Small changes to big systems A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It's easy to think not much has changed. But book publishing isn't about printing, and it's a useful metaphor for the systems changes we're seeing all around us. The book…

Considering infinity Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism. Starbucks knows that they can't get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one. The…

Confused about donations A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team? Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause? Does calling it a "donation" make it more valuable or less valuable…

If they knew… Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don't know, and who aren't particularly good at decision making. Others do their best work when the customer knows what's up and is making an informed choice. Are you closing the sale or…

That’s what studies are for "Are you sure it's going to work?" That's the wrong question to consider when proposing a study. It's also not helpful to say, "It's unlikely to solve the problem." All the likely approaches have already been tried. The useful steps are: Is there a problem worth…

Tight rope standing It's much easier to walk a tight rope than it is to simply stand in place. Forward momentum creates stability.

Imagination is work We spend most of the time we're in school extinguishing imagination. "Will this be on the test?" is a much more common question than "What if?" We've been trained to do tasks in a factory. Imagination is a skill and it takes effort. It's not useful to say, "I'm not…

The Uncanny Valley It used to be an obscure oddity, now we all need to understand it. 18 years ago, I posted this image: ...and I still can't get it out of my head. Sorry. Why do we have such a creeped-out reaction to images that aren't quite right? A robot that looks too much like a person, or a…

The gap between “I” and “no one” This is where empathy lies, and it's an easy chasm to fall into. "I can't imagine eating durian ice cream," is not the same as "no one likes durian ice cream." We fail as marketers, editors and project managers when we can't find the empathy to bridge the gap. It's…

Popular (and good) Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much. Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that's what it was built to do. Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals…

A nearly perfect score After playing 498 days in a row, my score today in Bongo was the second-highest in the world: There's a difference between casual online games that have a right answer, and those that are open-ended. In crossword puzzles and most of the games from the Times (like Wordle and…

AI slop It's not slop because it was created by an AI. It's slop because it's slop. I just read the first two pages of a sci-fi novel on my Kindle. The author proudly proclaims that the 400-page book was created without any AI whatsoever. Alas, the book is slop. The writing is overwrought and the…

How to win a bidding war Pundits are saying that Netflix "lost" the bidding for Warner. Actually, they won. They didn't just win because they got a nearly $3 billion breakup fee. They won because in just about every contentious public auction, the winner is the one who is willing to overpay the…

Justice and luck Orson Welles may have said, "Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck." I think it's more productive to imagine that "Justice is how society deals with luck." Good and bad.

No. Is a complete sentence. So is, "yes."

Love your customers It's nice if you do, but it's not required. You're not them. You may have had different experiences, been exposed to different ideas or simply be prepared to make different choices. That's okay. What's useful: loving the change you're able to make. Being proud of helping people…

Time is the wildcard There are two feet of snow blocking your car from the road. This is a problem. Except it's not a problem if you don't need to leave the house for a few days—the snow will melt on its own. And it's not a problem if you had decided to move to the island of Saba a few years ago.…

Sarcasm self-defeats Sarcasm is an easy way to amplify feedback. It has two hidden costs: It reveals low status. People with power don't need to use sarcasm to make a point. If you want to lead with status, using sarcasm undermines that goal. It adds emotion where it's not always needed. The…

Blizzard pasttimes Millions of folks are about to get snowed in. Stay safe. Here's a code for last year's Thriving with AI course on Udemy. It's free for the first 1,000 people. And I see that This is Marketing is currently half-price on Amazon. Or you could build a snowman.

Should you keep playing your hit song? It depends. A freelancer, a brand, a musician--they're here to serve. If people come to the restaurant for your famous marinara sauce, if new clients hire you to architect your signature style home or they want to dance to your top 40 hit, that's what you're…

Brown rice and status Rice is one of the most consumed foods in the world, and it gives us insight into our relentless search for status and for affiliation. Once rice is harvested for consumption, it's brown. The outer layers of the rice husk contain the bran and many of the nutrients in the…

“Hide competitive stats” I've been playing an online wordgame for a few months, and after each round, it shows me how well I'm doing against the 10,000 other people who are also playing. It didn't take long for me to realize that the stats weren't improving my mood (a really good play had me…

Freelancer empathy When phone cameras got good enough, portrait photographers scolded people who took their own headshots. And when the Mac got pretty good at typesetting, professional designers pointed out that people who can't tell a font from a typeface and don't care about kerning should avoid…

How to write a coaching/learning prompt An AI like Claude is actually a pretty good fortune cookie. You can ask a simple question and get a simple answer, sometimes a profound one. But this is a waste of the tool's potential. The AI is patient. It's capable of remembering things over time. And it…

Misguided optimization Industrialism brought us the idea of optimization. Incremental improvements combined with measurement to gradually improve results. We can optimize for precision. A car made in 2026 is orders of magnitude more reliable because the parts fit together so well. We can optimize…

Mysterious predictability A watched pot will boil. As it heats up, there's no way to predict where the cavitation will start and which bubble will arrive first. But with enough time and enough heat, it's going to boil. That tree down the street is going to lose its leaves this winter. We don't…

Better vs. done "There, it's done." This is the production mindset and the rule of school. Pencils down. Hand it in. The alternative is, "Sign me up for a commitment to better." Ship an update every day. Learn from what works, relentlessly improve what doesn't. The hard part about this path is…

Things that feel risky Often aren't. In fact, they might be the safest way forward.

