Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (48 page)

This is the cornerstone of our way of life. The backbone of our economy does not lie in brain surgeons and master violinists. It’s in fairly average people doing fairly average work.

The focus on productivity wouldn’t be relevant to this discussion except for the second thing Ford did. He decided to pay his workers based on productivity, not on replacement value. This was an astonishing breakthrough. When Ford announced the $5 day (more than double the typical salary paid for this level of skill), more than 10,000 people applied for work at Ford the very next day.

Instead of paying people the lowest amount he’d need to find enough competent workers to fill the plant, he paid them more than he needed to because his systems made them so productive. He challenged his workers to be more productive so that they’d get paid more.

It meant that nearly every factory worker at Ford was dramatically overpaid! When there’s a line out the door of people waiting to take your job, weird things happen to your head. The combination of repetitive factory work plus high pay for standardized performance led to a very obedient factory floor. People were conditioned to do as they were told, and they traded autonomy and craftsmanship for high pay and stability.

All of a sudden, we got used to being paid based on our output. We came, over time, to expect to get paid more and more, regardless of how long the line of people eager to take our job was. If productivity went up, profits went up. And the productive workers expected (and got) higher pay, even if there were plenty of replacement workers, eager to work for less.

This is the central conceit of our economy. People in productive industries get paid a lot even though they could likely be replaced by someone else working for less money.

This is why we’re insecure.

Obedience works fine on the well-organized, standardized factory floor. But what happens when we start using our heads, not our hands, and when our collars change from blue to white?

Before you hit Send on that next email, perhaps you should run down this list, just to be sure:

1. Is it going to just one person? (If yes, jump to #10.)
   
2. Since it’s going to a group, have I thought about who is on my list?
   
3. Are they blind copied?
   
4. Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it?
   
5. So that means that if I
   didn’t
   send it to them, they’d complain about not getting it?
   
6. See #5. If they wouldn’t complain, take them off!
   
7. That means, for example, that sending bulk email to a list of bloggers just ’cause they have blogs is not okay.
   
8. Aside: the definition of permission marketing—anticipated, personal, and relevant messages delivered to people who actually want to get them. Nowhere does it say anything about you and your needs as a sender. Probably none of my business, but I’m just letting you know how I feel. (And how your prospects feel.)
   
9. Is the email from a real person? If it is, will hitting Reply get a note back to that person? (If not, change it, please.)
   
10. Have I corresponded with this person before?
    
11. Really? They’ve written back? (If not, reconsider email.)
    
12. If it is a cold-call email, and I’m sure it’s welcome, and I’m sure it’s not spam, then don’t apologize. If I need to apologize, then yes, it’s spam, and I’ll get the brand-hurt I deserve.
    
13. Am I angry? (If so, save it as a draft and come back to the note in one hour.)
    
14. Could I do this note better with a phone call?
    
15. Am I blind-CCing my boss? If so, what will happen if the recipient finds out?
    
16. Is there anything in this email that I don’t want the attorney general, the media, or my boss seeing? (If so, hit Delete.)
    
17. Is any portion of the email in all caps? (If so, consider changing it.)
    
18. Is it in black type at a normal size?
    
19. Do I have my contact info at the bottom? (If not, consider adding it.)
    
20. Have I included the line “Please save the planet. Don’t print this email”? (If so, please delete the line and consider a job as a forest ranger or flight attendant.)
    
21. Could this email be shorter?
    
22. Is there anyone copied on this email who could be left off the list?
    
23. Have I attached any files that are very big? (If so, Google something like “send big files” and consider your options.)
    
24. Have I attached any files that would work better in PDF format?
    
25. Are there any :-) or other emoticons involved? (If so, reconsider.)
    
26. Am I forwarding someone else’s mail? (If so, will they be happy when they find out?)
    
27. Am I forwarding something about religion (mine or someone else’s)? (If so, delete.)
    
28. Am I forwarding something about a virus or worldwide charity effort or other potential hoax? (If so, visit
    Snopes.com
    and check to see if it’s true.)
    
29. Did I hit Reply All? If so, am I glad I did? Does every person on the list need to see it?
    
30. Am I quoting back the original text in a helpful way? (Sending an email that says, in its entirety, “yes” is not helpful.)
    
31. If this email is to someone like Seth, did I check to make sure I know the difference between
    its
    and
    it’s
    ? Just wondering.
    
32. If this is a press release, am I really sure that the recipient is going to be delighted to get it? Or am I taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of email—free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete?
    
33. Are there any little animated creatures in the footer of this email? Adorable kittens? Endangered species of any kind?
    
34. Bonus: Is there a long legal disclaimer at the bottom of my email? Why?
    
35. Bonus: Does the subject line make it easy to understand what’s to come and likely that it will get filed properly?
    
36. If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?
    

Wealth is not created by financial manipulation, the trading of equities, or the financing of banks. They just enable it.

Wealth is created by productivity. Productive communities generate more of value.

Productivity comes from innovation.

Innovation comes from investment and change.

