Volume 151: Internet Magpie.

Internet Magpie.

tl;dr: AKA a random walk through my mind.

I read so many interesting things this week that I figured I’d try to connect them into a single post. 

I’m going to start with Roger Martin pointing out that the great management thinker Peter Drucker never said many of the things he’s supposed to have said, including the infamous truism, “what gets measured, gets managed.” For that, we need to look to another great management thinker, W. Edwards Deming, who did say the words, but it turns out they’ve been taken wildly out of context. What he actually said was: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.”

Amazing, what a difference a little sentence topping and tailing will make, don’t you think? (My version of that statement, FWIW, has always been, “What’s easily measured gets manipulated, what’s hard to measure gets ignored.”

I’ve always held that what’s not measurable - what Cory Doctorow labels “qualia” - is equally as important as what is, which I find particularly critical when we consider how important the experience of what we buy has become. Take, for example, a recent bout of car test-driving. My wife and I test-drove what appeared to be two very similar-looking vehicles by the numbers on paper, and yet when it came to actually driving them, the experiences couldn’t have been more different. One put a smile on our faces, while the other made me feel like my soul was being sucked out of my body. Cars are fundamentally emotional purchases, not rational, which is why it’s often nigh on impossible to capture what’s magical about an experience on a spreadsheet.

Thinking about spreadsheets, I read a thought-provoking piece on how airlines are now banks. Frequent flyer miles being a currency that’s more valuable when sold to credit card companies than anything involving an actual aircraft. There’s no doubt that market concentration has led to a steep decline in service quality, amenities, and affordability. What I hadn’t considered is that magicing a made-up currency out of thin air had now become the core business of the airline. Well, from an enterprise value standpoint, anyway. 

From thin air, we move to a missive that’s probably making a few ad people hyperventilate, namely, this little expose on the business of digital advertising. It’s hardly a new tale, but it bears repeating. There are big problems sitting at the heart of digital media, and they’re yet to work their way through. And when (or if) they do, the big ad holding-co’s, aren’t likely to come out the other side smelling of roses. 

Thinking of the big ad-holding companies brings me to downsizing. Namely, that the firms that do so are statistically more likely to fail than those that do not. Which might come as news to more than a few Wall Street analysts. However, I can’t help but think that downsizing is often forced upon you due to financial pressures, so it’s pretty easy to see why a company that doesn’t need to downsize is more likely to survive than one that does. It simply doesn’t face the same pressures. (Please forgive me for overgeneralizing. I know it’s not that simple.)

Almost done. Thank you for sticking with me. I really enjoyed this puff piece on the reality of running a stock trading app during the heady days of Gamestop-mania. It’s both sobering and amazing to realize just how good we’ve become at making tiny corporations built from Band-Aid and Flex-Tape appear as large, capable, secure, and customer-friendly as their much larger competition. But with more speed, “go for it” chutzpah…and Michael Bolton.

Finally, I’d like to circle back to where I started and leave you with the rather delightful Tim Brown, of IDEO fame, talking about something very hard to measure - creativity. (I met Tim once for a cup of tea, and he’s exactly as thoughtful in person as you’d imagine. Although, I, to my eternal shame, ended up being a bit of a dick. Story for another time.)

Here, he fleshes out the need to de-risk creativity - the most messy of things - in order to solve the really big problems. You know, problems of a magnitude that years of analytical thinkers doing their thing have failed at. Anyway, I really loved his point that asking better questions is often more important than seeking a better idea. Having grown up professionally in an ideas culture, it’s hard to give this a wholehearted “right on” even when I believe he’s correct. However, I’m working with a client right now that’s exceptional at the art of asking better questions, and I’ve never seen so many clients of my client say such glowing things about a business partner. So, right on. Better questions, everyone.

That’s it. Thank you for your time and attention. Onward!