Don't Make Me Brake

Web designer Steve Krug pronounced the "Three Laws of Usability" in his decade-old Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. The three laws stated:

Don’t make me think. Make every element of a web page obvious and self-evident, or at least self-explanatory.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. Make choices mindless for ease of use.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. Be ruthlessly concise.

I now pronounce the Three Laws of Readability:

Don’t make me brake. Strive at every turn to help the reader maintain her preferred speed. Use common words to say uncommon things. Avoid empty, exhausted idioms.

Adding more imprecise words doesn't increase precision. Ambiquity can be lessened with a picture, and our language is rife with picturesque words and phrases. Find them. Use them.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. No, not an error; the Third Law of Readability mirrors the Third Law of Usability. Be ruthlessly concise. You will capture readers' interest. As Voltaire said, "The secret of being boring is to say everything." So obey Hemingway's Iceberg Theory.

Live Events: Wanamaker's Worry and the Pedigree Problem

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.

John Wanamaker

B2B CMOs spend more than 50 cents of every dollar on live events.

But they don't share Wanamaker's Worry.

They never ask, how much of my money is wasted? They simply boost event budgets when sales are up; and slash those budgets when sales are down.

Event managers will gripe all day about spotty crowds, the cost of drayage, and the bungling of lead follow-up. But the foolhardy spending begins and ends with CMOs—specifically, with their pedigrees.

CMOs ascend to their lofty jobs through predictable routes. Advertising. Digital. PR. Research. Product management. Sales. 

Have you ever heard of a CMO who once held the job of event manager at his—or any—company?

The consequence of their pedigrees is: CMOs bring blinders to the job, when it comes to live events.

It's why they don't share Wanamaker's Worry.

Brief History of Hop

The Oxford Advanced Learner's English Dictionary defines the noun hop as:

• a jump
• a journey
• a plant
• a dance

Hop comes from the Old English verb hoppian, the Old Norse hoppa, and the German hüpfen, all meaning "to skip."

In late summers in the 1890s, young singles from New York would escape the city and vacation upstate, where they helped farmers harvest the region's cash crop—hops. They'd lodge in rustic dorms or swanky hotels, mingle all day in the fields, and attend the "hop" at night.

In 1928, professional ballroom dancer "Shorty" George Snowden was performing in a marathon in Harlem when a reporter asked him the name of the dance he was doing. It was just after Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh had finished his "hop" across the Atlantic. Snowden paused and told the reporter, "I'm doin' the... Lindy Hop."

In 1958, American Bandstand host Dick Clark made a hit of a Philly doo-wop group's “At The Hop.” Before Danny and the Juniors performed the song, Clark asked the leader to change the song's name from “Do The Bop,” so he could promote his side-hustle, MCing high school “sock hops.” At the same time, African-American teens were dancing at their own version of sock hops, commonly known as "hip hops.”

In the late 1960s, New York City DJs began to chant ("rap") over the top of the Disco records they played on the radio. "Hip Hop" was born.

Pick a Peach

Good words are worth much, and cost little.
                                                                      
                                                                                       George Herbert

Sunday's trip to the farmers' market told me peaches are in season. They all cost the same, so we put a lot of care into picking the fattest, prettiest and juiciest. We picked up a lot of them before settling for the best.

You can spot the careless writer easily: when it comes to word choice, she's the one who settles for the first peach she picks up.

She publishes pap like this:

Your IT application infrastructure is the foundation of your business. It must be scalable, available, and secure. It must also evolve as your business needs do. This is why you need more than a support contract from your technology vendor. You need a collaborative relationship. Such a relationship is the key to a successful strategy for deploying and maintaining an enterprise platform. Red Hat understands this need.

Roget's Complaint, Rule Number 2 of copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis' "three key rules of copywriting," states:

With all the specific descriptive words available, the writer who regards neutral, non-impact words such as needs, quality, features, and value as creative should agree to work for no pay.

Specifics sell, Lewis says; and specific descriptive words sell because they provoke the emotions of otherwise indifferent readers.

"Specific words generate far greater emotional reaction than generalized words; the more specific, the more the writer controls the emotions," he says.

Novelist Joseph Conrad famously said, "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.

So, a word to writers everywhere: If you want to make readers hear and feel and see, don't settle for the first word that shambles through your comatose cranium; and certainly don't, if you expect to be paid. Instead, open your Roget's. You will find it's packed with fat, pretty, juicy words that cost little, but are worth much.

Pick a peach.

POSTSCRIPT: Had she pushed herself, Red Hat's copywriter might have said:

You need an uncompromising IT platform—reliable, scalable and secure. One that will grow as your enterprise grows. And a sidekick you can depend on to be with you all the way. Red Hat understands that.

Mission Improbable

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
                                            Gary Hamel

Only 4 in 10 workers strongly agree their company's mission makes them feel their job is important, and fewer than half feel strongly connected to their company's mission, according to a new study by Gallup.

You may not care. But Gallup research shows a compelling mission boosts profits and reduces employee turnover and on-the-job accidents.

Gallup analysts Nate Dvorak and Bailey Nelson say company leaders should:

Build a brand. Employees and customers should hear the same brand promise from leaders. The promise separates the company from rivals and makes it worthy of consideration.

Recruit purpose-driven people. High performers long to make a difference in customers' lives. Leaders should use purpose-centric recruiting ads to attract them.

Foster employee engagement. Profitability soars when the mission's more than posters in the lunchrooms. Leaders themselves should continually communicate the company's purpose, and help workers relate it to their jobs.

But why is it so hard for leaders to step up?

La condition humaine.

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre spelled out the reasons people rarely rally in his multi-volume doorstopper, Critique of Dialectical Reason:

• Even when part of a group, Sartre says, people normally live lives in lonely crowds. He calls life in the primordial group the life of the series. While they work toward one goal (boarding a bus, for example), people in a series don't share common bonds or act in concert. It's every faceless, interchangeable man for himself.
  
  
• While the series is the primordial group, it's not the only one. When people in a series are threatened, they form an organic and spontaneous group Sartre calls the fused group. Everyone in a fused group rows in concert of his own free will; everyone trusts and inspires his fellows; and everyone's a leader. (Think of the French Resistance, for example.)
  
  
• When the outside threat diminishes, Sartre says, fused groups either disband or ossify. If the latter, they become organizations. People in an organization take the "pledge" to watch out for each other. But the pledge doesn't mean the group members won't seek to fulfill their own self-interests first. In fact, they usually do. (Think of any labor union.)
  
  
• To discourage members of an organization from "taking care of Number 1," leaders eventually emerge who put constraints in place. Sartre calls this "degraded" spinoff of the organization the institution. Institutions work to make sure to every member knows he's a cog that can be easily replaced. (Think of any of today's corporations.)