Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1591

A Summer Reading List for Marketers

Spoiler alert: I dropped out of university.

It's true. I entered university with the best of intentions. At the same time, I was already publishing a couple of music magazines that were becoming successful. As I ventured down the road of burnout by trying to be both a publisher and a full time college student, I had a heart-to-heart conversation with my parents. In a very non-traditional fashion, my mother said, "If the magazines don't work out you always go back to school, but if you stay in school and stop publishing those magazines, you will never know what could have been." While I dropped out of university (and never went back), I never let not being in school get in the way of a higher education.

And graduate programs? While there's no substitute for the kind of education you'll get at a great master's program, the fact remains that many of us either can't afford the material cost to attend these types of schools or we can't afford the time and dedication required. We're older, we've been in the workforce for several years, and we have families that need our financial support. We read the odd business book or attend an occasional conference, and that's the extent of our professional development.

But education has never been easier... and, if you know where to look, cheaper. The Internet provides a ton of resources that — when approached in a serious manner — offer up an excellent education. Following are some of the richest and deepest places to grab a master's level education in marketing... for free (free of cost... not free of time, effort and homework).

Email newsletters:



AdWeek. One of the marketing industry's premiere trade magazines offers up a slew of free e-newsletters that are chock full of information and insight. Check out the Advertising & Branding newsletter along with the Technology Today one.

Almost Timely. A weekly (and free) e-newsletter from Christopher S. Penn (co-host of the podcast Marketing Over Coffee and author of the book Marketing White Belt) who brings together a slew of links and tweets from some of the Web's biggest (and smartest) thinkers. Between Media ReDEFined (see below) and Almost Timely, if you read nothing else, these two will keep you in the loop without any gaps.

Marketing Charts. This is one of those "It's hard to believe that it's free" ones. This daily e-newsletter is filled with tons of free articles and insights on the bleeding edge of research. Warning: you can get lost in these articles and research reports.

MediaPost. Simply click on "publications" and then be very cautious. You will be overwhelmed with the breadth and depth of options here. Interested in marketing to moms? They have a unique e-newsletter for that. Real Time Bidding? Yep, one for that too. I'm a major fan of their Online Media Daily and Mobile Marketing Daily newsletters.

Media ReDEFined. Jason Hirschhorn is the former co-president of MySpace. Currently, he is curating and aggregating this amazing resource of information. Forget the website and simply sign up for his free, daily e-newsletter. If something interesting happened in the digital realm, Hirschhorn has you covered.



Websites:



MarketingProfs. With a focus on Business-To-Business and a slant towards content marketing and social media, MarketingProfs is filled with fascinating articles, blog posts and interviews. While there is vast majority of free content on this site, once you dive in you will find it hard to not upgrade to a paid Pro Membership level.

Seth Godin. There are thousands of marketing blogs on the Internet. There is only one Seth Godin. Short blog posts (sometimes long ones) that will get you thinking differently about marketing (and business). Along with having well-over ten bestselling business books, Godin is one of the few marketing experts online that is actually an established expert. He brings years of experience and skill to his blog, instead of hyperbole and posturing. It's rare to have a seasoned veteran offer this much constant and consistent quality content.

Sparksheet. A highly underrated and not well-known-enough website that focuses on content marketing, but veers into fascinating general marketing themes. Published by Spafax (a branded content and custom publishing agency), Sparksheet is a great, little gem.

Audio and video:



Foundation. Kevin Rose (ex-Digg and currently at Google Ventures) hosts this video podcast where he deep-dives into conversations with many startups from Silicon Valley. While this isn't a formal marketing podcast, Rose's depth of knowledge and subjects he chooses to have a conversation with always has some kind of bent towards marketing and how to make some noise.

HBR IdeaCast. This ain't nepotism; the Harvard Business Review audio podcast is not one to miss. Recent episodes have looked at everything from pricing strategies and business intelligence to finding great talent and creating a business for longevity.

iTunes U. You won't have a hard time finding a ton of marketing podcasts to download and enjoy for free by heading over to iTunes and looking in the Business — Management & Marketing category, but many people fail to realize that iTunes U gives you free access to some of the world's leading educational facilities (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc) for free. Dig through both the Business category along with the Communications & Media one. Hours upon hours of amazing ivy league lectures (all free).

TED Talks — Business. As more and more TED Talks get published online and more TEDx events are held all over the world, the good people at TED have tagged over 200-plus talks as "business" and many of those have a heavy marketing slant.

The above is just a sample of what's out there. What you will quickly begin to understand is this: there has never been a moment in the history of business like this. Never before have we had this much access to this much education and content for free. The challenge is no longer in accessing this content. The challenge is in finding the time to immerse yourself in it. In the next couple of week, things will naturally slow down as we move into the summertime. As things slow down, you may want to find some moments to learn, grow and expand your marketing and business horizons. There's a world of knowledge, just a few clicks away.

Please recommend your favorite marketing resources below.

Strategic Humor: Cartoons from the July 2013 Issue

Enjoy these cartoons from the July-August issue of HBR, and test your management wit in the HBR Cartoon Caption Contest at the bottom of this post. If we choose your caption as the winner, you will be featured in next month's magazine and win a free Harvard Business Review Press book.

"Mary, check with Legal and see whether a fist bump is binding."

Scott Arthur Masear

"May I use you as a reference?"

Bob Eckstein

"We were able to cut our marketing budget in half by just guessing."

