Rowan's Future of Choice

Remembering more than 9/11

I am mortified by the media’s depiction of how we are remembering and making sense of 9/11: the cheesy movies, the staged reenactments, the sensational re-telling.

What does this have to do with decision-making? I believe we are close to forfeiting our ability to make collective decisions about survival and defense. We let others decide for us.

For five years, our fears and vulnerabilities have been exploited for entertainment and political advantage. Clever and sophisticated marketing has re-defined the truth about actual history, real threats, and possible solutions. A range of special interests from politicians to the entertainment and construction industries have profited mightily. Our response to all of this? Low-grade indifference spiked by moments of lonely terror.

We know that we are not the generation that faced the attack on Pearl Harbor. And we do not care.

This media frenzy far exceeds anything I have previously experienced. To give you my perspective, I was born during the Korean War and raised during Vietnam, by parents who were raised during World War I and survived World War II. Like you, our family has made sacrifices and choices.

What can we do? We must take back the decisions we let others make for us. How do we do that? Start by reading more diversely. Learn enough about political candidates so that your vote reflects what you know, not what you have been told. Question all sources. Look behind the curtain.

Leading by metaphor... or not

Aristotle said, "the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor." In the realm of decision-making and choice, I argue that metaphor alone is not sufficient because it exists solely in the imagination, and not in the larger world of actions and consequences. (UPDATE 9/28: I say 'larger' because I really do believe the world is bigger than anything we can imagine. This is what makes living so exciting.)

If metaphors are the greatest things by far, then the leaders we entrust with decision authority need to use them with much greater precision and clarity.

The dictionary says metaphors "involve figures of speech or symbolism and do not literally represent real things."  "Command" means to direct or control. To have command of metaphor is, in some sense, to be master of illusion.

Goodness knows, we are drowning in a sea of illusion. Leaders say things like "stay the course" and "weather these difficulties." (What course should we stay? Are we expecting a bad storm?)

They re-arrange the deck chairs before urging us not to jump ship, even as they welcome new folks on board and make sure nothing terrible happens on their watch.

Is anyone else confused by these voyages of speech? Would it help if I laid out the ground rules or showed you my roadmap?

What these expressions really mean is,

I give up. I have no idea what I am talking about. Think I'll go sailing.

Now I understand.

Definition of metaphor; Drawing

This time, the customer gets to decide

As customers, many of us have antagonistic relationships with businesses. We have come to expect check-out errors to favor the store, products to break the day after warranty runs out, and electronics to become obsolete within a few months.

Six Apart, my blog service provider, had some infrastructure problems recently.  Barak Berkowitz, Chairman and CEO, gave me options for compensation. I get to decide the impact their problems had on me. Who better to judge? I love being treated this way.

From Barak's email:

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation.  If you click the link below, you'll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

• While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
  Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
  Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
  Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

• I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
  Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

More to know, less to trust

Noah Weiss at ChangeThis.com says:

America is filled with noise.... The end of constructive debate was years ago.... More now than ever, America is faced with an unprecedented number of options and an unprecedented lack of media validity and integrity.

Noah believes it doesn't have to be this way. Check out this link. Sign up for their email. Great ideas.

Subtle differences

Big business spends small fortunes on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to run its core functions of finance, marketing, customer relations management, and more.

New research by the Hackett Group shows little difference in how companies use competing products by ERP's big three (or is it two?): Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft (recently acquired by Oracle). Their research does not tie products to corporate performance or competition, although one indicator relates to revenue.  This is unfortunate, because vendors tout business performance and competitive advantage as the top reasons to buy their software. What is the truth?

Nicolas Carr really digs into this phenomenon in his recent post, "Lies, damned lies and IT statistics." I highly recommend Nick's post to anyone interested in trust, data, and making better decisions. Link

Also, check out today's Financial Times story by Ben King, "Shock news: why all ERP vendors are the same." An extract from Ben's piece:

Research among large corporations by the business process advisory company suggests the battle to sell ERP... is largely irrelevant.

When it comes to financials, the core of an ERP system, any of the leading vendors’ software will do more or less the same job.

Link requires subscription

Hackett Group home.

Buyer choices

A number of factors go into our decision to buy from a particular store: a friend's recommendation, prior experience, convenience. Much of the time we have lots of choices.

Derek Sivers at CD Baby has funny way of making customers feel good--and likely to return. The email he sent me today is not just a shipping announcement--it fuels my next decision.

"Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Thursday, October 27th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'.  We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby"