Plans2Reality

Banished Word: "It's in our DNA"

It is not "in your DNA". You don't get to vote about what's "in your DNA." You certainly don't get to change, at the whim of the marketing department, what's "in your DNA".

There's a good chance that what is in your DNA is as lovely as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs's Disease, and sickle-cell anemia. Especially if you are a large organization.

So knock it off!

 

Banished Word: Seamless

Okay, folks, we have beaten this one to death. Your product? NOT seamless. Stop claiming otherwise.

Klein bottles are seamless. (Look it up). Lovely bolts of cloth from Britex are seamless. Your product is not seamless. It does not provide seamless coverage. It is not a seamless support experience.

Stop beating this perfectly innocent word to death!

Fuel economy: Going along for the ride

The Economist throws a bit of cold water on fuel economy hype

IMAGINE you are stopped in the street by a clipboard-toting pollster, who asks whether health insurance should automatically cover all necessary procedures and medication, with no restrictions or co-payments? Nine out of ten people (if not all) would instantly answer yes. But had the respondents been warned beforehand that they would have to stump up an extra $10,000 for such coverage, the answer could easily have been a resounding no.

via www.economist.com

Jawbone Shows How Customer Service Is Done

Jawbone apparently had some technical issues with early versions of their new UP health monitor. Did they hide behind lawyers? No. They stepped up and did the right thing. Read the letter from the CEO, below.

Jawbone understood that p*ssing off the early adopters would kill the product, and maybe the company. Why don't more companies know this? Does yours?

 

LETTER FROM THE CEO

• THE UP™
• NO QUESTIONS ASKED
• GUARANTEE

To the UP community:

Earlier this year, we unveiled Jawbone’s vision to help people live a healthier life with UP. We’ve been thrilled by the passionate response to this product. We heard from tens of thousands of you through emails, tweets, blog posts and on our forums about how you’re changing your lifestyle and becoming consumers of your own health. In just four weeks, UP users have collectively taken over three billion steps, gotten more than 300 years of sleep and captured hundreds of thousands of meals.

While many of you continue to enjoy the UP experience, we know that some of you have experienced issues with your UP band. Given our commitment to delivering the highest quality products, this is unacceptable and you have our deepest apologies. We’ve been working around the clock to identify the root causes and we’d like to thank everyone who has provided us with information and returned their bands to us for troubleshooting. With your help, we’ve found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands. We’re also fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware. Typically, these issues surface within the first seven to ten days of use. The glitches are purely performance related and do not pose any safety risk.

We’ve also received helpful feedback on the application experience, including bug reports, ways to make signup and finding friends easier, user interface suggestions and new feature requests. Your comments are invaluable as we continue to improve, so please keep them coming and check back frequently for updates to ensure you’re always enjoying the latest features and enhancements.

We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action:

The UP No Questions Asked Guarantee

This means that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, you can receive a full refund for UP. This is true even if you decide to keep your UP band. We are so committed to this product that we’re offering you the option of using it for free.

The program starts December 9th and full details can be found at http://jawbone.com/uprefund.

For most of you, this program is simply meant to offer peace of mind. Please continue to enjoy your UP band and keep sharing your experience with us. If you encounter any problems with your UP band, contact Jawbone directly for your choice of a replacement and/or refund under this program. It’s that simple.

Jawbone remains deeply committed to addressing all issues with UP, investing in the category and giving our customers the tools to live a healthier life. We’ve temporarily paused production of UP bands and will begin taking new orders once these issues have been sorted out. In the meantime, we’ll continue to release app updates for existing users.

We regret any disappointment we’ve created for our community of users and appreciate the trust you’ve put in us. The fact that you’ve taken the time to talk with us and help us make a better product is simply phenomenal. Our customers have always been part of our team and we’re incredibly grateful for that.

Please know that we’re doing – and will continue to do – everything we can to make things right. This is just the beginning for UP and we are excited to keep improving until we realize the powerful vision of what this category can be.

If there is absolutely anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Hosain Rahman
CEO
Jawbone

 

Why People Are Getting Cranky with the Public Sector

There are two stories that point to reasons why:

Philly Councilwoman to Retire and Collect $478,000 Pension, Then Start Back To Work On Monday

Marion B. Tasco, who has been described as being “politically savvy,” will retire from her sixth term as councilwoman, collect $478,057, and then be sworn in on Monday to serve her seventh term, Catherine Lucy and Chris Brennan of the Philadelphia Daily News.