Bob Vojtko

"For the plaintiff in this case, your honor, the product's bold assertion — 'easy-opening lid' — was a cruel and vicious lie."

Nick Downes

"Isn't there a sports metaphor that would explain this?"

Kaamran Hafeez

Paul Gilligan

And congratulations to our May caption contest winner, Ben Cross of Richardson, Texas. Here's his winning caption:

"Sorry I'm late. If I do get the job, I'd prefer to telecommute."

Cartoonist: Susan Camilleri Konar

NEW CAPTION CONTEST

Enter your own caption for this cartoon in the comments field below — you could be featured in next month's magazine and win a free book.

Cartoonist: Susan Camilleri Konar

The Get-Big-Quick Fallacy

Is it better for a start-up to purse profitability initially, or go for growth? Advocates of that second, get-big-fast approach inevitably point to companies like Tumblr (the company founded by a high school dropout that Yahoo! just acquired for $1.1 billion before it had even $20 million in revenues) or YouTube (which was sold 19 months after its founding to Google for close to $2 billion), or other companies whose hyper-growth attracted suitors before a viable business model emerged.

But it's important to consider how incredibly rare these examples are. For every Tumblr there are dozens of companies that had some success but never broke through — and hundreds more that never really got out of the starting block. Research by Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh, in fact, has found that fully 75% of venture capital-backed startups — presumably the crème de la crème of the startup world — failed to return the capital invested in them to their investors (let alone generate positive returns).

A pure focus on growth carries risks. If you are a growth-obsessed startup and venture capital financing dries up and buyers grow scarce, you can run out of money. If you are inside a big company, profit-draining ventures are typically early sacrifices in corporate cost-cutting exercises.

Why then do so many people doggedly focus on growth? There's a term in the psychology literature for this — the availability heuristic. Big events are endlessly discussed and analyzed. They lodge in our memory, fooling us into thinking that they happen more frequently than they actually do. An oft-cited example of this phenomenon is the difference in perceived risks between getting on an airplane and getting in an automobile. Airplane crashes tend to be major news events; automobile accidents aren't. The worst year for airplane fatalities was 1972, when more than 3,000 people died in plane crashes. That's roughly the number of fatalities in automobile accidents in a typical month in the United States.

Growth is great, but profits are more convincing proof of long-term viability. Sufficient profits make a business self-sustaining, inoculating ventures against the need to pry money from tight-fisted venture capitalists or often-skeptical corporate investors.

When through our venture investment arm we seek to evaluate the profitability prospects of a young business, we look to see whether its team can credibly answer two questions:

How will you charge enough for a transaction to cover the costs related to producing and delivering a good?
How will you generate enough transactions to cover the fixed costs involved in running your business?

We know that the answers we'll get are nothing more than hypotheses, which will change as the venture gains experience in the market. In fact, we'd be worried if a team were too dogmatic about its path to profits. As venture capitalist Fred Wilson notes, locking into a business model prematurely carries its own dangers. But seeing that a team is at least thinking about the road to profitability increases our confidence that the venture ultimately will arrive at the right destination.

There are times when a company chooses to be unprofitable. That is, individual transactions are profitable, but the company is investing in building infrastructure or marketing to build long-term advantage. For a long time, Amazon.com fit in this category. The company's efficient supply chain made individual transactions profitable, even at low price points. But founder Jeff Bezos believed emphatically in scaling the business, and so he invested heavily in expansion. That's different from a company that hasn't yet figured out the essence of how it will make money. If for whatever reason Bezos couldn't find the funds for investment, he could have easily decreased spending and kept the business solvent. The businesses to watch out for are those that don't have any credible idea how they will make money.

Harvard scholar (and Innosight co-founder) Clayton Christensen guides innovators to be "patient for growth, and impatient for profits." There are wonderful exceptions to this rule. The Apple iPad generated $10 billion in revenue in its first year (no patience required there!). Amazon.com has a massive market capitalization even though its thirst for investment seems unquenchable. Groupon went from nothing to $1 billion in revenue in two years.

As wonderful as these events are, they are exceptions. If you plan to be an exception, odds are you will be disappointed. If you plan for the norm and it happens that fortune smiles on you, at least try to remember the role luck played in your outcome when a young entrepreneur comes knocking for advice.

The Complex Science of Cyber Defense

Traditionally, cyber security research has focused on technical solutions to specific threats — for example, how to filter spam or protect PCs and mobile devices against the latest malware. This approach has greatly enhanced our ability to defend information systems against attack. Widespread use of antivirus, intrusion detection technologies, improved cryptography, and methods for blacklisting infected web sites are just a few examples of how technical advances have improved cyber defense.

Such technical improvements will not be sufficient, however. Today's cyber-issues involve systemic social, economic, organizational, and political components. Ordinary people have little incentive to secure their home computers using available technology; Internet censorship and surveillance is intertwined with questions of free speech and privacy; and concern over Chinese cyber-espionage is a high-priority diplomatic issue. The mismatch between speed-of-light electronic communications and the time required for human institutions to respond to data security and privacy concerns is large and growing. These types of cyber-issues must be addressed not only with technological solutions, but also on the social, political, and policy levels.

This task is even more challenging than it sounds. Most computation today occurs on the Internet, one of the most complex human artifacts ever devised. Developing appropriate solutions requires understanding networks comprised of multitudes of heterogeneous subnetworks managed by organizations around the world, each with their own policies and incentives.

