By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jan 14, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET “Want to quickly and easily get your credit score right now for free?
If you answered ‘Yes’ then click here….
Oh, wait a minute….
Let’s decode that offer.
“Would you like to pay a $30 monthly fee to have your credit score sent to you each month (nearly $400 a year if you forget to cancel) and if you try to cancel it’s a real pain in the neck because although they will sign you up in a jiffy… online, to cancel you have to call in during certain hours and remain on hold for a maddeningly long time until you speak to a customer-service representative who will essentially refuse to cancel your membership until you shout at them that, “Yes, you understand all the amazing benefits of having your score sent to you monthly and despite the  fact you are an inexplicable ignoramus unable to decipher obvious commonsensical benefits to yourself and my family, you still want it cancelled?”
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jan 13, 2014 at 10:00 AM ET To be sure, there are numerous things that Marco Rubio’s anti-poverty speech this week failed to do: the list of omissions run frominsisting on budget neutrality for his proposals without giving any hint exactly how and what he would cut to support them; to not addressing whether his plan to block grant antipoverty programs would end up with the red-state, blue-state disparity that characterizes Medicaid and TANF; to vagueness on how his job training condition for extended unemployment benefits would function in distressed communities that have no reliable higher wage jobs available.
These aren’t quibbles, and some of them leave Rubio’s ideas vulnerable to the charge that they would in practice gut or outright eliminate subsistence for millions of low income Americans in the name of “upgrading” the War on Poverty.
But to enlarge the discussion beyond policy specifics, there are arguably two broader dimensions to the Rubio address, each of which illustrates the challenges Republicans face when they venture into this arena. First, the senator’s context from start to finish was that a (relatively) bipartisan generation of antipoverty legislation amounts to a massive systems failure. Liberal commentators were correct to shoot this overstatement down: a country stripped of Medicaid, SSI disability, Title I education funding and food stamps would not only be fundamentally crueler, it would have inevitably fractured into revolt under the strains of the Great Recession. In the same way that De Blasio style liberals have glossed over the contributions the Giuliani/Bloomberg run made to a safer, more livable New York City, the “failure” critique that Rubio and most conservatives advance regarding the War on Poverty is too glib, too shallow.
 This criticism, by the way, isn’t just finding fault with rhetoric. The legislative challenge for a President Rubio would be assembling a coalition of a unified Republican Party and more centrist Democrats to enact a new anti-poverty agenda: and one of the primary requirements for attracting any Democrats into that coalition would be the preservation of most of the anti-poverty regime that exists today. Could Rubio even begin to sell the right wing of his party on such a trade-off if his premise has been that the status quo is a disaster?
And that leads to the second challenge that Rubio tackled, but not forcefully enough. The leading ideological sensibilities of today’s GOP voters are that (1) poverty is not really systemic and is a product of either inept economic management by Barack Obama or of weak individual choices and that (2) stirring up public interest in poverty or income inequality is usually “class warfare” based pandering. Rubio has earned credit for implicitly rebuking this mindset by bringing up the issue at all.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: What Rubio Did and Did Not Say About Poverty
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jan 13, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET “Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire” W.B. Yeats
Excuse the rant but I am outraged by the state of the U.S. education system. We have let the pilot light go out and we are failing our youth. Particularly egregious is the way we are failing our urban youth.
We must refocus our national and regional innovation conversation on how to solve real world problems. Job number one is to design a better education system that lights a fire for every youth, creating lifelong passionate learners. It is time to move beyond public policy debates and institutional rugby scrums to try new solutions. What we are doing now isn’t working, and far too much of the federal stimulus investment in education is being spent to sustain the current system.
A report last year from the nonprofit network America’s Promise Alliance showed that 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year. Only about half of the students served by school systems in the nation’s 50 largest cities graduate from high school. The U.S. public education system, especially in the country’s urban centers, must be transformed.
Only about 40 percent of the U.S. adult population earns a college degree. That may have been fine in the 20th century when an industrial economy supplied good jobs to those without post-secondary education. It is not fine today when a college degree is a necessity for a good job.
 Our education system was built for the 20th century.
