Ponderings Archives - Page 8 of 10

Mar 30

Why weddings should have a business plan

Ponderings 15 Comments »

A bit of a departure from the normal topics but ponder this for a sec:

Would weddings benefit from having a short biz plan or executive summary drawn up?

I’m not speaking to the institute of marriage itself, just the actual event that is a wedding. I’ve attended maybe twenty weddings throughout my life and in at least 70% of them the stress level surrounding the preparation and execution eclipsed the enjoyment of the day for those putting it on. I’m thinking about why this situation occurs consistently and it seems to all come down to one thing: trying to desperately meet some expectation for what the day should be instead of just enjoying whatever it is.

I have a string of four back-to-back weddings over the next two months and I’m starting to handle the travel arrangements and gifts. It’s one of those odd cycles where a handful of friends have all chosen to tie the knot around the same time. Thinking about the resources spent from their angle as well as from all the guests, this is an enormous expenditure for everyone involved. What if we all just agreed to have a huge group vacation with that money instead?

The wedding industry is one I’ve never thought much about but as with any industry where there’s an entire ecosystem developed around it, it has unstoppable inertia. The industry revolves around perpetuating the idea that you need to have huge fanfare on that day– giant bouquets of exotic flowers, invitations hand-etched by buddhist calligraphers done on papyrus, dresses sewn from silk of an exotic butterfly, cakes made with wind-milled flour… The future brides of my guy friends all have these magazines that tantalize them with the various options for the flowers, cakes, dresses, invitations, etc. I do understand that it’s an important day that women want to have it perfect, but doesn’t it all seem a little… off?

You’ve probably seen those data visualization maps of the world that show countries disproportionate in geographic size that instead express size of the country relative to another scale like GDP or emissions or population. The data viz map for the typical wedding looks like:

I’m probably forgetting obvious things but that’s about how I remember it from my brother’s wedding. The funny thing is, in every wedding I’ve ever attended it’s never been about any of that stuff. I couldn’t tell you what any of the cakes looked like or how the flowers smelled- all I remember is the people that were there and the interaction of the different circles of friends coming together. If there was a map to express the ideal proportion of the elements involved, it would look more like this:

with the focus entirely on the guests. I’ll concede that having a skilled photographer is a worthwhile expenditure for capturing the moments and preserving them. But looking at the reality of how the normal wedding goes down, it’s strange to see how misaligned the budget is with the real goals. I can hear Kathy Sierra and her mantra of “help your users to kick ass” and how she would probably agree with the notion that your wedding should be about “helping your guests kick ass.” So this proposal will probably sound cold to anybody currently organizing a wedding but for such an important event, shouldn’t a wedding have a business plan for the same reasons that businesses have a business plan? It would ensure that the actual focus is accurate with the intended one and that the budget reflects the same story.

If that day comes for this guy, it’s going to be a pretty simple formula:

Friends + booze + tropical place + pictures to crystallize the memories = ideal wedding.

The mission: to get all the right people to a special place for the purpose of having an unforgettable weekend. All expenditures support that mission: axe the calligrapher in favor of web RSVP’s, scratch all fancy flower arrangements and expensive clothes and instead do a travel fund to disburse amongst guests to defray travel expenses and a local tour guide organizing a weekend of fun activities for guests to meet each other and enjoy the island.

So if you’re not already married but you’re in the process of planning a wedding, some questions for you:

What are the elements of your ideal wedding?
What would you consider the mission of your wedding day to be if you had to distill it to one sentence?
How would your budget support this mission?
Would thinking about the event in this way change how you execute it or is your game-plan already pretty much consistent?
If you had never seen a wedding before or had any idea of what they’re traditionally like, and someone asked you to set the tradition of how weddings should work, what would yours be like?
If you agree that the focus has been somewhat derailed by the economics of the wedding industry, is it possible/desirable to reshape how weddings are done and how could that occur?

Mar 23

Parking meter arbitrage

Ponderings 10 Comments »

Here’s a strange Friday thought:

Parking Meters are like gift certificates in that there’s always “breakage” one way or another.

If you think about it, you always end up either putting in too much money and leaving change in the meter when you drive away, or you make the more costly mistake of putting in too little and end up getting stuck with a parking ticket because you short-guessed it. The optimal payment to a parking meter is just enough money so that it expires right as you return to your car. Any other situation and you’re getting hosed.