We can tackle this problem using the growing field of Complexity Science, which seeks to find the universal principles and mathematics underlying and unifying a wide variety of complex systems, including the Internet, biological systems, ecologies, markets, and economic systems, political systems, and societies. Such systems consist of many independent and self-interested agents (biological cells, firms, nations, computers, and people), each adapting their behaviors in response to their environments and other actors in the system. Global patterns and trends emerge from these low-level interactions that cannot be predicted by studying the individual components in isolation.

Malicious elements are ubiquitous in complex systems. Just as there are cyber security threats in the Internet, there are viruses, parasites, and bacteria in biology; bullies in social networks; and rogue nations in the international community. Studying the general principles that complex systems use to manage such threats can suggest techniques for tackling the problem of cyber security.

In particular, biological systems have evolved to cope with a multitude of threats such as proliferating pathogens, autoimmunity, escalating arms races, deception, and mimicry. One design strategy that helps biological systems achieve robustness to these threats is diversity — genetic diversity in a species, species diversity in an ecosystem, and molecular diversity in an immune system.

Its opposite, uniformity in design, allows us to achieve economies of scale but also leaves us vulnerable to widespread and targeted attacks that exploit homogenous infrastructures. Cyber infrastructure today resembles biological monocultures, and recent market trends towards vertical integration (think of Apple), cloud storage (Google), and computing (Amazon's Compute Cloud) will worsen the situation.

Diversity is just one of many strategies that biological systems have adopted to protect themselves and continue functioning in the face of attack. Understanding how malicious agents affect the growth and functioning of various systems is a task for Complexity Science, which can suggest strategies to influence them to mitigate damage.

Many complex systems can be viewed as groups of abstract nodes linked together to form a network. The study of these networks, called network science, has successfully identified tipping points in disease epidemics and cascading failures in power grids. In the case of the Internet, network science can provide important guidelines for policymakers — for example, by determining that security interventions by the 20 largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world will be considerably more effective than relying on interventions by thousands of ISPs chosen at random.

Although network science enables us to understand important common properties of complex systems, it is too abstract to capture the unique factors influencing the dynamics of specific systems. For that we rely on other approaches such as agent-based modeling (ABM) which allows us to incorporate domain-specific knowledge into a computer model. With ABM we can explore the consequences of allowing each abstract node in the network to adapt, learn, and react to local conditions. ABM differs from the traditional modeling used in science, such as the mathematical models in climate science, which are based on physics where the primitive elements are not adaptive. ABM is well-suited for modeling systems where economic self-interest and politics intersect with technology, such as in the Internet. In fact, we have shown that when self-interested agents are included in a model of the Internet, policies that seem to be effective in the short-term actually exacerbate the cyber security problem in the long-term. This effect is similar to the overuse of antibiotics promoting antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Agent-based modeling is particularly useful for studying complex systems that exhibit "long-tail" behavior, where there is huge variability in outcomes. In such systems, real-world experiments with limited sample sizes are often misleading and can misdirect policymakers. Using ABM we can study a large number of simulated scenarios, giving a clearer picture of which cyber security policies will work best in the long run, even with highly variable outcomes.

When agents have competing interests, Game Theory is useful for understanding their strategic interactions. Game theory is relevant to the Internet, where we see an ongoing arms race between attackers and defenders, between those trying to spread information and those trying to censor it, and so forth. Game Theory can help us understand how better to protect a system, or conversely, how better to evade defenses. Important concepts such as the "Price of Anarchy" measure how the efficiency of a system degrades through selfish behavior (cyber attacks) and how much cooperation might help. Game Theory is also useful for studying how cooperation can evolve among independent parties, which can guide the choice of policies to encourage desirable behavior. Complex systems rarely eliminate malicious threats permanently. Rather, they develop strategies for managing and coexisting with them in a way that minimizes damage to the overall system.

The best approach to cyber security will emphasize defenses that are robust to unforeseen perturbations, evolvable in response to changing conditions, and self-repairing in the face of damage. Using complexity science to understand today's technological networks and their linkages to human behavior, social norms, and economic incentives, can help us build a safer and freer online world.

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





Why Businesses Should Share Intelligence About Cyber Attacks
Why Your CEO Is a Security Risk
Beware Trading Privacy for Convenience
Four Things the Private Sector Must Demand on Cyber Security

Mobile Payments and the 'Wow' Factor: Q&A With Square CFO Sarah Friar

While marketers strategize heavily around how to help consumers decide what to buy, how much time do they spend thinking about how they will pay? This area of innovation is where mobile payment companies want to play, especially in markets where such technology is less than ubiquitous.

San Francisco-based Square, led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is among the companies looking to lead this genre. For the uninitiated, Square offers two technologies — a card reader for merchants to use, which is called Register, and the other a mobile interface for customers to pay, which is called Wallet. With over 3 million users, Square processes more than $15 billion in transactions annually. We asked Square's CFO and Operations Lead, Sarah Friar, for perspectives on this technology, what it means for marketers, and how to manage in the world of mobile innovation. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Help us understand the two sides of Square. There is the part for businesses and then the part for consumers. Is one of them more important?

We absolutely think both sides are incredibly important if you want to build a very powerful network. We definitely started on the merchant side of the counter, so for our sellers, we wanted to create that dramatic moment where they went from not being able to accept things like credit cards to being able to come online and accept credit cards like any other kind of grown-up business would do. I think we have created a "wow" moment for them.

