EMBA的小眼睛

Placebos, manipulation and preying on the weak

Marketers make change happen. Good marketing can change governments, heal the sick and bring a new technology to the masses. Marketers spend money (sometimes lots of it), take our time and transform our culture. It's quite a powerful position to be in.

Who decides, then, what and how it's okay to market?

At a recent conference for non-profits, a college student asked me, "what right does a public health person have to try to change the behavior of an at-risk group?" That one was easy for me. How can they not work to tell stories and share information that will help those at risk change that behavior?

And then, just a day later, I heard the story of a marketer who intentionally bankrupts the elderly by loading them up with worthless 'investments'. He said, "Hey, if it makes them happy in the moment and they voluntarily buy what I'm selling, who cares? I'm not doing anything against the law, and if it's not against the law, I'm not going to stop."

A Peter Corollary

The original Peter Principle made perfect sense for the industrial age: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, organizations keep promoting people up the organization until the people they promote reach a job where they are now incompetent. Competence compounded until it turns into widespread incompentence.

Industrial organizations are built on competence, and the Peter Principle describes their undoing.

Consider a corollary, one for our times:

"To be promoted beyond your level of confidence."

Taking the plunge

Maybe that's the problem.

Perhaps it's better to commit to wading instead.

Ship, sure. Not the giant life-changing, risk-it-all-venture, but the small.

When you do a small thing, when you finish it, polish it, put it into the world, you've made something. You've committed and you've finished.

Staffed by mimes

If someone asked you how to do something, would you act it out, using no words at all?

Of course not. Yet, in our increasingly post-literate world, it seems like organizations are afraid to use prose. It doesn't cost anything, and when you post a link, you have all the room in the world to clearly write out a narrative of how something works. You can even do it in 200 languages without too much trouble.

Here's the fundamental mistake that marketers make: Great design often needs little explanation. And so, natural, organic, effective design often comes without written instructions. But, and it's a huge but, the converse is not true. Shipping something without instructions doesn't mean it's a great design.

What are the chances that a guest is going to use this hotel shower properly the first time?

"I need you"

Three magic words. They light up our brain, they grab our attention, they initiate action.

But they're being corrupted by the ease of reach and the desire by some organizations to grow at all costs.

I doesn't always mean a human. More and more, "I" means us, the corporation, the shareholders, the faceless. I is actually, "we," and you're not a part of that we.

NEED more and more means "want." We want you to do this, to buy this, to forward this, to write about this. We want it because it will give us more.

An end of radio

Eight years ago, I described how city-wide wifi would destroy the business of local radio. Once you have access to a million radio stations online, why would you listen to endless commercials and the top 40?

I realized last week that this has just happened. Not via wifi, but via Bluetooth and the smart phone.

The car-sharing driver (Bluetooth equipped car, with a smart phone, of course) who picked me up the other day was listening to a local radio station. It was almost as if he was smoking a pipe or driving a buggy. With so many podcasts, free downloads and Spotify stations to listen to, why? With traffic, weather and talking maps in your pocket, why wait for the announcer to get around to telling you what you need to know?

The first people to leave the radio audience will be the ones that the advertisers want most. And it will spiral down from there.

The time to think about middlemen is before there's only one

I grew up near a mall that had 42 shoe stores. If a store didn't carry what you wanted, it wasn't a big deal to walk 22 feet to a store that did.

The core issue of net neutrality isn't whether or not a big corporation ought to have the freedom to maximize profit by choosing what to feature. No, the key issue is: what happens when users are unable to choose a different middleman?

In a town with ten newspapers, finding a newspaper that brings you the truth you seek is not a challenge. But network effects and lock in mean that in more and more arenas, there's a natural monopoly arising.

The simple example is cable TV. It doesn't pay to wire a town with five or six competing cable companies, and so we end up with one middleman. The simple understanding of net neutrality: When there's only one middleman, who gets to decide what you see?

過去發生許多社會事件，導致女性單獨搭乘計程車會有安全上的擔憂，為解決女性乘客的安全顧慮，現在出現專為女性乘客服務的女性駕駛。同時善用科技優勢，美國將推出SheTaxis-SheRides搭車App，以滿足更多女性乘客需求。

■ 女性乘客透過SheTaxis-SheRides尋找女性駕駛。（圖／ADWEEK）

SheTaxis-SheRides是一款專為女性乘客設計的App，此App會將有搭車需求的女性乘客與女性駕駛配對，若乘客為男性，則會將男性乘客連結到其他計程車App上。專為女性乘客服務的女性計程車駕駛預計9月中正式在紐約、曼徹斯特等地上路，但SheTaxis-SheRides目前只適用於ios系統，Android 裝置還需要再等一段時間。