Where there’s inefficiency there’s room to innovate and capitalize on the arbitrage. If you live somewhere where you are using parking meters frequently, would you pay $20/mo for a subscription to a service that ensured you never got any parking tickets and always optimized your payments to deposit only what was necessary to the meter while you used it? There’s a right answer here because you would know a month after using the service whether it was saving you money or not. If you use the meter twice a day and this service saves you from even one parking ticket or from wasting enough change each time from over-paying, it would be worth it.

I have no idea how to best automate this and it’s in the municipality’s best interest to not optimize this here- they win the more breakage there is in this situation (whether it’s through extra change left in the meter or through parking tickets). Affixing some device to all parking meters would be costly not to mention illegal due to tampering with government property. It would most likely not be cost-effective to have low-paid bikers with change purses being texted with instructions on where to deposit money either. I’m not sure the winning implementation here but there is absolutely an opportunity to middleman this situation and capitalize on the parking meter inneficiency problem offering a service that would save people money- the question is if you could do it in such a way as to be profitable. Estimate the number of meters in the world and the money wasted on each one on an average day and you have a fairly attractive market cap…

Jan 07

The “post-tropical vacation blues” hypothesis

Ponderings, Psychology 20 Comments »

People that come back from tropical vacation spots occasionally report mild depression upon returning to civilization. The generally-accepted cause seems to be that our society has become materialistic and disjointed. I have a different hypothesis as to what might be the true cause and it has nothing to do with flaws in the congruity of life in big cities.

The trouble with being given a spotlight is that you start to behave the way you think someone in a spotlight should behave rather than continuing with your own voice that got you there in the first place. Granted, this will be breaking my first New Year’s resolution of ditching the first person tense for posts but the realization I had after consulting a very wise woman is that ultimately blog writing is about connecting deeply with others and has nothing to do with tense usage and choice of grammar or even subject matter. If you can write something that resonates deeply with one person, that’s far more important than appealing shallowly to a ton of people. It matters only that the writing stem directly from the center of your chest as opposed to the top of your head. So I want to first tell a story and then suggest an idea for a thesis or dissertation to any graduate student of the behavioral sciences who might be qualified to test this theory and is looking for good fodder for a dissertation.

A friend of mine, Jeff Hausman once said to me upon returning from an extended vacation in Thailand, “Why is it that I feel so depressed by all this concrete and the pace of things here in the US– what are we doing”

You really have to know Jeff to appreciate this statement. He’s the owner of VanHalenStore.com. I’ve known him since 1997 and he is the largest online retailer of Van Halen merchandise in the world and formerly produced Inside Magazine, the exclusive Van Halen fan magazine (this makes him one of the coolest people ever btw). He is one of the rare people that has made a living doing exactly what he loves and he’s been successful not because he is a genius at marketing or online sales, but because he is arguably VH’s biggest fan and believes in what he sells. Anyways, in October of 2000 he convinced four of us to drive with him from Phoenix to Cabo San Lucas. It was a round-trip of nearly 4000 miles that took three days of straight driving each way on some of the narrowest, most treacherous roads down the untamed Baja peninsula.

And it was a pilgrimage of sorts for all of us – Benny, Brad and I had just come out of working for a company called ProScout. Avery was in a transitional phase at Nortel and Jeff was flexible through the nature of his business to be able to take two weeks off and go to Mexico. The moons that were each of our lives were in proverbial alignment to facilitate this trip and it felt like one of those Stand By Me-type transformational voyages we all needed to take.

The trip was in every way an epic adventure. We saw terrain and people that few others will ever see. When we finally arrived in Cabo we pulled up to this beach bar called “The Office” (still fresh out of our cube farms, the irony was laughable). We promptly grabbed a metal bucket of coronas, filled the bottom 1/3rd with sand and floated out into the ocean bobbing up and down on the swells that rolled in off the Pacific. It is a gem of a memory I keep tucked away and to this day draw upon it in moments of great stress.

Mexico is a “heat sink for stress” – it melts it away and puts even the most neurotic person into a relaxed state of mind. Mexican locals in the towns we visit don’t know the meaning of hurriedness there. The rest of that trip we spent lounging on Land’s End, taking water taxi’s, sea kayaking around the point, playing guitar and talking about the things that good friends can talk about under the stars in a foreign place. It was epic and it unwound us all.