Everyone loves to point fingers at other players in the system as the cause of the problem. Observing our education system today is like watching an intense rugby scrum that is moving in slow motion hoping the ball will pop out. We have finger pointing and incessant public policy debates galore. We love to admire the problems: It’s the unions that are getting in the way. Teachers are resisting change in the classroom. Administrators don’t understand what is going on in the classroom. Parents are not engaged. Public policy makers can’t make up their minds. If only private sector companies were more engaged. Students are unruly, undisciplined and disrespectful. Everyone gets blamed and nothing changes.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Education Rant
By Lauren Mayer, on Wed Jan 8, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET We’ve all been guilty of it – the inside-out logic of deliberate self-delusion, to try to convince ourselves of something we really wish were true, such as
– “I’ll get there on time as long as I hit every light and there’s no traffic”
– “I can quit drinking/smoking/bingewatching Downton Abbey whenever I want”
– “If you eat leftover dessert standing up, it doesn’t have any calories”
– “How can global warming be real if it’s snowing?”
So I’d like to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their objection to extending longterm unemployment benefits, spearheaded by Senator Rand Paul. His explanation is one of the all-time classic inside-out rationalizations, “Extending benefits does a disservice to the unemployed.” See, they’d be out looking for a job, even though there are 3 unemployed people for every available job, except that $200 weekly check is making them way too comfy, and so they’ll be grateful for the kick in the pants they need to go out and get a job that doesn’t exist.
And let’s assume their objection is also out of concern for the economy – even though most economists say that every dollar in unemploment benefits adds more than a dollar to the economy (because unemployed people will spend the money on frivolous items like food, housing and utilities), and even though the shutdown last fall cost just about the same as extending benefits would. It’s just that in Rand Paul land, up means down, and numbers work backwards. (Either that, or he’s too busy footnoting every single word he says, so that we mean liberals won’t accuse him of plagiarizing again.)
In that spirit, I’m only likening Paul to a certain Seussian green-skinned character because they’re both so cuddly and cute!
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jan 6, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET I made a new friend today. An unknown number from Atlanta called and I excitedly answered to see who could be on the other end of the line. It was Portfolio Recoveries calling me today–not a long lost friend, as I had hoped– although they did act like they knew me well. In fact, they insisted I owed over them $9000 on two credit cards.
They offered no information about purchases or any other helpful details. And were just terrible at making pleasant small talk. They just kept asking me angrily “How are you going to pay for this?” and “You need to set up a payment plan– now!”
I insisted that they I have never owned either card and had no idea what they were talking about.
I must have been doing well with my answers because the angry person who called me told me she was going to let me speak to her manager.
I am guessing not everybody they call gets to do that.
The manager was clearly the manager. I could tell because he read from the exact same script but sounded both angrier yet also more sane than the first person I spoke to.
No disrespect to her but she just isn’t management material —yet. At least in the debt collection biz. Time will tell. She may make it there one day. But for now she is well placed as just the “initial contact” person.
I told her and “the manager” that I had to go but would call them back tonight.
They thought I was saying I would “call them back” like some people say but never do, for example, with a one night stand. I could tell they didn’t believe me–and couldn’t blame them. They were acting like a stalker girlfriend in high school calling me constantly, not wanting me to ever hang up the phone with them, probing into my personal financial business and God knows what else. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t currently involved with any other debt collection agencies but instead simply reassured them I wouldn’t leave them feeling like all we had was a single casual conversation by saying “I promise I will call you back tonight. Really. I swear.” I didn’t want them to think I was one of “those guys” who says he will call but never does.
So I did. At around 9:15pm
I got a new person this time. A sort of new friend who seemed really excited to hear from me—and, frankly, amazed I actually called back. It made me feel good inside.
We chatted for a while exchanging pleasantries and then after about seven and a half seconds she was back on the “How are you going to settle this debt?” topic…which I didn’t care much for and more and, frankly, was bored with from my earlier conversation that afternoon on this same topic.
So I said “Look, I am a lawyer.” That had no relevance to our conversation but I rarely ever get to say that to people and this seemed like a good opening to mention it. I wanted them to know that even though she was dealing with a clueless person who they claimed owed a debt they were trying to collect–that I did happen to have a law degree. My hope was that she would think I could use some sort of legal Jiu Jitsu to talk my way out of the supposed debt they were collecting and just give up after hearing my status as a “lawyer.” But, as it turns out, telling her she was unbowed. And after I told her I was a lawyer I couldn’t think of anything about that to elaborate on about staring down debt collection agencies. ” I thought about telling here a second time I was a lawyer just for the effect but figured it might come off as overkill.
