It's not unusual to describe a heavy object in tonnage. But no one has any idea how much a ton is, really. Is 250 tons a lot? How much? 250 tons is 500,000 pounds. About the weight of 8 houses.... | Continue reading
If you want to reach more people, if you're measuring audience size, then the mantra of the last twenty years has been simple: make it dumber. Use clickbait headlines. Short sentences. Obvious ideas. Little nuance. Don't make people uncomfortable or... | Continue reading
Express trains run less often, make fewer stops, and if they're going where you're going, get you there faster. The local train is, of course, the opposite. Some people hop on the first train that comes. A local in the... | Continue reading
There's an island off the coast of Spain that houses a church. The church has 230 steps to the top, and it's said that it's worth the climb. What a great expression. Gaztelugatxe can now mean, "it's a lot of... | Continue reading
When you order flowers online, they're usually delivered by a local florist. Which means the florist has a dilemma: He can deliver his very best effort and the most beautiful flowers he has in stock, even though the sender will... | Continue reading
Back in the day, hitchhikers held cardboard signs with their desired destination city clearly written out. After all, if you're headed to New York, it doesn't make sense to pick up someone headed for Denver (it's a bad idea for... | Continue reading
Anticipating doom is brutal. And anticipating brutality is even worse. It creates an enormous amount of emotional overhead. It makes it difficult to invest, hard to make long-term plans. And it fills us with dread, short circuiting our creativity. Peace... | Continue reading
It doesn't matter what your privacy policy says, it doesn't matter when your quarterly results are due and it doesn't matter what the database is telling you... If someone doesn't want to hear from you anymore, you've lost the ability... | Continue reading
Voluntary education is different from compulsory, the kind we grew up with. When you're the victim/beneficiary of compulsory education, it happens to you. You have little choice. Perhaps you choose to open your mind and do the work, but either... | Continue reading
Of course everyone wants to reach the maximum audience. To be seen by millions, to maximize return on investment, to have a huge impact. And so we fall all over ourselves to dumb it down, average it out, pleasing everyone... | Continue reading
Ask a frog or a housefly or a dog to describe the world around us and they'll give you the wrong answer. The frog will talk about moving objects, the housefly will describe things repeated hundreds of times and the... | Continue reading
Who do you subscribe to? And who subscribes to you? Those simple questions determine what you know and what you learn. And they influence whether a business or a charity will succeed, and whether or not lives will be changed.... | Continue reading
Marketing doesn't have to suck. It doesn't have to be a miserable experience for consumers, and it certainly doesn't have to be a distasteful, creepy or annoying task for the creator. We don't have to market at people, pin them... | Continue reading
In the short run, of course, not caring can save you some money. Don't bother making the facilities quite so clean. Save time and hassle and let the display get a little messy. Don't worry so much about one particular... | Continue reading
If you see yourself as an engineer, a scientist, or even a person of logic, then it's entirely possible that you work to make rational decisions, decisions that lead to the outcomes you seek. The paradox is that you might... | Continue reading
Isn't this the essence of design thinking? I have a great wool hat that I wear in the winter. Does it help? Well, that depends on what it's for. If it's designed to keep me warm, then yes, it helps.... | Continue reading
The data, the dashboard, the comments, the statuses, the likes, the rankings: Check them half as often and do twice as much with what you learn. Then, after you've gotten good at that, repeat the math: Check them half as... | Continue reading
Freedom comes with choice and choice comes with responsibility. Why do people willingly give up their freedom to a boss, a method or or even a despot? Why prefer a restaurant with a limited menu, or stock your freezer with... | Continue reading
Industries have rules. Rules and benefits. Hollywood requires agents, casting calls, big budgets and content aimed at a certain part of a certain market. If you follow enough of the rules, the thinking goes, you get a multi-million dollar budget... | Continue reading
It might be a market you can enter, but that doesn't mean it will reward your time and effort. It might be an all-you-can-eat situation, but there's a difference between all you can eat and all you care to eat.... | Continue reading
I know dozens of people who have a story about meeting, or nearly meeting, or somehow engaging with Bob Dylan. And just about everyone they know has questions about him, about those encounters, about what it was like. My guess... | Continue reading
Those things you're bad at? You're not nearly as bad at them as you fear. And those things you're great at? Probably not nearly as good as you hope. We beat ourselves up a lot, but often focus on the... | Continue reading
Delegate it to your customers. Let them give feedback, good and bad, early and often. Delegate it to your managers. Build in close monitoring, training and feedback. Have them walk the floor, co-creating with their teams. Use technology. Monitor digital... | Continue reading
If you're seeking to create positive change in your community, it's almost certain you'll be creating discomfort as well. Want to upgrade the local playground? It sounds like it will be universally embraced by parents and everyone who cares about... | Continue reading
