Archives / September 2008

Good Experience doesn't often cover the financial markets, but this is an exceptional time. The current US financial crisis will likely affect everyone who reads this column - even outside the US - so it's worth discussing.

I believe this crisis could have been avoided had the people in charge followed a "good experience" approach to their work: committing to simplicity (rather than gratuitously complicated products), a long-term approach (rather than short-term gains at everyone else's expense), and an integrated view of their own role in the world (rather than a narrow view of "just keeping my head down, don't ask me to think about it").

A simple, long-term, integrated approach is the right way to do business. There are many reasons to advocate it, but I'll just list one. Committing to good experience focuses attention on other people in the system, not just oneself - one might even call it "caring" (!) - and for companies that follow the approach, it happens to pay enormous dividends over the long run.

I believe in capitalism and the benefits it can bring society, even a global one. But like any system, the output depends on the input. If enough players try to cheat - say, by swindling their fellow citizens - the system won't perform well in the long run. When the day of reckoning arrives, someone has to pay up. And here we are.

I'm - well, what's the best word - outraged? sickened? - that our system worked in the perverse way it did. Many of those who made out with unfairly large short-term gains are now on their yachts, safely out of the game, while everyone else - teachers, nurses, designers, middle managers, stay-at-home parents, and so on - will have to pay back those indiscretions for a generation or two.

One good way I've heard the problem described is "privatize profits, socialize losses." To the robber barons running the system, here's the deal we-the-people had with them: heads you win, tails we lose (and we'll pay for it all). What's to keep someone from taking huge risks, with that upside-only arrangement?

Of course, it's more complex than simple finger-pointing. The robber barons were playing the game made legal by the legislation passed by the people we elected. And the signs of this corruption have been visible for awhile, so maybe the people didn't do enough to get it fixed. Maybe it's time to "throw the bums out," or maybe it's time just to pay more attention. I don't know. The important question is what we create, starting now.

For my part, I'm still a hedgehog, sticking to the same old message, advocating for good experience: a simple, long-term, integrated approach that focuses on benefits outside a narrow self-centered view. I'll continue, via the Gel conference, to spotlight creative leaders who take this approach.

And via our Councils, the Creative Good team and I will continue to build a community of executives who are helping each other get through these times.

And finally, I'll keep writing Good Experience. For anyone who's ready to build, there are good things afoot. Stay tuned.

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P.S. Below are some of my favorite resources for understanding the credit crisis and the larger financial system. Hope you find them useful:

• Roller coaster of housing prices

• Relating the financial crisis to Moses and the golden calf

• Must-listen Fresh Air interview explaining the crisis

• On a prescient column from a year ago

• A good punk song to accompany the crisis

• Money as Debt, a video on the origins of money

• A summary of the crisis (back in May!) by Douglas Rushkoff, Gel '06 speaker

Update: Just came across this column by Philip Greenspun, who writes:

The people who created the bubble, in many cases engaging in frauds of various kinds, were rewarded handsomely and are now relaxing in their Greenwich, Connecticut mansions deciding whether to take out the yacht or the private jet. Wall Street firms did not retain their exceptional profits during the years of fraud, but rather paid out almost all of it to the executives and rank-and-file employees who engineered the fraud. (Actually if they had retained some of these profits they wouldn't be needing a bailout!)

Just launched the new design for Good Experience Games. Enjoy!

Another financial-crisis item well worth your time. Below is a short video that I meant to play a year and a half ago, at Gel 2007, but ran out of time (there's a story there, ask me sometime).

This video shows US home prices over several decades as a roller coaster ride. Make sure to watch until the end. Watching this in early '07, it was beyond obvious to me that there was a problem that would inevitably be corrected. (Sadly, none of the "experts" at the banks seemed to catch on, basing their Ponzi scheme on the incredible notion that housing prices would never, could never, go down.)

Apart from the very important data, the presentation is worth a comment here: it's rare to see data played back for the viewer, in first-person perspective. This is a great use of an inexpensive tool to communicate the message in the data that much more effectively.

After such weighty issues in recent posts, here's something trivial to get your knickers in a bunch.

I saw the sign at right in my neck of the woods recently. Such a nicely designed sign (and an important message) with a glaring grammatical error! It should be "never reopens" instead of "never reopen."

Right?

This column may be worth re-reading, given today's events. From a year ago:

In an airport the other day I spotted Entrepreneur magazine's current cover story: "Get Rich 2.0" was the headline, in enormous type. Just under that, "The Fast, Cheap & Easy Way To Make Money Online."

I couldn't help but remember that I had seen similar headlines in late 1999 and early 2000, just weeks before the dotcom crash.

