Author Archives: Carey

Experts On A Bus

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Since moving to San Francisco last August I’ve ridden the Muni bus almost every weekday. Within a few seconds I can tell if the driver is careful and thoughtful enough to make it a smooth ride, or if I’m in for a series of jarring stops and stops.

When we get a smooth ride I’ll pull out the laptop and get an extra half hour of productive work time. So I have a personal interest in the smoothness of the ride and make a point of thanking the better drivers as I get off, hopefully encouraging them to keep up the good work.

If getting a smooth ride was important enough to me, I might even think of some simple questions to ask them in a non-distracting way about key techniques to giving passengers a smooth ride.

Then I could build up my knowledge of good driving techniques, organize them into a booklet or checklist, and offer it to the SFMTA so they might use it as a user-generated training piece.

Pretty fanciful idea, I admit. I don’t really have time or interest to embark on this project, and I’m pretty sure that even if I did, the SFMTA would thank me politely and permanently file my opus.

What’s more intriguing is the potential to create a small knowledge community of good drivers, for whom answering my questions would serve as a small diversion but possibly also make them more motivated and thoughtful.

In the process of gaining expertise, I might assemble a loose association of experts, and aggregating the information they share into a minor document with real–if minor–value to other passengers if not their employer.

The process mirrors the way millions of people today gain and share knowledge, recruit and motivate outside experts, and leverage their new expert status into something potentially worthwhile.

I wouldn’t be using social media or the internet at any point, but the fact that the drivers and I use those delivery systems to some degree would make the interaction and building of a “knowledge community” seem less weird than it would have if I had tried the same stunt just a few years ago.

A major shift in the expert paradigm, proceeding as we speak.

In my next post I’ll talk more about a practical way to make this shift pay off for you and your business.

Filed under Uncategorized

Feb 16, 2011

America’s Vulnerability To Soft Despotism . . .

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… and our history of exporting it as “democracy.”

America’s “Soft Despotism” links:

the shooting of Rep. Giffords in Tucson and burning parcels in DC.
the Monroe Doctrine and the occupations we call “wars” in Iraq and Afhanistan
the number of dictators we’ve supported around the world, and the ensuing of America by so many people
our dependence on oil and the national highway systems
the enduring power of Puritanism in American intellectual life
Free Market economists’ faith in trickle-down theory
our desire to make individuals responsible for every economic and social ailment
conservative groups to the civil rights movements
endemic resurgence of social problems we thought we’d licked (crime, prejudice etc)
the hidden agendas of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives
the Berlin Wall and the Roi Grande wall.

How can this cultural perspective be so deeply ingrained in Americans’ political, social and economic lives?

It’s actually part of what makes us Americans. In the early 1830s a French aristocrat who loved America tried to warn us about this potential “sink hole” that now grows around us.

When the US was still largely a frontier nation, and the US Capitol sat incongrously in fields, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the “dark side” of America’s dream of democratic equality.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described a new kind of social contract that’s only possible here. It works not by overt force, but by inner conditioning. Claiming to be benevolent, it programs us to accept being controlled, while calling ourselves free men and women.

Tocqueville wrote about 160 years ago about the consequences for the American people:

“Above them rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watches over their fate . . . it is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment. It labors willingly for their happiness, but it wants to be the sole agent and arbiter of their happiness. . . . The sovereign power doesn’t break their wills, but it softens, bends and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action. It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrranize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restarins, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with government as their shepherd.”

These consequences are only possible in a country driven by a dream of total equality like the United States. As a nation we fear saying publicly that the Emperor has no clothes.

And as we force our unique variety of democracy onto citizens of other countries, we leave them equally vulnerable to despots (or wannabe despots) as we are.

For a great introduction to and analysis of these concepts, check out Tocqueville’s Discovery of America by Leo Damroasch

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Feb 11, 2011

HOW Do You Decide, Though?

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Seth Godin’s entire blog today was “You don’t need more time … you just need to decide.”

Good advice, Seth, but deciding something is easier said than done.

Making choices and deciding is America’s new national pastime; saying yes or no, thumbs up or down, is the way we like to gain a sense of control over our world.

The most popular sites are changing before our eyes from Search Engines to Choice Engines. It’s no longer enough to find one piece of information. Without putting in much extra effort, we also want to compare and assess.

So we increasingly expect every piece of information to come equipped with an action item, making it possible to quickly and easily get a sense of accomplishment.

Unfortunately, just because we’ve set up a decision to be made quickly doesn’t mean the choice matches our needs or values.

It’s always easy to find something to decide, but we usually don’t have enough empirical data to compare two choices with confidence. So we rely on our instincts or feelings.

This makes every decision blatantly emotional. Americans have always valued our ability to separate reason from emotions, and expect important decisions to be made in “the cold light of reason.”

But what if we don’t have the time, much less the comparative data, necessary to make decisions that way?

Simply put: we don’t. So decisions tend to be increasingly driven by our preconceived ideas, or those of someone we’ve come to agree with. They’re quite often “knee-jerk” reactions, poorly thought out and too hastily implemented.

The good news is that there’s a better way to make sure we’re comparing apples and oranges, or one set of clearly defined preferences with another.

People who have identified their nuclear core message, personal brand or “mantra” only need to ask one or two simple questions before making an important decision.

Having already thought through their priorities and values, they won’t need much time to compare abstract, multi-faceted or very dissimilar choices. Or can use their time to add data and facts to their comparison

You won’t need as much time now, as comparisons become more straightforward and clear-cut.