Like all amazing journeys though, it had to come to an end. We were there for twelve days and on the final day (once we had convinced Brad that he could not in fact smuggle the stray puppy that he had found back to the States), we guided Jeff’s Bronco onto Interstate 1 and began the long drive back up the Baja to Phoenix. We each took something different from that trip but what was consistent for all of us was the grounding effect of extracting ourselves from the rat race, transplanting to a seaside town and putting life in slo-mo for awhile.

Upon re-entering the States, Benny Brad and I took desk jobs, Avery returned to his Nortel cubicle and Jeff to his basement. Subsequently, each of us experienced a period of depression as we re-integrated to the concrete sprawls of our respective hometowns, Phoenix and Dallas. We talked about it and tried to put our finger on the cause- the conclusion we all came to was that it had to do with temporary shelter in a responsibility-free, stress-free environment and snapping back to the reality of the grind of daily work in a more-material-oriented society. With hindsight having made several extended trips to various seaside towns in Mexico since, I have a different theory to explain the depression and it is as simple as this:

When your body acclimates to a tropical climate (humid and fresh sea air) and a healthy diet (organic produce and mainly seafood with high concentration of OM-3 and OM-6 EFA’s), abruptly transplanting to a locale with poor air quality, zero humidity and a EFA-deficient diet causes jarring changes in one’s chemistry and effects manifest as depression. We mistakenly attribute the resulting lethargy to the hustle & bustle and materialism of our home surroundings and ponder whether the US is going to “hell in a hand basket.” I’m suggesting that the depression can be attributed to simple Pavlovian classical conditioning with the body chemistry changes being the true culprit and us subconsciously pairing the stimuli of our home surroundings with the behavioral response we experience from the chemistry change. If this is in fact correct, then the effects can be easily mitigated with an air purifier, humidifier and dietary supplements to approximate the tropical environment.

Anyways, that’s the gist of my theory. Of course I have no scientific basis to substantiate any of this but it’s a best guess based on past personal experience and could be fairly easily tested with control groups. It would be great to see some grad student pick this up and do it as a dissertation – I will gladly volunteer to be one of the subjects if needed ;-)

I throw this out there because depression is an ugly thing and I have personally brushed with it on multiple occasions and would love to get to the bottom of what causes it. If you’ve ever experienced the “Post Tropical Vacation Blues” – leave your story here in a comment and maybe a medical researcher will latch onto this idea and test it. The bottom line- by chronicling your experiences, your physiology and the relevant variables, patterns will emerge that give clues as to the true underlying causes. Cheers to a depression-free world and to the day that mental conditions are understood with the same clarity as physical illnesses.

Dec 15

Social Media, the Pond Analogy and the Old Media Disconnect

Ponderings 7 Comments »

We had the second meeting of the Social Media Club last night in Phoenix, AZ and I believe I can finally summarize the disconnect between old media marketing folk and the new media people who understand the essence of what social media is about. For the sake of this discussion, think of effective marketing as the art of spreading ripples of awareness throughout a glassy pond. If the goal is to cover as much surface area in as little time as possible, this is the critical distinction:

Old media folk are used to a one-shot, one-direction stone toss – you get one chance to lob your rock into the pond and watch the ripples as they emanate out from that. New media people realize that the pond has mud skippers and dragonflies in it, each capable of generating their own ripples and far more important than the waves generated from your toss are the secondary and tertiary ripples coming from the pond’s wildlife.

This rift in philosophies really is that basic. While old media folk will be perpetually looking for a bigger rock to heave into the pond in order to displace more water, how to optimize the trajectory of their throw to get a greater initial splash and how to aim it just right so it lands in the very center of the pond to yield the maximum potential coverage area, new media people will be thinking about ways to reach the wildlife with messages worthy of redistribution. Under the old media paradigm distribution was scarce and channels were controlled by a select few so the well-aimed boulder throw made perfect sense. Today distribution channels are limitless, it’s the attention that’s scarce and the transmissibility of the message is what’s important.