Culinary delights at the State Fair of Texas: Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans, Deep Fried S'mores, Fried Pop Rocks Fundae Blast, and my personal favorite, the Fried Apple iPie:

delicious crispy fried apple pie with just a hint of cinnamon, smothered in rich vanilla ice cream and topped with an edible iPod-like mp3 player and whipped cream. Real working souvenir 'ear-bud' earphones complete this tasty iPie experience!

(Thanks, Elizabeth)

Clay Shirky talks about information overload, arguing that the solution comes down to filters... how to design filters in the tools, like the privacy settings in Facebook. Sort of the Web 2.0-ish version of "let the bits go" in Bit Literacy. Rather than running like crazy to engage the bits once they arrive, it's better to have a stance of avoiding, deleting, and deferring the bits so that they don't distract you in the first place.

Media diet pick: Last Wednesday's Fresh Air interview is a must-listen for anyone interested in untangling what's going on in the US financial markets right now. In it, Terry Gross interviews Michael Greenberger, former director at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a law professor at Maryland.

Eight ways to save design conferences: "Lately, design conferences have begun to feel less like intellectual retreats and more like conspicuous consumption. Albeit with excellent catering."

Item #2, "Discover new voices," mentions us: "Gel does a great job of not only corralling largely unknown speakers but giving them interesting things to do."

I'm working on a revamped Gel Videos site, so that we can share those new voices even more widely. Stay tuned.

WSJ on customer service after a service failure: "What businesses should be doing is looking at service recovery as a mission that involves three stakeholders: customers who want their complaints resolved; managers in charge of the process of addressing those concerns; and the frontline employees who deal with the customers."

As a nice followup to Secrets of book publishing, which I wrote a few weeks back, Cory Doctorow points out a New York Magazine article about the decline about the book publishing industry: Publishing's crises (incompletely) explained.

With the markets providing such interesting times, it's nice to have some punk rock available. The Briefs sing "Orange Alert":

Relating the financial crisis to Moses and the golden calf:

In popular culture it is common to raise an ordinary mortal to immense heights on the basis of the films they have been scripted to appear in or their ability to play a game with a ball. ... That does not matter too much when it is just a matter of film actors or football stars. But raise an entire institution - the unfettered financial world, for example - to the role of an idol and you are not critical of anything it does, either. That has more serious consequences. When outsiders try to show you its flaws, you will not genuinely listen to their arguments.

The author of the column is Gel speaker and friend David Bodanis (who was a focus of my crash course in innovation and wrote E=mc²). He also gave great talks at Gel '04 and euroGel '06 - here's a video clip.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Apple Store event last night.

I talked about the beauty of emptiness in the digital world. This reminded me to post these haiku-like poems from the good folks at Humana, who are studying Bit Literacy and wrote these clever responses.

On Email

A full inbox is a full mind
Emptiness is stress-less
Delete and file with swiftness!

Of Todo Lists

Todo is the center of all work
The center has only one time and place
Do todo or do not

About Media

To be full is joy
To be crammed full is pain
Be full, delete the useless

Of Photos

Choose what you remember
A blurred photo is not good memory
Let it go, delete the blur

On File Naming

What is in a file name?
A file becomes its name ...
or it becomes nothing

(Thanks to Bruce Spencer for sending these along.)

Event tonight, Wednesday: If you're in NYC, see you at the Apple Store Soho at 6:30pm for a talk on bit literacy (here's the book). Free event.

Geoffrey Canada interviewed on Fresh Air. He's still one of the all-time most popular Gel speakers - here's his video clip from Gel 2006.

Three visual treats on this Monday.

• Downhill skateboarding, in traffic, at shockingly high speed.

• The sticky-note experiment.

• Beautiful (if not always informative) visualizations of personal data.

A pitch-perfect sendup of the Facebook experience...

...all of which explains why I deactivated my Facebook account a few weeks ago. Cory Doctorow wrote some similar reasons last fall. More to say later, I hope in a fuller column.

(Meanwhile, if you missed it, watch Rhett & Link's Facebook song, which they also performed at Gel 2008.)

Charlie Todd, longtime friend of Gel and founder of Improv Everywhere, is featured today in this WSJ article on pranks. Nice work, Charlie.

I remember when AOL was the king of the hill in the early 90s. Compuserve and Prodigy were the other two choices for consumer online access, but they never had a chance. The "hook" of the online experience back then was email, and Compuserve and Prodigy each had its own incredibly, laughably complicated interface. AOL had a simple, easy-to-use interface. Sending and receiving email was a breeze on AOL and difficult anywhere else. No mystery why AOL won.

But then the Web arrived, and email was no longer the hook. Yes, email was still important, but the Web was a boundless resource, even back then - and continued to get more interesting and full-featured.

AOL could have said "we're committed to the user experience, and the Web is important to users, therefore let's embrace the Web."

Instead, AOL said "we're committed to remaining the sole provider of the Internet to our captive customers." So they made it hard for users to get to the Web, and unpleasant once they got there, via a horribly designed Web browser. (Didn't they see what happened to Prodigy and Compuserve, with their horrible email programs?)

