Imagine yourself in any major supermarket. One can get lost in multiple aisles of single-use plastic bottles filled with soap, gel, wash, shampoo, and conditioner for your body, face, hands, privates, and hair. The cosmetic and personal care section occupies another few aisles with attractively packaged soon-to-be landfill waste. More soaps for laundry and dishes border rows of household cleaning products, air and fabric fresheners. Toothpaste and brightly colored plastic toothbrushes have their own aisle. A few years ago one of the FMCG multinationals released a bamboo toothbrush in a flash of self-congratulatory marketing hype. I’ve never seen one in a store and that technology […]
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Fast-Food Thinking
Who writes your menu? The menu you eat from? The menu you consume information from? The menu of daily choices you consider free will. The menu of breakthrough business insights that promise a leadership advantage? Is it clear by now it’s just multiple choice, mostly bad ones? Predetermined options that deliver for someone else — someone you pay with your money, time, physical & mental health, or your privacy? Does it concern you? Surely you’ve heard a version of “the menu is not the choices/the map is not the territory.” Yet the menu and map are increasingly controlled by consolidated gatekeepers that discourage mental or […]
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Storytelling & Collapsing in Business and Society
The Key Words In 2015 and 2016 I was at Adobe conferences in Las Vegas, London and Singapore. Digital Transformation ran point, of course. Storytelling” and its sub-theme “empathy” were counterpoints in every room I entered. Storytelling was officially the thing. As software eats the world, software-enabled storytelling eats the humans at great societal cost. Empathy is just one device in the storyteller’s manipulation toolbox that includes vulnerability, purpose, meaning, and an assortment of intersectional mousetraps — all baited with emotional incentives that appeal equally to guilt mechanisms of the non-intersectional. This proven formula works for marketing, management philosophy, and all manner of public & […]
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Resources: Build A Newsfeed, Not An Anxietyfeed
The news sucks in large part because the ad-based business model profits from outrage and anxiety. There’s little incentive for that to change but there are ways to build a better stream of information that you control, instead of surrendering to algorithms. I’ve been working on a sanity-preserving newsfeed for about 7 years, going hard since 2018. This was recorded near the beginning of C19 hysteria. Some things have changed since then and some haven’t. Here it is as a reference: Recent Changes Bloomberg’s weekday morning shows (about 6-9 AM EST) were market-focused and mostly apolitical. That’s over, at least temporarily. Their web/print is biased […]
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NOTE5: Leadership, Media, Separating Signal from Noise
A Good Primer for Leaders Critical Race Theory (CRT) is banned as a training doctrine in the US Federal gov’t. The pushback will be noisy & distorted (and the ban may be overturned). CRT is the mother of white privilege, equity, diversity & inclusion, racial-sensitivity, anti-racism, anti-bias, and every other go-to-market branding that shares this singular tenet: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’” (–quoting DiAngelo) Here’s what this means for you. Waking up in the morning, your alarm clock is racist because time itself is racist and reliably showing up for your racist job is […]
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