Understanding of the principles proposed in books like Tipping Point is critical. Whether you refer to the pond wildlife as Seth Godin’s sneezers, Guy Kawasaki’s thunderlizards, Malcolm Gladwell’s mavens, or Robert Van Arlen’s igniters – their role is the same: they are the second and third-generation ripplers that filter and relay your message to the rest of the pond (and ripplers talk with other ripplers). The primary determinant of the virility of your message is the value of the message itself. The level of credibility of the ripplers determine it’s tertiary transmission. Yes it’s helpful to connect first with high-ripple-potential wildlife but it does no good if you hit them with a boilerplate press release. Your message must represent clear and present value to that wildlife and the depth of that connection you establish with the rippler is everything. Traffic is of secondary in importance compared to quality of the connection established.

As far as the Social Media Club, it’s an energetic group if not a bit overly so. There is an air of irrational exuberance that smells similar to when the dotcom craze struck as people started regurgitating buzzwords. Suddenly people think that blogs and wikis will solve world hunger and that blogging (the verb) is a sacred art form somehow different from writing. It should be no surprise that awareness and attendance of this group has ignited so fast given the nature of the subject matter. Last night had significantly more substance than the first though I’m happy to say. Francine who helped pull folks together as only she can, wrote up her take on the event and was right on with her comments. I’m planning to check out the next one as I am interested in this new press release style they’re talking about. It will be interesting to see how the group evolves.

Jul 08

Drug companies should be required to ‘eat their own dogfood’

Activism, Ponderings 12 Comments »

I want to propose a radical idea here: to the executives and employees of the major drug companies- if you are an individual responsible in any way for manufacturing, distributing or selling mind-altering drugs, you should be required to sample your own product before you push it on others in the same way that police officers are required to take a hit from the taser weapon before they can administer it in the field. Undoubtedly this idea would meet intense resistance and never get approved. I can hear the opposing arguments now and the rebuttal of “well if that’s your logic then Smith & Wesson employees should have to…” But what if a vitamin manufacturer was unwilling to consume its own product – would you not be skeptical of what they’re selling? Consider for a moment the current state of the pharmaceutical industry: think about the sums of money involved, the incentives at every level to encourage unnecessary prescription of these drugs, think about how they are defended and litigated to minimize exposure and maximize profit in situations where new information comes to light revealing crippling side effects and ultimately recognize who will bear the cost of this government-sanctioned racket in the form of long-term health issues for a significant chunk our population. More and more western medicine appears broken and the problem cannot be isolated to the chemists inventing the compounds in the lab, the clinicians conducting the trials, the lawyers securing the patents, the drug reps pushing the product, the doctor’s and psychiatrists writing the slips, the insurance companies paying the claims or the pharmacists scooping the pills over the counter – it’s the economics of the whole chain the fact that each individual is so removed from the end result that ensures this ugly trend will perpetuate itself indefinitely.

There’s a brilliant lyric from a song by Jack Johnson called Cookie Jar:

you can’t blame me, says the media man
i wasn’t the one who came up with the plan
i just point my camera at what the people want to see
it’s a two way mirror and you can’t blame me

I understand the dynamics of the situation: “it’s my job” says the salesperson. “It’s my job” says the chemist. “It’s my job” says the lawyer. “Other companies would move into our space if we didn’t” says the CEO. Capitalism has come in direct conflict with the the Hippocratic Oath and the public interest of health and wellness though, and guess which one has steamrolled the other? In such a radical situation, isn’t a radical approach necessary to re-balance the boat? When the boat has demonstrated that it’s not going to right itself an is in fact in an indisputable state of capsizing, isn’t it time to rally the crew and take action to save the ship? Responsibility has to exist at each link of the chain – if you’re pushing the safety of your product and you’re unwilling to sample it yourself, what does that say about the confidence of your assertions that the product is in fact safe?

I will share that for the greater part of 2001 I was on a cocktail of three of the most dangerous prescription drugs in existence: zyprexa, effexor and risperdal. How these substances continue to be sold blows my mind – read some of the patient testimonials from the above links to get a flavor for what these medications do. By some miracle and against the advice of every doctor and psychiatrist that saw me, I weaned myself off of these medications, evaded the path of zombie-dom that was inevitable for me and returned to a normal existence having gone through what I can only say what it must have felt like to the Apollo astronauts when they lost contact with earth on the dark side of the moon. Talking about a personal experience such as this carries a negative stigma, it’s seen as “uncool” and is arguably a risky bit of “career-damaging” info to share publicly. But having had first-hand experience with these medications and learning about the prevalence with which they are now being prescribed, it’s gut-wrenching to think about the lives that are being permanently destroyed under the guise of health and for monetary gain on the part of these drug companies.