The other side of the counter, as you mentioned, is the consumer side. That's where Square Wallet comes into play, and I think we came to it more secondarily because we had to begin to build a network of merchants to make Wallets have value. That's a huge part of the symbiotic effect between the two.

So, this changes the way marketers can communicate with their customers. Are there any specific ways that you've seen marketers use this technology effectively?

What we see very much with our merchants is as they come on to Square Wallet, we see them utilize just basic specials, like 10% off your first purchase. Or using punch cards. So those are some ways to drive a meaningful sense of loyalty, but I think we are only scratching the surface of that.

I think most bigger merchants certainly don't want to be in the price-discounting market. That doesn't ultimately drive loyalty, it just ends up hurting your top line. The thing that drives loyalty is understanding a particular pain point. I think the airlines have done this well with allowing me to just skip through security lines in first-class or allowing me to board the plane first. These are effectively free giveaways, but they inspire so much loyalty.

That comes back to knowing your customer, and that's where I get really excited. With Wallet, you start to really understand your customer, so it isn't just about giving away freebies. It is much more about giving me things that are important to me.

Square has taken its own approach to marketing, which some could say is less traditional.

I think ultimately we believe that the product has to sell itself ... those moments where people go "Wow, I need this for my business."

Before I joined Square, I don't think I had that same kind of sensibility for how important design is, and that design is a technical competency. When you have great design, it creates that sense of people loving a product and it spreads. Why we don't spend huge amounts of money on marketing and definitely not on sales is actually purposeful. I think it would make us lazy on the product, because then you are effectively subsidizing poor product with people who are persuading and manipulating a customer.

I want us to stay in this viral mode. The more we can make the product just sell itself and act and be used beautifully with no issues, that just keeps the pressure on the product organization to build the best they can.

There is a push and pull around having a human touch versus being technology driven. There are a lot of tools right now for personalization, but how do you really make that valuable?

A lot of technology fixates on the point of sale, and, I always say, by the time I get to the point of sale, I hope that I'm 99% through the experience. If not, it means you just put me in a line that lasted forever. So instead, use technology to actually greet me at the door or maybe it is before the door.

If you shop places like Nordstrom, one of the things I love most is that I order online, I order multiple sizes, they get delivered home, my kids try on, we decide which one doesn't fit, and then I usually enter the store with something to give back before I begin a shopping experience. The more that you can make that easy and quick because of technology, then it becomes really valuable, rather than just tapping my phone at the point of sale.

Square just expanded into Japan. It feels like the US has been a bit slower to adopt mobile payment technology.

On the mobile side, definitely when you move to a market like Japan, you become incredibly empathetic to the differences that culture makes to everything. Since commerce is such a basic human function, you become a total research analyst on how the cultures work. What drives a culture like Japan to be so tech forward? They love design. In fact, when we did our launch, Jack [Dorsey] showed the book Wabi-Sabi and said, every Square reads this when they enter Square. It's a wonderful concept of design and organic and the outside world coming together.

Secondarily, it's definitely a market that loves trends. The trend itself moves very quickly, but their ability to adopt it is so fast that things go by in the blink of an eye. I think that is something we need to be careful of — we don't want to be faddish, we want to be an underpinning of a shift. One of our big drivers into Japan was clearly the fact that you have tremendous smartphone adoption. Once you're in a country like Japan, if you can be successful, there is a lot of staying power. There is a deep loyalty in the culture.

Are there any trends that you find most exciting in the mobile space right now, things that people should really be watching?

Big data. I think we are only scratching the surface of what we can do with data in the right way.

I realize there are two sides to this, there are all the concerns and fears of privacy and keeping things confidential, but weighing that against just how much better my general life experience is when people know me better and can react ahead of me to things they know that I will want. I think the more that big data can be used to create these wonderful experiences that people have opted into, that is incredibly exciting.

Do you have words of advice for people who are trying to manage the world of mobile innovation?

One of our values is break the rules. As a CFO, that kind of terminology can sometimes scare the wits out of me, but it's break the rules, don't break the law, but break the rules and do not be held back by what has gone before. If you want to be innovative, you need to not say this is how it has always been and I am just going to increment my way there.

The other value I always think of when giving people advice is, give it soul. Don't forget your customer. At the end of the day, I think people get really caught up in technology for technology's sake, but spend time with your customer and go out and feel their pain. We can get way ahead of them with all gee-whizzy-bang amazing stuff, and then you have a coffee shop that is counting cappuccino cups, trying to figure out how many cappuccinos they have sold. Go live in your customer's shoes for long periods of time and never forget your customer as you innovate.

That is the great yin and yang — do transformational things but always bring it back to solving a real problem, not a problem you've made up in your head.

Innovations in Digital and Mobile Marketing
An HBR Insight Center





Don't Let Paper Paradigms Drive Your Digital Strategy
If Your Mobile Strategy Can Win Here, It Can Win Anywhere
When Personalized Ads Really Work
How Advertisers Can Maximize Mobile Conversions

Prices in Red Affect Men but Not Women

Men who saw red discount prices for toasters and microwaves agreed more strongly that they'd save "a lot of money" than men who saw black prices (4.26 versus 2.56 on a seven-point scale), says a team led by Nancy M. Puccinelli of Oxford's Saïd Business School. But this didn't happen when the research subjects were induced to think carefully about the prices, suggesting that red's happiness-inducing effect sways men's perception of discounts only when they're not paying close attention. Women were unaffected by the prices' color, perhaps because they were already paying closer attention than the men to the discounts, the researchers say.