And then, as a tepid response to the universe of wonder that was the Web, AOL offered a smidgen of content that they vetted, something they called the "walled garden." This was what AOL approved, and delivered, as your sole provider of the Internet. We see now how that top-down approach went.

To summarize: AOL, once a leader, lost its customer focus and suffered - probably fatally - as a result. (Exercise for the reader: can you think of any other companies that fit that pattern?)

Now we're at the point where the New York Times runs a post called Who uses AOL, and why? and gets over 400 responses, most of them negative, like this:

A-O-Hell is a service I use out of neccessity and not choice. It is awful from the ground up. The e-mail does not separate spam like Google's Gmail, their Search Engine is deplorably bad, the chatrooms are over-run ... the discerning customer knows better than to clog their computer with their flawed software.

It's a lesson for any company, in this economy, wondering where to focus its budgets.

From the you've-gotta-be-kidding department: the European Parliament has deemed Mr. Clean - shown at right - to be an offensive character. A "sexual sterotype." Uhh...why? Quoting the NYT article, his "muscular physique might imply that only a strong man is powerful enough to tackle dirt."

Just a little far-fetched! And I'm not sure what alternative the European Parliament would prefer. (Wouldn't a female character for a cleaning product be deemed more offensive?)

Maybe we need a non-man, non-woman, non-muscular, non-clean character to sell cleaning products in Europe. Here's my vote:

I know, I know, I'm way out of my league. Spotted on the Apple Store Soho site:

Hope to see NYC-area readers at the Apple Store in a week (Wednesday, Sept 17 at 6:30pm) for a chat about bit literacy.

Wireless Soapbox is one Canadian telco's project to listen to its customers. Apart from its gray-on-white color scheme (a design that still, years later, needs to stop), the site is an interesting experience. Here's part of one post:

As a Rogers Subscriber, here are a few things you can do to win me over:

1) Drop the System Access Fee. I HATE seeing this on my bill every month. Roll it in to the cost of the plans if you must (But I'd prefer it if you didn't!), but get it off my bill as a line item. I feel like I'm being ripped off every month.

2) Add things like Voicemail, Caller ID, etc TO THE PLANS, not as money grabbing add-ons. ...

The angry messages displayed on the site suggest that this is a genuine effort to listen to customers.

The Internet Overdose Song by Rhett & Link, presenters at Gel '08.

Now if we could just get them to sing a solution. (Bit Literacy with music, anyone?)

You don't often see Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, and "Brokeback Mountain" mentioned in the same breath. But there in an obituary in The Economist a few weeks back, all three of those cultural icons were revealed to have a common thread.

It was Jack Weil's obit, age 107: a Denver businessman, a Western clothing manufacturer who, for over 60 years, popularized much of what we know as cowboy fashion: flannel plaid shirts, bolo ties, and so on - worn at various times by Dylan, Reagan, and in "Brokeback."

Weil's accomplishment was monumental as a clothing maker: defining, then leading, an entire product category for over sixty years. If Steve Jobs is still leading Apple and its remarkable innovations at age 90, he'll come close to matching Weil's tenure.

And for such a feat, what was Weil's secret? Did he embrace the various management fads along the way - from Total Quality Management to Re-engineering to moving his cheese - or, perhaps, did he have some mystical insight into successful business?

The Economist reveals all:

What mattered were two things, quality, and knowing the customer: which was why, until a few weeks before his death, "Papa Jack" was always to be found from 8am till noon at his front desk in the company store on Wazee Street, poring over the past-due accounts and shaking hands with whoever came in, asking "Where you from?" and frequently being astounded at the answer.

He talked with customers face-to-face. He cared about quality. The truth is so simple, sometimes, it's easy to overlook.

Listening to customers, at least for Jack Weil, was not the territory of PhD's in market research or multi-tiered CRM databases. It was the simple, everyday act of listening to another person and caring about delivering something good to them.

And thus the company thrived for generations, and continues to live on today: Rockmount Ranch Wear.

Listening to customers isn't a new idea - it's been around as long as business itself. And it's not a complicated idea - the act of listening is one of the first things we do, as humans. And it's not an unpopular idea - brands are constantly shouting advertisements about serving customers, with services called "your" this, and "my" that.

Even so, few companies actually do it. Listening to customers is DIFFICULT. I think it's just too plain and simple for many companies to really commit to. You can just imagine executives thinking: something so mundane as talking to another person who happens to be my customer - surely that couldn't be the key to success, when there are so many newer, flashier solutions available?

Jack Weil's story answers the question. And if anyone needed more proof, they could look to the similar story of Joyce Hall, who also had a habit of listening to customers. His company, like Weil's, lives on today: Hallmark. Here's his case study.

(Photo of Jack Weil above from the Rockmount website.)