Following cognitive dissonance theory I can only imagine the supporting justifications that the employees of these companies must concoct to be okay with what they are doing. These drugs may be helpful in isolated cases as an intervention method but they are being prescribed as a way of life. Pharmaceuticals- don’t kid yourself, you are not improving the lives of your consumers- you are causing child suicides. Short of meeting this plague head-on with a radical addition of checks and balances such as the one I’m suggesting here, what is a possible resolution to this situation? I challenge any representative of one of the major pharmaceuticals to respond to this question. And to everyone else what do you think the answer is to this situation?

Apr 28

Google Sketchup and Google Desktop: Brain Edition

Google, Nerd, Ponderings 2 Comments »

I just downloaded Google Sketchup and went through their tutorials. I did two years of work with 3d studio max creating animations for jury trials and I gotta say this is interesting. From a 50,000-ft strategic view, it seems perplexing why Google would release a 3d modeling application when they’re typically thought of as a search company. And yet when you look more closely this move is hugely-consistent with John Battelle’s assessment of them building a massive database of intent.

If you think about what Google really is- they’re not a search engine company at all. They’re not even an ad company. They’re an information broker that is making their commission through different angles by hooking people up with the knowledge they seek. Their mission statement says their goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” By their own words they want to become the librarian for the card catalogue of everything that currently exists. But realistically their goal is more ambitious than that: it’s to know exactly what everyone wants at any given moment that does not yet exist for them. If the analogy of energy in its kinetic vs. potential states can be extrapolated to “information as energy,” Google is far more interested in the “potential” side of the equation. In fact I would argue that they are closer to Joseph Campbell and Karl Jung in their motivations than they are to Rupert Murdoch in terms of desire to create a real-time map the world’s collective intelligence at any given moment and broker the info exchange vs. scraping profiles on Myspace and targeting users with personalized ads. Of course they’re a public company now so it’s not entirely up to Google anymore what Google will become…

The SketchUp program from a tactical perspective is the distillation of the basics of a 3d modeling environment without the animation capabilities. It’s extremely friendly, simple, intuitive and their quickstart tutorial is solid. Compare the toolset from SketchUp on the left to that of 3dsmax on the right:

It’s reminiscent of the way Flash first felt as a vector drawing program after having used the more-powerful-yet-complex Adobe Illustrator for so long. The most interesting promise of this 3d app is not just in that it reduces the barriers for the layperson to be able to model fictitious things – it’s greatest value is in its integration with google earth. It will allow people to imagine things and overlay them where they would exist in the real world (or the “big room” as my buddy Dave calls it) and then share these dreamed objects with others. The teaser example graphic on their homepage shows an animation of a 3d model planning of a wooden deck evolving on the back of a house presumably tantalizing the viewer with the prospect of conceiving new home additions and overlaying these dreamed additions on reality via google earth. WOW- so Google essentially wants to:

know what your dreams are (exactly how you envision that log cabin you want to build in the mountains)
and where you want to manifest them (30 yards away from the creek and just south of the rock outcropping- lon/lat GPS coords…)

Understandable now why this app is compelling and very consistent with their strategy…It’s them giving a virtual lego set to the world and watching what people make with it – a more open-ended way of asking “what do you really want?” Armed with that intelligence they will have all the essential ingredients to broker info that helps get you there and doesn’t just satisfy your sterile web searches but that hones on the emotions and the passions that are driving your searches, and THAT (any salesperson will tell you) is where the the true power is in being able to close a customer.

The real question is, “which will be the first bionics company that google purchases?” And once that happens, how far off is it until the release of “Google Desktop: Brain edition?” There have been huge advances in bionics recently and scientists can now patch into the visual and motor cortex and to the point to facilitate sight in blind people, hearing in deaf people and even instill telekinesis in monkeys (no joke – listen to the podcast to hear how they’ve done it). My question to you is: if you could upgrade your brain to jack directly into google’s information database but the tradeoff was that they got to index your brain, is that a pill you would willingly swallow?