The Business-Friendly Legislature Known as SCOTUS

The U.S. Supreme Court's annual term is winding down, with key decisions still to come on gay marriage, voting rights, and affirmative action in university admissions. There's been lots of speculation that, given who has already written opinions for this term, the remaining decisions are likely to be dominated by the court's Republican-appointed majority.

Such prognostication is easy and kind of fun (political numbers guy Sean Trende labels it "Supreme Court bingo"), but it does give rise to uncomfortable thoughts. Supreme Court opinion counting is basically vote counting, which sounds like something you do with a legislative body, not a court of law.

The notion that Supreme Court justices are effectively legislators with really long terms first occurred to me after the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling in 2000. It wasn't so much the result as the voting breakdown, with five Republican appointees affirming Bush's electoral-college victory and the two Democratic appointees plus two Republican picks who had long since switched to the court's "liberal" wing (David Souter and John Paul Stevens) opposed. It also didn't strike me as the worst way to decide a disputed presidential election — by falling back on a vote by the indirect products of past presidential elections.

The current enthusiasm for Supreme Court bingo, plus a recent New York Times report claiming that the current Court is the most business-friendly in more than half a century (more on that later), got me looking deeper into the argument that justices are just a peculiar sort of legislators. I quickly learned that it is not even remotely a new idea. Mention it to someone who has taken a constitutional law course at a mainstream law school (in this case, my wife), and she will nod as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. In political science, it turns out, the dominant theory of why judges rule the way they rule is that it's all about ideology. Lee Epstein, William A. Landes, and Richard A. Posner recently published a book-length revisionist study that finds that most federal judges are actually just out to do what's best for their careers, but even their research shows that for the Supreme Court (something of a career pinnacle already) ideology appears to be key.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? In his 1978 Cornell Law Review article "The Supreme Court as a Legislature," law professor Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. points out that the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 seriously considered creating a "Council of Revision" to review and amend the work of Congress — an explicitly legislative role that to a certain extent the Supreme Court inherited. In Federalist Paper No. 78, Alexander Hamilton acknowledges that, while it is the job of the judicial branch to dispassionately ascertain the meaning of the Constitution, judges might "be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT." Appointing them to lifetime terms, he continues, might at least contribute to an "independent spirit" keeping their decisions from being too obviously political. And the landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, in which the Supreme Court first asserted its authority to void the actions of the executive branch and the decisions of the legislative branch, has long been cited as an example of Realpolitik as much as jurisprudence.

Still, in his 1986 history The Rise of Modern Judicial Review, political scientist Christopher Wolfe makes a persuasive case that something significant changed late in the 19th century, when the Supreme Court went from relying on the Constitution as the ultimate authority to citing "natural law" — which of course gave justices a lot more leeway to effectively make their own laws. From 1890 to 1937, this judicial activism focused on striking down state and federal attempts to regulate business. Then the ideological balance on the Court shifted, and the liberal majority became, in Wolfe's telling, even more willing to look outside the Constitution for reasons to, most famously, end school segregation and throw out state anti-abortion laws.

Wolfe disapproves of this activist turn. His complaint is not that justices have strayed from the "original intent" of the Constitution's framers — in the 1790s and early 1800s, those framers disagreed so vehemently about the federal government's proper role that defining original intent seems a fool's errand. Instead, Wolfe favors what he calls a "traditional" approach in which justices start with the words of the Constitution even as they interpret them in what may be diametrically opposed directions. By locating authority for their rulings outside the Constitution, the argument goes, legislator-justices have grabbed too much power and threatened the legitimacy of the Court.

For a non-lawyer, it's not hard to muster sympathy for this argument. When Supreme Court justices become "little more than Senators with lifetime appointments," as New York magazine's Jonathan Chait put it last year (only to have the phrase inexplicably edited out of the final version of his piece), they become objects of resentment more than respect. If they're really just legislating, why the heck do the justices all have to have law degrees? They don't, officially, but there hasn't been a justice without one since Stanley Forman Reed retired in 1957. Even worse, why do they all have to go to law school at Harvard or Yale? Every current justice did, although Ruth Bader Ginsburg was at least unconventional enough to transfer to Columbia before getting her degree. It is, when you think about it, pretty weird that the U.S. places so much political power in the hands of such an elite, unaccountable group. Few other countries grant their judges the kind of clout that the Supremes enjoy.

During the Rehnquist years (from 1986 to 2005), the Supreme Court did make a bit of a turn back to traditionalist ways — although mainly by reasserting the rights of states in relation to the federal government, not by shrinking the authority of the Court. Since John Roberts took over as chief justice in 2005, meanwhile, many observers say the defining tendency of the Court has been less Constitutional traditionalism than friendliness to business (which explains what this examination of judicial power is doing on hbr.org).

The most impressive piece of evidence for this assertion (and the backup for the New York Times article cited above) is a new Minnesota Law Review article by the aforementioned trio of Epstein, Landes, and Posner (respectively, a political scientist who teaches law too, an economist who teaches at a law school, and a famously prolific judge and writer) documents the Court's attitude toward business with painstaking detail. By looking at Supreme Court cases going back to 1946 where businesses faced non-business opponents, and smaller businesses faced bigger ones, they rated the Court and the justices on (big-)business-friendliness. By their measure, the Roberts years have been the most business-friendly, by far, since 1946, and Roberts and colleague Samuel Alito the two most business-friendly justices.