The next generation of AI businesses The first generation was built on large models, demonstrating what could be done and powering many tools. The second generation is focused on reducing costs and saving time. Replacing workers or making them more efficient. But you can't shrink your way to…

Tip for tap There is plenty of unintentional harm in our world. We've all been bruised or derailed by someone who had no ill intent. We often respond with intentional harm, to make a point and to teach a lesson. The alternative is clarity. Shared understanding instead of intentional pain. Tap is…

Time well spent What an admirable goal. Perhaps the overriding goal of all goals. How often do we measure this? Do we even know how? Do the systems we're in push us from considering this? I wonder why.

A starting point for the blog The challenge of the library is the card catalog. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's hard to find much of anything. The challenge of the web is the search box, for the same reason. It's efficient once you're on a mission, but it requires you to go first.…

Process thinking Sure, you made it work this time, but will it work next time? Can you teach the method to someone else? Do you have a protocol for what to do when it doesn't work? How can someone else contribute to your process to make it better?

Free agency Unrestricted free choice is a myth. There are always boundaries and trade-offs. But being fully stuck is also a myth. We might not like the trade offs, but we also have a choice. Since we always live in between, the work isn't waiting until we have free agency. The work is deciding and…

Vessel size "May your cup runneth over..." This begs the question: how big a cup? The logistics of vessel size determine how much money we need to raise, how big a team we need, how many customers are necessary to break even. When we're on the hook to fill an Airbus transatlantic flight with…

Voluntary stories The narrative we run in our head is a choice. It might or might not be based on objective reality and verified history. Doesn't matter, it's still a choice. There are millions of ways we can remind ourselves about the events of our lives and the systems we live in. But in this…

Making it whole Integrity is the act of being in and of itself, from every angle. As we see the bait-and-switch of the online networks and monopolists, it's easy to imagine that nothing with integrity stays that way very long. The systems we support almost always end up trading a straightforward…

Sorting A surprising amount of our time is spent sorting things to create value. They sort the rotten cranberries from the good ones to ensure that the bag at the market is worth buying. And we sort the movies worth watching, the bargains worth pursuing and the news worth reading. Editors, gold…

“Everybody wants to win” Sports analogies often let us down. A colleague was explaining how measurement was difficult in many organizations, unlike a basketball game, where the time, the score and the stats are clear and obvious. He said, "everybody wants to win." Depending on how you define…

Precision vs. accuracy Precision requires producing the same results each time. Repeatable, measurable, dependable. Accuracy means hitting the target. The only way to consistently be accurate is to be precise. But there are plenty of precision methods that don't yield the most desired outcomes.…

More trouble than it’s worth This is the hallmark of projects that turn out to be worth doing. The trouble might be a symptom that we're onto something that others don't care enough to do. And the things that are obviously worth doing are probably already being done.

The infinite tail The Long Tail was a profound cultural insight. When we created YouTube, Amazon, Roon, recipe websites and Netflix, the culture changed. When you give people a choice, they make a choice. We went from the Top 40 to millions of songs. From Blockbuster to every movie ever made. From…

AI ads are neither Neither AI nor ads. The problem started with search, and was weaponized by Amazon. Display ads go back at least 100 years. A century ago, the idea was simple: Show up in a place where people are offering up attention and tell a story. The advertiser pays the media for the…

Skepticism, surprise and resistance Every important medical innovation of the last five hundred years has been ridiculed, undermined and ignored by doctors and the medical establishment. Every single one. Hand-washing, antibiotics, and the dangers of smoking, just to pick a few. This happens in…

On the hiring line There have always been two sides: Hiring people to do tasks and jobs, or hoping to be hired to do those tasks and jobs. The difference now is that it's increasingly difficult to find a good job to get hired for, and easier than ever to be the person who hires an AI or a person…

Insulation > power When energy is cheap, people build buildings that are poorly insulated. It's faster and cheaper in the short run. In the long run, though, insulation always wins. You invest in it once and get the rewards forever. And of course, this is true for all things, not just buildings.…

Terrible Most of us are terrible at some things. Lack of skill, focus, practice, care or just temperament means that we don't do the task as well as we might. This might be anything from promptness to conflict to high-stakes negotiation. It could include filling in forms, taking notes or…

In defense of popups One friend recently opened a bookstore instead of a bookmobile. Another is investing two years of his life to open a restaurant instead of a series of pop up dinners. And a third is buying a boat instead of chartering one. It's easy to see why. A real bookstore has a lease.…

A better mousetrap That's easy advice and a fine goal. Except... if you look at the last hundred years, we haven't seen many useful advances in mousetraps, despite the number of people who have tried. It feels like an infinite market, so it attracts a lot of entrants. You probably won't come up…

Bent incentives Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me? A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she's calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I've never interacted, I block each number, but…