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What's Not Best: Fake Real Handwriting

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I received a mailing from a fundraising consulting company today advertising a new “cutting edge technology” that they can offer to their non–profit clients: a font that looks like real handwriting but in fact is not. In other words, fake real handwriting.

This is appalling. Why would a non-profit want to use this service? Plain and simple, the thinking behind this seems to be: “We can make your donors think that they are reading real handwriting so that they will feel that the message is more personal. Then, they might give more.”

If you could read the fake-real handwriting in the image above, you’d see this perspective come out as well. But you don’t have to read that to see it. What can the value be in fake-genuine handwriting (they are calling it “genuinely penned handwriting”) if the person knows that it was created by a machine?

If you know that a machine created it, then it no longer seems personal. So the purpose of this “genuinely penned” stuff seems to depend upon the person thinking it is real. But if you think that it is real, then your assessment of the “personal nature” of the writing is not based on reality. In which case, in a very real sense, you’ve been tricked.

Why do certain direct marketing companies — and, in turn, the non-profits who use and follow their consulting services — reduce themselves to such tactics?

This company is being added to my list of things that should not exist.

Make a "Best Of" Twitter List

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Squidoo has just launched a way to create a “best of” list of your favorite tweets on a specific topic. Godin writes:

Twitter is immersive. It washes over you. But what happens when a great link or clever post goes by?  Squidoo just launched a promotion around the new TwttrList tool. The power of this tool is that it turns the momentary stream of tweets into a permanent sign post. A curated best of instead of a random time-based river. You can chronicle a conference, or highlight great posts about your brand or event.

This lets other people find your collection of the best tweets on Google, or see a series of messages without the noise in between. Here are a few good ones.

Don't Try to be the "Next" Something

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From Seth Godin on why it’s a bad idea for Microsoft to attempt to be “the next Google” with its relaunched search:

Microsoft, home of the Zune, has just announced that they’re going to launch Bing, a rebranding and reformatting of their search engine. So far, they’ve earmarked $100 million just for the marketing.

Bing, of course, stands for But It’s Not Google. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It’s called Google.

Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:

Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.

Read the whole thing.

(By the way, this does not deny that there is wisdom in the words “geniuses copy.” Most new things are not wholly original — and shouldn’t be. The key is to take what is indeed excellent from what has been done before — and relevant to what you are doing — but to do it in your own way, integrating it with other excellent ideas [some of which may be unique to you] such that you are creating a new synthesis. That’s how you create something new.)

What Makes a Job Meaningful?

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From Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Outliers: The Story of Success:

Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.

I think most of us resonate with Gladwell’s assessment of the three things make work meaningful: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

Patrick Lencioni, who wrote the book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, similarly points to three things on the flip side — three things that make a job miserable. They are: anonymity, immeasurability, and irrelevance. If we flip them around to state what makes a job meaningful, we get: not being ignored, measurability, and relevance.

Lencioni’s three differ slightly from Gladwell’s. Both have measurability in common (that is, a connection between effort and reward), but they diverge slightly on the other two.

These three lists are not mutually exclusive — they both capture very important and profound realities.

But it’s probably also the case that they are talking about different things. Lencioni would probably say that you can have autonomy and complexity and still be miserable if you are anonymous and if there is not someone specifically — even if it is just one person — to whom your work matters (relevance).

The reason is that Lencioni points out that “being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves. A professional basketball player can be miserable in his job while the janitor cleanign the locker room behind him finds fulfillment in his work. A marketing executive can be miserable making a quarter of a million dollars a year while the waitress who serves her lunch derives meaning and satisfaction from her job” (pp. 217-218).

I would put Gladwell and Lencioni together like this. Gladwell points out the conditions that make a job intrinsically enjoyable. As with Lencioni, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with level in an organization or other such matters. The person cleaning the locker rooms after the basketball game can have complexity, autonomy, and a connection between effort and reward in his job.

But, no matter what your job is, if you do not also know that it matters to someone (even if only your boss) and are not to some degree known and appreciated by others around you (not anonymous), you are going to be miserable. Likewise, no matter what your job is, you can bring those things (plus measurability) to it in order to make it satisfying.

Putting this all together, let’s strive to make sure that our jobs (and the jobs of those we manage) fulfill both the characteristics that Gladwell points to and those that Lencioni points to.