There was an awkward pause after the lawyer comment and I filled up the silence by repeating again that I swore I really knew nothing about the two debts she was referring to. I even said, “I swear to God, I don’t know anything about these two credit cards.” I tried to make my swearing comment sound like legal jargon but it sounded more like a teenager who had been caught red-handed and was trying unsuccessfully to talk his way out of something.
Unconvinced of my innocence, she asked me again how I was going to “take care of this” and and after a pause asked me again. I said somewhat exasperated, “Uh. Well….I guess I’ll take care of it by not paying for it since its not my debt. I think that’s going to be how I’m going to handle it.” And I added, “And I would also ask that you all stop calling me. (At this point I could have been more polite and said, “Please don’t call me anymore about debt collection but if you want to just talk about personal things, sports, the weather and whatnot then that would be fine. But I didn’t. Frankly, I was starting to suspect we didn’t have that much in common anyway and I just wanted to get the false debt claim against me resolved.)
I said “There are a lot of John Browns out there, you know? Is there any chance you could have the wrong one?”
I asked for the address and birth date they had on file for “me.” I had never heard of the address she gave and; and as for the birth date, it turns out the John Brown they were looking for is 61 years old.
I assured her that wasn’t me and that I had never lived or had an office at the address she gave me—- and that no one had ever thought I looked a day over 50 before and I suggested she try harder next time to call and harass the right John Brown.
She finally agreed and conceded reluctantly, “It does appear we have the wrong John Brown –this time.” Maybe in a few years I will be the John Brown they are after—maybe when I’m 61–but I was the wrong John Brown this time.
I asked if she was going to offer me an apology for the heavy handed tactics, harassing calls, and offensive insinuations that I was lying.
She said she would have to check with her manager but didn’t offer one herself.
At first I thought that was a bit rude not to apologize but, on the other hand, I admired their commitment to protocol and procedure and the need to run it higher up into management chain before anyone could officially say, “Sorry we got insulted, offended and harassed the wrong person.” There is something about that discipline in any organization that you have to respect.
She told me she hoped that I had a nice evening and I wished her a nice evening as well. Both of us were sincere but I think mine was a little less formulaic and more genuine in my well wishes for the evening. And we hung up.
She seemed like a nice lady. She really did. And said earlier she would write me (by sending a certified letter to me about my debt —or something like that.) But I didn’t tell her I would call her back. I could have said that I would call her back to make it easier on both of us as we said goodbye, but I didn’t. Because I knew I wouldn’t likely call her again. She’s just not my type. Of debt collector, that is. And, besides, I’m just not that type of guy either.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jan 6, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET It is too easy and wrong to think that innovators are egocentric, always admiring themselves and their accomplishments in the mirror. They are confident but not self absorbed and impervious to outside input. If anything innovators are vulnerable, self aware, and open to diverse and critical input to improve their ideas and concepts. The view they see while looking into a mirror is more like the wavy one in the circus fun house that reflects a distorted view. A view that always causes a gasp and accentuates flaws that need serious work and improvement. Innovators know they must improve in order to find better ways to deliver value and solve real world problems.
Innovators spend very little time looking in the rear view mirror. They tend to be forward thinking and looking. It is important to learn from the past but innovators are never bogged down in it or constrained by the way things have always worked. Innovators tend to be market makers rather than share takers. Understanding how a market has worked in the past is helpful but innovators like to tinker across markets to envision and create an entirely new market model or system.
Looking in the rear view mirror magnifies the view from behind making objects seem closer than they really are. This distorted view puts too much emphasis on the past and is troubling to an innovator trying to create the future. While situational awareness is important innovation is about creating new and better ways to deliver value. It is about moving forward and away from intransigent models and systems that only appear larger in the rear view mirror than they really are. Fixating on the past looming large in the mirror is not helpful other than to motivate the innovator to enable change faster.
