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Top of Mind Thursday – February 29, 2024: Leaping Forward
Today, February 29, is Leap Year Day—the day that only appears once every four years.
Anything that happens today—good or bad—will only come back around for an exact anniversary in 2028. But did we move forward or backward since the last leap year in 2020?
Hard to believe, but four years ago, we were just starting to worry about something called Coronavirus. Not long after this date, the world pretty much shut down. We learned how to be socially distant, the importance of N95 masks, what worked and didn’t work in remote settings, and that even the best restaurants could (and would) provide good takeout meals.
In the last four years, we’ve seen a couple of conflicts wind down and two more new wars ramp up. We’ve seen a rise in incivility and violence in general, and antisemitism, racism, and gender-based hatred in particular.
Cybersecurity and supply chains are no longer the buzz words they were four years ago, but AI and ChatBots are the hot topics now. As happens with most technologies, we’re warned they may drastically change our lives. The question remains whether that will be for the better, the worse, or perhaps not much at all.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from the insurrection in January of 2020, with some perpetrators sentenced for their crimes, and the former president indicted 92 times for various criminal acts—for which he may or may not ever see the inside of a courtroom. And we likely will have the same two men vying to be the oldest-ever president again.
We’ve seen major steps backwards on women’s rights, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade and now an Alabama court that has jeopardized the success of in vitro fertilization by declaring that frozen embryos are full-fledged people. (Does that mean one can use the car pool lane with a test tube beside them? Inquiring minds want to know.)
The question now is where will we be on Feb. 29, 2028.
Will we have moved forward or back? That’s up to each of us. Today’s a good day to think about what steps we want to take personally and professionally to be in a better place in the future. That’s not such a big leap to make.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 22, 2024: The Death of Dissonance
On Friday, Alexei Navalny, the leading opponent to Vladimir Putin in Russia, died mysteriously.
While his death was shocking, it was not a surprise. Anyone who crosses Putin faces a much shortened lifespan—some fall out of tall buildings, others are poisoned or shot, and still others, like Yevgeny Prigozhin, are killed when their plane suddenly blows up.
Navalny himself survived a poisoning attempt in 2020, yet he returned to Russia where he was captured as an enemy of the state and imprisoned in a remote prison camp.
Navalny was the last of the well-known dissidents to question Putin’s supremacy. Since his death, hundreds of people throughout Russia have been arrested for leaving memorials to Navalny. A Russian-American woman is being held for sending a $51 donation to a group supporting Ukraine.
Navalny’s widow vows to continue his fight, albeit from outside Russia, but how much she can achieve under the current conditions remains to be seen.
There’s a lesson for us here in the US. No one here is arrested for expressing views against a political figure. We don’t poison those who oppose the government, nor do we blow up their planes or push them out of tall windows.
But democracy is fragile. Over the last decade, we’ve seen attempts to resort to violence rather than accept the will of the people through the voting process. We’ve seen political candidates threaten to eke out revenge against their rivals if they’re elected. We’ve seen colleges and universities physically attack those who belong to a different ethnic group or who don’t subscribe to the mob’s prevailing views. We’ve seen too much effort to stamp out dissonance.
Music without dissonance is boring. But a world without dissonance is dangerous. Let Alexei Navalny’s death be a warning to us: We can’t afford to let dissonance die.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 15, 2024: What a Difference a Decimal Makes
On Tuesday, ride sharing company Lyft astounded the market when it announced its profit margins were expected to grow by 500 basis points (5%) this year—sending their stock soaring.
There was only one problem: It wasn’t true.
What the earnings report should have said was that margins would grow by 50 basis points, or 1/2 percent. Whoops.
The company issued a correction and apologized for the error. The CEO said the company has a process where “thousands of eyes” review an earning release. And yet no one caught the error.
Most of the time an inadvertent error like this doesn’t cause such a big stir. But then there are those occasions where something small, like an extra zero or the wrong measurement, can be disastrous.
In 1999, NASA lost a craft that traveled for 10 months to Mars, only to crash on landing because navigational commands hadn’t been translated from English to metric measurements. Really big whoops.
None of us is perfect, and mistakes happen. But successful organizations learn from errors like this and put in safeguards so they don’t happen again.
In the case of Lyft, all those eyes reviewing the release either weren’t looking at the right numbers, or they were so close to the situation that they literally didn’t see the difference between 50 and 500.
One thing I’ve learned from decades of writing and editing is that you can’t proofread your own stuff. There isn’t a selfie stuck long enough to give you the perspective to see things from an outsider’s perspective.
But the good news is it’s not difficult to find someone who can fill that role for you—and help avoid the bumpy ride Lyft took this week.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 8, 2024: Not Knowing What You Don’t Know
I got absolutely no email for 12 hours yesterday.
Nada. No responses to email I sent. No messages I was expecting from clients and colleagues. No promotional offers. Not even a single piece of spam.
It turns out that on Feb 1st, Google and Yahoo implemented a new verification to prevent spam from email senders. This requires new authentication processes put in place for newsletters like this one.
It also meant that some of my 1:1 emails to and from clients and others were now blocked. In an effort to fix the problem, my domain provider actually made things worse, so that for half a day nothing got through at all. If you tried to email me yesterday, you probably got an error saying my account didn’t exist. Gee, where did Linda go?
While it was nice not to have all that unimportant stuff to wade through, it was also annoying. What important messages was I missing? People who had my cell number began texting me, but others may have just given up. Was it worth it to keep trying to reach me? Maybe not.
The problem with not getting information is you don’t know what it is you don’t know. And while not getting email for a day is not a life-threatening situation, not getting other information might be.
During the pandemic, many people put off routine medical screenings. As a result, more cancers were missed and caught later, when they were harder to treat—resulting in an unexpected rise in cancer-related deaths.
If you are an air traffic controller or a brain surgeon, not knowing critical information could be the difference between landing the plane safely or saving the patient—and disaster. If you’re a type 1 diabetic and don’t know if your blood sugar is very low or very high, you can wind up in the hospital—or worse.
And if you run a business, not knowing when your customers need your help can be the beginning of the end of the relationship.
What systems do you have in place to make sure you are up to speed on what’s going on in your business? How will you limit what it is you don’t know but should?
The only thing worse than finding out you have a serious problem is not finding out until it’s too late to fix it. If only you’d known what it is you didn’t know. . . .
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com