How does she get away with this?

Tasco, along with many of her fellow Council members, is enrolled in Philadelphia’s Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP). DROP allows city workers to collect salary and build up pension money during the last four years of their employment, writes Aaron Kase of Philadelphia Weekly.

Naturally, when DROP was originally introduced, it was touted as being “revenue neutral.” It’s been anything but that. SInce its introduction, Philadelphia’s DROP program has cost the city $258 million in extra pension costs over a decade, according to a 2010 Boston College study.

And:

Public employee union defends Denver cop who was fired for driving drunk at 143 mph

On June 17, 2010, Denver police officer Derrick Curtis Saunders was arrested for speeding and driving under the influence. Before he was pulled over, he was driving at 143 mph in a 55-mph zone. That’s 88 miles an hour more than the speed limit. His blood-alcohol level was 0.089 percent, slightly higher than the 0.08 legal limit.

Appropriately, the Denver Police Department dismissed him. (A judge also sentenced him to five days in jail, fined him $300 and ordered him to perform 100 hours of community service.) Now, Saunders would like his job back — and the Denver Police Protection Association stands ready to help him.

Saunders — with the help of the union — filed an appeal to the Denver Civil Service Commission to request his job back. The Denver Post reports:

Saunders’ appeal to the Denver Civil Service Commission asserts that Martinez’s findings and penalties are “unfounded and/or unsupported by the facts” and violate principles of fundamental fairness.

The penalty is “disproportionate to the offenses alleged and/or is excessive so as to be punitive rather than corrective in nature,” according to the appeal, filed by the Denver Police Protective Association’s lawyers.

Nick Rogers, the union’s president, didn’t return a call for comment.

My brother works for the State of California. He has earned a fair pension, I think. But we keep hearing stories about gaming the system - spiking annual income with overtime to get a huge pension; health care benefits far in excess of the private sector, etc.

And it is bankrupting our cities and states, and soon the Nation.

The stupidity of airline rules on electronics

This is worth the time to read. It's time we got the rules changed!

EVERY airline flight you are on has at least a handful of mobiles, laptops and other electronic kit left in a standby mode or actively on, rather than shut off as aviation regulators and airlines demand. Every flight, in other words, tests the proposition that hardware carried on board by passengers disrupts the aircraft or confuses the crew with false readings from cockpit instruments. And yet airplane electronics, or avionics to use the technical term, do not routinely squawk or fail. 

via www.economist.com

Brief Writing Tips #6

The Chicago Manual of  Style is a set of guidelines, not Heiligeschrift or a substitute for good judgment.

Special Event with Famed Author Holly Payne

San Francisco-based author Holly Payne will appear at a special Holiday event at the Union City Library, this Saturday, 10 December, from 1 to 4 pm. 

Holly has won numerous awards, and her most recent novel, Kingdom of Simplicity, recently won the Writer's Digest Best Book award for 2011, as well as the 2010 Benjamin Franklin award for best new book.

Holly will sign books, talk about the writing process, and answer your questions. Don't miss this event!

Learn more about her latest book, Kingdom of Simplicity by clicking on the title.

Here's Holly herself:

How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs' first retail war • The Register

You really want to read this article, and not just because it is pro-Apple. There are two excellent marketing points in it, and an example of why the even biggest company needs to be flexible enough to get something out the door in 48 hours - over a weekend.

The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.

via www.theregister.co.uk

Too blind to see cause and effect? Netflix, maybe....

Well, knock me over with a feather!

"Despite increases in gun sales, gun crimes continued to decrease in the United States for the fourth straight year in 2010, according to the FBI."

Sometimes people are so sure of their pre-conceptions that they truly cannot see contradictory data. 

This occurs in marketing communications a great deal - too often companies get so caught up in their own worldview that they cannot recognize the contrary data when they see it.

Netflix seems to have done that. Management made a series of choices that cost them an enormous chunk of their customer base. Even when confronted with millions of screaming customers, they did not back down very quickly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.....