SheTaxis-SheRides創辦人Stella Mateo表示，推出這樣的服務其實一部分是想幫助女性進入男性工作領域。多數國家的計程車司機都是男性，而駕駛工作也多被認定為較不適合女性從事的職業。然而，許多女性乘客皆表示，搭乘女性駕駛的計程車其實感覺比較安全，也更舒服。

台灣方面，其實在今年4月，臺北市政府公共運輸處也在智慧型叫車系統中新增女性駕駛轉接服務，整合目前車隊的女性駕駛資源，希望提升女性乘客搭車安全和滿足其服務需要。雖然目前各國女性駕駛的比例仍是少數，但由SheTaxis-SheRide的推出可發現女性駕駛的需求不斷提高，藉由科技和政策多方管理，期待能給乘客、消費者更好的服務。(蘇 璿，本文經《電子商務時報》授權刊登)
本文經《政大服務創新電子報》授權刊登

Choosing those that choose you

We have the privilege about being picky in who we expect/hope/count on/need to pick us.

Pity the foolish 8-year-old boy who gives a kid just a year older the power to make his day. In that moment, being picked for the kickball team is the most important thing in the world, and his dreams are in the hands of a kid with a demonstrated history of poor judgment. If you were walking by the playground and he yelled, "Hey Mister! Wanna be on our team?" it would (I hope) mean little to you. You're no longer willing to be judged by a kid who can't even ride a bike.

But what if your organization or your brand or your self esteem has chosen a chooser you can't rely on, or one you're not qualified to expect to have come through? If you say, "we need 100 of the top CIOs at the biggest companies in this region to choose our technology," you've made it clear who the choosers are. But if this group is swayed by bribes (which you won't pay) or local salespeople (which you don't have), you have a disconnect.

Or what if you "need" to be picked by the anonymous crowds on social networks, or picked by the apparently powerful editor or the bouncer at the club?

Inventing a tribe

I can't think of a single time that an individual or an organization has created a brand-new worldview, spread it and then led that tribe.

There were Harley-type renegades before there was Harley Davidson. There were digital nomads before there was Apple. There were pop music fans before there were the Beatles and Rastafarians before Marley.

Without a doubt, a new technology creates new experiences. But the early adopters who gravitate to it were early adopters before we got there.

Our job is to find the disconnected and connect them, to find people eager to pursue a goal and give them the structure to go achieve that goal. But just about always, we start with an already existing worldview, a point of view, a hunger that's waiting to be satisfied.

The tragedy of the last 10%

In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.

If you dig in deep, analyze, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.

The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.

The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.

"This will blow over"

Your employees notice when you take action. And when you don't.

When a storm hits your company, the instinct is to wait it out, to seek shelter, to work to set an agenda, not to let the outside world set it for you.

And sometimes this works. But even if the storm passes, your employees remember. They remember the standard you've set and the way things are around here.

Every time we give someone the employee of the month parking space for perfect compliance, or fire someone for creating a culture of disrespect, we send a message.

Of course it's been done before

John Koenig calls it vemödalen. The fear that you're doing something that's already been done before, that everything that can be done has been done.

Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.

A better question to ask is, "have you ever done this before?" Or perhaps, "are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?"

Originality is local. The internet destroys, at some level, the idea of local, so sure, if we look hard enough we'll find that turn of a phrase or that unique concept or that app, somewhere else.

Getting there

Is there an alternative to one step in front of the other, barely getting by, slogging it out? Is the only way to do good work to be a zombie (until you get to the end)?

How about, "how fast will this thing go?" Not because you want to get there faster, but merely because you want to find out what it can do.

The guys who delight in designing cars aren't worried so much about getting from point A to point B. Social media heroes like Gary Vee can't point to a direct ROI for everything they do. The famous chef probably isn't using those knives merely because they help her cut the carrots...

Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design. And it's fun.

Crowding the pan

One thing you'll discover when you start pan roasting brussel sprouts or tomatoes (or running a theater or an airline, or just about anything for that matter) is that more is not always better.

Sure, I know that you have three uncooked sprouts left, and it would be a shame to not serve them, but if you add those three to the pan with the others, the entire batch will suffer.

Adding one more is just fine, until adding one more ruins everything.

Greed costs.