The side view mirror offers a different but equally distorting view. You know the mirror that has etched on it the words ” objects in mirror are closer than they appear”. Its convex shape is designed to provide a wide-angle view. Innovators love wide-angle lenses that provide a larger perspective and world-view. But the side view mirror makes images appear further away than they really are. If anything innovators are guilty of the opposite. Seeing innovation so clearly that they see it happening sooner than it is likely to.
 Innovators are optimistic by nature and in my experience not the best at predicting market timing. They are great at seeing opportunities and passionately working toward making them a reality but tend to think they will come to fruition sooner than they actually do. How many innovators drove by a Blockbuster video store shaking their head saying all of this video content will be distributed digitally making the bricks and mortar stores obsolete. They were right of course it is just taking longer to happen. That is usually the case with innovation. Innovators think their innovations are closer than they appear in the side view mirror.
OK, enough with the mirrors. Innovators, mirrors, and admiring the past are not compatible. Let’s look forward. Innovators are trying to create the future and agree with Gibson when he said the future is already here it is just unevenly distributed. Standing in the future and building a path to it is the innovator’s opportunity. Eyes forward, let’s create the future together.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 30, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Maybe we need to bang together the heads of mad scientists and mad designers.
If we are waiting for randomized double blind studies to tell us how to address the big social system challenges of our time including health care, education, and energy we will be waiting a very long time. That is not how we will transform these systems. It will take passionate exploration, which is more iterative than traditional scientific methodology. It will take design thinking and process combined with powerful storytelling to create novel networked systems to deliver the value we need and expect in the 21st century. We need to try more stuff.
Last week I spoke at the Business of Aging: Ontario Innovation Summit in Toronto. It was a great event attended by many innovators from across the public and private sector. Attendees all shared a passion for focusing innovation on the opportunity emerging as the silver tsunami of an aging global population rapidly approaches. I shared my point of view on the need to do R&D for new business models and systems and our work at BIF in the Elder Experience Lab. As I always do, I blathered on about design and storytelling tools as the key enablers to system change, in this case developing age friendly environments and communities.
The reaction was largely positive but during a panel discussion I was reminded that many are still stuck on a perceived conflict between design thinking and analytical thinking, between design process and scientific method. They are not mutually exclusive. We need to apply our opposable minds to borrow from both approaches to design new systems while measuring what works and is most likely to scale.
 I was asked by summit organizers what I thought would be the most important innovation to enable an age friendly society by 2020. I replied:
Perhaps the most important innovation for an age-friendly society by 2020 does not require inventing anything new at all. Maybe it just requires all of us to reexamine our assumptions about the elder experience and ways to enhance it. Innovation is a better way to deliver value, in this case, designing environments and systems that enable elders to age in their own homes and communities with dignity. The innovation may be nothing fancier than bringing the voice of the elder directly in to the conversation and designing a better experience recombining existing capabilities and assets in new ways to serve the needs of society’s elders.
Most of today’s innovation conversation is through the lens of the institutions that comprise the current elder care system. The elder’s voice is missing. Tweaking the current system will not work. Adding technology to the current system will not work either. We need to design new system approaches to enhance the elder experience and to prepare for the imminent silver tsunami of baby boomers that will bring a completely new set of expectations and desires to the age-friendly conversation.
It is not technology that is getting in our way. We have more technology available to us then we know how to absorb. It is humans and the institutions we work in that are both stubbornly resistant to change. Rather than applying technology in a sustaining way to try and improve the current institutionally based elder care system we need to experiment with technology as a disrupter to enable new system approaches that enable elders to age in place. We need system level innovation designed around the elder to create environments and care models that enable a more age-friendly society.
It is odd for me to represent design thinking and process in the debate when my training is as a scientist and MBA. The reason I hang around so many smart designers is that I don’t think the old tricks alone will enable the system change we need. We need to borrow from both approaches to pave a new way. It is messy but necessary. Lets bring together the mad scientists and mad designers and see what happens.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 23, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Drip, drip, drip. One comment on a blog post. One re-tweet of a point of view. One new Facebook friend. You might not even realize while it is happening but over time an audience is developing that is genuinely interested in what you have to say and gives you permission to share it. Individuals are learning how to share their stories and gaining confidence by participating actively in social networks. Personal networks have become the new marketing channels and marketing has become the art of dribs and drabs. The problem is that most organizations haven’t figured it out yet.
