June 2011

About once a month, the partners at High Lantern Group gather a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you – and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.

Seven Ideas That Made Us Think

Seven Ideas That Made Us Think

1.  Why Being Redundant Actually Helps

In business communication,  redundancy apparently creates efficiency. Research described by Harvard Business Review  found that the most effective managers were those who deliberately repeated requests:

One manager we observed worked on an e-mail for 20 minutes right after explaining his request to the employee in a conversation. He not only was aware of the redundancy but took the time to make sure the two communications said the same thing.

Politicians have long understood this technique. One of the researchers reports: “Most people are prone to ignore or defer messages, especially if they require work. If you don’t ask twice, they think it’s probably not important to you.”

2.  The Behavioral Economics Behind Online Spending

In July’s issue of Wired, Dan Ariely, who popularized behavioral economics through his book Predictably Irrational, examines how Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and others lure users to spend more money. His assessment of Groupon, for example, focuses on how the company legitimizes coupon use for the Internet savvy:

They’ve taken the embarrassment out of coupon shopping for their target demographic….A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research found that shoppers would describe people standing near coupon users, not to mention the coupon users themselves, as cheap or poor.

3.  The Death of the Phone Number

Brilliant screed against the tyranny of the phone number. The author sees a world in which Skype, or something like it, could be become “the dominant and unified messaging platform that usurps the phone system, texting, video chat, and IM in one fell swoop”:

I hate phone numbers. They’re a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers….Why are we still pretending that phone service is at all different from any other type of data? The answer to almost all of these questions is carrier lock-in — your phone number is a set of handcuffs that prevents you from easily jumping ship, and they know it.

4.  Open Government: Obituary of an Idea

Depressing assessment from the Washington Post of how the U.S. government’s Data.gov initiative has quietly collapsed. The goal was to open up government data systems so companies and entrepreneurs could compete to write new applications. This competition, it was reasoned, would improve service and reduce prices. The fundamental problem is that government still has not embraced an open platform for innovation:

We may live in the richest nation on Earth, but most government agencies and large corporations still process their mission-critical transactions on ’60s-era legacy systems that were designed for machines with less processing power than an iPhone.…So, while grandma flips through photo albums on her iPad and watches streaming videos from Netflix, our government relies on cumbersome web-based systems that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to cathode ray tube terminals.

5.  How did Myspace Become Irrelevant?

Bloomberg Businessweek offers a long-overdue explanation of how Myspace went from being the darling of online music downloads and Rupert Murdoch to a barely mentioned, déclassé  website:

Mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders have accelerated Myspace’s fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth — one that promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture — to an afterthought. But Myspace’s fate may not be an anomaly. It turns out that fast-moving technology, fickle user behavior, and swirling public perception are an extremely volatile mix. Add in the sense of arrogance that comes when hundreds of millions of people around the world are living on your platform, and social networks appear to be a very peculiar business — one in which companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear.

Lingering question raised but unanswered by the article: could a similar fate await Facebook a decade hence?

6.  American Jobs: A Visual History

Intriguing, interactive website showing how U.S. job categories have changed over the last 150 years. Once half of us were farmers; today we are mostly clerks, salespeople, operatives, and owner/managers.

7.  How to Lie to Tourists

The Economist reports that the tourist flood in London this summer signals the relaunching of the mean-spirited and hilarious sport of lying to tourists. For example:

“Winston Churchill’s favourite branch of Starbucks was the one in New Oxford Street, because he considered it to have the cleanest toilets.”

Or:

“If you enter the British Museum, shout ‘I claim these marbles for Greece’ & exit with them, the police are powerless.”

A new Twitter feed has become a source for the best ways to mislead confused visitors.

For more information about High Lantern Group, please visit our website at www.highlanterngroup.com

Unsubscribe |  Profile Center