What to make of this? At one level this is great news for business, in particular big business. In a gridlocked city where lobbying by individual businesses and industries often bears fruit, but the legislative priorities of the business community as a whole — corporate tax reform, entitlement reform, tort reform — have been making no progress lately, the Supreme Court offers a rare haven of friendliness and decisiveness. And while the current term has offered no headline grabbers akin to the Citizens United corporate-campaign-spending decision of three years ago, it has delivered two rulings that make it harder to file the class-action lawsuits which frequently target big business. (Both pitted the Court's Republican-appointed majority against the Democratic-appointed minority.)

But political victories often carry in them the seeds of future losses. I'll leave aside the possibility that the legislative priorities of big business aren't actually in the long-term interest of U.S. business or the economy, and focus on the more obvious risk: backlash. In his 2012 best-seller Unintended Consequences, former Bain capital partner Ed Conard (approvingly) describes the relatively business-friendly political and economic climate of the past few decades as a byproduct of the Supreme Court's decision in the abortion case Roe v. Wade — because evangelical voters outraged by the decision joined with what Conard calls "pro-investment voters" to create a new majority. No court decisions in the Roberts years have engendered that much outcry, but the court's approval ratings are dropping. This decline may have more to do with general disdain for Washington than anything in particular that the justices have done, but it does stand to reason that years of pro-business rulings could eventually engender a political reaction.

Then again, eventually can take a while, and Roberts does seem aware that there are limits to how far the Supreme Court can safely go. His surprise opinion last year affirming the bulk of President Obama's health-care reform law (which many business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, opposed) was widely seen to have been brought on by fears of the backlash that would have ensued if the Court struck the law down. If that was really his motivation (we won't know for years, if ever, of course), it was a fundamentally political decision meant to prevent the Supreme Court from becoming seen as a fundamentally political body.

I am — in case you haven't noticed — still struggling with whether I think this is a bad thing or a good thing (please feel encouraged to try to persuade me one way or the other). But it's definitely an interesting thing.

Should You Write a Book?

It may be that everybody has a book in them, but not everybody is sure if they should try to get it out of them. Why should I write a book? How long does it take? What does a book do that a blog or Tweet can't do? Does anybody really read books anymore? Do I have to write a book?

These are the questions I get from would-be idea entrepreneurs — people who want to go public with a deeply-felt idea so as to influence how people think and behave and, as a result, create some kind of change in their company, discipline, or community. Given the uncertain status of the book in today's ideaplex (my term for all of those activities — from TED to Twitter — by which we create, communicate, and consume ideas) these are smart questions to ask.

The answer is different for everybody, but there are many valuable roles a book, and only a book, can play in taking an idea public and gaining respiration for it — that is, making it come to life and breathe on its own. (All of these assume the book does not totally stink.)

Keycard to the ideaplex. Yes, you can make your entrance to the ideaplex with a blog, video, or a conference talk. But the book is the most widely-accepted credential at the largest number of content venues. "Has new book" is a standard, and often required, box to tick for the gatekeepers who control access to areas of the ideaplex you would most like to enter: lecture halls, television studios, boardrooms, media pages, special events, people's minds. Charlie Rose rarely says, "My next guest has just posted a cat video."

Evidence of effort. Books are hard to write and everybody knows it. They demand more rigorous thought and require a greater preponderance of material than any other form of expression. If you put in the work and do the thinking, people will usually grant you a larger measure of authority than if you have put in the work and done the hard thinking but haven't written a book.

Crime-stopper. Take a look at the notice on the reverse of the title page of your book. It says Copyright © Me. All rights reserved. That means the rule of law has your back. Not infallible, for sure, but if you ask any of the high-profile authors who have run afoul of copyright provisions recently I bet they'll say the law can have pretty sharp teeth.

All-purpose tool. The book is a calling card, an icebreaker, a doorstop, a representative, a leave-behind, a marketing brochure, a love letter, a non-lethal weapon, a time-whiler, a discussion-starter, a manifesto, and an excuse to start a group whose real purpose is to gossip or drink wine.

Gateway. The book can't (and shouldn't) contain everything you know. It should be an enticing entry to the world of you and your content assets — your other writings, your talks, videos, seminars, special events, emblems, merchandise, teachings, and affiliations — a world that you can continue to expand and update, so that the book, while unchanging, takes on new meanings over time.

World's most beautiful (utilitarian) object. The book is a work of art and an elegant technology. It is a tangible form that enables you to hold an abstraction in your hands. It is also, you have to admit, a great gift item.

Wellspring of future endeavor. The book is the end of a period of work, and the beginning of another, often more important, one. It is not the final word on your topic, but rather the start of a conversation about it. With a book, you can lay the groundwork for a whole life's enterprise.

There are also some aspects of writing a book that are not so pleasurable, and you should take these into careful consideration before plunging ahead, including:

Special (rather weird) process. Writing a book is different from any other process you may be familiar with or good at. It is a creative endeavor more like personal art-making than commercial innovation. Parts of it are driven by mysterious forces of the unconscious that simply cannot be plugged into a flow chart or spreadsheet. As a result, the process can be frustrating, torturous, or so time-consuming that you'll want to give up.

Personal trial. Writing a book is intellectually, emotionally, and physically taxing. It is also quite exposing and revealing — of your knowledge, the quality of your ideas, your writing skills, and your personality. You are putting yourself out there in a big way, which you may not want to do.

