A baseball parable about politics
Once upon a time, there were two baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Yankees. Each team did its thing, and the owners made money, the players made money, the advertisers made money in the stadiums and on the televisions, and all was more or less well. Fans got to root for their teams and enjoy $7 hot dogs and mediocre beers while cheering from the seats. Occasionally someone even hit a fly ball into the stands and made everyone happy.
Then a rivalry developed between the two teams. Each team’s fans became more ardent supporters of their team and detractors of the opposing team. Red Sox fans didn’t like Yankees fans. Yankees fans didn’t like Red Sox fans. The rivalry grew intense over the decades, but strangely, it didn’t drive people away from the stadiums. Quite the contrary – people flocked to see their teams and cheer for their teams more than ever.
The owners made more money. The players made more money. The advertisers made more money. The fans still got $7 hot dogs and beer, and started to express their dislike for the other team using words like war, traitor, and hatred. Fans even started to murder each other over the rivalry. But instead of trying to cool heated heads, we are content with the owners, players, media, and advertisers fanning the fires ever higher, even if the consequences of doing so are more dire, because the folks running the show (literally) are making a lot more money.
This in the world of propaganda is known as a granfalloon, or minimal group paradigm. We create a largely meaningless distinction and divide people along that distinction until we’ve created two or more ardent camps that will do actual physical harm to each other.
Now let’s port this idea over to the realm of politics. We have two large teams in the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats. We have owners – the campaign funders who benefit from the decisions made by lawmakers of each party. We have players – the elected officials we put in office and their appointees. We have advertisers and media who benefit from the enormous sums each election cycle. And we have the fans – us, the citizens.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the bitter rivalry between the two teams in politics has the same outcomes as the bitter rivalry in baseball and is thus encouraged by the establishment for their benefit. The owners make a lot more money. The players make a lot more money. The advertisers and media make a lot more money.
And the fans – we, the people? We get the equivalent of $7 hot dogs and beer, get to root for our teams, get to be divided into our respective camps and incited to violence for the benefit of the owners, players, and other interests running the show. One nation, indivisible? Hardly.
The next time you have a knee jerk reaction to someone or something because of the political label on it or them, take a step back and recognize that you’ve been played by the moneyed interests and transformed from a rational human being into a rabid fan. Mentally remove your team jersey, put away the meaningless bluster you’ve been asked to recite by your team, and give some actual critical thought to what’s in front of you.
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Passwords are not enough
How secure are your digital assets? With the massive database compromises of sites like Gawker and its associated properties, both individuals and groups are finding that passwords aren’t enough. But what’s a realistic alternative or supplement?
Here’s one. Do you see this little gadget attached to my keychain?
It’s a World of Warcraft authenticator. It’s a little device that generates a random number bound to my Warcraft account every 30 seconds or so. To log in to play, I sign in with a password and type in the current number. It takes literally seconds to do and ensures that my Warcraft account is harder to hack as you’d need both the physical device and my password to get in.
Now explain this to me: why is my video game, my leisure activity, more secure than everything else I use in my digital life? I swipe my credit card at stores and the bored minimum wage clerk doesn’t even bother looking at the signature. I log into my bank account online with just a password. I used to work in a credit union data center a little while back where passwords for the system were mandatory – but they were four digits only and if you compromised them, you’d have access to literally billions of dollars.
The technology to add strong security – or stronger security at any rate – isn’t especially difficult for users to add to their routine. That’s a baseless fear- millions of Warcraft players like me use a strong security system daily. Database disasters like the Gawker incident highlight just how fragile and easily broken the simple text password is, and should be a wake up call to us, the consumers, to demand more security out of the institutions we deal with daily.
Want to get a jump on institutions? Change your passwords now, and change them in such a way that no one password works for everything. At a bare minimum, add a word for password groups so that password sets can be remembered but are different from major network to network.
