Nice Quote

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

-George Orwell

Buzzwords and Obviousness

I've come to believe that buzzwords are a necessary evil. They have the power to shake people out of their half-sleeping state and wake them up to a new idea. Think of them as taglines for ideas.

The idea may not actually be new. In fact, it probably isn't. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful. However, before anyone takes notice of the idea, it needs to be sold. It needs to be marketed. It needs a catchy slogan. Enter the buzzword.

I can think of a whole host of buzzwords that have simple, even obvious ideas behind them:

• Customer Experience / Your right hand and left hand should be doing the same thing and that thing shouldn't involve displaying your middle finger to your customers


• Permission Marketing / No one likes to be harassed by spam or junk mail


• Core Competencies / Doing what you are good at is better than trying to do something you know nothing about

The problem with buzzwords, though, is that once they have delivered their message to the world they don't go quietly away to die a dignified death. It would better if they did, but instead they tend to linger like an unwanted guest. Pretty soon they're getting used way too often by people who don't really understand them but want to sound clever in meetings.

This is where buzzwords get their bad rap, and I can't say it's not warranted. All I'm saying is that some of the overused buzzwords that you're sick of hearing started out doing the world a great service. Try to remember that the next time you groan and roll your eyes at one.

Obvious Yet Powerful Idea #1: Treat Potential Employees Better

�Our people are our greatest asset.�

How many times have you heard that old chestnut in an executive speech or seen it plastered across the careers section of a corporate website?

And yet, most companies do a downright lousy job of attracting talent. If you�ve ever spent half an hour cutting and pasting bits of your resume into a long-winded eight page online application form then you know what I mean.

A company I used to work for sold software to make this process less painful for job applicants. The marketing line we used amounted to this: if you treat people like crap, the best ones won�t bother and you�ll be left with the applicants who are desperate enough to jump through all the stupid barriers you throw in front of them.

When you think about it, this is obvious. Painfully obvious, in fact.

And yet those lousy eight page forms still exist. In fact, they are still the rule and not the exception.

Co-Creation of Value

Lively discussion of co-creation over at Corante's Brandshift blog. Worth a look.

Retro Estonian TV Commercials

Stumbled on this archive of Soviet-era Estonian commercials via Waxy.org's links blog.

As the lifelong owner of a last name that is both unusual and Estonian, I feel a strange kinship with these odd little cultural artifacts.

The Status Quo vs. Obviousness

Great post by Kathy at Creating Passionate Users. All about the implicit rules that keep us from questioning things. These are the forces that prevent obvious, logical policies and ideas from being adopted. These are the enemies of common sense and innovation.

One of the things that makes challenging the rules so damn hard is that other people have so much invested in...keeping the status quo. And of course the minute you question a rule, you're potentially threatening the people who've been following that rule... even if those people don't understand the rule either! Simply hinting that there could be a better way is enough to trigger someone's defenses.

Her advice is to stop going along with it and start questioning things. The good news for consumers is that people like Kathy are now starting companies. Successful companies. Companies that are starting to challenge the big boys' attachment to the status quo.

Look at Netflix -- they broke the rules and succeeded. They've done the video-renting public a huge service by forcing Blockbuster to choose between scrapping late fees or bleeding market share. They've snapped an entire industry out of consentual cluelessness.

Which industry will be next?

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the blog

Hugh at Gaping Void helped light the fire that launched this blog. Read this and you'll see what I mean . . .

Blog as if your life depended on it.

Act now to receive a free tagline with every purchase

This is a real screen shot from Google's dynamic ads:



Act now! Limited quantities!

Start the weekend with a haiku

This is from John Simmons, who writes incredibly sharp books about the power of words in business. He's the kind of guy who would can write a pretty-damn-good haiku about business communications:

Take dull stuff, numbers
And strategies, then make them
Bright, clear, shining words.

His ideas are a perfect example of how something inherantly obvious can be fresh and compelling. His new book is available in the UK and Canada only.

So what's the big idea?

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but I figured it needed to be about something specific.

But what?

While I was pondering this question, I kept bumping into a thought that I've had many times before -- a concept that has recently bubbled to the surface thanks to the reading I�ve been doing for work about customer experience management.

This blog will be about that concept. Here it is:

1. Many great ideas are actually sort of simple and fairly obvious.

2. Despite this fact�or maybe because of it�they are still great ideas. They have the power to surprise and inspire us.

3. This is because we are so used to doing things a certain way or looking at things from a certain point-of-view that we lose perspective.

Welcome to obviousness.