Irrevocability. You cannot take a book back. It doesn't slowly fade from memory like a live presentation does, or get lost in the sauce of the blogosphere. It's there and will always be there and if you aren't happy with it, or change your mind about something in it, you're stuck with it.

Backlash. You believe your book is great and that your motives in writing it are honorable. Yes, you want a lively conversation about your book — that's what respiration is all about — but when that first negative comment, sarcastic Tweet, or full-throated rebuttal comes along, you may feel taken aback or unjustly attacked.

It's not over when it's over. Books do not sell themselves. After writing the book, there is publishing, promoting, and promulgating to be done. That process also has uncontrollable parts (Will it get a good review? Will people buy it?) but if you don't work at selling the book, it may not gain the respiration you would like or it might be ignored completely, which is far worse than backlash.

So there is no all-purpose answer to the question, Should I write a book? That's why I usually answer it with a question of my own: Is it impossible for you not to?

If your answer is yes, Godspeed.

We Took a Vote. You're Fired.

Leave Your Title at the Door


Let's say you have a coworker who’s disruptive or isn't pulling his weight. Your company probably has a hierarchical process for deciding the proper course of action, and that process probably doesn't put you at the center of the matter. But you probably don't work at Menlo Innovations, where there are no bosses (at least in the traditional sense). Instead, the decision to fire (or hire or promote) someone is based on group consensus. So does this approach — which is also the premise of a new reality show called Does Someone Have to Go? — actually lead to more-productive employees and companies? Matthew Shaer takes a hard look at this question. Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky, for example, touts some of hierarchy’s benefits: "It reduces conflict, helps with role differentiation, and vastly increases coordination." But Menlo and other companies like GitHub, IDEO, and California tomato processor Morning Star have done away with hierarchy and, in some senses, even given employees the (blessed?) burden of running their companies’ day-to-day operations. The article doesn't outright glorify or condemn these work environments. Instead, Shaer leaves us with food for thought: "It’s possible that the triumph of the flattened office may be the creation of work environments in which leaders organically arise, and all employees feel a sense of ownership, whether real or imagined."

Stop Judging Me

Free Perks and Upgrades: Could They Actually Embarrass Consumers? Journal of Consumer Research

Most managers assume that customers love getting gifts, especially in front of other people. In fact, a survey of retail managers suggests that a majority think customers are happier getting preferential treatment in public than in private. That’s probably why stores are always dreaming up events like surprising the millionth shopper with a shower of confetti and a cartload of free groceries. But sometimes all this hoopla makes people really uncomfortable. New research led by Lan Jiang, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Oregon, shows that if you give a shopper an unearned reward, she’ll probably have mixed feelings if she’s observed by other people, such as shopper No. 999,999, who didn’t get anything. All it takes is the presence of one other person for the (un)lucky consumer to start feeling negatively judged. Unless, of course, the observers have higher status than she does, in which case those mixed feelings go away. — Andy O'Connell

Where's the Beef?

It’s No Accident Facebook Made Instagram’s New Videos Exactly as Long as a Television Commercial Quartz

Forget six seconds. Or at least that's what Instagram seemingly wants you — and the people who sell you things — to think per yesterday's announcement about its new video capabilities. While there are many takes on what this means about competition with Vine (are they apples and oranges? Or is there a direct fight for users, marked in part by Vine taking off on its parent platform, Twitter?). Christopher Mims smartly argues that the real battle lies in video advertising – and that Instagram, now owned by Facebook, is "going to get us all watching television ads again." It's an attractive value proposition: It's projected to be a big part of the 13.4% growth in digital ads between 2013 and 2014. What may be more important, the 15-second time frame allows for advertisers to upload already-created TV spots, which can then be featured on Facebook. Mims predicts that Mark Zuckerberg is "setting up Instagram, and by extension Facebook, to be a new home for one of the most lucrative forms of advertising."

First See-Through Pants, Now This

Why Lululemon's "CEO Wanted" Ad Is Bad for the Brand Fast Company

A word to the wise: A "humorous" help-wanted ad for candidates to replace your just-resigned CEO isn't exactly the best PR move Winnie Kao, who has written approvingly about Lululemon's "brilliant brand voice" in the past, takes a much more critical stance on the yoga-gear company’s attempt at irreverence this week. She points out that customers visit Lululemon's web site to learn about products, not to read about financial or corporate news. And the decision to post a “CEO Wanted” sign on the home page was timed terribly. "When a recent divorcée makes fun of relationships, it’s more awkward than funny," she writes. "When a company says that their CEO is quitting, and makes a joke of it, you’re not sure whether to laugh or be concerned." Kao also points out that smart use of the correct medium is vital: Social media is often a better place than the home page to be cheeky or snarky. She offers examples of companies that have succeeded with humorous tweets. So remember, companies: Not all of you are The Onion. At least not all the time.

Ethical Quandaries

Inside the Mind of the British Banker Reuters

This fun video presentation of a YouGov poll of 1,000 UK bankers shows that (not surprisingly) 75% of them think their colleagues are overpaid, and fully two-thirds believe some colleagues are compensated in a way that encourages inappropriate behavior. Even more disturbing, one in six say they've been personally bullied into doing something counter to their ethical values or their customers' interests. Reuters reporter Axel Threlfall says he finds it hard to believe the bankers when they say they were attracted to the industry as much by career opportunities and the prospect of interesting work as the salaries. I guess it’s all in how you define “interesting work.” — Andrea Ovans

BONUS BITS:

Getting Around

If the World Were Run Like Airlines (Wall Street Journal)
Water, Public Transportation, and the Future of Los Angeles (Pacific Standard)
Brazilians Spend as Much as 26 Percent of Their Income to Ride the Bus (Atlantic Cities)

The Great Dereliction

A quick thought experiment: name a leader in a position of power you (really) admire, trust, and respect. Not just the head of an "alternative" company or political party, but a well-known, mainstream, orthodox, leader of the status quo. Can you?

