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You are here: Home / Archives for 9 Other Resource Types / What's Not Best

This Guy Was in the Wrong Job

August 15, 2011 by Matt Perman

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”  — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.

(HT: The ROWE blog)

Filed Under: What's Not Best

Companies that Think Like This Won't Get Very Far

March 3, 2010 by Matt Perman

I saw a company policy somewhere once that stated:

“All information taken off the internet should be considered suspect until confirmed by information from another source. There is no quality control process on the internet; a considerable amount of information is outdated or inaccurate, and in some instances may be deliberately misleading.”

Default-negative views like this are life killers.

Filed Under: What's Not Best

What's Not Best: Nutraloaf

December 9, 2009 by Matt Perman

This is funny, from a recent issue of Wired. I had no idea that nutraloaf existed:

Could science build a completely nutritious space food? Sure, but it’d be a lot like nutraloaf, a substance served to prisoners in solitary in some states.

It’s so unpalatable that it’s the subject of several lawsuits.

The ingredients are ordinary enough, and Vermont’s version of the recipe (this makes three 1,000 calorie loafs) is balanced for fat, protein, carbs, and vitamins. So how could such a harmony of food and science constitute cruel and unusual punishment? Because it tastes like cardboard, smells like rotten eggs, and looks like baked vomit.

By the way, the ingredients are: whole wheat bread, canned spinach, great northern beans, powdered skim milk, potato flakes, tomato paste, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, seedless raisins, and vegetable oil.

Filed Under: What's Not Best

What's Not Best: Charging a Fee to Get a Discount

September 17, 2009 by Matt Perman

AT&T has a plan where you can save something like $5 per month on your cell bill if enough people in your company have AT&T for their wireless and enroll in the savings program. Something like that.

So I went on to sign up for the savings the other day, and AT&T charged me $36. They charged me $36 to enroll in a program designed to save money. They charged me a fee in order to get the discount.

???

A discount program should, at the very least, produce good-will in the customer. This program does the opposite. Now, AT&T is very close to earning a place on my list of things that should not exist.

Filed Under: What's Not Best

What's Not Best: When Customer Service Makes You Provide Your Info Twice

July 23, 2009 by Matt Perman

We’ve all experienced it: you call your credit card company or some other such company, and are prompted to enter your account number into the keypad. Then, when a real person comes on, they ask you for your account number again.

This is a poor customer experience. Why ask the first time if they are simply going to ask again? I can understand that, for security reasons, they might want the live person to get the number from you. But what possible benefit can it be to them to have you key it into the pad initially if they are only going to ask for it again later?

That’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure the companies have lots of good reasons. But, there are good reasons behind every poor customer experience. We need to get beyond allowing “good reasons” to complicate the customer’s life. And if we say “what’s the big deal with requiring the customer to do another 30 second action,” we aren’t truly thinking of the customer first.

Filed Under: What's Not Best

What's Not Best: Fake Real Handwriting

June 1, 2009 by Matt Perman

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.

Filed Under: Non-Profit Management, What's Not Best

What is Best: Family Friendly Parking

February 25, 2009 by Matt Perman

Every store should do this: allocate some spaces close to the entrance for families with young children and, by extension, expecting mothers.

Filed Under: e Social Ethics, What's Not Best

What's Not Best: I'm Not Even Sure How to Describe This

February 24, 2009 by Matt Perman

We ended up taking the stairs.

Filed Under: What's Not Best

Time for a New Tagline

January 17, 2009 by Matt Perman

Filed Under: What's Not Best

What's Not Best: Trying to Sleep on Airplanes

November 18, 2008 by Matt Perman

Normally when I’m on a plane I read the whole time. But today I had to get up at 4:30 to catch an early flight out and decided to sleep.

This was not the best decision I could have made. The space is already pretty small, obviously. Then my seat wouldn’t go back for some reason, though of course the person in front of me was able to put their seat back.

I found it impossible to figure out a decent position to rest my head, and wavered in and out of sleep for pretty much the entire flight.

I think there were a couple of other times when I tried to sleep on a plane, never with much success. Has anyone ever been succesful at getting decent sleep on an airplane? Alternatively, how do you make the most of the time when you fly?

Filed Under: What's Not Best

About

What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

We call it gospel-driven productivity, and it’s the path to finding the deepest possible meaning in your work and the path to greatest effectiveness.

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About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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