For example, if the password you want to use is CheeseBurgers!, then create CheeseBurgers!Banking as a password for financial services, CheeseBurgers!Social for networks like Facebook and Twitter, CheeseBurgers!Email for mail services, etc. You’ll still mentally have “one” password but it won’t work for everything. (the added length is also a minor increase to security since longer passwords are harder to guess) If another Gawker media incident happens where millions of passwords and email addresses are stolen, perhaps only your CheeseBurgers!Blogging password will need to be changed.
Security is and will be only as strong as we demand of the companies we work with. Demand better of everyone and everything you work with!
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Lighting mediocrity’s darkness with personal branding
Much has been said about personal branding, about establishing an unmistakeable identity in the online and offline worlds. Some judge it to be essential, while others call it the height of narcissism. That said, there’s an overwhelming tide racing to the shore now that only things like personal branding can endure: a tide of enforced mediocrity.
Take a read of this article about West Potomac High School all but removing failing grades as part of the educational process. By effectively removing the ability to fail, the school blurs the line between those students who are capable of doing good work in a timely fashion and those students who do mediocre work whenever they feel like it.
Here’s the problem: under this system, there’s no way to tell a B or C level student who works hard from a B or C level student who has no discipline. Changes such as this effectively make things like GPA (which were already fairly skewed and not terribly useful measures) and academic records useless measures of quality. As trends like this spread (and they invariably do), we remove more and more ways to judge a person’s capabilities.
Who would you rather hire? A hard worker or a lazy, undisciplined worker? Under models like West Potomac’s, you can’t tell the difference from academic track record. The diploma looks the same.
This is where personal branding comes in. This is where personal branding transcends being an exercise in self-congratulation and becomes a useful tool. As we continue to enforce mediocrity throughout our society in the name of self-esteem, those people who invest the time and effort to build credible personal brands will have the advantage when it comes to being hired, being promoted, and being valued. This is especially true for new college graduates, since they typically don’t have a track record of achievement and experience to point to, making one bachelor’s degree as good as the next.
So what should you do to build a personal brand? What should you advise your kids, your coworkers, your friends to do? Start obviously by stacking up achievements and doing great work. If you have no latitude to do interesting things in your current workplace, volunteer somewhere to put your talents to use in unconventional ways. Reinforce your great work by building out a strong content presence, blogging about what you’re doing, connecting and building a strong network as quickly as possible, and finding more opportunities to add to your track record of achievement.
Who would you rather hire? A B or C level student with a diploma and nothing else, or a B or C level student with a diploma, blog about your industry or vertical, well connected network, maybe even a magazine article or two, and a pile of LinkedIn recommendations praising them for their hard work as a volunteer? It’s a no-brainer if you’re looking to hire talented people.
No matter how much we neuter academic achievement or homogenize education for a consistently mediocre result, there is no way to disguise hard work, dedication, focus, and achievement in real world results. Your personal brand is your single best method for communicating that to the world, and as more and more signals of quality get diluted for the sake of poor achievers’ self-esteem, building a credible personal brand should become higher and higher priority for you.
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Public service message: ScheduleAPickup.com
Yesterday, I was walking along the streets of Boston, and noticed the biannual dumping of perfectly good stuff by college students on the sidewalks and streets. Mind you, this isn’t just the dorm room poster collection or something – we’re talking furniture in like new condition, clothing, lights, etc. – things that people with less money could use in their homes.
The problem is, most students don’t want to go to the trouble of hauling stuff like this to a charity. I can understand that, having been a student – the last thing on your mind as you’re moving out or in is moving yet MORE stuff somewhere else.
I’d like your help in spreading a simple message to every college student, to everyone and anyone who has stuff in still usable condition. There’s a charity I support called the Vietnam Veterans of America that has a charity donation system that kicks ass. Here’s how it works: you visit ScheduleaPickup.com and pick what you’re giving away, and most importantly
WHEN A TRUCK FROM THE CHARITY CAN COME TO YOUR PLACE AND PICK IT UP
That’s right: no hauling. No moving. No schlepping. A truck magically appears on Wednesdays and takes your still perfectly good stuff away. They leave you a receipt for tax purposes, too.