Chromeville是一個讓小孩子們可以利用擴增實境的方式，將紙上圖案變成會動的3D人物，進而創造出專屬於自己獨一無二的村莊。

（圖片來源：Chromeville）

擴增實境（Augmented Reality，AR），或稱作擴張實境，是一種利用攝影機將虛擬物件投射在現實生活中，透過將虛擬與現實結合以產生即時互動效果的技術，例如Sony的部分智慧型手機，就有Line AR 效果可供下載使用，讓照片中可以出現Line的虛擬人物；IKEA產品目錄也有提供擴增實境的功能，讓使用者可以感受商品實際擺設在家中是否合適。

根據官網，Chromeville的使用方式如下：
1.先去官網的下載頁面下載喜歡的圖案紙，並且列印出來。
2.在圖案紙上著上自己喜歡的顏色。
3.把Chromeville的應用程式下載到手機或是平板上（Android與iOS版本都有噢！），並按下開始按鈕。
4.選擇圖案紙上所指定的特定村莊。
5.將手機或是平板鏡頭對準圖案紙直到變成綠色，然後圖案紙上的圖案就會活過來囉！
6.除了3D，Chromeville還有提供其他功能，例如：拍照、音樂⋯⋯等等。
透過結合個人化與擴增實境，Chromeville讓小孩子們不但可以擁有著色的樂趣，還可以與自己創造出來的角色進行互動，是不是很有趣呢？

擴增實境除了應用在商業娛樂上，讓人們的生活可以擁有更多樂趣外，也有應用在醫療、工業等地方上，讓人取得需要的資訊以做出適當的決策。(邱靖婷)

Is a photo of a Magritte painting better than the original?

A major Magritte show ran at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was fascinating to see all of his greatest hits in one place, nicely curated and hung.

Unlike the Louvre, photography was forbidden, which got me thinking about ideas, photos and originals.

In front of the Mona Lisa are hundreds of people, all taking a picture, sometimes with their cameras held overhead to get a better view. Why? What's the point of taking a picture of the most famous, most photographed painting in the world? You're certainly not going to take a better picture than you can find online with a few clicks.

It feels obvious that people aren't capturing the painting, they're capturing the moment, their proximity with a celebrity. "I was there, here look." Can you imagine going to the Louvre and walking right by the Mona Lisa? (I did this once, and I confess it wasn't easy). I mean, she's famous.

腳踏車種類繁多，除了有常見的淑女車、越野車、三輪車等，還有一些具有特殊功能的腳踏車，例如之前介紹過的摺疊車Izzy bike。現在要來介紹一種在歐美可以看到的多人協力腳踏車－自行車酒吧（Beer bike），顧名思義就是一個行動酒吧，但是需要靠乘客們踩腳踏車的動力才能讓車子前進，如下圖所示。

（圖片來源：Beer Bike Berlin Tours）

自行車酒吧前方有一個座位讓駕駛負責控制車子前進的方向，剩下兩旁的座位下方都有踏板可以給乘客踩，這樣車子才會前進，車子最後方也有一個長椅可以坐著休息並且增加載客量。車子本身除了有最重要的酒放在酒桶中，可以透過扭轉啤酒水龍頭（beer tap）取得之外，還有基本的燈光、置物以及遮陽功能，也有音響可以播放音樂。一台車的乘坐人數可以到16人左右，時速可以達到6至8公里不等。

根據The New York Times的報導，自行車酒吧，或是稱作啤酒自行車、移動式酒吧等，普遍認為是在20世紀末於荷蘭發明的，自此流行於德國、聖保羅等歐美地區。自行車酒吧讓觀光客可以一邊喝著啤酒聊天、一邊沿路欣賞風景，並且還可以順便騎騎腳踏車運動避免啤酒肚，比起單純的去酒吧裡面喝酒聊天有趣多了！

透過結合酒吧與腳踏車，自行車酒吧不但擁有派對的樂趣，還兼具了環保與健康。國內尚未見此Beer bike，有興趣的人去歐美旅遊時如果看到可以去體驗一下噢！(邱靖婷)
本文經《政大服務創新電子報》授權刊登

Wall Street gets what it wants

In the magical abundancy-based, post-industrial world, it's tempting to look at the massive web companies that connect us as benevolent overlords, institutions that want what we want.

But then they go public.

Here's a Wall Street analyst with Needham & Company speaking her truth, about Facebook:

“Wall Street cares about the business model. We care less about changing the world.”

The jobs only you can do

One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive ("I could do that job for free") and starts thinking of them as cheap ("This frees me up to do something more profitable.")

When you get rid of every job you do that could be done by someone else, something needs to fill your time. And what you discover is that you're imagining growth, building partnerships, rethinking the enterprise (working on your business instead of in it, as the emyth guys would say). Right now, you don't even see those jobs, because you're busy doing things that feel efficient instead.