I believe the marketing model of companies deploying large internal teams of marketing specialists supported by even larger external advertising and public relations firms is dead. Watching the series Mad Men reminds me of how little the advertising and communications industry has changed from a model that is clearly being disrupted by the new world of social media.
It is exciting to be a participant in the seismic shift away from the old models of mass marketing and communication. The days of the big campaign developed behind closed doors followed by a grand unveiling comprised of orchestrated media placements and road show whistle-stops are behind us. Now the message is developed and honed every day. You don’t need an army of specialists to tell you what the message is. You just need to put your genuine ideas out in public every day where a community of interest can provide you with immediate feedback, help you to improve, and share your ideas with their networks if they like them.
No intermediaries required. Being genuine is valued above all else. No need to assign the task of sharing your perspective, idea, or message to a third party. Share them yourself.
This shift must be driving traditional marketing types and communications firms crazy. The industry was built on a foundation of “controlling the message” and secret sauce that only the experts possessed to unlock access to big media outlets. Imagine the horror when huge campaigns are ripped apart within 24 hours of release by the viral unknown masses or when an undiscovered talent like Susan Boyle can become an overnight global sensation.
Dribs and drabs sound so inefficient and even dangerous when you grew up in an industrial era when marketing was about controlling the message, leveraging marketing experts, and mass media channels to reach a target market segment. Marketing and Communications has been a centralized and protected function within most organizations. God forbid anyone outside of the chosen functions speaks on behalf of or about the company in public or on the web. Social media has blown traditional marketing up and most organizations I interact with are struggling with how to manage the new world where individuals are empowered communicators with an audience.
Communication is personal and everyone has a role to play. The world of personal and organizational communication is merging whether we want it to or not. I have talked to many active participants on social media platforms that are constrained or even blocked from communicating while at work or about work after hours. This is silly. Organizations are missing an amazing opportunity to virally share their stories and to tap into the networks of all the organization’s stakeholders. Organizations need to trust employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers to build and strengthen networks of supporters and fans that are the most important marketing asset today.
Organizations should be focused on turning all stakeholders into active storytellers and passionate supporters. Accentuate and build on the positive. Forget trying to hide the negative. Respond, learn and improve from it. It is no longer possible to control communications about your organization. Everyone should be encouraged to communicate openly and large marketing departments should be replaced with listening departments to learn from and leverage what is being shared.
The learning curve to go from industrial era mass marketing to personalized social media marketing is steep but rewarding. The most important rule is that everyone gets to play. I mean everyone. Celebrate the dribs and drabs.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Dec 18, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Another brilliant business idea. Sort of.
(Think late night infomercial)
In our more mature years resolving marital disagreements can be challenging.
When couples are younger couple and one spouse (often the male spouse) finds himself in error, there are a variety of conventional methods for remediation. These can range from from taking on extra chores around the house, finally doing yard work put off for too long, visiting in-laws for the weekend, long talks processing feelings, to utilizing the pull out couch in the den over night.
But as you get older a male spouse’s energy level and physical limitations make some of these conventional remedies impractical. Yet a mistake was still made and something has to be done about it.
I propose a new product that allows perjorative things to be written on the offending spouse’s tombstone for an agreed on period of time. The product would be made with a type of disappearing ink after a set number of days, weeks, or in some cases, years depending on what the spouses agree upon is the appropriate period of time for the public humiliation punishment.
For example, a tombstone could read:
John Smith 1947- 2026
Loving husband, great father, and dear friend to many
Lazy (2011)
Inconsiderate (2013)
Assh*** (2005)
The last three rememberances could be in the disappearing ink and written out without asterisks with the year the offending behavior occurered in parenthesis. These could be recompense for punishment for mistakes made in the past but during the mature years.
The beauty part is there is no painful extra work in the yard to do right now but a satisfactory punishment is still meted out that is appropriate to the misdeed. And remains for everyone to see. At least long enough for everyone the surviving spouse wants to see it. (For example, long enough for all living friends to see but not great grand children)
And for just an extra $9.95 a month the same tombstone message can be placed on the bereavement website for your loved one.
This way, finally, there is a way for both the deceased and their surviving spouse to Rest In Peace.
By Jason Grill, on Tue Dec 17, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
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