Grumpy people who work for charities

In the past month, I have given a number of things to charities such as Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army. Now, I know that the people I meet in the course of this are not the idealists who run the organizations, but most likely paid employees working for not very generous pay. Sadly, I have found that many of them are rather bad-tempered and rude. I get a feeling of resentment that they have to do this. When trying to donate the contents of a house, worth many thousands of dollars to the Salvation Army, no-one said "thank you," but only issued peremptory orders, about "if you are not there when we tell you to be, we will drive on and you will have to reschedule!"

Overall, the experience has been unpleasant enough that I would hesitate about doing it again. I think that the charities should stress good manners more to their employees.

Death and Taxes - failure in business and better decision-making

The inevitability of each is legend. However, so is failure in most business situations. Most new products fail. They need not in many cases. It is often clear to observers that the product is going to fail, but "the emperor has no clothes" syndrome takes over and no one says anything. Thus everyone watches in silence as the product rushes to inevitable failure and most effort goes into working out how to avoid blame. The same applies to acquisitions, new technologies. Yet as H.G. Wells said, "all progress is due to unreasonable men." People keep taking risks even if very foolish. Sadly, they do not use the simple tools which can reduce risk.

Why are Brands often less well understood today than twenty years ago?

In the search for business opportunity we have allowed the essence of what a brand is to become more complex. So many people claim expertise in understanding brands. Designers, copywriters, even accounting firms, now claim expertise. This is knowledge from a narrow perspective. The old idea from Procter & Gamble in 1929 that a Brand Manager, is the General Manager of a brand has long gone. A brand is often seen as being made up of smoke and mirrors, with graphics being more important than product or price. As a result, most companies do not do the best things to optimize the financial value of the brand.

Is the AARP guilty of age discrimination?

The AARP recently posted a VP, Marketing position which called for "10-15 years experience." This is frequently code for someone under 40. Whether or not the AARP meant this, it is surprising that it was not more sensitive to the issue. Given the job description, it was clear that while someone with this level might be able to do the job, someone with 25 years experience would probably be better qualified. So why did the AARP eliminate someone like that, perhaps a youth of 50?

Is Google going the way of Wal-Mart?

I recently took a look at a few Google job descriptions. They looked as though they had been written by children. The job description for a Product Manager had nothing in it about understanding the consumer or customer. The very clear impression was that they wanted a bunch of smart, creative kids who would run about and create new products without any sense of process. This was the way in which Google and many successful new businesses are started. The success of Silicon Valley is based on the thousands of businesses which do not succeed. However, the founders do not see them in the context of the thousands of businesses which fail miserably. So when they grow their business, they do not understand that within a corporation, throwing ideas against a wall to see what sticks is incredibly inefficient. While I do believe that top management at Google have a clear vision, I see that this is not understood at lower levels. Most of the people in Google, seeing the company' s success, have come to believe that it is easy. When a company comes to believe that it is so smart that they do not even have to understand what made it successful, nor have a process to replicate it, then the company is getting into trouble, much as Wal-Mart did.

Can't see the wood for the trees - buried in data?

With the enormous growth in computing power over the past 25 years, businesses have many magnitudes more data than they used to. Yet, human brain power has not changed. So management is faced with more data than it can process to make decisions. As a result, many decisions may be worse than they used to be. Companies have not spent enough time on improving human analysis and decision-making vs. on IT and data collection.