Even after a few moments to reflect and consider, most people can't name a single one. Obama? Bernanke? Cameron? Blankfein? They're hardly Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, or even JP Morgan.

I'd like to advance a simple thesis: today's leaders are failing on a grand, epic, global, historic scale — at precisely a time when leadership is sorely needed most. They're failing me, everyone under the age of 35, and everyone worth less than about $50 million. I can excuse leaders who are boring, mean, stingy, greedy, uninteresting, self-obsessed, vacuous, and generally lame. I can even excuse lying, cheating, and stealing. But I can't excuse the fact that they've failed.

If I had five seconds with today's so-called leaders, I'd simply, firmly, gently say (and I bet you would, too): You've failed to provide us opportunity. You've failed to provide us security. You've failed to provide us liberty. You've failed to provide us dignity. You've failed to provide us prosperity. So: resign. Quit. Step aside.

The world is (still) wracked by crisis. But here's the thing. The solutions to this crisis are straightforward. While there are nuances, and complications, it's also true that today's leaders can act, right now, right this second, in much greater degree, with much fiercer conviction, to make things not just marginally better — but dramatically so.

I used to think: this is an institutional crisis. We're surrounded by "banks" that blow up economies composed of "corporations" which mostly make you want to submit to lethal injection rather than show up for your soul-sucking "job" so you can deliver another few pennies of "profit" that doesn't have much real value except how many megabucks were looted today in "markets" that are populated by zombie vampire cyborg robots trading worthless bits of imaginary "money" at lightspeed for the benefit of "shareholders" who are mostly pension "funds" that don't provide security for anyone but "chief executives" who don't execute much but the careers of "managers" who don't manage much but the mass assembly of powerpoints for the production of "goods" that don't actually benefit anyone to buy with "money" we don't have anymore to live lives we don't really want to impress people we mostly hate so our "gross national product" adds up to more and more and more McShit every quarter.

But all that's not even really the problem. Now I think: this is a crisis of leadership — because though these institutions are deeply broken, they're not going anywhere anytime soon. Why? Because today's leaders are their staunch allies, not their adversaries. It's going to take nothing less than a new generation of leaders to reform, re-imagine, and redesign, and revolutionize all the above, and more. Real leaders — not high-fiving, bro-hugging wannabes.

What we've got, then, is a great dereliction: leaders who are incapable of fixing the broken institutions that are creating a lost generation, a planetary meltdown, a never-ending series of financial crises, mass unemployment, and a(t least another) lost decade. You'd think with all those icons blinking in the heads-up display, our leaders would act at least a little, well, concerned. But mostly, they seem to be clueless.

Let's admit it. Today's leaders don't just seem out of touch with reality — they are. It's like somebody decided to put Krusty the Clown, Homer Simpson, George Michael Bluth, and the Kardashians in charge of the world. Actually, I retract that. Homer, Krusty, and George Michael would probably do a better job. But we'd probably fire the Kardashians, amirite? That's the point: we can't seem to fire the tragicomically hapless, perpetually bewildered, totally bungling crackpots that are in charge of, well... the rest of our lives, the planet, and humanity's future.

Scared yet? You should be. Here's the simple fact: the leaders of the world aren't fit for the job. And it's time we sent them — yes, most of them — packing.

So let's you and I speak seriously for a few moments.

We're orphans in the gutter, disowned by the past, abandoned by the future. You know it and I know it. We're a lost generation that's being sacrificed by our leaders, who could and should act, if not to stop the hurricane, then at least to shelter us a little bit from the wind.

The old, greying men wag their fingers and sneer at you and I. Their hypocrisy comes to infect us with the slow, sure poison of cynicism. Why, we ask, should we bother to be leaders — when they, giving themselves the name, have surely proven unworthy of the word? When the men who call themselves our leaders are barely worthy of the term "managers", why, then, should we believe in their principles, ideologies, dogmas? When our leaders fail us, why should we believe, anymore, in leadership? When our leaders can't lead, why should we look anywhere but backward, downward, inward?

And yet it is in obligation that we find not imprisonment, but liberation; the chance to become who we are capable of becoming. It is obligation to the possibility of one another — leadership's purest form — that frees us to be more than mere lovers, friends, partners, fellow travelers on a dusty road; but to become husbands, wives, father, mothers; to be worthy of the proud titles: citizens, councilors, executives, representatives, Senators, Presidents, Prime Ministers — to be worthy of the word leaders.

If we don't lead now, it is clear: no one will.

The world needs a new generation of leaders. Now. And it needs the old generation of leaders — failing and unable to even comprehend their own failure — to step aside.

Leaders: We don't come to supplicate you; to beseech you; to beg you; to petition you. We come to replace you.

Every generation believes, "It's our time now." While still young, every generation presumes that they will be the ones to change the world. Here's the truth: some do.

Will we? Or will we, too, be derelict?

There's only one way to find out.