The media lemmings, the same ones that encouraged you to get a second mortgage, buy a McMansion, and spend, spend, spend, are now falling all over themselves to out-mourn the others. They are telling everyone to batten down, to cut back, to freeze and panic. They’re looking for stories about this, advice about this, hooks about this.

And of course, the paradox. If, in the middle of some sensible budgeting and waste trimming, we stop investing in the future, stop innovating, stop finding the breakthrough that leads to the next round of productivity gain, then in fact they’re right; the recession does last forever.

I believe that we’re on the verge of some exponential increases in productivity. Productivity in marketing, as the waste of reaching the masses goes away. Productivity in energy, as we figure out how to make a renewable process that gives us incremental units of power for free (think about the impact of that for a moment), and productivity in group work and management, as we allow the network to do more than let us watch stupid YouTube videos at work. The three biggest expenses of most endeavors (the energy to make it, the people who create it, and the marketing that spreads the idea) are about to be overhauled.

What a tragedy it will be if we let defensive thinking hold us back.

Years and years after some pundits began predicting the end of newspapers, the newspapers themselves are finally realizing that it’s over. Huge debt, high costs, declining subscription rates, plummeting ad base—will the last one out please turn off the lights?

On their way out, though, we’re hearing a lot of “you’ll miss us when we’re gone …” laments. I got to thinking about this. It’s never good to watch people lose their livelihoods or have to move on to something new, even if it might be better. I respect and honor the hard work that so many people have put into newspapers along the way. If we make a list of newspaper attributes and features, which ones would you miss?

Wood pulp, printing presses, typesetting machines, delivery trucks, those stands on the street and the newsstand … I think we’re okay without them.

The sports section? No, that’s better online, and in no danger of going away; in fact, overwritten commentary by the masses is burgeoning.

The weather? Ditto. Comics are even better online, and I don’t think we’ll run out of those.

Book and theater and restaurant reviews? In fact, there are more of these online, often better, definitely more personal and relevant, and also in no danger of going away.

The full-page ads for local department stores? The freestanding inserts on Sunday? The supermarket coupons? Easily replaced.

How about the editorials and op-eds? Again, I think we’re not going to see opinion go away; in fact, the Web amplifies the good stuff.

What’s left is local news, investigative journalism, and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.

But then I see the in-depth stories about the gowns to be worn to the inauguration or the selection of the White House dog, and I wonder if newspapers are the most efficient way to do this, anyway.

The Web has excelled at breaking the world into the tiniest independent parts. We don’t use
this
to support
that
online. Things support themselves. The food blog isn’t a loss leader for the gardening blog. They’re separate, usually run by separate people or organizations.

Punch line: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a nonprofit
function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us). Newspapers took two cents’ worth of journalism and wrapped it in ninety-eight cents’ worth of overhead and distraction. The magic of the Web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.

I’m not worried about how muckrakers will make a living. Tree farmers, on the other hand, need to find a new use for newsprint.

When industry norms start to die, people panic. It’s difficult to change when you think that you must change everything in order to succeed. Changing everything is too difficult.

Consider for a minute the pivot points available to you:

• Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
  
• Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.
  
• Keep your providers, but change the profit structure.
  
• Keep your industry, but change where the money comes from.
  
• Keep your staff, but change what you do.
  
• Keep your mission, but change your scale.
  
• Keep your products, but change the way you market them.
  
• Keep your customers, but change how much you sell each one.
  
• Keep your technology, but use it to do something else.
  
• Keep your reputation, but apply it to a different industry or problem.
  

Simple examples:

• Keep the musicians, but change how you make money (sell concerts, not CDs).
  
• Keep making guitars, but make bespoke expensive ones, not the mass-market ones that overseas competition has made obsolete.
  
• Keep the punch press and the lathe, but make large-scale art installations, not car parts.
  
• Keep your wealthy travel clients, but sell them personal services instead of trips to Europe.
  
• Keep the factory that makes missiles, but figure out how to make high-efficiency turbines instead.
  

Why people choose to visit online social sites:

• Who likes me?
  
• Is everything okay?
  
• How can I become more popular?
  
• What’s new?
  
• I’m bored; let’s make some noise.
  

None of these are new, but in the digital world, they’re still magnetic.

If you want to understand why Twitter is so hot, look at those five attributes. They deliver all five instantly.

Remember WordPerfect? This word processor dominated the world until Word wiped them out. How did that happen?

WordPerfect was the default word processor in every law firm, big company, and organization in the land. If you had the DOS operating system, it was likely you were using WordPerfect. And if the operating system in the office hadn’t changed to Windows, it’s likely you’d still be using it now.

What happened was that the change in operating system created a moment when people had to pick. They had to either switch to Word or wait for a new version of WordPerfect. In that moment, “do nothing” was not an option.

Do nothing
is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.

The key moment for an insurgent, then, is the time of “pick anything.” That’s why these are such good times for iPhone apps. That’s why the beginning of an administration is a good time to lobby. When people
have
to pick, they have to confront some of the fear and organizational barriers that led to the status quo.