Tag Archives: Reality checks

December 14, 2016 · 10:51 am

Willfully Ignorant

At the risk of being redundant, I’m going on a bit of a rant today about ignorance. It’s a topic I’ve touched on before but it seems as if something happens each day, either in the business world or elsewhere, that makes me feel as if I need to get this off my chest.

The hardest thing in business these days is seeing over the horizon. I think the people and enterprises that “win” are the ones whose horizon is just a bit further off, allowing them to see a little more of the road in front of them. I also believe that the way we can extend our horizons is through information. That impels each of us to seek out information about anything and everything that can help us improve our vision. Information about our market. Information about our customers. Information about our competitors. Information about the world around us.

What has me ranting today is the amount of willful ignorance I see. It’s one thing not to have information. It’s another thing if the information doesn’t exist. It’s absurd, however, to know that information is out there and even to have it offered to you and to decline it. Even worse is to hear about what the information source has to say and to challenge its reality based on nothing other than your own gut feel. That’s insane.

The worst part is that some of the folks who participate in this insanity do so out of hubris. They are the personifications of “let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story” or in the way of their own ignorant beliefs. That’s not to say they’re stupid. Many of the folks I’ve met who act this way are quite intelligent. They’re just too smitten with their own success to date to believe anything but their own guts.

I wrote about the role of intuition in business (there is one!) a little while back. Intuition is NOT “I know better than anyone.” It’s not throwing out factual information because it conflicts with your world view. It’s certainly not being willfully ignorant.

So today’s bit of business advice is to choose knowledge. Rather than willfully ignorant, be aggressively knowledgable. See further over the horizon and you’ll make better decisions. OK?

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December 12, 2016 · 11:40 am

Bursting The Bubble

Would you buy from you? Knowing what you know about your product/service and the team behind it, would you invest your hard earned capital in your company? Hopefully, the answer is yes, and it’s just as important that your response is based on real-world experience and not some vision you conjured up of your business as seen through a Vaseline-coated lens.

I raise this today because I read the chart you can see over there which summarizes the results of a study as reported by Marketing Charts. 200 Chief Marketing Officers were asked, by the CMO Council and Deloitte, how they prefer to spend their time:

When respondents were asked where they would prefer to spend their time as marketing leaders, a leading two-thirds said they’d rather team with leadership on global business strategy (66%), while a majority would also want to innovate and implement new approaches, products, and strategies (58%). Just 1 in 6 would prefer to spend their time in meetings and only 1 in 10 would want to review budgets and campaigns.

How this relates to the question I asked initially is simple. My questions put you in the position of the consumer. They imply that you’ve actually used your product or service and have done so as a consumer would (sort of like a secret shopper). The survey responses feel to me as if the CMO’s would prefer to live in a bubble, dreaming up new strategies and products while not particularly wanting to get their hands dirty in the real world activity of listening to customers.

You might wonder how any CMO can strategize without keeping the customer front and center. What’s interesting is that only 6% report that they are tasked with driving routes to revenue across all facets of the business globally. That reads like life in a bubble to me.

Each of us needs to burst whatever bubbles keep us away from our markets and our customers. Planning new products is fine but they can’t be solutions to problems that don’t exist or for which there won’t be demand once consumers realize they have a need (and hopefully they already do). You with me?

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November 16, 2016 · 12:29 pm

Why Can’t You Yell Fire?

I think we all know that you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. It will cause a panic and someone will get hurt. At a minimum, the odds are that someone will also call in a false alarm that distracts the fire department. That is a common-sense limit to free speech. Almost 100 years ago the Supreme Court said that the First Amendment, though it protects freedom of expression, does not protect dangerous speech.

I thought of that the other day when Google and Facebook announced that they would take what I think is a great first step in purging themselves of fake news by cutting off the access those sites have to revenue-generating or promotional ads. As Reuters reported:

Google said it is working on a policy change to prevent websites that misrepresent content from using its AdSense advertising network, while Facebook updated its advertising policies to spell out that its ban on deceptive and misleading content applies to fake news.

As someone who is devoted to the First Amendment, you might wonder why I’m OK with what seem to be limits on free speech. Fake news – or outright lies – are a big source of the divisive atmosphere most of us recognize exists in our country. They’re not hate speech, which I’m actually OK with because it’s so obviously slanted. They’re worse because they wrap themselves in a cloak of truth. As we’ve discussed here many times before, many people – both in business and out – don’t bother to do the research to find out if what’s being presented to them in factual. The presence of these sites and their fabricated BS makes a very difficult search even more so. No, the Pope didn’t endorse Donald Trump and yet 100,000 people shared that story as if His Holiness did.

By removing the financial incentive to create and promulgate this crap, Facebook and Google are taking a positive step in helping those of us who want to make decisions based on factual material. It’s not censorship; it’s arresting the idiot who’s yelling “fire” for a profit. Hopefully, the next step is some method to annotate and fact check the sites that remain. I also see that Twitter is suspending the accounts of some alt-right leaders.:

In a statement, Twitter said: “The Twitter Rules prohibit targeted abuse and harassment, and we will suspend accounts that violate this policy.”

There is no question that Twitter has become a bit of a cesspool and they certainly need to take some actions that clean up the rampant trolling and harassment that goes on. This, however, doesn’t sit as well with me since it starts down the slippery slope of censorship. The difference is my mind is that the fake news folks are making stuff up for profit while the hate groups are expressing (in theory) their own beliefs, however misguided.

Interesting times, aren’t they?

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