Looking for change in all the wrong places
If you're doing something important, you're working to make change happen.
But change is difficult, often impossible. Are you trying to change your employees? A entire market? The attitude of a user?
The more clear you can be about the specific change you're hoping for (and why the people you're trying to change will respond to your actions) the more likely it is you'll actually achieve it.
Here are two tempting dead ends:
Make three lists
When considering a new project, it might help to make three lists:
A list of everything that has to be true for this to be a good project (things you can look up, research or otherwise prove).
A list of all the skills you don’t have that would be important for this project to work (things you can learn, or hire).
And a list of everything you’re afraid of, or things that are essential and that are out of your control….
Show us the pictures
There’s an increasing gulf between the privacy of individuals and that of corporations and monopolies.
An individual is almost certainly going be videotaped every time he leaves home. You will be caught on camera in the store, at the airport and on the street. Your calls to various organizations will also be recorded “for quality purposes.”
At the same time, it’s against the law to film animal cruelty on farms in many states. And if you say to a customer service rep, “I’m taping this call,” you’re likely to be met with hostility or even a dead line.
Kudos, then, to police departments for responding to the public and putting cameras in cars and on uniforms. And points to Purdue for building a chicken processing plant where the animals aren’t covered with feces and where they’re able to proudly give a tour to a reporter. They're not doing this because they're nice guys... they're doing it because customers are demanding it. They view it as a competitive advantage that their competitors will have trouble replicating.