If you live nearby some college students who are throwing away perfectly good stuff, please consider corralling it to your yard or doorstep and then calling in the charity air strike yourself. There’s absolutely no reason that this stuff needs to take up space in a landfill when someone else can get some good out of it.
Please spread the word LOUDLY about ScheduleaPickup.com and solve both a waste and charity problem at the same time AND with little to no effort on the donor’s part. Everyone wins.
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More customers doesn't make you a better company
I’ve been shopping around the past few days for a terrific lead automation system for the day job, looking at all of the different vendors out there. One thread that’s been common among all of the comparison discussions on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc. that baffles me is this argument:
“We’re better because we have 42x more customers than any of our competitors, which shows that clearly we are the LEADER in our space!”
This argument makes no sense to me. More customers doesn’t make you a better company. More customers just means you have more customers. In fact, it might make you a worse company. If you and your competitor both have 60 people on staff but you have 42x more customers, all that means is I’m 42x less likely to get customer support when I need it.
If more customers were the benchmark of excellence, we’d all shop only at Wal-Mart for everything in life. They have more customers than anyone, right? Are they the best? If absolute numbers of customers were the mark of truly excellent service, logically wouldn’t the IRS (which has every taxpayer as a “customer”) be the best organization in the country to deal with?
What’s at work here is a bit of Robert Cialdini’s bandwagon influence techniques (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Amazon link). The hope of these marketers, I suppose, is that by seeing lots of people doing business with a company, I’ll be persuaded that it’s somehow better, in the same way that social media “experts” try to convince you that because they’ve got 20,000 followers, they’re somehow more knowledgeable about social media.
Sorry, gang. I’m not buying it. In this day and age when service, support, and care is needed more than ever, more customers as a sole metric of your worth means you just have less time for me.
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Does your company care? Do you?
While in the airport yesterday perusing a variety of marketing materials (aka billboards as I walked to my gate), I saw a bunch of different advertisements by companies about how much they care, from facility maintenance to oil to the airlines themselves. This inspired a late afternoon tweet:
If all your marketing materials insist that you care, you probably don’t.
Within a few minutes, Sophia asked the very on-point question:
brightwings: @cspenn curious. what would demonstrate “caring” to your way of thinking & satisfaction?
Caring is one of those terms that falls under the same category as cool. Saying that you care is far less impactful than actually caring.
What is caring? It’s hard to define but easy to spot. Take your pick of any of the things that people at companies do, from your local favorite restaurant server remembering the way you like your martini to an airline flight attendant doing the mandatory preflight announcement slightly differently:
Not caring is even easier to see. It’s business as usual, paying lip service to the idea that the people giving you money as customers might actually matter, and putting yourself before your customers. I worked for a company once where I watched as a customer service representative was told – in all seriousness – to care less, answer the phones more quickly, get the customer off the phone more quickly and get them to buy something online, and avoid helping them in order to maintain call volume, because phone calls cost money.
Caring isn’t a corporate directive that marketing can create from thin air, much as we might try or want to. Caring comes from a company’s corporate culture at every level, from the CEO to the janitor.
Maybe you’re in charge of a company, a department, a workgroup, and you want to evolutionize (note the missing letter R) the culture into one that cares. How do you do that? Take whatever it is you’re doing and reframe it as a mission. Not a B-school mission statement, but a real mission, a holy cause, a calling. Find or create a noble aspect to whatever it is you do, something that you can truly be passionate, even zealous about, and recenter your focus on that.
Sales will get easier because you will exude the subtle, powerful confidence that comes from speaking about something you believe in. Customer service will get easier because your customers will align to your beliefs or choose a different company to work with. Marketing will get much easier because you will rarely have to question whether the work you are doing is effective or not – you just have to determine if it is in line with your mission. Running the company itself will get easier because you won’t have to browbeat workers into coming to work or doing good work. The cause and the passion it fuels will do that for you; you need to maintain, encourage, and foster that faith, remaining true to your mission.
What demonstrates caring? When you have something to believe in and something worth fighting for, caring demonstrates itself.
What’s your mission?
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