Merge Strategies and World Views
One of the books I have been reading most recently is called “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The subtitle is “Why We Drive The Way We Do (and what it says about us)”. This is not the kind of book you would normally think of as an entertaining read. But like most people who drive a decent amount I have some fairly strong opinions about driving habits, rules and customs. So clearly this is a topic that promises to be of interest to someone like me. “Traffic” takes a very interesting (and detailed) look at some of these habits, rules and customs, and analyzes some of the (often mistaken) assumptions we make about things like speeding, congest

Stick Your Green Tips Up Your…
For the past few months I’ve been conducting an email campaign where I give away “Green Tips for Homeowners” to real estate agents. I make this offer to hundreds of thousands of agents and have hundreds who take me up on the offer. But occasionally (twice to be exact) a guy (so far it’s always been a guy) will say something like “Stick your green tips up your a**. I don’t want anything to do with your green Al Gore-loving liberal bs.” Usually I just ignore this kind of message and take them off the list. But a few days ago when I got this kind of message I decided to send a response to see what would happen. I innocently thou

Talk about stereotypes! There’s this cl…
Talk about stereotypes! There’s this classic image of a guy and a girl sitting across from each other at a cafe. It’s been lampooned in any number of commercials and sitcoms. The girl is yapping non-stop about who knows what and the guy sits there nodding, “Uh huh, Uh huh, Uh huh,” while the bubble over his head is filled with images of cars or golf clubs or whatever… Well, just about every time I go to my favourite coffee shop I see this scenario in the flesh. Tonight I could here this rapid-fire one-way stream of jibber jabber coming from two tables over. How anyone can keep talking that fast for so long about nothing is completely baffling t

Damn! I see Wordpress version 2.8.5 is n…
Damn! I see Wordpress version 2.8.5 is now available. Don’t these people ever stop making changes.

Time for a change
Every six or nine months I decide to change the focus of my blogging efforts. For the last three years or so I’ve blogged about various aspects of marketing. But the truth is I find it all kind of boring. The only reason anyone really cares about marketing is out of necessity – the necessity to run a successful business, to make a splash in the world – ultimately to make a living. There’s really not much more to it than that. Try as we might to make marketing ideas sound exciting and insightful, there is very little that is inspiring about the quest to get people to buy more of your products. So instead I am going to write about things I care about