Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 65
July 3, 2018
The Rise of Passive Job Seeking
Loyalty, on some level, means being happy with what you have.
This week there was another story of a new platform getting funded which offers “passive job hunting.” The idea is that you can anonymously enter details about the sorts of roles you might be interested in, as well as the triggers that might lure you away from your current job, and a bot goes off to search the web for your next role. In a world where everyone is constantly bombarded with examples of how the grass is greener somewhe...
June 30, 2018
5 Dangerously Futuristic Features Facebook Is Quietly Testing
Facebook is fond of running experiments, even though in the past this hasn’t gone so well. Yet these missteps haven’t stopped them from trying. Over the past several weeks, there has been reports of several new innovative features that they are testing which may soon have a significant impact on your online life and behavior.
To help with the challenge of finding balance between our online selves and offline lives, they are testing a feature that allows you to track how long you spend on FB a...
June 29, 2018
How Hot Dog Water Became The Hottest New Health Drink In America
Hot Dog Water officially launched this week and you can have some for just $38 a bottle. Before you roll your eyes in disgust, would it change your mind to learn that it helps restore the body’s homeostasis after an electrolyte imbalance? It is only if you read till the end of the small print that you would have seen the most important line: “Hot Dog Water in its absurdity hopes to encourage critical thinking related to product marketing.”
Today the ridiculousness of marketing is all around u...
June 26, 2018
Why Our Economy Supports (And Sometimes Needs) Bullsh*t Jobs
“A titanic amount of our economy is presently bullshit, and we’re working crazy hours to ensure that all the bullshit gets done.”
This review of the newly released book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber looks at some of the themes from the research of the author and why there are so many people doing jobs like “guarding” an empty room at a museum or doing meaningless data entry. One reason stems from the necessity of senior leaders to have many people reporting to them to inflate their salaries...
June 25, 2018
The Passive Future Of Learning: How To Learn Piano In An Hour
Imagine learning a new skill such as playing the piano or reading braille in as little as an hour. That may soon be a reality according to this story which introduces a concept called “passive haptic learning” where people were taught the finger patterns to play a song on the piano simply by wearing a glove that vibrated in a set pattern. During experiments, each person who used it was able to actually play the piano after an hour of wearing a special glove without any other instruction, even...
June 23, 2018
Backlash On World Cup Jersey Design Surprises Adidas. It Shouldn’t.
This week there have been no shortage of World Cup memes. Everything from Senegal manager Aliou Cissé becoming the tournament’s coolest man, to the early domination of Ronaldo. Yet the one meme so far that might offer the best business lesson is the justified worldwide ridicule Adidas is earning for their confusingly designed official jerseys. This is the “curse of knowledge.” Their team can’t see a problem like this because they have read that font many times. It’s obvious what the letters a...
June 16, 2018
SHRM 2018 and the Reinvention Of Human Resources
Toby Flenderson is not a popular guy.
A few years when I spoke at a previous SHRM event, Toby was one factor in a palpable sense of extreme frustration I felt from many of the people in my audience. The Office was still on the air and Toby (the HR character on the show) cast a long shadow over the profession of HR. Too many HR pros felt that they were missing a seat at the table, a sentiment my colleague Paresh Shah recently described perfectly.
Since then, there has been a slow but steady t...
June 14, 2018
How Brands Become Fixers Of Everything From Potholes To Fake News
Domino’s just started fixing potholes on roads, to help your pizza get delivered undisturbed. In response to news stories of kids getting fined by overzealous city officials for running lemonade stands without permits, Country Time Lemonade created a fund to pay their legal fees. Both are stunts from brands taking a short lived Brand Stand to try and become fixers of small problems. For brands, taking this role of a fixer could do wonders to inspire more loyalty. Sadly, in the cases of Domino...
June 13, 2018
Customers Are Not Always Right (And Sometimes Don’t Deserve Nice Things)
Yes, Elon Musk finally released his flame throwers to the consumer market … and people promptly began using them in totally inappropriate ways. It is a predictable side effect of our culture of Everyday Stardom that consumers behave badly … just because they can. This week, there were plenty of examples that maybe we don’t deserve all the nice things and technology that we have access to.
In France, students will be banned from using mobile phones in school. In China, one city created a slow...
June 11, 2018
How To Reinvent A Brand: Lessons From Kodak, Blackberry and Crayola
This week Crayola branched out in a new direction by launching its own line of colorful beauty products. In the same week, Blackberry continued their own quest to maintain relevance and resurrect their fading brand by announcing the KEY2 (a new phone featuring a full keyboard) and Kodak showed off the first photos taken on its relaunched Ektachrome 100 film. Each are legacy brands facing challenges on every level, from understanding shifting consumer needs to industry disruption from competit...