Filed under Random Thoughts, Writing Examples

Feb 9, 2011

The Wrong Kind of Dream

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You have plenty of dreams–but few of them come true. You’ve carried them around since the industrial age: hopes that people still respond to outmoded emotional triggers.

Replace those tired, derivative old dreams with new ones that will lead to more authentic engagement.

Your own dreams, the kind that excite and motivate you.

Then express them clearly, concisely and compellingly. Get real with your dreams!

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Feb 8, 2011

Atoms and Digits

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Here’s an analogy that might help you understand why everything works so differently now than it did just a few years ago.

If citizens of the industrial age functioned like atoms, in the internet age we’re like digits.

Atoms are more independent and amoeba-like in the way they gather and interact.

Depending on their composition, atoms are attracted or repelled by outside forces to become part of objects that are actually less solid than they seem.

(Scientists tell us that even the most solid object is actually mostly composed of empty space; with all the space removed, the world could fit inside a sports stadium. And as we all know, most people are nothing but hot air)

Over 50 years ago Elias Canetti’s monumental book Crowds and Power explored how crowds gather, are composed and are manipulated to form social “objects”–companies, organizations, and sometimes communities.

At the most basic binary level, on the other hand, a digit is just 1 or 0, off or on, yes or no. The most striking charateristic of people in the digital age is that, like digits, we often spend all day choosing between one thing, project or opinion and another.

And like digits, we gather in a string filled with other digits (unlike a coder’s digits, however, we can choose which string–tribe, project, network etc.–we want to be in).

Moving an atom, which has magnetic properties and seems at first glance to be more solid than a digit, is actually easier than changing a “plus” digit to a “minus.”

Seth Godin’s observation that individuals in industrial age businesses constantly fought with organizational friction in order to get anything done, while each of us today struggle to gain some traction in our lives, is about the same atom-digit dialectic.

It’s harder for a digit to stand out in a line of code than it is for an atom to be tracked and moved around. In the same way, an individual in today’s convergence culture, brought up to be a good “atom,” struggles to understand the new dynamic of digital organizations and groups.

The expensive internet marketing or SEO packages we buy online don’t work, because we think we can turn digits off and on the same way our bosses used to manipulate and attract “atoms.”

But it’s a brave a new world, and people will never again act like atoms. It’s time to learn how to “click on” the right digits–the people who can help us the most–and write our own code.

Filed under Random Thoughts

Feb 7, 2011

Web Sites and Email

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Social media users are getting very picky about what they’ll spend time looking at.

Even if they’re drawn to your site by SEO, they won’t stay there if it means reading crummy content.

And even if your site content is well written, they’ll click away if it doesn’t clearly answer the killer question, “So What?”

And even if you can answer that, they won’t spend time reading anything that lacks real value.

Email is like a letter; most web sites are like direct mail. Which do you prefer getting?

If folks must choose between poorly conceived, designed and written web sites and your great email, which do you expect them to choose?

So anyone whose site is like that is helping promote your emails.

Show you’re a friend, and enjoy writing memorable letters to everyone on an email list. Send prospects, customers and stakeholders a great email.

(And don’t forget to mentally thank all those lousy sites that help you build your business!)

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Feb 2, 2011

Forget your “problems” and backburner your skills for digital age success

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Whenever you feel blocked or frustrated, your natural response is to clearly identify the problem at hand, then use your skills or experiences to solve it.

That rarely works these days for two reasons.

1) What you consider a problem–a situation or condition that can be solved–is almost always not really a problem. It’s a constraint that you can only deal with at best.

2) And most of your constraints, as Richard Farson pointed out in his brilliant book Management of the Absurd, are closely connected to a desirable state or condition (crime is actually a constraint that resists our solutions, for example; it keeps growing because of our increased prosperity).

Luckily, there are good examples of a different approach that has worked well for other companies. Ever heard of Apple?

The great Seth Godin explains how Apple dealt with the ongoing constraint of a poorly performing product distribution infrastructure.

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Filed under Blogging

Jan 25, 2011

Greener Communications, Greener Bottom Line

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If you own a business and don’t understand how ROI and gross margins have changed in the last few years, you’re losing lots of money. Think “green.”

You recognize the intangible, long-term benefits of buying “green” products or materials. That’s why you’ve at least thought about buying them, and why you’d advertise the fact to your customers.

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Jan 24, 2011

A Tweetable Article

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Which customers or collaborators will help your business grow?
Decision makers, always looking for high quality information.
Information that’s relevant, clear and concise. Really concise.
Don’t expect them to read any wordy, derivative articles or blogs.
Or waste time at networking events and on Facebook pages.
They demand real value, in messages that can fit on iPhone screens.
Offer them bite-sized solutions to business problems and challenges.
Well crafted, concise content transforms leaders into your followers.
Intrigue them with articles like this on Twitter, posted one line at a time.
Such messages will help your business succeed long term.
Just keep ‘em short and sweet.
Tweet tweet . . .

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Jan 24, 2011

Read This or Go Broke!

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All right I agree . . . not every business owner who misses this page will go out of business. But take this to the bank: as the social media era matures, any business that’s still running their business communications–including marketing–like they did ten years ago will be working harder, for much skimpier results.

Business increasingly resembles a 3-D chess game. There are always many angles or perspectives that coplicate problems, constraints or opportunities.

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Filed under Marketing Copy

Jan 21, 2011

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