self-serve prices. It needn’t be expensive, just fun and unexpected.

But why stop at work? It works with friends, too. Send a “thank you for being my friend” card to your best friend. Or watch your cuddle bunny wander around the house at night, finding a little poem hidden in a favorite before-bed snack. Maybe a quiet love song as they fall asleep. Or your kids…what if they stumbled on a free concert ticket beneath their pillow for no reason at all—just because.

We get so wrapped up in the daily grind that we often forget it’s the truly exceptional moments that make the biggest impression. It works in business, it works in your home life. Plan some exceptional moments for the people around you and watch what happens. Nothing compares to Stumbling on Beauty.

P.S. If you haven’t spent time with a Mac recently, run to your nearest Apple store. They’re really quite something!

[1] Command-escape in OS 10.4.8 starts the Front Row media center. Don’t tell Windows users, though. They must buy a whole special edition of Windows to get a decent media center experience. back

Mind the (credibility) gap…

,

This isn’t exactly a business topic, but an article caught my eye about people who get scientific degrees based on traditional science, then use their credential to lend support to non-scientific groups. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/12/america/web.0212create.php

If someone gets a legit scientific degree from a major institution, should they be allowed to trumpet that connection when presenting teachings that the institution would consider invalid? The article addresses creationists who get degrees in, for instance, geophysics. For example, Billy Bob gets an MIT degree in geophysics, even though his religious beliefs are creationist. So basically, his dissertation represents quality thinking about a topic he doesn’t believe in. But now that he has a degree from MIT in geophysics, he starts going out saying, “The world is 5,000 years old. MIT geophysics PhD Billy Bob says so.” He’s using the MIT degree to endorse a position that is utterly NOT endorsed by the institution granting the degree.

I’m offended by this, but at the same time, people routinely use their degrees to gain credibility without telling their audience where their views deviate from the views held by the degree grantors. Consider a physiology PhD whose public personal, Dr. So-and-so, is considered an expert in mental health (when her “Doctor” title has nothing to do with mental health). It just usually isn’t as extreme as someone preaching the very opposite of their degree.

… and what if his religious beliefs are right? Many scientists have had unpopular beliefs that ran against conventional scientific thinking of their time, only to be vindicated later when it turned out that a paradigm shift was needed.

It’s a tough problem, and the integrity of our ability to believe credentials depends on it.

“Bomb hoax” hoax undermines our real emergency response ability

,

Ok. I can’t keep quiet about this any longer. It’s driving me nuts. I just read a story titled $2 million US settlement in Boston TV ad bomb hoax. This is a fine example of how the wrong words can do damage, even when intending to inform.

“Bomb hoax” implies intent to deceive people into believing a bomb was present. People who engage in hoaxes (“perpetrators”) aren’t nice people. Just the phrase smears the characters of the men who placed the ads around Boston.

In a real bomb hoax, someone calls a building and says “There’s a bomb!” In this ad campaign, they put boxes with lighted cartoon characters around the city, where they stayed unmolested for a couple of weeks before being noticed. The same boxes in a dozen other cities produced only calm amusement. That doesn’t sound much like a bomb hoax.

A more accurate headline would be, “$2MM paid to Boston to compensate for ad mistaken for bomb.” Or, if you want the language to correctly specify who did what, “Turner pays $2MM to compensate for Boston Mayor and Police mistaking ad campaign for bomb.”

The Mayor, Governor, and emergency response people kept saying that “in a post-9/11 world, [Turner] should have known” that police and bomb units would mistake glowing cartoon characters for bombs. That’s absurd. In a post-9/11 world, police and bomb units should be well-trained to notice something wrong, investigate it, quickly identify what is and isn’t a threat, and only shut down the city if there’s danger.

I live in Boston. It took the city’s emergency response team a couple of weeks to discover brightly-lit ads that were designed to be noticed. Is this supposed to make me feel more secure? Once they noticed the ads, it took them hours to figure out the difference between a light-bright and a bomb. And in an oft-overlooked postscript, while investigating the cartoons, they found two real pipe-bomb hoaxes that they’d not have found if they weren’t looking for the Turner ads. Oh, boy. I feel like they’re really keeping me safe in a post-9/11 world. Not.

Our emergency response team screwed up, big-time. They’ve successfully shifted the blame using words like “hoax” and “perpetrator” so they needn’t take the responsibility for their slow response, their extraordinarily inept discovery of the real situation, and their missing the real hoax pipe bombs. Now, they’re showing the same lack of skill in identifying and fixing their contribution to the problem. All so they needn’t say “we screwed up.” I only hope they perform better if we ever have a real emergency.

Other than pure profit, why would anyone pretend fast food is glamorous?

,

In an article on Reuters, Steven Anderson, the National Restaurant Association’s Chief Executive, has asked that an ad starring Kevin Federline as a fast-food worker leaves the impression that “working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant and asking the commercial to be dumped.”

Does Mr. Anderson really think the commercial will hurt people’s opinions of fast-food jobs? Does he think we consider working in a burger joint to be a fun, exciting, high-growth, deeply meaningful job? Perhaps he thinks we all secretly envy the kid behind the counter for their excellent benefits, great health insurance, stellar hourly wage, and wonderful team environment.

Get real. Steve, we don’t think fast-food jobs are glamorous. Kevin’s commercial will not be shattering anyone’s fantasies. Except maybe yours. Your industry depends on filling these crap jobs so the CEOs can make their million-dollar bonuses. Why don’t you spend six months behind a McFastFood fry machine. Then tell us with a straight face that service jobs in fast food are anything other than low-paying, demeaning, unpleasant dead-end jobs.

Meanwhile, let Kevin’s commercial air. At least it will give us something to laugh about while we sit in our comfy chair, awaiting our fast-food obesity-driven coronary.

The answer to CEO pay: yes, make them pay…

,

In a recent New York Times article on CEO pay, the reporter closely examines pay practices where companies use peer groups to justify CEO pay. But they don’t disclose who those peers are, allowing CEOs to inflate their pay by carefully choosing the peer group.

That all sounds fine and dandy, but I must ask: what difference does the peer group make, even if it’s chosen well? There is this bizarre assumption that CEO pay should somehow be linked to what other companies pay. What absurdity! That argument would suggest that if it’s the norm to vastly overpay executives (which it is), then a company should overpay their CEO for doing a job that just isn’t worth what they’re being paid.

“But that’s the market price for a CEO. we HAVE To pay that or we can’t hire a good CEO.” Bull-pucky. Startups and small businesses routinely find CEOs who will work for relatively low salaries because they’re devoted to the company or industry. IF they do well, their stock is worth something, but only if they truly do well. (Many F500 company CEOs think so little of their own skills they find it necessary to backdate their own options.)

Shouldn’t we use the same criteria for Fortune 500 CEOs? In fact, why not have prospective CEOs pay for the job? After all, the jobs are in very short supply, carry huge prestige and status, and give the job holder the unprecedented opportunity to test their skills and ideas on a scale 99.9999% of the human race can never know.

So there’s my solution to CEO pay: have the CEOs pay for the job. You’ll quickly weed out all but those who have an intrinsic care, interest, and passion for the job. It’s not at all clear to me that you’ll get a lower calibre of candidate–only different. So let’s give it a try. Then we can recapture all the money and time we’re spending examining CEOs and putting together niggling little disclosure policies and do something useful with our time instead.