The status quo is powerful indeed. We add layers, patches and small improvisations, all to shore up something we don't want to reconsider. If we had a clean sheet of paper, and could design something that actually worked, what would... | Continue reading
If you frequently run last-minute sales, don't be surprised if your customers stop buying things in advance. You're training them to wait. If you announce things six or seven times, getting louder each time, don't be surprised if your customers... | Continue reading
Why not? Why not make it more generous, more fair, more insightful than it needs to be? Why not deliver the service with more flair, more care and more urgency? Why not do it because you can, not because you... | Continue reading
Highlights from an annotated list of 17 rules for the new world of work: You are more powerful than you think It’s bigger than you Leaders are made, not born Leveling up is a choice They say you can’t, we... | Continue reading
No judgment, no responsibility. No responsibility, no risk. There's a fork in the road. If you seek out roles without responsibility, you might just find a sinecure. This is the hot job for undifferentiated job seekers at the placement office,... | Continue reading
Sometimes, you can learn a lot by watching. But not always. An alien observing our behavior in elevators would note that most of the time, a person gets in, approaches the front corner, leaves that corner, goes to the back... | Continue reading
We're pretty good at finding demons to be afraid of. The other. The one in the shadows. Change. The family member we can't possibly please. Competition. Critics. The invisible network of foes conspiring against us and what we stand for.... | Continue reading
Customer service used to be a great divide. Well-off companies would heavily invest in taking care of customers, others would do the minimum (or a bit less). Of course, back then, organizations couldn't possibly give you all the service you... | Continue reading
Really? Almost nothing in our daily lives is actually a winner take all competition. Somewhere, there's someone fitter, faster, thinner, quicker, smarter, more popular or richer than you. And there's someone else fitter, faster, thinner, quicker, smarter, more popular or... … | Continue reading
Leo's working hard to do something he's never done before. He's just turned one, and he doesn't know how to walk (yet). There are no really useful books or videos on how to walk. It's something he has to figure... | Continue reading
The standards of your industry and our culture were set a long time ago. So long ago that we often forget why... we forget and then we fail to change them. In 1934, the rules of bike racing were changed... | Continue reading
On one list identify the grievances, disrespects and bad breaks: People who don't like you. Deals that went wrong. Unfair expectations. Bad situations. Unfortunate outcomes. Unfairness. It's all legitimate, it's all real. Don't hold back. On the other list, write... | Continue reading
It's well known that the team that wins an Olympic relay isn't the fastest at running or swimming—it's the team that handles the handoffs the best. The same thing is true of your job. The tasks could be done by... | Continue reading
The late Jay Levinson created the Guerrilla Marketing series. I was lucky enough to work with him early in the arc, producing four of them. One of the core tenets of the books was that marketing was no longer merely... | Continue reading
I did an interview with a leading Turkish vlogger. He sent me his work (in Turkish) and of course, the thing I noticed was this: 76 people who saw this interview took the time to give it a thumbs down.... | Continue reading
Four hundred years ago, almost no one on Earth had tasted coffee. It was too difficult to move things a few thousand miles. A hundred years ago, if you wanted a cold drink in the summer or needed to ice... | Continue reading
Fear of success is at least as big a challenge as fear of failure. Because if it works, things are going to change. Are you ready for that? | Continue reading
For the creator who seeks to make something new, something better, something important, everywhere you look is something unsatisfying. The dissatisfaction is fuel. Knowing you can improve it, realizing that you can and will make things better—the side effect is... | Continue reading
Worth a try. When a problem isn't easily solved, it might just be that we have to resort to the other method of solving it. Difficult but worth it. | Continue reading
That's why we burn the boats when we land on the beach. Because the only way out is through. It's pretty easy to bail out of a course (especially a free online course that no one even knows you signed... | Continue reading
Nearly fifty years ago, Milton Friedman published a polemic, an article that altered the way many people think about corporations and their role in society. Countless writers have explained why it's poorly reasoned, dangerous and wrong. (Including business school deans,... … | Continue reading
Data is essential. Data lets us incrementally improve just about anything. That keyboard in front of you, the sink in the bathroom down the hall, the supply chain for the food you eat—they were all improved 100,000 times over the... | Continue reading
They're not doing the work. Pitching in requires a different kind of focus, and the generosity and humility to actually get something done. If they stop hiding, they might even produce something significant. | Continue reading
Don't expect much from a drowning man. He's not going to offer you a candy bar or ask how your day was. He's too busy not drowning. Generosity takes effort. It requires the space to take your mind off your... | Continue reading