I spent much of this Sunday weeding my driveway (don’t ask) which I followed with a 50min run. Needless to say, tonight’s Front Porch musings are accompanied by a margarita…
The Volt goes for a jolt but dishes out static.
Earlier this week GM put out a splashy headline about the Volt getting 203+ miles per gallon in city driving. Unfortunately while this no doubt tickled the newswire, I don’t believe it will help GM in the long run. It’s just the type of bravado that validates my belief that they simply don’t ‘get’ the transparency of our age. You can’t bullshit your way to success today. People will not only question your claims, they’ll publish what they discover.
Yes, the Volt is a big step in the right direction for GM and the US auto industry. And as a suburban/urban commuter electric car, it’s a nice piece of machinery. But rather than GM explaining why an electric car might matter to the world today it decided to overstate its case using a clever headline that muddies the value proposition with verbal slight of hand.
A better approach for GM would be to show some respect for people’s intelligence, to be a little humble (after all, you’re the punchline of a lot of jokes these days), to educate drivers on why they might want to consider an electric car and to act as if they understand that people can fact-check you pretty damned easily. Toss in a dash of patriotism and national economy re-building and you might actually come off as authentic, sincere and interested in the people you build cars for.
Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn unknowingly validates martial arts thinking on business.
I was pleased to come across this interview with Brian Dunn the new CEO of Best Buy. In his own words, he lent a certain credence to the piece I recently wrote on samu and the importance of spending time in the trenches. He also spend some time talking about ego and how it can impact the job of CEO, another topic I once touched upon from an Eastern/Western contrasting vantage point. Honorary black belt to Mr. Dunn.
Stream of consciousness: Self deleting data and the new tattoos.
A while back I read an article ( I can’t find it now or I’d link to it) about data files that were designed to self-delete. Today my wife told me about a book she’s reading by Barbara Kingsolver that describes wheat seeds engineered to self-abort – that is, to force the farmer to buy new seeds every season. This reminded me of the shitty drive belt on my drier which the maintenance guy admitted was smaller than the old one (and obviously engineered to break, thereby giving said repairman a job). Next leap, social media and kids losing jobs over stupid posts, incriminating pictures etc. Compromising digital records are the new tattoos. They seem like a fun, cool, good idea at the time, but they’re permanent and they may cause someone to judge you down the line. Seems to me there’s a market in social media for a product that would allow you to tag a digital asset and in doing so, set a sef-destruct point whereby the file would be deleted. Apparently some companies toyed with this but it doesn’t seem like there’s a great solution out there for the cell-cam-photographed masses. If such a product existed I might even do a post about the time I publically stripped off all of my cloth
